The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  5

  Over the years when Ruth had been at her most anxious, her most upset, Dr. Wenning always said to her: Ruth, Ruth. Sometimes you just have to be patient, wait it out. Put on the teakettle. Iron some clothes. Bake a cake. Read another book, why don’t you?

  For a few years, Ruth and Peter had owned a dog, a homely, wrinkle-faced, rusty-bearded mutt adopted from the pound in Wyeth, devoted to them. He had come with his name—Hercules. When he’d died, she and Peter had been brokenhearted. Dr. Wenning used to say: take that big pooch of yours and put him on his leash and go for a long, long walk. You will feel better afterward.

  Play a little piano, Dr. Wenning would say. How about you try the violin?

  A mediocre but enthusiastic cellist, Dr. Wenning complained often about Ruth’s failure to study the piano more seriously. It showed, she said, a lack of imagination and discipline, that Ruth had never become a better musician.

  Then, seeing Ruth’s face, she would say: Oh, my dear. It will pass, today’s sadness, tomorrow’s sadness, the next day’s. Something else will happen. Just wait.

  In the sunny living room of the new house—she always thought of it as “the new house”—Ruth folded the laundry on the dining room table—blond wood, Scandinavian design, completely modern—enjoying the scent of the clean clothes, the softness of Peter’s worn old shirts, even her big old white underpants. In the bathroom, she picked up his wet towels from the floor, hers as well, and carried them outside and hung them in the sun on the railing of the deck overlooking the lake.

  They never would be tidy people.

  It had been a stroke that had felled Peter, but a small one, after all.

  It was luck, only pure luck, that a boy—a homesick boy, escaped from his dorm and wandering the campus in the dark trying to reach his parents on his cell phone, looking for a hot spot where he could get a signal—had found Peter, collapsed in the courtyard. The boy had had the good sense to call 911 immediately, to stay with Peter, who later remembered the boy kneeling beside him, remembered the feeling of being unable to speak, though he could see and make eye contact, remembered trying to smile, remembered lifting his hand and the boy taking it, holding on.

  Charlie Finney stepped in, as Ruth had known he would, to take over at Derry.

  It had been absurdly easy, after all, for them to walk away. They had owned virtually nothing, so there had been nothing to take with them. She thought they’d probably had a bonfire after she and Peter vacated the headmaster’s house. She bet Charlie Finney had burned everything, every worn old sheet and patched bedspread, figured out how to buy himself some nice new furniture, a snazzy gas oven, a stainless-steel fridge.

  She and Peter had a few clothes, a few books, a few personal mementoes. Really, when they packed it all up, she realized the degree to which they’d been like penitents on the devotional road. Most of what might have been their savings, as Ruth had suspected, Peter had put back into the school.

  In the rehab hospital, in the days before he regained his speech, Peter could communicate only by writing.

  Are you okay? he wrote on a pad.

  She took the pad from him, bent over it. Yes, she wrote. No, she wrote. Then she crossed out no and underlined the word yes. She pushed the pad back to him.

  Are you angry about the money? he wrote.

  Yes, she wrote. Then she sighed. NO, she printed in big capital letters. She circled it and then turned the pad around so he could read it.

  He read what she had written, put his hand, the one he could lift, over his eyes.

  She leaned forward, touched her forehead to his.

  • • •

  The community of Derry, past and present, took up a collection on their behalf, cash and pledged amounts. The contributions bought Ruth and Peter a tiny house—this sun-filled A-frame at the edge of a lake in the Adirondacks—the property offered to them at a deep discount by a board member in gratitude for Peter’s years of generosity, his years of service, his years of love. Contributions came in from every graduating class over Peter’s years as headmaster. Many classes had one hundred percent participation.

  There had been an enormous party for them. A white tent had been set up on the big lawn, strings of lights wound everywhere, a dance floor in the center. A twelve-piece band had been hired to play. The whole thing had cost a fortune, Ruth had thought at the time, disapproving, eyeing the ice sculptures and the shrimp by the kilo, oysters on platters everywhere, an open bar. Who on earth had paid for all this?

  But what could they do?

  Ruth and Peter—leaning on a cane—had stood as if in a receiving line at a wedding, greeting people as they came through. So many people, all of them embracing Peter and embracing Ruth, thanking him, thanking her, many of them wiping away tears.

