The Last First Day (16 page)

Or sometimes the hinterland is a forest, Dr. Wenning had said, the trees so close together that we cannot see a path between them, only darkness or emptiness everywhere we look. We do not know which way to turn. It is not a place for citizenship, the hinterland. It is no kind of place, and so our instinct is to keep going, keep on walking. Eventually, though, so long, as you do not give up, you find your way
out
of the hinterland. That is the nature of it. It is only a middle ground, a location that separates one place from another.

Someone had touched Ruth on the shoulder, indicating the
seats just beyond them. Ruth had moved her legs out of the way, hoisted Dr. Wenning’s big handbag onto her own lap.

Ah, I go on and on, Dr. Wenning had said, when the stranger had passed.

You know me, she had said. How I love a metaphor. I should have been a poet.

But still—she began again as if Ruth had been about to interrupt her—for these voyages, Ruth, she said, these passages through the hinterland, what we need is a companion, a friend at our side.

She had leaned over and patted Ruth’s hand.

All right, my dear, she’d said. Now the music begins.

After Dr. Wenning passed away, it was difficult for Ruth to make herself believe that her friend, as Peter suggested, was somehow near her. But sometimes she could manage it: first the curtain in the hospital drawn across the room where Mr. Mitzotakis lay, then the cigarette smoke, then the bright color of the oranges, their scent so sweet and strong, and then the sound of big wingbeats, the feel of air moving against her cheek.

A year after Peter’s stroke, his speech nearly fully restored—only the right side of his face drooped a bit, his right leg still a little slow and clumsy—they drove to a nearby inn to
celebrate his recovery. Peter sat in the passenger seat beside her, dozing.

Getting out of the car at the inn, he gave her his hand so she could help him and smiled his lopsided smile at her.

The inn was just as she had imagined it would be, very pretty, with a wine list and a good menu, nice little shampoos and so on in the bathroom. She unscrewed the caps and sniffed the contents, pleased.

The next afternoon, they borrowed one of the canoes, took it out onto the lake. It was fall, the shoreline reflected in a brilliant rim on the surface of the water. They paddled for an hour or so, not speaking much. When they arrived back at the inn’s boathouse to return the canoe, another couple, much younger, was also returning their boat. The woman was attractive, tiny and lovely and neat in the way that Ruth, invariably the tallest woman in the room, her big breasts pulling her shoulders forward, had always envied.

She’d always wanted to be a tiny, skinny blonde.

This woman now was exactly that: blond, her hair expertly colored and cut. She wore a pair of tight black shorts, like the sort bicyclists wear.

When they pulled up to the dock, Peter insisted on climbing out first—ever the gentleman—to steady the canoe for Ruth.

Heart of a lion, Peter, Ruth said to him sometimes, fondly.

Ruth noticed the attractive young woman glance at Peter, the still handsome, rough lines of his face, the silver hair falling boyishly over his forehead.

Peter held out his hand. He was sweating, and there were rings of wet on his gray T-shirt under his arms. His fingers
closed around her hand, and she gripped back, holding on. For a minute the canoe wobbled underneath her, and she thought she might fall. She was too heavy these days. It was all that sitting around with Peter, she thought, playing cards with him to help him recover his dexterity. She couldn’t play cards without wanting to eat some nuts.

Oh, I’m so
fat
, she had complained the night before, toweling off after a hot bath, glancing at—and then averting her gaze from—her image in the mirror.

Peter had been slowly knotting his tie, frowning and lifting his chin in that way he had.

You’re beautiful, he said.

He had never been unfaithful to her, she thought. There had been that painful period long ago, when they were very young, long before they were married, when they hadn’t seen each other for a while. She imagined that maybe he had slept with someone else then, maybe even a couple of someones, though they hadn’t ever discussed it. There might even have been prostitutes, for all she knew. Young men used to do that. It had been more acceptable back then in a way, certain kinds of prostitutes like good-natured old friends or teachers, casual and a little carnal, teaching young men how to relax.

