Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  I am not sure where Alain and I met. Probably it was at a party, something connected with the French Department. The Department itself had such gatherings from time to time, and so did Maurice Coindreau, who was busy translating and introducing American writers such as Faulkner and Carson McCullers to France, and there were parties on the occasions of Robert Casadessus’s piano concerts. I went to those parties with an abiding sense of my inadequacy in French. Whatever I knew of the language I had acquired during the summer of 1947 in a crash course at McGill University in Montreal. I felt a similar inadequacy in Spanish, despite years of classroom study, as I listened to the nuanced, elegant, precise Castillian of Americo Castro’s lectures on Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares. In both languages, in which I was supposedly at ease, I kept struggling to catch up, to grasp the tail of the phrase, the syllable, the intonation, the implication that had just escaped me. I knew I was going about it the hard way, trying to catch the lost music of Villon and of the coplas of Jorge Manrique. Alain was trying to exercise his English, which he had learned in classrooms and out of books, but it was still like a pebble in his mouth. I remember that I liked him immediately: his frank good humor, his lack of self-importance, his unabashed interest in the world around him, combined with a curious, abiding (he probably would have been happy, at that point, to call it “Gallic”) skepticism. To him life seemed to be an outing. We became friends at once, recognizing some shared, uncanonical appetite for existence.

  Alain was a couple of years younger than I was, as I learned eventually. I never noticed the difference in age between us. It was clouded by his newcomer’s comparative strangeness to everything around him, something he tried to disguise and to use to his advantage, and his European upbringing and background gave him a range of reference that allowed him to seem more worldly-wise than many of the students around him, and in fact more sophisticated than he really was. But his newness in the New World, at Princeton, and his open nature, gave him a constant impulse to explore, to examine, to take in, a boyish eagerness that I recognized. We formed an adventurous friendship of a kind I had not been able to have as a child. I was a good audience for his tales of his French childhood in Normandy, which sounded exotic and enchanted to me. I imagined them set in a landscape configured by Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. We shared many likes and dislikes, from behavior to music. With the coming of spring in 1948 we took to making relatively impromptu hitch-hiking trips to spots on the Jersey shore, sleeping under boardwalks or on benches, and walking along back roads.

  The wartime three-semester-a-year schedule at the university had ended, and summer was coming. Alain had told me of Alan Stuyvesant’s bringing him to America in fulfillment of his promise to Jean Prévost, and one day he informed me, with some excitement, that this avuncular eminence in his life was looking for a tutor for his nephew Peter, who had lost a year’s school as a result of rheumatic fever. Alain said he would suggest me for the job if I was interested, and Alan Stuyvesant drove down to Princeton one day to look me over.

  9

  Alan arrived in a new brown Jeep station wagon, a model that had been developed in the wake of the jeep’s World War II legend. It had a wicker-work pattern on the sides, a lot of room, space in back for dogs—as I learned—and anything else. Alan raised Brittany spaniels, for field and show, and his own favorite, Chesta, was with him.

  One day near the end of that summer Alan would confess quietly and ruefully to having arrived at his forty-seventh birthday. He was round-faced, with red veins on his cheeks and a brush of dark moustache, and little hair left on top of his head. Medium height, slightly overweight, rounded in the middle and on the way to becoming portly. He walked with a flat-footed, knock-kneed gait, rocking from side to side when he was in a hurry, like a metronome or a wooden figure of the Little King wobbling down an incline. Though he displayed little physical grace he was someone of decisive energy, affable in manner but watchful and determined. Someone who was used to having his own way and being in charge. He surveyed Princeton with a seasoned familiarity, a disenchanted fondness, like a former owner who knew the present owners but seldom saw them. He was brisk, but he seemed to have grown into his elder role quite naturally.

  Alan had told Alain that he was afraid I might be too young for the job. I was twenty. And there was another young man whom Alan was considering, whom he had already met and had arranged to see there again. The other candidate, an athletic, clean-cut student of twenty-three, showed up before long, and a rather awkward conversation—or semblance of it—began. We did not manage to discover the slightest interest in common. Alan and he walked aside for a few minutes, and then Alan came back and drove down to the housing project with me to meet Dorothy and see where and how we lived, and then to take us to his own domain.

