The Last First Day (23 page)

Drink your tea, she said. Do not be afraid of these dreams. Imagine that these people are replanting their orchards, rebuilding their barns, fattening their cattle. Try to see everything, remember everything. The sun shining, the rain falling …

She looked down at Ruth.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well
, she said. Do you know these words? No? Julian of Norwich, famous Christian mystic. She had powerful visions, like you, except of course the only person she ever saw was Jesus Christ. Too bad.

After this conversation, Ruth discovered that she seemed at least to be paying closer attention in her dreams. When she recounted them later for Dr. Wenning, she appeared to remember greater numbers of details: the chestnut color of a horse in a field, the steep rise of a dormer and the reflection of clouds in the window glass, the sound of bulrushes moving in the wind at the edge of a pond, the smell in a room of a candle burning.

Did I dream these things, she asked, or am I just making them up right now, telling you about them?

Good question! Dr. Wenning looked pleased. How do they make you feel?

Like … well, like the world is full, Ruth said.

Dr. Wenning looked satisfied.

The things of the world will comfort you, Ruth, she said. Love the things of the world.

Ruth spent hours that first summer at Mary Healy’s reading.

Mary owned a series of books,
Rivers of America
—bought from a salesman one day when she’d been a young mother, she said—and also a big volume called
Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Storybook
. Ruth read this book over and over again, even though she knew she was too old for it.

When Mary realized that Ruth liked to read, she called around to the neighbors, and soon Ruth had books by Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw, several volumes of
Reader’s Digest
condensed books, Carl Sandburg’s
Rootabaga Stories
, a collection of new detective novels—
The Asphalt Jungle
and
Sunset Boulevard
—and also copies of
Lorna Doone
and
Under the Lilacs
. Best was the gift of several novels by Dickens,
Oliver Twist
and
Bleak House
and
David Copperfield, Great Expectations
and
Hard Times
.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose
, Ruth read in
A Tale of Two Cities
.

It rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away
.

She thought of her father.
Blight
. That was a good word for what had been inside him, she thought, after looking it up in Mary’s dictionary.
A ruined state, a destructive force. An affliction
.

Ruth already knew how to cook frankfurters and beans and
scrambled eggs. Mary showed her how to make corned beef and cabbage and vegetable soup, to bake rye bread and a cake made with raisins and brown sugar and Crisco.

The radio was always on in the sunroom annex off the kitchen, and she and Mary listened to baseball games at night.

They played cards.

They never mentioned Ruth’s father directly.

Once, apropos of nothing, Mary reached over and squeezed Ruth’s arm. You poor kid, she said. You never knew anything, huh?

Ruth shook her head. But she had known
something
, she thought.

Poor kid, Mary repeated.

One evening a few days before the school year began, Ruth and Dr. van Dusen walked to the local school, which was a dozen blocks from Mary’s house. Standing outside the fence with Ruth, Dr. van Dusen told her that he had gone to school there himself when he was a boy, and that she would go, too.

Two large oak trees shaded a lawn with bare patches in front of the building. Those trees, he told her, had been much smaller when he’d been a student.

Ruth wanted somehow to make Dr. van Dusen talk about Peter.

Did Peter like the school? she asked.

Peter attended a different school, he told her, a boarding school in Providence, where the boys were taught by Jesuit priests.

Mrs. van Dusen was Catholic, Dr. Van Dusen said.

Ruth felt her stomach drop. This had been her last hope, that she might see Peter at school.

If you would ever like to go to church, Ruth, Dr. Van Dusen said … Mrs. van Dusen would be happy to take you.

Ruth looked up at him. You don’t go?

Sometimes, he said. But I make house calls on Saturdays and Sundays for people who cannot get out. The priest and I often cross paths, he said, but he is usually the one invited for dinner.

At Dr. van Dusen’s tone, Ruth looked up. He was smiling.

