by W. S. Merwin
Once as I came over a rise under the big limbs and coasted down the other side I felt a swift cool rush of air on my head and down the back of my neck, and an instant later I saw a dark six- or seven-foot wingspan glide down in front of the jeep and sail ahead of me like a torn shred of night. It was the golden eagle. If I had reached up as it went over me I could probably have touched it.
Occasionally, if I thought about it, I had a rifle in the jeep. Alan and Harold had suggested it, complaining about groundhogs, and cattle breaking their legs in groundhog holes. But that was on the farms. There were no cattle in the park. I took the rifle along with a certain embarrassment, as though I were wearing a bit of costume in town. As a child I had been forbidden not only to own a toy gun of any kind but ever to point my finger as though it were a gun. Around the age of ten I saved up my dime a week allowance and bought a fifty-cent cap pistol, which could stand comparison with those of the other boys in the back alley. I cherished the smell of it, of the burnt cap paper and the metal barrel and imitation pearl handle. My mother knew about the gun, but it was kept from my father as a deadly secret, during one of the worst periods of my parents’ soured marriage and of my watchful relation to him. One day as he returned from conducting a funeral, stepping in his cutaway from the door of the funeral director’s Pierce Arrow, he saw me with the cap pistol, playing with the other boys in the alley (which was also forbidden), and a terrible scene followed that involved my mother as well as me.
In my last year in college, as a gesture of liberation from such prohibitions, I took some money I had earned and bought a target rifle in a sporting goods store on Nassau Street. Then a young member of the English faculty and I went, for several afternoons, to a ravine in the woods outside town where other people went to shoot at tin cans, and we fired away at cans while talking about Dostoevsky and Mann.
The rifle was dangerous in the jeep, and really had no purpose. It rode around behind the seat, and I did not shoot anything. But a neighboring farm boy and I went out twice, walking in the pastures outside the park, looking for groundhogs. Alan, when he heard about it, laughed and said from then on that I would shoot anything that moved, and I wondered what part his own safari days, with their expensive codes, may have been playing when he said it. The first of those afternoons we simply walked and never shot at all, but the next time, with the afternoon sun dazzling on the pasture, we came over a rise and I caught sight of a groundhog standing up, and I raised the rifle as he started to run for his hole, and fired. It was unlikely that I could have hit him at that distance, but it was what is called a “lucky” shot, and he was killed instantly. When we got to him he was lying on his back, one paw in the air. I looked down and was disgusted at what I had done. I thought, “This is what is supposed to be so exciting. This creature was full of his life a minute ago, and this is what I have managed to make of him. There he is. Dead. Something I know nothing about.”
“Just leave him there,” the boy said. “The crows will take care of him.” I stood looking down at the body already receding in death, and wanted to ask its pardon, and felt ridiculous about that and its uselessness, and the shame burned into me. There was nothing to say about it. The rifle went into a closet.
20
My driving seemed fairly reliable, although the traffic on the main roads and around the newly installed traffic circles near Heights-town still tightened my knuckles and accelerated my pulse. On Friday afternoon or Saturday morning I would check with Handy about whether he needed the jeep, and if it was free I would drive down to Princeton, to the Harrison Street housing project, and fetch Dorothy. Occasionally friends came up from Princeton on the weekends for picnics and to go swimming in the lake. Alan encouraged it, though I could guess when he was spotting telltale signs of their being “intellectuals.” Bill Arrowsmith and his wife Jean came more than once, and we rigged hammocks under the trees and talked through the afternoon, with Peter in and out of the conversations. He returned to Sherlock Holmes and Marco Polo, and we to Henry James, Yeats, and Joyce and Mann.
Alain Prévost came only once, turning up one day when Alan was giving a party for young friends that began at the lake and went on into the evening at a farmhouse outside the park gate. Alain seemed distracted and overcharged that summer. I believe (my guess based partly on a novel that he later published) that he was having an affair with a woman some years older than he was, another friend of Alan’s, with a big house on Long Island and a circle of rich friends—it sounded like a reincarnation of the Gatsby era—and when I was in Princeton I had no idea how to reach him.
