The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  He was flushed, and the hair on his forehead was damp. “Alice,” he said, as if he hadn't heard her. “My brain is going around and around.” He looked troubled.

  “What do you mean?” She sat up on the bed.

  He shook his head, ran his hand back and forth over his hair. “It feels like I'm thinking too hard,” he said. “Feels like I'm going to pop a cork. Blow a gasket.”

  “Maybe you shouldn't go upside-down on the fireman's pole,” Alice said, but Theo shook his head. “That's not it,” he said. “Being upside down is good for me.”

  A moment later, Elizabeth called them to come downstairs for supper before she left. Theo hadn't said much during the meal, but his spirits had seemed to revive as he put away a plate of meat loaf and three glasses of milk. “I've been thinking about Kenneth,” he told her, as if the nature of the thoughts that had been circling him all afternoon, running at his heels like wolves, had finally become clear to him,

  “Thinking what?” she had asked.

  He had shaken his head. “Not sure. Just thinking,” he said, but he looked less troubled somehow, less fatigued, as if the thoughts—whatever they were—gave him pleasure rather than hectoring him for solutions.

  Archie got up now to fetch a bottle of red wine from the sideboard, uncorked it, and poured himself a glass, sitting back down at the table with a sigh and peering over his glasses at the plate Alice put before him, two thick slices of meat loaf, a heap of peppery succotash, mashed potatoes. In the fridge, Alice found ajar of the corn relish Archie liked and brought it to the table.

  Archie ate while Alice and Theo built their sundaes and debated the merits of adding the leftover gumdrops. Finally they brought their bowls to the table. Theo scooted into the chair next to Archie and looked interestedly at the letters by his plate.

  “They're moving your grandmother into another wing at the hospital, Theo,” Archie said. He stood up to pour a second glass of wine and returned to his chair. “I spoke with your grandfather today.”

  “Does that mean she's getting better?” Alice said.

  Archie hesitated. Finally, he said, “It can take a long time to recover from a stroke.”

  Theo licked his spoon. “Having a stroke is like getting hit by lightning,” he said to Alice. “It fries your system,”

  Alice saw Archie stop, his wineglass halfway to his mouth, and regard Theo. “That's a very vivid way of putting it,” he said after a long moment.

  Helen's state had improved little since the night nearly three weeks before when she had fallen to the floor in her own kitchen, Theo standing helplessly in the room while O'Brien cradled Helen in his arms and shouted into the telephone. She could not speak, or chew her food, or stand up. She had a little use of her right hand, though she was, in fact, left-handed, like Alice herself, and she could write a few shaky phrases. The thought of Helen so incapacitated made Alice feel sick to her stomach. O'Brien would not let any of the MacCauleys see her, though one evening, Alice knew, Archie had simply forced his way into her room over O'Brien's protests that Helen would not want to be seen in such a state, to bring flowers to her bedside and kiss her cheek and hold her hand. O'Brien was hardly ever home since Helen's stroke, but Archie had dispatched Eli to keep the grass mowed, and Elizabeth had gone over one morning to clean out the refrigerator and do some laundry, and she had set Alice and Theo to vacuuming and dusting. Theo had run the vacuum cleaner at top speed through the house, racing behind it as though it were a runaway stallion, and when it was his turn with the feather duster, he had spent most of the time sneaking up on Alice and tickling her with it. Alice, who did not in general much like housework, had spent much of the morning laughing. Like most things, even cleaning was more fun with Theo around.

  Theo did not seem dismayed by or even interested in his grandmother's condition, and he expressed no desire to see O'Brien, which Alice felt, sadly, she understood. She did not completely understand, however, Theo's silence about his parents and his life with them in New York, unless it were just as Wally had said, that Theo's mother was depressed and his parents’ marriage was falling apart and it was all too horrible for Theo to think about. Theo's mother had telephoned one evening, and when Archie had called Theo to the phone, Theo had not resisted being summoned. Yet, nor had he seemed especially happy. He and Alice had been playing Monopoly on the floor in the dining room after dinner, and when Archie came to door and said, “Theo? It's your mother on the phone for you,” Alice had seen Theo look up, surprised. For a moment his face had opened with relief, but then just as quickly it had shut back down again, blank as a stone.

