The Last First Day (24 page)

Of course not, Dr. Wenning said.

Things are never all bad, all good, she said. A lot is gray.

She finished her drink.

I take it back, she said. Most is gray.

Years
did
pass, and then when Ruth was sixteen years old she came out of Mary’s house on a Saturday morning near Christmas, tugging her hat down over her ears, a stack of books to be returned to the library in a bag over her shoulder. She hesitated outside the front door, stopping to pull on her gloves.

When she looked up, Peter was standing on the icy sidewalk before her.

He looked older, but there was no question of recognizing him.

His hands were shoved into his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched, his hair wind-whipped. His face had grown fuller and
even more handsome, she thought, his head like the glorious beautiful heads on the statues in the museum.

It had been four years since they had seen each other, and Ruth could not believe he was standing there before her now. Yet she had thought of him so often, imagined this encounter so many times, that his presence also seemed inevitable.

Later, he would tell her that usually he went straight from the boarding school in Providence at the end of the school year to a summer camp run by a Jesuit brotherhood in the mountains of North Carolina. These arrangements, Peter explained, were made by his father, so that Peter spent no extended periods of time at home. His mother, Peter explained to Ruth, was increasingly depressed, the treatments she received at a hospital outside Boston briefly transformative but incrementally disabling.

You thought maybe I’d forgotten about you, Peter said that morning.

His eyes never left her face. Do you want to go for a walk? he said.

She came down the steps of Mary’s house. You
didn’t
forget about me, Ruth said.

I didn’t, Peter said. No.

The next summer, the summer between their sophomore and junior years in high school, Peter did not go to North Carolina. He got a job in Wells instead, working at a golf course and life-guarding at the town’s swimming pool. On his days off, he and Ruth rode the ferry Ruth had seen from the beach on her first day in Wells. They took it to other towns along the coast, where they sat on the painted horses at a merry-go-round, or went
to the movies, or ate lunch at a place that served malted milk shakes and fried clams. Gulls swooped in the ferry’s wake, crying and darting down to Ruth and Peter where they stood, holding on to the rusted handrails. In the shade beneath the ferry’s narrow metal staircase connecting the upper and lower decks, where no one could see them, they braced themselves against the wall of the cabin and kissed. They had sand in their teeth and in their hair. The ferry’s engine throbbed under their feet.

They swam off the beaches in the other towns during these excursions, places where they wouldn’t be recognized. They did not talk about it much, but they understood that what they were doing was forbidden, that no matter how irrational or unfair or unkind it was, Peter’s mother would be undone by the thought of Peter and Ruth together. They understood that they were governed by a tyranny—Mrs. van Dusen’s fragility—about which they could do nothing except what they were doing, which was to disobey an unspoken rule.

Swimming in the ocean, out past the breakers, they felt alone. Under cover of the water, they pressed their bodies together, Ruth’s arms around Peter’s neck. Ruth had never wanted anything as powerfully as she wanted to touch and to be touched by Peter.

More than a year would go by before they made love for the first time, though, lying hidden in the beach dunes at night.

When Peter returned home during the Christmas break from school during their senior year, he came to Mary Healy’s as often as he could, arriving late at night after Mary had retired
to bed with her radio. He carried his snow-covered boots in his hand and crept silently up the stairs, leaving the boots to drain in the bathtub.

Mary never came upstairs, and they felt safe up there, lying under the blankets in Ruth’s bed and facing each other, the sound of their whispered conversation drowned out by the radio playing downstairs.

Peter was the only person Ruth could talk to about her father, about what had happened.

Ruth was the only person Peter could talk to about his mother.

They’d been so young, Ruth thought later. Oh, the foolish things they’d said to each other. They’d recounted endlessly for each other their first meetings, how much they had thought about each other in the intervening years.

It
was
love at first sight, wasn’t it? Ruth said.

Peter agreed that it was.

That spring, Peter was admitted to Harvard, and Dr. van Dusen came to Mary’s house to congratulate Ruth for winning a scholarship to Smith. She would need spending money, he said, and he had set up an account for her. There would be money deposited there. She would be taken care of.

