The Last First Day (21 page)

This was somebody’s life, she thought. People lived like this, in a calm and clean quiet. Yet, like a pinch on her arm, she felt it: was it
too
quiet?

But it didn’t matter; such a life would never be her life, anyway.

She fled back to bed. She wanted only to sleep.

Later that evening, when Mrs. van Dusen brought her supper on a tray, the plate held two lamb chops and a baked potato and cooked carrots cut up into tiny cubes.

Ruth’s appetite had vanished, replaced by a stomachache, but she ate methodically; she needed to store supplies, she thought. It felt as if a long voyage lay ahead of her.

Dr. van Dusen appeared at the bedroom door, as she finished the last mouthful.

She might like to come downstairs and sit in the living room for a while, he suggested. It’s a lovely, cool evening, Ruth, he said. Put on the robe Mrs. van Dusen bought for you.

Downstairs he helped her to a chair, as if she were an invalid.

A polished silver dish shaped like a seashell rested on the table beside her chair. Books with gilt lettering on their spines filled the shelves on either side of a fireplace, which was neatly swept, two polished brass andirons side by side. The upholstered sofa was lined with tasseled pillows. The window by her chair was open, and outside in the garden, the lacy white globes of flowers glowed in the dusk. Ruth felt that she was in a painting of a world, not a real world. She had never been in such a place.

Mrs. van Dusen brought her a mug of Ovaltine on a saucer, a plate with two sugar cookies, an ironed linen napkin with embroidered letters on it.

Then Dr. van Dusen, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, reappeared in the doorway.

Behind him, carrying a folded-up checkerboard, was the boy, the boy on the bicycle.

This is our son, Peter, Dr. van Dusen said. He smiled. But I think you’ve met.

That night, Peter sat on a footstool across from her, the checkerboard on a folding tray table between them.

Ruth stole glances at him. The part in his shining hair was clean and straight. His eyebrows were straight, too, smooth, delicate lines, his eyelashes dark against his skin as he looked down at the checkerboard.

She could not believe he was sitting across from her.

Every time he took one of her men, he glanced up apologetically.

Sorry, he said, shaking his head

He won three games in a row.

After each one, Ruth was afraid he would pack up the board and leave, but he just set up the pieces again.

Then in the fourth game, as if the arrangement of pieces on the board suddenly leaped into focus for her, she saw a move that would allow her to jump two of his pieces.

She took his men off the board.

Then she looked up.

You
let
me do that, she said.

I didn’t see it, he said. That’s how it is sometimes. But he was smiling.

She looked down at the checkerboard.

You carried me upstairs after I fainted, she said. I’m sorry.

It’s all right, he said. I’ve carried much heavier things. Then he blushed. It was fine, he said. Don’t worry.

She saw in his face that he knew about what had happened to her father and to her, about the perverse and terrible thing from which she would never now be free.

You know why I’m here, she said. In your house, I mean.

He nodded.

I guess you feel sorry for me, she said. But I don’t want you to. Pity would follow his understanding, she realized.

I’ll try, he said.

Peter had his father’s tall gracefulness, the same large blue eyes and high forehead and straight nose. His hair looked so soft that Ruth longed to touch it, to brush it away from his forehead, where it liked to fall. Like everything in the van Dusens’ house—Ruth walked through it marveling at the china, the carpets, the furniture she recognized as antiques, every doorknob and mirror and window polished and sparkling—Peter himself was clean and finely made. His hair was full of silver and gold light. His skin glowed.

She found herself looking at the white half-moons on his fingernails, at his wrists, his forearms, the shape of his shoulders under his shirt, the declivity at the base of his throat, his jaw, the curve of his ear.

She was aware for the first time of wanting to touch another person, a boy, of wanting to bring her body close to his.

Sitting at the van Dusens’ dining room table across from him in the evenings, which she began to do after the first night of being brought downstairs, was excruciating. She tried not to
lift her eyes from her plate, but it was as if her gaze was dragged magnetically toward Peter, and when she looked up he seemed always to be looking back at her. Throughout the meal, while his parents made small talk with each other and with Peter—
How was your day, dear?
Was this really how people spoke to each other?—Ruth felt a racing sensation in her chest. She was aware of her breasts under her shirt, the smell of the perfumed soap with which she’d washed her hair. She felt herself blushing, her cheeks flaming throughout every meal.

