The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  Welcome back, she’d say.

  • • •

  She’d always liked listening to Peter’s speech on the first night of the year. She had never grown immune to the cheering nature of his remarks, the sense he conveyed to the boys that they were beginning—that the whole community was beginning together—a great adventure. Yet now as she left the dining hall, the open doors of the main building ahead of her and a glimpse of the night sky through them, she felt desperate to get outside.

  This day could not end quickly enough, she thought.

  She stepped outside onto the building’s landing above the flight of steps. The night sky, a red band at the horizon, opened up, star filled.

  A knot of boys, shouting and grappling and roughhousing, their shirttails untucked and their ties loosened, passed her.

  Hi, Mrs. van Dusen, someone said.

  Hi there, she said. Careful!

  She hung back against a column. The boys went past her down the steps and out into the crowd, disappearing into the evening’s darkness, headed toward the chapel.

  The night air was a relief against her skin, as if she’d plunged her arms and face into a pool of cool water. It was always overheated in the dining hall, and her haste earlier in the evening, everything that had happened with Ed, had made her feel dirty. She liked being outside at night anyway, the vertiginous assertion of scale that always followed. Sometimes, she thought, it was a perfect relief to be an infinitesimal presence on the face of the planet.

  She watched the boys passing her, aware as always of the extremes among them. Some of them were as beautiful as Greek statues, marble youths of classical antiquity with lambs borne across their shoulders. Another, unhappy group moved sullenly among these athletes and scholars, their manner simultaneously pained and aggressive, as if they understood how poorly they compared to their beautiful brethren and suffered for it.

  She put her palm against the column on the landing and lifted her gaze. Tatters of night clouds floated near the moon. The stars seemed to be clustered high up in the darkest part of the sky. Something about their distant position was a reminder of the scope of the universe. Tonight, she knew, Peter would ask the boys to pray for Ed McClaren. He would tell them how lucky they were, every day the gift of an education laid at their feet, a hot dinner prepared for them at night, pancakes for breakfast, doughnuts on Fridays. A cheer would go up at the mention of the famous doughnuts.

  Peter gave the same speech every year, absolutely earnest, and he meant every bit of it.

  She knew he got on people’s nerves sometimes. He was mulishly tolerant, tiresomely reasonable and conciliatory. There was not much irony in Peter, and some people—bad people, she thought—just plain hated sincerity. But the school would never find anyone who loved it as much as Peter had, someone who loved it without care for his own regard. Tonight he would mention the beauty of the campus, the lovely old buildings and the playing fields planted in grass so green and soft you wanted to lie down and rest your cheek there. For Peter, the bloom of romance—the goodness of the school’s initial purpose, the grief of the parents who had lost their child so long ago and who had wanted, in the wake of that loss, to help other boys—had never left his impression of the place. Ruth knew that some of the boys, especially the scholarship boys plucked from whatever misfortune had shaped their lives, would see it tonight as Peter asked them to see it. They would feel their luck, along with their shyness and their worry about being in a new place among strangers, just as she and Peter had felt their luck when they had arrived so many years ago.

  It was for those boys especially that Peter worked so hard.

  When she had weeded the flower bed this afternoon, the sunlight had been warm on the back of her neck and against her shoulder. But tonight in the air’s coolness she could feel the winter ahead. She had been thinking, as she always did at this time of year, of the poem by Keats, his season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Ever since she’d been taught this work in college, fragments of its lines had come to her as fall approached. Bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run … while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day … then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows …

  One didn’t want to hurry toward one’s end, she thought, and yet one longed nonetheless for the days to unfold. Kneeling at the edge of the driveway and pulling weeds earlier in the day, she’d felt that brief flare of pure contentment. The storms would skirt them. The evening’s party would be a success. Another year was about to begin. She wanted now to recapture that feeling, that respite in the middle of the afternoon when she had not worried. But it was as Keats had written. One could never get completely away from melancholy. The beginning of things always contained their end.

