The Last First Day (25 page)

All this, as well as Peter’s descriptions of his father’s patience, had worked against Ruth’s anger at Mrs. van Dusen. Yet one morning when Mrs. van Dusen came in to bring Ruth a tray of tea and toast, Ruth sat up, determined.

Where’s Peter? she said.

Mrs. van Dusen’s face went rigid.

I didn’t know what else to do, Ruth said. I want to know where Peter is.

But Mrs. van Dusen would not look at her.

I can’t talk to you, Ruth, she said, her voice shaking. No one here is speaking to you. And then she left the room.

Ruth understood then that she and Peter were being separated. She would not be allowed to speak to him. The van Dusens did not, could not—would not ever—regard her as a daughter-in-law.

Ruth was not a wife for the van Dusens’ son, she understood.

She was not, as she had known all along, anybody at all.

That night, in her nightgown, gripping the edge of the sink in the upstairs bathroom—Peter already must have been sent away somewhere, she assumed, for the house had been funereally silent—she choked down two handfuls of orange-flavored
baby aspirin she found in the medicine cabinet. They felt like dirt in her mouth as she chewed and swallowed them. She managed to get down everything in the bottle and then almost immediately vomited it all up.

Through the sound of her own retching, she heard footsteps hurrying up the stairs.

When she looked up from the sink, eyes streaming, stomach heaving, a mess of orange vomit in the basin and on the floor and running down the front of her nightgown, Dr. and Mrs. van Dusen were standing at the door of the bathroom.

What are we going to do with her? Mrs. van Dusen said. Oh, my god.

Dr. van Dusen stepped into the bathroom. He looked grim, but he rinsed a washcloth and helped Ruth, who was swaying, to sit down on the seat of the toilet.

Put your head between your knees, he said. He put his hand on the back of her head and pushed. For god’s sake, Ruth, he said. For
god’s
sake.

Years later, recounting the events of that terrible, sad summer for Dr. Wenning, Ruth could still remember the sensation inside her body that night, as if something too large for the space had been wedged into her chest and then ripped out, leaving a gaping hole. The pain of Peter’s absence felt insupportable. It no longer mattered to her that he had gone away in cowardice when she had told him to. She missed him so fiercely she thought she could not go on. It was too painful.

Lying in the dark that night after swallowing the aspirin, after a shower and after swallowing the pill Dr. van Dusen held out to her—Take it, Ruth, he said, frowning at her. You need to
sleep now—she could still smell traces of the orange-flavored baby aspirin clinging to her breath when she covered her face with her hands. Outside, she heard the rhythmic, sawing songs of tree frogs in the summer night, the percussion of the surf against the shoreline twenty blocks away. From downstairs, she heard the van Dusens’ raised voices and then the sound of crying—Mrs. van Dusen, Ruth realized.

A minute later, music reached Ruth, a symphony drowning out the sound of the tree frogs and the beating of the ocean and the grief that Ruth had brought into the house.

She lay in bed in the dark.

She tried to think of what she loved in the world, to name those things.

She loved books.

She loved to eat, crumbling oyster crackers into clam chowder with Ellie.

She loved swimming in the ocean.

She loved her bedroom at Mary Healy’s house, the sound of the waves, the strip of sea visible between the rooftops.

She loved Mary Healy, who had been good to her and who had climbed upstairs with only one foot to rescue her.

She had loved, she thought, her father, though he hadn’t deserved it, though perhaps he hadn’t even been her real father.

She turned her face aside into the pillow.

She loved Peter van Dusen.

As soon as the van Dusens discovered what had happened to Ruth, they confronted Peter, Ruth learned. He had confessed—
yes, he and Ruth had been seeing each other secretly for two years now. They sent him away without delay to relatives in New York City. He was to work for his uncle, who was a lawyer.

Dr. van Dusen arranged for Ruth to spend the remaining weeks of the summer after her recovery working for a friend who ran a camp in Vermont for blind children. For six weeks, Ruth sat in the camp nurse’s office, a hot little room whose walls were beaded with amber sap. She read paperback novels and dispensed calamine lotion and applied Band-Aids to the knees and elbows of the poor blind children who came in so frequently with cuts and scrapes. She understood that tending to the children had been someone’s idea of penance for her.

