Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  My father had been driving down to that part of the state, doing work for the Juvenile Court in Scranton, visiting a reform school near State College, and had found the place through friends he had met, “congenial folks” living down the road, the man a teacher at the college and his wife a great reader. My mother and she became friends, but even so my mother did not go down to the house very often. My father rustled up a few volunteers from the congregation to go with him to help renovate the late nineteenth-century house, paint it, wallpaper it, clean it out. He got a free load of lime from the State, somehow, since the place was officially a farm, with a small barn out in back, and a well and pump house, and quite a few acres of fields, which my father rented out to a neighbor. I shared his excitement about houses in general and this one in particular, and went with him a few times on weekends.

  The white pyramid of lime settled in between the kitchen door and the red barn, a proof of something, and my father had a row of willow posts planted along the lane that led between his fields down to the valley in back. They began to sprout in the spring as they were meant to, turning into a row of young willow trees. I was older by then. I was no longer intimidated by him. He said, on those trips, that we were “off on our own,” suggesting a conspiracy against the women of the family. He did not walk anywhere, and when I wanted to explore I simply told him that I was going.

  The ground was layered with outcrops of shale and was said to be full of rattlesnakes, though I never saw any. A neighbor’s pigs were allowed to run loose in the fields below the house, supposedly to keep the snakes down. I walked along the lane to the bottom of the fields and on into the woods, still on the land my father had bought. I did not know whether he had ever walked the bounds of it himself. The lane must have been used only by the farmer next door, who rented the fields and cut firewood in the woods. It led down to the creek, flowing there under low trees, which was my father’s boundary.

  Across the creek, downstream, among big trees, I saw a small cabin painted yellow. A dog chain trailed from the porch near the front door. Whoever lived there, I thought, must be out with the dog, and I walked on up through the woods some distance until the tracks ended in a field of buckwheat. I went on through the woods but found no path, and turned back.

  The dog chain was still running out to no dog as I passed the yellow cabin, and I saw no signs of anyone there, and went on back to the house. I told my father that I had walked back to the creek at the end of his land. He said nothing to indicate whether he had actually ever been there himself.

  “Whose land is it on the other side?”

  “Farmer over that way,” he said, pointing vaguely along the dirt road.

  “Is that his little cabin, by the creek?”

  “There’s no cabin over there.”

  “I just saw it. There’s a dog chain by the front door. Somebody’s living there.”

  “There wasn’t any cabin down there.”

  “Have you been down there?”

  “The first time I came. I didn’t see any house.”

  “Maybe they just built it. But it looks as though it’s been there a while.”

  Then he seemed to forget about it. The next day I walked down to the creek again and there was no cabin on the other side.

  The neighbor who taught at the state college had lived there for several years, and was interested in the history of the area. One day I asked him whether there had ever been a cabin down on the other side of the creek. He said, “I think there used to be some kind of building down there. It fell down a long time ago.” That seemed to be all he knew, and I said nothing about it to my father.

  17

  When I saw them, nothing about those houses had suggested to me that they were apparitions, some kind of waking dream. But the mansion at the Deer Park was ghostly even when we walked on the solid floor of the porch and tried to get our fingers around the edges of the shutters to peer through at the muffled panes. It remained like something seen through water or some less familiar element, even when Alan stood at the foot of the steps and looked around him at the dogwoods and sumacs under the beeches and oaks, the low branches that had moved closer to the house than he remembered them, and now were used to having the place to themselves. Whoever looked after the house when he was not there, whether it was Harold or one of the tenant farmers who came through the other gate on the far side of the Deer Park, had kept an area around the house cleared, and the mowed grass looked pale, so that the house appeared to be standing in its spellbound circle, at the foot of a sunbeam, in the middle of the forest. Alan walked up the loud steps, took out his key, raised it to the lock, and then turned and held it out to Peter.

  “You let us in,” he said.

