The Last First Day (3 page)

That night, she and Peter had quarreled—her fault, as usual. She had picked a fight over something inconsequential, her anger easier to bear than her grief.

She hated that he gave off a whiff of injury, like a weakened animal being tracked in the woods. She hated the complicated misery of her pity.

Still he wouldn’t agree to retire.

He could not even talk about it.

And she, because she loved him, could not talk about it, either.

After her lunch, she went outside to weed the flower bed in front of the house. It was warm for September, the air still and the birds quiet in the trees. It was as if the storms to the west were attracting all the energy in the atmosphere, creating around them a perimeter of unnatural calm. She realized that she had spoken to no one all morning. The telephone had not rung.

When she struggled to her feet at last following two hours on her knees, her back was so stiff she could scarcely stand upright.

It seemed an indulgence in the daylight hours, but she went indoors and ran a hot bath anyway. She had time before dinner, she thought. The day’s long silence had made her uneasy,
and the evening ahead would be tiring. There was no harm in a quick bath.

Yet she soaked in the tub for a long while, trickling water over the chilled atolls of her knees. Big, doleful things her kneecaps appeared from that perspective, her chin held just above the water. Six feet tall once, her legs powerful from years of regular walking, she had lost height as she had aged. After going through menopause, she had shrunk a quarter-inch or more every year, and she had grown heavier, too, pounds now apparently impossible to shed. When she folded laundry, she hurried to put away her underclothes, so distressingly large.

Addressing her image in the mirror directly was all right; it was odd, how one could look without seeing. But it was unpleasant to accidentally glimpse her reflection in mirrors or store windows, like a creature stumbling into civilization from the wilderness.
Hulking
was the word that came to mind

Her old friend Dr. Wenning, a doctor and a professor of psychiatry for whom Ruth had worked part-time while Peter was at Yale, had despaired over Ruth’s posture.

Ruth, her back rounded, had sat at a wobbly three-legged table, typing Dr. Wenning’s lecture and patient notes from yellow sheets covered with her illegible scrawl.

Do not
slump
so, Ruth! Dr. Wenning would cry. In her habitual cowl-necked sweater, her white hair a bird’s nest, Dr. Wenning would frown at Ruth. Chin jutting, shoulders back, she presented her chest.

Like a figurehead on a ship, Ruth, she said. Breasts forward.
Thus
.

Dr. Wenning had been barely five feet tall. The effect had been Napoleonic, ridiculous.

Ruth had laughed.

Go ahead, Dr. Wenning had said, shaking a finger. But your height is not an
affliction
, Ruth. Biologically speaking, it is a survival advantage. Embrace your height!

On days when Ruth felt disquieted, as she had been today—the tiresome, noisy vacuuming, the tornado warnings, the lonely afternoon and long evening’s duties that always accompanied the first day of the school year still ahead of her—Ruth missed Dr. Wenning.

It had been thirty years since she had died, Ruth sitting beside her bed in the hospital in New Haven, where Dr. Wenning had practiced medicine for so many decades, treating with Teutonic calm and courtesy the hysterical, the suicidal, the dangerous, the brokenhearted.

My friends, Dr. Wenning had always called them.

Ruth had stayed at the hospital for three days during which Dr. Wenning had not regained consciousness.

Perched on a hard chair, inching closer to the window as the sun moved across the sky, Ruth had reread
Middlemarch
, plucked for its heft from the bookshelf at home before she’d left. Occasionally, she went downstairs to call Peter from the pay telephone on the first floor across from the hospital’s cafeteria, where the smells in the hall of toast and egg salad and hamburgers, the cheerful sounds of conversation and the clinking of silverware, warred with the underlying odors of sickness, the dramas of birth and death taking place nearby but out of sight.

Trays of bland meals had been delivered with depressing, even cruel regularity, to Dr. Wenning’s room. Ruth had felt outraged by these trays, the callousness of their disregard; clearly it could be seen that Dr. Wenning—eyes closed, whey-faced and bloated—would never eat again. Exhausted, terrified, Ruth had had no appetite, and she had hurried to put the untouched trays outside the door, clattering the dishes angrily as she did so.
Why
did they continue to bring them?

