The Rope Walk (21 page)

They continued along the road, feet dragging. Lights were beginning to come on in the houses they passed. Here and there through the windows Alice could see the blue light of television sets being turned on.

“What do you eat for dinner at home?” she asked suddenly.

“Takeout,” Theo said, shrugging. “Thai. Chinese. Indian. Mexican. Ethiopian.”

Alice had never had Thai food or Indian food, let alone Ethiopian. “Doesn't your mom cook?” she said. She thought all mothers cooked.

“Yeah, she cooks.” Theo didn't say anything else for a minute.
“We like takeout, though,” he said finally. “In New York you can get anything you want to eat. I like dim sum.”

Alice didn't know what dim sum was. She sensed that Theo's mother didn't really cook. Maybe it was because of her sickness, what Wally had called her being “blue” and depressed. She wanted to ask Theo about this, but she didn't know how to phrase the question.

“Your mom's dead, right?” Theo said.

Alice said, “She died when I was a baby. I don't remember her.”

Theo nodded, as if something in his own experience compared to this, and he was familiar with the terrain. He did not say he was sorry the way adults did when they learned Alice's mother had died. Usually when children found out Alice didn't have a mother, they didn't say anything; theyjust stared at her as if she had described her mother's death for them in horrifying detail. Theo didn't seem impressed, though. He just walked along beside her.

Alice, feeling something behind her suddenly, glanced back and saw that their shadows trailed behind them, two ragged giants with flapping coattails and miniature heads, swaying along the street. She nudged Theo, who turned to look over his shoulder. He lifted his arms, and shadow arms flew out from the giant's side, two long sticks flapping into the darkness of the trees on the side of the road. It was a helpless gesture, as if the figure had suddenly taken fright and tried to lift off from the ground but had failed, its lead feet tied to the earth. Theo jumped, both feet off the ground, as if he were feeling what Alice felt, which was that she wanted to break free of this black, mournful figure attached to her ankles, to shake it away from her, leaving a paper man folded in accordion pleats on the road, lifeless as dust, like Peter
Pan's silken shadow lying over Wendy's knees while she searched for a needle and thread.

Alice had read in the newspaper about the tidal wave that had engulfed the beaches in Thailand this past winter. The animals had known something bad was coming, and goats and cows and dogs had tried to break free of their chains or their pastures and make for the hills, knocking down fences and wildly tearing stakes from the ground. Alice had imagined the animals streaming toward the mountains, running away from the still invisible tidal wave gathering out in the sea. One man, who finally understood what it meant when the animals started to run away, had gathered up his children and his wife and tried to hurry with them through the crowded streets, but the wave had overtaken them before he could get far enough away. He had survived, but his wife and his children had been torn from him in the wave that had crashed over their heads, and he had lost them in the swirling waters. Ever since then, Alice had tried to pay attention to Lorenzo's lazy meanderings around the yard, but she never sensed any urgency in his movements. Consulting her atlas, she had determined that there was no way a tidal wave could reach them in Vermont, but she had been sickened at the thought of the people trying to run, dragged down by their own weight, their own inadequate human instincts, their own fear … even by the people they loved.

She jumped, too, like Theo, and her shadow stayed right behind her, pitifully attached to her feet.

“Let's run,” Theo said, flapping his arms, and he caught Alice's hand.

They ran the rest of the way home, the sun burning red in the sky ahead of them.

A
LICE AND THEO
were in the kitchen making ice cream sundaes on a Friday night two weeks later, when Archie came in the back door. Tad and Harry had left the week before to go back to Frost; Eli was out in the barn with his friend Sam, working on Sam's old black Saab, a car for which Theo had expressed fervent admiration, though he had been banned from the barn for talking too much while Eli and Sam tried to puzzle through a problem with the car's transmission. Elizabeth, who usually stayed until Archie arrived home from Frost, even if he was late, as he was this evening, had left early to go visit a niece who had just given birth to twins. She had been working all day in order to bring food to the new family, a succession of salty-smelling Vietnamese dishes and a pineapple studded with gumdrops on toothpicks. Alice, witnessing the hectic level of Elizabeth's preparations, had suffered a moment of worry that the arrival of the infant twins might mean that Elizabeth herself would leave the MacCauleys in order to help her niece instead. She had been relieved when Elizabeth, banging pots on the stove, had said that she was glad it wasn't going to be her, looking after those twin babies. “One
time was enough for me,” Elizabeth told Alice. “Your bad brothers, they wore me out. Lucky for you, you were a good baby.”

