The Last First Day (29 page)

What was Ruth doing? Nothing.

She stared at the face of the clock beside their bed.

It’s not a cowhide. It’s actually a deer hide, Peter said after a minute. The vest that that guy always wears.

His hand was warm against her skin.

Ruth rolled back over to look up at him.

And he shot the deer himself. Peter made a face. Don’t ask him for the story, he said. You’ll regret it.

She put her hands over her mouth.

Then she reached up and put her arms around him. I wouldn’t think of it, she said. But I still don’t want to go.

Peter let the towel around his waist fall away and joined her between the sheets.

I’m sorry, he said into her neck. I know it’s lonely here for you, Ruth. I appreciate everything you’re doing to help me. I wish you had a friend here. You will. I know you will.

You’ll find your place.

They were late to the party that evening, holding hands and running across the silent campus. Many boys had already left for the holidays; in another day or so, they would all be gone, those with no families to the homes of parishioners for Christmas.

They arrived at the headmaster’s house red-cheeked and breathless. Ruth saw instantly that she was the only woman present. The headmaster, whose wife had passed away some years before Peter and Ruth moved to Derry, seemed surprised to see her, which made her think that maybe he had intended for Peter to come alone, after all.

She felt mortified. When the headmaster took their coats, she shot Peter a furious glance.

He looked back with a helpless expression. Sorry, he mouthed.

When they were seated at dinner, the bishop, a lean man with extraordinarily tufted eyebrows, offered a prayer.

Thank you, God, he said, for the state of Maine. Thank you for the care of these boys into whose lives we have been privileged to extend the powerful rays of your generosity.

Ruth felt her stomach rumble loudly with hunger.

The bishop’s eyes were closed, his fingers laced beneath his chin.

Down the table, all heads were bowed. The bishop opened
his eyes, gazing down the table as if he might have heard Ruth’s stomach, and then closed them again.

In the name of Jesus Christ our lord, amen, he said.

During the meal, Ruth could see Peter trying to catch her eye across the table, but she wouldn’t look at him. Neither man seated beside her spoke to her beyond extending the usual sorts of politeness.

And how old are you? the man to her left asked, as he sawed away at his beef.

Ruth repressed the urge to ask him the same question. What kind of question was that, anyway? she thought.

To her right, a bald gentleman with veins in his nose inclined his head when she told him her name, and then called her Beth and later Bess and finally—clearly with no idea of her name but apparently unconcerned about this—Susan.

Ruth did not bother to correct him.

She said hardly anything during the meal. She felt beaten down by the occasion, by the fact that the headmaster had not expected her, though he had greeted her kindly, calling her my dear and steering her toward the fireplace, putting a glass of sherry—which she drank down almost immediately—in her hands.

All the joyfulness of her earlier lovemaking with Peter, the comfort of his love for her and hers for him, their happy race across the snow-covered campus, felt extinguished.

She gazed across the dinner table at the waving lights of the candles. An image of her father in his suit pants and white shirt stepped before her, as it sometimes did when she felt most low.
She put down her fork. She put butter on a roll and stuffed it into her mouth so she wouldn’t cry.

After dinner Ruth smiled and shook hands dutifully around the room.

We’re glad you’re here, my dear, the headmaster said. Your Peter is doing a super job. Derry’s lucky to have him.

Someone helped her into her coat, and then the headmaster opened the front door. She and Peter stepped into the darkness, calling good night.

The headmaster closed the door behind them.

Ruth registered the silence around them, the night sky bristling coldly with stars. The temperature had been below freezing for several days, but Ruth felt feverish. She unbuttoned her coat as they left the driveway and turned down the lane back toward the center of campus. The loose tops of her galoshes—Peter’s galoshes, actually—flapped around her calves. She’d been in too much of a hurry to leave to buckle them properly.

Peter walked in silence beside her.

I wasn’t supposed to be there, she said.

I guess not, Peter said, but there wasn’t any harm in it. They were glad you were there. Anyway, I’m sorry.

Do you want to know what people asked me tonight? she said finally.

Peter said nothing.

