The Rope Walk (7 page)

Alice watched Wally take a long pull on his cigar. He grimaced and then leaned over to flick it into the fireplace where it glowed for a minute in the darkness. He didn't answer her question about when he was leaving. He'd already invited her to come along when Archie drove him to the airport, and she knew he understood that she was baiting him now out of meanness and sadness. She felt a sudden flare of longing like homesickness. She liked it when Wally took her with him on his nighttime walks, the two of them crossing the fields into the woods, walking along the old logging road near the river in the dark and then circling back to approach the house again through the orchard. She liked the feeling of coming upon her beloved house as a stranger would. Long and low, with black shutters under a green
roof, the original white-painted farmhouse had been extended by ad hoc additions supplied over the years to meet the needs of the growing generations of family. The ground floor of the original building, built in the early 1800s, had been converted long ago into Archie's study, where a tiger skin rug lay on the floor. The tiger's mouth was open in a silent roar and all its yellow teeth were bared at the French doors through which a raccoon had crept once while Archie sat up late one evening, working. At the sight of the tiger, the raccoon had arched its back and let out a scream so bloodcurdling that Archie had fallen out of his chair in shock. “Thank God it wasn't a skunk,” he'd said later. There was a tale about the tiger having been shot by one of their mother's forbearers in India, but Wally said it was apocryphal.

Suddenly Alice sat up. “Look!” she said, pointing to the window.

Outside, a strange glow had filled the air. Alice scrambled off the couch and ran to the window. “There's ice in the birdbath,” she said from across the room.

Wally got to his feet and joined Alice at the window. The sound of the rain had changed again. Little tacks fell against the porch awning now with a hushed noise, like sand filling a bucket. The birdbath was heaped with a mound of crystals; patterns of snaky trails of ice beribboned the lawn.

“Did I ever tell you,” Wally began in his Archie voice.

“About the live frog,” Alice said, in the same tone.

Together they stared out the window. Behind them, the arm on the record player lifted, reversed itself with a click. The music ceased and the sound of the hail pattering on the awning and on the tin roof filled the room.

Archie awoke with a snort. “Alice?” he said. His voice sounded worried, querulous, an old man's voice.

“We're here,” Wally said, turning around. “It's hailing, Arch. The world is raining frogs.”

“I've been asleep,” Archie said, unnecessarily.

Alice stared out the window. The spring day had been arrested by a false winter as transparently unreal and strange and magical as the fake snow that had tumbled through the footlights on the stage at school for the Christmas pageant, where Alice had been a candy cane, dressed in tap shoes and a red bathrobe onto which one of the other children's mothers had sewn a winding white stripe. Now everything had turned silver and gray. Steam rose from the ground. The new green leaves hung down from the branches, defeated and dark as soot.

“You'll remember this day forever, won't you?” Kenneth Fitzgerald had said to her at the party after Archie had introduced her finally. He had looked at her gravely. A little clump of white spittle had gathered at the corner of his mouth, and Alice had wanted to look away, but his eyes had been brimming and shining. “For my tenth birthday I was given a boat,” he'd said to her, and perhaps because he was at her height, sitting in the wheelchair, it was as if Archie and all the party melted away; it was only the two of them left there on the lawn. “It was called the
Alice Fitzgerald
,” he said, holding her eyes with his own, “named for my mother.”

Alice had stared back at him, struck of course by the coincidence of the names—her name being Alice, his mother's name being Alice; plus, it was hard to think of this old man as a boy, let alone a boy with a boat of his own. But she had been surprised mostly by the way in which he seemed to have read her mind, or at least her feelings, so inchoate but powerful that morning when she had sat in her windowsill and felt the exultant light of the spring day enter her body. Now his words seemed to her like a prophecy, for here in the silvered world outside the window, in
the cups of the daffodils filling with ice, in the spikes of grass frosted white, was an ending to the day so strange she knew she really would never forget it, the day it hailed in May on her tenth birthday.

As she stood there in her party dress facing Kenneth Fitzgerald, Theo's voice had piped up behind her.

“/have a boat,” he said.

Alice saw Kenneth Fitzgerald's eyes slide from her face to take in Theo in his dirty T-shirt. Somehow she knew Theo didn't have a boat; Kenneth Fitzgerald knew it, too, she thought, and suddenly there was between them a complicity that made her uncomfortable.

