Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  In early youth everything is untried, and one thing may not seem any more surprising than the rest. I know that when I first found myself at Princeton I did not at once appreciate how incongruous it was for me to be there, of all places. To begin with there was the matter of money. I had none. At Wyoming Seminary I had had an allowance of a dollar a month, which did not matter so much there since there was nowhere to spend it except one ice cream parlor near the school, and ice cream cones in those days cost five or ten cents. At Princeton, in recognition of my new status, my allowance was stepped up to a dollar a week. My mother apparently had conferred by letter with my father about it, and they had arrived at that figure and believed it was adequate, and I said nothing about it. I had grown up knowing that they got by on very little, and it would have gone against the grain for me to ask for money.

  Although my father was a Presbyterian minister, he had not finished at any of the schools he attended, from the one-room country schoolhouse in Rimerton, Pennsylvania, to Western Seminary in Pittsburgh. He had begun his ministry at small, rural churches in western Pennsylvania, and when he was thirty-one, a year or so before I was born, he had accepted a “call” to a big church in Union City, New Jersey, on top of the Palisades overlooking Hoboken and the river, with the Manhattan skyline as its backdrop. We lived there until the year I was nine. Union City must have seemed a great step up in the world when he and my mother went there. The First Presbyterian Church (there was only one) was a tall, yellow-brick, turn-of-the-century structure, with two steeples, a rose window, and green carpets down the sloping aisles. But its heyday, whatever that may have amounted to, was already irretrievably behind it. “Foreigners,” as we kept hearing, and Catholics, were taking over the whole area. The congregation that had built the church and attended it was ebbing away, almost gone, and the church’s financial stability with it. By the time my father became the pastor there, everything about the church from the attendance to the condition of the building was in steep decline. He invested in a new glass-fronted poster display-case out in front of the building to announce the services and sermon titles. Then the Great Depression hit. I remember being wheeled through the streets, in the big brown wicker baby carriage, at a different pace than usual, picking up a feeling of urgency and anxiety when I breathed, and stopping to look up, along with a small crowd of people, at the closed, polished bronze bank doors, and hearing crying and voices full of grief and anguish above me, a scene that I did not understand but that would resurface at times as an emblem. We stayed on in Union City for several years after that, through the first years of my childhood. Not long after we left there, the church building was sold—to the Catholics—and a few years after that it was torn down.

  The move to Scranton, then, and the Washburn Street Presbyterian Church, was something of a repetition of the earlier step to Union City. Again it must have seemed like a marked improvement in worldly success. The church was a large, imposing building with a square, crenellated belfry tower, and across the street from it was the twelve-room frame manse. My mother was immediately struck by the fact that the manse had thirty-six large windows—she counted them—which would need curtains. A committee of welcomers, made up of church elders and members of the board of trustees, spoke of the church and the city in glowing terms, and delegates talked over plans for redecorating the manse. It was summertime. The streetcars celloed and swung along the tree-lined streets near Elm Park, and the new “call” to Scranton at first seemed to represent a new life.

  But Scranton was deep in its own depression, within the national one. The anthracite mines had all but lost their long struggle with the cheaper soft coal from shallower mines near Pittsburgh and in West Virginia. Silk manufacturing, and then the artificial silk industry, which had been the hope of the Chamber of Commerce in the twenties, had collapsed. The church finances reflected those of the region, and before long my father and senior members of the board of trustees were locked in opposition, mostly about money, as far as I could tell. His stipulated salary had been miserably small to begin with—three hundred dollars a month, three thousand six hundred a year—and the trustees’ rancor built until they stopped paying it altogether, a move that led to the matter being carried to the Synod of the Presbyterian Church, which forced the trustees to pay what they owed or have the church closed down. But the deep dissension, the subsequent rift in the congregation, remained there and affected my father’s moods and behavior at home. For months at a time my mother managed the household on almost no money, and the persistent lack of it, along with the unquestioned necessity (as we were taught) of keeping up appearances as “the preacher’s family,” became a condition of life in those years.