  • • •

  She began to make her way down the steps and was almost at the bottom when three boys, a chase in progress, dodged past her. Howls of encouragement went up from the others. The boy in the lead, freckle-skinned, hair close-cropped, long grasshopper arms and legs, went down the steps three at a time, knocking into her as he went past. Ruth stumbled forward, snatched at the air. She grazed the head of the boy before her, his hair in her fingers for an instant, soft as silk.

  Sorry, Mrs. van Dusen! someone called.

  She righted herself on the steps, flapping helplessly, trying for comic effect.

  It’s all right! she called. Don’t mind me!

  On the sidewalk, boys streamed toward the chapel, chattering and laughing, bumping shoulders.

  She reached the bottom and stepped onto the grass, the heels of her good shoes sinking into the turf.

  The forest surrounding the school had become a black mass on the horizon, darker than the sky. The main building with its high position on the campus had a vantage over hundreds of acres, the forest of alder, chestnut, honey locust, maple, oak, and pine. At night in the winter, especially once snow had fallen, the school’s lighted windows and illuminated colonnades, its cloak of Virginia creeper stirring against the old brick, created an illusion that Ruth found almost theatrically romantic. Wood was still burned in the fireplaces, and on cold mornings smoke hung in drifts in the low places, herds of white-tailed deer moving out from among the trees to venture across the playing fields. Somehow, Ruth thought, the wilderness beyond the lighted compound of the school’s buildings made everything that had been acquired over the school’s history—paintings and books, dishes and lamps and desks and ladder-back chairs and upholstered sofas and faded fringed throw pillows—seem especially valuable, like the intimate belongings of a pharaoh arranged in the chambers of his tomb. Whenever she walked down the halls, the eyes of the headmasters who had preceded Peter gazing out at her from the cracked pigment of their portraits, she was aware that her own and Peter’s place in this continuum was, after all, brief.

  Now someone spoke her name.

  She had been standing on the grass and blinking up into the streetlights, white moths orbiting through the galaxies of insects. For a moment, when she turned around, she couldn’t see anything, the space from which someone had spoken to her a pure darkness.

  Then an enormous, familiar boy with shaggy hair surged toward her—Mrs. van Dusen! he said again. He gave her a bear hug and loped away.

  Welcome back! she said.

  Her sweater had slipped off one shoulder, and she pulled it back. What was that giant boy’s name? She couldn’t seem to remember anyone’s name tonight.

  When she turned to look up at the top of the steps, Peter stepped out onto the lighted landing among the boys, appearing there as if she had called his name. He hesitated between the columns and then began to descend stiffly, going sideways one step at a time in the midst of the throng.

  The signs of Peter’s illness had begun with his eyes, a degeneration of his peripheral vision. Tests had been run. Meanwhile, he had not been allowed to drive, and Ruth had chauffeured him around for a few days, including to the follow-up appointment at their general practitioner’s o
ffice. The doctor had been a young man; neither she nor Peter had seen him before. In the brightly lit examining room, he had laid out the symptoms of Peter’s condition.

  The full lips, he’d said, glancing from the chart in his hand to Peter’s face and then back to his folder, speaking as if to students who were taking notes.

  Large eye sockets, he said. Eyes slightly recessed. Dominant brow, frontal bossing, prominent jaw … Can I see your hand, please? he’d asked.

  Peter’s hands, like everything about him, were large, his fingers long and slender.

  Peter held out his hands, palms up.

  Arachnodactyly, the doctor said. Like the spider. He did not seem to notice Ruth’s growing perturbation.

  Bossing? Ruth said. She stared at the doctor. What’s that?

  The doctor appeared not to have heard her. Sweat a lot? he asked Peter.

  Peter nodded. In the heat, he said. Exercising, he added. He cleared his throat.

  The doctor turned finally to Ruth. Snoring? Getting worse?

  Ruth clasped her hands together in her lap. She did not trust herself to speak, afraid her voice would tremble.

