by W. S. Merwin
In the kitchen Alan introduced us to Mary, a handsome, self-possessed, grown-up woman (the accepted word at the time was “colored”) from Aiken, South Carolina, where Alan’s family had kept a winter residence for several generations. She came up from Aiken in the spring, Alan explained to us while she stood there, to be the cook and housekeeper at the Deer Park house through the summer, and to keep things in line, as she had done ever since he was a child. Alan asked after her family in Aiken, and was asking her where Handy was when a colored man who must have been roughly Alan’s own age appeared in the terrace door. It was Handy himself, the chauffeur and caretaker of the house, who started by apologizing for not having been there when Alan arrived, explaining that he had just been in to town and had got back, in the jeep, after we came. He too was from Aiken, and had followed the same schedule for many years. We stood in the kitchen for a moment, all together, and they alluded to the past and talked of the unknown summer ahead of us.
11
Mary had planned lunch on the terrace, and she set it out for us. “She is,” Alan said, well within her hearing as she came and went, “a great cook,” and Mary tossed her head as she went through the door, and raised her hand as though shooing a fly. The dogs lay on the stone near the door, watching both ways.
Peter wanted to go down to the lake right away, that afternoon, and as soon as lunch was over he started getting his fishing tackle ready, fetching his tackle box out of a closet, his closet, and sorting out the redolent contents on his bedspread. “We can change down there,” Alan said. The jeep was parked by the station wagon, over toward a small, reed-bordered frog pond.
As we started up the stairs to the outside fence Chesta and Beth shot past us, Chesta in the lead, and raced around the cars to the reeds, slowing to prowl along the water’s edge, heads down. “Chesta’s after frogs,” Alan said. “She never stops. She’s so good at it, she gets too many of them.” He led me up closer to the pond, walking cautiously. “Watch,” he said, showing her off.
Chesta crept closer to the water, behind a tuft of reeds. “There’s a frog there, in the reeds,” Alan said in a low voice. Chesta made a short lunge, a feint, to the left side of the clump, flushing the frog so that it leapt to the right, just as she had known it would, and as it jumped she wheeled, pivoting on her left front paw, and leapt to the right, catching the frog in mid-air and tossing it over her shoulder onto the bank. “Come on, Chesta,” Alan said, and Chesta looked up, undecided for a moment, perhaps hoping to bring the frog along, and then came over and jumped into the station wagon. With the toe of his shoe Alan flipped the live frog back into the water.
As Alan and Peter were shutting the dogs into the back of the station wagon, Alan turned to me and nodded toward the jeep, an army issue vehicle bought at a surplus outlet after the war. He’d asked whether I knew how to drive. I did not, and as a child had been forbidden, as from On High, ever to touch the controls of any machine. I was going to have to learn to drive if I was to spend the summer up there. “You can learn on the jeep,” Alan said, “and practice on the roads in the park.” They were jeep roads, certainly, as we saw on the mile or so between the Deer Park house and the first glimpse of the lake through big trees. Alan nursed the high-slung but more vulnerable station wagon along over boulders and across mud holes, around an appendage of the lake covered with water lilies, then through muddy ruts, past a marsh under big trees. A duck with a string of ducklings behind her paraded out of the marsh and crossed the ruts ahead of us, disappearing under the big leaves of skunk cabbage on her way to the lake.
“I hope they escape the snapping turtles,” Alan said.
“Harold got a fifty pound one,” Peter said with pride.
“And the hawks get some,” Alan said. “There were golden eagles in there a few years ago,” he added, “when my brother was here. My brother saw them first. And they took their share, I’m afraid. First nobody could believe they were golden eagles. The Audubon people came out and saw them and confirmed that that was what they were. Then the Rod and Gun people wanted to shoot them, because of the ducks, they said. We wouldn’t let them do that. That’s just what you have to expect if you have eagles, the price you have to pay. The cats take more than the eagles ever did. People from all around here dump cats up along the road, whole litters of them, and they come into the woods and go wild.”