  6

  My father was severe in any case, and capriciously so, and the uncertainties and anxiety of his situation at Scranton, his fear of failure, of being found out as someone with no real education or credentials, must have depressed him and damaged an already disappointed marriage. He kept talking about insurance, and when he got paid anything he put as much as he could into endowment policies, speaking of what he was doing as a sacrificial burden but an act of foresight. His attention to me was limited almost entirely to what I was forbidden to do. The list seemed unique (if compared with what my schoolmates were allowed to do), and it was absolute. Punishments for infractions were sudden, without appeal, and relatively harsh. He spent almost no time with me, and when he did we had little to say to each other.

  Some of my discontent and claustrophobia in those years took the form of feeling far away from water. I remembered the glimpse of the Hudson River that we had had from the bottom of 4th Street in Union City, looking across Palisade Avenue past my father’s church, and the time or two when my father had allowed me to accompany him to his small, crammed, musty, dusty study at the top of the steep, narrow, boxed-in spiral stairs out of the vestry in the back of the church. One window of the study looked out over Hoboken and the harbor and the river, with the ferries coming and going, the freighters and liners catching the west light, and beyond them the jagged, gray, glittering skyline of New York, looming in its silent distance, its own dimension. I had been allowed to accompany him on those occasions “if I thought I could keep quiet while he worked on his sermon. Did I think I could?” I thought I could, and I knelt on the blue velvet cushion on the window seat, gazing out through the leaded panes, or through the open casements—though usually his windows were tightly closed—watching the river, without a word, utterly rapt in the vast scene out in front of me, hearing my father muttering words of scripture (“Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee”) somewhere far behind me. Whole trains were crossing the river on railroad ferries, all shades of orange in the sunlight. White puffs of steam climbed out of unseen whistles and horns, the distant sounds arriving, faint and faded, a long breath afterward. I was seeing something that I could not reach and that would never go away.

  The French liner Normandie, said to be a vessel of incomparable beauty, was berthed in Hoboken, and my father took me there once to see it, stopping at the house of someone affiliated with the neighboring Baptist church, whose pastor was a friend of my father’s. The man was a barber, merry and red-faced, his barbershop in a brownstone building facing the harbor, and there was a parrot next door belonging to a friend of his. The barber took us to the Normandie and we stared up at the tapered, towering prow looming high over us, but no one was allowed aboard that day, and the mysterious disaster that led to the ship’s capsizing at the dock happened not long afterward.

  The German behemoth Leviathan (my father pronounced it with a dramatic emphasis on the “i”) was still there too. That ship had been impounded, my father said, during the World War. He wanted to see it partly because of the passage about the Leviathan in the Book of Job, and partly, I think, because of his own experiences in his youth as a sailor on a mine sweeper during the war. It was possible then to get permission to see something of the Leviathan, and we went down one day to the vast
, dark, empty, echoing wharf building, where we were met by a man who seemed all but wordless. He led us across a gangplank over the black water, and then along dim iron corridors, up stairs to a dingy deck, the screams of gulls, the smell of the harbor, and back again. My father began to talk about Jonah.

  Four destroyers were berthed for a while where we could see them from the Palisades, and the public was invited aboard to tour them. My father took me along to see them one afternoon, and we lined up with a small group and were led by men in real naval uniforms, between rope railings, from the wharf to the gangplank, and then across the decks of all four ships, and were shown the torpedo tubes, and then led back again. My father talked affectionately about his mine sweeper, and one voyage as far as Cuba and the Panama Canal, and how they had always thrown all the uneaten food and other supplies overboard before coming into port, so that they could order more, and the waste of war. Oh my.

  Hanging in the church basement were two very large framed photographs of battleships, old ones, with towers like round black baskets, dotted with blurry white shapes of sailors. The brass plates under the names (USS Texas? and the older Arizona?) said they had twelve Babcock and Wilcox boilers, I believe. My father said he was not sure why they were there. Somebody must have given them to the church. They seemed no stranger than my father sailing on a mine sweeper. The harbor, and the river, made it all credible.

