The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  Mr. Mitzotakis turned his face to her. The eye that was not swollen shut was at half-mast, like a drunk’s.

  Ruth felt her legs tremble.

  Dr. Wenning brought her lips down to his hand, kissed his knuckles.

  You are one of the most brilliant men I know, Petros, she said. I would like to see these wings of yours sometime. They are wonderful, I am sure. You didn’t ruin them, I hope, subjecting them to such an endeavor?

  Then she sat up. I have brought you something, she said. Along with these evil smokes. She dropped the cigarette into a cup of water by the bedside.

  My god, they must be busy tonight, she said. No one has come in here to shout at us.

  She reached down to the bag at her feet and withdrew one of the oranges. She began to peel it, leaning on the bed with her elbows, like a girl resting on a windowsill. The scent was bright and clean; an orchard entered the little enclosure behind the curtain. Ruth could not take her eyes from the gap.

  Dr. Wenning offered a section to Mr. Mitzotakis; he opened his mouth.

  He swallowed, said something in a low tone. Dr. Wenning continued to peel the orange. He said something else. Dr. Wenning nodded. She brushed the peel into a little pile on the bedclothes, fed him another section, then another. She peeled a second orange.

  More words passed between them, but Ruth could not hear them all clearly. Finally she looked away.

  She felt very, very tired.

  • • •

  So many years later, as she and Peter patiently did his stroke recovery exercises together—blowing dish soap bubbles from a child’s bubble wand to strengthen the muscles in his face, walking slowly up and down and up and down the stairs, riding the stationary bicycles side by side at the local YMCA—Ruth thought often of this night with Dr. Wenning and Mr. Mitzotakis.

  She remembered the scent of the cigarette smoke, the feel of the thin predawn air, the light snow flying past horizontally when the doors at the end of the hallway had opened to the cold darkness outside. She remembered the sound of Dr. Wenning’s voice, how she had sat so calmly with the fact of Mr. Mitzotakis’s wish to die.

  She remembered the oranges, their color and scent.

  In the car on the way back to Dr. Wenning’s house later that night, Ruth had said, He’s a plumber, Mr. Mitzotakis?

  A plumber … and a sculptor, Dr. Wenning had answered. I think it is useful to him as an artist, knowing how to build things with pipe.

  She had looked up through the windshield, squinting at the falling snow.

  Ruth had thought about the story of Daedalus and Icarus, the son who had flown too near the sun.

  He has a son? Ruth said.

  Dr. Wenning agreed. Had a son, she said.

  The son … died, Ruth said.

  Dr. Wenning nodded again. That is correct, she said. Killed himself. Petros’s wife left him afterward. This is not uncommon. It takes great strength to keep a marriage together after something like that.

  Ruth was quiet. She tried to concentrate on driving. She could feel the snow beneath their tires, the inches of it packed below, the ice beneath that. A car passed them, its snow chains dragging and clanking.

  Petros is a dramatic person, Dr. Wenning said. Those wings … who could understand that? But the man’s sadness? That is very real.

  Ruth realized that her chest hurt, as if she were the one who had fallen through the snowy air to the frozen ground below.

  Then she remembered something.

  Why did you move your pen? she said. You moved your pen, to your other pocket.

  Dr. Wenning looked at her sharply. Then she smiled.

  Ha, she said.

  She reached over and cuffed Ruth lightly on the shoulder. You have such the sharp eyes, Ruth, she said, pleased. Truly? I did not think about it, really. I just wanted to go in there … as his friend. No business. I already give him drugs. I wanted to bring only the oranges. And the cigarettes. I knew he would want a cigarette. A man who tries to kill himself and fails should have a smoke, if he wants one.

  Later, after Ruth and Peter had moved to Derry, on one of her trips back to New Haven, Ruth had asked Dr. Wenning again about Mr. Mitzotakis.

  Ah, the wings, Dr. Wenning said. Yes, I saw them once. Enormous things, black like a bat’s wings. Terrifying, hideous, even, but quite beautiful in their way. They were in a museum, in an exhibition. Didn’t I tell you?

  She’d shaken her head. A passionate man, Petros, she said. He was quite attached to those things.