The road climbed to a low bank along the lake, running under tree limbs, with huge dead trunks sloping down into the water, and dark rocks the size of rooms along the shore.
“Turtles,” Peter said, pointing along a mossy trunk almost covered with water. Four domes the size of small skulls, gray shells gleaming like old pewter, were lined up along the log, catching the sun.
“Not snappers, those,” Alan said. We eased ahead past them on the road that skirted the lake, and came finally to a clearing, and a cabin set back from the shoreline, with a small porch across the front of it facing out toward the water. Dark board siding, a big stone chimney emerging from the middle of the roof, the whole of it set low to the ground. It looked like an Appalachian cabin in the southern mountains, and it occurred to me later that its form might have been suggested by buildings that the family knew well, near Aiken.
Alan parked on the slope behind the cabin and handed Peter the key to the front door, and Peter let us in. We stepped straight into a room with an oval table in the middle of the floor, and not much else except the broad stone fireplace. A heavy smell of squirrels, chipmunks, and bats rushed around us. Every surface appeared to be deep in dust and grit. There were nutshells on the floorboards and on the table, as we could see even in the gray darkness before Alan opened the shutters, front and back, and a back door into a small screened and shuttered kitchen. The fireplace rose like a rock spire through the middle of the building. On the far side of it was the other room, with a bed in it, the spring bare: they did not leave a mattress down there through the winter for the cabin’s regular residents to nest in.
“You can change in there,” Alan said to Dorothy. He and Peter went back out and we met on the porch a few minutes later in bathing suits.
“Harold put in the dock last week,” Alan said to Peter. There was an orange canoe overturned on the end of it, and a float out in the water some eighty or ninety feet beyond it. From the front door of the cabin we had a broad view of the lake, looking bigger than it really was, shaped like a piece of a picture puzzle, with long arms extending back into the woods, out of sight. The dogs had been in the water already, and they stayed watching us until we came out, and then nosed off along the shore picking up scents, looking back toward us, heading out again, finally settling down beside us, in the sun.
12
When we got back to the house, Alan gave me my first driving lesson on the jeep. Gear positions. The importance of neutral. Brakes. Ignition. Then the first spine-jolting stalls, with my foot on the clutch pedal. Over and over, lurching and losing it, starting up again in neutral, hand on the knob of the long rod vibrating in the floor beside me. Finally getting it into gear once and leaping forward at a speed that immediately felt out of control, finding the brake pedal and stalling again, a few feet along the track. Alan said little except, “Try again,” but I sensed his impatience and certainly found it understandable. I had come to recognize, by then, his chronic irritation with what he referred to as “intellectuals,” and I was trying to figure out just what the term meant to him, what trait or behavior it was that he found so annoying.
It may have been a residue of some moment in his own college days when he felt exposed and vulnerable, and was sure that he was looked down on by students and faculty members who knew more than he did and were not impressed by the advantages that he had always taken for granted. His aggravation was directed, above all, at “intellectuals” in the humanities, and most specifically literature. He spoke of most writers of all kinds with a fixed condescension. The chief exceptions seemed to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whom he clearly admired. He ref
erred to Alain’s mother—Jean Prévost’s first wife, Marcelle Auclair, a very Catholic writer, author of a well-known (in French) biography of St. Theresa of Avila, and of a life of Federico Garcia Lorca—with a weary annoyance, suggesting that apart from her subjects she knew nothing worth knowing. But his exasperation did not seem to include Jean Prévost himself, a French literary “intellectual” by any definition. He always spoke of Jean with respect.
I encountered this uneasy prejudice of Alan’s at the beginning, when he inquired about my graduate studies in French and learned that my enthusiasms were François Villon and the poets of the Pléiade, whom Alan dismissed, saying that he had had enough of them at school. From then on he described my French, to me and to others, as bookish (which was one of the least of its shortcomings) and obsolete. In fact it was merely student French, inexperienced and clumsy. My first attempts at driving the jeep, repeatedly fumbling his instructions, confirmed his prejudice that “intellectuals” were useless in the real world. Yet he had somehow decided that I would do, in the circumstances, and he even showed a kind of avuncular concern, as though I were a younger member of his family whom he was trying to shape up.
