Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  I was not sure at first why she had been sent to stay with that family in the big house across the street behind the school. She was reluctant to talk about it and seemed unhappy but determined not to admit it. In the end she gave me to understand that her father wanted her to be there so that she would be able to go out with a young man a few years older than we were, who lived in Wilkes-Barre and came from a family with a considerable amount of money and social position in the region. I had always thought of her father as wealthy. They were the richest family in the church and he was an eminent figure in the city, but evidently his ambition was far from satisfied. I knew from what she told me then that despite her apparent self-assurance she was afraid of her father, and I understood that well enough, because for years, until I turned on him physically and defied him, I had been afraid of mine. During my early childhood he had been distant, unpredictable, and harsh. He had punished me fiercely for things I had not known were forbidden, when the list of known restrictions was already long and oppressive. I was told regularly that I loved him, as I was told that I loved God and Jesus, and I did not know at the time that the names for much of my feeling about him were really dread and anger.

  But by the time I went to Seminary, at fourteen, he was in Europe as a chaplain in the army. In his absence I had transformed him in my mind into the figure I wanted to believe he was, and without my realizing that it was happening, I had transferred much of my resentment of him to the school and its antique restrictions. When he came back to the States after the war, I spent a week or so with him at the army base at Fort Story, Virginia, a time of reacquaintance and acceptance that would eventually help me to ponder elements of his past that may have fostered some of the hapless, incapacitating anxieties he carried with him.

  At Seminary, the faculty kept a stern, suspicious eye on the budding adolescents of both sexes living under its one roof. Boys were not allowed to speak to girls on campus, except for one period of half an hour or so, once or twice a week, when they could “socialize” in one designated “socializing room,” in the presence of the white-haired Dean of Women. The elder members of the faculty mounted guard over the priceless distance between the sexes of the boarding students. I did not get home very often on weekends, and had no money when I did escape from the campus, and I found the regimentation suffocating. By the end of spring, that last year, I had been admitted to Princeton with a scholarship, and during the final weeks, as the sentiment about leaving the dear old walls intensified among some of my classmates, I could not wait to see the last of the place.

  In the final weeks there, though, the weather was beautiful. The big trees were reentering the sounds and smells of true summer. One weekend when the year’s studies were all but over and the classrooms empty, and I had been confined to campus as a disciplinary measure for some rebellious infraction, I was earning points or payment by washing the outsides of the windows on the upper floors of the main class building, with one other boy. We had straps with swivel hooks to hold us in place as we stood on the cement window sills, up among the rustling leaves, watching the street and the campus from the birds’ height. The sense of risk, the recurrent rush of vertigo, nourished an elation, a foretaste of freedom, a floating happiness that accompanied me, and my bucket, reflected in the panes of window after window, and stayed with me as we carried the buckets and squeegees and rags down the marble stairs and as I went across the street to the dormitories and upstairs to my room. It was a feeling that remained beside me as though I could touch it, through those last days, and it was there one sunny morning when a large, heavy boy, a guard on the football team and neighbor in the dormitory, came crashing up the stairs. I heard the roar of his voice well before I could make out what he was shouting about. I ran out to hear what was so important as he pounded along the hall, and others popped out of their doorways around him. “They’ve landed,” he kept shouting, “they’ve landed.” It was the Normandy landing. It had just begun. Few boys had radios, but some had been hiding them until then, and all at once they were turned on everywhere, and the remnants of the school schedule were forgotten as we huddled around them.

  3

  That winter I had read War and Peace, carrying the thick red volume down the hall to the bathroom after lights out and sitting there in a marble stall for hours, unless I was caught, by some professor on his rounds, completely immersed in the Russia of the Romantic era, the Napoleonic invasion, the characters and dilemmas of Tolstoy’s huge fiction, and also in Tolstoy’s essays, set at intervals in the narrative, on the nature of history, the forces that impel it. I had never encountered that kind of speculation. I found it enthralling, and had been discussing Tolstoy’s theories with my history teacher, Prof. Leroy Bugbee, one of the two professors there whom I really liked. The other was my Spanish teacher, Prof. Lawrence Sampson, who was dying of a weak heart and puffed cheerfully along the street with a cane, stopping to catch his breath, but whose wit, temperament, cultivation, and skeptical worldliness awakened in me a growing fascination with languages and language. He taught me my first years of Spanish. I had been reading some of Frost’s poems, and Shakespeare, and had won the Declamation Contest (twenty-five dollars) with a performance of Mark Anthony’s speech over Caesar’s body in Julius Caesar. But it was Tolstoy’s story that went on playing in my head into the months of that spring and summer when I had turned sixteen, and bits of news were reaching us from the war in Europe.

  While my father was overseas in the army, my mother had taken an administrative job in the Scranton YWCA. We had moved from the manse, across the street from my father’s church on Washburn Street, to an apartment on the other side of town, on Madison. Most university schedules had been speeded up as a wartime measure, with three semesters a year and no summer vacations, and so, a few weeks after I graduated from Seminary, a friend of my mother’s named Deb Borden, who taught Physical Education at the “Y” and had a little ten-year-old Ford, drove my mother and me and my things down to Princeton. I had a suitcase or two and a few books, but the car did not have much room in it, and Deb could not see why I needed so much stuff.

