The Rope Walk (2 page)

The dead moth was a shadow cast over the morning. She liked moths, their modest, dusty colors and twilight journeys, the comical way they marched around in circles on the tabletop as if they'd been wound with a key. This one had the shaggy head of a statesman, laid out in death like a plenipotentiary in ermine robes, or a judge, eyes closed beneath his powdered wig. Her brothers hunted butterflies and pinned the specimens of monarchs and painted ladies and viceroys behind glass in a case in their bedroom, but Alice held back from these pursuits, averting her gaze from the needle and her brothers’ hands and the butterflies’ slender bodies, their little waists pinched between thorax and abdomen.

A breeze reached her now from over the fields, touching her shoulder and cheek. The white curtains shifted and bulged beside her, and at her feet the moth's wings stirred, too, a deceptive, tantalizing flutter. There had been a time, even just a year ago, when that little movement would have beguiled her, the laws governing the universe so much less appealing than the powers of her imagination, the possibility of a moth's resurrection. But today, with the inevitable capitulation from nine years old to ten, from the era of single digits to double, she had arrived at the age of scientific empiricism: she knew that there were no other possibilities for this moth. All summer long there would be more of them, anyway, legions of gentle pilgrims who would blunder into her bedroom at night to bump their noses against the yellowing shade of her bedside lamp. And every night another one
would expire in the windowsill, fallen onto one wing like a soldier upon its shield. Alice thought the windowsill was a terrible place to die, almost as bad as the gutter. In the stories she had read, the gutter was always where the poor orphan nearly expired. Carefully she lifted the tiger moth and held it out on her palm to the breeze. In an instant the wind picked it up. It blew away off her hand like a fighter jet veering suddenly out of formation. She raised her hands quickly, tried to find the tumbling moth inside the frame of her imaginary camera. At first the lawn tilted and held, a wedge of the blossoming lilacs obtruding into her view like an enormous purple mountain. But the moth was gone. It had disappeared, a speck crossing the frame of the picture like a shooting star and falling out of it into the void, into the world where sky and grass, flagpole and balloons, overturned chair and blur of yellow daffodils jostled and collided against the blue sky, the arrangement of everything that belonged to her tenth birthday holding still for just a moment. In heaven, in what Alice thought of as the parallel universe where everything that died could be set gently on its feet again and given a push with the tip of giant finger, the moth would be restored. But for now, as far as Alice could see, it was lost.

The day was innocently beautiful, the air milky and calm and full of the scents of pollen and flowers and the new grass of May. The morning was intoxicating, irresistible; Alice wanted to turn handsprings over the lawn or run through the orchard with her arms outstretched like an airplane's wings. All her life, she thought, she would want to remember the feeling of spring inside her this morning, the birds going mad with joy and purpose in the trees, the silky warmth, the glamorous light. She wanted never to forget this day: not the moth, not the daffodils,
not the heat on the back of her neck. It was all in the details, she sensed, the paint chips from the windowsill stuck to her bare feet; the feel of the silver bangle, her birthday present from her father, sliding coolly up and down her arm; the sunlight laying a bright path over the grass like a jingling of bells.

She leaned over and like a kitten quickly touched her kneecap with the tip of her tongue, tasting the rough, salty surface of her own skin, its strange heat; the taste was irrefutable evidence of herself, satisfying and private and known. This was who she was, Alice MacCauley, ten years old today in the town of Grange, state of Vermont, United States of America, continent of North America, the planet Earth, the World, the Universe.

She raised her hands again and tented her fingers into the box of her camera. She looked at the morning, the wobbling lawn, the careening tableau of the chairs and lilacs and balloons, the pink and white bunting shuddering along the porch rail in the breeze like a snake trying to shed its skin. It was impossible to believe that one day it would all disappear like poor Charlotte the whale, the whole of Alice's world and everything she loved sinking under a glacier or lost like Pompeii under the ash of the volcano.

Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom;
a bumblebee thudded close by Alice's ear, startling her.

The wind advanced, an invisible army bending the tops of the pine trees. The tiny mirrors hidden in the grass, faceted like the compound eyes of insects, flashed and flew. Something powerful stirred in the air, rippled over her shoulders, and caught the wild beating of her heart.

