The Last First Day (4 page)

Aware of the weight of them against her, the intimate smells of other people’s houses in the children’s fine hair and on their skin, Ruth had tried to stay still on these occasions, like the careful servant of a dignified child emperor who has consented to be comforted, but with whom one must not take liberties.

She and Peter weren’t so sad about it anymore; they could smile over a child’s head now, Ruth’s hand tentatively touching the child’s shoulder, the child turning to lay a palm against Ruth’s cheek or her breast. Ruth had to close her eyes at these moments, the heat of the little hand against her skin.

They’d had the school, she and Peter. All the boys.

They’d had other people’s children.

In the years when Peter was first headmaster, Ruth had given gifts on birthdays and at Christmas to the children of the faculty.
She chose these gifts—rocking horses, dollhouses, enormous teddy bears—on twice-annual shopping trips to Boston, trips she undertook alone, staying in a hotel and eating solitary meals at the hotel’s restaurant.

Peter thought the trips were a kind of holiday for her and encouraged her to go. She didn’t want to tell him how sad they made her sometimes, all those toys. She hated how pathetic she’d felt in the hotel’s dining rooms as she gulped her wine, cut up a lamb chop, forked in mashed potatoes against the trembling of her mouth. She would cry if she did not have to chew and swallow.

Worst of all was that she eventually came to understand that the gifts were considered—by some—extravagant. Her efforts were not appreciated; they conveyed an attitude of noblesse oblige on her part. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She and Peter could ill afford such generosity, though she realized that others had no way of knowing this, perhaps. But people who were badly paid were sometimes quick to become bitter, she understood. People felt obligated to repay her kindness somehow, she realized, or it was a burden to them to write a note of thanks. She had felt hurt by this—she had wanted to please—but it had been with mingled disappointment and relief that she’d finally given up the practice.

Now she only sent cards at Christmas, a photograph of Derry taken by Peter—Derry in snow, Derry in autumn, deer at Derry, boys cavorting at Derry, sunset at Derry—and signed with love from Dr. and Mrs. van Dusen.

Over the years, as the children grew up, she crossed out the
Dr. and Mrs. and wrote instead in her big sloping script, Peter and Ruth. She had kept an album of all the Christmas cards they’d had made of Peter’s photographs.

In a few years they would be eighty, she and Peter. Some of the children who had been born while Peter was headmaster were now in college. Some of them were married, with children of their own. Ruth had lost track of them all, though many had stayed in touch with the van Dusens out of loyalty and affection, proudly sending cards at Christmas with photographs of their spouses and children, beautiful little strangers.

She nearly drifted off to sleep in the bathtub, but finally the water was too cold to be comfortable. She stood up unsteadily in the tub, reached for a towel and wrapped herself up in it.

In the bedroom, she looked at the clock. It was nearly five p.m.

She called Peter at his office—it was odd that he had failed to check in during the day, as he usually did—but there was no answer. Nor did his secretary pick up his phone.

Ruth sat down on the bed and dialed his cell phone number, but he didn’t answer that, either.

Well, it was the first day, she thought. They were all busy.

She put on a slip and her navy blue dress. Standing at her bureau, she found in her jewelry box a large gold sunburst pin Peter had given her. He did not trouble about his own clothes—she had to throw away shirts and trousers that became disreputable, frayed along the collars or cuffs—but for a man of thrift, he was an impulsive shopper, and he had what Ruth thought
was a disconcerting taste for dramatic costume jewelry. Occasionally the things he chose for her—soapstone dolphins on black cords, hunks of turquoise wrapped in thick silver bands—were so conspicuous that Ruth knew people felt compelled to compliment her on them, even if they were ugly, which they sometimes were.

He would notice the sunburst tonight and be pleased.

She carried her shoes from the closet and set them down by the bed, a show of her good intentions. She would be ready on time.

She would not even pull the bedspread away from the pillow, she thought. But she longed to close her eyes for a few minutes.

She lay down carefully on her back so as to minimize wrinkles, tugging the fabric of the dress smooth under her bottom. Her body was hot from the bath, and the bedspread felt warm beneath her, the sunlight having moved slowly across the empty bed all afternoon.

