by Carrie Brown
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.
THREE
THE 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.
“What do you feel when you have a birthday?” she asked him now.
“Nothing,” he said. “It's just another day, isn't it?” He blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Once I might have felt something,” he said. “I can't really remember.”
Alice looked down at her white socks and her party shoes. “Archie doesn't want you to smoke in the house,” she said primly.
“I know,” Wally said. He sighed. “It's just stress making me do it. Sorry.” He stood up. “Come on. Let's go.”
When Alice didn't move, he said, “It's just the first moment that's bad. After that, nobody will notice you.” He stubbed out his cigarette, stood up from the bed, and came across the room to reach down and take her hand. She let him pull her to her feet and then leaned into him for a moment. He smelled like cigarette smoke and something sour: grass clippings, she thought.
“Courage,” he said, and pushed her toward the door.
“Here you are!” Archie looked relieved. He met them on the porch and put his arm around Alice's shoulders, bearing her with him down the steps and over the grass toward Helen O'Brien, who stood waiting on the brick path, leaning on her cane and smiling.
“Happy birthday, dear Alice,” Helen said. She kissed Alice's cheek. “You look perfectly beautiful.”
The O'Briens were the MacCauleys’ nearest neighbors. Helen's husband, Tom, known to most people simply as O'Brien, was Archie's oldest friend, an engineer who built bridges for the state of Vermont. Like Archie, he had grown up in Grange. Helen had been stricken by polio when she was young, and she wore a brace on one leg, a complicated affair of Velcro straps and buckles and metal splints. Alice had seen a picture of Helen from when she was a child in the hospital in Boston, flanked by smiling nuns in wimples who surrounded the frail little girl like a merry fleet of sails. She was gentle and kindhearted, beloved by the MacCauley children.
Helen seemed distracted. “Now, where has that boy gone?” She took Alice's hand between her own and held it, gazing around. “I wanted to introduce you. We have Ann's boy visiting with us, you know, he's—”
Ann's boy? Alice had never met Helen's grandson, but she knew the interesting fact that Helen and O'Brien's daughter, Ann, who was several years older than James, had run off to New York City when she was still in college and married a black man with whom she'd had a son, and that they did not come to Grange to visit. Helen spoke wistfully about Ann sometimes, and about the grandson, who was close to Alice's age.
“He's all right, Helen,” Archie said. “I saw him tearing around like a fire engine. Come and sit down.” He put a hand under Helen's elbow and led her along the path toward the terrace. Alice trailed behind them.
“Aren't you glad to have them all home?” Helen said to Alice, taking a seat in the chair Archie held for her.
“Tad and Harry brought a new dog with them,” Alice said. “They're keeping it in their room,”
“Another dog! What does Lorenzo say?”
&nb
sp; Alice knew she was being teased, but she didn't mind. “He's a three-legged dog, with blue eyes,” she continued, ignoring Helen's tone. “They're training him to count. A professor at Frost is doing an experiment.”
“Well!” Helen's eyes were smiling. “I hope it doesn't distress him when he figures out that all the other dogs have four legs.”
The lawn in front of the house had filled with people. They came by and shook hands with Archie, chatted with Helen, and smiled down at Alice, remarking inevitably on how tall she had become. Alice could see across the driveway into the barn, where Eli had opened the doors and where a few little children inside waited for turns on the swing suspended from the rafters. Tad and Harry, each bearing a tray of glasses of lemonade, stopped to kiss Helen in greeting and moved on.
“What have you done with O'Brien?” Archie asked Helen, taking the chair beside her finally and pulling Alice close to him with one arm. Alice leaned against him, safe from the barrage of well-wishers.
“Oh, he's coming,” Helen said. “He's a little out of sorts.”
Alice watched Helen look significantly at Archie over the top of her lemonade glass. She was about to ask why O'Brien was out of sorts, but Archie pushed himself out of his chair.
“There are the Fitzgeralds,” he said. “I'll go give them a hand.”
