The Last First Day (7 page)

The other boys, including a younger child with beautiful brown skin and black eyes and hair, his posture erect, sat at the table in stoic silence. The boy’s beauty was striking. The child looked like royalty, his silence majestic. Nearly all the African American boys at the school were there by Peter’s hand; he found them through his connections at public schools in the state and secured funding from private sources for their tuition. He fretted endlessly that there weren’t enough of them. The school was predominantly white, and it wasn’t easy for the black boys.

Ruth stood at the table, waiting. Sometimes her height alone had the effect of silencing miscreant boys, but the fat boy continued speaking as if Ruth were not even there. The plates had not been cleared away. He took up eating, apparently where he had left off. He waved his fork, food dripping onto the tablecloth.

Negotiating is for cowards, he said in a tone that suggested someone was arguing with him. You don’t
negotiate
if you want to win.

Ruth pulled out her chair abruptly. Across the table, the beautiful boy avoided her gaze, looked down at his plate, his shoulders straight.

She cleared her throat.

Well, she began, interrupting the monologist.

Someone
, she said … tell me about your summer. What interesting things have you been doing?

Her dream from the afternoon pressed against her again, a brief, insistent demand. She had a flash of the canyon’s rose-colored walls, the impression of great silence. The room of chattering boys fell back. Then the dream slid away, and the room around her was restored.

She turned quickly to look over her shoulder at Peter—she had a strange, keen sense of missing him, as if she were departing for a long trip—but he was bent toward the boy beside him, his head inclined, listening, as he always did, intently.

They finished the meal, somehow. Coffee and cake were brought out, and then suddenly conversation died away. When she turned around, Peter had gotten to his feet across the room. He looked even more stooped than usual, she noticed, a result of the scoliosis the doctors had warned them about, part of the syndrome.

It was time now for him to retire, she thought.
Why
was he putting them through this? They might still go off and do something together, go somewhere, before it was too late. They hadn’t much money, she knew, but surely there was enough. She had been foolish, allowing Peter to handle all that—
making
him handle all that—as if she were a child.

At the last board meeting in May, Alec Brown, a trustee who’d been on the board for years and who had been a good
friend to Peter, had taken Ruth aside in the main room of the library while people had drinks there before dinner.

No one will ever fill Peter’s shoes, Ruth, Alec had said. You know that.

They had laughed about that for a minute—Peter’s feet, size fourteen, were notorious—but Ruth had known there was more coming.

Alec’s tone had been light, but then he had put a hand on her arm. See what you can do, Ruth, he said.

She had looked at his hand, then at his face.

Around them she had taken in the sound of merry conversation, ice clinking in glasses. Someone had pulled the long drapes against the glare of the setting sun, and the room was pleasantly cool, the windows open behind the curtains, and a breeze moving.

What if he just wanted to stay and teach? Ruth had taken a gulp of her drink, looked at Alec. He might agree to that, she said.

Alec had not met her eyes.

How about a trip somewhere? he said. It could be hard on a new guy, having Peter around. Hard on Peter, too.

He’d made an apologetic face. And, of course, you’ll have to leave the house, he said. There’s that.

I know, she said. But the truth was that she kept forgetting that fact.

Now she watched Peter, standing by his seat across the dining room. He was waiting for the boys to quiet, she knew.

Then, smiling, he made a sudden gesture with both hands, a benediction. Off with you.

The boys pushed back their chairs with a joyful sound.

Ruth folded her napkin. Beside her, the fat boy shoveled in cake. He had managed to put away two pieces, she saw, stacking the empty plates beside him like an emperor piling up picked-over carcasses of quail.

By the fireplace, Peter had his back to her again, talking with a handful of boys clustered around him.

It was difficult to resist the crowd moving her along. She allowed herself to be borne out the doors of the dining hall and down the waxed floors of the hallway toward the front entrance.

