The Last First Day (11 page)

My god! I am so
terrible
at this! she would cry in frustration, watching a ball she’d hit sail off into the trees. And then the next one would follow, equally wide of the mark. Sometimes she had made him laugh so hard he’d have to stop, doubled over, and rest his hands on his knees. She didn’t mean to be comical. She just was. Once she’d thrown her racquet at him.

She could get fighting mad, too, his Ruth. You didn’t want to cross her.

Usually he did not need to speak or raise a hand to ask for silence in the chapel on this first night. Ruth had asked him that one time how he managed it, and he’d been truthful when he’d said he didn’t know. He didn’t believe he was in control of it, actually. The boys familiar with the ritual fell quiet of their own accord, knowing it was expected of them. The younger ones, glancing around, alert to something happening in the room, eventually grew silent, too.

That shared silence was magical for Peter.

Tonight, however, the boys did not seem to see him standing there. They turned around and exchanged fake punches with the fellows behind them, or tapped the shoulders of the boys in
front and then withdrew their hands, gazing innocently toward the ceiling. He watched all this but felt unmoved by it, as if standing at a great distance. Laughter broke out here and there. He saw teachers lean forward, frowning at the miscreants.

Peter waited for the horseplay to stop, for conversation to cease. He didn’t know what else to do. He could not see Ruth in the darkness of the chapel. He wondered if she had gone home, perhaps, to get ready for the party afterward. He was sorry that he’d been pulled away from her earlier. He’d wanted to take her arm, walk with her down to the chapel. He’d missed her today. He felt that more often these days, sometimes at odd moments: he
missed
her beside him. Like any man, he admired a beautiful woman, had stolen his share of looks at centerfolds over the years. But really the only woman he’d ever wanted was Ruth.

He’d felt it from the moment she’d showed up at his house when they were twelve years old, his father the town physician who had taken her in when she was alone.

At the far end of the aisle, the square of blue twilight glowed steadily.

Peter understood that his extreme height, the pronounced size of his big head, wielded a kind of drama; just standing up in front of them could make the boys be quiet in the classroom, though his size rarely seemed to intimidate little children. When he stood on the sidelines at athletic events, there always seemed to be one or two urchins, the children of faculty members, hanging on to his arms like monkeys and walking up his sides in their grass-covered sneakers.

He was sorry, but not as sorry as Ruth imagined perhaps,
not to have had children of his own. He was mostly sorry for Ruth; it was really Ruth to whom children were drawn. It had been hard for him to bear the longing in her eyes sometimes.

He’d tried to give her so many children, in a way. All these decades of boys.

They’d been enough for him, but perhaps not for her. Still, she had not complained. They had not spoken of it, really.

That, too, had been a mistake, perhaps.

He knew in general that he could put his height to good use. He had seen how it worked in the classroom. His stature, his athleticism … these had helped him be a good teacher. During graduate school, he’d left Ruth alone in New Haven for three months while he’d served briefly on a commission for training seminarians in rural ministries as schoolteachers. As the panel’s youngest member, recommended by a history professor at Yale, he’d been farmed out to the least hospitable sorts of locales, tiny towns in Minnesota and Wisconsin near the Canadian border, places that might have taxed older, less vigorous men. During those cold, dark days spent observing from the back of one-room schoolhouses, his knees jutting up above the tops of the low desks, he had discovered in himself, alongside a love of God, an instinct for how to teach and a rambunctious style. In the classrooms at Derry, though he wasn’t in them so much anymore, Peter behaved as if every answer, no matter how lackluster or hesitant, was a revelation. He loved to see the boys’ eyes light up at his pleasure.

He disliked formality. He wanted the boys to call him Peter. He insisted on that. Everyone at Derry, in fact, whether
they worked in the kitchen or drove one of the big mowers that roved over the playing fields or taught Shakespeare or physics or Greek, called him Peter. He hated standing on ceremony.

