The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  Dr. Wenning had nodded. But perhaps, my dear, she said, you would not like the truth so very much more than the mystery. Better to have the mystery and make the story what you like.

  Ruth looked away. I want a happy ending, she said finally.

  From behind her desk, Dr. Wenning had gazed at her.

  A happy ending, Ruth, she said—forgive me—is a bullshit construction of the entertainment industry. First you are born and then you die. If you are lucky, you are happy some of the time. Sometimes, if you are very lucky, you laugh a lot along the way.

  Also, she began, but then she paused.

  She waved at the room around them, and Ruth understood that she meant not just the bookshelves and the ornate crown molding and the paintings on the walls, but the world beyond those walls, Ruth’s life with Peter, their future.

  Perhaps, Dr. Wenning said, you already have a happy ending.

  The bedroom in the silent house at Derry was full now of shadows.

  Ruth felt around on the floor for her shoes, pushed herself up from the bed. Surely dinner had already begun. Peter would wonder what had happened to her.

  She went into the bathroom. In the mirror over the sink, the late afternoon’s light slanting through the window struck one side of her face—chin, high cheekbone, temple—brightening the silver of her hair. Two toothbrushes in an enamel mug on the sink’s edge, a cracked oval of pale green soap in a scallop shell, a damp washcloth draped on the glinting tap … these, too, were illuminated.

  How beautiful such ordinary objects appeared, she thought, like the humble objects in Vermeer’s paintings—table, ewer, drape of fabric—mysteriously elevated to the level of sacrament. She loved Vermeer’s work, its artful familiarity.

  The light behind her shifted, the room darkening another degree. The tableau on the sink’s edge faded, a dying away of the light.

  Ruth bent to the basin, splashed water on her face, cupped her hands and drank. Brushing her teeth, she grimaced into the mirror.

  She was late. She would have to hurry.

  In the bedroom, she found her watch on the dresser, held her wrist against her bosom to strap it on. It was just past six, after all. She had not slept as long as she’d thought, despite the endless, forlorn feeling of the dream.

  She and Peter had lived in the headmaster’s house at the edge of the school’s campus since Peter’s appointment to the job forty years before. A settled-looking white clapboard Colonial with a circular drive before it, the house was in need now of a coat of paint. A shutter from an upstairs window had fallen earlier that summer; Peter had carried it to the garage and set it up on sawhorses, intending to repair it himself, but he had no time and, in truth, no skill, either, for such things. He had, as always, only his good intentions. They had argued about his getting up on a ladder, anyway.

  The power in the house frequently went out. A high wind could do it, or nothing at all. She’d have to go down the basement before she left and check the old fuse box.

  The house lay down a tree-lined gravel lane less than half a mile from the campus. The road ran for miles through empty forest, a rural route designated only by a number, before the paved surface resumed in the next county. Little traffic passed from either direction, and they had no neighbors. Except for the carillon bells, or on afternoons when the wind carried the sound of the boys’ shouts from the playing fields, it was a quiet place.

  The Appalachian Trail ran nearby. On the far side of the road across from their house, a gap had been cut and a gate installed in the old stone wall. A signpost for the trail and a historical marker identifying the school’s campus were mounted nearby on a metal post. The trail followed the road for several hundred yards before veering back into the forest.

  Sometimes hikers with their big walking sticks went silently past, Ruth just happening to look out a window or step outside in time to see them, their heavy packs and determined stride giving them the air of pilgrims. She did not think they looked happy, these loners desperate to escape the world, or at least other people. A few times over the years, one of them had crossed the road to ask for water or matches or even food. Their unkempt appearance, the certainty they appeared to possess about their pursuit—they seemed beyond the need for, even disdainful of, ordinary human commerce, as if they were engaged by something far more important—had always made her feel a little foolish, as though her domestic concerns, her artistic ambitions, her longing for rootedness, were character flaws that revealed her fear, the sorely limited scale of her world.