  The first summer that we were in Scranton, a member of the congregation arranged for us to rent for very little money (as I overheard) a ramshackle, homemade cottage in the woods an hour’s drive north of the city, beyond Elk Mountain, at Fiddle Lake. For a month or so the days there seemed like a complete time, with an age of its own. The friend who had found it for us drove my sister and me up there in the back of his plumber’s truck, and that in itself was a great adventure for us. We arrived among the tall trees to the cawing of crows, which made my heart pound with excitement, and tears, to my surprise and embarrassment, come to my eyes. During the week my father was back in Scranton much of the time—leaving his list of prohibitions hanging in the air—and my sister and I were there with our mother, who loyally observed the injunctions, more or less (“Now you know your father said not to do that”), where they concerned our safety. I loved the lake, the rowboat, the sunlit rippled sand in the shallows, the cold clay springs out deeper, the old trees along the shore, and all that they allowed me to imagine, as I had never loved anywhere up until then, and I counted the days there, trying to keep them from slipping away.

  The next summer at Fiddle Lake, one day I spotted a rowboat sunk on the lake bottom, and I waded back to it later with a friend, to investigate. It was filled with rocks, only a foot or two below the surface, an elephant in its graveyard. I got the rocks out, and with the help of a boy next door dragged the water-logged hulk ashore and overturned it to dry out a bit. The craft had never been a model of grace in its best days. The stern had been sawn off and crudely replaced. Just the same it was my new treasure, a vessel to dream about. It would be a sailboat. Nobody at the lake had a sailboat then. It would be a sloop, with one, or even two jibs, and a bowsprit, and a deck up forward.

  That winter I thought of it all the time, getting books about boats out of the public library. There had to be a keel. I talked a house builder from the church into bolting a sheet of iron into a slot in a long block of wood that could, in turn, be bolted to the bottom of the boat. I pored over the Sears Roebuck catalogue for essential materials for which I saved up my ten-cents-a-week allowance. Canvas for sails was a dollar a square yard, and then there was heavy thread, a sailor’s palm for stitching, caulking for the joints, white deck paint. I cut the cloth, when it came in the mail, and stitched the sails, with the sections laid out on the living room floor. Mr. Yoder, a retired school superintendent in the church who loved to make things at his forge and anvil, made me a set of iron rings for the mainsail.

  Two houses down the street, at the corner of Washburn and South Main Avenue, old Mrs. Davis with her floor-length black dresses and her white hair piled on her head, who had lived on alone in her big, elaborate, dark house—“the mansion,” as it was called in the neighborhood, with turrets and round rooms, and balconies and porches and banisters wound around it upstairs and down—had died, and the house had been sold to be torn down and replaced by an Esso station. I watched the progress day by day: the funeral, the emptiness afterward, the emptying of the emptiness, the demolition and the razing, the opening of the cellars, the excavation with a steam shovel for the gasoline tanks, and then the rise of the cement building, faced finally with enameled white metal panels. I stood watching the work, after school and on Saturdays, and got to be on nodding terms with some of the workmen, and when they began to use tar on some of the surfaces they were paving I managed to buy or cadge a big square cookie tin full of tar, with a wire to carry it by, to use for the bottom of the boat after I had caulked the joints in accordance with the instructions in the Sea Scout Manual.

  Mr. Yoder had been intrigued by the thought of the derelict rowboat that I was transforming—in my mind—into a sailboat, and without saying anything about it he had made me a perfect anchor, complete to the tapering heart-shaped flukes. It weighed almost forty pounds. He gave it to me sometime that next spring—partly to please my father, I think, for Mr. Yoder had been one of his loyal supporters on the board of trustees—and it became at once one of my most prized possessions, an epitome of the whole enterprise. I can still hear the sound of the iron ring striking against the shaft.

