The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  He was depressed, perhaps. They said it just came on people sometimes, like any sickness. Perhaps it was an inevitable part of the syndrome.

  It had nothing to do with Ruth. He was sure about that.

  It was something else, some hand reaching toward him from elsewhere, groping around for him, trying to tell him something. He had looked down at the cleavage of her breasts under the towel, the little accordion fan of wrinkles there, but he had not felt aroused, a further dismay. Ruth’s breasts, her glorious freckled breasts, had always aroused him.

  And poor Ed McClaren today, that god-awful scene in the dining hall … he hoped the man would be all right.

  But he knew, somehow, that he would not be.

  The new boys usually seemed poignant to Peter, full of promise and worry and false gaiety. He was struck every fall by the difference a summer made in the appearance of returning boys who, in three months’ time, had acquired shoulders and facial hair and an adult bearing. All day today he’d roamed around, shaking hands, greeting returning students, meeting the new boys, surprising and pleasing a few by knowing their names. Facebook was a great tool for that; he loved Facebook. Here and there he carried into a dorm room on behalf of a flummoxed new boy and his pleased parents a box or a suitcase or a complicated tangle of computer equipment trailing cords.

  He had, just like his old self, conducted bits of business with the faculty members with whom he crossed paths, coming back to his desk between these periods of sociability and encountering the messages of phone calls that needed to be returned.

  But he’d said the wrong thing to a few people today, irritably chiding Mark Simmons, the art teacher, for forgoing a tie, though Mark had steadfastly refused to adopt this required convention for his entire career at Derry, and twice interrupting (boorishly, he thought now) during a presentation to the new boys about the library with irrelevant and probably incorrect observations about the school’s wireless service. He had just wanted to hear himself speak, to reassure himself that he was—what? Present, somehow. Yet he had forgotten names, had failed to remember details about certain changes in the calendar agreed upon earlier in long, tiresome meetings.

  Worse than these lapses, though, the sort of forgivable lapses perhaps typical of a man nearing eighty, he had been aware that he was chasing all day after the optimism that had once been, had always been before, so effortless.

  Several times today he had crossed paths with Charlie Finney—Charlie had used that nickname Ruth so hated, Pater, and had saluted him with what seemed a false smile—and Peter had felt for the first time a real fear in Charlie’s presence, an anger so rare that he almost didn’t recognize it.

  How dare you, he had thought. How dare you take that tone with me?

  Now, facing the assembled school, he recognized that his performance today had been exactly that, a performance calculated to create the appearance of his own involvement. At his desk, during the few moments of quiet throughout the day, he had not talked on the phone or read through the papers stacked up and awaiting his attention. He had stared around the paneled walls at the portraits of his predecessors, the whiskered gentlemen and clean-shaven clerics who had led the Derry School since its creation in 1902. He had stared out the window. He had extended his foot, as if testing for solid ground, into the sharp parallelogram of sunlight that fell over the carpet. The sun’s heat had blazed against his ankle, almost burning him. He had not wanted to move when the time had come for his next appointment.

  He had loved this place so much. He had worked so hard for it. And he knew it was being gradually taken from him.

  He was just like everyone else, of course. He would die, and the grass would grow right over his grave.

  Somehow, he realized, he had begun speaking. He had arrived at the part of his speech about the eye being on the sparrow, the paragraph he’d constructed carefully to be read as both a comfort and a warning: they were seen, these boys. No one would be overlooked.

  He did not remember having started, though, and the shock of disorientation he felt made him stop. His mouth had been moving, and words had been coming out of him, all of it issuing as if from an automatic reflex. He remembered a scientific experiment from his youth—or was it from one of the science labs he’d observed at Derry? An electrical impulse made a frog twitch. The brain was not involved.

  Peter felt the mass of people before him shrink slightly, shiver, and then fix like a tiny, faraway image calcifying under a microscope. Where was Ruth? Had she actually gone home without him?

  In the awkward silence that now filled the chapel, an explosive snort of laughter came from somewhere in the darkness of the pews. Someone, one of the boys, had not been able to bear the tension of the moment. A contagious ripple, the possibility of horrible affront, ran through the boys in that area—Peter saw a section of the pews writhe like something about to strike—and then died away. He knew then that he must just get to the end somehow.

  Ruth? Where was Ruth? He looked for her again, but he did not see her. Fear began in him now in earnest, a headache as shocking as ice applied to his temples. Sweat ran down his face, into his shirt collar.

  He’d lost Ruth on the way to the chapel. She hadn’t waited for him.

  With a strange effort, as if tuning himself to the right frequency, he began speaking again, heard his own voice, heard relieved laughter from the audience—he had told the joke about the cow and the horse and the pig. Nearly there, nearly there, he thought distractedly, and then, thank God, he was at the end of it.

  He smiled—where did that smile come from? A rictus, the frog jumps—but what he felt, he knew, was grief.

  He could not make out a single face in the darkness. He felt none of what he usually felt on this occasion, the thing he had been so glad for Ruth to feel at last, the thing that came into the room every year because of the silence … no, the thing that was the silence, a moment of extraordinary communion, Peter believed, a rare blessed moment that made him feel both unimportant and yet also part of the infinite, important largeness of the world.