Sometimes Alan brought friends of Peter’s for a swim on weekends. During the week Peter and I went to Allamuchy almost every day to collect the mail at the general store, and into Hackettstown occasionally to check the fishing tackle, and we took to calling in often at a big brick colonial-style house above the highway, facing out over the woods of the Deer Park, where Peter’s Rutherford cousins, twin boys of his own age, came for the summer. Occasionally we took them along with us into Allamuchy to the post office, and I shudder still when I remember how they loved the jeep and begged me to drive faster, as they sat in the back with the top down, and how fast I did drive, more than once, with all four of us shouting and laughing, along the concrete highway. Fortunately there was almost no traffic along that road then, but the jeep’s short wheel base and high center of gravity made it precarious as the speedometer needle climbed. The prayers in my gut brought on prudence before our luck, or whatever guardian was along, gave up on us.
A few times, late in the summer, Alan drove us to New York, to his big top-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue, furnished grandly in some other life, probably by his mother, the décor part nineteenth-century European, part twentieth-century New York City lavish. Huge grand piano, fringed shawls on tables, Louis XV chairs, silver-framed photographs, including one of General De Gaulle with an inscription to Alan’s mother. I am not sure now whether we were brought along to keep Peter company or to acquaint us with another aspect of Alan’s life. He chatted confidentially about the politics of the building, its snobbish exclusivity its antisemitism, which he spoke of with disapproval. But it was on one of those trips that he referred to the time in the thirties when his brother, Louis, and he had planned to join in the Spanish Civil War, on Franco’s side. They may even have gone to Spain, though I believe they never saw action. My startled questions were inept, and Alan ignored them and turned the talk to other things.
I had grown up in the atmosphere of my father’s unquestioned and determined Republican faith, which he relayed as though he had it from Mount Sinai. I had begun to grow away from that creed as soon as I began to think about it, in my student years. I simply woke up to discover that his notions were not mine. But even he had inconsistencies that he must have been carrying from somewhere in his own youth. He could not hear the name Carnegie (as in Lake Carnegie at Princeton, or the various libraries and museums) without saying, “If he had paid his workers a decent wage he might not have had so much money to give away in his own memory.” It was a sentiment that he had almost certainly picked up on the streets of Pittsburgh, from people who remembered the Homestead Steel Strike and the Pinkertons, but it was evident that he liked its trenchant ring. He claimed proudly that his mother had allowed John L. Lewis to hold in her cellar some of his early, secret—indeed, “underground”—meetings of what would become the United Mine Workers. He had no details of that, when I got around to asking, and I have never been sure whether it was true. But although at least one of his sisters, a narrow, hardheaded, mean-spirited woman, was a vehement racist, my father was always openly and firmly opposed to racial discrimination of any kind.
During my childhood his political stance, however he had come to it, reached me less obviously than the prohibitions that came from his own upbringing and temperament, and from his religious fundamentalism, which I encountered again at the Seminary when he was away in the army. That seemed to me an extension of something
in my father that I had outgrown and would no longer tolerate. But politics, during my first years in college, was like watching a card game I did not really understand, played by people I did not know. It was the year I went to the Deer Park, and I listened to friends, including the revered Richard Blackmur and Bill Arrowsmith, speaking with passion about the coming election, expressing their dread at the thought of Thomas Dewey being elected to the presidency, which seemed likely, and other friends talking urgently of their hopes for Henry Wallace. That spring and summer the political arena, and what was involved in it, began to seem real to me. My own readings in history began to take their place in that. Arrowsmith would be talking about the poetry of Wallace Stevens one minute and Rousseau’s Social Contract, and its relevance to us, the next. I began to recognize my own sympathies and convictions, and see that they were liberal, however unformed and unfocused they might be. And when I learned of Alan’s and Louis’s adherence to Franco, and some of Alan’s other political assumptions, they seemed to me not only startling and repellent but discredited, done for, like bits of wallpaper in a demolition site, or obiter dicta of the Red Queen.
