The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  Alice looked up. Archie had turned away from her, squinting at the lawn and the field beyond, the sun shining on his face. His hair floated up around his head in the breeze, white and feathery.

  “What's a camarilla?” Alice asked.

  Archie turned around. “What?” He frowned. “Oh, it's a king's inner circle, I think, sort of a cabal. Clever schemers who advise the king. Why?”

  “He's giving us two of his mobiles,” Alice said. She imagined herself and Theo dressed in heraldic mail like Knights of the Round Table, with lions on their breasts. She was surprised that Kenneth had called Miss Fitzgerald “loony” in the letter. But then Alice had seen the house; he wasn't telling her anything she didn't already know. Also, he'd put that exclamation point there; Alice had mistakenly called them “excitement” points when she was younger. The mark of punctuation seemed to suggest he had a lighthearted view of his sister's housekeeping failures. Last night, when Archie was back at the hospital, she had asked Wally if the boys had told Archie about the house. “The twins did,” he had told her. “I'm sure he thinks they're exaggerating. I told him it was beyond even the twins’ imagination.”

  Archie came to sit beside her on the steps of the porch. “Well. That's something,” he said. He hesitated for a moment before going on. “You know, Mr. Fitzgerald is an important artist, Alice,” he said finally. “I suspect these are worth a good bit of money. He's made us a very valuable gift.”

  Not us, Alice thought. Me. Me and Theo. She looked down at the letter in her hands.

  “Ken's had an extraordinary life,” Archie went on, leaning his elbows on his thighs. “One adventure after another. Climbed all sorts of mountains in India and Pakistan, designed sets for ballets and operas in theaters all over the world. As I say—he's quite famous.” He paused for a moment. “I read something once about him. It was in an interview, I think. He said he got the idea of the mobiles from mountain climbing, looking down on the world and seeing the shadows of the clouds…” He trailed off.

  Alice looked up at him.

  “It's just that it's probably a lot of money, Alice,” he said. He straightened his back and rubbed a hand over his head, disarranging his hair.

  Did Archie mean they would have to give them back? “They're a present,” Alice said.

  Archie was silent for a moment. “Not your ordinary sort, though,” he said. “I want to think about it.”

  “Think about what?”

  “Whether we ought to accept them.”

  Alice felt alarmed. He did mean to send them back. “He gave them to us,” she said. “To me and Theo.”

  Archie sighed. “Let me think about it, Alice.”

  Alice stood up and looked down at Archie. “I want to open the boxes,” she said. She rarely argued with her father; it startled her to hear her voice now, the note of anger in it. But why was he being so … careful, she thought in resentment, so careful and old and slow. Archie always wanted to think about things. He always wanted to consider matters before venturing an opinion or making a judgment, as if everything were equally important, what to have for breakfast and—she cast about for a parallel construction—whether to go to war. And of course they weren't, she thought now in frustration. Some things just didn't matter all that much. For a second she felt a shocking blaze of hatred for her father, a sensation utterly unfamiliar and powerful. It was as if all her blood had suddenly been exchanged for fire and then just as quickly extinguished, leaving only a smoldering gunpowder trail.

  Archie looked up at her. “He must like you very much, Alice.” He reached to take her hand. “What did you do to besot him so already?”

  But Alice took her hand away. Sometimes when Alice went in search of Archie in his study, she found him in his tufted leather chair, the one their mother had called Sleepy Hollow for the deep well of its cracked seat. He would be staring vacantly past the book open on his lap, the room dark except for a single light shining onto the page, the lamp's occult ceramic finial, an Egyptian eye, watching the shadows in the corners of the room. Archie would look up at her knock, startled, and when he saw her, peeping around the edge of the door, he would close the book and smile. But it was a sad smile he offered her at those moments, and she understood that she had seen a side of her father he ordinarily took more trouble to conceal. Behind the mild expression Archie presented to the world—his calm manner, his quiet voice, his wry, economical utterances—lay this sadness, Alice knew, all the years of missing Alice's mother and struggling alone to raise their children. Yet even more troubling than the sadness was the indifference Alice sometimes detected behind her father's melancholy, as if he simply could not rouse himself to care sufficiently about either the questions posed to him in this world or the answers he would supply. On those evenings when she came to say good night to him in his study, when she found him so inert and helpless and far away, Alice would run for his lap and put her arms around his neck and bury her face in his shoulder, unwilling and unable to look at him,

  Archie's face, turned to her now as he gazed up at her on the porch steps, looked old and tired and defeated.