  Peter opened the door slowly into the sleep of the place, the deep smell of dust and dustcovers and old wood and mildew, all sunk in shadow, with the curtains drawn, the shutters locked, the walls enclosing a hush that was not quite silence but a kind of gray monotone. From some far-off room in the place a note, like a faint chime, a glass bowl or metal object touched once, came to us, and we stood listening.

  “Chipmunks,” Alan said. In front of us a flight of broad stairs with a cataract of carpet in the middle, and an unfurled banister, rose into the dusk. I was startled to find a figure standing beside me, close enough to touch me, motionless, not alive. As my eyes got used to the dimness I saw that it was a standing suit of armor.

  Alan disappeared around a corner and drew back curtains, raised blinds, let in more light, and then opened windows and the shutters outside them, and the day found us. Everywhere there were mammoth shapes in dustcovers. Following old habits, Alan moved from window to window letting the light and air in, and then going on to other rooms while Peter and I explored more slowly. Most of the house, as it was then, must have been built in the years following the Civil War, the heyday of the robber barons, some of whom had been friends of Alan’s grandfather. That had been the age of the self-righteous terminations known as the plains wars. Through the seizure of the West with its massacres and justifying, the floors and turrets and Tiffany windows had gone up here, under the hands of carpenters from Allamuchy and Tranquility and Hackettstown whose experience included building and repairing churches where they sang in the choirs and thought of being saved, and hotels in whose bars they gathered on Saturdays. They brought in wagonloads of beams and raised them in the clearing, and somewhere in one of the rooms, in a desk to which Alan carried the key, there was probably still a yellowed printed program of the ceremonial opening, with a guest list of politicians and bankers from New York, and the governor of the state and local clergy, and maybe an Episcopal bishop, a menu, the program of the small concert.

  There had been other buildings at that time, out under the trees. An outdoor kitchen for the summertime, carriage houses and a stable, and garden structures. There had been a small formal rose garden with a statue, decently draped, one arm raised, in the middle of the far hedge, against the woods. There had been a croquet lawn, and rockers on the porch surveying it all, and cigar smoke and gossip and talk of money and politics and the financing of railroads and Custer and Bismarck, Fisk, Gould, and the scandals of Erie. Reminiscences of the canals. The Johnstown Flood. Fishing and hunting. All cooked for and waited on in virtual silence by colored servants from South Carolina, some of whom remembered slavery.

  We were turning slowly and walking through the dust of it, over its carpets, lifting dustcovers to reveal empty elephant’s feet, touching the reflections on its closed piano, pausing before the long window of its tall clock with the pendulum holding the faces of sun and moon hanging motionless, waiting for the return of time.

  We wandered through the rooms, losing sight of each other, noticing that we were alone. Alan had gone up another flight of stairs somewhere, opening windows in the upper stories. He said he wanted to air the place out. Both he and Peter needed to visit it. I went slowly through rooms, examining, touching—a tiger’s teeth, which seemed real, the edg
e of a tapestry—staring up at paintings that might have been by Inness or Whittredge or Bierstadt, or imitators of theirs. Then Alan reappeared and was telling me about the place, what he remembered there, how Peter loved it. He wanted to show me the kitchen. He opened closets and peered around inside. Mothballs. Croquet mallets and a table umbrella and folding chairs.

  “I’m going to open this up again,” Alan said. “Maybe next month. We used to do that in the summer. Open it up and stay here for a while. Great parties. Went on for days. One time after a Princeton reunion we came on up here. We had more help in those days. But we can still get some more in if we need to. Peter would like to stay over here.”

  “Has he ever done that?”

  “When he was very small. Louis liked to have it open in the summer and stay here, and I stayed over at the Deer Park house. They came in through the other gate, toward Tranquility. That’s only a few years ago. My God, I can’t believe it.”

