The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  She had missed two periods by then. She understood what had happened, despite—as Peter said—that they had been careful.

  Though she was afraid, she had not imagined that Peter would desert her—she had never imagined that.

  You’re sure? Peter said.

  His hunched shoulders—both boyish and like an old man’s—filled her with fear and then with rage.

  He would leave her, she thought. Of course he would.

  No, I’m guessing, she said. Just to terrify you.

  She had been warm in bed, waiting for him. Now she felt freezing cold.

  Oh, Ruth, he said. He did not turn and face her, did not take her in his arms. He held his head in his hands.

  She hadn’t actually expected him to be happy. Yet this response, this cold fearfulness in him, took her by surprise. He was being a coward, she thought. She had been braver than he already. She had not cried, not once. They would just make a plan, she had thought.

  Oh, Ruth, he said again. He clasped his hands around the back of his neck, bowed his head further.

  Ruth rolled away from him, pulled the sheet and blankets up over her shoulders.

  From downstairs, she heard a sudden burst of hilarity from Mary’s radio.

  She thought of the nights she had fallen asleep at the top of the stairs, waking cold in the morning, her knees pulled up under her nightgown. She thought of her father mowing the lawn the day he’d been shot, the way she had lifted her legs cooperatively out of his way. She thought about the policeman who had ruffled her hair when he’d dropped her off at the van Dusens’ house that night.

  Sorry, Doc, the policeman had said, as if she were a stray dog.

  Go away, she said to Peter now.

  Peter turned on the bed. She knew he was looking at her.

  Ruth, he said. I’m sorry. I’ll—

  Get out, she said. Go away. I hate you.

  He put a hand on her shoulder, but she flinched away from him. It was easy, at that moment. She actually hated him. How easy it was.

  I don’t ever want to see you again, she said. If you touch me, I’ll scream.

  Ruth, he tried again. Don’t do this. We—

  Get away from me, she said.

  You don’t mean it, he said then.

  From downstairs, more laughter, then applause. Dance music drifted up the stairs.

  Go away, Peter, she said. I mean it.

  There was a long silence, and then the bed beside her rose slightly when he stood.

  Please, he said. Ruth?

  She said nothing.

  Eventually she heard him leave the room. A little later, she thought she heard his footsteps, coming back. She sat up in bed, tears running down her face.

  But there was no one there.

  She couldn’t believe it.

  At the doctor’s house in Boston where the abortion was performed, Ruth woke from a hazy sleep with fierce pain in her bowels and belly. She lay on a daybed in a room with tall windows and a dark dresser with a bowed front and a mirror in which she could see reflected a framed map—some ancient version of the world—behind glass. How had she gotten to this place? She had no memory of it. Her head felt sore, as if she’d had teeth pulled.

  Around her, the house was silent. The door to the room stood ajar. With shaking hands she put on her underwear and her skirt and her stockings, which had been laid neatly on a small table. Her shoes had been placed side by side next to the bed.

  Her legs wavered. The floor seemed to pitch. She put her head down between her knees, waited until her vision cleared.

  There was no one in the back passage, no one in the large unlit kitchen to which the passage led. She had come to the back of the house, as instructed, earlier that day, and rung the bell just after noon. Now, making her way through a quiet kitchen and parlor, she realized that it was nearly dark outside. She had no idea how to find the back door again. She went through a deserted dining room into what she assumed was the front entrance.

  Beside the front door in the shadowy hallway was a coat-rack on which hung a man’s black raincoat. The door was flanked by twin panels of stained glass, extraordinarily rich in color, featuring the design of two peacocks, tails spread, flowers climbing up the borders.

  Ruth, clutching her purse, her coat over her arm, stared at them, the minute depiction of tiny star-shaped blossoms around the clawed feet of the birds. As she stood there, a set of pocket doors leading to the hall slid open. A woman—middle-aged, her thick brown hair streaked with gray and parted on one side—emerged. Wordlessly, she crossed the hall, never looking once at Ruth; it was as if Ruth were invisible. She opened the front door and stepped aside, holding the door ajar.

