The Rope Walk (15 page)

Mr. Moon and James carried the crates onto the lawn.

“I know how to open them,” Theo said, dancing around the men. “All I need is a box cutter.”

When James headed for the porch to go inside and find a knife to open the crates, Theo scampered along behind him. “All we need is a box cutter,” he said again. “I know how to do it.”

James leaned over and clamped a hand over his mouth. “I'm going to cut a box,” he said. “A
voice
box.” He threw Archie an exasperated look.

Alice sat down on the steps of the porch. Suddenly she felt deflated, as though the lovely pleasure of Kenneth's gift to them was being ruined, exactly as Tad and Harry had ruined the muff.

“Go ahead.” Archie gestured toward the letter. “Open it.”

Alice looked down at the envelope in her hand. Carefully she took out the heavy paper and unfolded it. Kenneth's handwriting was large and heavily slanted, veering unevenly across the page as if he might have written it with his eyes closed, feeling for the margins with his fingers.

Dear Alice
, he had written.
I would be honored if you and Theo would accept
Monkey Man
and
Old Soldier's Beautiful Daughter.
They are too large to hang inside an ordinary house, but a tree branch is fine. It wont hurt them to be outside. I hope you will come see me today. There is no one to talk to except my loony sister (!) and Sidonnie, who I fear does not like Vermont and will be leaving me soon
. There was a little break on the page before the writing began again, like a postscript.
Word of the day: I think you and Theo will become my
camarilla. He had underlined the word
camarilla. Do you remember yesterday's word? You're it
. Rara avis.
Your friend, K.F
.

Alice looked up. Archie had turned away from her, squinting at the lawn and the field beyond, the sun shining on his face. His hair floated up around his head in the breeze, white and feathery.

“What's a camarilla?” Alice asked.

Archie turned around. “What?” He frowned. “Oh, it's a king's inner circle, I think, sort of a cabal. Clever schemers who advise the king. Why?”

“He's giving us two of his mobiles,” Alice said. She imagined herself and Theo dressed in heraldic mail like Knights of the Round Table, with lions on their breasts. She was surprised that Kenneth had called Miss Fitzgerald “loony” in the letter. But then Alice had seen the house; he wasn't telling her anything she didn't already know. Also, he'd put that exclamation point there; Alice had mistakenly called them “excitement” points when she was younger. The mark of punctuation seemed to suggest he had a lighthearted view of his sister's housekeeping failures. Last night, when Archie was back at the hospital, she had asked Wally if the boys had told Archie about the house. “The twins did,” he had told her. “I'm sure he thinks they're exaggerating. I told him it was beyond even the twins’ imagination.”

Archie came to sit beside her on the steps of the porch. “Well. That's something,” he said. He hesitated for a moment before going on. “You know, Mr. Fitzgerald is an important artist, Alice,” he said finally. “I suspect these are worth a good bit of money. He's made us a very valuable gift.”

Not
us
, Alice thought.
Me
. Me and Theo. She looked down at the letter in her hands.

“Ken's had an extraordinary life,” Archie went on, leaning his elbows on his thighs. “One adventure after another. Climbed all sorts of mountains in India and Pakistan, designed sets for ballets and operas in theaters all over the world. As I say—he's quite famous.” He paused for a moment. “I read something once about him. It was in an interview, I think. He said he got the idea of the mobiles from mountain climbing, looking down on the world and seeing the shadows of the clouds…” He trailed off.

Alice looked up at him.

“It's just that it's probably a lot of money, Alice,” he said. He straightened his back and rubbed a hand over his head, disarranging his hair.

Did Archie mean they would have to give them back? “They're
a present
,” Alice said.

Archie was silent for a moment. “Not your ordinary sort, though,” he said. “I want to think about it.”

“Think about
what?”

“Whether we ought to accept them.”

Alice felt alarmed. He
did
mean to send them back. “He gave them to
us
,” she said. “To me and Theo.”

Archie sighed. “Let me think about it, Alice.”