  No pun intended, she said. Of course.

  Then, one Christmas, Dr. Wenning sent Ruth Mr. Mitzotakis’s obituary notice from the newspaper.

  Dr. Wenning had underlined the words died peacefully in his sleep.

  Ruth had recognized the triumph there. Mr. Mitzotakis had survived.

  Ruth liked tidying up the A-frame. She bought a Swiffer—what a marvelous gadget that was—and enjoyed pushing it around the smooth floors, dust collecting neatly on the little cloths. The house was so small it took hardly any time at all to make it spick-and-span, and Ruth felt pleasure—though she recognized it as shallow—at owning material things for the first time in her life: Table. Bureau. Bed. She bought colorful throw pillows for the sofa, enjoyed arranging them this way or that.

  They had two plastic Adirondack chairs, side by side, on the deck.

  They went grocery shopping together, Peter holding on to the cart. They went to the movies and out for supper. Peter continued to cultivate his old sources for the school, families who dedicated their contributions specifically for scholarships. Charlie Finney called often to speak with Peter, asking for advice, and one day Ruth was surprised to hear Kitty’s voice on the telephone.

  She called under what Ruth understood finally was a pretense—some silly question about the house. What she really wanted, Ruth realized, was just to talk, to ask about various personalities at the school, about how to deal with the prickly secretary in the admissions office, about what should be done to recognize the years of service of a fellow retiring from the grounds crew, about whether Ruth thought a book club for parents would be a good idea. After that first conversation, Kitty called Ruth nearly as often as Charlie called Peter, and Ruth found herself reporting news of the Finney children to Peter over dinner at night—one of the boys had trouble with his hearing and was being tested—or a bit of gossip Kitty had passed on, or some detail about Kitty’s experience with a trustee or a teacher.

  Do you know that her favorite book is Middlemarch? Ruth told Peter. Just like me. And that she plays the piano?

  I wish you were here, Ruth, Kitty said one day. It would be so nice to have your company.

  Tears came into Ruth’s eyes.

  I’ll come and visit, Ruth said, when Peter is better.

  Ruth had learned a great deal from Dr. Wenning, she thought, folding the laundry on the table, glancing up from time to time to watch Peter, sitting on the deck in the sun, reading. Pain and beauty were so often tangled up together. Joy and sorrow came and went from a life, the balance sometimes shifting one way, sometimes the other, like a car sliding on an icy road. The trick was just to hold on somehow through the difficult stretches.

  Haven’t you found, Ruth, Dr. Wenning had said once, that sometimes in our lives we are lost in the hinterland, neither here nor there?

  Ruth and Dr. Wenning had been sitting at the time in a concert hall at Yale, waiting for the performance to begin. The musicians in the orchestra had been tuning their instruments.

  Sometimes we are lost in the wilderness, Dr. Wenning went on. We are far away from the shoreline, the cheerful port where the ships go and come, but also from the busy city, with its lights—Dr. Wenning had waved at the brilliantly lit room around them—and its apples for sale on the sidewalk, and the sound of typewriters going everywhere—clackety, clackety, clackety—everybody talking away.

  Ruth had turned in her seat to look at Dr. Wenning. Such a long speech was unusual for her.

  The hi
nterland … it is like a desert, Ruth, Dr. Wenning had continued, gazing up at the concert hall’s elaborate ceiling, its gilt cornices, its painted stars.

  Or sometimes the hinterland is a forest, Dr. Wenning had said, the trees so close together that we cannot see a path between them, only darkness or emptiness everywhere we look. We do not know which way to turn. It is not a place for citizenship, the hinterland. It is no kind of place, and so our instinct is to keep going, keep on walking. Eventually, though, so long, as you do not give up, you find your way out of the hinterland. That is the nature of it. It is only a middle ground, a location that separates one place from another.

  Someone had touched Ruth on the shoulder, indicating the seats just beyond them. Ruth had moved her legs out of the way, hoisted Dr. Wenning’s big handbag onto her own lap.

  Ah, I go on and on, Dr. Wenning had said, when the stranger had passed.