  But it had not come this year. It had packed up its bags and gone away, he thought, like an old man with a hunched-over back and a battered suitcase walking alone down the road in the darkness, away from Derry, away from the boys, away from Ruth, away from Peter.

  He had been left behind.

  Afterward, outside the chapel, someone was speaking to him. Peter knew he knew who it was, but for the life of him he could not remember the man’s name. He remembered Ed McClaren, and that something had happened to him.

  He saw Ruth come up behind the interlocutor, her eyes wide, questions all over her face: What is wrong with you? her look said. You’re frightening me!

  He could not tell her how strange he felt. He could not sort it out.

  I left something on my desk, he told her abruptly, afraid to say more, afraid that he could not get the words out properly, that his mouth wouldn’t work. I’ll see you later.

  Ruth will take care of you at the house, he then said with concentrated politeness to the man before him; he knew the extreme formality of his tone was wrong, but he didn’t know what else to say. Who was it? Jesus, he couldn’t remember. A coil of fear shot into his stomach, up his esophagus, into his mouth. It tasted like blood, as if his tongue or his gums were bleeding.

  I’ll be along, he said, and hurried away.

  He had hurt Ruth, had frightened her, but he had frightened himself more. Still, he had not wanted her to watch whatever was happening to him.

  And he did not want any of these people—these strangers—at his house tonight. It felt outrageous to him, the prospect of their intrusion into whatever terrible and important thing was happening to him. It was as if they were planning to turn up at his funeral, corks flying, arms slung over one another’s shoulders, bawdy songs belted out into the night. Of course it wasn’t like that at all. He knew that. They were only doing what they were expected to do, what he expected them to do: to come and b
e convivial for an hour or so, to shake hands with the new teachers and settle their first-year jitters with a few funny stories, a few insider tips, a few drinks, reassure one another that they were glad to be there.

  He was not himself, he thought. It had all become too difficult, his job. He was no good at it anymore.

  Instead of going to his office, he continued alone along the brick path that wound under lampposts between the buildings. The Virginia creeper covering the facades like a second skin shivered in the night breeze. The leaves had just begun to turn from green to a glowing, complex crimson, like an oxidized penny. The vines encased most of the main buildings on campus. A few years ago, he’d presided over contentious meetings about the creeper, and whether it was destroying the masonry. Peter thought it gave the campus an air of enchantment. At night, with lit windows peeping out from the foliage, the buildings appeared to be made entirely of green leaves, a fantastical effect: two stories, three, in places, of living foliage. Birds nested in it, feeding all fall and winter on the hard purple berries.

  As he walked now, the walls beside him stirred as though something secret ran beneath their surface.

  He crossed one of the colonnades, preparing to take the long way through campus to his house. He only needed a walk, perhaps, some fresh air, something to settle him. This part of the campus, the administration and classroom buildings, was deserted. By now the work in the kitchens was over, the remains of dinner in the dining hall cleared away, the giant dishwashers churning, emitting gassy fumes of bleach into the darkness of the tiled pantries with their wet floors and sour-smelling drains. On the playing fields, the grass would be cold to the touch now, stiffening in the night air.

  He turned off the colonnade, began to descend the steps. The breeze did not reach the inner courtyard, and the vine-covered walls around him were still, black leaves hanging quietly. Something was slipping away from him.

  But not the things themselves, or the place, the lovely world of Derry, the beautiful, material world of his own life, he thought. Not his beloved Ruth, with her sad start in this life and all her bravery in the face of it, her funny stories and her straightforward way of looking at the world. She had entertained him so much over the years. He had almost lost her once, by his own cowardice and fear, but it had all worked out, in the end.

  There was no one else like her.

  But something was leaving him. He moved close to the wall of the building, stared up at the facade of motionless greenery, as if he could detect and prevent the departure of this thing, whatever it was. As he did so, a desperate fluttering in the leaves just over his head startled him. He stepped back as the shape of something dark flew from the foliage, the wings of an alarmed bird almost brushing his face.

  He felt a powerful grief, as if a dear companion had stepped across the divide and turned to raise a hand before disappearing.

  4

  At the house, Ruth turned on the lamps in the living room with shaking hands, and then went immediately into the kitchen. The cheese puffs took only a few minutes in a hot oven. She turned it on, aware of the unwashed plate from her sandwich earlier in the day, left in the sink.

  In the face of Peter’s bewildering behavior at the chapel, she had felt mortified, humiliated, aware of people’s eyes on her, and she had rushed away, pretending haste in order to get ready for the party. She hadn’t fooled anyone, she thought now.

  It was his age, they would speculate. He was too old to be doing this job. He was losing his mind. He was no good anymore. He had lost his touch.

  But it was not that which troubled her. For a moment she had to put her face into her hands. She stood very still in the kitchen, breathing in the smell of her own palms. The way he had spoken to her, as if she were someone he disliked, as if she were a stranger.

  She struggled to fit the oven mitts over her shaking hands. Something was terribly the matter with Peter. She shouldn’t have let him go off by himself like that. But he had been so certain, so cold. And there were all these people coming! She had to get ready.

