The Last First Day (28 page)

You don’t
always
have to be so chivalrous, Peter, Ruth said to him once. It gets on a person’s nerves, you know.

Fine, he said. I’ll do my best to be hateful.

But he would never be hateful, Ruth knew. He was the most well-intentioned person she had ever met.

From Wyeth, the road to the Derry School passed through a forest of white pine and hemlock and yellow birch, the sunlight filtering daintily through the leaves. A few miles to the east, too far away to be visible through the trees, lay the plain of the Atlantic Ocean.

She had been glad they would be near the ocean again.

Reading about that part of the country before they’d arrived, Ruth had discovered that the twigs of the birches along the roadside could be broken off and chewed for their distinct wintergreen flavor. That day, the windows of their car rolled down, Ruth detected the scent, so bracing she could almost taste it.

As they approached the campus through the forest, the atmosphere around them gradually brightened. Then the peaceful, sun-struck lawns of the school appeared around a bend in the road: a jumble of roofs, the sweep of the old oaks’ branches, the diamond patterns of paths faceting the lawns.

It had been a sight so surprising, so magical, that both she and Peter gasped.

Peter whistled. Not so shabby, he said. Pretty nice for those orphans.

Ruth shot him a look, but she, too, was enchanted.

If she couldn’t be happy here, she thought, she couldn’t be happy anywhere.

Their first apartment was above one of the stone garages, a big room with a kitchen counter and appliances along one
wall under a series of transom windows, and a tiny bathroom with an old claw-footed tub. The room was furnished with a double bed and an uncomfortable mattress, too short for both of them, and two windows with a view of the small lake. They arranged their table, a maple drop-leaf that seated the two of them, beneath one of the windows. Ruth loved looking out at the water when they ate their meals.

In a dormered attic above the big room, Peter set up his desk and typewriter, an Underwood Noiseless.

Ruth fell asleep many nights that first year to the dampened sound of its keys being struck as Peter worked on his lesson plans over her head.

Their housing at Derry was provided as part of Peter’s salary. For the first time in her life, Ruth didn’t need to work. In New Haven, she’d held three jobs, one as a part-time secretary in the biology department at Yale, and another on two evenings a week at Filene’s, where she’d sat behind the perfume counter on a stool—her supervisor didn’t like her towering over the customers—garbed in a white clinician’s coat that had made her feel absurdly important. And once a week on Saturdays she had ridden her bicycle across the Green to work for Dr. Wenning, though often all they did after a while was talk.

That first fall at Derry, while Peter taught his classes and went to meetings and ran around coaching the boys on the basketball court, Ruth began work on a novel. She sat at their little table and wrote by hand, eating toast and drinking tea, looking up between sentences and watching the reflection of the trees in the surface of the lake as the leaves changed color. She had studied American literature at Smith, had loved it all
indiscriminately—Willa Cather and Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau.

But it was difficult, she discovered. The struggle of it wore her out. Still, she tried to feel hopeful. She swept and polished their rooms, she washed and ironed Peter’s shirts and under-shorts and khaki pants and handkerchiefs, she sewed skirts and dresses for herself, and she cooked dinner every night—dishes overly ambitious and too expensive for just the two of them, duck à l’orange and lasagna with a béchamel sauce and standing rib roasts. She wrote detailed letters about her life to Dr. Wenning and to the few friends from Smith with whom she had kept in touch.

They were all married, these friends, like Ruth.

Two had had a baby already, and another was pregnant. Ruth tried not to mind about that.

So far she had not been able to get pregnant.

Pregnant
again
, she sometimes reminded herself, and then sat alone in the bathroom, the water running, so Peter would not hear her cry.

A novel! her friends said by reply. How exciting.

Yes, and I’m trying a play, too! Ruth said in her letters back. And I’m also painting! And I have time to play the piano! I’m definitely improving.

But she could not avoid the worrying sense that she was casting about wildly for something to do that felt meaningful, that her protestations to her friends and to Dr. Wenning were an unconvincing disguise for the loneliness she felt.