You’ve done a wonderful job, Ruth, he said. We are very proud of you.

But by then Ruth had already guessed that she was pregnant.

Peter came home from school in April for spring break. He appeared at Mary’s house very late his first night home, well after midnight. Ruth lay in bed, watching him undress. He
tossed his coat on the floor, kicked off his shoes, pulled his sweater over his head. He was elated by the news of his admission to Harvard, hers to Smith. They would be able to see each other often, he said.

He sat down on the bed beside her.

What’s the matter? he said.

He fished one of her hands out from under the blankets. Aren’t you happy?

I’m pregnant, she said.

He stared at her. Then he closed his eyes.

We were careful, he said.

He let go of her hand and dropped his head into his palms, rubbing furiously at his hair.

Then he reached down, found his sweater and pants, and put them back on. He sat back down on the bed beside her.

What are you doing? she said.

I feel stupid without my clothes on, he said quietly.

She stared at his back. Outside, wind rattled the windowpane, gusts of rain splattering against the glass. The ocean had been stirred up all day. Earlier in the afternoon Ruth had walked alone along the beach.

She had missed two periods by then. She understood what had happened, despite—as Peter said—that they had been careful.

Though she was afraid, she had not imagined that Peter would desert her—she had never imagined that.

You’re sure? Peter said.

His hunched shoulders—both boyish and like an old man’s—filled her with fear and then with rage.

He
would
leave her, she thought. Of course he would.

No, I’m guessing, she said. Just to terrify you.

She had been warm in bed, waiting for him. Now she felt freezing cold.

Oh, Ruth, he said. He did not turn and face her, did not take her in his arms. He held his head in his hands.

She hadn’t actually expected him to be happy. Yet this response, this cold fearfulness in him, took her by surprise. He was being a coward, she thought. She had been braver than he already. She had not cried, not once. They would just make a plan, she had thought.

Oh,
Ruth
, he said again. He clasped his hands around the back of his neck, bowed his head further.

Ruth rolled away from him, pulled the sheet and blankets up over her shoulders.

From downstairs, she heard a sudden burst of hilarity from Mary’s radio.

She thought of the nights she had fallen asleep at the top of the stairs, waking cold in the morning, her knees pulled up under her nightgown. She thought of her father mowing the lawn the day he’d been shot, the way she had lifted her legs cooperatively out of his way. She thought about the policeman who had ruffled her hair when he’d dropped her off at the van Dusens’ house that night.

Sorry, Doc, the policeman had said, as if she were a stray dog.

Go away, she said to Peter now.

Peter turned on the bed. She knew he was looking at her.

Ruth, he said. I’m sorry. I’ll—

Get out, she said. Go away. I
hate
you.

He put a hand on her shoulder, but she flinched away from him. It was easy, at that moment. She actually hated him. How easy it was.

I don’t ever want to see you again, she said. If you touch me, I’ll scream.

Ruth, he tried again. Don’t do this. We—

Get
away
from me, she said.

You don’t mean it, he said then.

From downstairs, more laughter, then applause. Dance music drifted up the stairs.

Go away, Peter, she said. I mean it.

There was a long silence, and then the bed beside her rose slightly when he stood.

Please, he said. Ruth?

She said nothing.

Eventually she heard him leave the room. A little later, she thought she heard his footsteps, coming back. She sat up in bed, tears running down her face.

But there was no one there.

She couldn’t believe it.

At the doctor’s house in Boston where the abortion was performed, Ruth woke from a hazy sleep with fierce pain in her bowels and belly. She lay on a daybed in a room with tall windows and a dark dresser with a bowed front and a mirror in which she could see reflected a framed map—some ancient version of the world—behind glass. How had she gotten to this
place? She had no memory of it. Her head felt sore, as if she’d had teeth pulled.

Around her, the house was silent. The door to the room stood ajar. With shaking hands she put on her underwear and her skirt and her stockings, which had been laid neatly on a small table. Her shoes had been placed side by side next to the bed.