  She had walked alone to the house, quickly, almost running, stumbling in her good shoes. The others would follow along eventually, she thought, but she imagined they were keeping a respectful distance now. Or perhaps none of them would come at all. For a second she saw them, standing outside the chapel on the path, a few people appointed to get the boys to their houses, the rest of them plotting, considering: How could Peter be removed from his job? How could they get rid of him?

  She jumped when Charlie Finney spoke quietly to her from the doorway.

  Do you need any help in here, Ruth? he said. He sounded tentative. She was unused to that tone in him. Or she distrusted it.

  Stop it, she thought. Do not feel sorry for me.

  She would not turn around from the window over the sink. She looked at the reflection of him in the glass, a dark wavering shape, his balding head shining oddly.

  You gave me a fright, Charlie, she said, coming in like that.

  She knew she sounded angry. She turned away from the window, opened the oven door, and clattered the baking sheets unnecessarily.

  He stepped into the kitchen.

  I’m sorry, he said. But people are in the living room. Should I bring in some ice?

  Oh. Yes, she said. Ice. Bring in ice. By all means.

  She closed the oven door but did not turn around, afraid of her blazing cheeks. She thought she might weep, if she looked at him.

  There was silence behind her. Then she heard his footsteps move across the kitchen, heard him open the freezer, ice clinking into the bucket. He must have brought it with him, people in the living room standing around awkwardly, waiting for her to appear. The hostess. She looked down at the stained and scarred countertop. A strip of the laminate edging had fallen off. She and Peter had tried to glue it several times, but it never wanted to stay. The raw seam looked filthy.

  The house was shabby. She knew it was, and humiliation flooded her. Some of it was her neglect. She just didn’t care too much about that sort of thing, fancy decorating and so forth. If it was comfortable, she was happy enough. But some of it—most of it, really—was that there had never been enough money. She’d been foolish, all these years, to work for nothing. She was a Smith graduate, for heaven’s sake! And what had she done with that education?

  Nothing.

  Worked for free for all these years, worked so that people like Charlie Finney could have it all, in the end.

  Peter had never taken enough money for himself, putting so much of it back into the school, into the students and even the faculty and staff and their troubles, writing checks in his big block letters to help pay the tuition of local boys from Wyeth, boys whose letters of application to the school broke his heart. She did not know how much of his paycheck he had returned to the school over the years, but she had a sudden apprehension that it was much more than she’d known, much more than was reasonable or wise.

  This was why he’d never wanted to talk about retiring, she realized. There was no money. He had spent it all on other people.

  In the windowsill above the kitchen sink, his plants were crowded in their old clay pots, some of them filmed with white mold. A spider plant sent out its tentacles, little baby spider plants, a crazy thing.

  Peter loved that plant, tossing the tiny spiders with a finger so that they bounced a little. He touched them the way one would chuck an infant under the chin.

  He would have been, she knew, a wonderful father.

  Outside the window, the night sky had thickened, drawn in closer, clouds moving in beneath the moon and stars. She remembered the radio forecast from earlier in the day, the storms to the west.

  Peter liked to watch the Weather Channel on television, sitting forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, a drink in his hands.

  Holy smokes, he would say, shaking his head. Look at the size of that mess.

  Charlie spoke behind her.

  It’s been a rough day, Ruth, he said. Firs
t, the business with Ed … I think it shook up Peter. It shook up everyone. It shook me up! He gave a nervous laugh. Not a good start to the …

  Then he hesitated. Ruth, has Peter been … you know, he said. Has he been all right? Has he been under any stress?

  Ruth whirled around. Charlie blanched.

  Stress? she said. Stress? Don’t condescend to me, Charlie Finney. You know as well as I do how hard he works, how little help he gets. He is a good man, she said fiercely.

  She had put up her fists, bunched inside the oven mitts, as if to shake them at him. She looked absurd, she realized. She dropped her hands.

  She went on, though, helpless to stop herself. You with your fancy-pants marketing and websites and snazzy videos and e-blasts and—she struggled for the vocabulary—blogs. Your blogs, she said. Your important relationships with people at all those other fancy schools. Your texting and tweetering … and whatnot. Peter just wants to help people, those who deserve it, children who need him. Not those who already have enough money to get anything they want in this world.

  Charlie held up his hands. Ruth, he began—his face had gone from white to red.

  He was embarrassed, not angry, she thought, but she couldn’t stop.

  I know, she cried. I know. It’s the rich who will help pay for those who cannot afford it. I understand that. I understand trickle-down just fine, thank you. Peter understands it, for god’s sake. He’s been making it work for thirty-five years, civilly and man-to-man, finding people who also wanted to help those who are unfortunate. One of you could lift a finger to help him here, she said. He’s doing it all alone.

  She wanted to weep.

  Charlie was looking at her, his expression unreadable.

  You’re trying to change this place, she said then. It has been a good place.

  She hit the table with her hand, still in its oven mitt. The sound was muffled. She ripped off the mitts, snapped them savagely against the table’s edge.

  You don’t know what it’s been like here, she said.