  Curiosity overwhelming her, Alice had followed Theo and lurked at the end of the hall, listening.

  Between silences, Theo had answered in a sluggish stream of monosyllables: “Yes. No. Yes. Uh-huh.”

  Alice had watched him scratch violently at his scalp. Then he had just stared at the floor, kicking gently at the leg of the telephone bench as he listened to his mother telling him something. “Okay,” he said at last. “Uh-huh. Okay. ‘Bye.”

  When he hung up, he put down the phone as if finally releasing something unpleasant from his grasp.

  Together, he and Alice walked back to their game in the dining room.

  “Do you want Boardwalk?” Alice said, reaching for something that would make him happy. He had won Park Place early on in the game and been outraged when Alice landed on Boardwalk a few turns later and promptly bought it. “I'll trade you Boardwalk for your railroads,” she said.

  He glanced at her suspiciously.

  “The railroads and two hundred dollars,” she said, not wanting her offer to sound too much like charity. “Okay,” he said, shrugging. But somehow, she sensed, his heart wasn't really in it anymore.

  It seemed to Alice that Theo had fallen into their lives as if out of the ether, with no cords binding him to anyplace else and no end in sight to his stay with them. His suitcase had remained in the guest room, but he slept every night in the spare twin bed in Alice's room, and Alice was aware, every time she entered her room, of the new smell of him there, lingering in the sheets. He had so completely filled Alice's attention that she had hardly noticed Tad and Harry's departure for Frost.

  One night, Alice, who had come downstairs to say good night to Archie in his study, had asked her father how long Theo would stay with them.

  “A little while longer,” Archie said.

  Alice had crossed the room and stroked the tiger skin with her bare foot. “Is it because his mother is sad?” she asked.

  Archie had looked up at her over the tops of his glasses. “Has Theo spoken to you about his parents?”

  The way he phrased it made it sound that, by confiding to Alice, Theo would have violated his parents’ privacy, shown himself to be disloyal, or at least unreliable, in some way.

  “No,” Alice said. “Wally told me. But even if his mom is sad, don't his parents want him? Why are they leaving him here so long?”

  Archie, who had been staring at his computer, turned back to the lighted screen as if the answer to Alice's question might appear there, like the enigmatic replies that floated up into Alice's Magic 8-Ball.

  Alice was aware of being alone, without Theo beside her. She'd left him upstairs, hanging upside down off the bed and reading; he seemed to prefer this position for reading, saying it was easier somehow. Alice imagined the inside of Theo's head like a loose collection of nuts and bolts and wheels and cogs— like the contents of his toolbox, in fact—that somehow fell magically into place when he was upside down.

  “Don't they miss him?” she repeated now.

  “I'm sure they do,” Archie said.

  “Well, then why—”

  “Sometimes, Alice—” Archie began, interrupting her. But then he stopped.

  Alice felt the hair rise on her arms. Archie's silence, she understood, was the silence of someone who is too tired to answer an important question, someone whose experience in the world has finally overwhelmed his i
ntentions to be a good parent, a parent who will answer his child's questions. It was also the silence of someone who believes that no answer he can provide will be understood. Alice was suddenly enraged.

  “I'm not a baby,” she shouted. She stamped her foot. “I'm not a baby, Archie. Tell me! What is wrong? Why doesn't anyone come to get him? Why don't they call here more often and talk to him? Doesn't anyone love him?”

  Archie swung away from his computer screen toward her. “Alice,” he began, and Alice saw with horror that she had scored some sort of winning point, achieved a terrible advantage. He did not know what to say. He had no answer for her.

  She looked away from him, heat suffusing her neck and cheeks, prickling under her arms. The space inside her chest seemed to have become very small and tight, like a keyhole. On the floor, the head of the tiger faced her, his glass eyes fixed in an eerie stare. What a horrible thing to do, she thought suddenly, to have killed this beautiful, wild, mysterious creature and turned him into a rug to step on with your smelly feet. She closed her eyes for a moment. How could nobody love Theo, she thought, and the anguish of this possibility felt like a fist struck hard into her sternum, taking away her breath. Somebody, she thought, had to love him. She remembered James's exasperation with Theo the morning the mobiles had arrived from Kenneth, how he had snapped at Theo, when Theo was only trying to help. She remembered the twins teasing him about his toolbox. Even Eli had kicked him out of the garage, when all he wanted to do was watch them working on the car. Theo had only brought two T-shirts with him, she thought, and one pair of shorts, and only two pairs of underwear, but he'd packed, inexplicably, fifteen pairs of old man's black socks and a grown-up's belt long enough for a fat man. Alice knew what it was to be taken care of, and she knew that no one—at least right now and maybe not ever—was taking care of this boy.

