The Last First Day (26 page)

You look gorgeous, Sally said, blowing her a kiss from the doorway. See you downstairs. They’re waiting.

From the landing halfway down the staircase, one could see through an archway in the hall into the sitting room.

Sally and her date—a hawk-nosed boy wearing a tweed jacket, a ridiculous-looking meerschaum pipe clamped in his mouth—were standing in front of the tiled fireplace.

On the sofa sat a tall young man reading a newspaper, his knees sticking up. One brown sock had slipped down around his ankle.

Ruth stopped. Heat flooded her. In her ears, a clanging sound began.

Peter’s hair had been cut short. Gone were the soft, wheat-colored bangs that had fallen over his forehead. Lamplight lay against the exposed back of his neck and across his shoulders. He looked half a foot taller and a decade older than when Ruth had last seen him.

Ruth put out her hand and steadied herself against the banister. The rail felt slick under her palm. Wild joy ran through her.

Peter looked up. He dropped the newspaper. Then he stood up slowly.

Ruth, he said.
Ruth
.

Sally’s date gazed back and forth between Ruth and Peter. He took the pipe out of his mouth.

You two know each other or something? he said.

The sitting room at Talbot House was furnished with brown wicker armchairs, standing lamps whose pleated shades were the color of old parchment, rickety gateleg tables where the girls sat to study or to knit and chat or play cards. Heavy plaid curtains hung at the windows. On the mantelpiece stood a stuffed fox, eyes glittering, and a white ermine, perched on its hind legs and lifting a dainty paw, alert in death as in life, both animals a gift from someone, the oddball husband or father or uncle of an alum, someone who had once lived in Talbot. On little pieces of paper tented next to the creatures, a girl had written the names Lucy and Ricky. The ermine sometimes wore a garter around its neck like an Elizabethan ruff, but not tonight, Ruth noticed. With its paw raised, the ermine stared out over Ruth’s head.

From the stairwell and the dining room below came the sounds of supper, the rise and fall of girlish chatter. Ruth caught the familiar scent of Saturday night dinner, navy bean soup and gingerbread cookies.

Paradise Pond on campus had been frozen solid for a week. The day before, Ruth had gone with some other girls to push and be pushed unsteadily across the ice in her shoes, laughing hysterically, arms waving. She had no skates and had never learned, anyway, but it hadn’t mattered. The snow lay beautifully around them as if painted on the arms of the fir trees.

This was the world to which she had miraculously ascended,
Ruth had thought, she and her fictitious past, her imaginary young parents killed tragically in a car accident: pretty Anita and handsome Carl, both botanists, Ruth had decided. Early on in her days at Smith, Ruth had gone alone to the Botanic Garden to read the plant labels and memorize the names:
Adonis amurensis Fukujukai
, which flowered early, even in the snow.
Abutilon
x
hybridum
, the flowering maple or Chinese lantern.
Aconitum japonicum
, Japanese monkshood.

She’d known nothing about botany, but it was not difficult to imagine a shared history among plants with names derived from Southeast Asia, and it had been easy to invent trips for her specimen-gathering parents to the archipelago of Japanese islands, where they’d wandered the canals lined with willow trees or bathed in the hot springs in the snow-covered mountains, feeding one another sea urchin and black rice from chopsticks. One rainy afternoon, Ruth had sat in the Conservatory for a couple of hours and drawn the orchids with colored pencils, signing the drawings in tiny script—she’d carefully canted the letters backward, unlike her own forward-sloping penmanship—with her fictitious mother’s fictitious initials.

It had been work to invent a past, though not much, it had turned out. It had been more difficult to know when to stop, in fact. How tempting it was to imagine what she had never had but had longed for: her mother’s famous chicken and rice casserole and Black Forest cake, her father’s skill on the dance floor.

In the sitting room of Talbot House now, Peter—Peter who
knew
her, who knew everything about her—looked up at her.

She had forgotten what it was, to be known.

