The Last First Day (8 page)

She reached the bottom and stepped onto the grass, the heels of her good shoes sinking into the turf.

The forest surrounding the school had become a black mass on the horizon, darker than the sky. The main building with its high position on the campus had a vantage over hundreds of acres, the forest of alder, chestnut, honey locust, maple, oak, and pine. At night in the winter, especially once snow had fallen, the school’s lighted windows and illuminated colonnades, its cloak of Virginia creeper stirring against the old brick, created an illusion that Ruth found almost theatrically romantic. Wood was still burned in the fireplaces, and on cold mornings smoke hung in drifts in the low places, herds of white-tailed deer moving out from among the trees to venture across the playing fields. Somehow, Ruth thought, the wilderness beyond the
lighted compound of the school’s buildings made everything that had been acquired over the school’s history—paintings and books, dishes and lamps and desks and ladder-back chairs and upholstered sofas and faded fringed throw pillows—seem especially valuable, like the intimate belongings of a pharaoh arranged in the chambers of his tomb. Whenever she walked down the halls, the eyes of the headmasters who had preceded Peter gazing out at her from the cracked pigment of their portraits, she was aware that her own and Peter’s place in this continuum was, after all, brief.

Now someone spoke her name.

She had been standing on the grass and blinking up into the streetlights, white moths orbiting through the galaxies of insects. For a moment, when she turned around, she couldn’t see anything, the space from which someone had spoken to her a pure darkness.

Then an enormous, familiar boy with shaggy hair surged toward her—Mrs. van Dusen! he said again. He gave her a bear hug and loped away.

Welcome back! she said.

Her sweater had slipped off one shoulder, and she pulled it back. What was that giant boy’s name? She couldn’t seem to remember anyone’s name tonight.

When she turned to look up at the top of the steps, Peter stepped out onto the lighted landing among the boys, appearing there as if she had called his name. He hesitated between the columns and then began to descend stiffly, going sideways one step at a time in the midst of the throng.

The signs of Peter’s illness had begun with his eyes, a degeneration
of his peripheral vision. Tests had been run. Meanwhile, he had not been allowed to drive, and Ruth had chauffeured him around for a few days, including to the follow-up appointment at their general practitioner’s office. The doctor had been a young man; neither she nor Peter had seen him before. In the brightly lit examining room, he had laid out the symptoms of Peter’s condition.

The full lips, he’d said, glancing from the chart in his hand to Peter’s face and then back to his folder, speaking as if to students who were taking notes.

Large eye sockets, he said. Eyes slightly recessed. Dominant brow, frontal bossing, prominent jaw … Can I see your hand, please? he’d asked.

Peter’s hands, like everything about him, were large, his fingers long and slender.

Peter held out his hands, palms up.

Arachnodactyly, the doctor said. Like the spider. He did not seem to notice Ruth’s growing perturbation.

Bossing? Ruth said. She stared at the doctor. What’s that?

The doctor appeared not to have heard her. Sweat a lot? he asked Peter.

Peter nodded. In the heat, he said. Exercising, he added. He cleared his throat.

The doctor turned finally to Ruth. Snoring? Getting worse?

Ruth clasped her hands together in her lap. She did not trust herself to speak, afraid her voice would tremble.

Haven’t you noticed, the doctor said—he looked back and forth between Ruth and Peter—that he’s getting taller? His shoes getting tighter?

Ruth had felt stricken. She
had
thought Peter was getting taller somehow, but it seemed so unlikely. He’d lost some weight, and she’d attributed the odd effect of his apparently increased height to that change in his appearance. But he’d complained about his shoes, and just the week before she’d replaced both his ancient wingtips and a pair of sneakers.

The syndrome, it turned out, was a form of gigantism. Marfan syndrome, the doctor had continued, an uncommon genetic disease, an inherited defect of connective tissue. It was relatively rare, though less so than one might think, he said.

I’ve never seen it before, actually, he admitted, but there was no reason for them to worry about it much in a man of Peter’s age.

