Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  14

  We drove to the lake every afternoon, with the driving growing less bucked and choppy, my use of the clutch and accelerator and brake gradually coming to be surer and smoother, and we began to explore the “roads”—the rutted wagon tracks leading past the cabin into the rest of the Deer Park. One such track went all the way around the five-thousand-acre park, just inside the fence, and Alan had recommended my following it and keeping an eye on the fence for signs of damage, so that it could be repaired before the deer found their way out and onto the paved road. We watched for the elk, too, especially the aging bull somewhere in the woods known for his cantankerous and aggressive behavior. Peter told me stories about him as we drove. There was a body of elk legend in the Deer Park that went back through generations of elks and humans. Alan would tell me some of the same stories Peter had told me, with more details, and a seasoned, proprietary pleasure. As we drove, even when we were talking, the sounds and the hush of the deep woods enveloped us and dwarfed our voices. We found that we were speaking quietly, and then that we had stopped speaking and were driving slowly in silence, with the snore of the jeep as a low, hoarse continuo.

  Handy kept checking on how my driving was coming along, and one afternoon when he judged I was ready he climbed in beside me—without Peter—and we drove to the gate of the Deer Park and then out onto the highway. There were few cars in those days. The cement road was empty for long stretches of time and distance, in the middle of the day, with an expectant, settled stillness, but it seemed exposed and unpredictable and frightening to me. I gripped the wheel and tried to do exactly what Handy asked me to do, driving along in top gear, shifting down, braking, looking in the rear-view mirror, signaling to cars as they appeared behind us to tell them to go by, then stopping on the shoulder, turning around, driving back and down the hill to the edge of Hackettstown, around a block, and back again. We did that for several days, with Handy quietly ignoring every manifestation of my anxiety, and finishing his lessons with some mechanical rudiments, like checking the oil and the battery water, and when not to open the radiator cap, and how to put up the canvas top and take it down. How to make the jeep mine, in a sense, when I needed it.

  Handy extended the driving lessons, getting me to go around other blocks in Hackettstown, and eventually into the town itself, stopping at intersections, letting cars out of parking spaces in front of me, turning left at green lights, parking, pulling out into traffic, telling me what to do one block in advance, driving into the gas station, filling up on Alan’s account, and one day taking a back road over to a small neighboring town.

  Finally the day came when he thought it might be time for me to sign up for an official driving test. I parked in front of the yellow frame municipal building on the main street of Hackettstown, and as calmly as possible filled in the papers applying for a license, and then with an inspector beside me followed his instructions, backed out into the main street and drove around Hackettstown, turning at traffic lights as I had done with Handy, driving up and down steep hills, signaling, parking, turning around and driving back along the main street. And passing. Trying to act as though it were something I did all the time.

  Then I was shown into a back room with desks like a schoolroom and given the form for the written test. The old building had been set on a slope, so that the front of it was at ground level but the room at the back was one story up, and the open windows looked straight out into the limbs of oaks and maples, with the breeze whispering through the leaves. It seemed to me only a few weeks, surely not more than a month or so, since I had sat in that other upstairs room, in the first warm days of spring, in Pennsylvania, with the windows open among the new leaves, to take the College Entrance Examination, without even knowing, when I had the form in front of me, what college I was taking it for. This time the test seemed to be something of a formality. I was grown up now. And Handy had brought back for me from town a little manual of the New Jersey driving laws and instructions on which the test would be based. I knew the answers to the questions, and when I had completed the test I waited out in the front room, and a man in uniform issued me the official yellow card allowing me to drive on my own.

  Handy and I walked to the jeep, with me trying to think of what I could give him, to thank him. I could not take him for a drink, for a start. He rejected the very mention of it, and I could only guess why, for he would not say a word about it. As we drove back and turned into the Deer Park, the question nagged me, through my muffled elation at having my new license. Handy appeared to take the license for granted and to regard his own part in my getting it as all in the day’s work, like fetching the groceries. What could I give him? Nothing I could think of was right. Not clothes, or books. Fishing gear? He told me he did not fish. Not even companionship: where could we go, what could we do together, outside the routine of his days as the caretaker at the house? Everything I thought of seemed to allude to distances that I had never realized were between us. When I next saw Alan and told him about the license, I asked him what I could do for Handy to thank him, and I saw that the question stopped him too, and appeared to take him by surprise. He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” I said I wanted to give Handy something myself, and asked him what it could be. He said again, “I’ll take care of it.” If I managed to get Handy some small token, that summer, I am sure he accepted it correctly and without any expression that I could interpret, but all these years later I am convinced that I never really managed to thank him.