For two days, Dr. Wenning had moved restlessly in the bed, though never opening her eyes, her mouth working in ways that made Ruth’s throat constrict with helplessness.

Dr. Wenning had suffered her first bout of breast cancer years before, had survived one mastectomy and then another. She had known that this would be the end.

I know very well what will happen to me, Dr. Wenning had said, addressing her cowed young physician on her last visit to his office, Ruth sitting beside her, obedient as a nun.

It is pretty easy, Dr. Wenning had said. She had smiled at the young doctor, but his ears had gone red.

You give me enough morphine to sink a naval carrier, Dr. Wenning said. No stinginess in that regard. We are not, after all, worried about my
addiction
.

Do you hear me, Ruth? She had reached over to clutch Ruth’s arm and had gripped it lightly, as if to emphasize Ruth’s presence there for the doctor, someone who would hold him accountable.

Then her tone had softened. Ah, she had said lightly, almost gaily. What a nuisance I am to you. I hate it when my patients are physicians. Sorry!

She’d shaken her head, as if he and she were in agreement about their mutual obstinacy, their presumption, the necessary ego of those who took the Hippocratic oath.

Dr. Wenning had hefted her purse to her lap. But you understand me, I know, she said. And Ruth here knows what I want. So … it is okay? We are of one mind.

She had patted Ruth’s arm, as if Ruth had made this speech.

Afterward, breathless as they left the doctor’s office, she had apologized.

I had to scare him a little bit, she said. It was not too bad, though? I tried to be gentle.

Ruth realized she had never seen Dr. Wenning be anything
but
gentle, though she could be brisk with people she called bureaucrats and tyrants. A line from Shakespeare had come to Ruth; most of the time, Dr. Wenning’s tone would
sing the savageness out of a bear
.

On the third morning of Ruth’s vigil at the hospital, something seemed to ease inside Dr. Wenning’s body, and she had quieted. Ruth, staring at her, felt distance enfolding between them, though their positions never moved. The intervals between Dr. Wenning’s breaths became farther and farther apart.

Throughout the day, glancing up from
Middlemarch
, Ruth started forward in her chair only to see—after a long moment—Dr. Wenning’s sad, flat chest rise again.

Late on the evening of the third day, Ruth was awoken by a nurse’s hand on her shoulder.

She jumped up.

All traces of Dr. Wenning, everything Ruth had known
about her, had disappeared. Ruth cried out, her book falling to the floor.

In an instant that Ruth realized she had missed, Dr. Wenning had left her. The thing on the bed—the face hollow beneath the cheekbones, the nose a bloodless beak, the hand curled on the sheet—was almost unrecognizable.

She discovered then, though she had imagined it otherwise, that it would have been impossible to mistake sleep for death.

Night had fallen. Through the open window, Ruth heard the sound of wind in the treetops, the noise of traffic. Other nurses came into the room; how had they been summoned? One of them—there, there, she said; I’ve seen much worse—ushered Ruth from the room, as if now there was something mysterious to be done to Dr. Wenning that was too private, too obscene to be witnessed.

Ruth went downstairs, her legs wavering beneath her.

The cafeteria had been closed, the lights out. Through a round window in a door behind the lunch counter, she could see into the lighted kitchen, where someone was still at work, his white paper hat moving back and forth across the porthole window.

Inside the phone booth, she turned her back to the empty hallway, pressed her handkerchief to her face. When Peter answered the phone, she couldn’t speak.

Oh, Ruth, Peter said at last. I’m sorry.

The sympathy in his voice had made her cry.

He had not been able to come with her. That had been before he’d been made headmaster. He was only a teacher then, and it had not been easy for him to leave the school. There
weren’t enough teachers as it was, and when one of them quit or was sick or had to be away, the burden fell to the others, and the boys could be unruly and needed a strong hand. Resentment flared up quickly among colleagues who thought they spotted a shirker in their midst.

And Dr. Wenning had been no relation, after all, though she had been mother, father, sister … everything, really, to Ruth.

Outside the phone booth, someone had tapped a knuckle impatiently on the glass.