  If you have any difficulty, she said, you should go to a hospital. But you were never here. Remember that.

  Dazed, breathless from the pain in her abdomen, Ruth hesitated. She understood that she was being dismissed, but she did not know how to ask about the pain, whether it was to be expected. As she passed the woman on her way outside, she saw the colors from the stained glass thrown eerily against her neck and face.

  Her friend Ellie was waiting in the car on the street outside. It began to rain as Ruth opened the passenger door.

  That took forever, Ellie said, when Ruth got in the car. Her face was terrified. I’ve been driving around the block for hours, Ellie said. You look awful. Are you all right?

  Twenty-four hours later, Ruth was in bed, teeth chattering, delirious. At first she did not recognize Mary Healy, standing on her one foot in the door of her bedroom.

  Mary had never climbed the stairs in all the years Ruth lived with her.

  How did you get up here? Ruth said, lifting her head from the pillow.

  Mary came in the room and put a hand on Ruth’s forehead. When she pulled back the sheets, she gasped.

  Ruth gaped down at the blood.

  I’m calling Dr. van Dusen, Mary said. What happened, Ruth? What have you done?

  After Ruth was released from the hospital, she was brought again to the van Dusens’ house. Once again, she understood, there was nowhere else for her to go. Mary, ever more infirm, could not have been expected to cope.

  At first, Ruth imagined that some sort of arrangement would be made, that the things she had said to Peter when she had told him she was pregnant would be taken back, that he would be there to care for her. Things would be explained to his parents; Ruth felt as much relief as fear at this idea. She had thought that her solution to the problem of the pregnancy—she did not call it a baby; that would come later, again and again, a grief that would flatten her for days at a time—had been a difficult but responsible one, a kindness to them all. She and Peter weren’t ready to have a baby. Ruth wanted to go to college. She was going to make something of herself.

  Peter would apologize. She would apologize.

  She and Peter would be engaged, she thought, eventually married under the appropriate circumstances.

  All would be forgiven and forgotten.

  In fact, she learned later, she nearly died of the infection. At the van Dusens’, back in the same bed in which she had spent the first days after her father’s arrest five summers before, Ruth slept with a similar kind of exhaustion. Mrs. van Dusen brought meals to her, but she did not speak to Ruth. There was no discussion of the happy future that Ruth—foolishly, she finally realized—had imagined. Mrs. van Dusen herself looked terrible, her face puffy and ashen, her hair dull and dry.

  Ruth had seen Mrs. van Dusen only a couple of times over the last few years. Peter’s descriptions of his mother’s illness had made Ruth feel sorry for them all: Mrs. van Dusen’s frantic phone calls again and again throughout the day to Peter’s father, her hours at church where she held the priests prisoner with her endless talking, the pacing in her bedroom, the hand flapping and the weeping, the raw, chapped skin at the corners of her mouth, the uncontrollable trembling … His mother’s stays in the hospital seemed to help, Peter had reported, but the effect of the treatm
ents never lasted.

  All this, as well as Peter’s descriptions of his father’s patience, had worked against Ruth’s anger at Mrs. van Dusen. Yet one morning when Mrs. van Dusen came in to bring Ruth a tray of tea and toast, Ruth sat up, determined.

  Where’s Peter? she said.

  Mrs. van Dusen’s face went rigid.

  I didn’t know what else to do, Ruth said. I want to know where Peter is.

  But Mrs. van Dusen would not look at her.

  I can’t talk to you, Ruth, she said, her voice shaking. No one here is speaking to you. And then she left the room.

  Ruth understood then that she and Peter were being separated. She would not be allowed to speak to him. The van Dusens did not, could not—would not ever—regard her as a daughter-in-law.

  Ruth was not a wife for the van Dusens’ son, she understood.

  She was not, as she had known all along, anybody at all.

  That night, in her nightgown, gripping the edge of the sink in the upstairs bathroom—Peter already must have been sent away somewhere, she assumed, for the house had been funereally silent—she choked down two handfuls of orange-flavored baby aspirin she found in the medicine cabinet. They felt like dirt in her mouth as she chewed and swallowed them. She managed to get down everything in the bottle and then almost immediately vomited it all up.