  At the registration office in Stanhope Hall I was directed to Dodd Hall, a late nineteenth-century stone building with fire escapes that amounted to balconies, and splintery floors, broad staircases, and iron banisters inside. The assigned rooms, up one flight, consisted of an entrance hall, and inside that a large living room with a fireplace, and two bedrooms, one on either side of the entrance. I would be sharing the quarters with another boy who had just graduated from Seminary, where I had never known him. He had been a day student. He was very blond, pale, Teutonic, and turned out to be intensely earnest and conventional. He was already determined to become a doctor, like his successful father. He had not yet arrived when I got there.

  There was no furniture. We had been informed at the registration office that we could pick up secondhand pieces at several places across Nassau Street, and though my mother was naturally suspicious of buying anything of that kind because you never knew where it had been, on the basis of that official advice she and Deb and I walked to one of the jumbled exchanges, and my mother bought a few matured essentials—bed, desk, chairs, tables, lamps—while visibly struggling to overcome her distaste at their condition, especially when it came to the mattress, which necessitated a patient reassurance, from the person running the establishment, about what every mattress there had endured to restore its innocence, and about how this was the way it was always done. According to the law, he said, which seemed to reassure her somewhat. Deb stood apart from the whole undertaking, somewhere above it. It seemed to me that it was my mother who was being initiated, misgiving by misgiving, into the unkempt rites that were the prerequisites of becoming a college student, and that to me somehow they must already be familiar.

  The furniture we had settled on was to be delivered in the next few hours. My mother kept clucking her tongue and remembering that she had always heard that Princeton was awfully fast. She a
nnounced that the rooms were utterly filthy, and the next stop, after the veteran furniture had been settled on, was a hardware store, where she bought a bucket, a scrub brush, cloths, ammonia, white vinegar, and washing soda, and on the way back to the room she made sure I understood the correct mixture of them that was to be used, in hot water, to get the buff-colored paintwork clean. We must have had a sandwich somewhere—one that she had made at home and packed in waxed paper—before they left to drive back to Scranton, which seemed a very long way in those days. As I began to scrub, alone in the rooms, I thought I felt the arrival of the beginning of freedom. The Promised Land was empty and evidently dirty, but I was elated, and when my roommate, whose name was Alex, arrived, the furniture was piled in the middle of the room and I was obediently sloshing the wainscots for the first and only time, before I knocked off to push the battered pieces into place for a new life, in which Alex would be shocked, day by day, by my views about everything.

  He was a couple of years older than I was, but then, at sixteen, I was young to be there at all. Back in grade school, in Union City, New Jersey, I had been moved a grade ahead, skipping a year, and then another one, and then had been told that that would not work because I was too much younger than any of my classmates, which would be bad for me, and I had been moved back again one grade. I came to feel that somehow all that shifting was my fault. After it was settled there was always an age difference of a year or two between my classmates and me.

  4

  After I left Seminary I had learned that, in the weeks that followed the Normandy landings, the Germans, thrown onto the defensive, drew units from occupied territories, particularly from southern France and northern Italy, to build up strength for a battle that they hoped would throw the Allies back into the sea. I heard odds and ends about it over the radio, read scraps of stories in the occasional newspapers, and we talked about it around the school during the days before graduation, and on the picnics with friends who had cars and could drive out to nearby lakes. We did not have much real information, and the news was kept off-stage much of the time by the impending graduation itself, the visiting families, our own sense of imminent change, and our moving out of the old dormitory building—its long swaybacked halls with their brown linoleum floors and naked overhead bulbs, shadowy at all hours with the ghosts of generations going back to the Civil War and before it. Then we would hear of the war again: fragmentary accounts of the fighting in Normandy, silent and unreal. Impersonal dispatches about the advances, the continuing bombardments, the German buildup. I am sure it did not occur to me that I would go on hearing details of those days, those far-off events, for years, and in fact for the rest of my life.

  The Germans hoped to rout the advancing Allies near the city of Caen, east of Bayeux and the landing beaches, and as they fell back they were preparing defensive positions and assembling troops, artillery, and armor for the battle. The Luftwaffe had been crippled by then, so they could no longer count on air support as they had done in the early days of the war, at the time of the British evacuation of the beaches at Dunkerque. The Germans based their hopes, in great part, on the numbers and performance of their tanks, and crack German units—armored units especially—were being rushed north and west for the decisive confrontation. The troop movements toward Caen were part of a general ebbing of German forces out of southern Europe to concentrate on defending the north. As the Germans retreated through southern France, with certain picked units such as the Das Reich Division perpetrating vindictive farewell massacres on the way, the French Resistance, which had long been organizing for this moment, did whatever it could to ambush and harass and delay them, at times with telling success, but often at terrible cost to themselves, and to nearby civilian populations, whom the Nazis punished in retribution for the activities and the very survival of the Resistance.