At night, left to her own devices, she went down to the lake and swam out far enough that she could not be heard if she cried.

She lay on her back, floating, and looked up at the moon and the clouds, feeling the pull of the water around her.

In a novel, she thought, the protagonist would want to die, would just drown herself. But the reality was actually far worse, she thought; she did not want to die, and yet it was so painful, being alive.

At the end of the summer, Dr. van Dusen returned to pick her up. Getting into the hot car in the pine-needle-filled parking lot, Ruth saw that all her belongings—her clothes and books, her winter coat and boots, everything from her five years at Mary Healy’s—had been packed up.

She understood that she would not return to Mary Healy’s or to Wells.

What had happened to Mary? she asked Dr. van Dusen. Who was taking care of her?

She’s gone to one of her daughters, Dr. van Dusen told her. She had lost her other foot.

I want to write to her, Ruth said.

Dr. van Dusen nodded. I’ll give you her address.

For the remainder of the car trip from Putney to Northampton, they exchanged fewer than a dozen words. Ruth did not ask about Peter, and Dr. van Dusen did not offer her any information.

Mostly, she pretended to be asleep.

Ruth’s roommate at Smith, a cheerful-seeming blond girl named Louise, had already moved in by the time Ruth and Dr. van Dusen appeared in the door of the room to which Ruth had been assigned in Talbot House. Louise had scattered her belongings everywhere. She talked enough for all three of them, exclaiming with false enthusiasm over Ruth’s modest clothes as Ruth opened her suitcases.

Dr. van Dusen stood by silently.

Finally, clearly aware of the tension in the room, Louise left to go see a friend from home who, she said, lived on another floor.

Dr. van Dusen went to the door and looked out into the hall for a minute after Louise left. When he turned back, he pulled the door behind him, but he did not close it all the way.

That opening—as if people would find it odd to discover
them in a room with the door closed, Ruth thought—filled her with anger.

The time had come for them to say good-bye. She understood that she would probably never see him again. She turned away from him, staring blindly into her closet. She would not cry in front of him, she thought.

When he spoke she heard pain in his voice.

Don’t worry about your bills, he said. I am not abandoning you, Ruth. I’ll see that you have money, whatever you need.

Ruth said nothing.

Everyone makes mistakes, he went on. You and Peter made a mistake, a natural mistake for young people to make. It just … it had a sad outcome.

She did not think she could stand to hear any more.

But still he went on. I know you were fond of each other, he said. You and Peter. But you’re young. You’ll go on.

Yes, she
had
made a mistake, she thought, going to that doctor.

She had made a mistake, taking those baby aspirin.

She had made just about every sort of mistake there was.

That awful night, as she’d sat on the seat of the toilet in the bathroom in her soiled nightgown, Ruth had begged Dr. and Mrs. van Dusen.

Where is Peter? she had said. I want to see
Peter
.

You ended a
life
, Ruth, Mrs. van Dusen had said suddenly, fiercely, from the doorway. She had leaned toward Ruth, her face contorted as if she would spit on Ruth, and Ruth had understood then that no one had forgotten about Ruth’s father, either, about the lives he had ended.

You’ll see, Ruth, Dr. van Dusen said now from behind her in her dormitory room. But his voice was sad, and she knew he didn’t believe it himself.

You’ll forget all about this one day, he said.

We were introduced in college, Ruth told people later, when they asked how she and Peter met.

Or sometimes she said: Oh, we were set up on a date.

Neither of these statements, she thought, was actually a lie.

In the winter of 1957, by then a senior at Smith, Ruth celebrated her twenty-second birthday. She had a group of friends and plans to go to New York after graduation, where she hoped to find a job in publishing. She’d majored in English. She thought herself a pretty good writer.

One Saturday afternoon that December, someone knocked on Ruth’s door in Talbot House. Ruth looked up from her book.

Sally Carlisle, who lived down the hall from Ruth, stuck her head around the doorframe.

Did Ruth want to come along that night on a double date? she asked.