  You know me, she had said. How I love a metaphor. I should have been a poet.

  But still—she began again as if Ruth had been about to interrupt her—for these voyages, Ruth, she said, these passages through the hinterland, what we need is a companion, a friend at our side.

  She had leaned over and patted Ruth’s hand.

  All right, my dear, she’d said. Now the music begins.

  After Dr. Wenning passed away, it was difficult for Ruth to make herself believe that her friend, as Peter suggested, was somehow near her. But sometimes she could manage it: first the curtain in the hospital drawn across the room where Mr. Mitzotakis lay, then the cigarette smoke, then the bright color of the oranges, their scent so sweet and strong, and then the sound of big wingbeats, the feel of air moving against her cheek.

  6

  A year after Peter’s stroke, his speech nearly fully restored—only the right side of his face drooped a bit, his right leg still a little slow and clumsy—they drove to a nearby inn to celebrate his recovery. Peter sat in the passenger seat beside her, dozing.

  Getting out of the car at the inn, he gave her his hand so she could help him and smiled his lopsided smile at her.

  The inn was just as she had imagined it would be, very pretty, with a wine list and a good menu, nice little shampoos and so on in the bathroom. She unscrewed the caps and sniffed the contents, pleased.

  The next afternoon, they borrowed one of the canoes, took it out onto the lake. It was fall, the shoreline reflected in a brilliant rim on the surface of the water. They paddled for an hour or so, not speaking much. When they arrived back at the inn’s boathouse to return the canoe, another couple, much younger, was also returning their boat. The woman was attractive, tiny and lovely and neat in the way that Ruth, invariably the tallest woman in the room, her big breasts pulling her shoulders forward, had always envied.

  She’d always wanted to be a tiny, skinny blonde.

  This woman now was exactly that: blond, her hair expertly colored and cut. She wore a pair of tight black shorts, like the sort bicyclists wear.

  When they pulled up to the dock, Peter insisted on climbing out first—ever the gentleman—to steady the canoe for Ruth.

  Heart of a lion, Peter, Ruth said to him sometimes, fondly.

  Ruth noticed the attractive young woman glance at Peter, the still handsome, rough lines of his face, the silver hair falling boyishly over his forehead.

  Peter held out his hand. He was sweating, and there were rings of wet on his gray T-shirt under his arms. His fingers closed around her hand, and she gripped back, holding on. For a minute the canoe wobbled underneath her, and she thought she might fall. She was too heavy these days. It was all that sitting around with Peter, she thought, playing cards with him to help him recover his dexterity. She couldn’t play cards without wanting to eat some nuts.

  Oh, I’m so fat, she had complained the night before, toweling off after a hot bath, glancing at—and then averting her gaze from—her image in the mirror.

  Peter had been slowly knotting his tie, frowning and lifting his chin in that way he had.

  You’re beautiful, he said.

  He had never been unfaithful to her, she thought. There had been that painful period long ago, when they were very young, long before they were married, when they hadn’t seen each other for a while. She imagined that maybe he had slept with someone else then, maybe even a couple of someones, though they hadn’t ever discussed it. There might even have been prostitutes, for all she knew. Young men used to do that. It had been more acceptable back then in a way, certain kinds of prostitutes like good-natured old friends or teachers, casual and a little carnal, teaching young men how to relax.

  Now, on the dock, Peter pulled, surprisingly strong, and she stood up, the canoe bobbing dangerously beneath her. A moment later she was safe on the dock.

  Oopsie daisy! Peter said.

  What a funny, old-fashioned expression, she thought. It made the tears come into her eyes.

  That was a nice day, she said, as they walked up the leafy path to the inn, the late-afternoon sunlight falling down through the trees.

  Yes, it was, he agreed.

  She took his arm.

  They made love before dinner, that business not so easy as it once was, it was true, but then you didn’t really mind so much about that anymore, either. You did the best you could. Yet the old longing was still there between them. When Peter pulled her against him, her back to his belly, when he kissed her neck, ran his hand down her side, following the dip of her waist and the rise of her hip, she still felt that old heat.