  A small number of British and American agents had been hidden in the French countryside for a year and more, helping to maintain contact between the Allied command and the French Resistance network, and in the days after the Normandy landings others were parachuted into the south, to provide liaison and to help, where that might be possible. One of these agents, as I understood the story (though it was told in so sidelong and elusive a manner that I was never sure exactly what did happen), was Alan Stuyvesant, a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, “Peg-Leg Pete,” the Dutch seventeenth-century governor of New Amsterdam, which after the English took it would be called New York.

  When I came to know Alan I had just turned twenty and he was forty-seven. Although I had graduated from Princeton and was in graduate school and married, I was still provincial, naïve, and penniless. And Alan, a generation older, was worldly, knowledgeable, opinionated, and very rich. He had learned, long before that, how to appear to be frank and open, while referring to his own life with a practiced reserve, recounting moments of it with a flourish of humor, as finished anecdotes, and then stepping aside from them into the wings. It was a while before I learned to recognize the maneuver, and to see that his descriptions of his brother’s and his mother’s drunken binges and turns of unedifying behavior were cutouts: mythologized fragments held up in front of him in a way that was meant to suggest his own amiable candor about matters that he knew someone would reveal sooner or later, in any case. My own upbringing had not fostered an aptitude for asking pertinent questions. I had been told repeatedly that it was rude to be openly curious about anything “personal.” Besides that, I am still surprised to learn how many things other people who have known each other for years, and perhaps at close quarters, have never found out about each other.

  It is not hard to understand why Alan might have been chosen for a liaison mission with the French Resistance in Provence near the Italian border. He was bilingual, to begin with. His mother had been the Belgian Princesse de Caraman-Chimay. (I never managed to find out much about his father, who for some reason or other was not talked about.) Alan had grown up partly in France and had gone to French schools. From his mother he had inherited a large villa on the sea cliff at St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, between Nice and Monte Carlo, which had been her summer house for many years. It was a house where he had spent summers during his childhood. He had known the Alpes Maritimes all his life.

  The story, as I understood it, was that in the summer of 1944 Alan had been dropped by parachute into a small valley north of Nice to join a man whom he already knew well, from very different, urbane circumstances.

  That man’s code name in the Resistance was Captain Goderville. The name by which Alan knew him was Jean Prévost. Prévost was a man of letters, a writer and literary critic of some eminence. In 1944 he was forty-three years old, roughly the same age as Alan. He had been born in St. Pierre-les-Nemours, south of Fontainebleau, and at the age of seventeen had entered the Lycée Henri IV as a student, in a special category chosen to study for a competitive examination. His philosophy professor was the well-known writer and essayist who published under the name of “Alain.” Jean began to write, and was publishing articles in La Nouvelle Revue Française by the time he was twenty-three. He married two years later. His wife, Marcelle Auclair, was also a writer. They had three children, Michel, Françoise, and Alain, named for Jean’s professor, who had remained a family friend. In the early thirties Jean lectured at Cambridge and travelled to the United States. His first marriage came apart and he remarried when he was thirty-nine. In 1943, after the fall of France, he obtained his Doctorate of Letters and was awarded the Grand Prix of the Académie Française for a study of Stendhal.

  In that same year, 1943, he joined the Resistance, undertook several missions in Paris, and in 1944 took command of a company of the Maquis in the Vercors, a mountainous region that became a famous operational area of the Resistance. On June 13th of that year, one week after the first Normandy landings, on a winding mountain road near St. Nizier du Moucherotte, his company ambushed and repulsed the German 157th Gebirgsjager Division. Fighting continued there in the mountains until the Maquis
withdrew on July 23rd. Jean had been wounded. He and some of his company hid in a cave, the Grotte des Fées, where the Germans found them on August 1st, and Jean was killed.

  At what point in 1944 Alan Stuyvesant made contact with him, if that is what really happened, I have never been completely sure. Alan had known Jean, and Jean’s first wife, and their children, in Paris, and his friendship with Marcelle and the children continued after the war. Alan said that Jean had asked him to promise to look after the children if he did not survive the war. It is hard to imagine such a promise being requested and given before the war. The most likely time for that would have been at a meeting between them when Jean was in the Resistance, just before the action in early June 1944. But Alan’s vagueness about the circumstances made me curious—to no avail—about how it had come about. Only once, when several of us were driving to dinner from St. Jean Cap-Ferrat to St. Paul de Vence, at an intersection north of Nice Alan pointed to a road we were not taking and said that it was “up that way” that he had been dropped in by parachute, and Jean had been wounded, and caught by the Germans, and killed. It sounded as though the place was just a few miles up the road, and it was years before I pieced the dates and names of sites together and realized that the region he had been talking about was most of the way to Grenoble, a distance of many miles through the mountains.

  It was because of Alan’s promise, and Jean’s youngest son, Alain, that I would go to Europe.

  5

  With the stepped-up schedule that had continued at the university through the end of the war and for a while afterward, I had graduated in 1947, three years after I entered as an undergraduate. Then I had gone on to graduate school in Romance languages and embarked upon my thoughtless first marriage.