Archie hung his jacket over the back of one of the chairs in the kitchen and sat down at the table, glancing at the stack of mail and the evening paper from Brattleboro folded in half by his place.

“Do you want a banana split, Arch?” Theo said, waving the ice cream scoop. “I can make you a humongous one.”

It pleased Alice that Theo had developed an obvious affection for Archie. He spoke to him as if to a familiar his own age, using a jocular form of address that sounded to Alice as if it were an unconscious imitation of Archie's own faintly ironic manner of speaking to Theo. She thought that Archie's restraint on the night Theo had climbed into the tree at the hospital had elevated Archie in Theo's mind. Probably Theo had expected a punishment, and she knew herself that sometimes Archie's polite refusal to mention an obvious transgression, as if he were carefully allowing you to save face, had the effect of making you especially sorry for whatever you had done and especially grateful to him for his tact. Once Alice had cut off a length of the silky fringe from the drapes in the dining room to use as trimming for one of the fairy houses she built in shoe boxes. She knew that Elizabeth, who had discovered the hacked-up curtain, had reported this to Archie, but Archie had been only rather quiet and tender with Alice when he had come home that evening, as if aware of the enormity of her guilt, the possibility that one more ounce of disapprobation would have been overwhelming.

“Thank you, Theo, but I try to avoid ice cream until I've had my dinner,” Archie said. “I assume Elizabeth fed you before she left?”

“I'll bring you a plate,” Alice said. “It was meat loaf.”

“You're lucky you didn't get some of that ooo-wong-tang or
whatever it was she made,” Theo said gaily. “It smelled like a dead fish.”

Theo's spirits had been restored after a funny dip earlier that evening. A dank summer rain had begun to fall around five p.m., forcing Alice and Theo inside. Theo had wandered around restlessly for a while and then finally settled on sliding down the fireman's pole on the porch again and again, sometimes headfirst, muttering under his breath as if he were narrating a story to himself. “You,” he said, pointing to an invisible spot on the floor. “Take a brigade and protect us from the flank.”

Alice, lying on her stomach on the upstairs porch with her chin on her folded arms, had watched Theo below her through the round hole in the floor. She concluded that in the game Theo was playing, he had the starring role as the beleaguered general. Hands laced behind his back, head down, he paced back and forth as if considering his strategic options. Alice had wanted to join in the game, but Theo was playing with such concentrated, even unhappy intensity that he took no notice of her when she sat up and dangled her legs through the hole, knocking her heels noisily against the fireman's pole. It was the first time he had excluded her from something, and after a while she had drifted away, bored and lonely.

When Theo grew tired of his game, he had come looking for her. She was stretched out in retreat on Wally's bed reading
Robert, the Quail
, which she'd already read once before. She ignored him when he first came into the room, but after a minute or two of him aimlessly clinking the pennies in the little bowl on Wally's bureau, she put down her book and turned around.

He was flushed, and the hair on his forehead was damp. “Alice,” he said, as if he hadn't heard her. “My brain is going around and around.” He looked troubled.

“What do you mean?” She sat up on the bed.

He shook his head, ran his hand back and forth over his hair. “It feels like I'm thinking too hard,” he said. “Feels like I'm going to pop a cork. Blow a gasket.”

“Maybe you shouldn't go upside-down on the fireman's pole,” Alice said, but Theo shook his head. “That's not it,” he said. “Being upside down is
good
for me.”

A moment later, Elizabeth called them to come downstairs for supper before she left. Theo hadn't said much during the meal, but his spirits had seemed to revive as he put away a plate of meat loaf and three glasses of milk. “I've been thinking about Kenneth,” he told her, as if the nature of the thoughts that had been circling him all afternoon, running at his heels like wolves, had finally become clear to him,

“Thinking what?” she had asked.

