The Last First Day (10 page)

Pale-skinned and freckled, with a redhead’s bruised-looking lips, Ruth recognized herself in portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, the same terrified, haughty look. All her life, she knew, people had mistaken her shyness for disdain. Her unusual height, her big feet, clownishly long—pontoon boats, Peter called them—
all this had made her self-conscious. And she knew she was capable of serious missteps about clothing, as well. It had always been difficult for her to judge about hemlines. The 1970’s particularly, when long skirts had been in fashion, had been a terrible era for her. In photographs from that period she thought she looked like someone who’d been abducted and taken into a cult.

In her younger years, though, when she had not been so heavy … well, perhaps then she had been
almost
beautiful.

The evening she and Peter had made love for the first time, two teenagers hidden in the sand dunes on a blanket, Ruth had opened her eyes to the night sky when Peter collapsed against her. She had felt triumph, alongside her own marveling. A hundred yards away from them, the waves had broken onto the shore. Ruth, the weight of Peter against her, had filled her hands with sand, sensing the depth of the earth beneath them.
She
had made that sound come from him. She had made him bury his face in her hair, say her name again and again.

But once you got to be the age they were now, you stopped thinking about being beautiful. Still, it had been good of him to say her hair looked nice.

In the chapel now, breathing the cool, entombed air, surrounded by the smells of smoke and wax, she tried to quiet her mind, but she could not settle herself. For a couple of years an emergency room nurse had offered a yoga class in the basement of the library in Wyeth. Ruth had gone every week until the instructor moved away, and no one could be found to lead the class anymore.

She took in a deep yoga breath through her nose, exhaled quietly.

Peter had approved of the yoga.

Good, he’d said, when she’d reported that she’d signed up. Maybe it’ll help you relax.

I don’t deserve him, Ruth had said once to Dr. Wenning. I’m nothing but trouble for him, always complaining about him, and he’s the nicest man on the planet.

Then why does he stay with you? Dr. Wenning had folded her arms, looking bored. She’d disapproved of this line of reasoning from Ruth.

He’s a big boy, your Peter, Dr. Wenning said. He could leave if he wanted to, go find somebody else. Gina Lollobrigida, for instance.

Gina Lollobrigida, Ruth had learned, was Dr. Wenning’s idea of a bombshell.

Will it be forever? Dr. Wenning had held up her hands, shrugging. Nothing is promised, Ruth, she said.

Anyway, I think it is the balancing of the scales, Dr. Wenning had said finally to Ruth’s worried silence. Not everyone gets a good husband. You know that. Some people get a schmuck, a nincompoop. You got a lousy childhood. Worse even than lousy.

Ruth started to object. Dr. Wenning’s own young life had been terrible beyond all imagining—

True, true—Dr. Wenning held up a hand, interrupting her—some have it even worse than you. But, still, the gods are attentive. They gave you a prince of a husband. Try just to enjoy him.

• • •

Ruth had been present for Peter’s annual welcome address to the school every year since he had become headmaster at Derry. He’d been so handsome and sexy in those early days. Ruth had always understood exactly what girls meant when they said a fellow was so good-looking it made you weak in the knees. For years, she had sat through this occasion in the chapel, hands folded in her lap. She’d looked like the portrait of the headmaster’s good wife, but sometimes her mind had strayed. She’d thought of other things.

Sometimes Peter naked. Sometimes sex.

Or sometimes she’d run over the preparations for the cocktail party. Quiches defrosted? Cheese and crackers? Olives, lemons, extra beer in the second refrigerator in the pantry, cocktail napkins, flowers for the front hall and the dining room table … over the years, she had learned how to do this, how to be a hostess.

She remembered the first time Peter had given this speech. Though the trustees had held a formal search for the position, the head of the board had told her privately that it had never been a contest. Peter had had the job from the moment he’d applied.

He’s an impressive fellow, your Peter, the man had said. We’re lucky to have him.