  Suddenly, surprising herself, she jumped to her feet and leaped down the steps to the grass two at a time. She did not want Archie to look at her that way. On the lawn, in the heat of her confusion, she turned a violent handspring, and then another.

  Theo banged through the screen door onto the porch. “No box cutter,” he announced.

  Archie had no practical skills; the boys joked that he couldn't even change a lightbulb. He had never maintained the kind of respectable tool bench O'Brien had set up in his garage, for instance.

  James appeared a moment later, a steak knife from the kitchen in his hand.

  They slit open the boxes and the mobiles appeared, fixed to the boards with huge staples, like creatures caught in mid-flight and pinned to the wood. At first Archie wanted to leave them attached to the boards and not hang them, but Theo and Alice set up such a complaint that he relented. The children stood under the maple tree on the front lawn, and James brought around the ladder and set it against the tree to climb up and hang the mobiles from the branches. Theo threw open his arms as thejointed black shapes of Monkey Man, with the distended belly of a starving child, arms and legs akimbo, mouth open in a howling O, jumped down and bounced on the mobile's metal arms, doing a Saint Vitus's dance in the air. The figure was nearly the same size as Theo, recognizable as a monkey but also human and vital, like a shaman caught up in a secret ritual.

  When James affixed Old Soldier's Beautiful Daughter and let the pieces fall into place, a shimmering waterfall of tiny gold leaves dropped and spun like golden bees in the dappled shade under the tree. Elizabeth, who had come to work even though it was Sunday because she was finishing up the laundry for James and Wally's departures, came out onto the porch in her apron to watch. “Wha! So beautiful!” she said in surprise. “And what's that one? That one's you, Theo, jumping around like a monkey!”

  Inside, Wally began playing the piano, a complicated passage of notes that ran up and down the scale. When Alice had gone by his bedroom door on her way down to breakfast that morning, she had seen his suitcase open on the bed, a stack of ironed shirts folded on the bedspread, and his tuxedo, magisterial and black, draped like a mourner over the footboard, his black shoes side by side on the floor. Tomorrow he would leave for Michigan, but inside the living room now Wally played the exercise faster and faster; his hands must be a blur over the keys. Alice listened and imagined the notes running around and around the walls like birds trapped in a room. Since their trip to the Fitz-geralds’ yesterday—since breakfast, really, when Wally had gotten angry—Wally had held himself apart from the boys. Even his playing now had a remote, concentrated energy to it, as if he were having an argument with himself.

  Alice stood beneath the shower of Old Soldier's Beautiful Daughter. Beads of reflected light danced over her skin, and she tried to catch them in her fingers. Theo bumped into her as he spun around beneat
h Monkey Man, and they clasped hands, swinging each other in furious circles and then collapsing onto the grass.

  Theo rolled her over and sat on her, victorious. He smelled like grass and dirt—April and May—and the bacon they'd had for breakfast and something else, something she was learning to identify as his own particular smell. She bucked violently and toppled him, but he had her pinned again in a minute, her cheek against the grass, his chest pressed against the wings of her shoulder blades.

  “Surrender,” he said from on top of her, panting onto the back of her neck. The sensation of his hot breath on her skin tickled her, a strange, hysterical tickle. She began to squirm beneath him, wrenching her shoulders and trying to throw him off, but she was laughing too hard to be successful.

  “Got you,” Theo crowed. “I've got you, Alice.”

  After lunch it began to rain, a steady spring drizzle, and Archie dropped Alice and Theo off at the Fitzgeralds’ in the car. When they pulled up in front of the house, Alice hesitated. She wondered exactly what Tad and Harry had told Archie about the condition of the Fitzgeralds’, what Wally had said, whether Archie himself had ever been inside. She wanted him to see it, the strange walled city of junk Miss Fitzgerald had built inside her own house. Archie would be able to fix things somehow, Alice thought. He would understand about Miss Fitzgerald's trouble and put it right.