  She opened her eyes again. Archie was leaning back in his chair, watching her.

  “I—” she began, and then she caught herself in horror. I hate you, she had been about to say. But she did not hate her father, she thought, and in her grief and remorse she pitched herself into his lap, sobbing. “I can't stand it,” she wept, even while in her head she thought, with a curious cold detachment: what can't I stand?

  Kenneth had taught them two words the other day, Stygian and halcyon, which were almost like opposites of each other, she thought, one of them like the night and the other like the sun. What she felt now was the slow-moving, inexorable tug of something stygian, something as dark and perilous as the River Styx, the boatman Charon's grim face flickering in the mist. Recently the paper grocery bags at the store had been imprinted with the photographs and descriptions of missing children. Alice, reading the text on the bags as Elizabeth's groceries were packed up, had noticed that some of the children appeared to have been stolen by one of their own parents. Smiling little Anita from Sykesville, Maryland, missing her front teeth and wearing a dress with a wide lace collar, had disappeared in the company of her father, who was said to be armed and dangerous. This was part of that stygian darkness, too. As was the tidal wave in Thailand, and the tornado that came down in The Wizard of Oz and swept Dorothy up to Oz … and yet Alice had been disappointed at the end of that movie. Kansas was so dull, so plain, compared to the Technicolor landscape of Oz. Who would want to be there? And no one in Kansas believed anything Dorothy said.

  Suddenly her head had begun to hurt.

  She felt Archie's hands stroking her hair. Alice raised her face.

  Archie gazed down at her. And then quietly, he said, “Come away, come away, death, And in sad cypress let me be laid; Fly away, fly away, breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid.” He smiled sadly. “You've no idea, Alice,” he said, “how much I would—” He stopped. “I am sure Theo's parents love him,” he finished. “It's just a difficult time for them, in their marriage, and his mother is going through a rough patch, emotionally, and …” He trailed off.

  Alice got off his lap and stood up with cold dignity. She wiped her hand across her face. She was not comforted, but the sense that she did not know what she was saying, and that in the extremity of her feelings might say something unspeakable, had gone away; the danger had passed. What would happen to Theo? she thought.

  “He's so smart,” she said to Archie, as if pleading Theo's case. “He knows about so many things.”

  Archie nodded, as if he agreed. Then he leaned forward and took her hands for a moment, holding them in his own. “Try not to worry about things so much, Alice,” he said. “I hate to see you worrying. You're just a child.” Her gave her hands a last little shake and then let go.

  Alice nodded, but it was only politeness, for she could not manage real relief in the face of this final offense. She was just beginning to discover, she thought, how very much there was to worry about.

  That night, Alice and Theo had made a tent city in her bedroom by spreading sheets over the gap between the beds, and they slept side by side on pillows on the floor in the cool, dark cavern beneath the sheet. Theo's presence beside her, the smell of his bare skin and the warm exhalation of his breath, had filled Alice with sympathy and with contentment. It came to her that he smelled like the inside of the silky cloth pocket of her winter coat. She liked smelling coat pockets. Archie's were full of the scents of ink and Pep-O-Mint Life Savers, Wally's of tobacco, a smell she did not dislike, though she disapproved of the habit. The pockets of Eli's hunting jacket with the corduroy collar smelled of dirt and something chemical, like gasoline. That Theo's smell reminded her of something of her own gave her a secret thrill, as if he and she were aligned in an important way. Waking once during the night to find her head butted into his ribs and his leg flung over her own, she had taken in the smell of him. Sleepily, in a drowse of contentment and pleasure at his proximity, the soft darkness of the room, the sheet floating above them like the band of the Milky Way, she had turned her face to his warm skin, breathing him in and burrowing down beside him into the pillows. Sometimes, when they sat on the bank of the river by their fort and stared upstream, he tossed his arm around her shoulders as he talked, the way a pirate might embrace a mate, pointing out the ships on the horizon, the gold and silver weighted in their holds, the good fortune that would soon be theirs.

