The Last First Day (6 page)

In the basement she picked her way hesitantly through the welter of boxes and cobwebs, the crumbling hills of damp rot. It was cold down there, something rancid-smelling somewhere.

At the fuse box, she trained the flashlight over the circuits with their faded labels of masking tape and flipped the breaker.

For a moment there was nothing. After a pause, she felt the house shudder, heard it buzz back to life above her head.

She climbed the stairs, her hand on the cool, smooth old wooden railing. Peter was certainly worrying about her now.

In the front hall, she stopped to look in the mirror one last time. There was a smudge across her cheek. She licked her finger and rubbed at it.

Then, from upstairs, she heard a sound. Footsteps?

She went to the bottom of the stairs and listened. Peter? she called. Is that you?

But there was no answer.

She must have been imagining it.

Five minutes later, on the lawn below the school’s dining hall, she stopped to take off her shoes. They were her good shoes, seldom worn and uncomfortable, and she could not run in them. Still, she hoped no one looked out a window and saw her, the old headmaster’s wife, undignified in her stocking feet, carrying her shoes and hurrying up the hillside.

Early-evening light fell over the empty lawns and against the buildings. The Virginia creeper covering the brick was two stories high in some places and darkly lustrous. Birds streamed across the sky, flying straight at the walls and disappearing into them as if diving into water. She never tired of watching this. Here and there sections of the foliage shivered, where birds nesting in it settled for the night. Walking along the paths in the evening, Ruth liked it when the walls beside her rustled in the darkness. It was as if the buildings themselves were alive, big creatures made of brick and mortar, stirring under their green skin.

The school buildings appeared completely deserted, but as she climbed the hill, a muffled, orchestral din from the open windows of the dining hall reached her, the sounds of striking silverware and clattering dishes, the boys’ voices carrying over the silent evening, the cacophony strange, almost otherworldly.
Invisible diners, Ruth thought, condemned forever to their invisible supper.

The air had a porcelain calm, no sign of the storms predicted earlier, the tornadoes gathering their evil intentions somewhere. She beheld the scene ahead of her: the ring of buildings at the top of the hill, the streetlamps scattered along the curving drive, their white lights penumbral in the early-evening haze. The maze of shadows from the great trees lay across the velvet hillside.

She hated to go inside and leave it all. She wanted to lie down in the air full of sweet, grassy ripeness and watch the stars come out.

The day was cooling, at last, but her haste had made her warm. Vibrating clouds of gnats assembled and then dispersed above the grass, specks before her eyes. She raised her arm to her damp forehead, moved her shoes to her other hand.

The carillon bells rang the hour.

A moment later, in the silence following the ringing of the bells, she realized that the sounds coming from the dining hall had ceased abruptly.

She paused on the grass. It was not her hearing, she thought, yet there was no sound at all: no knife scraping against a plate, no glass chiming against glass, no human voice. The silence felt like a hood had been dropped over her head.

Two swallows, dipping and swerving, approached, crossing the lawn before her, startling her with their nearness. They veered away toward the horizon of the black woods. Her skin
had gone cold, as if a damp cloth had been passed over her bare arms.

Then a bird’s sweet little note hung for a moment in the silence. It repeated in a questioning tone and then once more, plaintively.

Something
had happened to make them all go quiet like that in the dining hall.

She loved the beautiful old room in which the boys and teachers took their meals, the dark oak beams across the high ceiling, and the bands of light from the tall windows crossing overhead. In the oceanic darkness below, forty round tables with their white tablecloths floated in the shadows, and two hundred boys bowed their heads over their plates. Steam rose from the regiment of tarnished coffee urns along the wall, the radiators ticking and hissing, the air above them rippling. From the kitchen came the yeasty odors of milk and meat and cooked vegetables and, behind those, the sour fumes of bleach and laundry starch and drain water from the dish room.

In the winter, Ruth cut boughs of evergreens and holly and decorated the mantel over the vast fireplace. In spring, she used daffodils and wands of forsythia for the tables.

The sad, sweet bird’s note sounded again on the hillside, hanging in the air, a question.