“Come on, Alice,” Theo said rudely then, and Alice caught Archie's frown as she struggled.

But Kenneth Fitzgerald's eyes had come back to her face. “Happy birthday, Alice,” he said. “Go with your brave friend.”

And so she had run off with Theo, relieved and embarrassed, and yet somehow strangely thrilled.

“Look, Archie,” she said now, and she raised her hand to the cold glass, the world outside the window, the memorable, memorable world. “Look at the poor lilacs, all covered with snow.”

A
LICE HESITATED
on the porch—the air was full of hissing and a hushed tinkling of ice—and then she ran down the steps and out onto the cold grass. She cringed as the hailstones bounced off her arms and the back of her neck, but she was mostly just surprised; they didn't really hurt. The air smelled bitter, like the inside of the rusted old freezer case in Barrett and Rita's general store in Grange, with its tempting, meringue like crust of ice to which Alice had once unwisely touched her tongue. She had been shocked at the taste, cold and somehow burnt, and the roof of her mouth had stung for hours afterward. She'd been afraid to tell anyone what she'd done, though. She was always being told not to put things in her mouth.

It was exhilarating to be outside, the spring day majestically transformed into a winter theatrical in its effects. A group of adults staged a play in Grange every summer; Archie had been recruited to help with some of the Shakespeare productions. Alice had once played a fairy in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, but she'd preferred being backstage and conscripted for sound effects, rattling lengths of sheet metal and banging pot lids and ringing bells and firing an air horn in
The Tempest
, hunched down in the
wings with some other children, a flashlight taped to a broom handle and suspended over a music stand so they could follow the script. Tad and Harry, on ladders, had let loose a bed sheet full of tissue paper confetti for hail and fired a volley of painted cardboard lightning bolts that jerked across the stage on a pulley and rope.

One of Alice's favorite illustrations came from a book,
The Wind Boy
, in which the North Wind, cheeks puffed out and lips pursed, blew swirling gusts across the page. She could feel the face of that colossus above her now, eyes streaming, curled locks of gray hair disarranged. The mild, perfumed May afternoon had been replaced by a reckless cold. Alice ran in circles, slipping on the grass, and when she stopped running the hail collected like fallen stars in her hair and in the lap of her dress, which she held out like an apron. High above, the hailstones tore noisily through the leaves of the trees and piled up in curving tracks over the grass. It wasn't true, was it, Archie's story about finding a live frog in a hailstone? She examined one: they were like marbles, gray and knobbed and dirty looking, as though they brought with them on their screaming ride toward the earth particles of outer space, a gritty planetary grime like fireplace ash. She scooped up another handful; they were strangely dry.

Then she felt the pace of the hail pick up. The sound intensified overhead, a moaning in the wind. The hail began to clatter like a train wreck on the roof high up and invisible in the crazily blurred sky.

“Ouch!” she cried, as a hailstone struck her face. She ducked and held her hands over her head as she ran.

“Alice!” She heard Archie's voice; he was calling to her from the porch, leaning over the rail. “Alice, come inside!”

But this was too wonderful, too strange and wonderful, not to be out in it. She slipped on the grass and fell. From the porch she
could hear Wally laughing as she scrambled to her feet, the whoosh of the hail filling her ears.

“Ouch!” she cried again, and then in surprise, “Ow!” for it really hurt now and she skidded back toward the house, bent double under the storm of ice. Safe on the porch, panting, she shook her head like a dog. Crystals of ice flew off her.

Wally jumped back. “Hey!” he said.

Archie hustled her inside past James, who held open the door, smiling.

“Mad girl,” Archie said, pushing her in front of him. In the hall he stood, breathing hard, looking down at her. “Go have a bath,” he said. “Go and have a bath, mad birthday girl.”

In an hour it had all melted away. The air grew cool and heavy, the twilight full of drowsy, stunned mosquitoes and a haze that drifted in layers over the lawn. Alice wandered downstairs from her bath in bare feet and jeans and an old sweater.

James and Eli were in the kitchen, the windows fogged with steam from a pot of water boiling on the stove. Just as Alice stepped into the room, Tad and Harry came in the back door, the three-legged dog scrabbling at the end of a leash behind them.