  15

  Alan came on weekends, usually, and sometimes turned up in the middle of the week. He would be there, suddenly, to our surprise, and then it would turn out that Mary and Handy had known he was coming: he’d called them and they hadn’t told us. Alan got me to drive him to the lake, with Peter in the backseat, to check on my driving, and he gave me a few tips, about shifting down before tight corners and easing my way over rocks and roots, and generally he seemed to approve, not only of my handling of the jeep but of the way Peter and I seemed to be getting along, and of what he could tell of our morning studies. I liked the math part of them no better than Peter did, but we managed our daily pages of the book, and we had a reading schedule for history and literature that went far beyond Peter’s school curriculum, but dutifully included all of it. Peter loved Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Treasure Island, and when he came to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels he read—sometimes aloud—with great excitement and amusement.

  On one of our early trips along the tracks through the Deer Park, Peter and I had come to the mansion. The track descended a slope in the woods, and all at once there it was, standing by itself in its clearing, a very large frame house painted brown, so that it looked like a free-standing shadow in the forest, a jagged shape with curved corners, a wide porch coiled around it, the roof sections rising several stories to the tops of round towers, elaborate gray-green lightning rods, filigreed combs of gray metal along the roof peaks, all one solitary looming silence, with the trees whispering around it. We got out and stood looking up at it, and went up the wide steps that cracked and echoed under our feet, leaving our footprints in the dust, waving through spiderwebs as we stepped onto the porch with its broad ornate banister curving up to friezes of dowelled ornamentation below the eaves. The porch went on echoing our feet, the sound coming from another century.

  The shutters were closed outside the long windows. They too were covered with the same gray film of dust that lay like a shadow on the steps, the porch, the banisters. We tried to peer in but the curtains were drawn inside, and Peter told me what he remembered in there. This was the living room, this was the dining room. I asked whether the house was ever used now, and Peter said yes, but not really. Nobody lived there. Alan was always going to open it up and spend some time there, but it had been a long time since anyone had done that. “My grandfather lived here sometimes,” he said. “I think it was my great-grandfather who built it. He was the one who brought the elks, I think.”

  �
�Did you ever see the house when it was open?”

  “Oh yes,” Peter said. “I remember people here in the dining room, in the middle of the day, and seeing it all lit up, with lights hanging in the trees all around it.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t know. I was small. Just—very small.” Then, after a minute he said, “But this is where I’m going to live someday.” He said it again, when we got back into the jeep.

  Then when Alan came and the three of us drove down to the lake, Peter asked whether we could go to the mansion and see inside. Alan said he had been meaning to do that, and we made our way through the woods to the slope where the house suddenly emerged below us, and I realized as it appeared that it had seemed to me to be a ghost, and that I was surprised to see it standing there again.

  16

  I had loved empty, uninhabited houses ever since I was a child. I suppose most children do. An empty house was a found dream, part of it forgotten, but perhaps not beyond recall. I had even seen two ghost houses, one when I was younger than Peter, and the other a few years later.

  I had come to the first of them on one of the unplanned and unexpected outings with my father that occurred seldom in my childhood and were never repeated, so that each was startling and unique.

  The day I remembered was during the years in Scranton, when the wasteland between us was at its most desolate. In later years, when I came to think of it, one of the odd things about my father’s demeanor toward me during that time was how completely it was confined to my childhood. Once I had reached college years, after he came back from the army, he was distant, but helplessly so, without hostility, like someone adrift in himself without oars. But when I was a child, his behavior toward me, with its fixed, watchful, tight severity, was in sharp contrast to his indulgent kindly manner with other children of my own age, in Sunday school, for example. Whatever it may have been in either of us that kept him from simple affections toward me at that time, he did not normally give any thought to my company, and occasionally spoke of being much too busy for that. When he did take me along somewhere—on a round of house calls, for instance, during which I waited in the car while he visited each house—he remained preoccupied and moody, off in his own projects and considerations, and likely to be impatient if addressed. But from time to time some twinge of guilt, intimation of inadequacy, sentimental resolution, or random loneliness suggested to him that we should do something, and have some real time, as he said, together. When he spoke of it that way it made me feel hot in the face, and uncomfortable, and when the real time together started he seemed to have forgotten it, and to have returned to his distant and unapproachable self.

  On a day in spring when the weather seemed to have really turned, and the sky was clear, the air sunlit and balmy, the green buds just beginning to appear on the bare branches, he decided that he and I should go for a drive up the West Mountain and have a picnic together. He loaded a few things to eat into the trunk of the car and we drove up the mountain, starting on dirt roads that I took when I hiked there. It was strange, driving over them in a car, and with him, as though something needed to be explained. I thought that, as usual, he had other things in mind besides this outing of ours—some member of the congregation whom he wanted to visit for some reason, or maybe some piece of property that somebody wanted to sell. I could not tell whether he knew where he was going. We drove off the road I knew onto one where I had never been, and followed it for some miles along the slope until it was no more than a farm track, a pair of tractor ruts with a grassy ridge between them. He edged off the road into an overgrown pasture behind the remains of a wall, parked, and unpacked the food he had brought.