Alice stood up and looked down at Archie. “I want to open the boxes,” she said. She rarely argued with her father; it startled her to hear her voice now, the note of anger in it. But why was he being so … careful, she thought in resentment, so careful and old and
slow
. Archie always wanted to think about things. He always wanted to
consider
matters before venturing an opinion or making a judgment, as if everything were equally important, what to have for breakfast and—she cast about for a parallel construction—whether to go to war. And of course they
weren't
, she thought now in frustration. Some things just didn't matter all that much. For a second she felt a shocking blaze of hatred for her father, a sensation utterly unfamiliar and powerful. It was as if all her blood had suddenly been exchanged for fire and then just as quickly extinguished, leaving only a smoldering gunpowder trail.

Archie looked up at her. “He must like you very much, Alice.” He reached to take her hand. “What did you do to besot him so already?”

But Alice took her hand away. Sometimes when Alice went in search of Archie in his study, she found him in his tufted leather chair, the one their mother had called Sleepy Hollow for the deep well of its cracked seat. He would be staring vacantly past the book open on his lap, the room dark except for a single light
shining onto the page, the lamp's occult ceramic finial, an Egyptian eye, watching the shadows in the corners of the room. Archie would look up at her knock, startled, and when he saw her, peeping around the edge of the door, he would close the book and smile. But it was a sad smile he offered her at those moments, and she understood that she had seen a side of her father he ordinarily took more trouble to conceal. Behind the mild expression Archie presented to the world—his calm manner, his quiet voice, his wry, economical utterances—lay this sadness, Alice knew, all the years of missing Alice's mother and struggling alone to raise their children. Yet even more troubling than the sadness was the indifference Alice sometimes detected behind her father's melancholy, as if he simply could not rouse himself to care sufficiently about either the questions posed to him in this world or the answers he would supply. On those evenings when she came to say good night to him in his study, when she found him so inert and helpless and far away, Alice would run for his lap and put her arms around his neck and bury her face in his shoulder, unwilling and unable to look at him,

Archie's face, turned to her now as he gazed up at her on the porch steps, looked old and tired and defeated.

Suddenly, surprising herself, she jumped to her feet and leaped down the steps to the grass two at a time. She did not want Archie to look at her that way. On the lawn, in the heat of her confusion, she turned a violent handspring, and then another.

Theo banged through the screen door onto the porch. “No box cutter,” he announced.

Archie had no practical skills; the boys joked that he couldn't even change a lightbulb. He had never maintained the kind of respectable tool bench O'Brien had set up in his garage, for instance.

James appeared a moment later, a steak knife from the kitchen in his hand.

They slit open the boxes and the mobiles appeared, fixed to the boards with huge staples, like creatures caught in mid-flight and pinned to the wood. At first Archie wanted to leave them attached to the boards and not hang them, but Theo and Alice set up such a complaint that he relented. The children stood under the maple tree on the front lawn, and James brought around the ladder and set it against the tree to climb up and hang the mobiles from the branches. Theo threw open his arms as thejointed black shapes of
Monkey Man
, with the distended belly of a starving child, arms and legs akimbo, mouth open in a howling O, jumped down and bounced on the mobile's metal arms, doing a Saint Vitus's dance in the air. The figure was nearly the same size as Theo, recognizable as a monkey but also human and vital, like a shaman caught up in a secret ritual.

When James affixed
Old Soldier's Beautiful Daughter
and let the pieces fall into place, a shimmering waterfall of tiny gold leaves dropped and spun like golden bees in the dappled shade under the tree. Elizabeth, who had come to work even though it was Sunday because she was finishing up the laundry for James and Wally's departures, came out onto the porch in her apron to watch.
“Wha!
So beautiful!” she said in surprise. “And what's that one? That one's you, Theo, jumping around like a monkey!”

