The Last First Day (2 page)

What on earth had Peter seen in her all this time?

It was a mystery, wasn’t it, why people loved one another?

But she had closed her eyes, resting her head on Peter’s shoulder, remembering the sensation of his gaze on her that day, the heat of it.

That old love between them.

The noise of the vacuum cleaner was deafening, but she pushed it grimly through the rooms downstairs. How long had it been since she’d used it? She’d never been much for housework, especially in summer when school was not in session and visitors to the house were rare.

There must be something wrong with the old thing, she thought, to make such a racket now. She’d have to take it in to get it fixed.

Once she had imagined that a point would come when such
duties would fall away from her. After decades of diligence—the headmaster’s house ought to be kept properly, and she had tried never to leave undone that which ought to be done—she had thought that perhaps a sort of exemption would be granted.

Now she knew she would cook and vacuum and dust until she was no longer able to do so. And after all, she thought, she supposed she was grateful for the wherewithal and ability to keep even an untidy house.

She would not lug the vacuum cleaner upstairs, however. No one would go up there during the party anyhow. She bundled it back into the hall closet and fetched one of Peter’s old undershirts from the ragbag hanging on a hook in the back hall. In the living room, she ran the cloth over the bookshelves and end tables, the frayed silk lampshades, the tufted chair backs. Dust rose, accusing her. After the vacuum’s noisy vibrato, the silence rang. She sat down at the piano and played a few emphatic bars of a Mendelssohn march, feet pumping the pedals, but her hands faltered, the melody lost.

There was work to be done anyway, she thought, rising. She could not sit and play all day.

The mirror over the fireplace needed polishing. She dragged in the shaky old stepstool from the kitchen and climbed the steps. But as she reached for the eagle at the top of the mirror’s frame, the stool swayed alarmingly beneath her. In the glass, her reflection lurched to one side, like someone falling off a cliff. She backed down carefully, clutching the mantelpiece. No need to break a hip, she thought, just to prove a false assiduousness.

In the kitchen she turned on the radio, tied on an apron,
and set about making three baking sheets of the cheese puffs she always fixed for social occasions at the school. They had a French name—
gougettes
?
gougères
? She always just called them cheese puffs. In the refrigerator she moved aside the jars of mayonnaise and mustard and pickles, half-empty bottles of salad dressing and tubs of yogurt, balancing the warped trays on the crowded shelves.

Then she made herself a ham sandwich. She ate standing at the sink, dropping crumbs.

Outside the window, goldfinches mobbed the thistle feeder. On the radio, a piano opus by Schumann commenced. She recognized the piece: “Tangled Dreams, Confusing Dreams,” it was called, something like that. The station played a lot of Schumann.

She and Peter had seen Rubinstein play this particular piece once years and years before, she realized, when Peter was at Yale. Ruth had a remarkable memory for music, though never the aptitude for which she had longed. Rubinstein had been the height of elegance that night, silver in his hair, and dressed in a forked tailcoat. They had sat where they could see his hands, big as a longshoreman’s. At the time, he had seemed to them impossibly old, though he couldn’t have been more than seventy. Younger than she was now, she thought.

It had been early spring then, the evening they’d heard him play. Water from the snowmelt had been running in the streets in New Haven. After the performance, she and Peter had gone home to their three-room apartment, theirs exactly like all those issued to married graduate students. Pocket doors separated a bedroom and a tiny sitting room with a hissing
radiator and a leaded-glass window on a crank. A hallway led to a narrow kitchen with a two-burner stove. The toilet and a stall shower were concealed behind a curtain in a space no bigger than a broom closet.

In the sitting room, Peter had put the Schumann record on the turntable. Ruth had watched him from bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin.

She had loved that sound, dust blown from a phonograph needle.

Peter had joined her between the sheets, pulling her to him, naked and warm.

In Peter’s arms, Ruth had listened to the quicksilver notes. She’d wanted, as she sometimes did, to say how the music made her feel, to describe it. She and Peter had watched on a friend’s television set Leonard Bernstein’s first live concerts for young people. She’d been held rapt by Bernstein’s analysis of Beethoven’s
Waldstein
Sonata and “The Blue Danube” and boogie-woogie. She loved how Bernstein would say,
I’ve missed you!
to the children at the start of each new broadcast. She felt exactly like one of those lucky children sitting in the audience. Bernstein asked them if they, too, saw colors when they listened to music. A brass sound made Bernstein see fiery orange, he said, and Ruth had known just what he meant.