  Haven’t you noticed, the doctor said—he looked back and forth between Ruth and Peter—that he’s getting taller? His shoes getting tighter?

  Ruth had felt stricken. She had thought Peter was getting taller somehow, but it seemed so unlikely. He’d lost some weight, and she’d attributed the odd effect of his apparently increased height to that change in his appearance. But he’d complained about his shoes, and just the week before she’d replaced both his ancient wingtips and a pair of sneakers.

  The syndrome, it turned out, was a form of gigantism. Marfan syndrome, the doctor had continued, an uncommon genetic disease, an inherited defect of connective tissue. It was relatively rare, though less so than one might think, he said.

  I’ve never seen it before, actually, he admitted, but there was no reason for them to worry about it much in a man of Peter’s age.

  Other things, he implied, unsmiling, would probably finish Peter first.

  Peter had taken the news with what Ruth considered freakish calm.

  In truth, though, there was little to be done. He had regular echocardiograms, as there could be trouble with deterioration of the walls of the aorta, an enlargement of the heart. (How terrible and ironic, Ruth had thought, if Peter should die because his heart was too big.) But so far he’d been fine. Other than new prescriptions for his glasses—at least every year and sometimes more often—there wasn’t anything else to do in terms of treatment, they’d been told.

  The doctor had put more drops in Peter’s eyes that day and sent him off with a pair of folding cardboard sunglasses, which he had obediently put on. They were much too large, even for his big head, and he had looked ridiculous.

  In the car on the way home, Ruth had glanced at him in the passenger seat. When they left town and the road passed into the woods, the light was like that of the old newsreels that used to play in movie houses when she and Peter were young, flickering and premonitory, disconcerting. But Peter had seemed serene, sitting quietly in the passenger seat, as if not only his vision had been compromised but also his ability to speak or even think.

  He was not a fighter, Ruth had thought then. His strengths were endurance, not belligerence; obedience and compromise, not resistance. If he were told he would soon die, he would accept it without self-pity or complaint. For Peter there would be no raging against the dying of the light.

  Long ago, when they’d been very young, everything for her a kind of now-or-never drama, she had told him once that she hated him, that she never wanted to see him again.

  He had accepted it—had believed her, because it was not in his nature to deceive himself and so he could not imagine Ruth doing so—and had turned sadly away. It had been for them a nearly fatal submission.

  Now she watched him come down the steps of the main building, looking over the crowd of boys and teachers milling around on the pavement below. How was it that they had been married for so long, over half a century?

  He would never see her, she thought, but she waved anyway.

  Surprisingly, his gaze found her. He lifted a hand and came toward her.

  • • •

  Peter had left the house early that morning, having been awake and restless, she knew, since before five a.m. For years in their marriage it had been Ruth who’d had trouble sleeping. Now she couldn’t seem to sleep enough. Peter, however, seemed more and more often to be awake in the middle of the night. Occasionally, he went downstairs and had a glass of milk and some cookies; she was aware sometimes, waking in the middle of the night herself, of the smell of Oreos on his breath.

  Last night, coming briefly out of sleep in the darkness, she had sensed him awake beside her.

  She had rolled over to face him. What’s the matter?

  His eyes had been open. He had reached over to pat her hair, his big hand resting heavily on her head.

  But she hadn’t been able to stay awake. Before she’d heard his answer, she was gone again, tugged back down into sleep.

  When she’d opened her eyes this morning, he’d been gone, the bedroom full of explosive light.

  Is anything wrong? she had asked him a few days before. Is everything all right at school?

  Never better, he had said, but he’d busied himself with something or other, and she’d thought he was withholding.

  She knew that she was sometimes unhelpful when difficulties presented themselves at the school. She was made easily angry on his behalf, full of righteous indignation and frustration, suggestions about what he should or shouldn’t do. She’d had to remind herself—especially when she was younger and less patient—just to listen sometimes, not to weary him with tirades, however sympathetic their origins.