“Here. Hold him, okay?” Harry handed Alice the leash and crossed the room to open the refrigerator.

Alice took the leash and sat down in a kitchen chair. When the dog pushed past her knees to go under the table, the leash wrapped around the leg of the chair and Alice followed him to untangle the line. The dog sat down with the top of its speckled head grazing the underside of the table. The stump of the dog's leg held Alice's gaze; she found she could look at it for longer now, though she still wasn't ready to touch it. Suddenly the dog darted its head toward her. Alice froze in alarm; was he going to
bite her? But he only licked her hand swiftly and then looked away. She stole her arm around him, her fingers in his rough coat. He began to pant.

They sat to eat finally with a clatter of knives and forks, a scraping of chairs. Alice came up from under the table and took her seat between Archie and Tad, who reached over to give her a horse bite on the thigh; Archie frowned at them as he uncorked a bottle of wine fetched up from the basement, his glasses pushed back on the top of his head. Then he gave Alice a second look and leaned toward her, the corkscrew still in his hand. “Did the hail do that to you?” he said, staring at her forehead.

Alice put her hand up to her face, the little cut just above her left eyebrow she had noticed when she cleared a circle on the steamed-over mirror in the bathroom. It had stung in the bath, just for a moment, when she'd soaped her face and slipped under the hot water. “Maybe,” she said. “I don't know.”

Archie's eyes were fixed on her forehead.

“What?” Alice said.

“It's very strange.” Archie's eyes roved over her face.

Alice stared at him.

“Your mother,” he began, his eyes returning to her forehead, “your mother had a little scar.” He raised a finger and touched his own eyebrow. “Just here, where that hail got you.”

“I remember that,” James said suddenly from the other end of the table.

The other boys had fallen silent.

“I do, too,” Wally said after a minute. “How'd she get it?”

Archie put down the corkscrew and picked up his wineglass. He glanced down the table at the boys and then back at Alice, and his look, when Alice met it, was full of loneliness.

She reached to put her hand up to the place above her eyebrow where the hailstone had struck her. No one said anything.

“She got it from a hailstone,” Archie said finally. “When she was ten.”

“You're kidding?” Harry stared at Archie.

“That's so weird,” Tad said. “Really?”

Alice did not say anything. The little cut above her eyebrow burned for a moment and then buzzed, and then the sensation died away. She felt excited. Coincidences such as this were part of her understanding of the world, the same part that contemplated stories without questioning, whether their events were believable or not, but this instance of concurrence drew her close to her mother in a way that felt especially strange and important. Archie had read enough Shakespeare to Alice for her to see that even stories for adults sought conclusions, couples marching off together paired like swans, or the apparently dead returned to life, or twins parted by shipwreck finding each other at last. The pattern of revelation, resolution, restoration was familiar to her. Alice had a pop-up book—supplied to her by Elizabeth—that displayed various anatomical parts with a startling three-dimensionality; erect penises leapt up out of the book's pages, a woman's abdomen was peeled back like layers of an onion to reveal a uterus, a pair of ovaries nestled like pears in her belly. On one page, an umbilical cord was strung from margin to margin like a watch chain. But though Alice knew she had been linked physically to her mother, this bridge between them—mother and daughter struck at the same age and in identical places by a hailstone—carried with it an extraordinary, even Shakespearean dispensation. Her brothers did not have scars caused by hailstones.

Alice looked back at Archie. He seemed so sad to her sometimes. He rarely laughed, he often seemed tired, his shoulders sloped and hunched. This incident likewise seemed to have failed to charm or even amaze him. On the contrary, he looked more
serious than usual, though Alice, with the communication of this revelation, felt blessed, singled out for special attention. Yet such moments in stories, she remembered suddenly, usually preceded something significant, a test of some kind. An ordinary boy discovers that he is actually a member of an ancient, magical race, destined to save it from destruction. A girl to whom heavenly creatures are revealed discovers that she must rescue her father from a terrifying enchantment. Alice had always admired the children in these stories, the ones who found themselves in the midst of bewildering adventures, charged with something terribly important. Was this one of those moments, she wondered? A little shiver ran over her.