  On the way up through the suburbs of central New Jersey Alan told Dorothy and me a little about his family relationship to Peter. Peter’s father, Louis, had been Alan’s older brother, and as Alan told it, Louis had always been the star. He had been handsome, athletic, and dashing, a better boxer—they had both been boxers—and a drinker and playboy. He and Alan had had twin foreign sports cars, and they used to race them, sometimes in inappropriate places, and not always when they were sober. Once they had set out from a party, on a bet, and raced to the Mexican border. Alan’s accounts, however they may have been magnified by the passage of time, obviously alluded to a Great Gatsby Princeton rather than the relatively toned-down scene of my own experience, in which I knew of no students who had cars. (Students were not allowed to keep cars on campus.) Louis, Alan told us, had been divorced from Peter’s mother. There were two children. Peter had an older sister, Diana. Louis had died—as a result, it seemed from the way Alan told it, of his drinking. That was a few years back, and Alan was trying to help with the children, as well as he could.

  We pulled up outside a small new ranch-type house on a semicircular suburban street, in a development where all the trees were guyed to stakes and appeared to be about two years old. I have no idea why Alan’s sister-in-law, Louis’s divorced widow, had picked that place to live, and it was not the moment to ask. Peter and his mother and sister were expecting us. We all stood in the small, new living room cluttered like a children’s playroom, while Alan and Peter’s mother talked past each other. Peter was a thin, pleasant, evidently shy boy with brush hair growing out and big braces on his teeth. He seemed uncertain, watchful, and likeable. His sister was quiet too, taller, graceful, and watchful too, like a herd dog around sheep that were not hers, unwilling to be drawn into the talk at all, but not wanting to miss anything that was said. Their mother seemed to have grown into a middle-age of unadorned resentment, or at least that was the aspect of herself that she preferred to present to Alan and anyone who might be with him. She was small, thin, perhaps athletic, with cropped hair and no makeup. She made no pretense of being glad to see anyone, and no one was invited to sit down. After a few exchanges, jollied along by Alan, he suggested that Dorothy and I go out and talk with Peter while he stayed inside to discuss things with Peter’s mother.

  Out behind the car, Peter too was reticent and cautious, but without hostility. Instead of asking him, yet, about himself, I asked him what he wanted to do that summer, and he began to answer, in monosyllables at first, about wanting to spend it at Alan’s Deer Park house, out west of Hackettstown, a place that Peter obviously loved. He was telling us about the place when Alan came back out, looking blank, spoke affectionately to Peter for a moment, and then said he would see him soon, and he and Dorothy and I drove off.

  He told us as we went that he had never managed to like Peter’s mother very much, though she had been lively, original, and unrecognizably different when she was younger and she and Louis were first running around together. It had been a stormy affair from the start, and the marriage had grown stormier, as everyone had been able to see. The atmosphere of the storms became chronic. Louis’s drinking and—Alan suggested—his playing around made it worse,
whatever she herself may have done to contribute to it. He said that the divorce was finally triggered, as both she and Louis told it in different ways, when one day, in the course of one of their bouts of mutual recrimination, she had turned her back and bent to pick up something from the floor, and while her behind was facing him his hand fell on a toy bow and target arrow with a rubber suction cap on the end. Later there was some question as to whether or not he had been sober or drunk, but either way he had shot her in the seat and that was that. To Alan it seemed to epitomize their whole story. No doubt he was telling us about it because of his own immediate annoyance with her and the way she had received us all, but I wondered whether his revelation of this unedifying nugget of family history, a critical moment so close to him, might be an indication that he had made up his mind to offer me the job as Peter’s tutor. I had no idea, then or later, whether he ever brought the other prospective candidate to meet Peter and his mother. He must have been pondering the choice ever since Alain had first proposed me, on the basis of whatever Alain told him. Alain said to me later that the fact that I was married and seemed to have settled down a bit had been important in his choosing me. And it seems likely that his old loyalty to Jean Prévost, relayed via Alain, extended to a leaning in favor of Alain’s new friends.