  Once, complaining to Dr. Wenning about Peter’s tendency toward ponderousness, his quiet method of reaching decisions—How can I help him if he doesn’t tell me anything? she had protested—Dr. Wenning had said to her: Not everyone likes to talk so much as you and I do, Ruth. Maybe a little silence is nice sometimes. Good for the marriage.

  Peter made his way toward her now, moving against the tide of boys, parting them as he came. Some of them came up only to his waist. He held his hands over their heads, elbows up, like someone pushing through deep water.

  When he bent to kiss her, she put her hand on his cheek. Under her fingertips she felt a patch of bristles, a place he’d missed, shaving.

  You’ve had a long day, she said. You all right?

  Then a boy, practically bouncing with urgency, was beside them. Dr. van Dusen? he said. Can we—

  Peter turned from her, his hand falling from her arm. In a moment he was gone from her side, pulled back into the crowd.

  She stood for a minute, waiting.

  The bell in the chapel began to ring. Everybody would want Peter for one thing or another tonight, she thought. No point in waiting.

  She turned away and went on without him.

  She walked alone down the path toward the chapel. The world, so solemn and aloof in the growing darkness, looked like a painting or an engraving, she thought. The big motionless shapes of the oak trees with their heavy crowns standing at a distance on the lawn; beyond the trees, the palisade of wrought-iron streetlamps. Along the road, a row of parked cars, silver-backed in the moonlight. The light at the horizon had faded, and overhead now the sky was a deep, humbling blue.

  Ruth had studied languages at Smith. In the Old High German she knew, the word for blue was blau, which meant shining.

  It was a shining kind of night.

  The world was everywhere a mess, she thought, countries all over the globe being torn to pieces, it seemed, by flood or fire or poverty or hate. And sometimes she had so many complaints about even her own small safe corner of it. But how dazzling it could be.

  At the end of the path where the trees parted, the white steeple of the chapel stood out against the sky. At the steeple
’s top, the weathervane’s bronze ship pointed her bow west.

  Once, years ago, Ruth had won a five-dollar bet with Peter about weathervanes: the ship faces the oncoming wind, she’d insisted. It doesn’t follow it.

  She had known this as she knew so many things: from reading. She read voraciously, novels and histories, dozens of self-help guides—though Dr. Wenning had disparaged such material—nonfiction on diverse subjects: world hunger, astrophysics, nineteenth-century European art. Over the issue of the weathervane, she had been her worst self, triumphantly pushing the open volume of the encyclopedia across the dining room table at Peter and jabbing the page with her index finger.

  She had made him get up and give her the money right then and there, even though they’d been eating dinner at the time. That had been part of her problem, she knew; she’d never made any money of her own in her life. Gloria Steinem had been two years ahead of Ruth at Smith. Beside someone like Gloria, Ruth felt the paucity of her experience, her meager achievement. Over the years, she’d done every sort of job imaginable at the school, answering the phones, playing the piano to accompany the choir—though inexpertly, it was true—even teaching French. But because she was Peter’s wife, and because he was the headmaster, and because that’s how things were then, it had been assumed that she would never be paid for any of it. That was how women had been treated—wives had been treated—in those days. Today no one would tolerate such an arrangement, she knew, and everyone was better for it.

  As she had watched Peter cross the room that night to find his jacket and his billfold, lifting the coat from the chair and patting the pockets, her absurd victory had felt pyrrhic, of course.

  I’ve got some work to do before the morning, he’d said after that, and he had taken himself off to his study upstairs.

  She’d been angry with herself, ashamed. Why had she needed to prove to Peter, of all people, that she knew which way a weathervane faced? He had never doubted her intelligence, never once been anything but grateful for her presence at his side, the way she had put her head down and worked alongside him. Yet she had cared so much about being right all the time, because that’s what happened when you felt that you were a powerless person, just someone’s wife. She’d never told Peter she’d wanted to be paid for what she’d done at the school, and in the end it wasn’t about the money, anyway. But perhaps it would have helped her feel less useless sometimes, if she’d ever had a paycheck with her name on it.