The Rope Walk (3 page)

In the long gallery that ran the length of the back of the house, a summer porch that had been closed in long ago and lined with cupboards for the boys’ boots and skis and tennis rackets, a rope swing had been suspended from two sturdy eye hooks in the ceiling. Here, when the boys deserted her for their more grown-up activities, Alice swung through the rainy afternoons, sailing over mops and rusty buckets, heaps of dead wasps in the dusty casement windows, her toes grazing a battered ball that traveled slowly, inevitably, to the corner where the floor sloped.

Children loved the MacCauleys’ house. There was a fireman's pole that ran through a hole from the upstairs porch to the downstairs porch, and, in the branches of a maple tree, a tree house with a drawbridge on a pulley that let down into Tad and Harry's bedroom window. Explorers in the house, Alice silent and unnoticed in their wake, found soon enough the telescope in the attic window, the liquor bottles in the closet with its tiny hidden sink
in Archie's study, the false bottom in the drawer of the desk in the living room, the secret opening beneath full of old copies of
Playboy
which the boys, when Alice first discovered them, snatched away from her.

This year, with all her brothers gone off to college, Alice sometimes walked aimlessly through the rooms in the quiet that came over the house, and over herself and her father, when the boys were away. She had the notion that along with all the silly voices—those of the Bishop, Vulgar the rocking chair, Brigitte the love seat—that fell silent when her brothers were not at home, her mother's voice was murmuring somewhere at an undetectable frequency in conversation with the possessions among which, as a living, breathing presence, she had once moved. Alice let her hands brush these objects and thought about how her mother's hands had once touched the same places.

All the family's fun, Alice understood, had begun with her mother.

Squeak
went the Bishop again, and there was Archie. Alice leaned over and watched her father from the windowsill. He was fifty-six, but already his hair had gone completely white. It shone in the sun, flawless as the wings of the moth prince who had perished in Alice's window casement. Archie, his progress grave as a butler's, came down the steps of the porch bearing a tray of glasses, proceeding one step at a time in a careful sideways attitude like an old man, and made his way through the dining room chairs arranged haphazardly across the front lawn. High above him in her windowsill, Alice detected the tinkling of the glasses trembling on the tray.

A terrace had been built on the foundation of the old summer kitchen that had burned down before Alice was born, and here a
table with a snowy cloth had been laid. The lilacs had dropped a snowfall of tiny purple blossoms over the dishes. Elizabeth had set out platters of sandwiches under a drape of cheesecloth, glass bowls of berries, and an enormous sagging gelatin mold jeweled with pineapple and mandarin oranges. The ice cream—peach and strawberry in brown cardboard five-gallon buckets—would be brought out later.

In the apple orchard beyond the stone wall that bordered the lawn, Alice could make out from her window her brothers moving under the trees and hear snatches of their distant voices, mostly Tad's and Harry's. They were making a rope walk for her.

The night before, at dinner, James had leaned over the dining room table, his hair falling over his forehead, and had drawn scribbled curlicues with his finger on the table's mahogany surface, explaining it to her. Many girls had fallen in love with James over Alice's lifetime. Archie said James's romantic lock of black hair worked on them like a hypnotist's watch on a chain.

“It's like a big spiderweb,” James had said. “The idea is that everyone has a string, and you have to untangle it to get your surprise. There's a surprise at the end of every one, a present,” he said. “How do you like the sound of that?”

The rope walk sounded fine. But then Alice liked almost everything the boys did, except when they excluded her from their adventures. Eli had turned seventeen that year. Tad and Harry, April fools, had recently celebrated their eighteenth birthdays. Wallace was twenty; James, the elder statesman, twenty-two. This year, they had all left for college on the same day, including for the first time, Eli. Alice, embarrassed to cry in front of Elizabeth and Archie, had gone upstairs to lie on her bed with her face in the pillow. At least Tad and Harry stayed in Vermont to attend Frost, where Archie was a dean. Alice knew that it had
to do with their bad grades and their general failure to take anything seriously that the twins had not, like their father and grandfather, and like James and Wallace and now even Eli, gone to Yale. They didn't seem to be sorry about it, though. They had come home to attend her piano recital in November, where they stamped their feet and whistled appreciatively as she made her embarrassed curtsey. In March they had showed up for public speaking night at school, where they made faces at her from the audience in the auditorium and succeeded in making her laugh, and then, her face aflame with mortification, fall silent, unable to remember another word in her recitation of “Hiawatha.”