He had shaken his head. “Not sure. Just thinking,” he said, but he looked less troubled somehow, less fatigued, as if the thoughts—whatever they were—gave him pleasure rather than hectoring him for solutions.

Archie got up now to fetch a bottle of red wine from the sideboard, uncorked it, and poured himself a glass, sitting back down at the table with a sigh and peering over his glasses at the plate Alice put before him, two thick slices of meat loaf, a heap of peppery succotash, mashed potatoes. In the fridge, Alice found ajar of the corn relish Archie liked and brought it to the table.

Archie ate while Alice and Theo built their sundaes and debated the merits of adding the leftover gumdrops. Finally they brought their bowls to the table. Theo scooted into the chair next to Archie and looked interestedly at the letters by his plate.

“They're moving your grandmother into another wing at the hospital, Theo,” Archie said. He stood up to pour a second glass of wine and returned to his chair. “I spoke with your grandfather today.”

“Does that mean she's getting better?” Alice said.

Archie hesitated. Finally, he said, “It can take a long time to recover from a stroke.”

Theo licked his spoon. “Having a stroke is like getting hit by lightning,” he said to Alice. “It fries your system,”

Alice saw Archie stop, his wineglass halfway to his mouth, and regard Theo. “That's a very vivid way of putting it,” he said after a long moment.

Helen's state had improved little since the night nearly three weeks before when she had fallen to the floor in her own kitchen, Theo standing helplessly in the room while O'Brien cradled Helen in his arms and shouted into the telephone. She could not speak, or chew her food, or stand up. She had a little use of her right hand, though she was, in fact, left-handed, like Alice herself, and she could write a few shaky phrases. The thought of Helen so incapacitated made Alice feel sick to her stomach. O'Brien would not let any of the MacCauleys see her, though one evening, Alice knew, Archie had simply forced his way into her room over O'Brien's protests that Helen would not want to be seen in such a state, to bring flowers to her bedside and kiss her cheek and hold her hand. O'Brien was hardly ever home since Helen's stroke, but Archie had dispatched Eli to keep the grass mowed, and Elizabeth had gone over one morning to clean out the refrigerator and do some laundry, and she had set Alice and Theo to vacuuming and dusting. Theo had run the vacuum cleaner at top speed through the house, racing behind it as though it were a runaway stallion, and when it was his turn with the feather duster, he had spent most of the time sneaking up on Alice and tickling her with it. Alice, who did not in general much like housework, had spent much of the morning laughing. Like most things, even cleaning was more fun with Theo around.

Theo did not seem dismayed by or even interested in his
grandmother's condition, and he expressed no desire to see O'Brien, which Alice felt, sadly, she understood. She did not completely understand, however, Theo's silence about his parents and his life with them in New York, unless it were just as Wally had said, that Theo's mother was depressed and his parents’ marriage was falling apart and it was all too horrible for Theo to think about. Theo's mother had telephoned one evening, and when Archie had called Theo to the phone, Theo had not resisted being summoned. Yet, nor had he seemed especially happy. He and Alice had been playing Monopoly on the floor in the dining room after dinner, and when Archie came to door and said, “Theo? It's your mother on the phone for you,” Alice had seen Theo look up, surprised. For a moment his face had opened with relief, but then just as quickly it had shut back down again, blank as a stone.

Curiosity overwhelming her, Alice had followed Theo and lurked at the end of the hall, listening.

Between silences, Theo had answered in a sluggish stream of monosyllables: “Yes. No. Yes. Uh-huh.”

Alice had watched him scratch violently at his scalp. Then he had just stared at the floor, kicking gently at the leg of the telephone bench as he listened to his mother telling him something. “Okay,” he said at last. “Uh-huh. Okay. ‘Bye.”

When he hung up, he put down the phone as if finally releasing something unpleasant from his grasp.

Together, he and Alice walked back to their game in the dining room.

“Do you want Boardwalk?” Alice said, reaching for something that would make him happy. He had won Park Place early on in the game and been outraged when Alice landed on Boardwalk a few turns later and promptly bought it. “I'll trade you Boardwalk for your railroads,” she said.