Peter did not move. She knew he awaited her judgment,
and that a judgment was forming inside her, though she did not yet see its sentence. She wondered what would happen if she just turned around and went back up the stairs. Would he follow her?

She could see, at least, that he was as shocked as she was.

Well, it was a
blind
date. She supposed he hadn’t been told
her
name, either.

She thought about Carl and Anita, the depth of love she’d imagined between them. Browsing one day in an antiques shop in Northampton, she had found an album of old photographs, its heavy leather cover embossed with a fleur-de-lis, and she had slipped from its pages two pictures: Carl and Anita leaving the church, both smiling happily, one of Anita’s tiny gloved hands on Carl’s arm, one raised against a shower of confetti. The other was a picture of Carl and Anita and infant Ruth, the baby’s bonneted face invisible, her christening gown in a drape over Anita’s lap, Carl’s hand on Anita’s shoulder.

A Christmas tree had been behind them in that photograph, the electric lights little blurs.

Ruth had known it wasn’t real, of course—wasn’t
her
—but sometimes she took out that photograph and stared at the baby.

She’d had to produce the pictures only a few times over the last several years, carefully rewrapping them in tissue paper afterward and tucking them away again in her drawer. She had been moved, doing this, had found herself near tears.

She had depended on Carl and Anita, she knew, the mute testimony of the anonymous photographs. She had come in some way to love their story, these two young people who had adored and admired each other, and who had loved her, too,
who had loved a world of curling vine and tendril, of blossom and leaf, of greenhouses filled with scented flowers and cool dirt, warm air from the heaters high overhead stirring the fernlike leaves of the towering cycad.

On the stairs now, her feet seemed to have disappeared beneath her. Yet somehow she descended the final steps.

She came into the room.

Peter held out his hand and she came forward and took it.

When they touched, Peter held tight to her fingers, and for one more moment she thought of Carl and Anita, whoever they really were, as they’d left the church that day after their wedding, heading into the future together.

Then she let them go. She wanted to let them go. She had never really known them, never really loved them, she knew.

How are you, Ruth? Peter said.

Fine, she said. Her face felt strange, rigidly grinning. How are you?

Then she took her hand away and fished frantically in the little clutch Sally had loaned her for her handkerchief, because she had begun to cry. She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes.

Excuse me, she said from behind it, but it was the joy she knew was on her face that she was trying to hide.

From his position at the fireplace, Sally’s date put his arm around Sally and pointed at Peter and Ruth with his pipe.

Well! he said. That’s what I call a reunion.

They went to the party with Sally and Ed, as it turned out the pipe-smoking date was named. A crowd of people milled
in someone’s apartment—Ruth didn’t even know where they were; the snow-filled night had gone past the car windows in a blur—with everyone smoking and drinking and laughing. Ruth heard nothing of the conversations going on around her. People kept shaking her arm and shouting things.

What? she would say, turning to them, feeling dazed.
What?

Finally, after a few minutes of Ruth and Peter staring at each other across the room, Peter made a gesture; he would go find their coats.

Ruth ducked into a bathroom. A narrow shelf above the sink was crowded with bottles of perfume and lotion, talcum powder spilled messily over a woman’s kimono draped over a radiator. The room smelled girlishly sweet.

She stared at herself in the mirror.

Was this really happening? she thought.

Outside, she and Peter stopped on the sidewalk under the cone of light from a streetlamp and turned to face each other, snow falling fast around them. They were almost the same height, Ruth only a few inches shorter than Peter. Snow settled on his shoulders, his collar, his hair.

Tonight, she said. Did you know it would be me?

He shook his head. It’s not the first time I’ve tried to find you, he said, but I was just as surprised as you were.

Ruth blinked against the snow falling onto her eyelashes.
What?
she said.

A bunch of times this fall, Peter was saying. Last year, too, and the year before.

She felt the air around them, colder than it had been earlier. He reached out and took her hand, laced her fingers between his own.

She had not been wrong, she thought. All those times she had somehow
felt
him near her … she had imagined that it was just a kind of wishing on her part.

He was still talking.

