The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  How foolish she was, to want a boy like Peter.

  The next day, Dr. van Dusen drove Ruth to Mary Healy’s, several blocks away through a complicated tangle of streets. Ruth could see, looking at the houses as they drove past them, that they were moving into a neighborhood of less affluence.

  A parcel in her lap held the belongings Mrs. van Dusen had presented to Ruth that morning before she’d left: a handmade sweater—a cardigan in blue wool—as well as an ivory brush and comb set.

  It was a complicated fact about Mrs. van Dusen that Ruth would come to know in the years ahead; she was not unkind, and she was generous—she would give Ruth many gifts—but her generosity was not an easy generosity, nor one borne of joy. It was designed, Ruth came to understand, to protect Mrs. van Dusen from the knowledge of her own loneliness, her estrangement from other people.

  Later, after what happened between Ruth and Peter, Ruth threw away all of Mrs. van Dusen’s gifts except the books: every item of clothing, including the hand-knit sweaters and scarves and mittens, the embroidered pillowcases, the jewelry box with Ruth’s name embossed on it in gold letters, and the gold bangle bracelet, the set of watercolor paints, and the shepherdess figurine.

  These were gifts she would have been given if she were actually someone’s beloved daughter, she understood. But she was not someone’s daughter.

  She was not anyone’s daughter.

  And she was not beloved.

  When Mary Healy opened the door of her house to Ruth and Dr. van Dusen, Ruth took in a sitting room crowded with plants on one side of a front hallway, and a dark dining room and kitchen on the other side. Off the back of the kitchen, she discovered, was an annex where Mary, who could no longer walk upstairs, had a daybed and her beloved radio.

  Mary, in her early eighties, Ruth assumed when she saw her for the first time, looked as if she had been fattened on something unhealthy. She was missing a foot, the stump of her leg ending in a man’s white sock. Her skin shone wetly, faintly green. Sweat stood out around her hairline and on her scalp under her thin white hair.

  She was in pain, she told Ruth, but not much, really. She spoke without self-pity, moving through the downstairs of the house on her crutches, showing Ruth where everything was. Plants garlanded the windows, tentacles of greenery running along the ceiling moldings, dead blossoms falling on the carpets.

  Mary had written out in a shaky hand a list of Ruth’s duties, which she gave to Ruth in the kitchen. The simplicity of the tasks—wash, iron, cook, sweep, garden—reassured Ruth.

  But I don’t know anything about gardening, she told Mary.

  Anyone can put a seed in the ground, Mary said. That’ll wait until spring, anyway.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Mary stopped.

  I can’t get up there anymore, she said, holding on to the newel post. But you tell me if there’s anything you need. She looked at Dr. van Dusen and then at Ruth. I’m glad to have you here, she said. You’ve been unfortunate. That’s not your fault. I’m unfortunate, too. We’ll be a pair, won’t we?

  The telephone rang, and she went to the kitchen to answer it.

  What happened to her leg? Ruth asked Dr. van Dusen when Mary had gone.

  She has a disease, Dr. van Dusen said. Diabetes.

  Ruth looked away from him, up the stairs toward the dark landing.

  It will help her to have you here, Ruth, Dr. van Dusen said. It is not a punishment. Try to see it as an opportunity. Mary is a good person. She has two daughters, but they live in Boston and they can’t get here as often as they’d like. She’ll treat you well.

  Upstairs in Mary’s house, Ruth discovered that she could see the ocean from one of the bedrooms, despite that the rooms were crowded with furniture. She left her things there on the bed and came back out to the landing.

  Dr. van Dusen was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He lifted his hand.

  Not good-bye, he said. I’ll see you soon. I pay house calls to Mary every week.

  Ruth raised her hand. I can’t pay you anything, she said. For what you did.

  Dr. van Dusen closed his eyes and put his hand over his mouth for a moment. Then he took it away.

  No, Ruth, he said. No, there would be no need for that, in any case.

  After he left, Ruth went back to the bedroom and looked out the window at the tiny piece of the ocean visible between the rooftops. She watched it, as if something might appear there, a ship on which she could sail away.