Jim McNulty, who taught history with Peter, went past her, squeezing her arm as he moved by. Balding, with a monk’s white tonsure and sad eyes, a medievalist by training, he had been Peter’s first hire at the school years and years ago. They hadn’t seen him over the summer—he had a place up on the coast, a cabin where he went for a couple of months every year. The sight of him now made her feel glad, the familiarity of him—an old friend, devoted to Peter—a comfort.

Jimmy, she said. I’m glad to see you. Poor Ed.

I know, he said. He shook his head. Awful.

Then he looked closely at her. Everything all right, darling? Peter’s been all right?

Yes, yes! she said, surprised.

Did she look unwell? she wondered. Did Peter?

We’re fine, she said. See you tonight?

He blew her a kiss, but then he was gone before she could say more.

• • •

Ruth loved listening to the boys’ choir at Derry, though she had to fight back tears when they sang “Soldier’s Hallelujah” or “Once in Royal David’s City” or even “Polly Wolly Doodle.” She knew it was idiotic, weeping over “Polly Wolly Doodle” or “Jim Along Josie,” but she couldn’t help it. Tonight they would sing the school song after Peter’s address. That, too, might unmoor her. It had been a day of feeling unmoored.

There had been so much to love about their lives at Derry. And now it felt as if it was slipping from their grasp.

For many years she’d worked shifts at the school’s tutoring center, where her enthusiasm for grammar and punctuation had helped buoy her spirits during sessions with glum boys and their awful essays about Petrarch or their pets or global warming. She brought chocolate chip cookies on the afternoons she worked.

The cookies went some distance toward cheering up the recalcitrant.

Her favorite job over the years had been working in the school’s infirmary, a duty that made her feel competent and kindly and brought out a fussy, bossy Florence Nightingale streak in her. She liked bustling around, fixing glasses of ginger ale with bent straws, cutting the crusts off toast triangles, tucking a flower or two into a vase on a tray. It had not been difficult for her to be patient with boys who were sick. She played gin rummy or Russian Bank with them, read to them for hours from
Treasure Island
or from Sherlock Holmes. She took temperatures, chattering away cheerfully while the boys held the thermometers in their mouths, lips closed, eyes on her face. It
was funny, she thought, how her habitual shyness disappeared at those times.

Over the years she had often been asked to take the night shift at the infirmary, when they were short-staffed. She never minded the hours sitting in the moonlight in a chair in a boy’s room, watching him sleep. Sometimes she dozed, her chin on her chest, but mostly she found herself wakeful, gazing for so long at a boy’s features as he slept that his face seemed to pass through a thousand expressions as she watched, his eyelids moving, his lips opening and closing, a fist coming up to brush an ear or graze a cheek.

The infirmary’s west windows looked out over the lake. If the night was warm, she opened the window and listened to the water, the chorus of frogs, the little lapping sounds against the shore, or, if the dam was overflowing, the steady sound of water going over the sluice. These were times of absolute peace for her. There was nothing else she ought to be doing, nowhere else more necessary for her to be. Somewhere, she knew, other people were doing more important things, but when the moonlight fell into the room, she felt herself and the sleeping child joined together in a powerful embrace, and she watched over her charge as if guarding a prince.

At those times she felt, she imagined, some measure of what it might have been like to love a child of her own.

She did not leave the boy, whoever she was watching, until his eyes opened in the morning.

Then she’d smile and stand up, smoothing down her skirt.

Welcome back, she’d say.

• • •

She’d always liked listening to Peter’s speech on the first night of the year. She had never grown immune to the cheering nature of his remarks, the sense he conveyed to the boys that they were beginning—that the whole community was beginning together—a great adventure. Yet now as she left the dining hall, the open doors of the main building ahead of her and a glimpse of the night sky through them, she felt desperate to get outside.

This day could not end quickly enough, she thought.

She stepped outside onto the building’s landing above the flight of steps. The night sky, a red band at the horizon, opened up, star filled.

A knot of boys, shouting and grappling and roughhousing, their shirttails untucked and their ties loosened, passed her.