Usually Elizabeth went home on Friday evenings—she had kept her own house as long as she'd been with the MacCauleys; various grandchildren had moved in and out over the years—but she had stayed last night to bake Alice's cake, a three-tiered coconut one with curls of real coconut on it. Alice had been given the hammer the night before and had aimed several ineffectual blows at the coconut, but it had been Eli who'd cracked it finally, the milk splashing onto the floor.

Pushing open the door with her hip, an avalanche of the boys’ ironed shirts over her arm, Elizabeth had been upstairs once already this morning to check on Alice after her bath.

Alice was on the forbidden windowsill, still in her undershirt, when Elizabeth surprised her, looking around the door.

“Alice! Get
down
from there! You going to fall off! Get down, get down!” Elizabeth glared at her. “You find your shoes? Eli polished them last night. He said he put them on the stairs.”

Alice swung her legs around hastily so that her feet grazed the floor. Yes, she'd found the shoes, the black patent leather smelling
of polish. Yes, she'd hung up her towel. And yes, her dress had been where Elizabeth had said it would be, hanging up in the airing cupboard off the upstairs back hall where the ironing board was kept, a fancy white dress with a blue sash and bunches of cherries appliquéd on the collar. She hated the dress. It was a baby's dress, chosen by Elizabeth.

“Fix your hair,” Elizabeth said on her way out.

Archie called the sweaty tumble of red curls on Alice's head her glory; he liked to brush his hand over the coils. Alice hated her hair. It was painful, having Elizabeth brush it, and she herself only tore ineffectually at her head with her mother's old ivory-handled hairbrush. She would have to brush it today, even though it was her birthday.

Squeak
went the Bishop.

Alice leaned over again to look. Archie had gone back indoors, and the lawn below was empty now except for the dining room chairs. Already the morning shadows had contracted, drawing in on themselves to become soft shapes disappearing against the brightening grass. Soon the guests would arrive and Alice would come downstairs in her dress. There would be lunch, and running among the children, and the singing of happy birthday and the cutting of the cake, the first slice to go to the youngest guest and the next to the eldest and the very last to Alice herself.

People did not look at the MacCauley boys and necessarily think of the boys’ mother, but Alice knew they remembered her when they looked at Alice, perhaps for the likeness between them, both of them red-haired and red-cheeked and mottled on the neck when upset or anxious, or perhaps just because Alice was a girl. Alice sensed that she was regarded as unfortunate by some of the MacCauleys’ friends and neighbors, a girl in a house full of boys, a girl in a house that lacked a mother's touch, a girl in
a house that contained neither hair dryer nor drawers of makeup in the bathroom, nor even, thanks to Alice's own perverse preference for pants rather than dresses, more than one summer dress and one winter one, an old-fashioned blue velvet with a white bib of a collar picked out by Elizabeth that made Alice feel like an orphan dressed up to impress prospective parents. People had relegated Alice, she believed, to the shadowy underground of the woebegone and misbegotten, the world of those who had suffered bad luck; those who had attached themselves, even unwittingly, to something sad; those who always reminded people of someone no longer living. In that dark place, misfortune, ugly as a stepsister, would always follow at your heels. You would have to be very brave, Alice thought, to escape. You would have to be heroic.

Still, despite their mother's early death, they had a talent for happiness, the MacCauley children. That was what people said, admiring them at parties—all of them (except Alice) so tall and boldly colored, the twins like Alice and Beryl with Nordic strawberry-colored hair, the others dark-haired and blue-eyed like Archie, with Archie's handsome features. Surely Alice, too, feeling as she did on this morning of her tenth birthday with the world sparkling beneath her, could hold on to a share of that happiness?