  It was the bedroom she would occupy for the next six years, until she was eighteen years old.

  Early on a Saturday evening a few weeks after moving to Mary Healy’s, Ruth heard someone knock at the front door downstairs.

  Dr. van Dusen stood under the porch light.

  Would you like to go for a drive tomorrow, Ruth? he said.

  He named a place; she agreed. She did not recognize it as the place where her father was. She thought Dr. van Dusen was proposing an outing of some kind, that such car trips were what people like the van Dusens did on the weekend.

  She hoped she would see Peter.

  Peter, however, was not with his father when Dr. van Dusen arrived with the car the next day. Instead, she sat in the front seat as they drove past late-summer marshland from which ibis and herons with their snowy wings and delicate legs lifted off, soaring away as if in accompaniment to the jazz playing on the car radio. Once they stopped for gas, and when Dr. van Dusen returned to the car, he gave her a serious look.

  All right, Ruth? he said.

  Yes, she said. She was fine.

  But she did not understand where they were going until they arrived and she saw the coils of barbed wire, the empty cars in the parking lot. The inconsolable silence of the place was terrifying.

  She shook her head, held on to the armrest. She did not want to get out of the car. She did not want to see her father. She felt shocked to learn that he was still alive.

  Are you sure? Dr. van Dusen said.

  Ruth said nothing. She did not want to think about her father in that place. She did not want to think about him at all.

  She looked up at what she recognized was a guard tower, two men with rifles standing in it. She looked down at her hands, turned them over, palms down, in her lap.

  It’s all right, Ruth, Dr. van Dusen said finally. Never mind. This was a mistake. It’s my fault, and I’m sorry. I thought you understood.

  He started the car again and turned around. Near dusk, they stopped at a diner and he bought them both hamburgers and Coca-Colas, carrying the food out to the car where Ruth waited.

  It’s my fault, Ruth, he said again. Forgive me.

  He asked about me? Ruth said.

  I think he said it was up to you, Dr. van Dusen said after a minute. If you wanted to.

  Ruth looked up at the lighted windows of the diner, a man and a woman leaning toward one another across a table, both of them laughing. The woman’s hair was red, her lipstick bright.

  You don’t have to decide now, Dr. van Dusen said. He handed her a napkin.

  We can try again one day, he said. If you want to.

  One evening just before school began in September, Mary called to Ruth from the bottom of the stairs. From the landing, Ruth looked down and saw Dr. van Dusen. He was dressed in khaki trousers and his shirtsleeves and suspenders, as if he had been taking an evening stroll and had stopped in to say hello, but he did not smile when he greeted her.

  In the small front room, the windowsill crowded with plants, Mary’s cats prowling a path between the chairs, he asked Ruth to sit down.

  Her father was dead, Dr. van Dusen told her. He had taken his own life in prison.

  I thought you should know, Ruth, Dr. van Dusen said, though I am sorry to tell it to you. I believe he regretted—here Dr. van Dusen hesitated, as if searching for the word. I believe he regretted his past, he finished finally.

  Mary Healy stood in the doorway. Ruth understood that she’d been warned that Dr. van Dusen would come with this
news.

  I want you to know, Ruth, Dr. van Dusen said, that there is no need for you to worry about anything. I mean, in terms of money. You will be taken care of.

  She’s a good girl, Mary said from the door, as if she had been asked to defend Ruth.

  Dr. van Dusen glanced at Mary, then back at Ruth.

  I know she is, he said.

  Ruth looked around the room. Sometimes the act of naming things in her head, crowding her mind full with the words for everything that was in the world, helped her ward off panic, a sensation inside her body that things were speeding up to an unbearable degree.

  Leaf, she thought, looking up at the long tendrils of one of Mary’s philodendrons. Armchair. Carpet with roses. Moon climbing in the sky. Sound of waves.

  Mary came forward on her crutches.

  Ruth felt Mary’s hand rest lightly on her head.