Her legs wavered. The floor seemed to pitch. She put her head down between her knees, waited until her vision cleared.

There was no one in the back passage, no one in the large unlit kitchen to which the passage led. She had come to the back of the house, as instructed, earlier that day, and rung the bell just after noon. Now, making her way through a quiet kitchen and parlor, she realized that it was nearly dark outside. She had no idea how to find the back door again. She went through a deserted dining room into what she assumed was the front entrance.

Beside the front door in the shadowy hallway was a coat-rack on which hung a man’s black raincoat. The door was flanked by twin panels of stained glass, extraordinarily rich in color, featuring the design of two peacocks, tails spread, flowers climbing up the borders.

Ruth, clutching her purse, her coat over her arm, stared at them, the minute depiction of tiny star-shaped blossoms around the clawed feet of the birds. As she stood there, a set of pocket doors leading to the hall slid open. A woman—middle-aged, her thick brown hair streaked with gray and parted on one side—emerged. Wordlessly, she crossed the hall, never looking
once at Ruth; it was as if Ruth were invisible. She opened the front door and stepped aside, holding the door ajar.

If you have any difficulty, she said, you should go to a hospital. But you were never here. Remember that.

Dazed, breathless from the pain in her abdomen, Ruth hesitated. She understood that she was being dismissed, but she did not know how to ask about the pain, whether it was to be expected. As she passed the woman on her way outside, she saw the colors from the stained glass thrown eerily against her neck and face.

Her friend Ellie was waiting in the car on the street outside. It began to rain as Ruth opened the passenger door.

That took
forever
, Ellie said, when Ruth got in the car. Her face was terrified. I’ve been driving around the block for hours, Ellie said. You look awful. Are you all right?

Twenty-four hours later, Ruth was in bed, teeth chattering, delirious. At first she did not recognize Mary Healy, standing on her one foot in the door of her bedroom.

Mary had never climbed the stairs in all the years Ruth lived with her.

How did you get up here? Ruth said, lifting her head from the pillow.

Mary came in the room and put a hand on Ruth’s forehead. When she pulled back the sheets, she gasped.

Ruth gaped down at the blood.

I’m calling Dr. van Dusen, Mary said. What happened, Ruth? What have you done?

After Ruth was released from the hospital, she was brought again to the van Dusens’ house. Once again, she understood,
there was nowhere else for her to go. Mary, ever more infirm, could not have been expected to cope.

At first, Ruth imagined that some sort of arrangement would be made, that the things she had said to Peter when she had told him she was pregnant would be taken back, that he would be there to care for her. Things would be explained to his parents; Ruth felt as much relief as fear at this idea. She had thought that her solution to the problem of the pregnancy—she did not call it a baby; that would come later, again and again, a grief that would flatten her for days at a time—had been a difficult but responsible one, a kindness to them all. She and Peter weren’t ready to have a baby. Ruth wanted to go to college. She was going to make something of herself.

Peter would apologize. She would apologize.

She and Peter would be engaged, she thought, eventually married under the appropriate circumstances.

All would be forgiven and forgotten.

In fact, she learned later, she nearly died of the infection. At the van Dusens’, back in the same bed in which she had spent the first days after her father’s arrest five summers before, Ruth slept with a similar kind of exhaustion. Mrs. van Dusen brought meals to her, but she did not speak to Ruth. There was no discussion of the happy future that Ruth—foolishly, she finally realized—had imagined. Mrs. van Dusen herself looked terrible, her face puffy and ashen, her hair dull and dry.

Ruth had seen Mrs. van Dusen only a couple of times over the last few years. Peter’s descriptions of his mother’s illness had made Ruth feel sorry for them all: Mrs. van Dusen’s frantic
phone calls again and again throughout the day to Peter’s father, her hours at church where she held the priests prisoner with her endless talking, the pacing in her bedroom, the hand flapping and the weeping, the raw, chapped skin at the corners of her mouth, the uncontrollable trembling … His mother’s stays in the hospital seemed to help, Peter had reported, but the effect of the treatments never lasted.