by Carrie Brown
In the winter, Ruth cut boughs of evergreens and holly and decorated the mantel over the vast fireplace. In spring, she used daffodils and wands of forsythia for the tables.
The sad, sweet bird’s note sounded again on the hillside, hanging in the air, a question.
As she neared the flight of granite steps that led up to the building, the approaching siren of an ambulance coming up the main road reached her. She ran up the stairs, trying to hook her shoes on her feet as she went.
In the long hallway—cool compared with the afternoon’s warmth outside—the eyes in the old portraits lining the walls seemed to stare down at her, all of them men in Episcopal vestments, the white of a clerical collar at every neck like a cold dab of snow against the field of black pigment.
At the far end of the hallway, a group of boys, heads together, stood in silence at the doorway to the dining hall. They turned toward her as she approached.
She tried to calm her voice. What happened? she said, reaching them.
It’s Dr. McClaren, one of the boys said. He fainted.
She put her hand to her heart.
It had not been Peter.
The ambulance is coming, she said. There was an unpleasant lump in her throat, a knot of fear now dissolving.
She patted one of the boys on the arm.
Not to worry, she said, and went past them into the dining hall.
She saw Ed McClaren on the floor between the tables, surrounded by a semicircle of worried onlookers. He was at least a decade younger than she and Peter, Ruth thought. Florid, with a fold of stomach over his belt, he was divorced. What else did she know about him? He had been at the school for only a year, a post-retirement job from a small college somewhere in the South. He taught physics and coached the wrestlers.
His eyes were open, but his skin was a ghastly shade, his lips colorless.
Peter was on one knee beside him, a hand on his shoulder. When Ruth stepped forward, Peter glanced up at her over the top of his glasses.
He would wonder where she had been, she knew, but there was no reproach in his expression. He was, as always, slow to blame, quick to forgive. If anything, he was inclined too often to take upon himself the faults of others.
Once, meanly, she had accused him of playing the martyr.
He had agreed with her, apologized for it. He had a need to comfort the world.
Well, there were worse things.
Now they exchanged a grave look.
Not this time, Ruth said to him with her eyes.
Sometime, of course, his gaze said back. But not now.
Ten years before, Peter had been diagnosed with the late onset of a genetic syndrome that produced, among other effects, immoderate height.
Already a tall man—six feet by the time he was fifteen, six feet four inches by the time he graduated from college—he was now nearly six feet seven inches tall. Ruth knew that eyes inevitably were drawn to him in a room, to the head and heavy-lidded eyes, the thick, soft white hair, the long arms and developing hunchback.
His face, she thought, looked more and more like something carved from rock and trying to return to its original state, the brow jutting, and the jaw pronounced. This, too, the coarsening of his handsome features, was part of the syndrome. He had been an extraordinarily good-looking man when young. Something remaining in his expression—a basic good nature, Ruth thought—invariably made people feel that he understood them and would take their side. He had a way of drawing confidences from the boys and from teachers without ever saying much himself.
Ruth heard commotion behind them. A paramedic team toting boxes and equipment appeared beside her at the edge of the circle gathered around Ed. An older man with a comically bushy mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, and a young woman, muscled as a boxer, her hair in a high, tight ponytail, moved in with calm dispatch.
Hi there, the young woman said, pulling out a stethoscope. Let’s have a little room here, folks. Thank you.
People shuffled out of the way.
I’m fine, Ed said, his voice soft, as if apologizing for the trouble he’d created. Then, as if someone had jumped hard onto his stomach, he turned his head to the side and vomited violently onto the floor.
The crowd leaped away.
Peter glanced back up at Ruth.
She felt a cold hand run up her legs, a buzzing in her ears.
I’ll go get the mop, she said quietly.
She pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen, where a radio was playing. The head cook—a huge black man, a former MP in Vietnam—glanced up at her from the big sink.
I need the mop and bucket, Clarence, Ruth said.