As she neared the flight of granite steps that led up to the building, the approaching siren of an ambulance coming up the main road reached her. She ran up the stairs, trying to hook her shoes on her feet as she went.

In the long hallway—cool compared with the afternoon’s warmth outside—the eyes in the old portraits lining the walls
seemed to stare down at her, all of them men in Episcopal vestments, the white of a clerical collar at every neck like a cold dab of snow against the field of black pigment.

At the far end of the hallway, a group of boys, heads together, stood in silence at the doorway to the dining hall. They turned toward her as she approached.

She tried to calm her voice. What happened? she said, reaching them.

It’s Dr. McClaren, one of the boys said. He fainted.

She put her hand to her heart.

It had not been Peter.

The ambulance is coming, she said. There was an unpleasant lump in her throat, a knot of fear now dissolving.

She patted one of the boys on the arm.

Not to worry, she said, and went past them into the dining hall.

She saw Ed McClaren on the floor between the tables, surrounded by a semicircle of worried onlookers. He was at least a decade younger than she and Peter, Ruth thought. Florid, with a fold of stomach over his belt, he was divorced. What else did she know about him? He had been at the school for only a year, a post-retirement job from a small college somewhere in the South. He taught physics and coached the wrestlers.

His eyes were open, but his skin was a ghastly shade, his lips colorless.

Peter was on one knee beside him, a hand on his shoulder. When Ruth stepped forward, Peter glanced up at her over the top of his glasses.

He would wonder where she had been, she knew, but there
was no reproach in his expression. He was, as always, slow to blame, quick to forgive. If anything, he was inclined too often to take upon himself the faults of others.

Once, meanly, she had accused him of playing the martyr.

He had agreed with her, apologized for it. He had a need to comfort the world.

Well, there were worse things.

Now they exchanged a grave look.

Not this time, Ruth said to him with her eyes.

Sometime, of course, his gaze said back. But not now.

Ten years before, Peter had been diagnosed with the late onset of a genetic syndrome that produced, among other effects, immoderate height.

Already a tall man—six feet by the time he was fifteen, six feet four inches by the time he graduated from college—he was now nearly six feet seven inches tall. Ruth knew that eyes inevitably were drawn to him in a room, to the head and heavy-lidded eyes, the thick, soft white hair, the long arms and developing hunchback.

His face, she thought, looked more and more like something carved from rock and trying to return to its original state, the brow jutting, and the jaw pronounced. This, too, the coarsening of his handsome features, was part of the syndrome. He had been an extraordinarily good-looking man when young. Something remaining in his expression—a basic good nature, Ruth thought—invariably made people feel that he understood them and would take their side. He had a way of drawing confidences
from the boys and from teachers without ever saying much himself.

Ruth heard commotion behind them. A paramedic team toting boxes and equipment appeared beside her at the edge of the circle gathered around Ed. An older man with a comically bushy mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, and a young woman, muscled as a boxer, her hair in a high, tight ponytail, moved in with calm dispatch.

Hi there, the young woman said, pulling out a stethoscope. Let’s have a little room here, folks. Thank you.

People shuffled out of the way.

I’m fine, Ed said, his voice soft, as if apologizing for the trouble he’d created. Then, as if someone had jumped hard onto his stomach, he turned his head to the side and vomited violently onto the floor.

The crowd leaped away.

Peter glanced back up at Ruth.

She felt a cold hand run up her legs, a buzzing in her ears.

I’ll go get the mop, she said quietly.

She pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen, where a radio was playing. The head cook—a huge black man, a former MP in Vietnam—glanced up at her from the big sink.

I need the mop and bucket, Clarence, Ruth said.

He shook his head. That’s no good, he said.

A thin young man in a soiled white apron—Ruth recognized him but could not remember his name; it was difficult to keep kitchen help, and he was a newcomer—went away into
the dish room and came back pushing the wheeled mop bucket filled with suds.

Her eyes watered against the astringency of the cleaning fluid, but she was grateful for its sharp smell.

I’ll take care of that, Clarence said, coming forward.

It’s all right, Ruth said. You have enough to do in here. Thank you, though.

