The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  Don’t ever do that again, he said. You promised, Ruth. You promised you wouldn’t leave me.

  I won’t, she said.

  That wasn’t leaving, anyway, she said. That was … steam.

  They were wild with each other that night, a mixture of pain and anger and desire and love.

  In bed, in the darkness, the weight of Peter against her felt like the deepest kind of consolation and forgiveness.

  She had walked that evening across the mostly deserted campus, her head down against the wind. The icy rain had turned to snow again, but at first she hadn’t felt cold; she’d been giving off heat like a furnace, making a penumbra of warmth around her, her breath a cloud.

  Her hair, though, was quickly covered with snow. She’d shaken her head, lifting her face to the sky, blinking against the numberless, endless, falling snowflakes, the darkness lit from within as if an enormous lamp burned somewhere high above her. She took deep breaths, trying to calm herself.

  The snow fell so thickly that soon the paths were covered.

  When she felt slippery grass underfoot, she could tell she’d veered off the path and lost her way. She fell down but scrambled immediately to her feet, an explosive energy inside her. She could walk all night, she thought. She could walk forever. She’d just keep going.

  Soon, though, she felt the land beneath her feet shifting down the grade. Was she near the entrance gate? Were those massive dark shapes ahead the old oaks?

  She fell again, sliding downhill for several feet. The cold of the snow on the back of her neck and down her collar was shocking.

  She lay on her back, watching the air above her swarm with snowflakes.

  She was a bad person to have hurt Peter in that way. She was a bad person to have made such an awful mess of their lovely apartment.

  She felt cold and wet and very tired. How could she have behaved so badly?

  She sat up in the snow, brushed her hands against her coat and got to her feet. Where was she?

  She turned around. In the distance, through the falling snow, she could see that a few lights were on here and there in the school’s buildings, high up in the darkness above her. She knew there was still a handful of boys left on campus, those who would be picked up in the next day or so by families taking them in for the holiday.

  They must be reading now late at night, she thought, those left-behind boys, or asleep, their cheeks resting on the open page.

  How lonely the lights looked, the solitary lights of orphan boys.

  Over the years she had accompanied Peter from time to time when he had night duty, a responsibility he maintained through the years, even when he was headmaster. They had climbed the dormitories’ creaking stairs and walked the halls together, Ruth reading the names of the boys printed on the cards taped to their doors, looking at the notices on the bulletin boards for club meetings or study halls or upcoming football or basketball games, the times of church services, the routines for fire drills. Sometimes Ruth brought oatmeal cookies and thermoses of hot cider with them, a late-night surprise for the boys. Sometimes Peter had to stop to quiet a rowdy group swinging from their bunk beds, or to tell a boy to turn out the lights, putting his head around a doorframe to say sternly, settle down now, lights-out, time for shut-eye.

  She wished she were there now, opening her coat and unwinding her scarf, smelling the heat of the radiators, walking the halls that smelled like boy.

  When she had been a child, she remembered, on Sundays she had laid out her clothes for the school week ahead, deciding what she would wear each day. She had lined up her skirts and blouses in her closet so as to have them in order. Mary had taught her how to sew a blouse, how to make darts.

  She had a sudden memory of the kerchiefs she had sewn from scraps, of her first clumsy attempts at knitting. What a sorrowful thing she had been.

  But now, here she was.

  It had ended after all, that sad childhood.

  She looked up at the hill, the solitary lights floating here and there in the darkness.

  Those hoodlums and orphans, she thought.

  Surely there was something she could do for them.

  That night, she had started to pick up the clothes strewn over the floor.

  Just leave it, Ruth, Peter had said of the disarray. It’s okay. Come to bed.

  He fell asleep almost instantly after they’d made love, a combination of whiskey and relief, she thought, his arm draped over her, part embrace and part restraint.

  Ruth lay awake. She would have to confront the chaos she’d created, everything helter-skelter in their apartment, in the morning, she knew.

  She thought about Mrs. van Dusen and her troubled mind, her shining floors and windows, the glacial beauty of the surfaces in her house, the sad years during which Peter had watched his mother disappear. She thought about what it must have been like for Mrs. van Dusen to lose so much, herself, her husband and her son.

  She thought about her father, the tongue twisters he’d practiced in the mirror during her childhood, watching himself in the mirror.

  Daddy draws doors. Daddy draws doors. Daddy draws doors. Tommy Attatimus took two T’s, tied them to the top of two tall trees.

  Then, in her mind, as she had so often over the years, she made her apologies on her father’s behalf to the men who were said to have died at his hand. She would never understand what her father had wanted, what he had feared, what he had hated.

  There was his voice, a whisper in the darkness. Going, going, gone.

  Forgive him, she thought.

  Beside her Peter sighed. His breath smelled like Scotch.

  She thought about her mother, whoever she had been. She must have had her reasons.