  Before Alan let himself out of her front door, he and Peter’s mother must have agreed that Peter would spend the summer at the Deer Park, and no doubt that Alan would pick a tutor she could accept, so that Peter could make up the studies he had missed.

  10

  Dorothy kept her good job at Princeton, as the head secretary of the Physics Department and of Harold Smyth, its chairman. Prof. Smyth had worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and had written the first lay reader’s guide to the subject, Atomic Physics. As soon as the news of the bomb broke, ordinary students like me began to learn of the connections of the Princeton Physics and Mathematics departments, and of figures around Princeton from Alfred Einstein to Robert Oppenheimer, with the evolution of the project. Dorothy worked at Princeton during the week, so it was on a weekend that Alan came to take us to the Deer Park the first time. On this trip he had Peter with him.

  Peter was excited to be on his way to the Deer Park, which all his life had been one of his favorite places. He kept asking Alan about things there, about the dogs, and the lake, and the elk, and Alan filled in around his answers so that we understood more or less what they were talking about. I thought Peter might be relieved, besides, to be getting away from his mother, and to be on his way to a part of his life where she would not follow him or hear what he said. By the time we got to Hackettstown Peter was telling us what we would see next, and the elation of his homecoming affected all of us.

  When I last saw Hackettstown, more than twenty years ago, the middle of town had not changed much since those days. It still had the appearance of a country town, with frame buildings painted yellow or brown or green, a hardware store, and an old shingled hotel from the turn of the century, complete with rockers on the porches, on the main street near the central intersection. That first time, as we got to the center we stopped, and Alan and Peter went into the hardware store as though they were visiting an old friend, and picked up a few odds and ends, including fishing lures for Peter. Then we headed out through the west side of town, past a grain elevator and feed store by the railroad tracks, and over the tracks and up the hill.

  From there on virtually everything that I remember of the place in those first summers has been wiped out, replaced by a veining of multilane highways, with the farmlands and woods graded out of existence to make way for a resort and shopping complex called Panther Valley (now that there are no more panthers), dreamed up in some cloned room miles away on a ninety-fifth floor. If the countryside I remember had to endure change, there is a certain relief in its having happened that way. It was not chewed at, dollied up, debased feature by feature, like so many remembered places, until it was unrecognizable and shameful before it was completely gone. Instead it has vanished altogether like an image on a screen, and when I see it now it is intact and untouchable.

  We crossed the tracks and drove up the long hill toward Allamuchy. Already, on the way, Peter had managed to endow the name with a ring of legend. It was where the mail arrived for the Deer Park house: there was a post office box in the country store, which stood, among a few other unpainted wooden buildings, down a steep hill on a back road. The newspapers came there too, and the morning gossip for miles around.

  But we were going to the Deer Park first. At the top of the hill we turned off to the right, along an unmarked dirt road. We reached a wire gate and closed it behind us. “We’re here,” Peter said. We were on land that had been in Alan’s family since before the English drove the Dutch from power in the seventeenth century. The road led into mixed woods, under big trees, curved sharply left at what may once have been the corner of a field or a farm, passed a couple of big yellow frame farmhouses sitting among old trees on the right, and dropped to an open space with a row of fifteen or twenty kennels and runs behind chain-link fencing, and another farmhouse on the slope behind them. In a number of the runs Brittany spaniels were barking through the fences. There must have been a dozen dogs. Peter said sadly that there used to be more when Alan had more time for them. When Alan pulled up near the kennels a man in jeans and a checked shirt came around the side of a shed at the end of the runs and walked toward us, smiling. He was Harold Franz, who took care of the dogs and, as we soon came to understand, a great deal else at the Deer Park. In most respects he was in charge of the place. Peter was clearly delighted to see him and to ask him about the dogs. Alan and Peter and Harold went off to the kennels, deep in discussion, and came back in a few minutes with Alan’s dark Brittany, Chesta, and a bigger, younger dog, Beth, who was Peter’s, at least when Peter was at the Deer Park. While they were catching up on practical matters, Alan remembered to make the introductions.