She saw, too, that Mrs. van Dusen noticed her feelings, color rising in her own face.

After dinner at night, Dr. van Dusen encouraged Ruth to retreat to the living room, where she was left alone to read. Ruth stood before the shelves choosing books at random, putting her nose to them, and pressing their cool, smooth covers to her cheek.

She could not believe her life with her father was over, gone, that her father himself was gone, probably dead. Because no one spoke to her of what had happened, despite the enormity of the events, it seemed logical to her that people would tell her nothing, that she was owed nothing, neither explanations nor news.

And their life had not been a
real
life, she saw now. It had been a false life, an experiment to which she had been subjected.

Yet she could not let go of its details.

Her father must have carried her when she was a baby. He must have held her, rocked her to sleep sometimes. She remembered holding his hand while crossing streets, remembered the
pressure of his hand on her shoulder, briefly, pushing her forward into classrooms, into unfamiliar apartments where a succession of women looked after her when her father was away somewhere. She remembered, oddly, the feel of his hand over her own as she had practiced writing her first letters.

Every night she waited for Peter to appear again in the living room with the checkerboard, but he did not. Sometimes Dr. van Dusen sat with her, reading the newspaper. Mrs. van Dusen brought him a cup of coffee, and he looked up at her then, touched her arm or put his hand on the small of her back as she leaned over to set the cup carefully on the table beside him. Ruth watched these exchanges; this, too, was a revelation to her, how people were with each other. Polite. Intimate.

She sat dutifully with a book, but often she did not really read. She hoped Peter would come join them in the living room, but one evening she watched from the living room window as he headed off on his bicycle after dinner. The next evening he left with a basketball under his arm. Other pursuits had been found for him, she realized.

Sometimes the telephone rang, and Dr. van Dusen rose to answer it, speaking in quiet tones to someone, one of his patients, she assumed. Occasionally he left the house at night with his doctor’s bag. One night while he was out, Ruth passed the kitchen on her way upstairs and saw Mrs. van Dusen sitting at the kitchen table, her hands clasped before her. There was no book or magazine or sewing on the table. The kitchen was immaculately tidy, a light on over the stove but the
room otherwise in darkness. Mrs. van Dusen did not seem to see her.

In some way, Mrs. van Dusen reminded Ruth of her father. There was something hidden inside her that could not be spoken, she thought.

Every night, Dr. van Dusen left a sleeping pill for Ruth, a tiny tablet in a little dish beside a glass of water on the bedside table. Every night, Ruth took it.

A week went by. Two. Other than the visit from the FBI men one afternoon, the hours passed with excruciating slowness. Mrs. van Dusen continued to bring Ruth breakfast on a tray in bed, as if she were an invalid, and Ruth spent much of the day there, reading or sleeping. Every night she dressed in the clothes that had been purchased for her and went downstairs for dinner. She assumed that Peter did not return to play checkers with her because of her father, because of what had happened to her. His parents—Mrs. van Dusen, in particular—wanted no friendship between their son and Ruth.

She did not know what would happen to her. She assumed that, as the policeman had said, someone would arrive one day to take her away somewhere. A feeling of alert waiting had replaced her impulse to run away, the instinct that had driven her downstairs and outside to the porch on the first night at the van Dusens’. She did not know how to be ready, nor what to be ready for, but her skin prickled frequently with fear. It seemed that no one was to talk to her, to tell her anything. She had the sense that she was on a dangerous kind of probation, that any move was likely to result in catastrophe. She tried to be as quiet as possible, to ask nothing. From the windows she
watched Peter coming and going from the house, heard the sounds of passersby or cars on the street, the telephone ringing. But the apparently ordinary life around her seemed both mysterious and out of reach. Such a life would never be her own, she thought. The invisible connections that tied people to places, to each other … she did not possess these. Had never possessed them, it seemed.