He shook his head. That’s no good, he said.
A thin young man in a soiled white apron—Ruth recognized him but could not remember his name; it was difficult to keep kitchen help, and he was a newcomer—went away into the dish room and came back pushing the wheeled mop bucket filled with suds.
Her eyes watered against the astringency of the cleaning fluid, but she was grateful for its sharp smell.
I’ll take care of that, Clarence said, coming forward.
It’s all right, Ruth said. You have enough to do in here. Thank you, though.
In the dining room, the paramedics had unfolded a stretcher onto which they now hoisted Ed without ceremony.
Tears had left tracks on his face. I can’t breathe, he said suddenly, his voice panicked.
The young woman paramedic put her hand on his arm and turned her face to speak rapidly—a series of unintelligible words—into a crackling radio mounted on her shoulder.
You’re fine, she said, snapping an oxygen mask over his face. Blood pressure’s good, pulse is fine. You’re going to be fine, sir. You diabetic, by any chance? Smoker?
Ed nodded—Ruth knew he was a heavy smoker—his eyes pleading.
The paramedics moved swiftly now, pushing the stretcher, teachers and boys shoving away the tables and chairs with a horrendous noise to clear a path. The paramedics’ radio squeaked and buzzed. The young woman, one hand at the stretcher’s head, repeated a series of numbers into it.
In seconds they were gone.
Ruth plunged the mop into the bucket and swabbed the floor. The whole evening, the whole day, she felt had been drawing toward this. Yet she knew it was irrational; nothing had happened today. Absolutely nothing.
Around her the boys and teachers pulled the tables back into place. She wrung out the mop, grateful again for the ammoniac smell of the cleaner. Well, it was no trouble to mop. One could manage that.
All their years here, she thought, hers and Peter’s … this was the life they had led.
She felt an absurd surprise at this recognition. How ridiculous, that this fact should appear to have crept up on her, ambushed her. Of course, this had been their life.
There would be nothing else beyond this for them, for her and Peter, she realized.
She turned the crank to wring the mop again. Her strange dream from earlier, in which she had been alone in that desolate and beautiful place that somehow had felt so much like home, came back to her. Her eyes prickled.
Oh, she was too sensitive; this was Ed McClaren’s awful moment, not her own. As Dr. Wenning had always said, sensitive people were the worst tyrants.
Peter appeared at her elbow.
He took the mop from her—automatic, his chivalry—but then he held it absently, as if he’d forgotten what to do with it.
I sent Andy to the hospital with them, he said.
Andy Whitmore, Peter’s oldest colleague, teacher of Greek and Latin, reed-thin and a master of calm and civility; he would be of comfort to Ed, Ruth thought. And perhaps there would be someone else they could call, too. Surely there was someone in Ed’s life …
Peter’s face looked gray, blue pouches beneath his eyes.
Poor man, Ruth said. Then she said, Are you all right?
Peter put the mop in the bucket. I’d like to get the boys back, he said. Better to have them fini
sh up dinner. Do you mind taking Ed’s table?
Peter always distributed the teachers among the boys at dinner on the first night. These groups would then reconvene periodically over the year for dinner and to debate various questions Peter devised, usually ethical dilemmas: Whom would you save first in a fire, a baby or an old person? Is it right to steal goods acquired unfairly by another in order to help someone else? When is lying acceptable? Sometimes Ruth and Peter lay in bed and tried to dream up new, impossible predicaments; it was challenging to create a roster of original dilemmas so that a boy never faced the same question twice.
Of course, she said. Then she added, I fell asleep at home. I’m sorry I was late.
Peter didn’t seem to hear her.
He turned away from her. Please return to your seats, he said, raising his voice. The boys stood around in murmuring groups.
It’s all right, Peter called. Back to your tables, please. Finish up, and then there’s cake and coffee. Dr. McClaren is in good hands.
He made shepherding motions with his arms, smiling.