A little protest rose in her, competing with an instinct for valor. She wasn't ready, she wanted to say.

But she would have to be.

Any moment now, the guests would arrive.

A
LICE
ATTENDED
to the sounds of the household as they floated up the stairs. From the kitchen came the bouncing tempo of polka music. Elizabeth Tranh, the MacCauleys’ Vietnamese housekeeper, played the radio at a volume uncomfortable for most other people. She had poor hearing, the result of an infection acquired during the six weeks in 1979 she had spent in an open boat on the South China Sea with her son and daughter-in-law, two grandchildren, one of them an infant, and a dozen other Vietnamese fleeing their country. After many months in a camp in Hong Kong, the family had been taken in by the United States under the Episcopal archbishop's fund for refugee relief. Alice's mother, Beryl MacCauley, who had belonged to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Grange, had become Elizabeth's American sponsor when the family was resettled in nearby Brattleboro. The year Alice's twin brothers were born, Beryl offered Elizabeth a job helping with the house and the children, and Elizabeth had stayed with the family ever since. Alice knew her to be devoted to the MacCauley family and tireless in an impatient, sometimes militant way. Once Alice had asked Elizabeth about being adrift in the boat for so many weeks, but Elizabeth had waved away
her questions. “Hot,” she said. “Thirsty. Boring. What do you think?”

From her place on the windowsill, Alice heard the rumble of her father's voice calling something to Elizabeth and Elizabeth's shouted reply. Alice could tell by the sound of his voice that he was facing the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, jutting out his chin and fumbling with the knot of his bow tie.

Already that morning, Alice's brothers had brought her breakfast in bed, a family tradition on birthdays. The five boys, teeth unbrushed, hair stiff with sleep, in sour-smelling T-shirts and boxer shorts, had banged open her bedroom door, James bearing the old bamboo tray laden with French toast and vanilla ice cream. They had jumped on her, shocking her out of sleep, tickling her and blowing into her ear and making farting noises with their mouths against the back of her neck when she buried her face in the pillow, squealing. Happy birthday, they'd shouted. Happy birthday, Alice!

She had rolled over, shrieking and struggling inside the vice of her pajamas and the twisted sheets, and they had swamped her. Where's Alice, they had asked each other, sitting on her while she screamed and hiccupped with laughter and tried to fight them off. Who's seen Alice? It's her birthday today!

When the screen door to the front porch below Alice's window opened, offering up its familiar rusty squeak, Alice leaned over from the windowsill to see who was coming. Tad and Harry could imitate anything: countless lines of dialogue from movies, various birds, the ascending whistle of the teakettle, the sound of Elizabeth's rubber-soled shoes on the kitchen floor. The squeaky screen door below Alice's bedroom window was a character the twins referred to as the Bishop, its voice a whine of hysterical, nasal complaint that Archie forbade the boys to perform at the
dinner table. Once they had made Alice laugh so hard milk came out her nose.

In a game begun by Alice's mother, a piece of furniture in nearly every room of the house had been named and its character established. Alice understood that her mother had been silly, playful in a sentimental, old-fashioned way, an instigator of traditions still observed years after her death: charades on New Year's Eve, candlelight for birthday dinners, pajamas worn inside out in hopes of snow, the bestowal upon the troubled or faint of heart of a certain stone from the Cornwall shore reported to bring good luck and cheer. Beryl had been a kisser of dogs and horses, children and women and men, creative in a slapdash, comic vein, such as the trail of black footprints she'd once painted across the pine floor of the kitchen, its outline still just barely visible. Since her death, the children had continued to refer to the selected pieces of furniture by their assigned names, as if to give up the game would have been to acknowledge that they had, gradually, forgotten her. As a result, they all referred to the uncomfortable black rocker by the fireplace in the living room as Vulgar, their mother's name for it, and whenever someone unsuspecting sat in it, the twins went into a contorted performance Alice loved known as Violated Vulgar, clawing the air as if they were drowning and sputtering absurd, made-up epithets, usually inspired by Shakespeare, thanks to their father's influence:
Thou deboshedfish, thou
.