Alice watched the Fitzgeralds’ old car turn slowly onto the field. Miss Fitzgerald had been Wally's first piano teacher, though the arrangement had not lasted long. After less than a year, when it was clear that Wally was significantly talented, Archie had offended Miss Fitzgerald by finding someone at Frost with whom Wally could study instead. Alice did not like Miss Fitzgerald; none of the MacCauley children did. Alice felt distrustful of Miss Fitzgerald's apparent interest in children, which seemed to Alice to be fabricated at great effort. She never bent over to shake hands or rest a palm on your head; in fact she seemed to put her hands deliberately out of reach or to busy them with something—change in her purse, an umbrella, a sheaf of papers— so as to avoid having to shake your hand, as if she feared that invisible germs were leaping off you like fleas. Yet Alice felt the tug of an unpleasant tide when she was around Miss Fitzgerald. Something happened between them, something neither of them liked or wanted to happen, but against which both of them were helpless: they had a peculiar awareness of each other that made Alice feel exposed, like when someone opened the door of her cubicle while she was changing into her bathing suit at the YWCA in Brattleboro, where Alice went for swimming lessons. It was not just that Alice felt a strange sympathy for Miss Fitzgerald, though she was certainly aware of the desperate degree of Miss Fitzgerald's discomfort. It was that Miss Fitzgerald made Alice remember all the bad things she'd ever done in her life, and though there hadn't been so many, and most of them were trivial enough—petty thefts from her brothers, once a math test at school when she had looked at the answers of the boy beside her in class, various lies to Archie about whether she had done her piano practice or helped Elizabeth with the ironing or the dusting—the resurgence of guilt she felt in Miss Fitzgerald's presence was powerful enough that she had never confessed this to anyone, not even Wally, who, Alice thought, might have understood.
The boys’ imitations of Miss Fitzgerald singing “For Those in Peril on the Sea” in a shivering vibrato were familiar stock in the MacCauley household. It had caused hurt and bitterness when Archie, sympathetic to Wally's complaints, had severed the piano arrangement. Even now, if Alice and Archie happened to run into Miss Fitzgerald while doing errands in town, Alice was aware of Archie's careful effort to appease her whenever she asked after Wally with an injured, studied politeness.
“You were the beginning of it all, Hope. Thank goodness you were there and saw what he had,” Archie always said diplomatically.
Helen turned around in her chair now to watch Archie cross the lawn toward Miss Fitzgerald's car.
“So the great Kenneth has arrived,” she murmured. “Poor man.” After a moment she added, “Poor Hope.”
“Who's Kenneth?” Alice said.
“That's Miss Fitzgerald's brother.”
This was interesting news, that Miss Fitzgerald had a brother. Alice, who considered herself an expert at brothers, did not like to acknowledge any further similarities between herself and Miss Fitzgerald, however. She watched with dismay as Miss Fitzgerald got out of the car and stood fussing at Archie's shoulder while he struggled to unload an old-fashioned cane wheelchair from the trunk. It was the strangest-looking chair Alice had ever seen.
Helen made an exasperated noise. “Where on earth did she find that old relic?” she said. “I bet it was in her attic.”
They watched Archie wrestle with the seat.
Helen glanced at Alice. “Do you want to know a secret about Kenneth? It's not really a secret anymore. Plenty of people know it.”
Alice nodded.
Helen lowered her voice. “He's Anonymous.”
Alice gazed back at her, mystified.
“The library!” Helen said. “Your library. Kenneth Fitzgerald's the anonymous donor!”
