The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  She had turned her head and slept then, her cheek on Peter’s arm.

  Those had been such lovely years.

  Now she brushed her hands free of crumbs, put her plate in the sink.

  As she did so, the music on the radio ceased abruptly. A dead silence fell into the quiet kitchen.

  Ruth turned away from the window.

  The radio was on a shelf mounted over the radiator. Three warning blasts blared from a siren, and then, after a moment, a computerized voice announced the threat of tornadoes in a distant county.

  A line of dangerous thunderstorms was moving eastward.

  On the radar maps that Peter consulted, such storms were conveyed as comic-book explosions of red and yellow and green.

  She glanced out the kitchen window again.

  The sky was empty, a formal ceremonial blue.

  She turned on the tap to rinse her plate.

  Years of living with Peter, whose interest in the weather Ruth considered obsessive, had acquainted her with the habits of storms. These would dissipate long before reaching them so near the coast, she expected, their force dissolved by the wall of warm air gathering offshore and advancing inland.

  She even knew, thanks to Peter, the name of this effect: the marine influence.

  She had never seen a real tornado, only the ones captured on television. How sinister they were, she thought, their scale so … biblical.

  But Peter would tell her not to worry now.

  She ran hot water and washed the mixing bowls, glancing up at the sky from time to time.

  She had always done the work herself for parties at the school. There had never been any extra money for help, and she wouldn’t have asked for it if there had been. The school had many other, more urgent needs. There was no skill to making cheese puffs anyway, as she’d told Peter when he fretted that all the labor fell to her. She’d made them so often she could do it in her sleep. She’d rather bake a cake—and eat one, for that matter—but one didn’t eat cake with gin, and gin was what they would all want at the end of this first long day of the school year.

  It was a private satisfaction to Ruth that those who had worked at the Derry School all the years that Peter had been headmaster had come to expect cake on their birthday. She made several kinds—lemon, coconut, apple, German chocolate, carrot—taking care to find out people’s preferences and keeping a list. Also, those who were sick or suffering trouble knew they could depend on soup and pie from Ruth. She was glad to have been relied on in this way. Such kindness was uncomplicated, easy to give. In the summers, too, she delivered to people in their offices bunches of the dusty purple grapes from the old arbor sagging behind the house. They were delicious, with an old-fashioned sweetness, and Peter hated to see them go to waste. The bees would ruin them if she did not give them away.

  He did not think of the grapes as belonging to them, in any case. Everything they had, including the house itself and most of its furnishings, was theirs only provisionally, for as long as they remained at Derry.

  Her work in the world had not been equal to Peter’s.

  She knew that, but she had wanted to be of help to him and to the boys. She had wanted, as she had said often to Dr. Wenning, to be of use in the world.

  • • •

  Peter and Ruth had lived and worked at Derry for just over fifty years. In the summer of 1960 when they arrived, Peter was just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, tall and gangly and all Adam’s apple and kneecaps and hair flopping in his eyes. His first job at the school had been to teach American history.

  The Derry Industrial School, as it was called then, had been founded at the turn of the nineteenth century. Parents who had lost a son to influenza in early childhood had established the school with a bequest to the Maine diocese of the Episcopal Church, and its original purpose had been to educate boys once referred to as unfortunate. The curriculum promised a vocational path, the gift of useful knowledge and practical skills—including the harvesting of lumber—which would arm these boys with a way to make a living in the world.

  For decades, Derry boys had gone into the forest with teams of horses and wagons, learning the art of selecting and felling timber. The practice had been in use still when Ruth and Peter had arrived, and even after bulldozers and mechanical equipment were available, the school continued to use the horse teams, the method thought to be more in keeping with the Derry spirit and its pride in self-reliance and discipline, the nostalgic virtues of manly, robust health.