I managed to get the jeep into reverse, and stall and lurch back to the starting point without breaking our necks or demolishing anything, and Alan got out, saying that the Deer Park was about as safe a place for practicing as anyone could hope for, and suggesting that, with Handy’s help, even I might be able to learn to drive there.
13
Alan took Dorothy back to Princeton the next day, Sunday, so that she would be ready for her job on Monday morning, and then he went on to wherever he was going. He told us nothing about his own plans, or the rest of his life. He had an apartment in New York, a top floor on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum, as I learned later, but I had no sense of what his life might be like away from the Deer Park.
His manner with Dorothy was amiable, polite, and without interest. She would stay in Princeton through the week while I was up at the Deer Park with Peter. She was welcome at the Deer Park on weekends, which was a further reason for my learning to drive. In the first days there with Peter I started to practice, after we had had our morning lessons and Mary had given us lunch.
Peter watched my uncoordinated controversy with the clutch with earnest attention and bouts of helpless hilarity, as though we were making up a new and not entirely permissible game. In spite of the awful jolts and sudden stops, after a while he climbed in, treating it like a dodgem ride at the county fair. Yet he himself took surprisingly little interest in the mechanical manipulations that I was trying to master, and was quite content to leave all that to me. My struggles with reverse gear, as I tried to keep the jeep running in a straight line backwards, without hitting anything, amused him—as they worried me—most. Handy, who must have heard the jeep’s agonized arpeggios and winded grunts, came up to see if he could make things a little easier for the unfortunate machine. He gave me a few tips about the pedals, and then wisely instructed both of us on how to take off a wheel with the jack and wrench, and put on the spare, in case we had a flat—or something. His kindness, and my anxiety about the vehicle, were both magnified by the fact that the jeep was what he used himself for his trips to town almost every day. It must have been like his own wheel and freedom, and teaching me rudimentary repairs to it probably was a kind of protective gesture toward it. His manners in sharing it, that summer, were a model of grace. If he planned to be in town for any length of time he would come to find me, if he could, and tell me how long he expected to be using the jeep, “if it won’t disconvenience you none.” And whenever I asked, he would come and give me tips on my driving practice, always with unruffled patience. His lessons did not seem like lessons at all, but like private information that he wanted to pass on to me.
I was still far from mastering the reverse gear—in particular—when, after a few days of practice, Peter and I loaded fishing rods and tackle into the back of the jeep and set out for the lake. Peter regarded my stalling as a joke that got better the more often it was told, and he thought it was almost as funny if we hit a pothole or a root, or if I braked too hard on a tight corner. We could have walked to the lake, I think, in the time it took us to cough and bump our way there in the helpless jeep, and when we reached the cabin Peter got out and watched, convulsed, as I set about backing up on the slope and turning around to face the way we had come.
We had a swim, and then took out the canoe and trolled for bass down near the lily pads, and Peter had a few bites that got away, and caught a couple of sunfish that were too small to keep. Handy had given us the key to the cabin, which he kept in the kitchen, and we opened the building like a present, inspecting the darkness, the smell of wood and rodents, the dark pile of bat guano near the fireplace. We talked about whether the bats would be driven out, as Peter said they had been sometimes, or would be left alone, which was what he wanted.