• • •

A few weeks after classes began at Derry that first fall, Ruth and Peter were invited to a cocktail party at the headmaster’s house. Ruth agonized over what to wear. Finally she chose a long, gold-colored quilted skirt she’d found at the Junior League Thrift Shop in New Haven and had thought very grand. That evening, glancing into the headmaster’s living room from the front hall—the house that would become her own ten years later, when Peter himself was offered and accepted the position—she saw instantly that the skirt was wrong.

The other women in the room, though there were only a handful of them, wives of teachers, were dressed for the party in trim, short dresses and pantsuits.

A smile plastered to her face, her long red hair pinned up fussily, Ruth shivered as Peter lifted her coat from her shoulders and made introductions. Her bibbed white blouse, too, was wrong, wrong, wrong, she thought. She looked like Miles Standish.

Ruth’s working on a novel, Peter announced proudly as they all stood around with their drinks in hand. It’s going to be terrific.

She wanted to die.

By the first Christmas at Derry she had begun to dread the parties.

The handful of wives who lived on campus often left these affairs early, if they came at all, to go home and fix dinner for their children. There weren’t many women at the school who were her age to begin with, and the few who were seemed to
Ruth bewilderingly angry, full of complaints—when Ruth ran into them at the post office or the grocery store in Wyeth—about the school or their children or their husbands or the boys.

It was true that many of the boys
were
trouble. It was part of the school’s mission, after all, to educate those who’d had no opportunity to prepare for it. Ruth understood from Peter that there were teachers who felt the place was beneath them. She knew, too, that Peter’s enthusiasm for the challenge—his credentials were strong enough to have won him a job almost anywhere—was a mystery to some.

For Peter, she understood, teaching was a source of happiness. He was energized by the boys and by their rough ways. He tended to see the best in people, and he came home full of stories about their triumphs in the classroom, delighted by the ways in which he saw their lives being shaped for good. He rarely doubted that a boy would succeed, and somehow, Ruth thought, his certainty communicated itself to them. At dinner he regaled her with stories about them, their misdeeds and their achievements.

Don’t you ever
dislike
any of them? Ruth asked once, feeling peevish.

I don’t like what they
do
, sometimes, Peter said. But I try not to dislike
them
.

Well, Ruth said,
I
dislike some of them.

I know you do, he said. But they think
you’re
fetching.

Try harder to make friends, Dr. Wenning told her, when she went back to New Haven to visit and confessed that she was lonely.

Why don’t you have a tea party or something?

I can’t have a tea party, Ruth said. There’s no one to invite. For a
party
you need more than one guest.

Okay. Have someone for dinner, Dr. Wenning said. Just one person. Make one of those fancy dinners you’ve been working so hard on.

Ruth went back to Derry and tried to strike up a friendship with an English teacher at the school, a spinster named Ann Kressman with a gentle voice and a sweet face, whom Ruth imagined was in her early forties. Ruth approached her in the library one day and began a conversation about Edith Wharton, and eventually Miss Kressman herself invited Ruth for tea at her house on campus. Ruth tried to tell herself that she’d enjoyed the occasion—though in truth it had all seemed stiff and formal to her; she’d felt silly sipping from her teacup like an old lady—but she issued a reciprocal invitation, which Miss Kressman accepted.

Ruth went to great lengths for the occasion. She made a chiffon pineapple daisy cake ringed with a fussy barricade of sponge ladyfingers that kept falling over.

On the agreed-upon Saturday afternoon, Miss Kressman failed to appear.

When Ruth finally reached her on the telephone on Monday, Miss Kressman behaved oddly. She apologized. Oh, dear, she’d had the date wrong, she said. Yet her tone—injured, faintly hostile—somehow implied that it was Ruth herself who had made the error, then compounded the mistake by forcing Miss Kressman into politely accepting blame.

Eventually Ruth came to understand that Miss Kressman
wanted
to be kind—she was capable of entertaining Ruth at her own home, a beautifully decorated little cottage, where they could peruse her admirable library and talk about books—but somehow she just couldn’t bring herself to visit Ruth.

The evening of the failed tea party, Ruth, depressed, served Peter cake for dinner. He ate three pieces of it. Ruth pushed a lady finger around on her plate. The cake had been a visual failure—one side had toppled over completely—but it tasted all right.