  In the early years, Ruth and Peter had gone with the boys and the lumbermen who directed them. In winter, bells were hung on the big draft horses’ harnesses, the horses’ warm breath clouding the air. There had been a gravely festive quality to those occasions—thermoses of milky sweet coffee and cheese sandwiches on brown bread supplied—not a celebration exactly, Ruth had thought, but something significant. Finally, however, it was no longer affordable to timber the land in this way. A company came now to clear-cut a section every few years, and the school depended on the revenue. Ruth missed the old days. She thought she would never forget the sound of the horses’ bells, the trees coming down in the silence of the forest, the great ominous rushing sound and the raw, sour tang in the air. Standing beside Peter in the red hat she’d knitted for herself, Peter wrapped in the red scarf she’d made for him, she had felt deep inside her the collision of tree with earth.

  The language of the school’s mission had changed over the years, of course. The word unfortunate could not be used anymore, though as Peter always said, it was the same truth now as it had been one hundred years before that those who were born poor deserved their poverty no more or less than others deserved the silver spoon. But costs had risen steeply, and the trustees were exerting growing pressure on Peter to redirect the school’s focus toward paying students. A capital campaign had begun to transform the beautiful but shabby old brick buildings and to up-market, a term Peter disliked, the school’s image. More and more, especially in the last few years, Peter had been left alone to importune privately his own contacts—old friends they were, by now—to raise the money to protect the boys who needed scholarships. His job had become a continual fight for principle and for the funds to sustain that principle, and Ruth had watched him suffer over it.

  Now, after fifty years at the school, nearly forty as headmaster, Peter was, Ruth knew, too much a part of the school’s history to be fired, too well loved by too many. The school’s financial future was at present too uncertain for the risk of such change. Yet the uneasy compromise in which Derry now found itself, neither New England prep school for wealthy boys nor home for the indigent, could not last long. And the very rich and the very poor were rarely good bedfellows, Ruth thought, no matter what notions Peter cherished about empathy and civic duty.

  Peter was now seventy-six years old, Ruth just a couple of months behind him.

  He had so far resisted retiring, but it was only a matter of time, Ruth knew, before something unpleasant happened. She felt that time fast approaching.

  And then where would they go?

  What would Peter, who had worked every day, his whole adult life, for this school, do with himself?

  He was old—they were both old—and she saw that the boys were not as impressed by him as they had been back in the day. He still loped around the classroom firing questions at the students, though now hobbled by his bad knees and much changed in appearance from his younger self, worn down by age and disease. But his enthusiasm was more performance than it once had been, she knew. He’d been uncannily good with names when he was younger—amazing really, Ruth had thought—but more often now he relied on old-fashioned endearments: Sport, Champ, Buster, Pal. Peter’s reputation—a thing separate from Peter himself, she thought, like the story of a great king—held him aloft in the minds of most boys. But one day last year she had seen a boy walking behind Peter and imitating him, swinging his arms ape-like and lurching like Quasimodo. The impression had not been inaccurate, and Ruth
had felt sick with pain and anger. It had taken all her restraint not to go up and grab the boy by the arm and slap his cheek.

  That night, she and Peter had quarreled—her fault, as usual. She had picked a fight over something inconsequential, her anger easier to bear than her grief.

  She hated that he gave off a whiff of injury, like a weakened animal being tracked in the woods. She hated the complicated misery of her pity.

  Still he wouldn’t agree to retire.

  He could not even talk about it.

  And she, because she loved him, could not talk about it, either.

  After her lunch, she went outside to weed the flower bed in front of the house. It was warm for September, the air still and the birds quiet in the trees. It was as if the storms to the west were attracting all the energy in the atmosphere, creating around them a perimeter of unnatural calm. She realized that she had spoken to no one all morning. The telephone had not rung.

  When she struggled to her feet at last following two hours on her knees, her back was so stiff she could scarcely stand upright.

  It seemed an indulgence in the daylight hours, but she went indoors and ran a hot bath anyway. She had time before dinner, she thought. The day’s long silence had made her uneasy, and the evening ahead would be tiring. There was no harm in a quick bath.