  If she happened to wake near dawn that summer, Ruth always went outside to Mary’s front porch. She hoped she might see Peter as he rode his bicycle down the dark streets, delivering the morning papers, but she never did. Perhaps his route did not take him past Mary’s house. She thought again and again of her first sight of him, riding toward her with no hands on the bicycle’s handlebars, whistling. But most mornings when she woke, the light already streamed into her bedroom, finding a path between the furniture stacked around her. She felt comforted by the barricade of old wicker chairs and tables, the heavy wardrobes and battered desks stored on the second floor of Mary’s house.

  Mary kept Ruth busy—she was a talkative person, and she seemed to like Ruth’s company—and there were always books to read.

  Rainy days were most difficult. All her life her moods would be sensitive to the weather.

  Gloomy days, Ruth told Dr. Wenning many years later, always made her feel depressed.

  Dr. Wenning appeared uninterested in this observation.

  Turn on the lights, she said.

  Electric light isn’t the same, Ruth said. People need real sunlight.

  Dr. Wenning was silent.

  You’re the psychiatrist, Ruth said finally. You should know this.

  Bah, Dr. Wenning said. Everyone feels a little blue when it rains except the ducks.

  Ruth rolled her eyes. For a psychiatrist, you’re awfully unsympathetic sometimes, she said. You know that?

  What makes you think psychiatrists are sympathetic? Dr. Wenning said.

  She took off her glasses. Fortunately, she said, you and I cannot do anything about the rain, Ruth. But it is as the poet said: Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.

  Longfellow, Ruth said. I know that poem.

  Is that who it is? Dr. Wenning said. Oh. Well, I cannot remember it all. How does it go? Something, something, something … into every life some rain must fall. Some days must be dark and dreary.

  Ruth remembered the nights over those years with Mary as often dark and dreary.

  She was frequently awoken by nightmares. She sat up, heart pounding, her forehead damp. She learned to take a blanket and sit at the top of the stairs where she could hear the sound of Mary’s radio. Mary didn’t sleep much herself, she had told Ruth, and the radio kept her company through the night. Ruth sat on the landing wrapped in the blanket and leaned her head against the wall, listening to the comforting sound of voices from below. She liked the tones of the sports announcers with their steady patter interrupted by bursts of excitement, the canned laughter from the comedy shows. Occasionally she fell asleep curled up on the floor and woke at dawn to the sound of the surf crashing against the beach a few blocks away.

  Of course her nightmares were fueled by the events of her childhood, Dr. Wenning agreed later, by the incident that had taken place before Ruth’s young eyes, by an early lifetime of her father’s silence and secrets.

  One Saturday afternoon near the end of the first winter that Ruth worked for Dr. Wenning, she looked up from her typing to see Dr. Wenning standing beside her with a cup of tea. Dr. Wenning patted Ruth’s shoulder as she set the cup and saucer beside her.

  This is chamomile tea, she said. Good for sleeping.

  Then she sat down on the chair beside the table where Ruth did her work.

  I have been thinking about your dreams, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said. About the problem of your nightmares.

  She gestured at the cup.

  Go ahead, she said. It tastes a little bit like grass, I think, but it is calming. Try it.

  Ruth took a sip. It did taste like grass. She made a face.

  Honey might improve it, Dr. Wenning said.

  Anyway—she went on as if talking aloud for her own edification—who wants to be frightened to death every night? No one does, of course.

  Then she looked at Ruth.

  But maybe there is another way for us to look at these dreams, she said.

  Ruth’s nightmares sometimes were haunted by a firing squad aiming its guns at her and by her own weird, ghoulish rise from the ground again and again. More often, though, the dreams contained the people Ruth imagined her father had wronged. Desperate men in torn shirts, widows dressed in black, and inconsolable children accused her from ruined landscapes, empty barns, and desolate, echoing houses; unplanted fields and streams empty of fish; orchards barren of fruit. In her dreams, Ruth encountered people sitting on porches and staring into space or lying defeated in the furrows of their fields. She ran among them, helpless and guilt-stricken, trying to take them by the arm and rouse them, or to give them money from her pocket.

  Dr. Wenning had listened to Ruth’s accounts of these miserable scenarios, her face still.

