The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  When Mary realized that Ruth liked to read, she called around to the neighbors, and soon Ruth had books by Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw, several volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed books, Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, a collection of new detective novels—The Asphalt Jungle and Sunset Boulevard—and also copies of Lorna Doone and Under the Lilacs. Best was the gift of several novels by Dickens, Oliver Twist and Bleak House and David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Hard Times.

  Sadly, sadly, the sun rose, Ruth read in A Tale of Two Cities.

  It rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

  She thought of her father. Blight. That was a good word for what had been inside him, she thought, after looking it up in Mary’s dictionary. A ruined state, a destructive force. An affliction.

  Ruth already knew how to cook frankfurters and beans and scrambled eggs. Mary showed her how to make corned beef and cabbage and vegetable soup, to bake rye bread and a cake made with raisins and brown sugar and Crisco.

  The radio was always on in the sunroom annex off the kitchen, and she and Mary listened to baseball games at night.

  They played cards.

  They never mentioned Ruth’s father directly.

  Once, apropos of nothing, Mary reached over and squeezed Ruth’s arm. You poor kid, she said. You never knew anything, huh?

  Ruth shook her head. But she had known something, she thought.

  Poor kid, Mary repeated.

  One evening a few days before the school year began, Ruth and Dr. van Dusen walked to the local school, which was a dozen blocks from Mary’s house. Standing outside the fence with Ruth, Dr. van Dusen told her that he had gone to school there himself when he was a boy, and that she would go, too.

  Two large oak trees shaded a lawn with bare patches in front of the building. Those trees, he told her, had been much smaller when he’d been a student.

  Ruth wanted somehow to make Dr. van Dusen talk about Peter.

  Did Peter like the school? she asked.

  Peter attended a different school, he told her, a boarding school in Providence, where the boys were taught by Jesuit priests.

  Mrs. van Dusen was Catholic, Dr. Van Dusen said.

  Ruth felt her stomach drop. This had been her last hope, that she might see Peter at school.

  If you would ever like to go to church, Ruth, Dr. Van Dusen said … Mrs. van Dusen would be happy to take you.

  Ruth looked up at him. You don’t go?

  Sometimes, he said. But I make house calls on Saturdays and Sundays for people who cannot get out. The priest and I often cross paths, he said, but he is usually the one invited for dinner.

  At Dr. van Dusen’s tone, Ruth looked up. He was smiling.

  Ruth looked away from him at the dark windows of the school. She would not tell Dr. van Dusen that she was afraid of God. Sometimes when she sat on the front steps of Mary’s house at night, after the lights in the other houses had been extinguished, she imagined seeing Peter, imagined him appearing suddenly. She did not want to pray for this, though, because she did not think God was reliable; in fact, she thought God, if he existed, was an unpredictable force, as unknowable as her own father had been.

  Also, she found it difficult to believe fully in God.

  She did not want to say that she did not believe in him, though. If God did exist, surely her doubt would bring down his wrath. Better not to direct his attention toward her in any way.

  She could wish for things, she thought—wishing was not the same as praying—but she had no faith in either enterprise, anyway.

  • • •

  The day before school began, Mrs. van Dusen made a surprise appearance at Mary’s house, bringing school supplies and clothes for Ruth, five cotton dresses and two cardigans, one white and one dark blue. She also arrived with a lemon pound cake, paper sacks of peaches and plums, a bouquet of flowers for Mary, and a vase of tiny flowers fashioned cleverly out of seashells for Ruth.

  Ruth noticed that Mary was a little abashed around her.

  It must be tough, being the doctor’s wife, Mary said later to Ruth. You have to be nice to everybody all the time. Still, she’s not an easy person, is she? Makes me kind of nervous.