  We’ll miss you both so much, they said, again and again, and Ruth had had to put her fingers over her mouth.

  After all, it had not been unnoticed, her work.

  Kitty Finney, her hair worn girlishly in a hairband, had come up to Ruth and embraced her.

  Where are the boys? Ruth asked.

  Babysitter, Kitty said. She had a drink in her hand and she raised it in Ruth’s direction. Thank god, she said, grinning.

  Then she had impulsively hugged Ruth again.

  I won’t ever be able to do what you’ve done here, Ruth, she said. I don’t know how you’ve done it. You did everything. You know everybody. Look at all these people, all these people who love you.

  Ruth looked past Kitty. People had begun to dance, and she was having trouble hearing what was said to her over the sound of the music. Someone waved to her from the dance floor. She waved back.

  Kitty took a gulp of her drink. You and Peter were a team, weren’t you? she said.

  Ruth turned to her. Kitty’s eyes had filled with tears. She took off her headband and pushed her hair back from her face with her hand. Then she resettled her headband. Sorry, she said. Sometimes I’m just overwhelmed. I just know I can’t do what you’ve done.

  You’ll be fine, Ruth said. Of course you can.

  She remembered the sagging grape arbor behind the house, the buzzing fuse box, the lights on in the windows of the house at night, greeting her when she came home. She remembered the birds flying into the walls of the buildings on campus at dusk, the rustling creeper, deer moving out across the frozen fields in winter. She remembered the bells on the horses’ harnesses. She remembered pale boys lying in their beds in the infirmary, remembered tooth marks on pencils, smudged erasures on papers. She remembered the boys singing “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  She remembered her younger self, the woman in the Liberty scarf, cheering on the boys at the track meet, Peter keeping the camera steady on her face on a sunny fall day long ago.

  The love between them.

  I was lucky, she said now to Kitty. You’ll do a wonderful job, you and Charlie.

  The evening ended with an announcement that the school had drawn up plans for a new library to be named in Peter’s honor.

  Ruth, in the dress she’d bought for the occasion, had helped Peter cut a ceremonial ribbon.

  Her dress was pink, a daring color for her. It had a ruffle around the neck.

  I like that dress, Peter had said when they’d been getting ready earlier that evening. The ruffle makes you look like a cupcake.

  A delicious cupcake! he’d said quickly, seeing her expression.

  She’d hit him on the arm, but only gently. She was still careful around him, watchful. The first time he’d had an orgasm after the stroke, she’d ended up in tears.

  It’s all right, he’d said, holding her to him while she cried.

  It’s fine, Ruth, he’d said. Really, I’m fine.

  The months while Peter was recovering, their daily routine so different from the one they’d maintained at Derry, possessed a loneliness that reminded Ruth of their years in New Haven, when Peter had been so busy with his graduate studies. Ruth had worked all kinds of jobs in those year
s, trying to earn money, but still she had sometimes felt as though she was standing still, while Peter moved on ahead of her. They were each sometimes tired, or bored, or restless … but often, it seemed, not at the same time, Peter collapsing with exhaustion just as Ruth found a movie she wanted to go see, or Ruth succumbing to a cold or the flu when Peter had a break between classes. They made love at odd hours—in the middle of the night, or just before dawn, or hastily, when Peter came home for lunch, kissing hungrily in the hall afterward, Peter shrugging into his coat, Ruth handing him a paper sack with an apple and a slapped-together sandwich.

  The last winter that they lived in New Haven, Dr. Wenning had slipped on the ice in the parking lot of the hospital and suffered a bad sprain to an ankle. She’d needed help, and so Ruth had packed a suitcase and gone to stay with her for a few weeks, sleeping uncomfortably on the tiny overstuffed sofa in the study at Dr. Wenning’s apartment.

  Ruth did the laundry, which included washing by hand Dr. Wenning’s yellowed old slips and heavily fortified brassieres, hanging them to dry on a complicated hanger contraption over the bathtub. She cooked scrambled eggs or baked beans for their supper. During the day, she drove Dr. Wenning to work and carried her bags and briefcase, fetched liverwurst-and-pickle sandwiches for them at lunchtime from the deli down the street. While Dr. Wenning taught her classes or saw patients, Ruth read. Madame Bovary. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Our Mutual Friend by Dickens. Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Sometimes Ruth was able to meet Peter between his classes at a tiny breakfast and lunch place near campus, where they ordered coffee and sat in a booth, kissing like lovers who had been parted for months.