Someone asked me my name, she said. Someone else asked me how
old
I was. She puffed out a breath. And, before dinner, three people asked how we’d met.

Peter hunched down inside his collar. She could tell he felt wearied by her.

Well, it
is
a story, he said.

Ruth shot him a look of anger. It’s not the kind of story you
tell
people, she said, and you know it.

She slipped on the path in her open galoshes, felt cold snow against her ankle.

They want a
love
story, Peter, she said. Hearts and flowers and doves.

We have love, he said. He tried to catch her hand.

We have terrible things in our past, Peter, she said. My father is not dinner table conversation. Nor is an abortion, for god’s sake.

They almost never talked about that time. She’d said that last part because she felt mean.

Peter, striding along beside her, said nothing.

It was always like this between them, she thought helplessly. She said too much; Peter said nothing at all.

It was not that they ever disputed Ruth’s past, the tragic business of Ruth’s father and the way in which Ruth and Peter had been delivered to each other. There was no disputing those facts, of course, or any part of their shared history, the time before their marriage, the doctor who had ended the pregnancy, nearly ending Ruth’s own life as well. But what was she to
do
with her past, she thought? What was she to do with the loneliness and sadness that came up inside her sometimes, the way those feelings transformed so quickly into anger?

Ah, Ruth. Do not
punish
yourself so, Dr. Wenning had said to her once. Your childhood would explain a lifetime of bad behavior in very many people. You are not a bad person
because you feel sad sometimes. And that boy Peter loves you. You know he does.

Still, Ruth knew that it was difficult to live with someone who struggled as much as she did sometimes. She wished she could believe in God. What a relief it would be. But she just couldn’t manage it. In truth she sometimes felt repulsed by the idea of a God who seemed to preside over so much suffering in the world. And she was equally repulsed, though she knew it was uncharitable of her, by what she saw as the credulousness of those who
claimed
to believe—or perhaps, like Peter, really
did
believe—by the kneeling and rising and murmuring of prayers and singing.

Something about it, about even Peter’s faith, struck her as smug and horrible.

How are you so
sure
? she asked Peter once.

I just am, he said. I don’t know why or how.

Simple as that? Ruth said.

Well, not simple, he said.

No, she cried. It’s
not
simple!

You’re right, he said. You’re right.

She put her head in her hands. I can’t fight with you, she said.

I’m trying, he said. Give me credit here.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, she said.

In general that first year at Derry, Ruth tried just to follow Dr. Wenning’s advice.

Once every few weeks, she packed a sandwich and a thermos of tea and drove from Derry to New Haven, where she sat
in Dr. Wenning’s office and tried to help her with her increasingly disorganized papers, meanwhile listening to Dr. Wenning opine about the mental habits of the optimist, exercises of positive thinking designed to help Ruth defeat the voices of despair inside her.

You must alter the schema, Ruth, Dr. Wenning advised. Reject the sad ending. Concentrate on what is now, on the extra
-or
-dinary present!

Afterward, they would go out for dinner at the Italian restaurant Dr. Wenning liked, where the owner kissed Dr. Wenning’s hand as if she were royalty and took her shabby old coat from her shoulders as if it were a full-length mink.

Dr. Wenning spoke to him in rapid Italian; some of his relatives, too, had died in the war, she told Ruth.

We have that in common, she said. Also the experience of national shame.

Ruth and Dr. Wenning always ate the same thing on these occasions—eggplant Parmesan or spaghetti with vodka sauce—and shared a bottle of wine, and then Ruth would spend the night on the itchy little sofa in Dr. Wenning’s study at her house, driving back to Derry the next day feeling restored and more hopeful.

I’m sorry, Ruth apologized to Dr. Wenning on one of these visits, after a long afternoon of complaining. All I do when I see you is woe-is-me. You just bring it out in me.

You are not my patient, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said kindly. You are my
friend
. I want to listen to you. You listen to me as well, you know.

Dr. Wenning was fond of quoting Whitman and Rilke,
especially, and she gave Ruth many books over the years, mostly novels and poetry. Ruth also read lots of popular psychology books, though Dr. Wenning tried to discourage her from this.