  He led me into the kitchen, checked closets and fire extinguishers. “It could burn to the ground before anybody knew a thing about it,” he said, and opened a fuse box, threw a switch, threw it off again. The huge kitchen was full of hulking dark forms. Vast tables in the middle, great black stoves, sinks near the back door, a refrigerator like a bank vault, cupboards loaded with stacked kitchen equipment waiting like the pendulum. I noticed, with a certain surprise, that the kitchen smelled like the kitchen in the basement of my father’s church in Scranton.

  “We managed,” Alan said. “Louis was the last one really to use it. My father spent the summers here when they weren’t in Europe. Before that, my grandfather had it open all summer, and they used to come up here for a week or two at Thanksgiving and Christmas. New Year’s up here. And people wanted to come out and see the elks. My grandfather had stories about the elk he liked to tell when he had a chance to. He was in the living room one day with some friends when some photographer who had an appointment to see him came by. Horse and buggy from somewhere. He wanted to take pictures of the elk for a Sunday rotogravure section of the Times. My grandfather probably reeled off a few of his elk stories, and he liked to tell how he said to the man, ‘You can bring your cameras and all that and I’ll see that they let you in, but I have these witnesses that I’m telling you now it’s at your own risk entirely. I can’t be responsible for the bull elk’s disposition. You may never see him at all, but if you do, and he goes for you, don’t come to me about it—if you can still go to anybody.’ And the fellow agreed, and came back with a buckboard and tripods and a load of glass plates and went out and shouted until the elk came, and he got a few pictures. But apparently he outstayed his welcome, from the bull’s point of view, or he tried to get too close or something. And when he was down under his black hood trying to get the elk in focus, upside-down, the big head and the antlers came down and the bull charged him. The poor guy took off for the back of the wagon and jumped on with the elk right after him, and when he jumped into the wagon the bull jumped in after him, and he got bashed around and hurt before he managed to crawl into the driver’s seat and pick up the reins and get out of there. He never sued. There are some old photographs of the elk even from those days. I don’t know who took them. There were a lot more elk in those days. There’s only that one old bull now and he’s pretty lazy, but if you call for him you want to have a tree nearby. Sometimes he won’t get out of the road. And don’t get out of the jeep if he does that. He smashed somebody’s headlight and radiator a few years ago because they were a little too impatient to get past him.”

  Alan went on up the back stairs from the kitchen and I followed, and Peter found us, and we walked through the big bedrooms, with the canopied beds tented with dustcovers, but the windows open onto the bright grass of the clearing below.

  “Just close the windows,” Alan said. “I’ll tell them we’ve been over, and get them to come back and give it a good airing, until we can open it up.”

  18

  Beyond the far gate of the park the lane led down through the woods to a paved country road and several small houses that were part of Alan’s estate. He took me along to meet friends of his who were staying in one of them, an English couple with a little boy, in the States for a short time on some kind of import-export business. The man was attached to a firm in India. He was taking a new Packard convertible back with him to sell there—he already had the buyer—driving it himself in the meantime. All three of them seemed perpetually and impossibly clean and well turned out, and in whatever circumstances slightly overdressed, like mannequins in advertisements, and they were infallibly polite, agreeable, and distant. They came to the lake in the Deer Park for a swim a few times, praying for the Packard on the park roads, and Alan added to the distance between us by warning Peter and me in an undertone not to crowd them, but to let them have their privacy. From the cabin steps Peter and I watched them take out the canoe, as though they were borrowing it from us for some unavoidable but risky venture. The atmosphere around them emanated from the primness of the young woman, and her treatment of the child—who indeed appeared to be a kind of miniature—as though he might easily break. As far as we knew he had no one to play with.

  Once when Alan could not get out to the Deer Park for some reason and wanted Peter and me to join him in New York, the man drove us to town in the Packard, talking to us more freely than usual, about India and the circles he moved in there. He said he had done this before, on an earlier trip: buying a new Packard in the States and taking it back with him when he went, to sell for a price that sounded like a fortune, to some nabob. The last time, he said, the sling on the crane had broken when they were unloading the car in India at the dock, and the car had fallen upside-down, flattening the whole top of it, but they had rebuilt it out there, and the accident had not seriously reduced the price that had been agreed on.