  Someone at the police station, Ruth supposed, had spread the story of what had happened to her father; everyone at school that fall seemed to know that something bad trailed her. Teachers did not call on her in class, as if forcing her to speak would be unkind, and for the most part the students ignored her. Her English teacher was a middle-aged woman named Miss Dougherty. She had a bold manner, and she wore lipstick and blouses with ruffles. After Ruth turned in her first essay—an account of the books she had read over the summer—Miss Dougherty took Ruth to the town library one day after school and got her a library card. She gave her some clothes, too, a few dresses and soft sweaters.

  I’m too old for them now, she said, looking Ruth up and down. But they’d be pretty on you.

  You watch out for the boys, Ruth, she said. And don’t you bother about those other kids, either, she told her. Just keep reading. Keep your head down but your chin up. You’ll be done with school before you know it, and then you’ll go to college.

  She looked again at Ruth. Everything will be all right then, Ruth. It’ll be better when you’re a grown-up. Trust me.

  Walking around town one weekend afternoon that first fall, Ruth discovered that Wells had a small art and natural history museum. After that she went often after school, stopping under the portico at the entrance to the building where she turned her back on the front door with its medieval, studded hinges and leaded-glass window and checked her face in the mirror of the compact she had bought at Woolworth’s with the allowance Dr. van Dusen gave her. She patted her nose and her cheeks with powder. She wore a dark green beret over her hair and gray wool mittens, items she had unearthed in a dresser and that Mary had told her to keep.

  Even though she knew he was away at school, she always imagined that there was a chance she might run across Peter.

  A rambling heap of brownstone boulders, the museum had been built originally as a private residence for a cotton baron in the late 1800’s. Ruth read this information in a free pamphlet on her first visit, the blurry, mimeographed copies stacked on a spindly three-legged table at the foot of the marble spiral staircase in the front hall. A niche in the curved wall of the stairwell contained a magnificent urn embossed with flowers and Irish harps and trimmed with a design of dogs chasing each other.

  From the tower of the museum, Ruth liked to look out over the water, the whitecaps like fins bristling over the surface. The wind came off the ocean and blew a flurry of crimson leaves across the cotton baron’s lawns.

  In every room of the museum, around every corner, there was something bizarre or horrifying or fascinating or beautiful: a taxidermied monkey’s head from Lima, Peru, and a giant clamshell, pearly jaws shining under the lights, fossils of fish and shells and an ostrich complete with an egg. She loved an exquisite, thimble-sized nest woven of down and silver hairs by a ruby-throated hummingbird. The museum’s dusty dioramas were mysterious, all inky undergrowth and slanting sideways light in which a mountain lion and a squirrel and a toucanet stared glassily past each other. A bronzed man with a Neanderthal brow and beaded loincloth, spear poised, hung behind a tree so obviously made of paper that the scene seemed both comical and tragic at once.

  Paintings hung floor to ceiling in some rooms, many of them so high above Ruth’s head that she couldn’t see them properly. There were dreamy seascapes, and pictures of flushed maids scattering grain, and glittering still lifes: an ermine hanging upside down, pointed teeth bared, a parallelogram of light captured on a dusky red grape. It amazed her to consider that one man had collected so many things in his lifetime. She hadn’t thought before that this is w
hat one might do, if one had money: amass the treasures of the world. She’d only ever thought of her father’s dreams: a big house and him all alone in it, room after room, all to himself. She’d never imagined a room for herself in those houses, she realized.

  Her solitary afternoons in the museum—its otherworldly isolation, the mute, majestic silence of the extraordinary objects within—offered her a profound comfort during that first year in Wells, filling her eyes and her mind. The rooms were hushed, smelling of the sea and the lemon-scented oil used by a smocked curator’s assistant, an old man who nodded at her while polishing the gleaming banister and the glass cases. Wandering through the building, Ruth tried to catalog it all in her head, even the smells: fur and tooth and nail and enamel and crystal and gold, oil paint and silver tarnish, marble and plaster and ancient reeds and papers.