Ruth had made angry gestures of dismissal at the intruder, turned away her wet face.

Ruth had felt forlorn in the weeks following Dr. Wenning’s death.

One night, after another silent dinner, Peter had put down his fork.

She is still with you, Ruth, he said.

He had meant to console her. She knew that. But she thought his certainty fatuous—how on earth could he be so sure?—and she had snapped at him and told him so, though of course she regretted it later.

It made her feel hideous, being cruel to Peter, even when that cruelty arose—as she came to understand that it usually did, as was the case for most people, of course—out of pain.

She did not exactly wish that she had Peter’s faith in God—you couldn’t
try
to believe in something; you either did or did not—but she envied it. And his faith had only grown stronger over the years, though by what mechanism he could not say. He
was, Ruth sometimes thought, remarkably inarticulate about the things that seemed most important. In their early years, she had argued with him about God, even though then, as always, he had failed to rise to the attack.

It’s just a
story
, she said once. All that about the world being made in seven days, the Garden of Eden, the serpent who speaks, the stone before the mouth of the cave, the water turning into wine, blah blah blah.

He had shrugged. Think of it as a metaphor, he suggested.

Well, I just
can’t
, Ruth had snapped. And dead is dead.

Yet she also felt grateful for Peter’s faith, the way his conviction occasionally made it possible for her to trust, even temporarily, his version of things, a world where one was never really alone. And it
was
true that it made her feel less lonely to remember things about Dr. Wenning, to picture her. She would try to reconstruct Dr. Wenning’s face: blue eyes bulging behind the thick lenses of her glasses, the splatter of black moles like pepper on her neck, the unlikely softness of her plump hands, like little pillows. She tried to remember exactly how Dr. Wenning had looked sitting across from her in their favorite Italian restaurant in New Haven, Dr. Wenning wearing her big clip-on earrings, chunky square amethysts made of resin, and a red checkered napkin tucked under her chin. The chandeliers with their ivory silk shades had cast a pink light over the room, over the white bowls of spaghetti with vodka sauce that Ruth and Dr. Wenning always ordered.

The comfort these memories held for Ruth—the moments when she could actually conjure forth Dr. Wenning’s elusive,
vanished presence, the sound of her voice—was fleeting but piercing, a joy, though a joy strangely akin to pain. How close those two states often seemed, Ruth felt. How odd that one cried tears of
joy
as well as sorrow.

Every year on the first night of the school year it was the same. Dinner in the dining hall, Peter’s address to the boys at the chapel, then drinks and something to eat at Ruth and Peter’s house afterward for the faculty, who came in shifts so as not to neglect the boys on their first night.

Tonight she would go to dinner and to Peter’s talk, as she did every year. And she didn’t mind giving the party. She would never
not
have given it, in any case. Yet always when the school year began, she felt a little dread at what lay ahead. Cocoa nights with the boys, dinners with the trustees, retirement parties, school-wide picnics … she did her best on these occasions, but she was not naturally good at such things.

As she said to Peter, it was absurd for a basically shy and uncomfortable person to be in charge of making
other
people feel comfortable. A loner—though a
lonely
loner, as she knew herself to be—she had never found the public side of things, of being Peter’s wife, to be easy. What she
had
liked was to work. It was never a problem for Ruth to work. Hobnobbing with the high and mighty, as she said, was simply not her thing. And she was better with the boys than with the adults, anyway.

In the bathtub now, she lifted one foot and with her big toe turned on the faucet to run a trickle of hot water into the tub. She would likely forget someone’s name tonight, she thought,
or the names of their children, as she seemed to do more frequently.

They’d had no children of their own, a grief between her and Peter, though this was never mentioned anymore. Sometimes in the old days she saw that Peter had been caught off guard, noticing her with someone’s toddler in her lap. He had turned his eyes away from hers then, keeping a distance. It would have been too much for a look to pass between them. And children inevitably had seemed to like her, finding her at public events at the school as if they’d been watching for her, swinging on her arms when they saw her or crawling familiarly into her lap, where they leaned against her, gazing out defiantly at their embarrassed parents.