  Shortly after they’d moved into the headmaster’s house at Derry, she and Peter had walked a bit of the trail, a couple of miles north from the break in the stone wall. The section of forest was dense and dark. Ruth had found it claustrophobic, even ominous. She preferred walking along the shoulder of the road, where there was hardly any traffic but where one felt somehow safer, less alone.

  A beautiful stand of birches, like a ring of silver ghosts, had grown up near a tiny, still pond about a twenty-minute walk into the woods.

  Peter, who always had his camera with him, had lingered at the spot, fussing with his lenses. The delicate trees stood out wraith-like against the firs. Something about the mysteriousness of the little pond, like an enchanted place in a dark fairy tale, had made Ruth uncomfortable.

  Let’s go, she’d said finally, impatient.

  On his knees, trying for a certain angle, Peter had continued to stare through the camera.

  It could be maddening, trying to walk with Peter. He always wanted to take pictures. Sometimes she wanted to snap at him to put the camera down and just look, for heaven’s sake. What on earth would he do with all these photographs, anyway? But she had given him a fancy digital camera just last Christmas, spending hours with an enthusiastic young man in a camera shop in Boston who had seemed happy to explain all its features, even though she’d understood almost nothing of what he told her.

  Peter’s delight with the gift had touched her. The computer, too, had been a marvelous development in his life: he had grasped its cataloging uses immediately, and he had endless files for things, including for his photographs. There was a file for pictures of Derry, of course, and for individual events at the school—sporting matches, plays, etc.

  There was also a file labeled with her name—RUTH, in capital letters.

  What do you keep in there? she’d asked him once.

  What? Oh, this and that, he’d said. Information for you, policies and so forth.

  She had not wanted to think about that, about a time when she might need to know things he would not be able to tell her himself.

  Just a minute, he’d said that day, focusing on the birches.

  Ruth had gazed around at the woods, the motionless trees.

  Finally, after some further adjustment of the lens, Peter had clambered to his feet.

  Okay, he said. I think I got it. He’d put away the lens in his bag, tucking it carefully into one of the many compartments.

  Ruth had stared off unhappily into the distance. The place gave her the creeps.

  Peter attached the various Velcro flaps and adjusted the bag over his shoulder. What’s the matter? he said.

  Ruth folded her arms. Oh, I’m just hungry, she said. Let’s go home.

  It had been near dusk when they passed through the gate and crossed the road toward their house a few minutes later. Relief came over her at the sight of the house’s lighted windows, the steps before the front door curved in what had looked to her, from the first time she’d seen it, like a smile. She had wanted, foolishly, to run toward it. She felt as if she’d been lost in the woods for months or even years and had finally found her way home again.

  I love this house, she’d said impulsively to Peter, and yet all at once she’d been filled with the idea of the indeterminate future when she knew they would have to leave Derry, leave this house she loved.

  The idea of the future when one of them would die, the other one soldiering on somewhere … it was uni
maginable. She couldn’t bear the thought.

  Yes, it’s a good old house, Peter said. I’m glad you’re happy here, Ruth.

  He had put his arm around her, and she had leaned against him.

  I am happy, she said.

  She’d brushed her cheek against his sleeve. She would not let him see her sadness.

  Let’s make a fire, Peter had said. What’s for dinner?

  Now, checking her face quickly in the dim glass of the mirror in the bedroom, she was aware of the well of silence down the carpeted staircase, the stillness in the front hall and through the arched doorway to the living room, where she had already set out trays of drinks and glasses, bowls of nuts and fruit for the party tonight. The busy world of the school seemed far away.