  Harold was an agreeable man, obviously extremely capable and reliable, with a quiet authority. Alan said he had been there for some fifteen years. He and his wife and family lived in one of the farmhouses overlooking the kennels. The other houses there Alan used for guests, or occasionally rented out to friends. Harold and Alan went on conferring about the place, about dates for dog shows, painting to be done, tree work, fence work, plumbing repairs after the winter, messages from people in town. The dogs were loaded into the back of the station wagon. Then we drove over to the entrance of the Deer Park itself, a tall ranch gate, the side posts and top beam made of rough logs. Harold walked over with us to open the gate in the eight-foot-high fence. There was a chain and padlock on it, hanging unlocked, and another lock, Peter explained, was connected to Harold’s house by an electric cable. You could call up Harold from a phone there on the gatepost, for him to let you in if he knew you. When we had driven through and Harold let go, a big cement weight on a wire cable descended behind us and closed the gate again. Keeping the deer in, Alan said, for they could jump anything up to eight feet, and in fact could go higher than that if they were frightened. And strangers out, he added, though he explained that he let local groups in for picnics and visits. The Rod and Gun Club came, and the Rotary Club, for fishing parties and to shoot ducks in season, and the Boy Scouts and Audubon Society had hikes and meetings and bird watching parties there.

  We drove on into the woods for a mile, perhaps. The road was rutted, pot-holed, dotted with rocks and tree roots. Some of the trees appeared to be remnants of old forest—oaks, maples, beeches, tulip trees—Alan said he had no idea how ancient they might be. There were trunks three and four feet in diameter. The tops formed a high canopy over us. Then an open clearing on the right, gray snags standing at the edge of a wide marsh, a shallow basin, with more forest on the far side. It could have been part of the landscape that the first Europeans saw there, and that the tribes had known as the world, before that. Up a small hill, and we came to a stop across from a bit of gray board fence. Half hidden behi
nd it was the roof of the Deer Park house, set down into the hillside so that it faced out over the marsh and the open valley.

  Alan reminded me that he was an architect by profession, and he said part of the building appeared to be a house, or perhaps half house half barn, dating from long before the Revolution. Early eighteenth century, or even perhaps as early as the original European settlement around there. We carried our bags through the gate and down stone stairs to a walk along the back of the house. We could see below us that the lower floor of the house was built of dressed fieldstone, the dark masonry plain, elegant, and beautiful. The upper floor, which may have been added at a later date, was of wood: a broad clapboard painted a pale gray, almost white. The stone stairs turned to lead down to the ground level, but we went along the uphill side and into a back door to the upper floor, with the dogs tumbling in beside us. Alan showed us the bedrooms—cupped planks in the wavy, varnished floors, some of the windows set low in the walls, framed as though they were in boxes. Those were the old ones, Alan explained. The larger ones, set higher up, had been put in when the roof was raised at a much later date.

  Downstairs he showed us the rest of the house. On the ground floor the ceilings were low, and so were the doorways between the rooms. Some of the walls were faced with broad, sawn, blue-painted boards. At one end, near the stairs, was the big kitchen, with a stone floor. That part of the house may have been a dairy or a barn, originally. At the other end was the wide living room with a broad stone fireplace taking up much of the far wall. A small plank door to the right of the fireplace opened onto stairs leading down and outside through a miniature cellar piled with firewood. From the kitchen, French doors, glazed with small panes, led out onto a wide stone terrace overlooking the open marshland and its wide green radiance. Those, and some of the other windows and later renovations, and the present roof, Alan admitted with a certain reticence, were of his own devising, but he had not wanted to alter the building in any essential respect. Besides the fact that he had grown up knowing it, he was obviously keenly aware of how beautiful it was, with its rooted plainness and the unremembered lives it had harbored.