  One winter afternoon in the minerals room Ruth came upon an old couple, very well dressed, the man leaning on a silver-topped cane. He and his wife—Ruth assumed they were husband and wife—hung together over the glass-topped cabinet containing the milk-spattered gypsum and the foot-long aquamarine and the bristling geodes. They were whispering happily to one another, the woman’s gloved hand nestled in the crook of her husband’s arm.

  They looked up at her in surprise when she came into the room.

  Ruth had begun to feel that the museum belonged to her alone—there were almost never any other visitors—and she backed away, hurrying down the marble staircase. Outside, snow had begun to fall. She walked carefully down the long drive, slipping in her school shoes, listening to the sound of the surf crashing nearby.

  The sight of the old couple had made her feel lonely. She wished again that she would see Peter. Occasionally, walking to school or in town to the library or on an errand for Mary, she had the sensation that she had stepped around a corner onto a street where he had stood a moment before, or that she had entered a store he had just left. Once she thought she saw him going into the hardware store on Main Street. She had followed him inside, her heart pounding, but it was not Peter after all.

  She did not ever walk past the van Dusens’ house, though she thought she knew where it was. And of course she avoided the block on which she and her father had spent their one night.

  That winter she made a friend, a girl named Ellie McHenry, whose parents ran a bar and restaurant called the Castle House. Ellie and Ruth had been paired together at school on a history project. In the kitchen of the Castle House, working on Sunday afternoons when the restaurant was closed, they made a model of the Parthenon out of sugar cubes. Sometimes on weeknights Ellie’s father paid the girls to wash dishes. Ruth sensed that the Castle House with its sticky tablecloths and noisy bar was not the kind of place where the van Dusens would go.

  It was fun to work alongside Ellie. In the kitchen they listened to the radio, tossing soapsuds at one another. At night when they were finished with work and the restaurant was closed, Ellie’s mother let them eat lobster rolls or bowls of clam chowder and plates of French fries at the bar.

  Dr. van Dusen or his nurse, a brisk woman in a neat uniform, came over regularly to see Mary and give her injections, but those visits usually took place when Ruth was in school.

  Sometimes Dr. van Dusen left packages for Ruth, books and clothes from Mrs. van Dusen.

  After that?

  Years passed, Ruth would tell Dr. Wenning later.

  Years passed? Dr. Wenning lifted an eyebrow.

  Ruth looked away, out of the tall windows in Dr. Wenning’s study in New Haven. She flicked a dustcloth at a windowpane, blinked.

  I understand, Dr. Wenning said after a moment.

  She got up then and poured two whiskeys, another of her remedies.

  Together Ruth and Dr. Wenning sat in silence and watched the sky outside the window. Ruth would never know anyone who could remain silent as long as Dr. Wenning.

  It wasn’t all bad, Ruth said finally. Then she drank down her whiskey, grimacing.

  Of course not, Dr. Wenning said.

  Things are never all bad, all good, she said. A lot is gray.

  She finished her drink.

  I take it back, she said. Most is gray.

  Years did pass, and then when Ruth was sixteen years old she came out of Mary’s house on a Saturday morning near Christmas, tugging her hat down over her ears, a stack of books to be returned to the library in a bag over her shoulder. She hesitated outside the front door, stopping to pull on her gloves.

  When she looked up, Peter was standing on the icy sidewalk before her.

  He looked older, but there was no question of recognizing him.

  His hands were shoved into his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched, his hair wind-whipped. His face had grown fuller and even more handsome, she thought, his head like the glorious beautiful heads on the statues in the museum.

  It had been four years since they had seen each other, and Ruth could not believe he was standing there before her now. Yet she had thought of him so often, imagined this encounter so many times, that his presence also seemed inevitable.

  Later, he would tell her that usually he went straight from the boarding school in Providence at the end of the school year to a summer camp run by a Jesuit brotherhood in the mountains of North Carolina. These arrangements, Peter explained, were made by his father, so that Peter spent no extended periods of time at home. His mother, Peter explained to Ruth, was increasingly depressed, the treatments she received at a hospital outside Boston briefly transformative but incrementally disabling.