  When we went up to the lake that summer I caulked and tarred the bottom of the boat, found someone to help me get the keel bolted on, got the decking nailed across it with a socket for the mast, and then painted everything white—three coats. Finally one day, with the help of the boy next door, I managed to get the boat into the water again, found out where it still leaked (clear water appearing as though by magic through the tar and new paint), and patched it some more. I put on the rudder, stepped the mast, and hoisted the mainsail with the halyard running through clothesline pulleys that I had bought in the hardware store at the corner. I had named this ponderous aspiring swan Zephyr, and had embroidered a winged figure, a hybrid part dolphin and part torpedo, on the sail, imitating my mother’s cross-stitch, but with no practice or gift for it. The anchor took up most of the space before the mast and made it hard to hoist the jib. Or jibs. I pushed away from the dock and sat in the cockpit, holding the sheet and the tiller. There was no wind, to start with. When a little came across the lake the boat had even less sense about sailing than I did. Zephyr’s preferred motion turned out to be sideways. The sails helped us drift with the wind, leaving small dimples across the smooth surface we were sliding away from, along an expanse as wide as the boat’s length, which was eleven feet. Fortunately I had kept the old oarlocks and had borrowed a pair of oars, which got us back after a while, to start making adjustments. The vision of the craft’s eventual skimming flight was unimpaired, for the time being.

  For my thirteenth birthday my mother gave me A Conrad Argosy, a compendium of Joseph Conrad’s stories and short novels, which expanded and colored all my fantasies of sails and sailing. I decided that I would sail Zephyr down the Delaware River, all the way, and then up the Jersey shore and on up the East River, to Cape Cod. At the same time the book kindled ambitions of another kind. The first page of Heart of Darkness seized me in a spell, and as I read I longed to be able to write, and I began to try.

  That was the winter the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I had the radio turned on in my bedroom, very low so as not to disturb my father, and I heard the news. Everyone was already talking of the armed services, of uniforms, and I was, as usual, too young. In the attic I had a pile of National Geographics, and in one of them there was an article on Annapolis, with pictures of cadets in summer dress uniforms, and I thought of the doctor’s daughter and how she would look upon me if I were wearing summer whites, and for the next couple of years I wanted to go to Annapol
is, and everyone around me, I suppose, humored the idea, which no doubt they thought so improbable as to be harmless. In retrospect, that ambition seems to me to have been, above all, an image of an underlying determination to get away.

  7

  After America entered the war my father enlisted in the army as a chaplain. During the summer before he left he rowed Zephyr across the lake to the cottage of friends from the congregation, for them to plant purple petunias in. I was awarded a scholarship to Wyoming Seminary and went off to boarding school, coming home sometimes for the weekend on the small two-car Luzerne Valley Line. My sister followed a year later, and my mother moved from the manse, across town, to be near her job at the Y, but it was she who continued to hold us together. In my last year at Seminary I took the College Entrance Examination, rather as a matter of course, without any clear idea of what it might lead to. I was fifteen. I was still hoping, more or less by habit, to go to the Naval Academy, dreaming of the doctor’s daughter, but I was too young in any case, and in the meantime I was advised by one of my professors that it would be a good thing to take the examination.

  It was held in a public room upstairs over a dry-goods store (where as students we had stolen pairs of socks on a dare) at a corner of the main street a block from the school. Through the open windows I could smell the new leaves of spring. There were only a few students taking the examination that year, most of them girls, as I recall. On the top of the examination form there was a line where the applicant was to write the names of the colleges for which he or she was taking the test and applying for entrance. I thought of the prospect of a year of college as a way of getting some preliminary schooling that would help me later at Annapolis, but even so, when I had to name colleges or universities, I realized that I knew only the names of football teams and engineering schools. I wrote down Lehigh and MIT (despite the fact that math had always been my weakest subject), thinking of preparing for Annapolis. And I had heard my parents talk about Princeton, so I wrote Princeton. I learned, some time after the examination, that the Princeton my parents had been talking about with memorable respect was not the university at all but the Presbyterian theological seminary. My examination pages, fortunately, went to the university anyway, and when I got the results, my score was acceptable at all the colleges listed. Princeton offered me a scholarship besides, and a history professor at the Seminary said that if I was really thinking of going to the Naval Academy with its emphasis on math and the physical sciences it would be a good idea to devote the intervening year to the humanities while I had a chance to. I went to Princeton.