Now, on the dock, Peter pulled, surprisingly strong, and she stood up, the canoe bobbing dangerously beneath her. A moment later she was safe on the dock.

Oopsie daisy! Peter said.

What a funny, old-fashioned expression, she thought. It made the tears come into her eyes.

That was a nice day, she said, as they walked up the leafy path to the inn, the late-afternoon sunlight falling down through the trees.

Yes, it was, he agreed.

She took his arm.

They made love before dinner, that business not so easy as it once was, it was true, but then you didn’t really mind so much about that anymore, either. You did the best you could. Yet the old longing was still there between them. When Peter pulled her against him, her back to his belly, when he kissed her neck, ran his hand down her side, following the dip of her waist and the rise of her hip, she still felt that old heat.

At dinner, they shared a nice bottle of wine in the inn’s pleasant dining room, curtains drawn against the dark window glass. She ordered fish, as usual, and Peter ordered a steak, and then he fell asleep in bed before the nightly news had finished on the television: the deadly account of casualties from the war in the Middle East; footage of endangered harp seals in the Canadian Gulf of St. Lawrence; the revelation of comical indiscretions on the part of a politician in Washington, his name—unbelievably—Weiner.

Oh, for god’s sake, Ruth said, holding the television remote, speaking out loud to no one in the pretty bedroom at the inn, for Peter was snoring beside her.

Oh, their heartbreaking faces, those seals. Their gray whiskers.

The dog’s gray muzzle, she remembered. The man’s face.

The faces of the many boys from Derry, the beautiful and the not beautiful, the lucky and the unlucky.

Sometimes, when she was alone, she actually spoke aloud to Dr. Wenning. Are you there? she asked the empty air.

For a while that night, Ruth lay awake beside Peter in the dark, looking out the unfamiliar open window into the night sky blazing with stars. There seemed to be more stars than usual here, a conference of them, all gathered together.

She put her hand on Peter’s back, spread her fingers against his warm skin and rested it there until she felt his pulse against her palm.

You never knew how much happiness—or how much unhappiness—would be delivered to you in a lifetime, no matter whether you deserved it or not. So there was really nothing to be done, as Dr. Wenning had said, but get on the bus.

Get on the bus, Ruth, she said. Make love, not war. Give strangers a piece of your heart. Sing “Kumbayah.”

Ruth had rolled her eyes.

But Dr. Wenning had loved that song. A woman who had lost everyone in her family to the Nazis had loved “Kumbayah.”

Do you know what it means, Ruth, that word? Dr. Wenning had asked. It means Come by here.

I would like to say that to God sometimes, Dr. Wenning said. Hey, God. Come by here, please. I need your attention for just a minute.

Ruth stroked Peter’s back lightly, softly, with her fingertips. He had the softest skin, Peter, like a baby’s. Even his feet, so big and white, were soft.

He made a little noise, a little snore like a hiccup in the quiet of the room, and then all was silent again.

She thought of the stars and the lake and the forest around them, the gentle, brilliant darkness. Surely goodness and mercy, Ruth thought.

Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me.

A few days after Peter’s stroke, Ruth’s car had been recovered near an entrance to the Appalachian Trail in northern Maine. Someone—the man, presumably—had left a little bier of stones at the signpost, the dog’s dead body, legs tucked in neatly, nose curled to tail, beneath the heap.

Of the man himself, there was no trace. He had disappeared into the forest, back to whatever awful dark place he had come from, she assumed.

She started awake occasionally in the middle of the night, the terrible stuffed animal through whom the man had spoken snarling at her. But mostly what she felt about the whole incident was sadness, not fear. Not anymore.

Charlie Finney had driven her home from the hospital that night, after she’d seen Peter and had spoken with the doctors. Peter had been able to smile crookedly at her, to lift his hand and let her hold it. She had gripped his hand hard—probably hard enough to hurt him—and kissed his knuckles, weeping.

He wasn’t entirely out of the woods, the doctors had said that night, but they were pretty confident he’d be all right. He’d been lucky.

