The Rope Walk (6 page)

Once the dog had been restored to the bedroom, Theo had disappeared briefly, returning minutes later with a toolbox, a battered red tin case that held a messy collection of odds and ends and broken parts of things: a sprinkler nozzle, a hammer missing a claw, various screwdrivers, a bent section of radio antennae, coils of copper wire, a penknife with a floppy blade, miscellaneous screws and nails and washers and unidentifiable mechanical parts, a cell phone with a smashed face, a television remote missing its back. He had opened the toolbox on the floor of Tad and Harry's bedroom, rifling busily through its contents.

Harry, a plate of sandwiches on his knee, had leaned over to look inside. “Nice junk,” he said.

“We can maybe rig him up a fake leg,” Theo said to Alice, ignoring Harry. “A wheel or something …”

Alice had seen Harry roll his eyes at Tad. She had felt embarrassed for Theo; it was obvious even to her that the toolbox didn't contain anything that could make the dog a new leg. But after
Tad and Harry had left, Theo had rifled through the drawers of the desk until he found paper and a pencil. He had not asked for permission to do this; he'd just done it, a trespass Alice herself would not have committed in a stranger's bedroom. Lying on his stomach on the floor and smoothing out the paper with his palms, he had drawn, tongue between his teeth, what Alice recognized immediately as an extremely good likeness of a dog, his hindquarters suspended in a rolling cart strapped to the dog's shoulders with a device like the stays of an old-fashioned buggy. From this beginning they had imagined all sorts of tasks the dog could perform thus equipped: trundling objects from place to place, fetching the newspaper, delivering mail, hauling rocks, conveying messages. He could even be recruited as a moveable lemonade stand. Even while she had known that these things would never happen, that the dog would be taken back to Frost with the twins, it had been easy to forget that truth, to pretend otherwise. It had been fun, planning the dog's future with Theo. He had a good imagination.

Now, as Alice lay on the couch, the sounds of the thunder and the rain and the cello seemed to fill up the room and overflow, as if the walls were dissolving. Wally's cigar smoke rings made ghostly wreaths in the air. She blinked against their wavering shapes, and her eyes closed. When she heard someone come to the door of the living room, her eyes felt too heavy to bother opening.

It was James's voice. “Success?” he said.

Alice heard Wally shift on the floor in front of her, felt his eyes on her. “She's asleep,” he said after a minute, turning around again. “Worn out with partying.”

Alice felt too sleepy to correct Wally. She had occasionally deliberately pretended sleep in order to overhear something that might not have been said aloud in her presence, though she had
never heard anything interesting this way; people usually just tiptoed away. Once, though, she had been discovered hiding inside the kneehole of Archie's desk when Archie was confronting James about a girl whose upset parents had called Archie on the telephone; James and the girl had driven to Key West for a week during high school, leaving behind cheerful notes of explanation that seemed to assume that no one would mind. Alice, fascinated by the drama, had been listening intently, but when Archie noticed her at last, he had hauled her out from under the desk, her elbow hurting inside his grip. This past Christmas, shooed away repeatedly from her brothers’ conversations, she had lain waiting under Tad's bed for what had seemed like hours, aware of the dusty coils of horsehair inside the box spring above her like something alive enlarged to terrifying proportions under a microscope. When the boys had finally congregated in the bedroom, Harry tossing a tennis ball against the wall with maddening regularity, the only thing she had heard that was at all interesting was Tad and Harry's report that Archie was in fact quite a popular professor at Frost. His worst offense, Harry said, was that he was thought to be “unknowable.”

“Which means he doesn't drink with them,” Tad had said.

“Or sleep with any of them,” Harry added. “Thank god.”

Alice had not understood why Archie should want to go to sleep beside any of his students, but she had sensed dangerous, uncomfortable territory. Afterward she was a little sorry she'd eavesdropped.

Another set of footsteps approached the living room. With an effort, Alice opened her eyes enough to see Archie appear beside James in the doorway. Through her eyelashes he looked as if he were crosshatched by the enormous shadow of palm fronds. The layer of bitter cigar smoke shivered in the air.

“Radio says they're having hail in Newfane,” Archie said, speaking above the rain. “Poor Alice.”

“Oh, she'd had enough,” Alice heard James say. “Look at her.”