She woke with the alarm of those who know they have overslept.

Smoky, golden haze filled the window between the curtains, and the carillon bells were ringing.

She sat up abruptly. The smell of burning leaves reached her through the open window. Two beautiful old oak trees had come down across the entrance road to the school in thunderstorms the week before. There were only four men left on the physical plant crew, and two of them too old to be doing such work safely, she thought. It had taken them days to cut up the
trees and haul away the wood, everyone aware that the students were arriving soon, that haste was needed. They must be burning the brush behind the old garages this evening.

They had been sad to see them go, those trees, she and Peter. Somehow one just hated to see them on the ground like that.

She looked at the digital clock beside the bed, but its face was blank. She realized that the power had gone out while she’d been asleep. The mirror over the bureau was empty and dark.

What time was it?

She had been dreaming, she remembered then, and the scene of her dream came to her. There had been a canyon with high, ochre-colored walls and, in a valley below, an enormous solitary building like a warehouse, the many windows illuminated by a sunset. Hawks had circled in a cold, high, desert twilight. In the dream she had been standing above the canyon, looking down into it, the landscape somewhere in the west, Utah or Nevada, she thought. She had never lived in that part of the country. Yet the feeling in the dream had been that she was returning after many years to somewhere she had once known well, a place now deserted. A memory of it had stirred in her somehow, even as she was dreaming, the canyon’s echoing emptiness and the towering sky familiar.

As if in answer to the bright, precise vividness of this vision, her head began to ache.

Ruth had suffered from nightmares for many years, though over time they had come less and less often. She hardly ever had one anymore.

Perhaps, as Dr. Wenning had once proposed, the balance of
her life had finally shifted, the weight of her years of happiness with Peter asserting itself against the unhappiness of her childhood. Usually now her dreams, like this one—like most people’s, she assumed, the events and settings distinct but without sense—were simply mysterious. Yet though the dreams resisted interpretation—she had no idea what this one
meant
—they had a strong feeling to them. These feelings, difficult for her to put into words, nagged at her for hours, sometimes for days, after waking. This dream, stubbornly visual, would stay with her, she thought.

She had long ago stopped telling Peter about her dreams. His lack of interest—raising his eyebrows at her in the mirror by way of response as he brushed his teeth in the mornings—had been poorly concealed. She had been a little hurt by this, even as she had understood it. Still, one wanted to tell
someone …

What would Dr. Wenning have said about this dream, she wondered now. The silent, eerily familiar landscape, the hawks making their slow rotation high in the sky, the windows in the building flaming red and then washed black as the sun dropped below the horizon … what did it mean that one’s mind produced such images? And how strange, Ruth thought, to appear to remember in a dream a place her mind had
invented
.

Yet to a person whose own past was a mystery, everything was a clue … and nothing. It didn’t do to make too much of such things.

Ruth’s friendship with Dr. Wenning was, she knew, the second luckiest event in her life after her love for Peter. For the four years while Peter was at Yale working on his degree, Ruth had
ridden her bicycle every Saturday afternoon across New Haven to the suite of rooms near the Green where Dr. Wenning maintained her private practice.

There Ruth organized Dr. Wenning’s books—there were usually heaps of them open on the floor and tables when Ruth arrived—typed up her notes, washed the dishes in the little kitchen, and pushed the carpet sweeper over the Oriental rugs. Sometimes she made tiny cups of the strong coffee Dr. Wenning liked and brought them to her while she worked at her desk, placing them by her elbow. Dr. Wenning, though she did not look up from her work, would reach out to touch Ruth’s arm in gratitude.

Ruth had never known someone to concentrate like Dr. Wenning.

In the high-ceilinged apartment with its air of bygone grandeur, Ruth felt removed from the world, suspended above it. From the windows, she watched cars and pedestrians appear below through the leaves of the trees the way she imagined glimpsing the earth through clouds from an airplane. The unnatural quiet—the steam rising from the electric kettle on a tea cart in Dr. Wenning’s study, the sherry glasses occasionally trembling on their papier-mâché tray, the gears of the mantel clock brushing and whirring—had made Ruth, usually so reticent, feel strangely voluble.