Hi, Mrs. van Dusen, someone said.

Hi there, she said. Careful!

She hung back against a column. The boys went past her down the steps and out into the crowd, disappearing into the evening’s darkness, headed toward the chapel.

The night air was a relief against her skin, as if she’d plunged her arms and face into a pool of cool water. It was always overheated in the dining hall, and her haste earlier in the evening, everything that had happened with Ed, had made her feel dirty. She liked being outside at night anyway, the vertiginous assertion of scale that always followed. Sometimes, she thought, it was a perfect relief to be an infinitesimal presence on the face of the planet.

She watched the boys passing her, aware as always of the extremes among them. Some of them were as beautiful as
Greek statues, marble youths of classical antiquity with lambs borne across their shoulders. Another, unhappy group moved sullenly among these athletes and scholars, their manner simultaneously pained and aggressive, as if they understood how poorly they compared to their beautiful brethren and suffered for it.

She put her palm against the column on the landing and lifted her gaze. Tatters of night clouds floated near the moon. The stars seemed to be clustered high up in the darkest part of the sky. Something about their distant position was a reminder of the scope of the universe. Tonight, she knew, Peter would ask the boys to pray for Ed McClaren. He would tell them how lucky they were, every day the gift of an education laid at their feet, a hot dinner prepared for them at night, pancakes for breakfast, doughnuts on Fridays. A cheer would go up at the mention of the famous doughnuts.

Peter gave the same speech every year, absolutely earnest, and he meant every bit of it.

She knew he got on people’s nerves sometimes. He was mulishly tolerant, tiresomely reasonable and conciliatory. There was not much irony in Peter, and some people—bad people, she thought—just plain hated sincerity. But the school would never find anyone who loved it as much as Peter had, someone who loved it without care for his own regard. Tonight he would mention the beauty of the campus, the lovely old buildings and the playing fields planted in grass so green and soft you wanted to lie down and rest your cheek there. For Peter, the bloom of romance—the goodness of the school’s initial purpose, the grief of the parents who had lost their child so long ago and who
had wanted, in the wake of that loss, to help other boys—had never left his impression of the place. Ruth knew that some of the boys, especially the scholarship boys plucked from whatever misfortune had shaped their lives, would see it tonight as Peter asked them to see it. They would feel their luck, along with their shyness and their worry about being in a new place among strangers, just as she and Peter had felt their luck when they had arrived so many years ago.

It was for those boys especially that Peter worked so hard.

When she had weeded the flower bed this afternoon, the sunlight had been warm on the back of her neck and against her shoulder. But tonight in the air’s coolness she could feel the winter ahead. She had been thinking, as she always did at this time of year, of the poem by Keats, his season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Ever since she’d been taught this work in college, fragments of its lines had come to her as fall approached.
Bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run
 … 
while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
 … 
then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows
 …

One didn’t want to hurry toward one’s end, she thought, and yet one longed nonetheless for the days to unfold. Kneeling at the edge of the driveway and pulling weeds earlier in the day, she’d felt that brief flare of pure contentment. The storms would skirt them. The evening’s party would be a success. Another year was about to begin. She wanted now to recapture that feeling, that respite in the middle of the afternoon when she had not worried. But it was as Keats had written. One could never get completely away from melancholy. The beginning of things always contained their end.

• • •

She began to make her way down the steps and was almost at the bottom when three boys, a chase in progress, dodged past her. Howls of encouragement went up from the others. The boy in the lead, freckle-skinned, hair close-cropped, long grasshopper arms and legs, went down the steps three at a time, knocking into her as he went past. Ruth stumbled forward, snatched at the air. She grazed the head of the boy before her, his hair in her fingers for an instant, soft as silk.

Sorry, Mrs. van Dusen! someone called.

She righted herself on the steps, flapping helplessly, trying for comic effect.

It’s all right! she called. Don’t mind me!

On the sidewalk, boys streamed toward the chapel, chattering and laughing, bumping shoulders.