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 assumptions—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.