When Peter had risen from the pew to turn and address the boys and the faculty for the first time as their headmaster, the room had gone suddenly silent, everyone instantly attentive. Peter had reached into his jacket pocket and withdrawn his remarks, unfolded the papers on the lectern. But then he had not looked at them again. He had spoken for half an hour, never once
glancing at the pages. Watching him, Ruth had felt as if a wand had been run down her body from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, splitting her open. She had been so proud of him.

That night, they had hosted their first cocktail party. Afterward, the kitchen cleaned up, Ruth had felt both exhausted and exhilarated by the evening.

She had climbed into bed beside Peter.

So, she said. Is it something you do with your hands? Or your eyes? How did you make them all be quiet like that, all at once?

In the dark, she had studied Peter’s face. He’d been lying on his back beside her, eyes closed, his familiar profile on the pillow: high forehead, big nose, the sensuous cleft of his upper lip, the exaggerated chin. He’d opened his eyes, and then he’d rolled toward her and put his hand on her hip, squeezed once, deliberately.

He doesn’t want to talk, she thought. He wants to have sex.

I don’t know, he said. It’s nothing.

Come on, she said. Really.

He rolled away from her. I don’t know, Ruth, he said. Really. It just happened somehow. He rolled back and patted her hip again.

Ruth ignored the squeeze. She wanted to talk.

The silence in the chapel that night had been instantaneous, pure and perfect, as if he’d snapped his fingers. It
meant
something, she felt, that he could do that. And his failure to be aware of his role in the event, even to be interested in it, was connected somehow to his ability to make it happen, she’d thought.

Come on, she said again. Tell me. You must know. It wasn’t anything I could see, obviously, but it was like there was—oh, I don’t know—
something
in the room.

In the darkness beside her, Peter ran his hand from her waist over her hip and down her thigh.

Maybe it’s sort of like the
via negativa
, he said. Understanding a thing by understanding what it is not. For instance, it was not
me
.

She lay beside him on her back, listening to the thrumming of the night’s thunderstorm. The sound trailed away in intervals over the hills. When lightning flickered, the bedroom ceiling appeared above her for an instant, a perfect square of blinding whiteness, shocking her with its nearness, bringing the room in close. Other details, as if from the flash of a crime scene camera, had blazed forth, just for a second: finial on the bedpost; length of beaded molding; Peter’s wool sweater, charcoal gray, tossed on the chair. A little fear had flickered over her, like a lizard scuttling across her skin.

The
via negativa
, she repeated. Well, maybe. If you say so.

She had closed her eyes again, reached over to find his hand and bring his palm to her mouth.

She knew at that moment—as, she realized, she had not fully understood it before—that one day she and Peter would be parted, and not by her own or by Peter’s choice.

Hours seemed to have gone by, but when she turned around again to search the empty doors of the chapel, Peter was standing there, absolutely still.

It was Ed McClaren, she thought. She felt her chest constrict. Ed had died.

Then abruptly Peter strode past her and down the aisle. He turned around when he reached the front of the chapel.

He stood there quietly, but not as if he was waiting, exactly. His belly was slack, his expression oddly empty. His shoulders seemed to have rounded further.

Something was the matter, Ruth thought. She started forward, her hands finding the rail of the pew before her. She stared at him, the big familiar planes of his face, his long legs and soft paunch. She could not see them from where she sat, but she knew the details of his body in her mind: thistledown in his ears, brown spots across the backs of his hands, scars in half-moons over his knees.

Peter seemed to be gazing at something over the heads of the boys facing him.

Though usually the boys quieted instantly when Peter stood before them, tonight they continued to chatter as if they could not see him, as if only
she
could see him.

Ruth glanced behind her. The doors to the chapel had been left open, framing a square of dark blue twilight. A cold feeling began in her hands, ran up her arms, gripping her neck and shoulders.

She turned back and tried to meet Peter’s eyes, but she could see he wasn’t looking at her … or for her, she realized. It was as if he stood at a distance from her, from all of them. He looked sad, his expression soft with sympathy, with regret. How could she tell this from so far away? But she could. She knew she could. He gazed away from her, away from everyone
in the room, apparently intent on the open doors as if something might move out there.