There was silence for a moment. Alice felt their eyes resting on her and she stayed very still, trying to take only the shallowest breaths, a pantomime of deep sleep.

“All parties should end early anyway,” James said. “Then people go away saying it was the best party they'd ever been to.”

Alice heard Wally laughing quietly.

Finally Archie spoke again. “The rope walk was a good idea. You boys were good to do that for her.”

They'd had to hurry through the game at the end of the party, the sky already threatening, scattered raindrops striking high in the trees. Some adults had played, too, helping the younger children through the maze. When Alice had found herself face-to-face with Theo, he had seemed electrified with excitement in the strange light, his strange bushy hair standing up on end. But they had easily untangled their lines from each other's, Alice slipping under Theo's arm, Theo twirling around her, both of them seeing instantly how it should be done. She had watched him as he vaulted through the maze, his line eventually leading him back to her. The other children had shrieked with excitement, but Alice had been quiet, watching the lines gradually unwind from one another, waiting until she was brought back face-to-face with Theo.

Once, when she had stopped near the stone wall, she had heard Miss Fitzgerald's voice, speaking from behind her where the adults had gathered to watch.

“Who's
that
little boy?” Miss Fitzgerald asked someone. “That's not Helen and O'Brien's little black grandson, is it?”

Alice knew that Theo's father was black, but Theo himself was
tawny like a lion, his burr of blond hair like the head of a thistle. She liked his color; it made her think of the desert in Kipling's
Just So
stories, the rhinoceros with his skin stuffed full of itchy yellow cake crumbs, the crazy Parsee dancing on the sand in glee.

The prizes at the rope walk had been good; nothing disgusting. There were yo-yo's, boxes of colored pencils, Hershey's bars, and harmonicas, all fished out of the old bins at Barrett and Rita's store in town. In the end, Theo had traded a box of crayons for Alice's Slinky, packing it away inside his toolbox.

“We should have played music,” Wally said now. “It would have been more fun. Horns, maybe, or Fats Waller. Might have sped things up, too.”

Alice looked through slits; she watched James and Archie's shoes and their pants cuffs cross the floor toward the couch, heard the sound of them sitting down. Perhaps she could stretch now, she thought, and pretend to wake up.

But then James spoke again, freezing her into stillness. “How
is
Alice?” he said. She could not understand his tone; he sounded as though she had been diagnosed with a fatal disease and everybody knew it but Alice. Coldness crept over her. It was one thing to pretend sleep and listen to people talk about inconsequential things. It was another thing when they began to talk about you. Either way, she thought, it was miserable in the end. “Come out from under there,” Archie had said to her the day he'd found her hiding in the kneehole of his desk, gripping her by the elbow; his roughness, the sense of Archie's barely contained anger, had shocked her. Archie never lost his temper, never shouted as she knew some parents did. She had stood in front of him, cheeks burning. “Go to your room,” he'd said. “No supper.” This was the only punishment Archie ever meted out, but it was terrible, far worse, she thought, than the groundings and the long lectures—and the whacks on the bottom—she had heard about
from her schoolmates. The sound of dishes clattering and conversation at the table reached you alone in your room, along with the smells of meat loaf or baked beans or macaroni and cheese cooked in the red casserole dish. You would be left alone for hours, waiting and growing more and more hungry, and at last, after dark, Archie would come upstairs to say good night, and he would kiss you sadly as you lay in your bed. Then he would reach into his pocket for the saltines, which he always brought with him, and he would stack them neatly on your beside table. It was those saltines, and the sight of his blunt, squared-off fingers shuffling them into a neat little stack that always broke you, and you would weep then, turning your face away in shame.

The two worst sins in the MacCauley house were lying and deliberate cruelty. Pretending you were asleep when you were not was like telling a lie.

Archie didn't answer James right away. Alice felt sure her face was bright red with shame.

Finally Archie said, “Alice is lonely. But Elizabeth is here.” He reached up and took off his eyeglasses. Alice heard them click shut as he put them away in his pocket. “Did I ever tell you—” he began.

“About the live frog found in a hailstone.” Wallace and James said it in unison.

“Ah,” Archie said. “I repeat myself.”