Despite its dreary aspect, Alice had been a frequent patron at the dark old library building in Grange. It had smelled of mice and mold, and the heavy yellowed shades pulled down over the windows had submerged the rooms in a permanent dusk. On the walls had hung a collection of faded botanical prints, spotted with age, and the children's book collection had been so old that sometimes bits of the books’ pages had come away in Alice's fingers like flakes of dry leaves. When Alice was seven, the old building had closed for a year while, thanks to an anonymous donor, it was restored and expanded by two new wings, one of which was devoted to children's books. This had quickly become Alice's favorite place in Grange. The high-ceilinged reading room was filled with heaps of brightly colored beanbag chairs and so many books that Alice knew she would never be able to read them all. Presiding over the children's wing was Carmel Murphy, a young woman whose name always made Alice think of creamy caramels and whose shining auburn hair and wide-open blue eyes and soft sweaters inflated by the gentle rounds of Miss Murphy's bosoms held Alice's attention with rapturous power; Alice, bearing her customary armload of books to the counter to have them checked out, knew she stared at Miss Murphy and knew it was impolite, but she could not take her eyes away from her, the pulse fluttering in her pretty white throat and the hypnotic action of her fingers deftly rifling the pages of Alice's books.
Tall windows in the children's wing let in the bracing winter light or rippling summer shade. The tables, made of smooth, pale wood finished to a silvery shine, were cool to the touch and satiny. Alice spent hours in the library, nestled in a beanbag chair dragged into a shaft of sunlight, or on rainy days curled up in a corner in one of the adult's leather armchairs, a delicious persimmon color. Besides the books, her favorite thing in the library was the pair of mobiles that hung from the high ceiling in the children's reading room, Alice liked to lie on her back on a bean-bag, staring up at the mobiles moving gently in the air far above her head, the shapes suspended from a branching series of long curved arms. She could not decide if the shapes were like leaves and coral and flowers, or whether they were more like creatures: a seahorse, a diving otter, a Klipspringer, the dainty little antelope that ran over Africa and which she had seen a drawing of in Archie's encyclopedia.
Alice nursed a secret fantasy that Wally and Carmel Murphy would fall in love one day and get married. Whenever Wally came along to the library to keep Alice company and help her carry home her books, she tried to catch him secretly following Miss Murphy with his eyes, but he did not seem as impressed by her as Alice did. Wally was not as successful with girls as James, a fact that made Alice feel protective of him. Yet he was not foolishly theatrical around them either, like Tad or Harry. He unselfconsciously stretched out his long frame on the floor of the reading room alongside Alice, lacing his fingers behind his head and watching the mobiles, the shadows of the shapes flickering over them like the shadows thrown b
y the quicksilver minnows across the sand in the riverbed. Alice hoped that, one day, Miss Murphy would look up and notice Wally. Yet this charitable feeling was complicated, for there was her own ardent admiration of Miss Murphy (and Miss Murphy's failure to notice anything special about Alice), as well as Alice's possessive feelings for Wally; none of her brothers paid as much attention to her as Wally. If Wally didn't seem interested in having a girlfriend, she had decided, she wasn't going to hurry him into finding one.
In Alice's estimation, the person responsible for the beautiful new library would be someone truly important. She and Helen watched Archie get the seat of the wheelchair in place and start around to the far side of the car.
“Hope always wanted Kenneth to come back to Grange,” Helen said now. “She's been alone for so long, since her mother and father died. You know, O'Brien and Kenneth were friends as boys, long ago, and your father, too, I think, though he would have been a good bit younger, of course. But now …” She paused. “Well, I don't suppose Hope expected it would be like this.”
Alice had never thought of Miss Fitzgerald as someone who might be lonely. She seemed instead like a very busy person, a person burdened by busyness, in fact, often showing up at the house with petitions she wished Archie to sign.
“It's Miss Fitz,” the boys would say, giddy with excitement, tearing into Archie's study to warn him. “Hide! Hide!”
And Archie would hush them and get to his feet and go to meet her at the door.
She had a habit of wearing scarves over her hair, tied under her chin in a way that forced you to concentrate unhappily on her face, bulging from the scarf's constricting hold. In a rare moment of irritation, Archie had once said aloud that he wished she would keep her snout out of things she didn't know anything about, and since then Alice had never been able to look at Miss Fitzgerald without thinking of a rat. Long-nosed, cheeks working nervously as if she were chewing something, eyes watering, she had the look of a bad rat in a picture book Alice had once read. Also, she seemed to Alice to be more of a male rat than a female one, a confusion that added to Alice's distress around her.