Ruth looked away from him at the dark windows of the school. She would not tell Dr. van Dusen that she was afraid of God. Sometimes when she sat on the front steps of Mary’s house at night, after the lights in the other houses had been extinguished, she imagined seeing Peter, imagined him appearing suddenly. She did not want to pray for this, though, because she did not think God was reliable; in fact, she thought God, if he existed, was an unpredictable force, as unknowable as her own father had been.

Also, she found it difficult to believe fully in God.

She did not want to say that she did
not
believe in him, though. If God did exist, surely her doubt would bring down his wrath. Better not to direct his attention toward her in any way.

She could wish for things, she thought—wishing was not the same as praying—but she had no faith in either enterprise, anyway.

• • •

The day before school began, Mrs. van Dusen made a surprise appearance at Mary’s house, bringing school supplies and clothes for Ruth, five cotton dresses and two cardigans, one white and one dark blue. She also arrived with a lemon pound cake, paper sacks of peaches and plums, a bouquet of flowers for Mary, and a vase of tiny flowers fashioned cleverly out of seashells for Ruth.

Ruth noticed that Mary was a little abashed around her.

It must be tough, being the doctor’s wife, Mary said later to Ruth. You have to be nice to everybody all the time. Still, she’s not an
easy
person, is she? Makes me kind of nervous.

Someone at the police station, Ruth supposed, had spread the story of what had happened to her father; everyone at school that fall seemed to know that something bad trailed her. Teachers did not call on her in class, as if forcing her to speak would be unkind, and for the most part the students ignored her. Her English teacher was a middle-aged woman named Miss Dougherty. She had a bold manner, and she wore lipstick and blouses with ruffles. After Ruth turned in her first essay—an account of the books she had read over the summer—Miss Dougherty took Ruth to the town library one day after school and got her a library card. She gave her some clothes, too, a few dresses and soft sweaters.

I’m too old for them now, she said, looking Ruth up and down. But they’d be pretty on you.

You watch out for the boys, Ruth, she said. And don’t you bother about those other kids, either, she told her. Just keep
reading. Keep your head down but your chin up. You’ll be done with school before you know it, and then you’ll go to college.

She looked again at Ruth. Everything will be all right then, Ruth. It’ll be better when you’re a grown-up. Trust me.

Walking around town one weekend afternoon that first fall, Ruth discovered that Wells had a small art and natural history museum. After that she went often after school, stopping under the portico at the entrance to the building where she turned her back on the front door with its medieval, studded hinges and leaded-glass window and checked her face in the mirror of the compact she had bought at Woolworth’s with the allowance Dr. van Dusen gave her. She patted her nose and her cheeks with powder. She wore a dark green beret over her hair and gray wool mittens, items she had unearthed in a dresser and that Mary had told her to keep.

Even though she knew he was away at school, she always imagined that there was a chance she might run across Peter.

A rambling heap of brownstone boulders, the museum had been built originally as a private residence for a cotton baron in the late 1800’s. Ruth read this information in a free pamphlet on her first visit, the blurry, mimeographed copies stacked on a spindly three-legged table at the foot of the marble spiral staircase in the front hall. A niche in the curved wall of the stairwell contained a magnificent urn embossed with flowers and Irish harps and trimmed with a design of dogs chasing each other.

From the tower of the museum, Ruth liked to look out over the water, the whitecaps like fins bristling over the surface. The wind came off the ocean and blew a flurry of crimson leaves across the cotton baron’s lawns.

In every room of the museum, around every corner, there was something bizarre or horrifying or fascinating or beautiful: a taxidermied monkey’s head from Lima, Peru, and a giant clamshell, pearly jaws shining under the lights, fossils of fish and shells and an ostrich complete with an egg. She loved an exquisite, thimble-sized nest woven of down and silver hairs by a ruby-throated hummingbird. The museum’s dusty dioramas were mysterious, all inky undergrowth and slanting sideways light in which a mountain lion and a squirrel and a toucanet stared glassily past each other. A bronzed man with a Neanderthal brow and beaded loincloth, spear poised, hung behind a tree so obviously made of paper that the scene seemed both comical and tragic at once.