I came as often as I could get here, he said. I don’t have a car, so it was whenever someone was coming from Boston, and I could get a ride.

Wait
, she thought.

I saw you four times this year, he was saying. Once going into the library, once on the sidewalk in Northampton outside the post office—you were eating an ice cream cone—once on the steps of the Hillyer, once in the Botanic Garden. You were with another girl in the garden, a blonde, much shorter than you. You had on a blue dress that time.

He gestured to her neck, indicating a shape.

Her blue dress with the sailor collar, she thought.

The suffering of the last three years, the loneliness of it, came up inside her. She took her hand away.

He had been here, he had seen her. He had not spoken to her.

Her ears started to ring. She put her hands up to her head and closed her eyes.

I thought you hated me, Ruth, he said, and she heard the pleading in his voice.

I didn’t know if you would ever speak to me again, he said. Ruth, take your hands away from your ears. Look at me. I didn’t
know what to do. I know I made a terrible mistake. All this time, I’ve hated myself.

He took her hands away from her head and held them in his own.

Please, he said. Please don’t tell me to go away, Ruth.

She allowed herself to fall against him—she had felt it happening inside her, like sliding down a mountain—her head resting against his chest.

He put his arms tightly around her. Oh, my god, he said.

Don’t cry, she said warningly.

I won’t, he said, but she knew he was.

And she was, too.

At the familiar feel of his body against hers, in the smell of his skin, in his presence again, she could not bear the remembered loss of him. His long wool overcoat against her cheek was silky.

What if it
hadn’t
been me? she said. Tonight?

I didn’t think it
would
be you, he said. Ed just said he was coming—he had a date with this girl he knew from home—and he asked me to come along. I’d taken every chance I could get. I always thought I would see you again, and that one day I’d have the nerve to talk to you.

When you came down the stairs? he said. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it.

Ed had given Peter the keys to the car. Apparently delighted to play witness to Peter and Ruth’s meeting again, he said he’d take care of getting Sally back to Talbot House and hitch a ride with someone back to Boston. Peter drove out of town in
the snow until they found a motel outside of Northampton, a place with a sad yellow light over the office door and a frozen pond next door. Ruth had to hunch down in the front seat of the car, watching Peter through the motel’s picture window, while he paid the owner inside and was given a key. In those days, at certain places, they wouldn’t let a couple stay if they weren’t married. People had to produce rings for that sort of thing.

She’d be in trouble for failing to turn up for curfew at Talbot House, she thought, but the snow was a good excuse. She would just say she’d been stranded somewhere, that the phone had been out of order.

It wasn’t as if there was anyone to whom the house matron could call and report Ruth’s misbehavior, anyway.

In the motel room, a painting of a stormy sea, the frame visibly sticky with dust, hung over the bed.

Peter closed the door behind them.

There was a prickly green bedspread on the bed.

It’s a cliché, Ruth said. It’s horrible.

She put her hands over her face.

Peter took off his coat and wrapped her in it, then in his arms.

It was freezing in the room. They got under the blankets, but they didn’t take off their clothes. Everything that had happened between them was in the room with them, everything they had lost.

They kissed, holding on to each other.

I’m sorry, Ruth, Peter kept saying to her. I’m sorry.

He held her face, stroked her hair. When she began to cry
again, he extricated an arm from their embrace to retrieve a handkerchief from his back pocket.

It’s all right now, he said. Don’t cry.

Later, she woke. She’d been asleep, she realized, but something had woken her. A sound outside? Then she realized what it was. Not a sound, but quiet. The snow must still be falling.

Beside her, Peter spoke. Are you awake?

She turned to face him. She couldn’t believe it. There he was.

He rolled toward her and brought his forehead down to touch hers. Ruth. Will you marry me? he said.

Okay, Ruth said. Yes.

Then she started to cry again.

I’m not ever going to be able to remember anything about our life without feeling sad, she said.

He found his handkerchief, handed it to her.

We’re going to be happy, Peter said. I love you, Ruth. I’ve always loved you, and I always will love you.