Come along, he said, touching the boys’ shoulders as he moved through the room, firm but gentle.
Everything’s all right now. Good boys.
At the table where Ed McClaren had been presiding, an overweight boy—no chin, no neck, no shoulders to speak of, his eyes an unnerving green, like those of a malevolent Irish silkie, Ruth thought—had already restored what Ruth suspected had been an unrelenting siege over the group. He barely glanced at Ruth when she appeared, unwilling—perhaps actually unable, she thought—to interrupt what she could tell immediately was a screed about the upcoming presidential election. Ruth and Peter were longtime devoted Democrats. Ruth, especially, would not hear a word against Barack Obama.
The other boys, including a younger child with beautiful brown skin and black eyes and hair, his posture erect, sat at the table in stoic silence. The boy’s beauty was striking. The child looked like royalty, his silence majestic. Nearly all the African American boys at the school were there by Peter’s hand; he found them through his connections at public schools in the state and secured funding from private sources for their tuition. He fretted endlessly that there weren’t enough of them. The school was predominantly white, and it wasn’t easy for the black boys.
Ruth stood at the table, waiting. Sometimes her height alone had the effect of silencing miscreant boys, but the fat boy continued speaking as if Ruth were not even there. The plates had not been cleared away. He took up eating, apparently where he had left off. He waved his fork, food dripping onto the tablecloth.
Negotiating is for cowards, he said in a tone that suggested someone was arguing with him. You don’t negotiate if you want to win.
Ruth pulled out her chair abruptly. Across the table, the beautiful boy avoided her gaze, looked down at his plate, his shoulders straight.
She cleared her throat.
Well, she began, interrupting the monologist.
Someone, she said … tell me about your summer. What interesting things have you been doing?
Her dream from the afternoon pressed against her again, a brief, insistent demand. She had a flash of the canyon’s rose-colored walls, the impression of great silence. The room of chattering boys fell back. Then the dream slid away, and the room around her was restored.
She turned quickly to look over her shoulder at Peter—she had a strange, keen sense of missing him, as if she were departing for a long trip—but he was bent toward the boy beside him, his head inclined, listening, as he always did, intently.
They finished the meal, somehow. Coffee and cake were brought out, and then suddenly conversation died away. When she turned around, Peter had gotten to his feet across the room. He looked even more stooped than usual, she noticed, a result of the scoliosis the doctors had warned them about, part of the syndrome.
It was time now for him to retire, she thought. Why was he putting them through this? They might still go off and do something together, go somewhere, before it was too late. They hadn’t much money, she knew, but surely there was enough. She had been foolish, allowing Peter to handle all that—making him handle all that—as if she were a child.
At the last board meeting in May, Alec Brown, a trustee who’d been on the board for years and who had been a good friend to Peter, had taken Ruth aside in the main room of the library while people had drinks there before dinner.
No one will ever fill Peter’s shoes, Ruth, Alec had said. You know that.
They had laughed about that for a minute—Peter’s feet, size fourteen, were notorious—but Ruth had known there was more coming.
Alec’s tone had been light, but then he had put a hand on her arm. See what you can do, Ruth, he said.
She had looked at his hand, then at his face.
Around them she had taken in the sound of merry conversation, ice clinking in glasses. Someone had pulled the long drapes against the glare of the setting sun, and the room was pleasantly cool, the windows open behind the curtains, and a breeze moving.
What if he just wanted to stay and teach? Ruth had taken a gulp of her drink, looked at Alec. He might agree to that, she said.
Alec had not met her eyes.
How about a trip somewhere? he said. It could be hard on a new guy, having Peter around. Hard on Peter, too.
He’d made an apologetic face. And, of course, you’ll have to leave the house, he said. There’s that.
I know, she said. But the truth was that she kept forgetting that fact.
Now she watched Peter, standing by his seat across the dining room. He was waiting for the boys to quiet, she knew.
Then, smiling, he made a sudden gesture with both hands, a benediction. Off with you.
