The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Carrie Brown

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brown, Carrie, [date]

  The last first day / Carrie Brown.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90804-9

  1. Middle-aged persons—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Private schools—Fiction. 4. Self-realization—Fiction. 5. School principals—Fiction. 6. Childfree choice—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.R68529L37 2013 813’.54—dc23 2012050988

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket illustration and design by Joan Wong

  v3.1

  To John

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I: The Last Day

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II: The First Day

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Other Books by This Author

  PART I

  The Last Day

  1

  That morning, in anticipation of the party to be held at their house in the evening, Ruth unearthed the vacuum cleaner from the front hall closet. She had to move aside a heap of belongings to reach it—umbrellas and boots and musty-smelling coats—as well as Peter’s old film projector, heavy as lead in its mossy green case, and half a dozen cartons containing reels of footage from their early days at Derry. A brand-new teacher then, his enthusiasm like a light inside his face, Peter had recorded everything during those first years, endless hours of slow-moving football games, canoe races on windy spring afternoons with the boats shunting jerkily across the lake, the winter evening Robert Frost came to read his poems in the chapel.

  Mr. Frost had been aloof that night at dinner, attending vaguely to the conversational gambits offered by the school trustees who had been assembled for the occasion. The meal had been splendid fare by the dining hall’s usual standards, stuffed clams and lobster with melted butter, corn and boiled potatoes, blueberry pie. The evening had been a triumph for Peter, who had arranged it, and an honor for Derry, which then had no real standing among boys’ schools of the day, its pupils drawn historically from poor families rather than the well-heeled aristocracy of New England.

  The trustees, already worried about the school’s financial future, however, had begun to entertain ambitions for wealthier students, and even those men who did not read poetry—which was probably all of them, Ruth had thought at the time—understood that Mr. Frost’s appearance conferred distinction on the Derry School, a reputation for intellectual seriousness that the school could not otherwise acquire no matter how much money it raised, or how many prosperous families it attracted. Poetry, the reading and writing of it, was understood to be a hallmark of patrician gentility. It was evidence—however baffling to the practical men of industry and commerce who made up Derry’s board of trustees at the time—of refinement. They were in search of pedigrees and the resources that came with them. If a poetry reading had to be part of the bargain, so be it.

  Mr. Frost had eaten his dinner with apparent appetite but without saying much, his head bent over his plate. His face was so shut away and expressionless that Ruth imagined he had suffered recently a personal loss of great severity.

  But when he began to read in the chapel later that night, coming up to the podium after Peter’s introduction with the slow steps of a man accompanying a coffin to the grave, his voice was surprisingly strong. Ruth knew that even the philistines among the trustees could not have failed to be moved.

  I have been one acquainted with the night, Mr. Frost began.

  A light was trained on the page before him, and he put his palm against the open book on the podium as if to crack its spine. He paused. Then he looked up, and he did not look down again for the duration of the poem.

  I have walked out in rain, he recited, and back in rain.

  When he read the line I have outwalked the furthest city light, Ruth thought that every boy, every teacher sitting in the cold, hard pews of the chapel with its smudged smoke stains on the white walls, and its old glass windows full of air bubbles, and the tall hurricane globes on the altar containing the candle flames—every one of the listeners in the chapel that night—was made aware of the miles of forest surrounding the school, the tumbled, rocky coast of Maine at the edge of the forest and its terminus at the sea, the black restless body of the Atlantic Ocean. Surely they felt themselves at that moment as alone as a man could be, Ruth thought, as alone as the lonely speaker of the poem, unwilling to meet the eyes of the night watchman whom he passes in the dark. Surely they understood that this lonely feeling was inside of them, too, even if it had lain there mostly a thing concealed from them by the blessed ordinariness of their days.

  Yet the occasion had been miraculous as well as solemn. The poem reminded them that the world around them lay beneath what Mr. Frost called the dome of heaven; Ruth pictured images from her art history classes at Smith: St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the gilded onion domes of Moscow, their golden beauty. And that night, as if to illuminate heaven and its arch above them, the sky had been filled with a meteor shower, streaks of light descending through the darkness.

  Outside the chapel after the reading, in the cold night air that smelled of the pine trees, everyone had stopped to stare up at the sky, some of the boys straying off the path into the snow, where they stood alone, heads tilted back, mouths open, faces upturned toward the stars. They had looked so vulnerable there, Ruth had thought, so faithful and willing, like those sad believers who trudged to the tops of hillsides in their old garments and with their heads shaved, expecting to be delivered up to God.

  She remembered Mr. Frost beside Peter, their hands deep in their coat pockets, their faces calm but watchful, everyone silent.

  Peter had studied with a professor at Yale who knew Mr. Frost, and it was through this man, actually a childhood friend of Robert Frost’s wife, that Peter had been able to secure the famous poet’s presence at Derry that night. As the assembled school stood there, the sky above them electric with light, Ruth had wrapped her arms around herself inside her coat. She had been absurdly pleased for Peter, as if he had orchestrated the display of meteors as a flattering tribute.