  Every night, she called Peter to say she missed him.

  She felt sorry for Dr. Wenning, shuffling around in her slippers, her ankle the size and color of an eggplant, but Dr. Wenning seemed to have little self-pity. Only once, gripping the kitchen table, leaning over as if she could not catch her breath, she had said, My god, Ruth. I don’t know what I’d do without you.

  Ruth had felt embarrassed, heartsick. What would Dr. Wenning do without her?

  One night, she had been awoken by Dr. Wenning, standing in the doorway of the office on her crutches.

  I am afraid we have to go to the hospital, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said.

  She had been wearing a frayed old robe, dark blue, with wide lapels and a heavy tasseled cord. Her hair—snow white as long as Ruth had known her—was wild. Without her glasses, she looked vulnerable, tired, an old queen aroused from sleep by urgent matters of state.

  Ruth had struggled upright on the couch. What’s the matter? she said.

  Mr. Mitzotakis is in a bad way, Dr. Wenning said. She turned, and then she turned back. The oranges in the refrigerator, she said. Bring those, please.

  On the way to the hospital, Ruth had glanced at Dr. Wenning, sitting in the passenger seat beside her. From her filing for Dr. Wenning, Ruth remembered that Mr. Mitzotakis, one of Dr. Wenning’s patients, owned a plumbing business.

  Is Mr. Mitzotakis all right? Ruth said.

  Dr. Wenning gazed out the window. Snow fell, lightly and beautifully, through the arc of the streetlights. Ruth was not an experienced driver, and the icy road made her nervous. Her hands were cold inside her mittens.

  Mr. Mitzotakis has attempted to fly from the second-story rooftop of his garage, Dr. Wenning said finally.

  Oh, Ruth said. She had not expected that.

  He didn’t get very far, Dr. Wenning said.

  The car, Dr. Wenning’s old ocean liner of an Oldsmobile, began to drift, as if it were light as a feather, across the centerline of the road. Ruth held her breath until she was able to pull the car back into the proper lane. The tires spun beneath them on the snow, making a high, whining sound. Ruth clutched the wheel. Sweat broke out across her forehead under her hat, making her head itch.

  Mr. Mitzotakis had broken both of his legs, one in several places, as well as his left arm and several ribs. He had a concussion. At the hospital, the grim-faced nurse in charge of him, her gray hair tucked in a net under her cap, told Dr. Wenning that shrubs planted along one wall of the garage—those, and the accumulated feet of snow—had apparently cushioned his fall.

  You know he was wearing this big wing contraption? the nurse said. She circled her finger in the air by her ear, rolled her eyes. Cuckoo, she said. Then she eyed Ruth.

  He doesn’t seem to like women, she said, warning Dr. Wenning. He’s been very rude.

  Ruth stood there, holding their coats and Dr. Wenning’s bag. She had offered to help Dr. Wenning into her white doctor’s jacket, but Dr. Wenning had shaken her head. She wore an old tweed blazer, her familiar cowl-neck sweater.

  Ruth’s fingers found the soft black velvet collar of Dr. Wenning’s winter coat in her arms.

  Wings? she thought.

  Dr. Wenning rubbed her hands together, cracked her knuckles, a sound that made Ruth cringe. Dr. Wenning usually did that when she was angry.

  He likes women fine, Dr. Wenning said. Just not certain women.

  The nurse shrugged—bored rather than offended, Ruth thought—and raised the top sheet of paper on the chart. Bad lacerations, the nurse reported. From the bushes. They sewed up the worst spot, on his back. And he’s probably going to lose the eye.

  Which? Dr. Wenning stared down the hallway, her hands folded across her belly.

  The nurse consulted the chart. The right one, she said.

  Dr. Wenning’s chin dropped slightly. She made a sound of disapproval. Too bad, she said. He has a severe astigmatism in the left. The right eye was perfect.

  The conversation that followed—Dr. Wenning’s questions, the nurse’s answers—was mostly unintelligible to Ruth. She understood that they were talking about medications, dosages. She understood that Mr. Mitzotakis had been severely depressed.

