by Carrie Brown
“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 prete
nding 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.
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.”
FIVE
ALICE 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 smelle
d 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.