She had wanted to tell Dr. Wenning everything.

Yet Dr. Wenning herself seemed to invite confession. With her high, thick waist and firm belly and wide blue eyes, she gave the impression of being able to absorb all manner of tragedy, like the Chinese brother in the tale who swallows the ocean.

Ruth learned that Dr. Wenning had been born in Germany in 1919. She had been in America on a teaching fellowship when the United States entered the war. The head of the psychiatry department at the hospital in New Haven, also a Jew, had helped protect her from internment in the United States or exchange with the Third Reich, but most of her family had died in the camps, only an elder brother surviving.

By 1954, the year Ruth met Dr. Wenning, she had been teaching for many years at Yale, one of the first women on the faculty and distinguished for her research on trauma and memory.

There had been love in Ruth’s young life by then; she had loved Peter at first sight. But her love for Dr. Wenning was different: a slow love, a love that came at her in waves, each larger and more powerful than the one before.

So, Dr. Wenning would say at the end of those Saturday afternoons, rising from her desk just as the light began to change and appearing in her office door to smile upon Ruth.

Enough of our ceaseless labors for one day, she would say. Tell me what amazing thing you have dreamed last night, Ruth.

They sat at opposite ends of the enormous sofa in Dr. Wenning’s inner office, mugs of tea or milky Nescafé in their hands. Sometimes Dr. Wenning poured sherry for them.

Come, Dr. Wenning always said, patting the sofa cushions and making herself comfortable, as if she had all the time in the world.

I want all the details, she said. Do not be stingy with your narration, Ruth. You are an
Olympic
dreamer. I am very much interested.

Not until years later, long after Ruth and Peter had left New Haven, did Ruth fully recognize the kindness of Dr. Wenning’s attention to her during those years. She must have been terribly busy, Ruth realized, and terribly tired, carrying with her not only her own sad history but also the woes of so many other people. Yet she had made Ruth feel proud of her dreams, of the minute details she seemed able to remember.

Ruth would relate her dreams, and Dr. Wenning would rub her chin, listening.

Remarkable, she would say, as if Ruth had performed a surprising feat of memorization or mental agility, like being able to recite the alphabet backwards, which Ruth actually could do effortlessly. Once she performed this trick for Dr. Wenning, to Dr. Wenning’s apparent delight.

Your mind, Ruth! Dr. Wenning had tapped her own temple with a finger. It is really quite beautiful. Even the horrors of these dreams of yours—the specificity of them is remarkable. Artistic, of course, given your temperament.

She had leaned over and patted Ruth’s knee where she sat curled up at the end of the sofa.

These dreams will not trouble you forever, I think, she had said.

Look at you, Ruth. You were built for happiness. A picture of happiness.

Yet Ruth did not always feel happy. In the months before her marriage to Peter, she suffered another spell of aching curiosity about the blank document that was her past. Her mother’s identity was completely unknown to her and her father’s was
uncertain; who and where had she come from? The urgency of these spells had waxed and waned over the years. Sometimes it was as if she couldn’t think about anything else. At other times, she felt oddly released from the mystery of her past, as if its importance to her had simply floated away. Who cared, after all, who Ruth’s parents had been?

Yet as the date for the wedding approached, learning something—
anything
, she thought—had felt to her of increasing significance.

Doesn’t it matter to you? she asked Peter.

No, he said. I love
you
.

Then, at her expression, he said, Yes! Yes, of course, it does.

Finally, at Dr. Wenning’s suggestion, Ruth sent off formally typed inquiries—she struggled over the language of these letters, crumpling up sheet after sheet of paper—to the prison where her father’s life had ended and to the courthouse where the trial had been held. Finally a reply had come to her, brief and impersonal, from a government office. The prison facility had closed. Its records had been destroyed in a fire.

Dr. Wenning threw up her hands at this news, an eloquent drama of exasperation.