Then, one evening as she sat in the living room, she looked up to see Peter standing in the hallway. He smiled and lifted his hand.

A moment later, Mrs. van Dusen appeared. Her gaze took in Peter, and then it took in Ruth.

Peter? she said. I need your help with something.

A few minutes later, Ruth heard the sound of the basketball outside, Peter shooting again and again in the twilight at the goal mounted over the door to the small barn behind the house where Dr. van Dusen parked his car at night. The basketball thudded against the backboard, and also, somehow, inside her own body, again and again.

The next evening after dinner, Dr. and Mrs. van Dusen told Ruth that they had found a permanent place for her. She was not to be taken away, after all. A widow who lived in Wells, a patient of Dr. van Dusen’s named Mary Healy, was in need of a girl who could help her. She was alone and her health was poor. Ruth understood that the arrangements were being described in particular terms: They were asking her to
help
Mary. They were not saying,
you have nowhere else to go, and we do not
want you here
. Yet she understood that the tension in the van Dusens’ house had to do with her.

She was not part of their family.

She was not part of any family.

The bad things her father had done, the bad thing that had happened to him … people would not want to be reminded of that.

Dr. van Dusen did all the talking during this conversation. Ruth could see that he was concerned that she might cry, though she had not cried once in front of either him or Mrs. van Dusen. She sensed that the decision to find a place for her had come because no authority had yet been found to come get her, and that Mrs. van Dusen—more than her husband—was eager for Ruth to leave. Peter was not present for this discussion, which was not a discussion. Nor had he been there for dinner that night. She would never see him again, she thought, and it was this realization, as Dr. van Dusen explained to her what would happen, that made her eyes fill with tears.

How foolish she was, to want a boy like Peter.

The next day, Dr. van Dusen drove Ruth to Mary Healy’s, several blocks away through a complicated tangle of streets. Ruth could see, looking at the houses as they drove past them, that they were moving into a neighborhood of less affluence.

A parcel in her lap held the belongings Mrs. van Dusen had presented to Ruth that morning before she’d left: a handmade sweater—a cardigan in blue wool—as well as an ivory brush and comb set.

It was a complicated fact about Mrs. van Dusen that Ruth
would come to know in the years ahead; she was not unkind, and she was generous—she would give Ruth many gifts—but her generosity was not an easy generosity, nor one borne of joy. It was designed, Ruth came to understand, to protect Mrs. van Dusen from the knowledge of her own loneliness, her estrangement from other people.

Later, after what happened between Ruth and Peter, Ruth threw away all of Mrs. van Dusen’s gifts except the books: every item of clothing, including the hand-knit sweaters and scarves and mittens, the embroidered pillowcases, the jewelry box with Ruth’s name embossed on it in gold letters, and the gold bangle bracelet, the set of watercolor paints, and the shepherdess figurine.

These were gifts she would have been given if she were actually someone’s beloved daughter, she understood. But she was not someone’s daughter.

She was not anyone’s daughter.

And she was not beloved.

When Mary Healy opened the door of her house to Ruth and Dr. van Dusen, Ruth took in a sitting room crowded with plants on one side of a front hallway, and a dark dining room and kitchen on the other side. Off the back of the kitchen, she discovered, was an annex where Mary, who could no longer walk upstairs, had a daybed and her beloved radio.

Mary, in her early eighties, Ruth assumed when she saw her for the first time, looked as if she had been fattened on something unhealthy. She was missing a foot, the stump of her leg ending in a man’s white sock. Her skin shone wetly, faintly
green. Sweat stood out around her hairline and on her scalp under her thin white hair.

She was in pain, she told Ruth, but not much, really. She spoke without self-pity, moving through the downstairs of the house on her crutches, showing Ruth where everything was. Plants garlanded the windows, tentacles of greenery running along the ceiling moldings, dead blossoms falling on the carpets.

Mary had written out in a shaky hand a list of Ruth’s duties, which she gave to Ruth in the kitchen. The simplicity of the tasks—wash, iron, cook, sweep, garden—reassured Ruth.