Is it me? Ruth said. Is it something I do?

Of course it’s not you, Peter said.

Ruth toyed with her fork. Well, obviously I did
something
wrong, she said. Why don’t I have any friends here?

There aren’t a lot of options, I know, Peter said. Don’t worry. Keep trying.

That night, they went to bed early. They left the dishes and the cake on the table. In the morning, Ruth threw the rest of it in the garbage can.

Determined to be supportive of Peter, to be a credit to him, Ruth continued to make an effort at Derry that first fall and winter. She retired the quilted skirt she had once thought so handsome. On another trip to New Haven to see Dr. Wenning, she went shopping at Filene’s and bought a black pantsuit with a tunic top and bell sleeves; she tried it on for Dr. Wenning, who assured her that it was elegant. But each time Ruth faced one of the social events at Derry, her heart pounded with anxiety as she dressed. She grew light-headed. It felt as if mice scurried over the skin of her belly.

One night shortly before the first Christmas at Derry, Peter received an invitation to a formal dinner at the headmaster’s house.

Am I supposed to come, too? Ruth asked.

I’m sure you are, Peter said. I think it’s sort of a holiday party.

In attendance would be a bishop from Maine’s Episcopal diocese, Peter had been told, and the executive committee of the school’s trustees, three who were also ministers. Peter’s energy and charisma, the success that first semester of the boys he taught, had attracted notice, and Ruth understood that the invitation to join the older men that evening was an important occasion for him.

A half hour before they were due to arrive, Ruth lay down on the bed in her slip. After a minute, she got under the covers.

I’m sick, she called to Peter, who was shaving in their tiny bathroom.

Peter came into the room and sat down on the bed beside her, toweling dry his hair.

No one talks to me at these things, anyway, Ruth said. That one man who teaches Latin, the one who wears that furry vest? What’s it made of, anyway? A cowhide? He spoke Italian to me all night last time, even though I told him I didn’t
know
any Italian. And he has dandruff in his eyelashes.

Peter rubbed his head with the towel.

I’m too shy a person for these things, she said. She closed her eyes.

Just leave me here, she said. Really, I’ll be fine.

On the bed beside her, she watched surreptitiously as Peter
draped the towel around his neck and tugged on either end, like a boxer. He gazed at the floor, frowning.

She felt a flare of resentment. He didn’t understand. He had a
job
here. He was an important part of things. She was nobody.

Ask them questions about their lives, Peter said. People like to talk about themselves.

She knew he was tired. He’d been working hard, staying up late at night, preparing for classes, and there was an endless procession of extracurricular obligations: meetings for the school’s newspaper staff, or the student government association, or sports council hearings, duties for which Peter always seemed to have been volunteered by his older colleagues. But she felt rebuked, misunderstood, as if he’d said her shyness was only a veneer—a lion pretending not to be hungry around a gazelle—like it was something she could put on and take off at will.

She turned on her side away from him.

Don’t condescend to me, Peter van Dusen, she said. I know how to talk to people, if I have to.

The room was cold. Despite herself, she began to shiver. This always happened when she was upset. She turned her face into the pillow.

Peter put his hand on her back.

Why was there no one to whom she could turn? she thought. Dr. Wenning was hours away. Ruth had no friends nearby, and no parents, no
mother
, as Peter well knew. Peter’s father was the closest thing she had to a parent, but she couldn’t talk with him
about any of this, about how useless she felt sometimes. All kinds of things were happening out there in the world—President Eisenhower had signed the Civil Rights Act a couple of years before, and there were sit-ins all over the South, the wonderful young John Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination, and Ruth and Peter hoped he would become President—but meanwhile she felt as if she had been banished to a desert island. Many of the women she knew from Smith were married, or trying to be, but she knew others who were writing for magazines, who were lobbying for women’s rights, including better pay and birth control. Gloria Steinem, who had been a couple years ahead of Ruth, had already published her extraordinary account of working as a Playboy bunny with its famous last line, the sad girl who waved good-bye to Gloria as she gathered her clothes for the last time.
See you in the funnies
.