Over the years she and Peter had listened to all kinds of music. Billie Holliday and Herb Alpert, the Rolling Stones and the Jackson Five, Gregorian chants and the Red Army Choir. Their taste for the classical repertoire, though—especially for the piano—had outlasted everything else.

But the piano made Ruth want to talk. She couldn’t help it.

That night, Schumann’s music filling the room, Peter—lying on his back beside her, his eyes closed—had reached over and put his hand over her mouth just as she opened it. Then he had turned to face her on the pillow and smiled.

He kissed her.

I forgot what I was going to say, she said. Thanks a lot.

Let’s play it again, he said.

He got up and crossed the floor to the sitting room. He was so tall and handsome, Ruth thought, with his long legs and lean belly and broad shoulders. She’d watched him, admiring.

There was that wonderful sound again, his breath on the needle. It was as if he had blown into her ear. The sensation sent chills over her skin. Then the music started.

Peter climbed back into bed beside her. He pulled up the sheet and blankets, tucking them in around her shoulders.

Fantastic, she thought, listening as the music began, closing her eyes.

Rubinstein’s hands had moved like lightning that night in the concert hall. How
did
the music sound? What color was it? Black and silver, she thought. Like the ocean, its pennants of light, its adamantine swells, flooding into pools like mirrors along the sand.

She had turned her head and slept then, her cheek on Peter’s arm.

Those had been such lovely years.

Now she brushed her hands free of crumbs, put her plate in the sink.

As she did so, the music on the radio ceased abruptly. A dead silence fell into the quiet kitchen.

Ruth turned away from the window.

The radio was on a shelf mounted over the radiator. Three warning blasts blared from a siren, and then, after a moment, a computerized voice announced the threat of tornadoes in a distant county.

A line of dangerous thunderstorms was moving eastward.

On the radar maps that Peter consulted, such storms were conveyed as comic-book explosions of red and yellow and green.

She glanced out the kitchen window again.

The sky was empty, a formal ceremonial blue.

She turned on the tap to rinse her plate.

Years of living with Peter, whose interest in the weather Ruth considered obsessive, had acquainted her with the habits of storms. These would dissipate long before reaching them so near the coast, she expected, their force dissolved by the wall of warm air gathering offshore and advancing inland.

She even knew, thanks to Peter, the name of this effect: the marine influence.

She had never seen a real tornado, only the ones captured on television. How sinister they were, she thought, their scale so … biblical.

But Peter would tell her not to worry now.

She ran hot water and washed the mixing bowls, glancing up at the sky from time to time.

She had always done the work herself for parties at the school. There had never been any extra money for help, and she wouldn’t have asked for it if there had been. The school had
many other, more urgent needs. There was no skill to making cheese puffs anyway, as she’d told Peter when he fretted that all the labor fell to her. She’d made them so often she could do it in her sleep. She’d rather bake a cake—and eat one, for that matter—but one didn’t eat cake with gin, and gin was what they would all want at the end of this first long day of the school year.

It was a private satisfaction to Ruth that those who had worked at the Derry School all the years that Peter had been headmaster had come to expect cake on their birthday. She made several kinds—lemon, coconut, apple, German chocolate, carrot—taking care to find out people’s preferences and keeping a list. Also, those who were sick or suffering trouble knew they could depend on soup and pie from Ruth. She was glad to have been relied on in this way. Such kindness was uncomplicated, easy to give. In the summers, too, she delivered to people in their offices bunches of the dusty purple grapes from the old arbor sagging behind the house. They were delicious, with an old-fashioned sweetness, and Peter hated to see them go to waste. The bees would ruin them if she did not give them away.

He did not think of the grapes as belonging to them, in any case. Everything they had, including the house itself and most of its furnishings, was theirs only provisionally, for as long as they remained at Derry.

Her work in the world had not been equal to Peter’s.

She knew that, but she had wanted to be of help to him and to the boys. She had wanted, as she had said often to Dr. Wenning, to be of use in the world.