  He never spoke about his parents. Alice was curious about them and suspicious about what she saw as their neglect of their boy, and she was certainly interested in Theo's life in New York City. But he offered her very few details, and she did not know how to ask him about his mother and her mysterious, sad condition, or his black father, or his parents’ falling-apart marriage, the thing that had caused them to abandon Theo. Most of what Theo reported to know seemed to have come from television. When she asked him what his father did, he said once that he was a musician and another time that he was an agent, whatever that was, and another time that he owned a nightclub with a partner. She asked him what his mother did and he shrugged. “I don't know,” he said, as if the question didn't interest him,

  Archie had asked them to draw pictures that he would take to the hospital for Helen's room. Theo had not objected to this, and one evening they had worked across from each other at the planter's desk in the alcove of the living room, colored pencils in a coffee can and a box of watercolor paints and a glass of cloudy water between them. Theo executed a painting so extravagantly detailed and complete that Alice felt her careful watercolor of a still life of flowers in a vase was embarrassing. He had painted their fort from a vantage upriver on the opposite bank, though he had never stood there, of course, the river being too wide and deep at that point to cross.

  “How did you know it would look like that?” Alice said, leaning over the desk on her elbows to marvel at the picture.

  Theo, bent over so close to the paper, his nose almost touched it, just shrugged. “I don't know,” he said. “I just did.”

  • • •

  They had spent every morning over the past two weeks playing down by the river, and every afternoon at the
Fitzgeralds’, where Alice read aloud to Kenneth and Theo, Kenneth lying on the settee, and Theo stretched out in his accustomed position on the floor. They never went to the front door anymore, but always came up the steps to the terrace and the French doors opening onto Kenneth's room. One day they had crossed the flagstones but stopped at the open doors, horrified, at the sight of Kenneth, sitting bent over on the settee and retching into a bowl held on his lap by his sister, who had her arm around his shoulders. Miss Fitzgerald had straightened up and turned around as if she had sensed them there, and Alice and Theo had backed away hurriedly. Later that evening they had taken bicycles and gone back to the house, leaving the bicycles by the fence under a shower of blue hydrangea, and crept through the shadows across the lawn to the terrace. The room had been dark, but the doors were open, a fan inside the room blowing the curtain through the open doorway. Get well soon, Kenneth! they had printed in fancy letters on a piece of Archie's shirt cardboard, each of them doing alternating letters, and they had pushed this over the doorsill and then dashed back to the street.

  Kenneth's left eye had been taped to his brow again, and his other eyelid drooped and sometimes fell closed. Alice could not get used to the sight of his face, the water seeping from his open eye and slipping down his cheek like tears. Where the eye had once seemed malevolent to her, though, it now appeared to be staring out at the world with an almost panicked entreaty, as if it were casting around helplessly for somewhere to alight and rest. Sometimes, while she was reading, she looked up to find it fixed on her in speechless longing. At these moments she felt the familiar flush creep up her neck and cheeks, but it was her own helplessness she was aware of as much as Kenneth's, her and Theo's failure to arrest the speed of Kenneth's decline, to disarm the thing that was weakening him, the thing that had driven him back to Grange, to this house, to his boyhood memories, to his sister and the few rooms he now occupied.

  Every day, though, the big room filled with objects unpacked from his boxes, more mobiles, now hung so thickly that the ceiling of the long room seemed to Alice to be constantly in motion with birds and insects, the leaping figures of men and women and deer and fish and lizards, curled streamers of colored cloud, suns and moons and stars. Thick rugs of richly colored and complicated patterns were unrolled over the wood floors, and books and record albums filled the shelves. One day a kaleidoscope appeared on the round table, a marvelous tube of polished black ebony, its lens filled with bits of colored glass that tumbled into a fan of intricate designs. On another day there was a strange brass instrument with a long black tube and a carved bowl like a pipe's. Kenneth had procured this is Morocco, he told them. It was a hookah, for smoking opium, and he invited them to sniff the sour-smelling little bowl. From a box one afternoon he unpacked a menagerie of little animal figures carved from green soapstone. From another box came a pair of china peacocks, with painted tails and jewel-encrusted crowns on their heads.