  At dinner, they shared a nice bottle of wine in the inn’s pleasant dining room, curtains drawn against the dark window glass. She ordered fish, as usual, and Peter ordered a steak, and then he fell asleep in bed before the nightly news had finished on the television: the deadly account of casualties from the war in the Middle East; footage of endangered harp seals in the Canadian Gulf of St. Lawrence; the revelation of comical indiscretions on the part of a politician in Washington, his name—unbelievably—Weiner.

  Oh, for god’s sake, Ruth said, holding the television remote, speaking out loud to no one in the pretty bedroom at the inn, for Peter was snoring beside her.

  Oh, their heartbreaking faces, those seals. Their gray whiskers.

  The dog’s gray muzzle, she remembered. The man’s face.

  The faces of the many boys from Derry, the beautiful and the not beautiful, the lucky and the unlucky.

  Sometimes, when she was alone, she actually spoke aloud to Dr. Wenning. Are you there? she asked the empty air.

  For a while that night, Ruth lay awake beside Peter in the dark, looking out the unfamiliar open window into the night sky blazing with stars. There seemed to be more stars than usual here, a conference of them, all gathered together.

  She put her hand on Peter’s back, spread her fingers against his warm skin and rested it there until she felt his pulse against her palm.

  You never knew how much happiness—or how much unhappiness—would be delivered to you in a lifetime, no matter whether you deserved it or not. So there was really nothing to be done, as Dr. Wenning had said, but get on the bus.

  Get on the bus, Ruth, she said. Make love, not war. Give strangers a piece of your heart. Sing “Kumbayah.”

  Ruth had rolled her eyes.

  But Dr. Wenning had loved that song. A woman who had lost everyone in her family to the Nazis had loved “Kumbayah.”

  Do you know what it means, Ruth, that word? Dr. Wenning had asked. It means Come by here.

  I would like to say that to God sometimes, Dr. Wenning said. Hey, God. Come by here, please. I need your attention for just a minute.

  Ruth stroked Peter’s back lightly, softly, with her fingertips. He had the softest skin, Peter, like a baby’s. Even his feet, so big and white, were soft.

  He made a little noise, a little snore like a hiccup in the quiet of the room, and then all was silent again.

  She thought of the stars and the lake and the forest around them, the gentle, brilliant darkness. Surely goodn
ess and mercy, Ruth thought.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me.

  A few days after Peter’s stroke, Ruth’s car had been recovered near an entrance to the Appalachian Trail in northern Maine. Someone—the man, presumably—had left a little bier of stones at the signpost, the dog’s dead body, legs tucked in neatly, nose curled to tail, beneath the heap.

  Of the man himself, there was no trace. He had disappeared into the forest, back to whatever awful dark place he had come from, she assumed.

  She started awake occasionally in the middle of the night, the terrible stuffed animal through whom the man had spoken snarling at her. But mostly what she felt about the whole incident was sadness, not fear. Not anymore.

  Charlie Finney had driven her home from the hospital that night, after she’d seen Peter and had spoken with the doctors. Peter had been able to smile crookedly at her, to lift his hand and let her hold it. She had gripped his hand hard—probably hard enough to hurt him—and kissed his knuckles, weeping.

  He wasn’t entirely out of the woods, the doctors had said that night, but they were pretty confident he’d be all right. He’d been lucky.

  At the house, Charlie had gotten out to open the car door for her, and she had given him her hand, let him help her. It had stopped raining by then. The storm had blown through, leaving branches littered across the lawn, another shutter down, crashed into the bushes beneath the kitchen window. But there was no worse damage, as far as she could see.

  Will you be all right, Ruth? Charlie had asked, and she had kissed his cheek, patted his shoulder.

  Go on home, Charlie, she said. Thank you for your help. It’s been an awfully long day.

  She had turned toward the house. Somehow, the front door had been left open—or perhaps the wind had blown it open—and inside the house was lit up, lights on in the front hall and the living room and in the kitchen, just as if the party were still going on, the drink glasses glinting on the tray, the dishes of nuts, the triumphant heads of the lilies in their vase on the hall table, the speckled brown Comice pears in the blue bowl … pears she had arranged earlier that very morning. It seemed a lifetime ago.