  Yet she soaked in the tub for a long while, trickling water over the chilled atolls of her knees. Big, doleful things her kneecaps appeared from that perspective, her chin held just above the water. Six feet tall once, her legs powerful from years of regular walking, she had lost height as she had aged. After going through menopause, she had shrunk a quarter-inch or more every year, and she had grown heavier, too, pounds now apparently impossible to shed. When she folded laundry, she hurried to put away her underclothes, so distressingly large.

  Addressing her image in the mirror directly was all right; it was odd, how one could look without seeing. But it was unpleasant to accidentally glimpse her reflection in mirrors or store windows, like a creature stumbling into civilization from the wilderness. Hulking was the word that came to mind

  Her old friend Dr. Wenning, a doctor and a professor of psychiatry for whom Ruth had worked part-time while Peter was at Yale, had despaired over Ruth’s posture.

  Ruth, her back rounded, had sat at a wobbly three-legged table, typing Dr. Wenning’s lecture and patient notes from yellow sheets covered with her illegible scrawl.

  Do not slump so, Ruth! Dr. Wenning would cry. In her habitual cowl-necked sweater, her white hair a bird’s nest, Dr. Wenning would frown at Ruth. Chin jutting, shoulders back, she presented her chest.

  Like a figurehead on a ship, Ruth, she said. Breasts forward. Thus.

  Dr. Wenning had been barely five feet tall. The effect had been Napoleonic, ridiculous.

  Ruth had laughed.

  Go ahead, Dr. Wenning had said, shaking a finger. But your height is not an affliction, Ruth. Biologically speaking, it is a survival advantage. Embrace your height!

  On days when Ruth felt disquieted, as she had been today—the tiresome, noisy vacuuming, the tornado warnings, the lonely afternoon and long evening’s duties that always accompanied the first day of the school year still ahead of her—Ruth missed Dr. Wenning.

  It had been thirty years since she had died, Ruth sitting beside her bed in the hospital in New Haven, where Dr. Wenning had practiced medicine for so many decades, treating with Teutonic calm and courtesy the hysterical, the suicidal, the dangerous, the brokenhearted.

  My friends, Dr. Wenning had always called them.

  Ruth had stayed at the hospital for three days during which Dr. Wenning had not regained consciousness.

  Perched on a hard chair, inching closer to the window as the sun moved across the sky, Ruth had reread Middlemarch, plucked for its heft from the bookshelf at home before she’d left. Occasionally, she went downstairs to call Peter from the pay telephone on the first floor across from the hospital’s cafeteria, where the smells in the hall of toast and egg salad and hamburgers, the cheerful sounds of conversation and the clinking of silverware, warred with the underlying odors of sickness, the dramas of birth and death taking place nearby but out of sight.

  Trays of bland meals had been delivered with depressing, even cruel regularity, to Dr. Wenning’s room. Ruth had felt outraged by these trays, the callousness of their disregard; clearly it could be seen that Dr. Wenning—eyes closed, whey-faced and bloated—would never eat again. Exhausted, terrified, Ruth had had no appetite, and she had hurried to put the untouched trays outside the door, clattering the dishes angrily as she did so. Why did they continue to bring them?

  For two days, Dr. Wenning had moved restlessly in the bed, though never opening her eyes, her mouth working in ways that made Ruth’s throat constrict with helplessness.

  Dr. Wenning had suffered her first bout of breast cancer years before, had survived one mastectomy and then another. She had known that this would be the end.

  I know very well what will happen to me, Dr. Wenning had said, addressing her cowed young physician on her last visit to his office, Ruth sitting beside her, obedient as a nun.

  It is pretty easy, Dr. Wenning had said. She had smiled at the young doctor, but his ears had gone red.

  You give me enough morphine to sink a naval carrier, Dr. Wenning said. No stinginess in that regard. We are not, after all, worried about my addiction.

  Do you hear me, Ruth? She had reached over to clutch Ruth’s arm and had gripped it lightly, as if to emphasize Ruth’s presence there for the doctor, someone who would hold him accountable.

  Then her tone had softened. Ah, she had said lightly, almost gaily. What a nuisance I am to you. I hate it when my patients are physicians. Sorry!

