The Rope Walk (5 page)

Yet she did not think she felt sorry for Kenneth Fitzgerald the way she felt sorry for Eric, with his blubbery face and untidy clothes. Kenneth Fitzgerald had a pointed widow's peak of
snowy hair and hooded eyes and a knowing expression, and despite his slouching he loomed in the wheelchair like a king or a sorcerer. He made Alice remember a story she had read about a magician, a complicated figure who'd thrown a long shadow of wickedness over a kingdom that under his tyranny had turned to an eternal winter, bleak miles of snowy plain before a final darkness. In the story, the magician himself had been under an enchantment, and another enemy, a magician even more knowing and powerful, had to be defeated before the good magician could be released from his spell and return to save the kingdom.

Kenneth Fitzgerald was speaking to Archie. He threw out his arm in a grand gesture, as if tossing a swarm of bees to the wind. Alice heard her father laugh, bent over the handlebars of the wheelchair. It was a surprising sound, and Alice took note. Archie rarely laughed aloud.

Alice wanted to ask about the library—had Kenneth Fitzgerald been responsible for the mobiles, too? Something about that gesture of his, his long fingers fluttering, had made her think of them—but at that moment a boy came running up to them, panting.

Alice stared at him. He had wiry sandy-colored hair and skin the color of the cloudy honey Barrett sold at the general store. An assembly of objects hung from his belt: a loop of thick rubber bands, an empty sheath for a knife with something bulging at its center, a hank of fraying rope.

“Here
you are!” Helen looked up, smiling, and put out her arm to draw him to her side. “Oh, Theo. You're soaked. What have you been doing?” She handed him her glass of lemonade. “Alice, this is our grandson, Theo Swann. Theo, this is Alice. She's the birthday girl.”

“Someone was chasing me!” the boy said breathlessly. He
gulped the lemonade, his chest heaving. He didn't acknowledge Alice.

“Chasing you?” Helen took the glass from him.

“A dog!” Theo said.

“Well, that's not
someone
. That's
something
,” Helen said. “Not that silly dachshund of the Caseys? I know it wasn't Lorenzo. I don't believe I've ever seen Lorenzo run.”

Alice had met Ann O'Brien only once, on a trip to New York last year with Archie and O'Brien and Helen. They had taken her to see
The Nutcracker
and the shop windows and the tree and skaters at Rockefeller Center. O'Brien had wanted to go see the place where the airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center buildings, but Helen had said he would have to go alone; she didn't want Alice to see such a sad and gloomy place. On their last afternoon in the city, before the ballet, Alice and Archie had picked up Helen and O'Brien at a restaurant where they'd had lunch with their daughter. Alice couldn't remember whether anyone had said anything about this boy then, though she had known he existed. She had wanted to ask about him; she knew he was around her age. But something, some anxious unhappiness in Helen's expression that afternoon, had stopped her. Ann had been a small woman like her mother, with exquisite, almost hypnotically perfect skin; she had gazed sleepily at Alice when they were introduced, and Alice had thought that Ann looked as if she were sick or recovering from being sick. The husband, the black man, had not been there.

Suddenly, Alice remembered Tad and Harry's dog. She turned to Theo. “Did the dog have three legs?”

He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Yes!”

“Did it have blue eyes?”

Theo's jaw dropped. “Whoa!” he said.
“Yeah
it did.”

“He must have escaped,” Alice said to Helen. “I've got to go catch him.”

When Tad and Harry had brought the dog into the kitchen a few days before, cringing and shaking on its leash, Alice had felt an unhappy confusion over the fact that the dog had only three legs. What had happened to the other one? It was terrible to think about. She had followed them when they had taken the dog outside, where it sniffed around urgently in the tall grass behind the barn.

“Want to hold the leash?” Tad had said, offering it to Alice, but she had put her hands behind her back. The dog had made her feel pity and also a shameful squeamishness; she had wanted to be brave enough to take its leash while it squatted pathetically on its three legs to pee into the grass, but she had not been able to make her hands come out from behind her back. Now the thought of it on its own, bewildered and limping along, its haunch above the stump of its missing leg moving horribly, aroused in her a confidence she had not felt the night before.

“I'll come, too,” Theo said suddenly.