Inside, Wally began playing the piano, a complicated passage of notes that ran up and down the scale. When Alice had gone by his bedroom door on her way down to breakfast that morning, she had seen his suitcase open on the bed, a stack of ironed shirts folded on the bedspread, and his tuxedo, magisterial and black, draped like a mourner over the footboard, his black shoes side by side on the floor. Tomorrow he would leave for Michigan, but inside the living room now Wally played the exercise faster
and faster; his hands must be a blur over the keys. Alice listened and imagined the notes running around and around the walls like birds trapped in a room. Since their trip to the Fitz-geralds’ yesterday—since breakfast, really, when Wally had gotten angry—Wally had held himself apart from the boys. Even his playing now had a remote, concentrated energy to it, as if he were having an argument with himself.

Alice stood beneath the shower of
Old Soldier's Beautiful Daughter
. Beads of reflected light danced over her skin, and she tried to catch them in her fingers. Theo bumped into her as he spun around beneath
Monkey Man
, and they clasped hands, swinging each other in furious circles and then collapsing onto the grass.

Theo rolled her over and sat on her, victorious. He smelled like grass and dirt—
April and May
—and the bacon they'd had for breakfast and something else, something she was learning to identify as his own particular smell. She bucked violently and toppled him, but he had her pinned again in a minute, her cheek against the grass, his chest pressed against the wings of her shoulder blades.

“Surrender,” he said from on top of her, panting onto the back of her neck. The sensation of his hot breath on her skin tickled her, a strange, hysterical tickle. She began to squirm beneath him, wrenching her shoulders and trying to throw him off, but she was laughing too hard to be successful.

“Got you,” Theo crowed. “I've got you, Alice.”

After lunch it began to rain, a steady spring drizzle, and Archie dropped Alice and Theo off at the Fitzgeralds’ in the car. When they pulled up in front of the house, Alice hesitated. She wondered exactly what Tad and Harry had told Archie about the
condition of the Fitzgeralds’, what Wally had said, whether Archie himself had ever been inside. She wanted him to see it, the strange walled city of junk Miss Fitzgerald had built inside her own house. Archie would be able to fix things somehow, Alice thought. He would understand about Miss Fitzgerald's trouble and put it right.

She turned in the front seat beside him. “Can you come in with us?” she said. She wanted to put her arms around Archie now, to apologize for her anger of earlier in the day when he had been reluctant about the mobiles. She was suddenly sorry for having pulled away her hand. She did not
want
to hurt him, she thought in a painful spasm of loyalty, as if it were someone else who had thought all those mean things about him, that he was boring and old-fashioned and … old.

Archie glanced at his watch. “Not today. I have to run up to Frost to pick something up, and I want to go back to the hospital tonight. Tell Kenneth I'll come see him soon. Tell him—well, tell him thank you, of course.”

Alice looked away from Archie out the window. The world beyond the wet glass appeared bent somehow, like a scene's disturbed reflection in a circus mirror.

“Call Elizabeth if it's still raining when you're ready to come home,” Archie said into the silence.

Alice opened the car door. “Can we come to the hospital with you tonight?” she said, turning back to look at him once more. “To see Helen?”

“We'll see,” Archie said. “Maybe.” He waved at them as he drove away, the car's taillights reflected in the dark shine of the wet pavement.

Theo and Alice opened the gate to the Fitzgeralds’ garden. The twins and Eli had been at work since earlier that morning. The grass had been mowed before the rain had started and one
section of the fence had been cleared of weeds. The fence itself, denuded, was falling apart. It looked as though it would have to be replaced entirely. There was no sign of the twins or Eli now, though. They'd probably gone home for lunch.

“I'm not going to go,” Theo said suddenly. He stopped walking.

Alice turned to him in surprise.

“I'm not going to the hospital to see her,” he said.

Alice stared at him, bewildered. “Why not?”

“They don't like me,” he said. “They don't like my dad.”

Alice couldn't imagine Helen not liking anyone. She couldn't imagine O'Brien and Helen not liking their own grandson.

“They're racists,” Theo said. “Especially
him
. He doesn't like us because we're black.”

The rain was falling harder now; it dripped off the hood of Alice's raincoat and ran down her face. Theo had been given an old yellow slicker of Eli's. It was too large for him and it hung down over his hands and nearly to his knees. He had not put up the hood, and the rain fell on his bare head, his golden hair darkening, sticking up in wet tufts.

“You don't
look
black,” Alice said.