Other things, he implied, unsmiling, would probably finish Peter first.

Peter had taken the news with what Ruth considered freakish calm.

In truth, though, there was little to be done. He had regular echocardiograms, as there could be trouble with deterioration of the walls of the aorta, an enlargement of the heart. (How terrible and ironic, Ruth had thought, if Peter should die because his heart was too big.) But so far he’d been fine. Other than new prescriptions for his glasses—at least every year and sometimes more often—there wasn’t anything else to do in terms of treatment, they’d been told.

The doctor had put more drops in Peter’s eyes that day and sent him off with a pair of folding cardboard sunglasses, which he had obediently put on. They were much too large, even for his big head, and he had looked ridiculous.

In the car on the way home, Ruth had glanced at him in the passenger seat. When they left town and the road passed into the woods, the light was like that of the old newsreels that used to play in movie houses when she and Peter were young, flickering and premonitory, disconcerting. But Peter had seemed serene, sitting quietly in the passenger seat, as if not only his vision had been compromised but also his ability to speak or even think.

He was not a fighter, Ruth had thought then. His strengths were endurance, not belligerence; obedience and compromise, not resistance. If he were told he would soon die, he would accept it without self-pity or complaint. For Peter there would be no raging against the dying of the light.

Long ago, when they’d been very young, everything for her a kind of now-or-never drama, she had told him once that she hated him, that she never wanted to see him again.

He had accepted it—had believed her, because it was not in his nature to deceive himself and so he could not imagine Ruth doing so—and had turned sadly away. It had been for them a nearly fatal submission.

Now she watched him come down the steps of the main building, looking over the crowd of boys and teachers milling around on the pavement below. How was it that they had been married for so long, over half a century?

He would never see her, she thought, but she waved anyway.

Surprisingly, his gaze found her. He lifted a hand and came toward her.

• • •

Peter had left the house early that morning, having been awake and restless, she knew, since before five a.m. For years in their marriage it had been Ruth who’d had trouble sleeping. Now she couldn’t seem to sleep enough. Peter, however, seemed more and more often to be awake in the middle of the night. Occasionally, he went downstairs and had a glass of milk and some cookies; she was aware sometimes, waking in the middle of the night herself, of the smell of Oreos on his breath.

Last night, coming briefly out of sleep in the darkness, she had sensed him awake beside her.

She had rolled over to face him. What’s the matter?

His eyes had been open. He had reached over to pat her hair, his big hand resting heavily on her head.

But she hadn’t been able to stay awake. Before she’d heard his answer, she was gone again, tugged back down into sleep.

When she’d opened her eyes this morning, he’d been gone, the bedroom full of explosive light.

Is anything wrong? she had asked him a few days before. Is everything all right at school?

Never better, he had said, but he’d busied himself with something or other, and she’d thought he was withholding.

She knew that she was sometimes unhelpful when difficulties presented themselves at the school. She was made easily angry on his behalf, full of righteous indignation and frustration, suggestions about what he should or shouldn’t do. She’d had to remind herself—especially when she was younger and less patient—just to listen sometimes, not to weary him with tirades, however sympathetic their origins.

Once, complaining to Dr. Wenning about Peter’s tendency toward ponderousness, his quiet method of reaching decisions—How can I help him if he doesn’t tell me anything? she had protested—Dr. Wenning had said to her: Not everyone likes to talk so much as you and I do, Ruth. Maybe a little silence is nice sometimes. Good for the marriage.

Peter made his way toward her now, moving against the tide of boys, parting them as he came. Some of them came up only to his waist. He held his hands over their heads, elbows up, like someone pushing through deep water.

When he bent to kiss her, she put her hand on his cheek. Under her fingertips she felt a patch of bristles, a place he’d missed, shaving.

You’ve had a long day, she said. You all right?

Then a boy, practically bouncing with urgency, was beside them. Dr. van Dusen? he said. Can we—

Peter turned from her, his hand falling from her arm. In a moment he was gone from her side, pulled back into the crowd.

