The Door into Summer

The Door into Summer is the novel’s recurring expression for an elsewhere where winter, confinement, and disappointment give way to warmth and renewed possibility. First embodied in a cat’s determined search for a door that opens onto summer, it becomes Dan Davis’s metaphor for escaping the painful present. Its final return, joined to his life with Ricky and his refusal to travel back again, turns the image from a wish to flee into an affirmation of the future he has chosen.

Pete’s Literal Search

In the farmhouse in Connecticut, Pete has a door of his own: a board fitted into a window, with a cat-sized opening cut through it. The house itself has eleven doors to the outside, twelve if Pete’s entrance counts. He ordinarily uses his door, but snow changes the arrangement. Pete will not venture through an opening that leads to winter; instead, he insists that Dan open the people doors for him, one after another, as if at least one must lead to summer.

The search is comic in its repetition and affectionate in its precise ritual. Dan has to accompany Pete around the house and hold each door open while the cat discovers that winter lies on the other side, too. When the inspection ends in failure, Pete stays inside until necessity drives him out. Returning with ice in his pads, he glares at Dan and withholds his purr until he has chewed the ice away. Forgiveness lasts only until the next snowfall. The seasonal frustration does not cure Pete of his expectation: he never gives up looking for the Door into Summer.

Dan’s Metaphor of Escape

On December 3, 1970, Dan is looking for a door of his own. In Los Angeles, snow is not the problem: what little southern California snow there is belongs on the mountains, while the city’s winter is an inward desolation. Dan acknowledges that his self-pity exceeds his circumstances; he is not seriously ill or broke, and the police, husbands, and process servers are not pursuing him. Yet he feels that winter in his heart and reaches for Pete’s image to express the wish to find an exit.

At this point, the imagined summer initially means getting away from the people and events that have made his life go sour. The Long Sleep offers a way to sleep through his troubles and wake in a different world. Dan especially wants to outlast Belle Darkin, and perhaps Miles Gentry as well, so that distance and time will remove the immediate pain of their presence. The Door into Summer thus begins as a hope of escape, not yet a settled destination: Dan wants the present to end, and imagines that an entirely different era might feel like summer.

The Choice to Face Winter

The metaphor changes when Dan reconsiders the stock certificate in Hired Girl, Inc. He has sent it to Ricky, but recognizes that if something happened to him it might eventually come into Miles and Belle’s hands. The certificate is more than property: it gives him the right to inspect the company’s books and affairs, and could help him challenge an effort to exclude him. Rather than treat the Long Sleep as the answer, Dan realizes that he has decided not to take it. The possibility of fighting with the stock as his weapon replaces the fantasy of withdrawing from the conflict.

Sending the envelope to Ricky does not mean that Dan has given up the struggle. He arranges the stock assignment so that she can return it without the red tape of a minor assigning it back, and feels lighter after mailing it because he has made a decision about how to live. He acknowledges that his problems are not solved; he has chosen to face them instead of crawling into a hole or using alcohol to blot them out. Seeing the year 2000 by living through the intervening years, he decides, will be more satisfying than skipping ahead without experiencing what comes before. Pete’s repeated search now carries a parallel meaning: persistence is not a guarantee that the next door will open onto summer, but it keeps hope alive through the winter.

The Dream and the Found Door

After returning to the future, Dan dreams of wandering, shivering, through branching corridors. At each door he hopes to find Ricky waiting on the other side, but Pete ranges ahead between his legs, peering outside and confirming that it is still winter. The cat’s back-and-forth movement nearly trips Dan, turning his familiar habit into a dream obstacle. Yet neither gives up the conviction that the next door may be the right one. The dream gathers the phrase’s two meanings—the literal cat’s search and Dan’s desire for reunion—into one image of persistence amid uncertainty.

At the novel’s close, Dan says that he has found his Door into Summer and would not travel through time again for fear of getting off at the wrong station. He would urge a son who chose to travel to go forward rather than back: the past is for emergencies, while the future is better. This is not the escape Dan first imagined. His confidence rests on remaining in the life he has made, with Ricky, rather than erasing the years that brought him there.

A Hope That Remains Open

The expression’s final recurrence brings the story back to Pete. Dan has built a cat bathroom for bad weather, but Pete prefers going outdoors and still believes that one of the doors, if tried, must be the Door into Summer. Dan’s closing agreement—he thinks Pete is right—lets the cat’s homely persistence stand beside Dan’s more consequential choice of a future. The hope is not that every door opens onto the desired season, but that the search remains worth making.

The phrase also holds together the novel’s seasonal contrasts. Winter names both the snow Pete refuses and the inward desolation from which Dan wants to escape; summer names the possibility of warmth, reunion, and a better life. By the end, that possibility is no longer located only beyond a door into another time. It belongs to the future Dan accepts, and to the ordinary loyalty of a cat who keeps testing every exit.