From the open doors came a blissful rush of cool air toward him, as if the grass outside, the trees with their drooping, fragrant burden of summer leaves, had given up the last of the day’s warmth. The knee that troubled him the most, his right knee, sent out a sudden throb of pain. The discomfort rose, flared and then ran up his leg, touching a finger to the base of his spine. He felt sweat on his forehead. He shifted, tightening his calves, releasing them. The pain dimmed a little, wandered off. Peter realized that he’d been holding his breath. His chest felt sore and tight, as if he might have broken a rib.

But it was not his heart; he thought it was not his heart. He felt it thudding along uninvolved, uninterested in the strange tumult of feelings he was experiencing. This sorrow. This bewilderment. This anger.

He had given his first day speech to the boys at Derry for years—the same talk, more or less, about responsibility and opportunity—and he’d long ago done away with notes for it. The point of the evening was less what he said anyway, though he’d been proud of his words at one time, the sentences carefully crafted. Ruth had helped him; she had always been the better writer. He’d never thought much of that play or that novel she’d worked on, though—too depressing, though he never would have told her so. He had tried to be enthusiastic.

It was the experience of this moment, when the school community gathered under one roof in the darkness and the silence that Peter wanted to give the boys. It worked like an
inoculation, he thought, protecting them against the worst of what might happen to them over the year, the various crimes perpetrated both by and against them. Right now, the new boys were at the fragile peak of their bravado, having made it through the parting from their families, the confusing business of the first day, without public tears. But some of them were precariously close to breaking down, Peter knew. He searched the audience and tried to fix his attention on them, the new boys, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds not yet free of their childhood selves, required to sit in the first rows. He counted on their faces to restore his equanimity, his sense of purpose.

A few days ago, just out of the shower one morning, Ruth had stood on tiptoe beside him, a towel knotted under her arms. She had kissed him as he’d straightened his tie in front of the mirror. Outside the window, a bird had been warbling, a long stream of entreaties, of fulsome nonsense.

Peter had made a goofy face at her in the mirror. He had not wanted to tell her how strange he’d felt lately, how uninvolved, somehow, in what was happening. He’d felt it powerfully the moment he’d opened his eyes this morning, as if he were watching the world through wavering old glass.

He was depressed, perhaps. They said it just came on people sometimes, like any sickness. Perhaps it was an inevitable part of the syndrome.

It had nothing to do with Ruth. He was sure about that.

It was something else, some hand reaching toward him from elsewhere, groping around for him, trying to
tell
him something. He had looked down at the cleavage of her breasts
under the towel, the little accordion fan of wrinkles there, but he had not felt aroused, a further dismay. Ruth’s breasts, her glorious freckled breasts, had always aroused him.

And poor Ed McClaren today, that god-awful scene in the dining hall … he hoped the man would be all right.

But he knew, somehow, that he would not be.

The new boys usually seemed poignant to Peter, full of promise and worry and false gaiety. He was struck every fall by the difference a summer made in the appearance of returning boys who, in three months’ time, had acquired shoulders and facial hair and an adult bearing. All day today he’d roamed around, shaking hands, greeting returning students, meeting the new boys, surprising and pleasing a few by knowing their names. Facebook was a great tool for that; he loved Facebook. Here and there he carried into a dorm room on behalf of a flummoxed new boy and his pleased parents a box or a suitcase or a complicated tangle of computer equipment trailing cords.

He had, just like his old self, conducted bits of business with the faculty members with whom he crossed paths, coming back to his desk between these periods of sociability and encountering the messages of phone calls that needed to be returned.

But he’d said the wrong thing to a few people today, irritably chiding Mark Simmons, the art teacher, for forgoing a tie, though Mark had steadfastly refused to adopt this required convention for his entire career at Derry, and twice interrupting (boorishly, he thought now) during a presentation to the new boys about the library with irrelevant and probably incorrect
observations about the school’s wireless service. He had just wanted to hear himself speak, to reassure himself that he was—what?
Present
, somehow. Yet he had forgotten names, had failed to remember details about certain changes in the calendar agreed upon earlier in long, tiresome meetings.

