The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  True, true—Dr. Wenning held up a hand, interrupting her—some have it even worse than you. But, still, the gods are attentive. They gave you a prince of a husband. Try just to enjoy him.

  • • •

  Ruth had been present for Peter’s annual welcome address to the school every year since he had become headmaster at Derry. He’d been so handsome and sexy in those early days. Ruth had always understood exactly what girls meant when they said a fellow was so good-looking it made you weak in the knees. For years, she had sat through this occasion in the chapel, hands folded in her lap. She’d looked like the portrait of the headmaster’s good wife, but sometimes her mind had strayed. She’d thought of other things.

  Sometimes Peter naked. Sometimes sex.

  Or sometimes she’d run over the preparations for the cocktail party. Quiches defrosted? Cheese and crackers? Olives, lemons, extra beer in the second refrigerator in the pantry, cocktail napkins, flowers for the front hall and the dining room table … over the years, she had learned how to do this, how to be a hostess.

  She remembered the first time Peter had given this speech. Though the trustees had held a formal search for the position, the head of the board had told her privately that it had never been a contest. Peter had had the job from the moment he’d applied.

  He’s an impressive fellow, your Peter, the man had said. We’re lucky to have him.

  When Peter had risen from the pew to turn and address the boys and the faculty for the first time as their headmaster, the room had gone suddenly silent, everyone instantly attentive. Peter had reached into his jacket pocket and withdrawn his remarks, unfolded the papers on the lectern. But then he had not looked at them again. He had spoken for half an hour, never once glancing at the pages. Watching him, Ruth had felt as if a wand had been run down her body from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, splitting her open. She had been so proud of him.

  That night, they had hosted their first cocktail party. Afterward, the kitchen cleaned up, Ruth had felt both exhausted and exhilarated by the evening.

  She had climbed into bed beside Peter.

  So, she said. Is it something you do with your hands? Or your eyes? How did you make them all be quiet like that, all at once?

  In the dark, she had studied Peter’s face. He’d been lying on his back beside her, eyes closed, his familiar profile on the pillow: high forehead, big nose, the sensuous cleft of his upper lip, the exaggerated chin. He’d opened his eyes, and then he’d rolled toward her and put his hand on her hip, squeezed once, deliberately.

  He doesn’t want to talk, she thought. He wants to have sex.

  I don’t know, he said. It’s nothing.

  Come on, she said. Really.

  He rolled away from her. I don’t know, Ruth, he said. Really. It just happened somehow. He rolled back and patted her hip again.

  Ruth ignored the squeeze. She wanted to talk.

  The silence in the chapel that night had been instantaneous, pure and perfect, as if he’d snapped his fingers. It meant something, she felt, that he could do that. And his failure to be aware of his role in the event, even to be interested in it, was connected somehow to his ability to make it happen, she’d thought.

  Come on, she said again. Tell me. You must know. It wasn’t anything I could see, obviously, but it was like there was—oh, I don’t know—something in the room.

  In the darkness beside her, Peter ran his hand from her waist over her hip and down her thigh.

  Maybe it’s sort of like the via negativa, he said. Understanding a thing by understanding what it is not. For instance, it was not me.

  She lay beside him on her back, listening to the thrumming of the night’s thunderstorm. The sound trailed away in intervals over the hills. When lightning flickered, the bedroom ceiling appeared above her for an instant, a perfect square of blinding whiteness, shocking her with its nearness, bringing the room in close. Other details, as if from the flash of a crime scene camera, had blazed forth, just for a second: finial on the bedpost; length of beaded molding; Peter’s wool sweater, charcoal gray, tossed on the chair. A little fear had flickered over her, like a lizard scuttling across her skin.

  The via negativa, she repeated. Well, maybe. If you say so.

  She had closed her eyes again, reached over to find his hand and bring his palm to her mouth.

  She knew at that moment—as, she realized, she had not fully understood it before—that one day she and Peter would be parted, and not by her own or by Peter’s choice.