“Where was he?” Alice said.

“Over there.” Theo pointed toward the apple orchard.

Alice began to run, and Theo ran after her. They sprinted away together, veering around a group seated in the dining room chairs pulled into a circle on the grass. “Happy birthday, Alice,” somebody called as they ran by, and Alice waved, a giddy lightness in her heart.

Oh,
this
was what she had wanted to do all morning, she thought. She had only wanted to run, flying out of her win-dowsill and over the grass. Some of the other children started up behind them, caught by the contagion of the runners.

Now here was the stone wall to be leaped, rearing up in front of her. And here, as she teetered atop the stones, was the strange
surprise of the rope walk in the apple orchard, a mysterious tangle of colored strings wound trunk to trunk like an enormous enchanted spiderweb, just as James had said. She balanced on the top of the wall, breathing hard.

“Follow me,” Theo called, for suddenly he was beside her and then past her, leaping to crest the wall and sail over it, his legs flying. His striped T-shirt blazed in the sunlight.

She hesitated for a moment, glancing behind her. She saw Archie, still with his hands on Kenneth Fitzgerald's wheelchair, look up at Theo's shout. He said something, and Kenneth Fitzgerald moved his head to look in her direction. He didn't look at her, exactly; his head moved like a periscope, as if an invisible eye were guiding him in her direction. Perhaps his nose was sniffing her out as she stood on the wall in her starched party dress, her feet in their patent leather shoes slipping on the stones.

Archie began to raise his hand; he meant to call her back, Alice thought.

And so before he could issue the command, before she could be accused of disobedience, Alice jumped.

A
SPRING THUNDERSTORM ENDED
the party prematurely. The last guests ran for their cars or were supplied with umbrellas from the hall closet and drove away up the lane to the West Road. Alice sat at the kitchen table and watched Elizabeth bustle around, putting away the last few dishes, wrapping the leftover sandwiches in plastic and setting them in the fridge. Finally, Elizabeth was finished. She went to the bathroom to change her shirt and came back, tying a plastic rain bonnet under her chin.
“Birthday
present, under your pillow,” she said in a teasing, singsong voice. “From me. Don't forget to look.” She bent to kiss Alice. Elizabeth always gave Alice money for her birthday, crisp one-dollar bills in amounts equal to whatever age she had reached.

“I won't forget,” Alice said. “Thank you, Elizabeth.” She put her arms around Elizabeth's neck. Sometimes she wished Elizabeth didn't go home on the weekends, but Archie had said that they must never ask more of Elizabeth than she wanted to give them; she did so much for them all as it was.

Alice went to the window and watched the taillights of Elizabeth's station wagon disappear up the driveway in the darkness of the rain. Then she sat back down at the kitchen table. In the hall,
the grandfather clock struck four p.m., the exact hour when Alice had been delivered into the world. Alice held her breath; now she was truly ten. The moment slid past slowly, chime after chime. The clock's voice rasped, its old gears struggling free for each stroke. When the clock fell silent, Alice stayed in her seat, but she did not feel any different than she had a moment before.

After the noise of the party, the house was quiet and lonely feeling; the rain fell with a sighing hush that was like the ocean Alice heard inside the goliath conch kept on the top shelf of the cabinet in the dining room. When Alice was younger, Archie would bring down the shell collection for her to play with under the dining room table. Alice had loved the shells, each like a miniature world with its glistening interior and elaborately carved and crenellated surfaces, its mysterious, sad smell of salt, the faint reminder of its old life in the sea. Lying with her elbows propped open before the
Golden Guide to Seashelh of the World
, Alice had learned the names of all the shells: Miracle shells, Babylon Turrids, the Noble cones, tiny Rose murex, cowries with their grinning mouths, Venus clams and cockles and whelks. Words in any arrangement—lists, names, snatches of verse— came easily to Alice, first pronunciation, for which she had an instinctive gift, and then sense; when she was only five or six Archie had enjoyed getting her to memorize, which she appeared to do effortlessly, and then recite lengthy bits of doggerel or silly Ezra Pound or Shakespeare's sonnets:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love's not love which alters when it alteration finds
. She had not been allowed to lift down the shells herself, and now she didn't ask for them anymore, but when she was younger she had spent hours under the table playing with them.