  He acted as though he knew the place, but I had no idea when or in what circumstances he might have come there before. A few rocks had been arranged in a horseshoe shape for an open fireplace, and he set about trying to light a fire there. He did not ask for my help, or seem to want any. He was not paying any attention to me at all. Maybe he was thinking. Maybe he had forgotten that I was there. The fallen sticks and branches lying around were damp with the spring rains. He crumpled newspaper and hot dog cartons and piled kindling on them and lit the paper in several places, but the fire would not catch. He bent down and took the sticks off and got more paper to repeat the process. He took off his hat and jacket and bent over in his white shirt and pulled the twigs into a pile on the paper, and blew on the paper when the flame was shrinking away. He looked awkward and undignified, and I could feel that he would not be pleased to be seen that way, failing to get the fire lit, wadding and lighting more paper as I watched. Finally I asked whether it would be all right for me to walk down the lane a little way and see what was there. He said yes, but not to go far, and to come right back.

  I walked along the ruts, the mud holes, the tufts of hueless late winter grass with new green coming through at the roots. The track looked as though no one had passed that way for a long time. Not since before the winter, maybe. There were thin branches lying across it where they had fallen. I could see overgrown pasture land beyond the wall to my left, woods on the other side, and then the track went straight ahead but was grassed over as though no longer used, and the ruts turned sharply to the right between two other half tumbled walls. I followed the ruts, and where they bent to the left, a hundred yards or so from the turnoff, I came to an old disused barn on the right, its wide, dark, unpainted boards cupped and cracked, showing night and day between them, its roof sagging, and gone here and there, its big doors awry and the dead grass grown high and pale against them. Just past the barn there was an opening in the wall on the left, through which the ruts led in to a clearing in front of a house. A plain, two-story building, with brick chimneys at either end. It was painted light gray, with white trim around the doors and windows and on the uprights of the banisters. It looked as though the paint was new, put on not longer ago than the summer before. The windows were clean, too, as though they had been washed very recently, and I could see through the front panes clear across the house and out through the back. The rooms looked completely empty. There was no sign of fresh vehicle tracks or of trodden grass around the front steps. Behind the house there was another barn, painted, and in better repair than the first one. I stood examining the silent place, wanting to explore it and find out about it but hesitant about approaching the front door, feeling that I had been gone long enough, and I turned and went back.

  My father had got the fire going and unwrapped the hotdogs and buns. He asked where I had been for so long and was pleased with his fire and this impromptu escapade, and was not annoyed. We stood avoiding the smoke, eating our hot dogs. He had brought some buttermilk to drink out of the bottle.

  I asked him whether he knew anything about the empty farmhouse up the road to the right.

  “What farmhouse?” he asked.

  “Just a little way up there and around to the right. It looks as though nobody’s living in it, but it’s well taken care of. It’s got new paint on it.”

  “There isn’t any farmhouse up that way.”

  “I saw it. I could look right through the windows.”

  “Don’t tell stories. There isn’t any farmhouse up there.”

  “But I saw it.”

  “Don’t tell stories.” The word, for my parents, was a way of not saying “lies.”

  I said nothing for a minute, and we chewed. Then I said, “Will you walk up there with me and look, when we’ve finished eating?”

  Somewhat to my surprise he agreed to do that, and when we had packed the remains of the picnic into the back of the car we walked up the track and turned right and went on to the bend, but there was no barn on the right, and beyond there, to the left, there was no building of any kind. I said I didn’t understand it, and my father said he did not want to hear another word about it.

  There was a boy in school who had been born in a house far up on the mountain, and whose older brothers still lived there as year-round hunters. I did not k
now him very well, but I asked him about the place, describing the way to get to it as well as I could, though I was not sure that he understood where I meant. He shook his head. Then he said, “Maybe I know where you mean. I think there used to be a house up around there somewhere. I think it was sold for the wood and things. Maybe my brother bought some of it.”

  Then two or three years later my father actually did buy an old farmhouse. I cannot imagine where the money came from. I think he said the place went for $1,500. His salary was $3,600 and the church was in arrears with that. Someone must have arranged things for him. The small house stood beside a dirt road, west of Hazleton, in the center of Pennsylvania, beyond several prosperous, well-kept Amish farms. It was a plain dwelling behind two big trees, with the two front windows facing the road, a narrow porch one step up from the ground, two tiny bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen, and then a further outdoor kitchen behind it. My mother frowned on the whole enterprise, or what she knew about it, no doubt for sound practical reasons, but by that point in their marriage she was likely to frown on any venture that he got up to, off on his own, with the car, which she could not drive. He took her there, and showed her the chicken-wired plot out in front where the last tenant still tended a vegetable garden, with cucumber vines trailing among the tomato plants and young cabbages, and my father talked to the tenant about the village of Rimerton, on the Allegheny, where he had been born, and my mother shook her head, and clucked her tongue at the kitchen.