Two Harvard boys, one of them an old chum of Sally’s from back home, were on their way, driving over from Cambridge.
Sally had told them she’d find another girl to go along to a party.

Ruth looked out the window. The air was smoky, full of fluffy clumps of snowflakes. She thought about Peter at Harvard, of course. But he would never come over to Northampton on a
blind date
, she thought. Not after what had happened between them.

She hadn’t seen him since their last night together, when he’d sat on the side of her bed at Mary Healy’s, holding his head in his hands.

It’s snowing again, she said to Sally, putting down her pencil and her copy of Horace’s
Ars Poetica
. She leaned across the bed and touched her finger to the cold glass of the window. As always when she thought about Peter, there was a war inside her. She missed him. She could not forgive him. She loved him. She hated him.

They won’t come in the snow, anyway, she said.

Oh, it’s only a
little
snow, Sally protested. And they’re already on their way. Come on, Ruth. It’ll be fun. Be a sport.

Ruth gazed out the window. In some ways, the years before she had entered Smith seemed far away now, a time from someone else’s life. Those years had seen the end of so much, her strange, sad life with her father, her father’s fate in prison, her love affair with Peter—its beginning and its end—the terrible abortion …

It was possible for Ruth to feel sometimes that those events had nothing at all to do with her. She had made up a story about her past: her parents, Carl and Anita, had been killed in an automobile
accident. One tragedy was just like another, she thought. She could tell Carl and Anita’s story with some ease now when people asked her about her family. Yet if listeners responded with tears at the news of Carl and Anita’s tragic death, the loneliness of the untold story inside Ruth made her stomach hurt. No one, she believed, wanted to hear the
true
story of her life.

Now she looked back to Sally, waiting impatiently in the doorway of Ruth’s room.

Outside, the snow hissed against the window, falling through the bare branches of the trees, over the grass, over the wet, dark line of the street.

Sally clasped her hands, a parody of longing. I
promised
I’d find another girl, she said.

Ruth watched the snowflakes swirling in the milky late-afternoon air. She would need to wash and set her hair. She had studying to do. She didn’t want to go on a date.

Who is he, anyway? she said. The other fellow.

Sally hadn’t been told his name.

But I’m sure he’s nice, she said. He’s got to be smart, anyway.

Well, there were men other than Peter van Dusen in the world, Ruth thought. She had gone on very few dates over her years at Smith, but there had to be
someone
to whom she could tell the truth about her past, someone she could know and be known by, someone else she might love one day and who would love her back.

Okay, she said to Sally. But I’ll need clothes.

She borrowed a dress of champagne-colored chiffon from Sally’s roommate, Barb. She knew it was somehow wrong with
her red hair, and she’d need to let out the hem, which would leave a line, but it would have to do, she thought, looking at herself over her shoulder in the mirror in Sally and Barb’s room. She had no extra money for clothes. Apart from buying her books for her first semester at Smith, she’d hardly touched the money Dr. van Dusen had written to tell her was in an account for her use. She’d feared she would need it more after she graduated.

Instead she had worked at the library and in the museum. She’d sewn costumes for the theater department, a skill she’d learned from Mary Healy. Other girls, aware that Ruth had no family, gave her clothes from time to time, castoff coats, shoes, or blouses they said were just wrong on them but would look marvelous on Ruth. The gestures embarrassed Ruth, but she accepted the offerings when she’d sensed it would cause offense not to do so. People wanted to be kind.

A few minutes before the boys were due to arrive she bit off the thread between her teeth and shook out the pleats in Barb’s dress. She put it on, reaching to zip it up in the back. She brushed her hair lightly, careful not to pull out the wave. She crouched a little to see her reflection better in the mirror. She applied lipstick, patted her nose with powder.

She would not think about Peter van Dusen.

She carried her coat over her arm, as well as a clutch and pair of gloves borrowed from Sally.

Her father had been a murderer and a thief, and her mother was a mystery. But Ruth was … well, she thought, she was a young woman at Smith College in the state of Massachusetts.

She would be a famous editor one day … or a scholar of
some kind, a professor of art history, maybe, or perhaps a pianist or a painter. She hadn’t decided yet which it would be. But first she would go out that evening and have a date, a triumph of will over desire.