The pair of high twin beds with the pineapple posts in Alice's bedroom were known as the idiotic Molly and Polly, who squealed and giggled when Alice lay down at night and shrieked like virgins, as Tad and Harry said, when one of the boys stretched out on the spare bed to read to Alice at night. The telephone bench in the front hall, with its voluptuous lines and worn
velveteen cushions, was the lascivious Brigitte, a cameo at which Harry excelled, swaying down the hall like a giant, six-foot-three drag queen past whoever sat on Brigitte to make a phone call. Tad and Harry were the most protective of these old traditions; they had been nine when their mother died, Alice knew, old enough to remember something, but only details so shadowy and elusive that later they were not sure whether they might have made them up.

Eli and Alice had no memory of their mother at all.

In Beryl's old dressing room, though no one ever went in there, the chaise longue upholstered in slippery polished cotton was known to all of the children as Auntie Lola. There had been no reason to speak of Auntie Lola for years, all ten years of Alice's life, in fact, nor to enter the darkened room under the eaves with its faded Chinese wallpaper and dressing table with its still skirt of blue silk concealing the desolate space beneath. Yet Alice knew all about Lola and her Pekinese, the collection of little pillows with their bunched pansy faces and button noses gathered against the seatback.

On Alice's dresser was a picture of her mother as a child astride a rakish black and white pony. Alice knew in detail the story of her parents’ marriage: in 1978, the red-cheeked daughter of an Oxford don—nineteen years old, pretty, and thought by her parents to be a bit wild—fell in love with Archibald MacCauley, a pipe-smoking young American scholar visiting England on a Rhodes fellowship. He and Beryl married at her parents’ house in Oxford, and their first son, James, was born in a London hospital five years later, Wallace a year and a half after that. Then, after nearly a decade away from the United States and in the face of an offer of a tenure-track position from the American college near the house in which he had been born and raised, Archie flew home with his English wife and two small sons to live in the old
Vermont farmhouse in which Archie himself had come into the world. The twins were born two years later in 1987, Eli sixteen months after that. Then, in 1995, seven years after the arrival of their last son and a month after giving birth to her only daughter, Alice, Beryl MacCauley died in a fall from her horse.

She had written one cookbook and edited another; given birth to six children; raised two litters of Labrador puppies; bought, trained, and sold two horses; planted a hundred feet of gardens; and cooked countless meals, including—Alice had been told— some especially memorable Moroccan-inspired tagines for her family and friends.

Too young to be aware of her loss, Alice was spared the first grief of her mother's death. Over the years, though, she had grown jealous of other girls who had their own mothers to fight with and complain about and love. She was jealous of her brothers, too, especially James and Wallace, who were old enough to reliably remember their mother. Alice had nothing but stories about her mother's affection for other people, and photographs, including just one of her and her mother together, in which Beryl, a patterned scarf tied around her head, leaned back in a canvas chair on the lawn in front of the Vermont house, cradling the newborn Alice in her arms and smiling. At Beryl's feet, in a detail Alice had studied, one of the family's Maine coon cats had rolled onto its back, four paws batting the air as it begged for attention.

Yet Alice would not have said she was lonely. The presence of her five brothers meant that for most of Alice's life, her house had been full of people, not only her father and Elizabeth and the boys but also the boys’ friends. It was a house that more and more over the years, despite what Alice witnessed as Elizabeth's increasingly shrill efforts, had fallen sway to the corruption of children, their chaos and theatrics, their games and hysterics and
crimes and hidden kindnesses and cruelties; this was how Alice knew it, as a series of stages on which play was enacted, Alice bringing up the rear in helmet or horned Viking headdress or feathered mask, bearing light saber or wand or pennant on a pole, whatever was left over, whatever she was handed. In James and Wallace's bedroom, a span of real ship's rigging, excellent for climbing, was fixed to one of the beams on the ceiling. Alice had been netted and caught here and hung upside down; she'd been a hostage, a stowaway in a crow's nest, Peter Pan. At six she'd broken an arm swinging onto one of the beds; at nine—a fly being drained of its blood by a spider—she had required five stitches in the top of her head after being cut loose while her hands were still tied behind her back. She never played a girl in any of these games; it never occurred to any of them, including Alice herself, that Alice should play a girl's role, Wendy instead of Peter Pan, for instance. Who would want to be Wendy?