The boys pushed back their chairs with a joyful sound.
Ruth folded her napkin. Beside her, the fat boy shoveled in cake. He had managed to put away two pieces, she saw, stacking the empty plates beside him like an emperor piling up picked-over carcasses of quail.
By the fireplace, Peter had his back to her again, talking with a handful of boys clustered around him.
It was difficult to resist the crowd moving her along. She allowed herself to be borne out the doors of the dining hall and down the waxed floors of the hallway toward the front entrance.
Jim McNulty, who taught history with Peter, went past her, squeezing her arm as he moved by. Balding, with a monk’s white tonsure and sad eyes, a medievalist by training, he had been Peter’s first hire at the school years and years ago. They hadn’t seen him over the summer—he had a place up on the coast, a cabin where he went for a couple of months every year. The sight of him now made her feel glad, the familiarity of him—an old friend, devoted to Peter—a comfort.
Jimmy, she said. I’m glad to see you. Poor Ed.
I know, he said. He shook his head. Awful.
Then he looked closely at her. Everything all right, darling? Peter’s been all right?
Yes, yes! she said, surprised.
Did she look unwell? she wondered. Did Peter?
We’re fine, she said. See you tonight?
He blew her a kiss, but then he was gone before she could say more.
• • •
Ruth loved listening to the boys’ choir at Derry, though she had to fight back tears when they sang “Soldier’s Hallelujah” or “Once in Royal David’s City” or even “Polly Wolly Doodle.” She knew it was idiotic, weeping over “Polly Wolly Doodle” or “Jim Along Josie,” but she couldn’t help it. Tonight they would sing the school song after Peter’s address. That, too, might unmoor her. It had been a day of feeling unmoored.
There had been so much to love about their lives at Derry. And now it felt as if it was slipping from their grasp.
For many years she’d worked shifts at the school’s tutoring center, where her enthusiasm for grammar and punctuation had helped buoy her spirits during sessions with glum boys and their awful essays about Petrarch or their pets or global warming. She brought cho
colate chip cookies on the afternoons she worked.
The cookies went some distance toward cheering up the recalcitrant.
Her favorite job over the years had been working in the school’s infirmary, a duty that made her feel competent and kindly and brought out a fussy, bossy Florence Nightingale streak in her. She liked bustling around, fixing glasses of ginger ale with bent straws, cutting the crusts off toast triangles, tucking a flower or two into a vase on a tray. It had not been difficult for her to be patient with boys who were sick. She played gin rummy or Russian Bank with them, read to them for hours from Treasure Island or from Sherlock Holmes. She took temperatures, chattering away cheerfully while the boys held the thermometers in their mouths, lips closed, eyes on her face. It was funny, she thought, how her habitual shyness disappeared at those times.
Over the years she had often been asked to take the night shift at the infirmary, when they were short-staffed. She never minded the hours sitting in the moonlight in a chair in a boy’s room, watching him sleep. Sometimes she dozed, her chin on her chest, but mostly she found herself wakeful, gazing for so long at a boy’s features as he slept that his face seemed to pass through a thousand expressions as she watched, his eyelids moving, his lips opening and closing, a fist coming up to brush an ear or graze a cheek.
The infirmary’s west windows looked out over the lake. If the night was warm, she opened the window and listened to the water, the chorus of frogs, the little lapping sounds against the shore, or, if the dam was overflowing, the steady sound of water going over the sluice. These were times of absolute peace for her. There was nothing else she ought to be doing, nowhere else more necessary for her to be. Somewhere, she knew, other people were doing more important things, but when the moonlight fell into the room, she felt herself and the sleeping child joined together in a powerful embrace, and she watched over her charge as if guarding a prince.
At those times she felt, she imagined, some measure of what it might have been like to love a child of her own.
She did not leave the boy, whoever she was watching, until his eyes opened in the morning.
Then she’d smile and stand up, smoothing down her skirt.