She stood for a minute, waiting.

The bell in the chapel began to ring. Everybody would want Peter for one thing or another tonight, she thought. No point in waiting.

She turned away and went on without him.

She walked alone down the path toward the chapel. The world, so solemn and aloof in the growing darkness, looked like a painting or an engraving, she thought. The big motionless shapes of the oak trees with their heavy crowns standing at a distance on the lawn; beyond the trees, the palisade of wrought-iron
streetlamps. Along the road, a row of parked cars, silver-backed in the moonlight. The light at the horizon had faded, and overhead now the sky was a deep, humbling blue.

Ruth had studied languages at Smith. In the Old High German she knew, the word for
blue
was
blau
, which meant
shining
.

It was a shining kind of night.

The world was everywhere a mess, she thought, countries all over the globe being torn to pieces, it seemed, by flood or fire or poverty or hate. And sometimes she had so many complaints about even her own small safe corner of it. But how dazzling it could be.

At the end of the path where the trees parted, the white steeple of the chapel stood out against the sky. At the steeple’s top, the weathervane’s bronze ship pointed her bow west.

Once, years ago, Ruth had won a five-dollar bet with Peter about weathervanes: the ship faces the oncoming wind, she’d insisted. It doesn’t follow it.

She had known this as she knew so many things: from reading. She read voraciously, novels and histories, dozens of self-help guides—though Dr. Wenning had disparaged such material—nonfiction on diverse subjects: world hunger, astrophysics, nineteenth-century European art. Over the issue of the weathervane, she had been her worst self, triumphantly pushing the open volume of the encyclopedia across the dining room table at Peter and jabbing the page with her index finger.

She had made him get up and give her the money right then and there, even though they’d been eating dinner at the time. That had been part of her problem, she knew; she’d never
made any money of her own in her life. Gloria Steinem had been two years ahead of Ruth at Smith. Beside someone like Gloria, Ruth felt the paucity of her experience, her meager achievement. Over the years, she’d done every sort of job imaginable at the school, answering the phones, playing the piano to accompany the choir—though inexpertly, it was true—even teaching French. But because she was Peter’s wife, and because he was the headmaster, and because that’s how things were then, it had been assumed that she would never be paid for any of it. That was how women had been treated—
wives
had been treated—in those days. Today no one would tolerate such an arrangement, she knew, and everyone was better for it.

As she had watched Peter cross the room that night to find his jacket and his billfold, lifting the coat from the chair and patting the pockets, her absurd victory had felt pyrrhic, of course.

I’ve got some work to do before the morning, he’d said after that, and he had taken himself off to his study upstairs.

She’d been angry with herself, ashamed. Why had she needed to prove to Peter, of all people, that she knew which way a weathervane faced? He had never doubted her intelligence, never once been anything but grateful for her presence at his side, the way she had put her head down and worked alongside him. Yet she had cared so much about being
right
all the time, because that’s what happened when you felt that you were a powerless person, just someone’s
wife
. She’d never told Peter she’d wanted to be paid for what she’d done at the school, and in the end it wasn’t about the money, anyway. But perhaps
it would have helped her feel less useless sometimes, if she’d ever had a paycheck with her name on it.

She looked up now at the white steeple of the chapel, its confident ascent. The young women hired today to teach at the school were accomplished and ambitious, half of them with doctorates—one of them had
two
doctorates, Peter had told her—even though it was only high school. All of them were busy with their careers and often children, too. It was difficult not to feel a little silly, a little superfluous, when she compared herself with these young women.

She thought about the amateurish paintings she’d made over the years, the failed play and the failed novel she’d written, the hours spent practicing the piano in hopes of being good enough to play professionally one day, even just with the ragtag local orchestra in Bangor. All those
years
, she thought now, when she had struggled so hard to be accomplished in this or that. She’d never had quite enough talent, in the end, or maybe it was patience. Few people did, she knew. Still, she couldn’t pretend it hadn’t hurt sometimes, knowing that.