• • •

Peter and Ruth had lived and worked at Derry for just over fifty years. In the summer of 1960 when they arrived, Peter was just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, tall and gangly and all Adam’s apple and kneecaps and hair flopping in his eyes. His first job at the school had been to teach American history.

The Derry Industrial School, as it was called then, had been founded at the turn of the nineteenth century. Parents who had lost a son to influenza in early childhood had established the school with a bequest to the Maine diocese of the Episcopal Church, and its original purpose had been to educate boys once referred to as unfortunate. The curriculum promised a vocational path, the gift of useful knowledge and practical skills—including the harvesting of lumber—which would arm these boys with a way to make a living in the world.

For decades, Derry boys had gone into the forest with teams of horses and wagons, learning the art of selecting and felling timber. The practice had been in use still when Ruth and Peter had arrived, and even after bulldozers and mechanical equipment were available, the school continued to use the horse teams, the method thought to be more in keeping with the Derry spirit and its pride in self-reliance and discipline, the nostalgic virtues of manly, robust health.

In the early years, Ruth and Peter had gone with the boys and the lumbermen who directed them. In winter, bells were hung on the big draft horses’ harnesses, the horses’ warm breath clouding the air. There had been a gravely festive quality to those occasions—thermoses of milky sweet coffee and cheese sandwiches on brown bread supplied—not a celebration
exactly, Ruth had thought, but something significant. Finally, however, it was no longer affordable to timber the land in this way. A company came now to clear-cut a section every few years, and the school depended on the revenue. Ruth missed the old days. She thought she would never forget the sound of the horses’ bells, the trees coming down in the silence of the forest, the great ominous rushing sound and the raw, sour tang in the air. Standing beside Peter in the red hat she’d knitted for herself, Peter wrapped in the red scarf she’d made for him, she had felt deep inside her the collision of tree with earth.

The language of the school’s mission had changed over the years, of course. The word
unfortunate
could not be used anymore, though as Peter always said, it was the same truth now as it had been one hundred years before that those who were born poor deserved their poverty no more or less than others deserved the silver spoon. But costs had risen steeply, and the trustees were exerting growing pressure on Peter to redirect the school’s focus toward paying students. A capital campaign had begun to transform the beautiful but shabby old brick buildings and to
up-market
, a term Peter disliked, the school’s image. More and more, especially in the last few years, Peter had been left alone to importune privately his own contacts—old friends they were, by now—to raise the money to protect the boys who needed scholarships. His job had become a continual fight for principle and for the funds to sustain that principle, and Ruth had watched him suffer over it.

Now, after fifty years at the school, nearly forty as headmaster, Peter was, Ruth knew, too much a part of the school’s history to be fired, too well loved by too many. The school’s
financial future was at present too uncertain for the risk of such change. Yet the uneasy compromise in which Derry now found itself, neither New England prep school for wealthy boys nor home for the indigent, could not last long. And the very rich and the very poor were rarely good bedfellows, Ruth thought, no matter what notions Peter cherished about empathy and civic duty.

Peter was now seventy-six years old, Ruth just a couple of months behind him.

He had so far resisted retiring, but it was only a matter of time, Ruth knew, before something unpleasant happened. She felt that time fast approaching.

And then where would they go?

What would Peter, who had worked every day, his whole adult life, for this school,
do
with himself?

He was old—they were
both
old—and she saw that the boys were not as impressed by him as they had been back in the day. He still loped around the classroom firing questions at the students, though now hobbled by his bad knees and much changed in appearance from his younger self, worn down by age and disease. But his enthusiasm was more performance than it once had been, she knew. He’d been uncannily good with names when he was younger—amazing really, Ruth had thought—but more often now he relied on old-fashioned endearments: Sport, Champ, Buster, Pal. Peter’s reputation—a thing separate from Peter himself, she thought, like the story of a great king—held him aloft in the minds of most boys. But one day last year she had seen a boy walking behind Peter and imitating him, swinging
his arms ape-like and lurching like Quasimodo. The impression had not been inaccurate, and Ruth had felt sick with pain and anger. It had taken all her restraint not to go up and grab the boy by the arm and slap his cheek.