He was fascinated by wild creatures of every kind. His father and Alan had been white hunters in Africa. There were skins of lions and tigers, and beautiful rippled horns of hoofed creatures on the walls and floors in the Deer Park house, and Alan had told me that they had met Hemingway and had heard local gossip about Isak Dinesen—another writer he approved of, and whose books Peter and I talked about, that summer. But although he loved to fish, Peter had no interest in the killing of animals. The bats intrigued him. He wanted to watch them, to learn about them, not to intrude upon them. He was interested in the turtles—there were several kinds in the park—and in the frogs and toads and water newts and all the different species of snakes that lived around us. It was the natural, quite ordinary interest of a boy of his age, but in him it was remarkably gentle, and seemed to represent some cherished, sequestered hope. We found on the shelves in the house Ditmars’ Reptiles of North America, and we both pored over it, using it as a reference to identify whatever reptiles we encountered, and talking about the text and about Ditmars himself, who had died from the bite of a rattlesnake—a hatchling, scarcely as long as his thumb, that he was moving from one aquarium tank to a larger one. The infant snakes had been so small that he had not worn gloves, and one of them had sunk its needle fangs into his hand as he picked it up. Because of the creature’s size he thought he did not need to attend to the bite until he had finished transferring them all, and by the time he did so the venom had been carried along his bloodstream to his heart, and it was too late to save him. The moral, as the note in the posthumous edition emphasized, was that the poison of pit vipers was the same poison at any age. The hatchlings’ fangs were little and fine and the actual quantity of poison they could inject was slight, but it could still be fatal if you did nothing about it.
Peter and I found other books about animals and old copies of National Geographic in the house, and passed them back and forth. During the summer we built a dam across the small stream that wound into the marsh, below the Deer Park house, and we watched the pond life colonize it: water striders, dragonflies, other water insects, small water snakes, more turtles, newts, salamanders. We acquired several aquariums of different sizes, for indoors and out. Peter caught a small water snake and a turtle, and kept them in one of the smaller glass tanks. He wanted to keep that one out of the way of Mary’s attention, and he took to changing the water in his own bathtub. Inevitably, the water snake escaped and disappeared down the drain. We gave it up. Then a few hours later, when the aquarium had been hidden somewhere else, the snake emerged from the air vent in the washbasin in Peter’s bathroom, and he caught it again.
The assortment of amphibians and reptiles in the aquariums grew. Mary tried to ignore them. The most prized captive among them was a harmless hognose snake, popularly known as a puff adder—a misleading nickname, for the real puff adder is a deadly snake from Africa. Our hognose snake was about eight inches long, and at first, when it was disturbed, it tried to act dangerous by hissing and swelling and rearing up, but after a few days it grew accustomed to our
taking the glass lid off the aquarium and cleaning out the inside, and it paid little attention to us unless we startled it. We even got to where we could pick it up gently and it would lie still in our hands. Snakes are said to like the warmth of touch. But we made a rule, for the collections, not to keep anything in captivity for more than ten days, and though Peter broke the rule, occasionally, for favorites, he never kept them for much longer than that. We knew that in the long run we could not provide them with what they needed, and that they were bound to suffer, and perhaps not survive, as a result.
We collected butterflies too, and kept them in jars with perforated lids, along with the leaves of plants and trees that the books said they lived on. They were kept for a day or two at most, to see whether they would lay eggs on the leaves. Sometimes they did not survive even that long in the jars. The books on butterflies that we had available did not seem as helpful as the ones on reptiles and amphibia. Neither of us had any wish to kill them for mounted collections, and in fact our interest in butterflies was haphazard and absentminded.
But the fascination with animal life that Peter and I shared was a thread running through our days, occurring in the course of our studies in the morning, leading us out to the aquariums and the dam before and after lunch. It was a strand in the new affinity that emerged between us, spontaneous, not competitive, slightly conspiratorial, unnamed. Surely it was an element of friendship, and for me it must have fulfilled something that I had wanted and had not been allowed to pursue or develop when I was younger, except in brief, exceptional, disconnected moments, inevitably interrupted if the playing became noisy and “overheated.” Within a few days it seemed as though in Peter I had acquired a younger brother, and in many of the things we did together—the lake, the dam, the books we both read, the drives in the jeep—the difference in our ages became increasingly unimportant.