  How small she had felt that evening. Mr. Frost had read his poems to them in a voice of judgment, not benevolence; he had seemed in some way hardly to see them at all. Yet she had felt the importance and the beauty of it all, as well, a sense of imminence in the world, something about to happen.

  Later, reading in the library, she discovered that the meteor shower, common in December, was named for an obsolete constellation no longer found on star maps. The meteors visible to them that night had been orphan lights, travelers from a vanished source.

  • • •

  From the hall closet she lifted aside the old round film cases, cool and smooth and heavy in her hands, in order to extricate the vacuum cleaner’s cord. Long ago it had
ceased to retract properly, and it lay now in an impossible tangle.

  When had they last looked at those old movies? She got to her knees and began stacking the film cases on the hall floor beside her. The last time, it had been for some event, she thought. The school’s centennial? She couldn’t remember. Peter had taken down the painting of the ship in the living room to bare the wall, and they had turned out the lights. He had been afraid the old projector might not work anymore, but after a moment’s delay, the reels had begun slowly to turn and a light had streamed toward the wall.

  At first they saw just a splatter of cracks and creases, hash marks on the film itself. Then, abruptly, a scene emerged: a track meet on an afternoon at Derry, the big oak trees in full, late-summer leaf, their crowns an undifferentiated black, their shadows pooling across the grass.

  There must have been enthusiastic shouting that day, bystanders urging on the runners. There must have been notes of birdsong, whistles blown.

  But as Ruth had settled herself on the couch next to Peter to watch that evening, there had been no sound accompanying the images on the film, only the whirring of the projector’s motor and its metallic-smelling heat.

  At first Peter had focused the camera on the boys, following them as they ran around the track, boy after boy, the white numbers on their backs flashing past. After the last runner had gone by, Peter had panned over the crowd standing at the edge of the field behind a white rope. Suddenly there was Ruth among the cheering onlookers, clapping and smiling. A boy standing beside her had spoken to her—she’d leaned toward him, clearly trying to hear him over the shouting. Peter had lingered on Ruth’s face, the runners forgotten. Then, as if feeling his eyes on her from across the field, Ruth had turned and looked straight into the camera.

  Seeing it so many years later, she’d felt again the power of that moment, her bodily awareness of his gaze, Peter looking at her through the camera from a hundred yards away. She’d felt again the way the distance between them had collapsed, everything else fallen away, the chattering boys and the shade beneath the trees and the afternoon’s high clouds. It was as if his hand had reached out to cup the back of her neck and pull her close for a kiss.

  On the film she had given Peter a little wave from the other side of the track.

  All right. Enough of that now, her wave said.

  But he had kept the camera steady, even when she’d turned her face aside.

  After a moment, she had looked back. She’d smiled, and then she’d made a dismissive shooing motion with her hands, her lips moving, though of course he couldn’t have heard her from that distance.

  What had she said? Stop it! You’re embarrassing me.

  Sitting in the dark living room watching the footage, Peter beside her, Ruth had stared as if at a stranger at this vision of her younger self. She was a tall woman, and she looked disconcertingly enormous in photographs with the boys, towering over all but a few of them. Her mouth—my big mouth, as she liked to say—had been open wide as she’d shouted to encourage the runners. The dark lipstick they’d all favored back then had been a mistake on her, she’d thought; her mouth was too large for it. Her hair had been held back in the wind with a paisley Liberty scarf given to her by her friend Dr. Wenning; it was the nicest item of clothing Ruth had ever owned, and she’d loved it. At the time, she’d thought it made her look sophisticated. But all those years later, an old woman looking back at her younger self, she could see only a fairy-tale giantess, an old peasant. Where was the chicken under her arm? The goat tied to her waist with a rope? The bucket drawn up from the well?

  What on earth had Peter seen in her all this time?

  It was a mystery, wasn’t it, why people loved one another?

  But she had closed her eyes, resting her head on Peter’s shoulder, remembering the sensation of his gaze on her that day, the heat of it.

  That old love between them.

  The noise of the vacuum cleaner was deafening, but she pushed it grimly through the rooms downstairs. How long had it been since she’d used it? She’d never been much for housework, especially in summer when school was not in session and visitors to the house were rare.

  There must be something wrong with the old thing, she thought, to make such a racket now. She’d have to take it in to get it fixed.

  Once she had imagined that a point would come when such duties would fall away from her. After decades of diligence—the headmaster’s house ought to be kept properly, and she had tried never to leave undone that which ought to be done—she had thought that perhaps a sort of exemption would be granted.

  Now she knew she would cook and vacuum and dust until she was no longer able to do so. And after all, she thought, she supposed she was grateful for the wherewithal and ability to keep even an untidy house.