  Sometimes she appreciated the house’s location, their relative isolation. She would not have liked being in the thick of things all the time. But sometimes it was lonely, too. She would have liked working in an office, she had thought over the years, though probably her notions of office life—convivial lunches, familiar jokes, and surprise birthday parties—were silly and unrealistic. The faculty at Derry did a lot of squabbling, she knew, and the school’s trustees weren’t much better, though there had been many people she had liked over the years, men whose acumen and experience she had admired, more recently women whose understanding of things sometimes seemed to Ruth more complex, more capable of nuance, than the men’s.

  Earlier that afternoon, pausing in the doorway of the living room to inspect it a last time before going upstairs to the bath, she had noticed that a few early leaves, the lime-yellow fans of the old gingko tree, had already fallen over the terrace outside the French doors. They’d looked lovely, scattered over the old pink bricks. Yet the sight of them had made tears come into her eyes.

  She hated that the idea of her own death—or Peter’s—came to her so reflexively these days, and often when she saw something beautiful … that glowing oval of soap on the sink’s edge in the afternoon light a moment ago, the bright color of the gingko’s flat-bladed leaves against the brick. She thought about dying too much, she knew. How awful that the world’s beauty—one day truly to be lost to her—so frequently made her think of leaving the world altogether.

  Dr. Wenning would have told her to stop being morbid. She’d had an ironist’s delight in foolish aphorisms. Cheer up, Ruth, she would say. Happiness is a warm puppy.

  Ruth had been amused by Dr. Wenning’s delight in the 1960’s. Except for the Vietnam War, to which she had been early and adamantly opposed, Dr. Wenning had liked everything about the decade’s easy sloganeering.

  Make love, not war. So simple, she said.

  She had liked the peace sign, liked the yellow smiley face that one day began to appear everywhere, liked the hippies for what she felt was a beautiful and intrinsic innocence (while strongly disapproving of drugs, whose effects she said people simply did not understand).

  They want to make a better world, those hippie children, she’d said, and they think they can do it. Good for them.

  She’d loved the names of the bands: The Monkees. Herman’s Hermits. Jefferson Airplane. The Lovin’ Spoonful.

  People are either on the bus or off the bus, she had told Ruth.

  Ruth had rolled her eyes.

  Remember the bus? Get on the bus, Ruth, Dr. Wenning had liked to say, when she felt Ruth complained too much about her worries.

  Stop fussing all the time about where the bus is going, or whether it will run off the edge of a cliff. Eventually, you are going to go over the cliff, Ruth, no matter what you do. Try to enjoy the ride meanwhile.

  But what if I just can’t seem to enjoy it? Ruth said.

  Then I give you drugs, Dr. Wenning said. But I don’t think that’s what you need.

  Are you sure? Ruth had asked.

  Pretty sure, Dr. Wenning said. Trust me. I’m the doctor.

  Now Ruth gave her hair a few quick strokes with the brush. No one would care what she looked like tonight; she just needed to hurry.

  Still, she looked at herself—her strange and familiar self—in the mirror. The words of the Psalm came to her: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

  She’d always had what Peter called an irrational ability to pick and choose from among the tenets of faith.

  God, perhaps. Heaven and hell, no.

  Noah’s ark? Of course not.

  The loaves and fishes … well, she liked the idea. Same with the Red Sea parting. The specificity of these images felt persuasive to her.

  You know what I like? she had said to Peter once. I like that surely. Surely goodness and mercy. It’s a question, don’t you think?

  Peter, who had been getting ready for bed, had sat down next to her, pulling on one of the white T-shirts in which he slept.

  Ruth, you are ever the ardent doubter, he had replied. Yes, I suppose it is. A question.

  A doubt, Ruth had said, hitting him on the arm.

  All right, he had agreed. A doubt.

  Yet what good did doubt do you? Ruth thought now. She adjusted her dress, twitching at the skirt.

  Time to go, she thought. No time for metaphysics.

  • • •

  She went downstairs, one hand on the banister. From a drawer in the kitchen she took a flashlight and opened the door to the rickety stairs leading to the basement, dark and dank as a cave. The battery in the flashlight was weak. Why did their flashlights never work properly?