  She’d shaken her head, as if he and she were in agreement about their mutual obstinacy, their presumption, the necessary ego of those who took the Hippocratic oath.

  Dr. Wenning had hefted her purse to her lap. But you understand me, I know, she said. And Ruth here knows what I want. So … it is okay? We are of one mind.

  She had patted Ruth’s arm, as if Ruth had made this speech.

  Afterward, breathless as they left the doctor’s office, she had apologized.

  I had to scare him a little bit, she said. It was not too bad, though? I tried to be gentle.

  Ruth realized she had never seen Dr. Wenning be anything but gentle, though she could be brisk with people she called bureaucrats and tyrants. A line from Shakespeare had come to Ruth; most of the time, Dr. Wenning’s tone would sing the savageness out of a bear.

  On the third morning of Ruth’s vigil at the hospital, something seemed to ease inside Dr. Wenning’s body, and she had quieted. Ruth, staring at her, felt distance enfolding between them, though their positions never moved. The intervals between Dr. Wenning’s breaths became farther and farther apart.

  Throughout the day, glancing up from Middlemarch, Ruth started forward in her chair only to see—after a long moment—Dr. Wenning’s sad, flat chest rise again.

  Late on the evening of the third day, Ruth was awoken by a nurse’s hand on her shoulder.

  She jumped up.

  All traces of Dr. Wenning, everything Ruth had known about her, had disappeared. Ruth cried out, her book falling to the floor.

  In an instant that Ruth realized she had missed, Dr. Wenning had left her. The thing on the bed—the face hollow beneath the cheekbones, the nose a bloodless beak, the hand curled on the sheet—was almost unrecognizable.

  She discovered then, though she had imagined it otherwise, that it would have been impossible to mistake sleep for death.

  Night had fallen. Through the open window, Ruth heard the sound of wind in the treetops, the noise of traffic. Other nurses came into the room; how had they been summoned? One of them—there, there, she said; I’ve seen much worse—ushered Ruth from the room, as if now there was something mysterious to be done to Dr. Wenning that was too private, too obscene to be witnessed.

  Ruth w
ent downstairs, her legs wavering beneath her.

  The cafeteria had been closed, the lights out. Through a round window in a door behind the lunch counter, she could see into the lighted kitchen, where someone was still at work, his white paper hat moving back and forth across the porthole window.

  Inside the phone booth, she turned her back to the empty hallway, pressed her handkerchief to her face. When Peter answered the phone, she couldn’t speak.

  Oh, Ruth, Peter said at last. I’m sorry.

  The sympathy in his voice had made her cry.

  He had not been able to come with her. That had been before he’d been made headmaster. He was only a teacher then, and it had not been easy for him to leave the school. There weren’t enough teachers as it was, and when one of them quit or was sick or had to be away, the burden fell to the others, and the boys could be unruly and needed a strong hand. Resentment flared up quickly among colleagues who thought they spotted a shirker in their midst.

  And Dr. Wenning had been no relation, after all, though she had been mother, father, sister … everything, really, to Ruth.

  Outside the phone booth, someone had tapped a knuckle impatiently on the glass.

  Ruth had made angry gestures of dismissal at the intruder, turned away her wet face.

  Ruth had felt forlorn in the weeks following Dr. Wenning’s death.

  One night, after another silent dinner, Peter had put down his fork.

  She is still with you, Ruth, he said.

  He had meant to console her. She knew that. But she thought his certainty fatuous—how on earth could he be so sure?—and she had snapped at him and told him so, though of course she regretted it later.

  It made her feel hideous, being cruel to Peter, even when that cruelty arose—as she came to understand that it usually did, as was the case for most people, of course—out of pain.

  She did not exactly wish that she had Peter’s faith in God—you couldn’t try to believe in something; you either did or did not—but she envied it. And his faith had only grown stronger over the years, though by what mechanism he could not say. He was, Ruth sometimes thought, remarkably inarticulate about the things that seemed most important. In their early years, she had argued with him about God, even though then, as always, he had failed to rise to the attack.