  She would not lug the vacuum cleaner upstairs, however. No one would go up there during the party anyhow. She bundled it back into the hall closet and fetched one of Peter’s old undershirts from the ragbag hanging on a hook in the back hall. In the living room, she ran the cloth over the bookshelves and end tables, the frayed silk lampshades, the tufted chair backs. Dust rose, accusing her. After the vacuum’s noisy vibrato, the silence rang. She sat down at the piano and played a few emphatic bars of a Mendelssohn march, feet pumping the pedals, but her hands faltered, the melody lost.

  There was work to be done anyway, she thought, rising. She could not sit and play all day.

  The mirror over the fireplace needed polishing. She dragged in the shaky old stepstool from the kitchen and climbed the steps. But as she reached for the eagle at the top of the mirror’s frame, the stool swayed alarmingly beneath her. In the glass, her reflection lurched to one side, like someone falling off a cliff. She backed down carefully, clutching the mantelpiece. No need to break a hip, she thought, just to prove a false assiduousness.

  In the kitchen she turned on the radio, tied on an apron, and set about making three baking sheets of the cheese puffs she always fixed for social occasions at the school. They had a French name—gougettes? gougères? She always just called them cheese puffs. In the refrigerator she moved aside the jars of mayonnaise and mustard and pickles, half-empty bottles of salad dressing and tubs of yogurt, balancing the warped trays on the crowded shelves.

  Then she made herself a ham sandwich. She ate standing at the sink, dropping crumbs.

  Outside the window, goldfinches mobbed the thistle feeder. On the radio, a piano opus by Schumann commenced. She recognized the piece: “Tangled Dreams, Confusing Dreams,” it was called, something like that. The station played a lot of Schumann.

  She and Peter had seen Rubinstein play this particular piece once years and years before, she realized, when Peter was at Yale. Ruth had a remarkable memory for music, though never the aptitude for which she had longed. Rubinstein had been the height of elegance that night, silver in his hair, and dressed in a forked tailcoat. They had sat where they could see his hands, big as a longshoreman’s. At the time, he had seemed to them impossibly old, though he couldn’t have been more than seventy. Younger than she was now, she thought.

  It had been early spring then, the evening they’d heard him play. Water from the snowmelt had been running in the streets in New Haven. After the performance, she and Peter had gone home to their three-room apartment, theirs exactly like all those issued to married graduate students. Pocket doors separated a bedroom and a tiny sitting room with a hissing radiator and a leaded-glass window on a crank. A hallway led to a narrow kitchen with a two-burner stove. The toilet and a stall shower were concealed behind a curtain in a space no bigger than a broom closet.

  In the sitting room, Peter had put the Schumann record on the turntable. Ruth had watched him from bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin.

  She had loved that sound, dust blown from a phonograph needle.

  Peter had joined her between the sheets, pulling her to him, naked and warm.

  In Peter’s arms, Ruth had listened to the quicksilver notes. She
’d wanted, as she sometimes did, to say how the music made her feel, to describe it. She and Peter had watched on a friend’s television set Leonard Bernstein’s first live concerts for young people. She’d been held rapt by Bernstein’s analysis of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata and “The Blue Danube” and boogie-woogie. She loved how Bernstein would say, I’ve missed you! to the children at the start of each new broadcast. She felt exactly like one of those lucky children sitting in the audience. Bernstein asked them if they, too, saw colors when they listened to music. A brass sound made Bernstein see fiery orange, he said, and Ruth had known just what he meant.

  Over the years she and Peter had listened to all kinds of music. Billie Holliday and Herb Alpert, the Rolling Stones and the Jackson Five, Gregorian chants and the Red Army Choir. Their taste for the classical repertoire, though—especially for the piano—had outlasted everything else.

  But the piano made Ruth want to talk. She couldn’t help it.

  That night, Schumann’s music filling the room, Peter—lying on his back beside her, his eyes closed—had reached over and put his hand over her mouth just as she opened it. Then he had turned to face her on the pillow and smiled.

  He kissed her.

  I forgot what I was going to say, she said. Thanks a lot.

  Let’s play it again, he said.

  He got up and crossed the floor to the sitting room. He was so tall and handsome, Ruth thought, with his long legs and lean belly and broad shoulders. She’d watched him, admiring.

  There was that wonderful sound again, his breath on the needle. It was as if he had blown into her ear. The sensation sent chills over her skin. Then the music started.

  Peter climbed back into bed beside her. He pulled up the sheet and blankets, tucking them in around her shoulders.

  Fantastic, she thought, listening as the music began, closing her eyes.

  Rubinstein’s hands had moved like lightning that night in the concert hall. How did the music sound? What color was it? Black and silver, she thought. Like the ocean, its pennants of light, its adamantine swells, flooding into pools like mirrors along the sand.