Paintings hung floor to ceiling in some rooms, many of them so high above Ruth’s head that she couldn’t see them properly. There were dreamy seascapes, and pictures of flushed maids scattering grain, and glittering still lifes: an ermine hanging upside down, pointed teeth bared, a parallelogram of light captured on a dusky red grape. It amazed her to consider that one man had collected so many things in his lifetime. She hadn’t thought before that this is what one might do, if one had money: amass the treasures of the world. She’d only ever thought of her father’s dreams: a big house and him all alone in it, room after room, all to himself. She’d never imagined a room for herself in those houses, she realized.

Her solitary afternoons in the museum—its otherworldly isolation, the mute, majestic silence of the extraordinary objects within—offered her a profound comfort during that first year in Wells, filling her eyes and her mind. The rooms were hushed,
smelling of the sea and the lemon-scented oil used by a smocked curator’s assistant, an old man who nodded at her while polishing the gleaming banister and the glass cases. Wandering through the building, Ruth tried to catalog it all in her head, even the smells: fur and tooth and nail and enamel and crystal and gold, oil paint and silver tarnish, marble and plaster and ancient reeds and papers.

One winter afternoon in the minerals room Ruth came upon an old couple, very well dressed, the man leaning on a silver-topped cane. He and his wife—Ruth assumed they were husband and wife—hung together over the glass-topped cabinet containing the milk-spattered gypsum and the foot-long aquamarine and the bristling geodes. They were whispering happily to one another, the woman’s gloved hand nestled in the crook of her husband’s arm.

They looked up at her in surprise when she came into the room.

Ruth had begun to feel that the museum belonged to her alone—there were almost never any other visitors—and she backed away, hurrying down the marble staircase. Outside, snow had begun to fall. She walked carefully down the long drive, slipping in her school shoes, listening to the sound of the surf crashing nearby.

The sight of the old couple had made her feel lonely. She wished again that she would see Peter. Occasionally, walking to school or in town to the library or on an errand for Mary, she had the sensation that she had stepped around a corner onto a street where he had stood a moment before, or that she had
entered a store he had just left. Once she thought she saw him going into the hardware store on Main Street. She had followed him inside, her heart pounding, but it was not Peter after all.

She did not ever walk past the van Dusens’ house, though she thought she knew where it was. And of course she avoided the block on which she and her father had spent their one night.

That winter she made a friend, a girl named Ellie McHenry, whose parents ran a bar and restaurant called the Castle House. Ellie and Ruth had been paired together at school on a history project. In the kitchen of the Castle House, working on Sunday afternoons when the restaurant was closed, they made a model of the Parthenon out of sugar cubes. Sometimes on weeknights Ellie’s father paid the girls to wash dishes. Ruth sensed that the Castle House with its sticky tablecloths and noisy bar was not the kind of place where the van Dusens would go.

It was fun to work alongside Ellie. In the kitchen they listened to the radio, tossing soapsuds at one another. At night when they were finished with work and the restaurant was closed, Ellie’s mother let them eat lobster rolls or bowls of clam chowder and plates of French fries at the bar.

Dr. van Dusen or his nurse, a brisk woman in a neat uniform, came over regularly to see Mary and give her injections, but those visits usually took place when Ruth was in school.

Sometimes Dr. van Dusen left packages for Ruth, books and clothes from Mrs. van Dusen.

After that?

Years passed, Ruth would tell Dr. Wenning later.

Years
passed? Dr. Wenning lifted an eyebrow.

Ruth looked away, out of the tall windows in Dr. Wenning’s study in New Haven. She flicked a dustcloth at a windowpane, blinked.

I understand, Dr. Wenning said after a moment.

She got up then and poured two whiskeys, another of her remedies.

Together Ruth and Dr. Wenning sat in silence and watched the sky outside the window. Ruth would never know anyone who could remain silent as long as Dr. Wenning.

It wasn’t all bad, Ruth said finally. Then she drank down her whiskey, grimacing.