The Last First Day (18 page)

At his auctions, when he began to call for bids using that strange song-like chanting, running up and down the numbers in increments of five or ten, pointing to people in the crowd, it was as if someone else emerged from inside him, another person he could summon or stifle at will. People paid attention to this person, Ruth saw, as if their lives depended on him. It was as if he hypnotized them.

When she was young, her father had given her tongue twisters, difficult phrases he could recite without error.

Round the rough and rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.

Once a fellow met a fellow in a field of beans. Said a fellow to a fellow—if a fellow asks a fellow, can a fellow tell a fellow what a fellow means?

These phrases, so problematic, so thorny to repeat, so liable to lead her into foolishness, tripping over her own tongue, seemed later to her like riddles her father offered, enigmatic sayings that were as close as he could come to explaining himself to her.

The ragged rascal.

The meaningless fellow, standing in his field of beans.

• • •

Sometimes her father sat at the table in whatever place they lived, a cigarette held in his mouth, and drew pictures, elaborate floor plans, of houses he would build one day. He wanted a swimming pool and a tennis court. He wanted fireplaces in every bedroom, and window seats, and bathrooms with big bathtubs. He wanted dumbwaiters and butler’s pantries with glass-fronted cupboards, a study with paneled walls, a porch with pillars and a portico under which they would park their car. He was going to be rich one day, he said. He was not meant to be a poor man.

He knew little symbols for things on his drawings, like how to depict the shapes of trees and to indicate which way a door would swing. Sometimes Ruth leaned on her elbows and watched him draw: he had a special mechanical pencil and a sheaf of graph paper.

Looking for the right place, Ruth, he said. Got to find the right place.

That evening as the sun began to set, after a supper of baked beans and hot dogs, purchased along with a few other supplies from the grocery, Ruth and her father followed people making their way up the paths in the dunes. Around them the grass lay flattened by the wind. Ruth could hear the ocean ahead of them as they climbed, louder now and sounding nearer than it had earlier in the day. The tide had come in, she saw, when they reached the top of the dunes, and the wind had picked up. Against the sunset, huge horizontal slabs of clouds like black railroad cars stood along the horizon.

Her father spread out his jacket on the sand for her. She was embarrassed that they had no blanket. They sat down among old people in folding aluminum chairs, families with babies and small children arrayed on quilts. She felt people glance at them from time to time, strangers. Ruth looked up and down the beach; would she recognize the boy on the bicycle if she saw him again?

Soon, though, it was too dark to make out anyone’s face.

The rockets, set off from a position some distance down the shoreline, made a high whistling sound overhead, exploding in the night sky far out past the advancing white line of the breakers. Showers of sparks rained into the blackness of the sea.

The people all around them cheered and clapped, and Ruth clapped, too.

Her father bent his head and cupped his hands around a match, lit cigarette after cigarette.

At the close of the fireworks show, a band assembled on the dunes played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and everyone stood and sang, including Ruth and her father, the notes lost in the sound of the wind and the waves. Afterward they walked back through the warm streets in the crowd leaving the beach. Some of the men had dressed in uniform that night, to mark the occasion. Ruth did not know if her father was embarrassed not to have gone to war or was glad to have been spared. He carried his jacket now, hooked with one finger over his shoulder, and he did not look at the people around them, offering only an occasional nod in someone’s direction.

Away from the commotion of the surf and the fireworks, the streets were quiet, the air in the tunnels of trees sweet-smelling
and soft. The velvet lawns and shadowy porches contained a rapt silence. The procession under the streetlights thinned gradually, families turning off and climbing the steps to their own houses. Fathers laden with picnic baskets and blankets and mothers carrying sleeping babies in their arms called good night to their neighbors as they left the stream of people walking home under the stars.

At a cross street, Ruth’s father hesitated.

Ruth glanced up at him.

His expression was alert, suspicious, as if in their absence that evening someone had deliberately sought to confuse them, rearranging street signs, moving trees and shrubs, cleverly altering the facades of buildings.

A car drove slowly past them. Then another.