Downstairs, Wally began banging on the piano:
ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, ta-ra-ra-BOOM-de-ay
, faster and faster. The door in the face of the cuckoo clock in the upstairs hall sprang open, and the little bird sang out the hour. Alice flung her legs outside the window frame, dangling her feet and thumping her heels rhythmically against the clapboard. Beside her, the window curtains inflated with the wind, rising and falling against her. Alice took deep breaths, puffing out her cheeks and exhaling gustily, her
breath filling her up, and up, and up until she was light-headed. She felt as if she might float off the windowsill; the only thing keeping her tied down were her feet, which had grown pleasantly heavy.

And then she heard the first car crunching down the long gravel drive between the pine trees, approaching the house.

The party was about to begin.

T
HE FIRST IN A PROCESSION
of cars turned slowly onto the grass of the field. Alice yanked her legs inside and dropped off the windowsill onto the floor. Her ironed party dress was ridiculous; she did not want to be seen in it. Girls her age wore blue jeans, even to parties, but Elizabeth did not think this was suitable party attire, and Archie helplessly deferred all such decisions to Elizabeth.

After a minute, Alice peeked up over the edge of the window-sill. The first arrivals were picking their way over the rough ground of the field toward the house, calling greetings to Archie, who descended the porch steps and strode out across the lawn to meet them. As Alice watched, nose above the windowsill, Mr. Casey, who owned the Grange Inn in town, sailed down the driveway on his bicycle, his dachshund standing up in the wicker bicycle basket and barking hysterically at Lorenzo, the MacCauleys’ affable black Labrador, who wound joyfully among the guests.

A balloon slipped free of the porch railing and rose silently into the leafy shadows of the maple tree near Alice's window.

When Alice heard Archie call her name, she sank back hurriedly
to the floor again. She could imagine him taking a step backward on the lawn to search her window, shielding his eyes with his hand. But she did not want to go downstairs in her foolish dress with its starched pleats and silly cherries, in her shiny shoes and babyish white socks. Everyone they knew in Grange had been invited, and people would feel obligated to make a fuss over her, which would be embarrassing. Few of the families in Grange had children exactly Alice's age. There were a couple of teenage boys who would have complained about having to come to the party, Alice thought, and who had probably stayed home, and then there was a group of children much younger than Alice. But this event and an annual Christmas party fulfilled Archie's sense of his social obligation for the year, and though Alice suspected that, like her, he did not really look forward to either occasion, he pretended bonhomie. In any case, no one ever asked Alice whether she wanted a birthday party or not.

Alice's door opened with a soft click. She looked up, stricken—was Elizabeth coming to get her?—but it was only Wally, who smiled down at her on the floor.

“Not a very good hiding place,” he said.

Alice looked at her feet. “I'm not hiding.”

Wally came in, closed the door behind him, and sat down on the bed. “You have to go down there sometime,” he said.

Alice watched him take a small glass ashtray out of one pocket and a cigarette and a book of matches out of another. He tapped the cigarette against his wristwatch and then lit it. Alice had spent a whole weekend leaving handwritten warnings about the dangers of smoking in Wallace's bedroom, filling the pockets of his coats and stuffing them inside the tight rolls of his socks. “You stink,” some of them said. “Cigarettes kill,” said others. Archie occasionally smoked a pipe, and Alice had papered his belongings,
too, dozens of little skull-and-crossbones notes. This had been Alice's year for furious letter-writing campaigns: against the war in Iraq (Archie was opposed). Against relaxed state laws controlling snowmobiles (Archie was opposed to this, as well). In support of increased fines for littering, this having been the collective cause of the fourth grade at her elementary school. One day, pedaling her bicycle along a mile-and-a-half stretch of West Road, Alice had affixed fifty hand-lettered signs to the trees, warning violators about tossing trash out their car windows. Tad and Harry, who discovered the signs on one of their trips home that fall, had arrived in time for dinner asking who'd put all that garbage on the trees on the road and causing Alice to flee from the table in mortification.

Wally was the tallest of the five boys, the most serious, and the one she could usually depend on for respectful consideration of her questions. His nose was big and beaked, and his jaw had a ferocious edge like an ax blade, but his eyes were dark and tender. He was the musician among them, sensitive and brooding. Alice knew that Archie expected Wally to be famous someday, and he'd already played a lot of concerts and won some important competitions. Alice thought Wally was mournfully heroic looking, like Abraham Lincoln. She knew James was considered the more conventionally handsome of the two, but she thought she preferred Wally's romantic look.