In the dining room, the paramedics had unfolded a stretcher onto which they now hoisted Ed without ceremony.

Tears had left tracks on his face. I can’t breathe, he said suddenly, his voice panicked.

The young woman paramedic put her hand on his arm and turned her face to speak rapidly—a series of unintelligible words—into a crackling radio mounted on her shoulder.

You’re fine, she said, snapping an oxygen mask over his face. Blood pressure’s good, pulse is fine. You’re going to be fine, sir. You diabetic, by any chance? Smoker?

Ed nodded—Ruth knew he was a heavy smoker—his eyes pleading.

The paramedics moved swiftly now, pushing the stretcher, teachers and boys shoving away the tables and chairs with a horrendous noise to clear a path. The paramedics’ radio squeaked and buzzed. The young woman, one hand at the stretcher’s head, repeated a series of numbers into it.

In seconds they were gone.

Ruth plunged the mop into the bucket and swabbed the floor. The whole evening, the whole day, she felt had been drawing toward this. Yet she knew it was irrational;
nothing
had happened today. Absolutely nothing.

Around her the boys and teachers pulled the tables back into place. She wrung out the mop, grateful again for the ammoniac smell of the cleaner. Well, it was no trouble to mop. One could manage that.

All their years here, she thought, hers and Peter’s … this was the life they had led.

She felt an absurd surprise at this recognition. How ridiculous, that this fact should appear to have crept up on her, ambushed her. Of course, this had been their life.

There would be nothing else beyond this for them, for her and Peter, she realized.

She turned the crank to wring the mop again. Her strange dream from earlier, in which she had been alone in that desolate and beautiful place that somehow had felt so much like home, came back to her. Her eyes prickled.

Oh, she was too sensitive; this was Ed McClaren’s awful moment, not her own. As Dr. Wenning had always said, sensitive people were the worst tyrants.

Peter appeared at her elbow.

He took the mop from her—automatic, his chivalry—but then he held it absently, as if he’d forgotten what to do with it.

I sent Andy to the hospital with them, he said.

Andy Whitmore, Peter’s oldest colleague, teacher of Greek and Latin, reed-thin and a master of calm and civility; he would be of comfort to Ed, Ruth thought. And perhaps there would be someone else they could call, too. Surely there was someone in Ed’s life …

Peter’s face looked gray, blue pouches beneath his eyes.

Poor man, Ruth said. Then she said, Are you all right?

Peter put the mop in the bucket. I’d like to get the boys back, he said. Better to have them finish up dinner. Do you mind taking Ed’s table?

Peter always distributed the teachers among the boys at dinner on the first night. These groups would then reconvene periodically over the year for dinner and to debate various questions Peter devised, usually ethical dilemmas: Whom would you save first in a fire, a baby or an old person? Is it right to steal goods acquired unfairly by another in order to help someone else? When is lying acceptable? Sometimes Ruth and Peter lay in bed and tried to dream up new, impossible predicaments; it was challenging to create a roster of original dilemmas so that a boy never faced the same question twice.

Of course, she said. Then she added, I fell asleep at home. I’m sorry I was late.

Peter didn’t seem to hear her.

He turned away from her. Please return to your seats, he said, raising his voice. The boys stood around in murmuring groups.

It’s all right, Peter called. Back to your tables, please. Finish up, and then there’s cake and coffee. Dr. McClaren is in good hands.

He made shepherding motions with his arms, smiling.

Come along, he said, touching the boys’ shoulders as he moved through the room, firm but gentle.

Everything’s all right now. Good boys.

At the table where Ed McClaren had been presiding, an overweight boy—no chin, no neck, no shoulders to speak of, his
eyes an unnerving green, like those of a malevolent Irish silkie, Ruth thought—had already restored what Ruth suspected had been an unrelenting siege over the group. He barely glanced at Ruth when she appeared, unwilling—perhaps actually
unable
, she thought—to interrupt what she could tell immediately was a screed about the upcoming presidential election. Ruth and Peter were longtime devoted Democrats. Ruth, especially, would not hear a word against Barack Obama.