Her father turned and looked back the way they had come. He ground out a cigarette under his shoe.

But it was all right, Ruth saw after a minute. They had only walked past it, she said, pointing. They had just gone too far.

Next door to their house, an elderly man with a deeply wrinkled face, wearing suspenders and a bow tie, and a younger woman Ruth assumed was the man’s daughter—something alike in their faces—sat side by side on a porch swing in the shadows. Ruth saw their heads turn, watching as she and her father came back along the sidewalk and then came up the path.

Ruth’s father unlocked the front door of their house and held it open for her.

Ruth lifted her hand in greeting to the people watching them from the porch. As she ducked under her father’s arm, she
saw him nod once in the neighbors’ direction before coming in behind her and closing the door.

They would know by that nod, she thought, that he had seen them watching.

The next morning was Sunday. Ruth woke to the sound of a lawn mower in the backyard and, farther away, a descending sequence of church bells. She and her father did not attend church, but wherever they lived, he was scrupulous about keeping the grass mowed. If he brought a kitchen chair outside to sit and smoke a cigarette at night, he always took it back inside before going to bed, locking the door and then putting his shoulder to it for a minute as if to test it against intruders. Later she understood this behavior as part of her father’s bizarre carefulness, the fearfulness of people who are themselves a danger to others.

The grass in the backyard of the house was full of clover. The day before, when they’d arrived, Ruth’s father had unlocked the kitchen door and stepped onto the concrete patio, testing the stiff crank of the awning and unrolling a faded, striped canvas speckled with mold. He had stepped down into the overgrown grass and scuffed the shiny toe of his shoe through it. She had trailed behind him out to the garage, where he’d wrenched open the doors, allowing a parallelogram of light to fall into the darkness and revealing a lawn mower and a gas can, along with shovels and an axe and a coil of rope.

He’d hefted the gas can.

Enough here to get the job done, he’d said. There’ll be ticks in that grass.

Ruth lay now in the unfamiliar bed, listening to the lawn mower drone. The neighborhood was otherwise quiet. She assumed that their neighbors were at church. This had been the case in the other towns where they’d lived.

The lawn mower’s sound was solitary and conspicuous. Ruth wished her father had left the grass until later in the day. She hated Sunday mornings. They made her feel as if she and her father—overlooked, oblivious—were the last people on earth, everyone else gone away somewhere, called to important business, she and her father somehow miscreant, the eternal outsiders. She could even imagine that everyone else had died, leaving her and her father alone in the world. She could picture it, even though she didn’t want to: grandfathers sagged against newel posts at the foot of staircases, children sprawled on their bellies across beds, mothers crumpled by kitchen tables, a brimming watering can fallen to the floor, water pooling across a carpet.

Ruth rolled over in bed and looked out the unfamiliar window of her new bedroom. The morning was overcast, the sky full of creased clouds. Finally, hungry and thirsty, she went downstairs to the kitchen. The walls were covered halfway up in pale green tiles, the grout between them grimy. Her father had made coffee in their percolator, one of the few possessions he carried from place to place. She stood in front of the stove in her bare feet, eating a piece of bread and butter and heating milk in a pan.

As she stood there, she heard the lawn mower in the backyard sputter in an escalating series of loud knocks and then cut off.

She waited in front of the stove, stirring. It took another minute for the milk in the pan to begin to foam.

Outside, the sound of the lawn mower did not begin again. Nor did her father come back inside.

When the milk was hot, she poured it into the cup and added coffee until it was the color she liked. Then, holding her coffee cup and her book—she was reading
Alice in Wonderland
again—she walked through the airless rooms and pushed open the door to the porch with her hip.

Thirty yards away at the far end of the long yard, her father crouched beside the mower, his back to her.

The day was warm, but he was dressed, as usual, in suit pants and a white dress shirt, the sleeves neatly rolled. He had done a third of the lawn, going back and forth between the house and the stucco garage. There were no flowers in the backyard, just a weedy rose of Sharon against the wall. The doors of the garage stood open, the red gas can on the gravel.