Now someone put on music in the living room. It was probably Wally. He was the only one of the boys who liked classical music. Alice got up to go find him.

Wally hadn't turned on any lights, despite the darkness outside. He sat sprawled on the rug, leaning against a pillow propped up against the couch, smoking a cigar and blowing ostentatious smoke rings that sank slowly in the heavy air.

Alice poked her finger through one as she came across the room.

“You ruined it,” he said. “I'm trying to get a bull's eye.”

“One to go through the other?” Alice stopped to watch as he exhaled, executing two ghostly, wobbly rings that collided in midair.

She climbed onto the couch behind him and lay down, gazing across the premature dusk of the room at the armchairs with their frayed armrests, the long table covered with the darkly patterned Kashmiri throw and stacks of books, the faceted glass lamp whose beaded shade winked in the half-light. Between the two high windows at the far end of the room, through which quivering flashes of lightning could be seen, stood her mother's tall secretary desk. Behind its glass doors, the pale moon faces of two porcelain Chinamen stared forth from between the books. Alice made her imaginary camera again and looked through the knothole made by her fingers: two jade temple dogs on the desk's surface, their teeth bared, held a messy row of telephone and address books and papers. On the stained blotter, a silver cup shone dully in the light. The cup had been won by her mother long ago in an archery tournament and was filled now with stubs of pencils and odd pens and a hawk's boldly striped feather.

Alice dropped her camera. In a deepening drowse that seemed to be taking hold of her limbs one at a time, she watched the mirror over the fireplace where lightning pulsed distantly like something in another world. The morning of just a few hours before, when she had sat in her room and waited for the party to begin, seemed far away. Now her dress was rumpled and stained, the
patent leathers lost in the tall grass of the orchard where the rain would ruin them. Elizabeth would complain, Alice knew, about the condition of the dress and the missing shoes. But that didn't seem to matter right now; she felt so sleepy. Alice gazed at the mirror in a somnolent stare. The light in the room dimmed another degree. Wally's cigar smoke hovered like a mist. Alice loved twilight for the appearance of fireflies, for the day's last giant shadows, comically oversize, for the way the color blue seeped into everything. Today would end without twilight, though, swallowed up by the rain and gloom; day would slouch into night like a hearse with drawn curtains.

Alice stretched and crossed her arm over her eyes. Her skin smelled of grass and dog. The three-legged dog, which had been captured eventually earlier that afternoon with the aid of a quarter-pound of hamburger meat supplied reluctantly by Elizabeth, had been braver than Lorenzo about the approaching thunderstorm. Usually at the first sound of thunder Lorenzo made straight for Archie's bed at a scrabbling run, crawling into the space beneath it, shaking and whimpering. The three-legged dog, on the other hand, confined again to the twins’ bedroom, had put his front paws on Harry's pillow, his body quivering, and stared out the window at the branches whipping back and forth in the high wind that preceded the rain.

“What happened to his leg?” Theo had asked Harry, and Harry had regaled Theo and Alice with a long, upsetting tale about how the dog had been caught in a trap and had chewed off his own leg, a story to which Theo and Alice had listened, horrified. Cruelty to animals was an unbearable idea to Alice, and Theo had seemed as moved as she was by the idea of the dog's suffering. “Those traps,” he had said fiercely after the twins had left the room, bored by Alice and Theo and the dog. “A hunter should get
his
leg caught in one.”

Watching him as he knelt on Harry's bed and patted the dog's trembling back, Alice had realized that Theo had completely conquered his initial fear of the dog. When they had first discovered the dog racing about wildly in the field behind the vegetable garden, Theo had drawn up behind her, a restraining hand on her arm. “Don't scare him,” he'd whispered, and she had shivered at his breath in her ear. But she had known it was Theo himself who was frightened. They had stood there, Alice herself suddenly unsure about how to proceed, while the three-legged dog snuffled frantically in the grass. When Tad and Harry arrived, armed with the hamburger, Alice had been disappointed. She wanted to have been the one to return the dog to safety. But Theo had gone darting out to help, firing questions at the twins: What was the dog's name? How old was he? What kind of dog was he? Where did they get him?