Worse than these lapses, though, the sort of forgivable lapses perhaps typical of a man nearing eighty, he had been aware that he was chasing all day after the optimism that had once been, had always been before, so effortless.

Several times today he had crossed paths with Charlie Finney—Charlie had used that nickname Ruth so hated,
Pater
, and had saluted him with what seemed a false smile—and Peter had felt for the first time a real fear in Charlie’s presence, an anger so rare that he almost didn’t recognize it.

How dare you, he had thought. How
dare
you take that tone with me?

Now, facing the assembled school, he recognized that his performance today had been exactly that, a performance calculated to create the appearance of his own involvement. At his desk, during the few moments of quiet throughout the day, he had not talked on the phone or read through the papers stacked up and awaiting his attention. He had stared around the paneled walls at the portraits of his predecessors, the whiskered gentlemen and clean-shaven clerics who had led the Derry School since its creation in 1902. He had stared out the window. He had extended his foot, as if testing for solid ground, into the sharp parallelogram of sunlight that fell over the carpet. The sun’s heat had blazed against his ankle, almost burning
him. He had not wanted to move when the time had come for his next appointment.

He had loved this place so much. He had worked so hard for it. And he knew it was being gradually taken from him.

He was just like everyone else, of course. He would die, and the grass would grow right over his grave.

Somehow, he realized, he had begun speaking. He had arrived at the part of his speech about the eye being on the sparrow, the paragraph he’d constructed carefully to be read as both a comfort and a warning: they were
seen
, these boys. No one would be overlooked.

He did not remember having started, though, and the shock of disorientation he felt made him stop. His mouth had been moving, and words had been coming out of him, all of it issuing as if from an automatic reflex. He remembered a scientific experiment from his youth—or was it from one of the science labs he’d observed at Derry? An electrical impulse made a frog twitch. The brain was not involved.

Peter felt the mass of people before him shrink slightly, shiver, and then fix like a tiny, faraway image calcifying under a microscope. Where was Ruth? Had she actually gone home without him?

In the awkward silence that now filled the chapel, an explosive snort of laughter came from somewhere in the darkness of the pews. Someone, one of the boys, had not been able to bear the tension of the moment. A contagious ripple, the possibility of horrible affront, ran through the boys in that area—
Peter saw a section of the pews writhe like something about to strike—and then died away. He knew then that he must just get to the end somehow.

Ruth? Where was Ruth? He looked for her again, but he did not see her. Fear began in him now in earnest, a headache as shocking as ice applied to his temples. Sweat ran down his face, into his shirt collar.

He’d lost Ruth on the way to the chapel. She hadn’t waited for him.

With a strange effort, as if tuning himself to the right frequency, he began speaking again, heard his own voice, heard relieved laughter from the audience—he had told the joke about the cow and the horse and the pig. Nearly there, nearly there, he thought distractedly, and then, thank God, he was at the end of it.

He smiled—where did that smile come from? A rictus, the frog jumps—but what he felt, he knew, was grief.

He could not make out a single face in the darkness. He felt none of what he usually felt on this occasion, the thing he had been so glad for Ruth to feel at last, the thing that came into the room every year because of the silence … no, the thing that
was
the silence, a moment of extraordinary communion, Peter believed, a rare blessed moment that made him feel both unimportant and yet also part of the infinite, important largeness of the world.

But it had not come this year. It had packed up its bags and gone away, he thought, like an old man with a hunched-over back and a battered suitcase walking alone down the road in
the darkness, away from Derry, away from the boys, away from Ruth, away from Peter.

He had been left behind.

Afterward, outside the chapel, someone was speaking to him. Peter knew he knew who it was, but for the life of him he could not remember the man’s name. He remembered Ed McClaren, and that something had happened to him.

He saw Ruth come up behind the interlocutor, her eyes wide, questions all over her face: What is
wrong
with you? her look said. You’re frightening me!