Ruth pressed into the back of the pew and braced herself against the vertiginous feeling of tilting downward.

She aimed the thought at him: Make them be quiet. Start talking.

But still Peter didn’t speak; he merely gazed up the aisle at the open doors.

She was aware now of the empty campus surrounding the chapel, its silence, all the people—innocent boys, adults with their complicated lives—gathered inside. It was when Ruth became conscious of needing help—please God, thank God—that she felt most persuaded of the reality of God, as if God were at that moment reading her thoughts, watching her in her moment of desperation decide to have faith in him. Now she had an apprehension of a presence outside the white walls. Something had orchestrated the whole day, the whole evening, steering it toward this moment of crisis. Something had built the whole waiting world around them, trees, scented grass stretching away into the darkness, stars. She was afraid.

There was a rippling along the pew, boys jostling one another. The boy beside her bumped hard against her shoulder.

He turned an agonized face to her, color leaping into his cheeks. Sorry, he whispered.

Face blazing, he leaned forward to flash a look of hatred and fury down the row.

Fights were inevitable at the school, often at sporting events. One moment everything was under control—the players spread out over the grass, clouds arranged prettily in the
sky. And then the next moment a boy somewhere on the field would have struck out savagely, a stick swinging, a fist. Suddenly a clot of bodies would be angrily grappling and struggling, the referees moving in. These incidents happened so quickly they left Ruth breathless. She felt now, in Peter’s strange silence, the potential for chaos among the boys.

She felt the anxiety of the moment pass now into her belly, her bowels. Should she stand up? Could she go rescue him?

Peter cocked his head slightly. He’d been doing that, she’d noticed, tilting his head as if he couldn’t quite hear.

The din of the boys around them rose another degree. She glanced behind her again, but the white frame of the doors contained only the pure, deep, shining blue of the night sky. A silhouetted figure crossed the open doorway, a dark form moving from one side of the chapel to the other. Then there was nothing but the empty square of the night, and Peter’s silence, and the dangerous restlessness of the boys around her.

Peter knew what was about to happen. The boys had filled the chapel between him and the open doors, the square of blue twilight glowing at the end of the aisle. In the past, when the shuffling and throat clearing had died away, a true and deep silence would enter the room, an invisible presence.
In the face of it, the babbling of the private mind, the ceaseless effort of holding up for examination before the conscious self one thing after another, the whole demanding dumb show of the imagination … all of this would cease, the mind as empty as if its contents had been sucked into a vortex. The paradox, Peter thought, was that this state of emptiness was simultaneously a state of acute, almost transcendental engagement.

He’d tried to explain this to Ruth. But her whole history, everything about her childhood, had conditioned her to vigilance, not acceptance. It had always been difficult for her to relax. He was grateful for the calm that had overtaken her later years and that spilled now into all corners of their life: the unmade bed, the haphazard meals of this or that, whatever they could find in the refrigerator or cupboards—bread and cheese, pickles and ham, bottles of wine. He was grateful for her clever mind—my god, she knew something about practically everything; she would have won on
Jeopardy
, he’d always thought—and grateful even for the untidy house.

What did it matter really, that the house was untidy? He had put too much pressure on her about such things over the years, he knew, even as he had disliked himself for worrying what others would think. And she had worked so hard for him, for the boys. She had been the picture of duty.

She was a funny person, too, his Ruth, though not many knew that about her. She had always made him laugh, so witty and smart. And she was beautiful, though he knew she had never thought so. Gorgeous big breasts and big sweet mouth and melting eyes and long legs … his
beautiful
Ruth. He had a sudden memory of her on the tennis court—she was a terrible
tennis player—running crazily from one side of the court to the other as he lobbed balls at her, her face red as a beet, her big feet pounding away in her big sneakers, her big hands swinging her racquet wildly as if she were being attacked by bees. She had looked great in tennis shorts, all those freckles on her legs. She’d tried awfully hard at it. He’d loved her for that, her determination to get out there and play with him—to keep him in shape, as she said—despite having no talent for it.