Ruth put down her cup, trying not to spill. Then she sat down on the concrete floor of the porch and extended her legs past the shade of the faded awning into the sunlight.

Her father closed the lid of the mower, stood up, and pulled the cord. The engine failed to catch.

On Ruth’s legs, the sunlight felt hot. She watched her father take a handkerchief from his back pocket and wipe his face, looking away across the hedge into the neighbors’ yard, the grass there crowded with weedy flower beds and a vegetable plot, a tilting arbor with a heavy grapevine dragging the scaffolding toward the earth. A cat appeared silently, bending
itself around the leg of a rusted metal chair beneath the arbor.

Ruth watched as her father turned back to the mower and looked down at it, his face expressionless. When he gave the cord a vicious yank, Ruth flinched.

He had told Ruth that her mother had left them when Ruth was a baby.

She had not been suited for married life, he said, or for the burdens of motherhood. He suggested that his relationship with Ruth’s mother had been brief, that their marriage had been a mistake.

She didn’t love us, Ruth had said, not looking at him.

No, he had agreed. I guess not.

In whatever town they had lived in over the years, he had hired someone—usually an old lady, a neighbor—to watch Ruth after school or on the weekend if he had to be away. He did not leave her alone. He did not neglect her. He had never struck her. She had never even heard him raise his voice. Yet Ruth knew that a deep trouble ran through her father. Other people, she knew, did not move every few months. Other people had friends and families. Other people had the evidence of their lives all around them: houses full of furniture, gardens whose produce filled their pantries and freezers. Even knowing someone who’d died and been buried in the local cemetery was a kind of belonging to a place.

Other people had mothers who had not abandoned them.

Ruth and her father had often packed up and moved in a day.

Her father had only one old acquaintance, a man called
Jake with dark circles under his eyes … like a cartoon character of an ex-con, Ruth told Peter later, trying to describe what her life had been like in those years.

Jake used to show up at intervals, she said. He’d walk up to the front door of whatever house they lived in with the air of a dog who has been abandoned by its owner but has stubbornly managed to find its way home again. He would stand there at the front door, moving his head around strangely as if his collar was too tight, grinning at them.

Ruth would remember about her father that at restaurants he had a fondness for heavy, rich dishes like beef stroganoff and shepherd’s pie, though he was disconcertingly thin.

She remembered that he encouraged her to read. That he admired libraries.

He taught her to play backgammon and to use the doubling dice, and also to play poker and Russian Bank.

Yet she had known almost nothing of any significance about him. He had never spoken to her about his own childhood.

Nothing to tell, he’d said, when Ruth had asked.

Her memory of her father was full of holes and silences.

Full of nothingness, she told her friend Dr. Wenning, many years later.

Well, it was a
sickness
in him, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said to her. You understand, Ruth, that it was
his
sickness, not
yours
. He was a man in hiding from the whole world, not just from you. You did not know him—of course you did not—because he did not
want
you to know him.

Maybe he was protecting me in that way? Ruth asked.

If you like to think so. Dr. Wenning shrugged. Maybe.

• • •

Ruth had liked working for Dr. Wenning during the years Peter was in graduate school at Yale. She had typed up Dr. Wenning’s notes, dusted the bookshelves, watered the plants on the windowsill. Sometimes Dr. Wenning didn’t feel like working when Ruth arrived as usual on Saturday afternoon. Instead, she put on a record for them, Mozart or Bach or her beloved Schubert, and the two of them sat, just listening to the music. From Dr. Wenning, Ruth learned to close her eyes when she listened to music.

She also learned to make the strong black coffee Dr. Wenning liked, and how to brew for the right amount of time a pot of a smoky-flavored tea called Lapsang souchong. Sometimes, at the end of the afternoon, Dr. Wenning poured schnapps or sherry into the two tiny ruby red glasses on the papier-mâché tray. It took several months for Ruth to discover exactly how many people Dr. Wenning had lost in the camps during the war: her parents, two brothers, a sister, her three aunts and three uncles and seven cousins. Countless friends.