There would be no answer to this, Alice thought. Archie
did
repeat himself, more and more often now. But she was being distracted by their conversation. Wait, she wanted to say. Am I
lonely?
Is
that
what this is?

In front of Alice, Wallace's shoulder, sculpted like a mountain in his white shirt, stood out in the melancholy light.

“Were we lonely?” she heard James ask.

“Well,” Archie said. “You had each other, didn't you?”

Lying on the couch, Alice felt herself growing small, like a stone dropped from a great height. She wanted to stretch, to sit up suddenly, blinking and yawning: the birthday girl awakes! Everyone say Happy Birthday! Yet she knew she was not equal to the performance this would require. They would suspect her of listening, and they would be right.

The rain seemed to be intensifying, hammering on the porch awning outside. James had told Alice once that thunder was the sound of rocks being rolled away from a giant's cave in the sky, a notion that for years had terrified Alice. Only repeated comic performances by Tad and Harry, who were forced to enact on Alice's twin beds the bumbling, slapstick boxing match of two crybaby giants, could restore Alice's equanimity. She was not afraid of thunder anymore, but still a storm left her with a feeling of disquiet, of doom and gloom, like being sick with a fever. She wished she had not heard Archie, but there was no undoing it now.

She
was
lonely.
She
alone, of all the MacCauleys, was a lonely child. Her brothers had had each other.

And then sleep took her, like a hood pulled down over her face. She slept deeply, though perhaps it was only for a few minutes, a refusal to stay awake and consider her sorry plight. When she opened her eyes, she saw that her father and James had fallen asleep, too, side by side on the couch, Archie's finger still trapped inside his book, James's head resting near Archie's shoulder.

Suddenly, Wally turned around.

She jumped.

“You've been awake this whole time, haven't you?” he said. “I felt your eyes.”

Alice turned her face away. “I have not,” she said. She felt disconsolate,
disoriented. She had dreamed vaguely of banishment, a dream of wetness and coldness, damp stones on a shore, her voice an echo in the fog.

She rolled back over and looked at Wally. The room had grown very dark. Archie, with his mouth open, looked like he was dead.

“When are you leaving?” she said. She knew Wally would be gone for the whole summer, but she wanted to accuse him now, accuse him of leaving her, just as he had accused her of pretending sleep. Wally had won a coveted apprenticeship with a conductor at a summer music festival in Michigan, where he would lead a youth orchestra. It was a challenging program for young musicians, not to mention a young conductor, Wally had told the family at dinner a couple of nights before: Beethoven's
Coriolan Overture;
Weber's
Invitation to the Dance; Songs of a Wayfarer
by Mahler, with a baritone soloist; Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony. James, too, would be gone soon; he was going to law school in the fall, but he would spend the summer at the governor's office in Montpelier on an internship. Sitting beside Wally on the floor the day before while he'd gone through Archie's ancient record collection in the living room, Alice had asked Wally what it would be like at the governor's house.

“Grand,” Wally had said. “Perfect for James.” He had slipped an old record out of its cardboard jacket, regarded the label.

James was full of charm and confidence. He liked to ruffle Archie's hair, sling an arm around his brothers, catch up Alice in a theatrical way and swing her around. He was full of plans and ideas, keeping Archie in his seat at the dinner table for hours after the dishes had been cleared while he talked and asked questions. He usually had a girl with him, too, someone pretty who clung to his arm. Wally never brought home a girl.

Soon the house would be empty again. Tad and Harry, after a week or so of carousing with their old friends at home in Grange, would return to Frost, where they were living over the summer in the basement of the college infirmary, working with the grounds crew to mow the lawns and surrounding fields and in the evenings acquainting themselves, as Archie had put it, with the girls in town. Only Eli would stay at home with Archie and Alice, and Eli was the quietest brother, slender like his mother, tall like Archie, who had staked out for himself, perhaps particularly in the wake of the twins’ boisterousness and Wallace and James's separate and pronounced interests of music and politics, the peaceful world of the garden. It was Eli who, as a young teenager, had revived his mother's perennial borders, who had built the path down to the river, stones quarried with a single-minded patience from the riverbed, and who hired himself out every summer to their neighbors in Grange for general yard work and improvements. Alice tagged along after him on these errands while he moved stolidly from one project to another, but he never talked much. Eli was inscrutable, Wally said.