At the house, Charlie had gotten out to open the car door for her, and she had given him her hand, let him help her. It had stopped raining by then. The storm had blown through, leaving
branches littered across the lawn, another shutter down, crashed into the bushes beneath the kitchen window. But there was no worse damage, as far as she could see.

Will you be all right, Ruth? Charlie had asked, and she had kissed his cheek, patted his shoulder.

Go on home, Charlie, she said. Thank you for your help. It’s been an awfully long day.

She had turned toward the house. Somehow, the front door had been left open—or perhaps the wind had blown it open—and inside the house was lit up, lights on in the front hall and the living room and in the kitchen, just as if the party were still going on, the drink glasses glinting on the tray, the dishes of nuts, the triumphant heads of the lilies in their vase on the hall table, the speckled brown Comice pears in the blue bowl … pears she had arranged earlier that very morning. It seemed a lifetime ago.

She walked toward the bright light, waving over her shoulder at Charlie, knowing it would all be just as she had left it, the impression of her head on the pillow and Peter somewhere nearby, still in the world.

Ruth was twelve years old when she and her father arrived in Wells, Massachusetts, just before dawn on the morning of July 4, 1945. In her memory, they had never lived anywhere for longer than a few months. She did not know how often they had moved in the time before she could remember, through how many streets, in how many cities—over how many fields or across what bodies of water—her infant self might have been carried, wide-eyed and seeing but without knowledge or consequence.

She had been born in Detroit, her father said.

After that?

He shuffled a deck of cards, dealt them each a hand. It would be impossible, he said, for him to recall exactly the sequence of their moves.

Ruth understood that her father had been spared military service during the war because he was her only parent. He was an auctioneer, running farm and home and business sales for people in straitened circumstances, families that had lost their men overseas or whose fathers and husbands had returned too shattered to work. Auctions, Ruth had learned, often followed
in the wake of defeat or death. Standing with her father at fences inspecting pastures or barns, or walking with him through dusty, darkened stores or hushed houses, she heard the stories about foreclosure and ruin, the men found swaying from barn rafters. The years before and during the war had been a time of loss and a terrible privation, she understood. The stories behind an auction were rarely happy ones, and her father did not talk about them.

But you are
helping
people, Ruth said, wanting to understand his work in this light.

He hesitated. In a way, he said.

But sometimes, he said, people hated the man who sold everything they’d spent a lifetime working hard to acquire.

A town gets used up, was how he always put it. Time to move on.

Yet she knew that it was not
just
this that made her father come home one night in place after place and announce that they would leave that evening or the next one, that he had a new home for them, a better prospect. There was something wrong in her father’s life, in their life together. She understood this, but being so close to it perhaps, she told Peter later, she had not been able to see it clearly. Its presence was felt but invisible, a disturbance in the air like a cloud of tiny insects, buzzing a warning.

There would be work in Massachusetts, her father said. The town of Wells was near both Boston and Providence, close to the sea and to farmland, to country and city, and he had sent away for a local newspaper from there in order to find a place
for them to live, to make necessary arrangements. In the car on the long trip from Roanoke, Virginia, where they had been living, to Massachusetts, Ruth studied the map, holding a flashlight over it. Wells did not appear to her to be near anything except the Atlantic Ocean, on the map an expanse of pale blue emptiness.

They drove all night, but the sky was still dark when they pulled onto the street where the house her father had rented was located. He stopped the car under a tree, a deeper darkness, and took off his glasses. He made a sound of fatigue, leaned his head back against the headrest, and closed his eyes.

Are we going in? Ruth asked.

He did not open his eyes. We don’t want to disturb people in the middle of the night, he said.

Ruth rolled down the car window. Her father had been smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee to keep awake, and the inside of the car smelled sour. She wanted to get out. She thought she could hear the ocean a few blocks away.

Go ahead, her father said, as if he could read her thoughts. But he didn’t move, didn’t rummage for a key in his pocket and hand it to her. The dark house with its aluminum awnings over the windows appeared forbidding, like a place where something bad might have happened. Ruth knew that her father understood she wouldn’t go in without him. He slept, his bottom lip sucked in, as if he had no lower teeth.