  You thought maybe I’d forgotten about you, Peter said that morning.

  His eyes never left her face. Do you want to go for a walk? he said.

  She came down the steps of Mary’s house. You didn’t forget about me, Ruth said.

  I didn’t, Peter said. No.

  The next summer, the summer between their sophomore and junior years in high school, Peter did not go to North Carolina. He got a job in Wells instead, working at a golf course and life-guarding at the town’s swimming pool. On his days off, he and Ruth rode the ferry Ruth had seen from the beach on her first day in Wells. They took it to other towns along the coast, where they sat on the painted horses at a merry-go-round, or went to the movies, or ate lunch at a place that served malted milk shakes and fried clams. Gulls swooped in the ferry’s wake, crying and darting down to Ruth and Peter where they stood, holding on to the rusted handrails. In the shade beneath the ferry’s narrow metal staircase connecting the upper and lower decks, where no one could see them, they braced themselves against the wall of the cabin and kissed. They had sand in their teeth and in their hair. The ferry’s engine throbbed under their feet.

  They swam off the beaches in the other towns during these excursions, places where they wouldn’t be recognized. They did not talk about it much, but they understood that what they were doing was forbidden, that no matter how irrational or unfair or unkind it was, Peter’s mother would be undone by the thought of Peter and Ruth together. They understood that they were governed by a tyranny—Mrs. van Dusen’s fragility—about which they could do nothing except what they were doing, which was to disobey an unspoken rule.

  Swimming in the ocean, out past the breakers, they felt alone. Under cover of the water, they pressed their bodies together, Ruth’s arms around Peter’s neck. Ruth had never wanted anything as powerfully as she wanted to touch and to be touched by Peter.

  More than a year would go by before they made love for the first time, though, lying hidden in the beach dunes at night.

  When Peter returned home during the Christmas break from school during their senior year, he came to Mary Healy’s as often as he could, arriving late at night after Mary had retired to bed with her radio. He carried his snow-covered boots in his hand and crept silently up the stairs, leaving the boots to drain in the bathtub.

  Mary never came upstairs, and they felt safe up there, lying under the blankets in Ruth’s bed and facing each other, the sound of their whispered
conversation drowned out by the radio playing downstairs.

  Peter was the only person Ruth could talk to about her father, about what had happened.

  Ruth was the only person Peter could talk to about his mother.

  They’d been so young, Ruth thought later. Oh, the foolish things they’d said to each other. They’d recounted endlessly for each other their first meetings, how much they had thought about each other in the intervening years.

  It was love at first sight, wasn’t it? Ruth said.

  Peter agreed that it was.

  That spring, Peter was admitted to Harvard, and Dr. van Dusen came to Mary’s house to congratulate Ruth for winning a scholarship to Smith. She would need spending money, he said, and he had set up an account for her. There would be money deposited there. She would be taken care of.

  You’ve done a wonderful job, Ruth, he said. We are very proud of you.

  But by then Ruth had already guessed that she was pregnant.

  Peter came home from school in April for spring break. He appeared at Mary’s house very late his first night home, well after midnight. Ruth lay in bed, watching him undress. He tossed his coat on the floor, kicked off his shoes, pulled his sweater over his head. He was elated by the news of his admission to Harvard, hers to Smith. They would be able to see each other often, he said.

  He sat down on the bed beside her.

  What’s the matter? he said.

  He fished one of her hands out from under the blankets. Aren’t you happy?

  I’m pregnant, she said.

  He stared at her. Then he closed his eyes.

  We were careful, he said.

  He let go of her hand and dropped his head into his palms, rubbing furiously at his hair.

  Then he reached down, found his sweater and pants, and put them back on. He sat back down on the bed beside her.

  What are you doing? she said.

  I feel stupid without my clothes on, he said quietly.

  She stared at his back. Outside, wind rattled the windowpane, gusts of rain splattering against the glass. The ocean had been stirred up all day. Earlier in the afternoon Ruth had walked alone along the beach.