On one of those trips to New York Alan stopped in the suburbs to pick up a school friend of Peter’s, a red-haired shy boy named Andrew, and he took Andrew and his father along with us to the city. Later, Alan told me that he had decided to go to France the following summer, to the villa on the Côte d’Azur, on St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, which he had inherited from his mother. He asked whether I—Dorothy and I—would be interested in coming along to look after Peter and Andrew, whom he had invited to come to keep Peter company. The question took me by surprise, but it was easy to answer, and we began at once to imagine France, the Riviera. Peter was as excited by the idea as we were, and talked about the villa with a wild incoherence that utterly failed to convey an image of it, even after he had found a photograph album and shown us some old pictures of the place.
All through the rest of that summer at the Deer Park we talked of France, next year. Peter wondered whether he had forgotten his French, and was bashful about speaking it to Alan. One of the last weekends there, friends of Alan’s whom I had not met before came to the Deer Park for the day. One of them was Maria Antonia da Braganza, an attractive woman several years younger than Alan, who was the sister of Don Duarte da Braganza, the pretender to the Portuguese throne. She had been married to a cousin of Alan’s by the name of Chanler, and Alan and she talked of her beloved house up the Hudson in Duchess County. Among Alan’s other guests that day there were several women whose talk with me turned to books, which surprised me in Alan’s house. A couple of them actually asked me what I hoped to write, and I was so startled that I found myself answering at far too great a length, and rather pompously. It did not seem to bother Maria Antonia—or perhaps she did not hear it. She said nothing about books at all, but she and I seemed to get along at once, and after lunch she asked me to take a walk with her.
We walked out to a bank of rocks that was the ruin of some old building and sat down. She took out a case of slender cigars, offered me one, and took one herself. When they were lit she told me, in her husky voice and slight, charming accent, that Alan and she had been talking about me. I had no idea what that might mean. She said that the Portuguese government had agreed to allow the royal family to return to Portugal, more or less without conditions, and that she had been offered a house there for the coming winter and was hoping to go back. She had two boys by her former husband, Alan’s cousin. The children had joint American and Portuguese citizenship, and she did not want them to lose their English if they went back to Portugal. She wondered whether I would like to join her and tutor the boys in English, after our next summer in France. We would have our own house, she said, and all our meals and living expenses. The salary itself would not be much—one conto a month, which came to around forty dollars—but we would be living in the country, with nothing to spend it on, and if we needed more we could talk about it later. I could not see that there was more than one possible answer, but there was Dorothy’s job. To her it seemed a small thing in comparison with the chance to go to Portugal in such circumstances.
At the end of the summer, on the last day at the Deer Park house, Alan sat with Dorothy and me in the living room and said that as a way of thanking me for the summer he wanted me to choose some object from the house, anything I wanted. It was a regal offer. There were valuable things in every room. I chose a pair of square Mexican jadeite candlesticks that I had admired all summer. I knew they were modern, not museum pieces, and it seemed all right to choose those. I have managed to hang on to them, through a series of moves, all these years.
21
That winter of 1948–1949 we tried to imagine France, and Portugal—which was even harder—and Europe. They remained somewhere between history and the world we knew, invisible despite whatever we had read. I remembered as a small child asking my mother great, persistent questions, among them, “Mother, what is Europe? Where is Europe?”