  Hours seemed to have gone by, but when she turned around again to search the empty doors of the chapel, Peter was standing there, absolutely still.

  It was Ed McClaren, she thought. She felt her chest constrict. Ed had died.

  Then abruptly Peter strode past her and down the aisle. He turned around when he reached the front of the chapel.

  He stood there quietly, but not as if he was waiting, exactly. His belly was slack, his expression oddly empty. His shoulders seemed to have rounded further.

  Something was the matter, Ruth thought. She started forward, her hands finding the rail of the pew before her. She stared at him, the big familiar planes of his face, his long legs and soft paunch. She could not see them from where she sat, but she knew the details of his body in her mind: thistledown in his ears, brown spots across the backs of his hands, scars in half-moons over his knees.

  Peter seemed to be gazing at something over the heads of the boys facing him.

  Though usually the boys quieted instantly when Peter stood before them, tonight they continued to chatter as if they could not see him, as if only she could see him.

  Ruth glanced behind her. The doors to the chapel had been left open, framing a square of dark blue twilight. A cold feeling began in her hands, ran up her arms, gripping her neck and shoulders.

  She turned back and tried to meet Peter’s eyes, but she could see he wasn’t looking at her … or for her, she realized. It was as if he stood at a distance from her, from all of them. He looked sad, his expression soft with sympathy, with regret. How could she tell this from so far away? But she could. She knew she could. He gazed away from her, away from everyone in the room, apparently intent on the open doors as if something might move out there.

  Ruth pressed into the back of the pew and braced herself against the vertiginous feeling of tilting downward.

  She aimed the thought at him: Make them be quiet. Start talking.

  But still Peter didn’t speak; he merely gazed up the aisle at the open doors.

  She was aware now of the empty campus surrounding the chapel, its silence, all the people—innocent boys, adults with their complicated lives—gathered inside. It was when Ruth became conscious of needing help—please God, thank God—that she felt most persuaded of the reality of God, as if God were at that moment reading her thoughts, watching her in her moment of desperation decide to have faith in him. Now she had an apprehension of a presence outside the white walls. Something had orchestrated the whole day, the whole evening, steering it toward this moment of crisis. Something had built the whole waiting world around them, trees, scented grass stretching away into the darkness, stars. She was afraid.

  There was a rippling along the pew, boys jostling one another. The boy beside her bumped hard against her shoulder.

  He turned an agonized face to her, color leaping into his cheeks. Sorry, he whispered.

  Face blazing, he leaned forward to flash a look of hatred and fury down the row.

  Fights were inevitable at the school, often at sporting events. One moment everything was under control—the players spread out over the grass, clouds arranged prettily in the sky. And then the next moment a boy somewhere on the field would have struck out savagely, a stick swinging, a fist. Suddenly a clot of bodies would be angrily grappling and struggling, the referees moving in. These incidents happened so quickly they left Ruth breathless. She felt now, in Peter’s strange silence, the potential for chaos among the boys.

/>   She felt the anxiety of the moment pass now into her belly, her bowels. Should she stand up? Could she go rescue him?

  Peter cocked his head slightly. He’d been doing that, she’d noticed, tilting his head as if he couldn’t quite hear.

  The din of the boys around them rose another degree. She glanced behind her again, but the white frame of the doors contained only the pure, deep, shining blue of the night sky. A silhouetted figure crossed the open doorway, a dark form moving from one side of the chapel to the other. Then there was nothing but the empty square of the night, and Peter’s silence, and the dangerous restlessness of the boys around her.

  3

  Peter knew what was about to happen. The boys had filled the chapel between him and the open doors, the square of blue twilight glowing at the end of the aisle. In the past, when the shuffling and throat clearing had died away, a true and deep silence would enter the room, an invisible presence. In the face of it, the babbling of the private mind, the ceaseless effort of holding up for examination before the conscious self one thing after another, the whole demanding dumb show of the imagination … all of this would cease, the mind as empty as if its contents had been sucked into a vortex. The paradox, Peter thought, was that this state of emptiness was simultaneously a state of acute, almost transcendental engagement.