  The nurse snapped shut the chart.

  He’s pretty doped up, she said, but he won’t stop talking. You want to knock him out altogether?

  She cocked her head toward the curtain, behind which Mr. Mitzotakis lay.

  Listen to him, she said. He’s still at it.

  There was a pen in the lapel pocket of Dr. Wenning’s blazer. Ruth watched Dr. Wenning take the pen out of her lapel and slip it, where it could not be seen, into a lower coat pocket.

  Please wait here, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said. You brought the oranges?

  Ruth handed her the bag. Dr. Wenning gave Ruth her crutches.

  From where she stood outside the curtain, Ruth could hear the sound of Mr. Mitzotakis moaning and, between the moans, a kind of hectic chanting. Ruth looked away quickly when Dr. Wenning parted the curtain. She did not want to see Mr. Mitzotakis. Once or twice when she had been working at Dr. Wenning’s office on a Saturday, he had come in for an appointment. A stout, middle-aged man, he was swarthy, with unattractively pockmarked skin. But he was also intelligent-looking, proud; his chest had seemed to Ruth somehow oddly inflated. He wore thick glasses, and his hair was slick and wavy—dyed, Ruth had guessed. He had bowed to her in an old-fashioned way.

  Ruth heard the sound of chair legs scraping the floor.

  Petros, she heard Dr. Wenning say. Petros, can you look at me?

  There was a silence. Then Dr. Wenning said, You are in a bad way here, my friend.

  Ruth stood still outside the curtain.

  Mr. Mitzotakis began to whisper, a sound somehow more terrible than the frantic chanting that had preceded it. He had been praying, Ruth understood then, in Greek. Doctors and nurses passed Ruth in the hall, but they made no sign that they noticed her standing there, wide-eyed, holding the coats. Curtains were swept aside and then whisked closed. Orderlies pushed rattling metal carts loaded with bottles and jars and boxes down the tumultuous corridor, the floor shining as if sluiced with water. The double doors at the end of the long hallway swung open, and she turned toward them, toward the rush of cold air. Outside was the December night, the red light of an ambulance parked at the curb, headlights illuminating a
filthy gray snowbank, the smell of exhaust.

  She did not want to be there, in that hospital, with Mr. Mitzotakis.

  She thought she understood why a man would jump off his garage roof, wearing a pair of wings. She did not want to understand it, but she did.

  She wanted to call Peter, but it was the middle of the night.

  Overhead, the lights in the hallway seemed to flare and then dim. She looked around for a chair. She needed to put her head between her knees or she would pass out, she thought.

  From somewhere she smelled cigarette smoke. She turned, her eye drawn against her will to the gap in the curtains.

  Dr. Wenning was lighting a cigarette. Ruth had never before seen her smoke. Dr. Wenning exhaled a cloud, and then she passed the cigarette to Mr. Mitzotakis, leaning over the bed to hold it to his lips.

  Now we will both be in trouble here, Dr. Wenning said. Don’t forget I did this for you, Petros.

  Mr. Mitzotakis was wrapped in gauze like a mummy, both legs suspended in plaster casts. His face was the color of sand, his thick hair disarranged. He moved his head from side to side, stopping only to drag on the cigarette Dr. Wenning held for him. One side of his face was badly mangled.

  Then he groped in the air with his unbandaged hand. Ruth saw Dr. Wenning reach out and catch it.

  She held it between her own.

  So, they did not work, your marvelous wings, Dr. Wenning said, her tone quiet. She was looking not at Mr. Mitzotakis’s face but down at the bedclothes, her head bowed. Still, it is a beautiful and sad story, she said, the story of the daring and loving and clever Daedalus. Nothing wrong with Daedalus, Petros.

  Mr. Mitzotakis turned his face aside. Ruth saw his chest heave with suppressed emotion.

  Well, we had agreed already that the wings would not work, Dr. Wenning went on, as if she had not noticed that he was crying. Of course they would not. Remember that, Petros. This is not the issue. It is not that the wings do not work, that you are a man, and a man cannot fly. But you thought perhaps you could die this way, and now not only are you not dead, but you are very, very badly injured. That must feel … I am trying to imagine it, she said.