The Nyhorn was scheduled to take over a week on its voyage to Genoa, and during that time, in the summer weather, it acquired the familiarity and the comfortable tedium of a temporary home. In one of the games with Peter and Andrew I slipped on the wet iron deck plates, under an iron companionway ladder, and laid my shin bare, so that I limped around for a few days (later I thought of that companionway as a prophetic signal), and we sat in the sun, more than was good for us, and read. We got to know where the mice lived on board, and their routes along the bulkheads, their daytime scheduled runs. One of the other passengers, a thin, laconic young man from Arkansas who had been a bombardier in Europe, told us about finding mice in the bomber, barely conscious with the cold and the lack of oxygen. He and his crew mates decided that the mice would never make it through the flight, however they had managed to survive up until then, and so they tied the corners of handkerchiefs to their tails to make parachutes and dropped them through the bomb bay doors, watching the slipstream snatch the handkerchiefs, and imagining them drifting down into the temperature of the world again. It was another story, like those of the Italian seaman, that seemed less likely the more I thought about it, but stories of that kind were a leitmotif of our days on the freighter. We listened to them, and they accompanied us, in the way that Peter’s much-thumbed Conan Doyle stories, and the Prose Edda, which we both read and talked about, and my Yeats and Dante and Huizinga, contributed their colors and dimension to our passage, as did the flying fish bursting like spray ahead of the bow wave, and the trails of phosphorescence unfurling alongside us through the summer nights. We got to know the crew members a little, and learned that the prevailing bad smell emanating from one doorway near the galley came from a bin in which potatoes were rotting. From time to time galley hands in dirty aprons emerged from that doorway (the one the mice came from) with full garbage cans, which they tipped over the rail, laughing to us at the messy game.
The vessel’s Norwegian ownership was detectable in the galley hands, the cook, and the menu, which included, at most meals, several kinds of preserved fish, cold pickled vegetables, and always potato salad—elements of what the steward (he of the routines) proudly and regularly informed us was smorgasbord. At the evening meal one week into the trip, he told us, as though he were letting us in on a secret, that we would be within sight of the coast of Europe the next morning. Peter and I were up on the bow before breakfast, looking ahead past the leaping showers of flying fish and the gleaming backs of the dolphins wheeling ahead of us.
There were no rays of sunlight yet in the overcast sky. Then as we strained our eyes we saw, on the horizon ahead, a slaty black line distinct from the gray sky and gray sea. The coast of Spain. We lay watching it, though it did not appear to draw any nearer. Finally we stood up, stiff and cold, and went down to breakfast, looking back over our shoulders, getting up to peer through the windows of the dining room. Then we climbed back up to watch through most of the morning, sitting on the bow with our legs swinging over
the cutwater. Other passengers came and joined us, stayed for a while and left, but we ended up getting deck chairs and books and settling in. By mid-morning we could make out a long facade of cliffs falling from a serrated crest to the haze on the surface of the sea. The sheer curtain of land faced west, so the morning rays of the sun left it in its own shadow, but the sun lit up the sea between us, and shone on our faces, and on the white bridge up behind us, which now seemed to be part of ourselves, a house and memory we were bringing with us.
As we watched, another shape darkened in the gray cloud at the foot of the cliffs, a low silhouette moving certainly but imperceptibly like a shadow on a dial. A vessel. A warship, with a warship’s lethal elegance. The outline, as I kept my eyes on it, was familiar, to my surprise, though at first I could not place it. Low in the water. A battleship. I did know it, I came to realize, because ten years before that I had built a model of it, and painted it a much lighter shade of gray. It was the Missouri, and the recognition, which could not be shared at all, was at once exciting and oddly troubling, an unexpected reminder that wherever I went I might count on some revenant from my childhood to be there ahead of me.
Closer in, after the battleship had disappeared up the coast toward the Cape Trafalgar, we saw a small town at the foot of the cliffs, and a road behind it descending from the top of the ridge. I fixed it so firmly in my eye as we approached that a year later, when I was on a bus to Algeciras and to Yeats’s “heron-billed pale cattle birds,” I would recognize the road I was on, and the town into which it was descending—which by then I knew was a fishing port named Tarifa—and feel that I had completed a kind of destined but unidentified circuit.