  He’d tried to explain this to Ruth. But her whole history, everything about her childhood, had conditioned her to vigilance, not acceptance. It had always been difficult for her to relax. He was grateful for the calm that had overtaken her later years and that spilled now into all corners of their life: the unmade bed, the haphazard meals of this or that, whatever they could find in the refrigerator or cupboards—bread and cheese, pickles and ham, bottles of wine. He was grateful for her clever mind—my god, she knew something about practically everything; she would have won on Jeopardy, he’d always thought—and grateful even for the untidy house.

  What did it matter really, that the house was untidy? He had put too much pressure on her about such things over the years, he knew, even as he had disliked himself for worrying what others would think. And she had worked so hard for him, for the boys. She had been the picture of duty.

  She was a funny person, too, his Ruth, though not many knew that about her. She had always made him laugh, so witty and smart. And she was beautiful, though he knew she had never thought so. Gorgeous big breasts and big sweet mouth and melting eyes and long legs … his beautiful Ruth. He had a sudden memory of her on the tennis court—she was a terrible tennis player—running crazily from one side of the court to the other as he lobbed balls at her, her face red as a beet, her big feet pounding away in her big sneakers, her big hands swinging her racquet wildly as if she were being attacked by bees. She had looked great in tennis shorts, all those freckles on her legs. She’d tried awfully hard at it. He’d loved her for that, her determination to get out there and play with him—to keep him in shape, as she said—despite having no talent for it.

  My god! I am so terrible at this! she would cry in frustration, watching a ball she’d hit sail off into the trees. And then the next one would follow, equally wide of the mark. Sometimes she had made him laugh so hard he’d have to stop, doubled over, and rest his hands on his knees. She didn’t mean to be comical. She just was. Once she’d thrown her racquet at him.

  She could get fighting mad, too, his Ruth. You didn’t want to cross her.

  Usually he did not need to speak or raise a hand to ask for silence in the chapel on this first night. Ruth had asked him that one time how he managed it, and he’d been truthful when he’d said he didn’t know. He didn’t believe he was in control of it, actually. The boys familiar with the ritual fell quiet of their own accord, knowing it was expected of them. The younger ones, glancing around, alert to something happening in the room, eventually grew silent, too.

  That shared silence was magical for Peter.

  Tonight, however, the boys did not seem to see him standing there. They turned around and exchanged fake punches with the fellows behind them, or tapped the shoulders of the boys in front and then withdrew their hands, gazing innocently toward the ceiling. He watched all this but felt unmoved by it, as if standing at a great distance. Laughter broke out here and there. He saw teachers lean forward, frowning at the miscreants.

  Peter waited for the horseplay to stop, for conversation to cease. He didn’t know what else to do. He could not see Ruth in the darkness of the chapel. He wondered if she had gone home, perhaps, to get ready for the party afterward. He was sorry that he’d been pulled away from her earlier. He’d wanted to take her arm, walk with her down to the chapel. He’d missed her today. He felt that more often these days, sometimes at odd moments: he missed her beside him. Like any man, he admired a beautiful woman, had stolen his share of looks at centerfolds over the years. But really the only woman he’d ever wanted was Ruth.

  He’d felt it from the moment she’d showed up at his house when they were twelve years old, his father the town physician who had taken her in when she was alone.

  At the far end of the aisle, the square of blue twilight glowed steadily.

  Peter understood that his extreme height, the pronounced size of his big head, wielded a kind of drama; just standing up in front of them could make the boys be quiet in the classroom, though his size rarely seemed to intimidate little children. When he stood on the sidelines at athletic events, there always seemed to be one or two urchins, the children of faculty members, hanging on to his arms like monkeys and walking up his sides in their grass-covered sneakers.

