Read Online The Last First Day by Carrie Brown - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Carrie Brown
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to unfold. Kneeling at the edge of the driveway and pulling weeds earlier in the day, she’d felt that brief flare of pure contentment. The storms would skirt them. The evening’s party would be a success. Another year was about to begin. She wanted now to recapture that feeling, that respite in the middle of the afternoon when she had not worried. But it was as Keats had written. One could never get completely away from melancholy. The beginning of things always contained their end.
• • •
She began to make her way down the steps and was almost at the bottom when three boys, a chase in progress, dodged past her. Howls of encouragement went up from the others. The boy in the lead, freckle-skinned, hair close-cropped, long grasshopper arms and legs, went down the steps three at a time, knocking into her as he went past. Ruth stumbled forward, snatched at the air. She grazed the head of the boy before her, his hair in her fingers for an instant, soft as silk.
Sorry, Mrs. van Dusen! someone called.
She righted herself on the steps, flapping helplessly, trying for comic effect.
It’s all right! she called. Don’t mind me!
On the sidewalk, boys streamed toward the chapel, chattering and laughing, bumping shoulders.
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 thelighted 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 degenerationof 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
• • •
She began to make her way down the steps and was almost at the bottom when three boys, a chase in progress, dodged past her. Howls of encouragement went up from the others. The boy in the lead, freckle-skinned, hair close-cropped, long grasshopper arms and legs, went down the steps three at a time, knocking into her as he went past. Ruth stumbled forward, snatched at the air. She grazed the head of the boy before her, his hair in her fingers for an instant, soft as silk.
Sorry, Mrs. van Dusen! someone called.
She righted herself on the steps, flapping helplessly, trying for comic effect.
It’s all right! she called. Don’t mind me!
On the sidewalk, boys streamed toward the chapel, chattering and laughing, bumping shoulders.
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 thelighted 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 degenerationof 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
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