  She thought about Dr. Wenning, the men and women who came to her with their burdens and their grief. My friends, Dr. Wenning called them.

  Ruth had not understood that, at first.

  Under the weight of Peter’s arm, Ruth settled herself more deeply into the mattress. She closed her eyes and remembered the scattered lights on campus she’d seen this evening, imagined every one of them going out, one by one, every orphan boy laying down his head on his orphan’s pillow in the breathing silence of the dormitory.

  She was not alone here.

  There was a place for her beside Peter, with these children.

  Go to sleep, boys, she thought. Good night and sleep tight. And she sent her love toward them across the campus, through the cold and the night and the bright snow falling, a light in the material world.

  About the Author:

  Carrie Brown is the author of five previous novels and a collection of short stories. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and, twice, the Library of Virginia Award. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, and the Oxford American. She taught for many years at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where she lives with her husband, the writer John Gregory Brown. She is now the distinguished visiting professor of creative writing at Hollins University.

  Other titles available in eBook by this author

  The Rope Walk • 9780307490292

  www.authorcarriebrown.com/

  For more information please visit: www.pantheonbooks.com

  A Pantheon Reading Group Guide for

  Carrie Brown’s The Last First Day

  About this Guide:

  This reading group guide is constructed to help raise issues and encourage discussion about Carrie Brown’s The Last First Day. Carrie’s first novel, The Rope Walk, is also available from Anchor Books.

  Questions/Points for Discussion:

  1. The book opens with a memory of Robert Frost visiting the Derry School, and within the novel there are many references to Keats and Longfellow. What is the author saying about the importance of poetry in our daily lives?

  2. In addition to poetry, discuss the role of literature and s
tories in the novel. How is Ruth’s relationship with reading and books essential to her identity?

  3. And conversely, discuss Ruth’s lack of family stories and memories. How do you think her lack of family and family mythology helped form the woman Ruth becomes? After her father is arrested and she learns why she’s had a peripatetic life, how does she find her way out of this tragedy?

  4. Why does Ruth later invent stories of her parents and childhood? Can you sympathize or relate?

  5. How is the physical environment crucial to the story? How important is the school’s Maine setting? Does this story feel like it could take place only in New England? Why or why not? How did moving around from one town to another in her childhood affect Ruth? Discuss the atmosphere of the various houses in the novel, from the headmaster’s house at the Derry School to Peter’s childhood house to Mary’s house, where Ruth was a teenager.

  6. What is the importance to Ruth of never having a house of her own until the very end of the novel? How important is it for you to have a place of your own?

  7. Describe the structure of the novel, and why it’s divided into two titled parts. Why is telling the story in this fashion more powerful than a simple chronological order? What emotional impact does this have on the reader?

  8. How does the author play with time and memory in the novel?

  9. Does the first part of the book, with its focus on a single day complete with flashbacks over the course of Ruth’s life, remind you of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway? Why or why not? What is similar? Dissimilar?

  10. What is the importance of family or lack of family, both parents and children, in the novel? Over the years, what does Ruth learn about creating her own family? Who is her true family?

  11. Discuss Ruth’s friendship with Dr. Wenning. Why are the two drawn toward each other, and how and why do they form such a strong attachment? What does Dr. Wenning provide for Ruth that Peter doesn’t? Is she more a doctor, mother, or friend to Ruth?

  12. What place does Mr. Mitzotakis’s Daedalus story have in the novel? Why does Dr. Wenning share this story with Ruth? Is it a metaphor for something in Ruth or Dr. Wenning’s life? In all of our lives?

  13. The man who steals Ruth’s car appears in the novel for one short scene. What is his role in the story? What impact does he have on Ruth?

  14. Discuss the line “The beginning of things always contained their end” (this page). How does this connect with the title of the novel, and with the novel itself?

  15. Ruth “wished she could believe in God. What a relief it would be. But she just couldn’t manage it” (this page). Discuss Ruth and Peter’s differing views on God and religion. In what does Ruth believe?

  16. Compare and contrast Ruth and Peter. What brought and keeps them together? How do they complement each other? Is either one of them the vulnerable one in the relationship? Is either one of them stronger? In what ways?

  17. Why does Peter betray Ruth during their teenage years? Does Ruth forgive him? How does he make up for that betrayal after they rediscover and rekindle their relationship?

  18. Why does Ruth put aside her dreams of being a writer? And how does she come to find her place at the school alongside Peter?

  19. Who are the Finneys? What role do Charlie and Kitty have in lives of Peter and Ruth? How does this change throughout the novel?

  20. How are Ruth and Kitty similar/different? How will Kitty’s role at the school be different from Ruth’s? What does this have to say about generational differences between the two women?

  ALSO BY CARRIE BROWN

  The Rope Walk

  Lamb in Love

  Rose’s Garden

  The Hatbox Baby

  Confinement

  The House on Belle Isle and Other Stories