Enough Freud, Ruth! she would cry, springing up in frustration from behind her desk. What you need is novels. You need music, sex, food, dancing, wine, jokes …

What do you call a cow, lying down? she said.
Grrrrrround
beef!

On Dr. Wenning’s advice, Ruth played tennis with Peter as often as he could find time for it, and she walked three miles every day, learning the country roads and the paths around Derry. In her correspondence with friends, she tried to be entertaining, telling little stories about happenings at the school and describing the boys and the flora and the fauna. She looked up the names of the birds and the wild-flowers.

She was a regular visitor at the school’s library, where she wandered self-consciously through the stacks. There were few women at Derry, and Ruth, with her red hair and height, felt herself especially noticeable. But she made her way through one or two novels a week, Dostoevsky and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Hardy. She toiled away at her novel and at her play, trying to have faith in herself and in the process, faith that all the creeping forward and crossing out and gusts of excitement and bleak periods of nothingness, when she couldn’t seem to imagine what came next, would end up finally in a complete story.

On the night of that first horrible Christmas dinner with the bishop and the board of trustees, however, Ruth felt that
all her weeks of determined effort—of self-improvement and patience, of taking care of Peter—had been a waste.

She had made no progress in acquiring serenity or contentment. She was as full of wanting things—things she couldn’t exactly name—as ever. She was tired of housekeeping. She was tired of being just a wife. She was lonely.

Beside her on the path, Peter took off his gloves and stuffed them in his coat pocket. He unbuttoned the top button of his overcoat and blew out a tired breath.

Ruth watched these movements through narrowed eyes.

As usual, she thought, Peter would not fight with her. He
never
fought with her.

She was sorry that she’d spoken. It wasn’t Peter’s fault that those old men were rude. Why hadn’t she just tried harder to be nice to them that night? Why hadn’t she wanted to charm them? What was wrong with a little charm, anyway?

At last Peter said, Well, you don’t have to mention those, um, darker aspects. He tried to take her arm.

For gosh sake, Ruth, he said. Slow
down
.

She thought but didn’t say: But if I don’t mention those darker aspects, then there’s no
story
.

Instead, she said, No one ever asks what I’m interested in or what I studied or what I hope to do with my life. It’s as if they think that meeting you is the only thing of consequence ever to have happened to me.

Peter didn’t say anything.

She’d hurt his feelings, she knew, but despite her effort to be rational, she felt too wild to care.

She wrenched her scarf from around her neck, where it
felt like it was strangling her. Her stride could be longer than Peter’s, if she wanted, and all she wanted at that moment was to stalk away from him, to run through the snow.

If I can’t ever tell anyone the true story, she burst out finally, then no one will ever
know
me.

It had begun to rain, a fine icy sleet almost invisible except in the halos of light around the lampposts along the path.

You
can
tell them, Peter said, trying again for her hand. You
can
.

She snatched her hand away.

She knew better than that, she thought. Some stories you simply could not let out into the open.

That night when they got home, Peter hung up his coat and began to gather his books from the table.

Ruth, still in her coat, watched him balance his grade book on top of the stack and tuck it under his arm. Where are you going? she said.

I’m going upstairs, he said. I need to do a little work.

Ruth said, The semester’s over, Peter.

He didn’t look at her. I know, he said.

Fine, Ruth said. Go ahead. Go do your important work.

He didn’t say anything. She watched him leave the room, closing the door quietly behind him. She threw her gloves at it.

She stood in the center of their room, listening, expecting to hear soon the sound of Peter’s old typewriter, but there was only silence from overhead.

The woods into which Ruth wanders early one lambent June morning nearly sixty year later, when she is eighty-five years old, are filled with ghost ferns and lady ferns and wild columbine and wild ginger, species of plants common to the part of the Adirondacks in which she and Peter made their home following Peter’s retirement from Derry. Ruth, always the student, always in search of knowledge, purchased dog-eared field guides to the area at the local library’s annual sale when they first arrived. She has struggled over the years to discern one fern from another.