  He was sorry, but not as sorry as Ruth imagined perhaps, not to have had children of his own. He was mostly sorry for Ruth; it was really Ruth to whom children were drawn. It had been hard for him to bear the longing in her eyes sometimes.

  He’d tried to give her so many children, in a way. All these decades of boys.

  They’d been enough for him, but perhaps not for her. Still, she had not complained. They had not spoken of it, really.

  That, too, had been a mistake, perhaps.

  He knew in general that he could put his height to good use. He had seen how it worked in the classroom. His stature, his athleticism … these had helped him be a good teacher. During graduate school, he’d left Ruth alone in New Haven for three months while he’d served briefly on a commission for training seminarians in rural ministries as schoolteachers. As the panel’s youngest member, recommended by a history professor at Yale, he’d been farmed out to the least hospitable sorts of locales, tiny towns in Minnesota and Wisconsin near the Canadian border, places that might have taxed older, less vigorous men. During those cold, dark days spent observing from the back of one-room schoolhouses, his knees jutting up above the tops of the low desks, he had discovered in himself, alongside a love of God, an instinct for how to teach and a rambunctious style. In the classrooms at Derry, though he wasn’t in them so much anymore, Peter behaved as if every answer, no matter how lackluster or hesitant, was a revelation. He loved to see the boys’ eyes light up at his pleasure.

  He disliked formality. He wanted the boys to call him Peter. He insisted on that. Everyone at Derry, in fact, whether they worked in the kitchen or drove one of the big mowers that roved over the playing fields or taught Shakespeare or physics or Greek, called him Peter. He hated standing on ceremony.

  From the open doors came a blissful rush of cool air toward him, as if the grass outside, the trees with their drooping, fragrant burden of summer leaves, had given up the last of the day’s warmth. The knee that troubled him the most, his right knee, sent out a sudden throb of pain. The discomfort rose, flared and then ran up his leg, touching a finger to the base of his spine. He felt sweat on his forehead. He shifted, tightening his calves, releasing them. The pain dimmed a little, wandered off. Peter realized that he’d been holding his breath. His chest felt sore and tight, as if he might have broken a rib.

  But it was not his heart; he thought it was not his heart. He felt it thudding alo
ng uninvolved, uninterested in the strange tumult of feelings he was experiencing. This sorrow. This bewilderment. This anger.

  He had given his first day speech to the boys at Derry for years—the same talk, more or less, about responsibility and opportunity—and he’d long ago done away with notes for it. The point of the evening was less what he said anyway, though he’d been proud of his words at one time, the sentences carefully crafted. Ruth had helped him; she had always been the better writer. He’d never thought much of that play or that novel she’d worked on, though—too depressing, though he never would have told her so. He had tried to be enthusiastic.

  It was the experience of this moment, when the school community gathered under one roof in the darkness and the silence that Peter wanted to give the boys. It worked like an inoculation, he thought, protecting them against the worst of what might happen to them over the year, the various crimes perpetrated both by and against them. Right now, the new boys were at the fragile peak of their bravado, having made it through the parting from their families, the confusing business of the first day, without public tears. But some of them were precariously close to breaking down, Peter knew. He searched the audience and tried to fix his attention on them, the new boys, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds not yet free of their childhood selves, required to sit in the first rows. He counted on their faces to restore his equanimity, his sense of purpose.

  A few days ago, just out of the shower one morning, Ruth had stood on tiptoe beside him, a towel knotted under her arms. She had kissed him as he’d straightened his tie in front of the mirror. Outside the window, a bird had been warbling, a long stream of entreaties, of fulsome nonsense.

  Peter had made a goofy face at her in the mirror. He had not wanted to tell her how strange he’d felt lately, how uninvolved, somehow, in what was happening. He’d felt it powerfully the moment he’d opened his eyes this morning, as if he were watching the world through wavering old glass.