The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

Any moment now, the guests would arrive.

  TWO

  ALICE ATTENDED to the sounds of the household as they floated up the stairs. From the kitchen came the bouncing tempo of polka music. Elizabeth Tranh, the MacCauleys’ Vietnamese housekeeper, played the radio at a volume uncomfortable for most other people. She had poor hearing, the result of an infection acquired during the six weeks in 1979 she had spent in an open boat on the South China Sea with her son and daughter-in-law, two grandchildren, one of them an infant, and a dozen other Vietnamese fleeing their country. After many months in a camp in Hong Kong, the family had been taken in by the United States under the Episcopal archbishop's fund for refugee relief. Alice's mother, Beryl MacCauley, who had belonged to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Grange, had become Elizabeth's American sponsor when the family was resettled in nearby Brattleboro. The year Alice's twin brothers were born, Beryl offered Elizabeth a job helping with the house and the children, and Elizabeth had stayed with the family ever since. Alice knew her to be devoted to the MacCauley family and tireless in an impatient, sometimes militant way. Once Alice had asked Elizabeth about being adrift in the boat for so many weeks, but Elizabeth had waved away her questions. “Hot,” she said. “Thirsty. Boring. What do you think?”

  From her place on the windowsill, Alice heard the rumble of her father's voice calling something to Elizabeth and Elizabeth's shouted reply. Alice could tell by the sound of his voice that he was facing the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, jutting out his chin and fumbling with the knot of his bow tie.

  Already that morning, Alice's brothers had brought her breakfast in bed, a family tradition on birthdays. The five boys, teeth unbrushed, hair stiff with sleep, in sour-smelling T-shirts and boxer shorts, had banged open her bedroom door, James bearing the old bamboo tray laden with French toast and vanilla ice cream. They had jumped on her, shocking her out of sleep, tickling her and blowing into her ear and making farting noises with their mouths against the back of her neck when she buried her face in the pillow, squealing. Happy birthday, they'd shouted. Happy birthday, Alice!

  She had rolled over, shrieking and struggling inside the vice of her pajamas and the twisted sheets, and they had swamped her. Where's Alice, they had asked each other, sitting on her while she screamed and hiccupped with laughter and tried to fight them off. Who's seen Alice? It's her birthday today!

  When the screen door to the front porch below Alice's window opened, offering up its familiar rusty squeak, Alice leaned over from the windowsill to see who was coming. Tad and Harry could imitate anything: countless lines of dialogue from movies, various birds, the ascending whistle of the teakettle, the sound of Elizabeth's rubber-soled shoes on the kitchen floor. The squeaky screen door below Alice's bedroom window was a character the twins referred to as the Bishop, its voice a whine of hysterical, nasal complaint that Archie forbade the boys to perform at the dinner table. Once they had made Alice laugh so hard milk came out her nose.

  In a game begun by Alice's mother, a piece of furniture in nearly every room of the house had been named and its character established. Alice understood that her mother had been silly, playful in a sentimental, old-fashioned way, an instigator of traditions still observed years after her death: charades on New Year's Eve, candlelight for birthday dinners, pajamas worn inside out in hopes of snow, the bestowal upon the troubled or faint of heart of a certain stone from the Cornwall shore reported to bring good luck and cheer. Beryl had been a kisser of dogs and horses, children and women and men, creative in a slapdash, comic vein, such as the trail of black footprints she'd once painted across the pine floor of the kitchen, its outline still just barely visible. Since her death, the children had continued to refer to the selected pieces of furniture by their assigned names, as if to give up the game would have been to acknowledge that they had, gradually, forgotten her. As a result, they all referred to the uncomfortable black rocker by the fireplace in the living room as Vulgar, their mother's name for it, and whenever someone unsuspecting sat in it, the twins went into a contorted performance Alice loved known as Violated Vulgar, clawing the air as if they were drowning and sputtering absurd, made-up epithets, usually inspired by Shakespeare, thanks to their father's influence: Thou deboshedfish, thou.