  She turned in the front seat beside him. “Can you come in with us?” she said. She wanted to put her arms around Archie now, to apologize for her anger of earlier in the day when he had been reluctant about the mobiles. She was suddenly sorry for having pulled away her hand. She did not want to hurt him, she thought in a painful spasm of loyalty, as if it were someone else who had thought all those mean things about him, that he was boring and old-fashioned and … old.

  Archie glanced at his watch. “Not today. I have to run up to Frost to pick something up, and I want to go back to the hospital tonight. Tell Kenneth I'll come see him soon. Tell him—well, tell him thank you, of course.”

  Alice looked away from Archie out the window. The world beyond the wet glass appeared bent somehow, like a scene's disturbed reflection in a circus mirror.

  “Call Elizabeth if it's still raining when you're ready to come home,” Archie said into the silence.

  Alice opened the car door. “Can we come to the hospital with you tonight?” she said, turning back to look at him once more. “To see Helen?”

  “We'll see,” Archie said. “Maybe.” He waved at them as he drove away, the car's taillights reflected in the dark shine of the wet pavement.

  Theo and Alice opened the gate to the Fitzgeralds’ garden. The twins and Eli had been at work since earlier that morning. The grass had been mowed before the rain had started and one section of the fence had been cleared of weeds. The fence itself, denuded, was falling apart. It looked as though it would have to be replaced entirely. There was no sign of the twins or Eli now, though. They'd probably gone home for lunch.

  “I'm not going to go,” Theo said suddenly. He stopped walking.

  Alice turned to him in surprise.

  “I'm not going to the hospital to see her,” he said.

  Alice stared at him, bewildered. “Why not?”

  “They don't like me,” he said. “They don't like my dad.”

  Alice couldn't imagine Helen not liking anyone. She couldn't imagine O'Brien and Helen not liking their own grandson.

  “They're racists,” Theo said. “Especially him. He doesn't like us because we're black.”

  The rain was falling harder now; it dripped off the hood of Alice's raincoat and ran down her face. Theo had been given an old yellow slicker of Eli's. It was too large for him and it hung down over his hands and nearly to his knees. He had not put up the hood, and the rain fell on his bare head, his golden hair darkening, sticking up in wet tufts.

  “You don't look black,” Alice said.

  “Well, I am. If you have even one little drop of black blood in you, you're black.”

  Alice thought about this for a minute. “ Why don't people like people who are black?”

  Theo shrugged. “They just don't.”

  Alice was troubled by these assertions, these revelations of dislike between Theo and Helen and O'Brien, though she wasn't sure she believed Theo's statement about Helen and O'Brien being racists and not liking their own grandson. It seemed baffling to her that people might not like each other because they were one color or another; they might just as easily decide not to like red-haired people, she thought uneasily. Having a lot of colors was much preferable to having only one, anyway. No child would ever be foolish enough to want a box of crayons with only one color in it, she thought. A girl in her class at school every year had a new box of seventy-two crayons, blissfully sharp and pristine. Alice, who was always told to rummage through drawers at home for stubs and broken crayons to fill her pencil box, any other practice being thought wasteful by Archie, was envious. She did not have time to consider any of this at length, though, because at that moment the front door of the Fitzgeralds’ house banged open and slammed inward, the door meeting the wall inside with a loud report. Alice heard herself give a little shriek of surprise, and she and Theo grabbed on to each other. They stood on the path, clinging together. But no one came out the door. It just hung open, a dark hole. Theo and Alice stared at it, horrified.

  “Let's go” Theo said. He took off around the side of the house in the rain. Alice followed him.

  They scrambled up the steps to the terrace and approached the French doors. They were shut, and Alice approached the house cautiously and leaned close to the glass to cup her hand. Theo stood next to her, panting. Rain splashed onto the bricks at their feet.

  “Maybe somebody got him,” Theo said breathlessly. “Maybe someone mugged him!”