  These are no fun, these dreams, she’d agreed.

  Ruth did not like to cry, especially not in front of Dr. Wenning. She wanted Dr. Wenning to see her as brave.

  I have been thinking, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said that Saturday afternoon. Obviously these nightmares are your imagination hard at work.

  There you are, she went on, waving a hand in the air. Your mind rushes in—gallantly rushes in, I might say—trying to make reparations, even for crimes of which you are innocent.

  These dreams are the dreams of a comforter, Ruth, she said. You want to make amends for your father.

  She leaned back in her chair and smiled at Ruth, as if she admired this quality in her and wanted to convey her admiration.

  Really, your mind is quite heroic, Ruth, she said. You want to put it all right, even though of course you cannot. But look how your imagination never rests! Night after night you have these dreams.

  She stood up and patted her stomach. I think, Ruth, she said, that you need to be grateful for them.

  Ruth gazed up at Dr. Wenning in her drab dress, cinched at her thick waist by a belt.

  Two pigs in a gunnysack! Ha ha, Dr. Wenning had said of her own shape. The twin wings of her frizzy white hair bobbed now as she nodded emphatically.

  It is a gift you have, Ruth, this ability to see things so vividly, Dr. Wenning said. I think these dreams will end one day, but meanwhile I see them as evidence of your compassion and your imagination. You could not have prevented what happened, of course, but you can convey your sympathy now. Speak to these people when you meet them in your dreams. Let them show you the places where they live, the things they loved and lost. Listen to their stories. Tell them of your own grief. Eventually, I think, you will come to the end of knowing one another, and you will let one another go.

  Ruth gazed around at the untidy shelves of Dr. Wenning’s office, the books tufted with loose papers, the pewter gray drapes at the tall windows overlooking Center Church on the Green in New Haven, the marble bust of Schiller with his flowing hair and Roman nose.

  She tried to imagine speaking to the people she could see so clearly in her dreams in their sad, shabby homes and unkempt farms.

  Dr. Wenning had lived during her childhood in the same town in Germany where Schiller had spent part of his own youth, Ruth knew. She liked to tell Ruth about the great beauty of this p
lace: the sloping vineyards alongside the river, the soft shapes of the dark islands in the water, the birches and fir trees, the golden light, the smell of honey in the air, the abbey with its vaulted ceiling and cold air full of ascending currents. Schiller had disliked the classroom, Dr. Wenning told Ruth. He became a poet because of the beauty of the world in which he ran free as a boy.

  No one believed in Schiller’s idea of the beautiful soul more than Dr. Wenning, Ruth thought.

  You have a beautiful soul, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said that afternoon. She patted Ruth firmly on the shoulder again.

  Drink your tea, she said. Do not be afraid of these dreams. Imagine that these people are replanting their orchards, rebuilding their barns, fattening their cattle. Try to see everything, remember everything. The sun shining, the rain falling …

  She looked down at Ruth.

  All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, she said. Do you know these words? No? Julian of Norwich, famous Christian mystic. She had powerful visions, like you, except of course the only person she ever saw was Jesus Christ. Too bad.

  After this conversation, Ruth discovered that she seemed at least to be paying closer attention in her dreams. When she recounted them later for Dr. Wenning, she appeared to remember greater numbers of details: the chestnut color of a horse in a field, the steep rise of a dormer and the reflection of clouds in the window glass, the sound of bulrushes moving in the wind at the edge of a pond, the smell in a room of a candle burning.

  Did I dream these things, she asked, or am I just making them up right now, telling you about them?

  Good question! Dr. Wenning looked pleased. How do they make you feel?

  Like … well, like the world is full, Ruth said.

  Dr. Wenning looked satisfied.

  The things of the world will comfort you, Ruth, she said. Love the things of the world.

  Ruth spent hours that first summer at Mary Healy’s reading.

  Mary owned a series of books, Rivers of America—bought from a salesman one day when she’d been a young mother, she said—and also a big volume called Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Storybook. Ruth read this book over and over again, even though she knew she was too old for it.