  In another of the houses on the estate Alan introduced me to an immaculately dressed old man, a brother or cousin of his mother, the late Belgian Princesse de Caraman-Chimay. He was very thin, elegant, and fragile-looking. I never saw him dressed otherwise than in a light gray three-piece suit in that small house in the country. He gave no indication that he either spoke or understood—or wished to entertain—any language except French, and once he had shaken my hand without looking at me, he paid no more attention to me than if I had not been there. After Alan explained to him what I was doing at the Deer Park and laboriously involved me in a few exchanges with this personage, he referred later to my stiff phrases in those circumstances as evidence of my hopelessly bookish and archaic French. Alan’s harshness in that case, I think, reflected some discomfort of his own in the company of this dried kinsman of his, who seemed to be a model of discontent. Alan had brought him a case of wine, because there was nothing locally available that was fit for him to drink. I helped Alan unload other boxes of delicacies for the house, and the two of them talked about food, about the minor virtues and the unfailing inadequacies of the cook whom Alan had arranged to take care of him, and about family news—another Belgian princess coming for a visit, as the Queen of Belgium had done a few years earlier—until the loose old fingers brushed mine in token of parting.

  There were still a dozen or more tenant farms in a deep crescent around that side of the Deer Park, an arrangement that apparently had been set up before the Dutch colony was taken over by the English in the seventeenth century, and had survived the Revolution and wars and social changes that came after it—three hundred years during which the region had escaped most of the changes that happened around it. The main line from New England to Philadelphia and Washington was some distance to the east, and the route from central Pennsylvania to New York City lay to the south, and so the Deer Park enclave had retained some ways and assumptions and appearances of a past that had been all but forgotten on all sides of it. Alan took me to meet a few of the farming families, and spoke to me a little about the ancient arrangement. It sounded like an ordinary landlord-tenant relationship, with long-term assum
ptions—in most cases going back for generations—on both sides. Alan had known the families we stopped to see all his life, and they knew a fair amount about him and his family, and surely believed rumors beyond that. But as we drove away from those visits, it was plain that Alan did not foresee the setup lasting much longer. Too many things were pulling it apart. The days of the family farm, in any circumstances, were numbered. Children moved away. Taxes and urban sprawl favored turning land into real estate. I could hear in Alan’s voice his own gradual withdrawal as part of the overall fraying.

  He took me to Tranquility to see the old country church, with the long sheds for horses and buggies on rainy or snowy Sundays. A pretty, nineteenth-century white frame building with a spire, in the colonial style. One weekend when Dorothy was at the Deer Park, Alan, to my surprise, suggested that we might go to the morning service, and I agreed. It sounded as though we would all be going together, but at the last minute it turned out that Alan was not going, and neither was Peter. But Alan urged it upon us. It was something we should see, and my reluctance ceded to Alan’s persistence and to my own curiosity. I could remember country churches in western Pennsylvania where I had gone as a child, in tow to my father, in my white buck wing-tip shoes that looked much too big for me, to be watched out of the corners of eyes from behind raised hymn books. To be uncomfortable and welcomed and made still more uncomfortable, and Tranquility was a kindly echo of those churches, in a different accent, and whatever curiosity we had brought was turned back on us until at last we escaped to the woods of the Deer Park.

  19

  Some afternoons I drove in the jeep by myself along the shaded tracks through the woods, drifting along with the top down. I saw the elk several times, always when I was alone. There were two or three elk does, and many deer in the woods. The summer days were hot. The deer and the elk stopped grazing, looked up in surprise, bolted or stood and watched me as I passed. Once when the bull had looked up toward me I slowed to a stop and sat watching him, with my foot on the accelerator. When he began to walk slowly toward me I moved on, and he stood still and went on looking.