  Alice had never heard of anyone getting mugged in Grange, but she'd played games of cops and robbers with the boys, sometimes armed with a club or more often dragged around in handcuffs or tied up and gagged in the tree house. She peered through the glass. The room appeared to be empty, but a chair had toppled over onto the floor—that was strange, Alice thought—and a pool of blankets lay on the carpet beside the settee. Several cardboard board boxes, their tops gaping open, stood in the middle of the room. The glass felt cool and wet on Alice's forehead as she leaned against it. The room was quite dark. There was only one light on near the settee, a lamp with its gooseneck twisted at a violent angle.

  Theo leaned in beside her. Alice peered into the dim room. And then she heard Theo gasp.

  “What's that?” he said in a tiny voice, as if the breath had been sucked out of him. He pressed up close beside Alice and pointed through the glass.

  At his sharp intake of breath, Alice had reared away from the door as if something were about to come hurtling toward them out of the depths of the room, but now she leaned in cautiously, following the path of his pointing finger. And then she saw it. On the floor, a man's dark trouser leg, bent at the knee, extended from behind the settee. She couldn't see beyond that.

  Her fingers found the latch and she pushed open the door and ran across the room.

  Kenneth was lying on the floor behind the settee, his head cradled on a toppled stack of books. The wind, gusting across the floor through the French doors behind her, rifled the open pages in a way that made Alice's heart stop for a minute; she was reminded of the blur of calendar pages signifying the passage of time in old movies. How long had he been lying here?

  She dropped to her knees beside him. What should she do? She didn't know what to do. She put her hand on his chest. Water ran down her sleeve and dripped onto his shirtfront. Under her palm she could feel the bony case of his chest barely rising and falling, as though something were happening a long, long way beneath his skin, a long way from the surface of the earth. His hair still bore the marks of the teeth of a comb. He wasn't wearing the cross of tape over his eye today, but she could see where it had left a mark against the white skin of his foreh
ead. His lips were badly chapped.

  Theo spoke from behind her, appalled. “He's dead.”

  She shook her head. “No, he's not,” she said. “We have to get help.” She turned around and looked up at him. He looked terrified, but she realized that she felt very calm inside, as if she was thinking in slow motion. When she spoke, she heard her own voice in her ears. She could feel every part of her hand where it lay across Kenneth's chest; she could feel his heart, very far away, offering up its exhausted beating through his shirt and against her palm. Wally had a heart murmur, and when Alice was younger and he had held her on his lap, she had put her ear against his chest to listen for it, the musical, murmuring voice she imagined, like the voices of the children in the auditorium at school, waiting for the principal to stand up and lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Wally's heart, she discovered, beat faster than other people's. Archie's heart, on the other hand, was slow. It sounded like muffled footfalls across an empty museum gallery, each beat a solemn echo of the last.

  She got to her feet. “We have to get help,” she repeated.

  Across the room, the door was ajar. Alice hurried across the floor between the boxes; at the door she hesitated, but only for a second. Pushing it open, she leaned into the hall.

  “Hello?” she called into the gloom. There was a window in the hall, but it was heavily curtained, the red panels finished with greasy silk fringes. “Miss Fitzgerald? Tad? Harry?”

  “Try again,” Theo whispered from behind her, making her jump.

  But Alice heard the sound of a door opening overhead and footsteps, a woman's clicking heels, coming down the back stairs. A moment later, Miss Fitzgerald appeared.

  She looked as if she had been asleep, bewildered and lost. She stopped ten paces from the children, almost as if she were afraid of them, Alice thought.

  “How did you get in?” Miss Fitzgerald said. “I didn't let you in.”

  “We came in through the terrace,” Alice said. And then she felt angry. It was irrelevant how they'd come in! Were they being accused of something? They hadfound Kenneth. “It's Kenneth,” she said, and as she spoke she understood, as if an electrical cable had connected them suddenly, that Miss Fitzgerald loved her brother and that the sight of him motionless and silent on the floor would terrify her. An intimacy would be exchanged now between Alice and Miss Fitzgerald, bearers and receivers of bad news alike, against which Alice protested. Suddenly she did not want to be there, seeing what she was seeing. The powerful sense of indignation she had felt a moment before deflated inside her, like a balloon releasing trapped air. “I think he fell down,” she said in a small voice.