  The pair of high twin beds with the pineapple posts in Alice's bedroom were known as the idiotic Molly and Polly, who squealed and giggled when Alice lay down at night and shrieked like virgins, as Tad and Harry said, when one of the boys stretched out on the spare bed to read to Alice at night. The telephone bench in the front hall, with its voluptuous lines and worn velveteen cushions, was the lascivious Brigitte, a cameo at which Harry excelled, swaying down the hall like a giant, six-foot-three drag queen past whoever sat on Brigitte to make a phone call. Tad and Harry were the most protective of these old traditions; they had been nine when their mother died, Alice knew, old enough to remember something, but only details so shadowy and elusive that later they were not sure whether they might have made them up.

  Eli and Alice had no memory of their mother at all.

  In Beryl's old dressing room, though no one ever went in there, the chaise longue upholstered in slippery polished cotton was known to all of the children as Auntie Lola. There had been no reason to speak of Auntie Lola for years, all ten years of Alice's life, in fact, nor to enter the darkened room under the eaves with its faded Chinese wallpaper and dressing table with its still skirt of blue silk concealing the desolate space beneath. Yet Alice knew all about Lola and her Pekinese, the collection of little pillows with their bunched pansy faces and button noses gathered against the seatback.

  On Alice's dresser was a picture of her mother as a child astride a rakish black and white pony. Alice knew in detail the story of her parents’ marriage: in 1978, the red-cheeked daughter of an Oxford don—nineteen years old, pretty, and thought by her parents to be a bit wild—fell in love with Archibald MacCauley, a pipe-smoking young American scholar visiting England on a Rhodes fellowship. He and Beryl married at her parents’ house in Oxford, and their first son, James, was born in a London hospital five years later, Wallace a year and a half after that. Then, after nearly a decade away from the United States and in the face of an offer of a tenure-track position from the American college near the house in which he had been born and raised, Archie flew home with his English wife and two small sons to live in the old Vermont farmhouse in which Archie himself had come into the world. The twins were born two years later in 1987, Eli sixteen months after that. Then, in 1995, seven years after the arrival of their last son and a month after giving birth to her only daughter, Alice, Beryl MacCauley died in a fall from her horse.

  She had written one cookbook and edited another; given birth to six children; raised two litters of Labrador puppies; bought, trained, and sold two horses; planted a hundred feet of gardens; and cooked countless meals, including—Alice had been told— some especially memorable Moroccan-inspired tagines for her family and friends.

  Too young to be aware of her loss, Alice was spared the first grief of her mother's death. Over the years, though, she had grown jealous of other girls who had their own mothers to fight with and complain about and love. She was jealous of her brothers, too, especially James and Wallace, who were old enough to reliably remember their mother. Alice had nothing but stories about her mother's affection for other people, and photographs, including just one of her and her mother together, in which Beryl, a patterned scarf tied around her head, leaned back in a canvas chair on the lawn in front of the Vermont house, cradling the newborn Alice in her arms and smiling. At Beryl's feet, in a detail Alice had studied, one of the family's Maine coon cats had rolled onto its back, four paws batting the air as it begged for attention.

  Yet Alice would not have said she was lonely. The presence of her five brothers meant that for most of Alice's life, her house had been full of people, not only her father and Elizabeth and the boys but also the boys’ friends. It was a house that more and more over the years, despite wha
t Alice witnessed as Elizabeth's increasingly shrill efforts, had fallen sway to the corruption of children, their chaos and theatrics, their games and hysterics and crimes and hidden kindnesses and cruelties; this was how Alice knew it, as a series of stages on which play was enacted, Alice bringing up the rear in helmet or horned Viking headdress or feathered mask, bearing light saber or wand or pennant on a pole, whatever was left over, whatever she was handed. In James and Wallace's bedroom, a span of real ship's rigging, excellent for climbing, was fixed to one of the beams on the ceiling. Alice had been netted and caught here and hung upside down; she'd been a hostage, a stowaway in a crow's nest, Peter Pan. At six she'd broken an arm swinging onto one of the beds; at nine—a fly being drained of its blood by a spider—she had required five stitches in the top of her head after being cut loose while her hands were still tied behind her back. She never played a girl in any of these games; it never occurred to any of them, including Alice herself, that Alice should play a girl's role, Wendy instead of Peter Pan, for instance. Who would want to be Wendy?

  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 shap
es 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?