  Through the sound of her own retching, she heard footsteps hurrying up the stairs.

  When she looked up from the sink, eyes streaming, stomach heaving, a mess of orange vomit in the basin and on the floor and running down the front of her nightgown, Dr. and Mrs. van Dusen were standing at the door of the bathroom.

  What are we going to do with her? Mrs. van Dusen said. Oh, my god.

  Dr. van Dusen stepped into the bathroom. He looked grim, but he rinsed a washcloth and helped Ruth, who was swaying, to sit down on the seat of the toilet.

  Put your head between your knees, he said. He put his hand on the back of her head and pushed. For god’s sake, Ruth, he said. For god’s sake.

  Years later, recounting the events of that terrible, sad summer for Dr. Wenning, Ruth could still remember the sensation inside her body that night, as if something too large for the space had been wedged into her chest and then ripped out, leaving a gaping hole. The pain of Peter’s absence felt insupportable. It no longer mattered to her that he had gone away in cowardice when she had told him to. She missed him so fiercely she thought she could not go on. It was too painful.

  Lying in the dark that night after swallowing the aspirin, after a shower and after swallowing the pill Dr. van Dusen held out to her—Take it, Ruth, he said, frowning at her. You need to sleep now—she could still smell traces of the orange-flavored baby aspirin clinging to her breath when she covered her face with her hands. Outside, she heard the rhythmic, sawing songs of tree frogs in the summer night, the percussion of the surf against the shoreline twenty blocks away. From downstairs, she heard the van Dusens’ raised voices and then the sound of crying—Mrs. van Dusen, Ruth realized.

  A minute later, music reached Ruth, a symphony drowning out the sound of the tree frogs and the beating of the ocean and the grief that Ruth had brought into the house.

  She lay in bed in the dark.

  She tried to think of what she loved in the world, to name those things.

  She loved books.

  She loved to eat, crumbling oyster crackers into clam chowder with Ellie.

  She loved swimming in the ocean.

  She loved her bedroom at Mary Healy’s house, the sound of the waves, the strip of sea visible between the rooftops.

  She loved Mary Healy, who had been good to her and who had climbed upstairs with only one foot to rescue her.

  She had loved, she thought, her father, though he hadn’t deserved it, though perhaps he hadn’t even been her real father.

  She turned her face aside into the pillow.

  She loved Peter van Dusen.

  As soon as the van Dusens discovered what had happened to Ruth, they confronted Peter, Ruth learned. He had confessed—yes, he and Ruth had been seeing each other secretly for two years now. They sent him away without delay to relatives in New York City. He was to work for his uncle, who was a lawyer.

  Dr. van Dusen arranged for Ruth to spend the remaining weeks of the summer after her recovery working for a friend who ran a camp in Vermont for blind children. For six weeks, Ruth sat in the camp nurse’s office, a hot little room whose walls were beaded with amber sap. She read paperback novels and dispensed calamine lotion and applied Band-Aids to the knees and elbows of the poor blind children who came in so frequently with cuts and scrapes. She understood that tending to the children had been someone’s idea of penance for her.

  At night, left to her own devices, she went down to the lake and swam out far enough that she could not be heard if she cried.

  She lay on her back, floating, and looked up at the moon and the clouds, feeling the pull of the water around her.

  In a novel, she thought, the protagonist would want to die, would just drown herself. But the reality was actually far worse, she thought; she did not want to die, and yet it was so painful, being alive.

  At the end of the summer, Dr. van Dusen returned to pick her up. Getting into the hot car in the pine-needle-filled parking lot, Ruth saw that all her belongings—her clothes and books, her winter coat and boots, everything from her five years at Mary Healy’s—had been packed up.

  She understood that she would not return to Mary Healy’s or to Wells.

  What had happened to Mary? she asked Dr. van Dusen. Who was taking care of her?