  In the basement she picked her way hesitantly through the welter of boxes and cobwebs, the crumbling hills of damp rot. It was cold down there, something rancid-smelling somewhere.

  At the fuse box, she trained the flashlight over the circuits with their faded labels of masking tape and flipped the breaker.

  For a moment there was nothing. After a pause, she felt the house shudder, heard it buzz back to life above her head.

  She climbed the stairs, her hand on the cool, smooth old wooden railing. Peter was certainly worrying about her now.

  In the front hall, she stopped to look in the mirror one last time. There was a smudge across her cheek. She licked her finger and rubbed at it.

  Then, from upstairs, she heard a sound. Footsteps?

  She went to the bottom of the stairs and listened. Peter? she called. Is that you?

  But there was no answer.

  She must have been imagining it.

  2

  Five minutes later, on the lawn below the school’s dining hall, she stopped to take off her shoes. They were her good shoes, seldom worn and uncomfortable, and she could not run in them. Still, she hoped no one looked out a window and saw her, the old headmaster’s wife, undignified in her stocking feet, carrying her shoes and hurrying up the hillside.

  Early-evening light fell over the empty lawns and against the buildings. The Virginia creeper covering the brick was two stories high in some places and darkly lustrous. Birds streamed across the sky, flying straight at the walls and disappearing into them as if diving into water. She never tired of watching this. Here and there sections of the foliage shivered, where birds nesting in it settled for the night. Walking along the paths in the evening, Ruth liked it when the walls beside her rustled in the darkness. It was as if the buildings themselves were alive, big creatures made of brick and mortar, stirring under their green skin.

  The school buildings appeared completely deserted, but as she climbed the hill, a muffled, orchestral din from the open windows of the dining hall reached her, the sounds of striking silverware and clattering dishes, the boys’ voices carrying over the silent evening, the cacophony strange, almost otherworldly. Invisible diners, Ruth thought, condemned forever to their invisible supper.

  The air had a porcelain calm, no sign of the storms predicted earlier, the tornadoes gathering their evil intentions somewhere. She beheld the scene ahead of her: the ring of buildings at the top of the hill, the streetlamps scattered along the curving drive, their white lights penumbral in the early-ev
ening haze. The maze of shadows from the great trees lay across the velvet hillside.

  She hated to go inside and leave it all. She wanted to lie down in the air full of sweet, grassy ripeness and watch the stars come out.

  The day was cooling, at last, but her haste had made her warm. Vibrating clouds of gnats assembled and then dispersed above the grass, specks before her eyes. She raised her arm to her damp forehead, moved her shoes to her other hand.

  The carillon bells rang the hour.

  A moment later, in the silence following the ringing of the bells, she realized that the sounds coming from the dining hall had ceased abruptly.

  She paused on the grass. It was not her hearing, she thought, yet there was no sound at all: no knife scraping against a plate, no glass chiming against glass, no human voice. The silence felt like a hood had been dropped over her head.

  Two swallows, dipping and swerving, approached, crossing the lawn before her, startling her with their nearness. They veered away toward the horizon of the black woods. Her skin had gone cold, as if a damp cloth had been passed over her bare arms.

  Then a bird’s sweet little note hung for a moment in the silence. It repeated in a questioning tone and then once more, plaintively.

  Something had happened to make them all go quiet like that in the dining hall.

  She loved the beautiful old room in which the boys and teachers took their meals, the dark oak beams across the high ceiling, and the bands of light from the tall windows crossing overhead. In the oceanic darkness below, forty round tables with their white tablecloths floated in the shadows, and two hundred boys bowed their heads over their plates. Steam rose from the regiment of tarnished coffee urns along the wall, the radiators ticking and hissing, the air above them rippling. From the kitchen came the yeasty odors of milk and meat and cooked vegetables and, behind those, the sour fumes of bleach and laundry starch and drain water from the dish room.