  She’s gone to one of her daughters, Dr. van Dusen told her. She had lost her other foot.

  I want to write to her, Ruth said.

  Dr. van Dusen nodded. I’ll give you her address.

  For the remainder of the car trip from Putney to Northampton, they exchanged fewer than a dozen words. Ruth did not ask about Peter, and Dr. van Dusen did not offer her any information.

  Mostly, she pretended to be asleep.

  Ruth’s roommate at Smith, a cheerful-seeming blond girl named Louise, had already moved in by the time Ruth and Dr. van Dusen appeared in the door of the room to which Ruth had been assigned in Talbot House. Louise had scattered her belongings everywhere. She talked enough for all three of them, exclaiming with false enthusiasm over Ruth’s modest clothes as Ruth opened her suitcases.

  Dr. van Dusen stood by silently.

  Finally, clearly aware of the tension in the room, Louise left to go see a friend from home who, she said, lived on another floor.

  Dr. van Dusen went to the door and looked out into the hall for a minute after Louise left. When he turned back, he pulled the door behind him, but he did not close it all the way.

  That opening—as if people would find it odd to discover them in a room with the door closed, Ruth thought—filled her with anger.

  The time had come for them to say good-bye. She understood that she would probably never see him again. She turned away from him, staring blindly into her closet. She would not cry in front of him, she thought.

  When he spoke she heard pain in his voice.

  Don’t worry about your bills, he said. I am not abandoning you, Ruth. I’ll see that you have money, whatever you need.

  Ruth said nothing.

  Everyone makes mistakes, he went on. You and Peter made a mistake, a natural mistake for young people to make. It just … it had a sad outcome.

  She did not think she could stand to hear any more.

  But still he went on. I know you were fond of each other, he said. You and Peter. But you’re young. You’ll go on.

  Yes, she had made a mistake, she thought, going to that doctor.

  She had made a mistake, taking those baby aspirin.

  She had made just about every sort of mistake there was.

  That awful night, as she’d sat on the seat of the toilet in the bathroom in her soiled nightgown, Ruth had begged Dr. and Mrs. van Dusen.


  Where is Peter? she had said. I want to see Peter.

  You ended a life, Ruth, Mrs. van Dusen had said suddenly, fiercely, from the doorway. She had leaned toward Ruth, her face contorted as if she would spit on Ruth, and Ruth had understood then that no one had forgotten about Ruth’s father, either, about the lives he had ended.

  You’ll see, Ruth, Dr. van Dusen said now from behind her in her dormitory room. But his voice was sad, and she knew he didn’t believe it himself.

  You’ll forget all about this one day, he said.

  8

  We were introduced in college, Ruth told people later, when they asked how she and Peter met.

  Or sometimes she said: Oh, we were set up on a date.

  Neither of these statements, she thought, was actually a lie.

  In the winter of 1957, by then a senior at Smith, Ruth celebrated her twenty-second birthday. She had a group of friends and plans to go to New York after graduation, where she hoped to find a job in publishing. She’d majored in English. She thought herself a pretty good writer.

  One Saturday afternoon that December, someone knocked on Ruth’s door in Talbot House. Ruth looked up from her book.

  Sally Carlisle, who lived down the hall from Ruth, stuck her head around the doorframe.

  Did Ruth want to come along that night on a double date? she asked.

  Two Harvard boys, one of them an old chum of Sally’s from back home, were on their way, driving over from Cambridge. Sally had told them she’d find another girl to go along to a party.

  Ruth looked out the window. The air was smoky, full of fluffy clumps of snowflakes. She thought about Peter at Harvard, of course. But he would never come over to Northampton on a blind date, she thought. Not after what had happened between them.

  She hadn’t seen him since their last night together, when he’d sat on the side of her bed at Mary Healy’s, holding his head in his hands.

  It’s snowing again, she said to Sally, putting down her pencil and her copy of Horace’s Ars Poetica. She leaned across the bed and touched her finger to the cold glass of the window. As always when she thought about Peter, there was a war inside her. She missed him. She could not forgive him. She loved him. She hated him.