The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  In the hall outside Kenneth's room, she called out again. “Kenneth? Miss Fitzgerald?”

  Theo had followed her and now his hands gripped the back of her shirt. Lorenzo, whimpering, shivered against her legs. There had to be a telephone somewhere, she thought. She called out again into the hallway, louder this time, but no one came.

  “There's no one home,” she said. “C'mon. We need to find the phone and get out of here.”

  Theo was the one who dragged Archie into the house and made him see what they had found. When Archie's car pulled up in front of the Fitzgeralds’, Alice and Theo were standing just inside the front door, watching for him, but Theo ran down to the car through the rain and yanked open the front passenger door. “You've got to see this, Archie,” he said, leaning inside. “You've got to come inside. You've got to do something.”

  Alice thought that because she had seen it before, she wasn't as horrified as Theo by what they'd seen. The house looked better, in some ways, than it had when she'd come inside the first day, because the boys had been able to carry out so much stuff, at least from the first floor. Still, what was left behind was pretty awful. Against the old wallpaper, like the outlines of furniture that hadn't been moved in decades, stood the dingy silhouettes of the heaps of trash that had leaned up against the walls. Alice could see how already Miss Fitzgerald had started to pile things back up again.

  Theo had been speechless when they'd looked into the kitchen, which was walled in by boxes and stacks of newspapers and cans and egg cartons and God only knew what else. No wonder Sidon-nie had left, Alice had thought. It didn't even look safe.

  It had taken them forever to locate a telephone. Finally, Theo still clutching the back of her wet shirt, Alice had steeled herself to head upstairs, despite the awful smell, and she had found an old rotary phone on a nightstand in what was obviously Miss Fitzgerald's bedroom. The bed itself was neatly made, an incongruity that made Alice's throat tighten inexplicably with emotion. Mostly what seemed to be stored in this room were clothes, heaps and heaps of clothes.

  Archie, running with Theo from the car to the Fitzgeralds’ front door and ducking against the ferocity of the rain, had stopped beside Alice just inside the hall. Once, she had wanted Archie to come inside and see it, but now she found that she was glad she wouldn't have to conduct this awful tour. Theo's horrified enthusiasm was enough for both of them. At first, though he had allowed Theo to drag him into the house, Archie had protested against proceeding any farther; it was dark in the front hall, and Alice forgave him for what she recognized, even as he hung back fishing for a handkerchief in his back pocket with which to wipe off his glasses, as cowardice. He didn't want to see it, she thought. In a way, she couldn't blame him for that.

  But Theo would not take no for an answer, and he hauled Archie by the arm through the rooms.

  Alice sat down at the bottom of the stairs, her chin in her hands, and listened to Theo exhorting Archie to see first one awful room, and then another. Through the open front door, while Lorenzo crowded against her knees, she watched the rain falling into the street. Where had the Fitzgeralds gone? Kenneth hardly ever went anywhere. She hoped they wouldn't come back now; her scalp prickled with fear at the thought of it. She wished Archie and Theo would hurry.

  In the front hall again, Theo started up the stairs, buoyed by a strange excitement. “You're not going to believe it up here,” he said, turning sideways to push past boxes on his way to the stair landing, but Archie said, “That's enough, Theo.”

  He stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up at Theo, his hand on the newel post, his face colorless in the gray light of the hall. “Come on down now,” he said. “That's enough.”

  He ushered them out the front door, pulling it closed carefully behind him. Alice and Theo ran for the car, Lorenzo leaping into the backseat, but Archie stayed for a minute on the front step as if hesitating. Alice watched him from the car, a short, dark figure bent inside his old raincoat. Somehow that first day when she was still riding the wave of her horror at the condition of the Fitzgeralds’ house and had imagined bringing Archie inside, she had thought that having Archie see it would be like transferring something heavy from her own arms to his, like relieving herself of a burden. And yet now that it had happened, she felt not better but worse, as if by dragging Archie into it, she had somehow made the whole thing more awful … more troubling, more bewildering, more real.

  All three of them were quiet on the short drive back home. Even Theo's brittle excitement seemed to have subsided, and in the backseat he leaned away from Alice, staring out the car window. Alice, too, rested her forehead against her cold window and watched the spray thrown up by the tires. Behind them, the Fitzgeralds’ house, and all it contained of sadness and trouble, disappeared behind curtains of rain.

  • • •

  When they got home, Archie put the car in the garage and sent them inside to take hot showers. When Alice came downstairs in dry clothes, he was in the kitchen scrambling eggs in a bowl. He'd made a small fire in the fireplace, and Lorenzo lay in front of it, steaming. A bottle of red wine had been uncorked on the counter, a glass poured. It was still raining, though the intensity of the storm had weakened a bit. Archie had stripped off his wet shirt and pulled on an old sweatshirt from Frost belonging to one of the boys. His white hair was still damp, disarranged on top of his head.

  Alice sat down at the table and hooked her feet over the rungs of her chair. “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “About what?” Archie concentrated on the eggs.

  Alice sat up. “About the house.”

  Archie didn't answer her at first. “Bacon or sausages?” he asked, opening the refrigerator.

  “Theo likes bacon,” Alice said automatically. “Archie? What are you going to do about the Fitzgeralds?”

  “I'm going to think about it,” Archie said at last. He turned away from her to put four pieces of bread into the toaster.

  Alice waited.

  “I'm not sure,” he said then, and, putting down the knife with which he'd sliced the bread, he turned around and looked across the kitchen at her. “It's not a crime, Alice,” he said. He rubbed a hand through his hair and then reached for his wineglass. He leaned back against the stove, the glass in his hand, regarding her.

  “Well, can't you just help them?” Alice said.

  “How could I help them?” Archie said. “By telling them I prowled through their home this afternoon while they were out? I already knew from Kenneth and the boys that things were a mess. Kenneth's not hiding anything.”

  He took a drink from his glass and watched Alice.

  Alice met his gaze for a moment and then looked away. She could hear Theo banging around upstairs in James and Wally's room, where he sometimes went to hang upside down on the ship's rigging.

  “I thought you could fix it,” she said, staring at the floor.

  She heard him set down his wineglass.

  “I know,” he said. “I know you did.”

  She wanted to understand this, she thought, the awkwardness, the impediments, the delicacies; she did understand. But still, despite all that … Archie should be able to do something, she thought. Why did he have to make it so complicated?

  After a minute, she stood up. “I'm going to find Theo,” she said.

  “Alice—” Archie began in a warning tone, but she didn't stop.

  She didn't even look at him as she left the room.

  That evening after dinner, Theo sat down at the desk in the living room and began to draw. He worked feverishly, crumpling up sheets and tossing them to the floor, pushing others aside, chewing on his pencil. Alice pulled up a chair beside him and sat on her knees, resting her cheek on her folded arms on the table, watching his hands move across the paper. Across the room, the windows were closed against the rain, and Alice could see their reflections wavering in the old glass.

  It would be beautiful, Theo said, and she began to see, in the pattern of his drawin
gs, what he meant, the rope bridge Theo imagined would span the river above the falls. It wouldn't have to be very long—the river wasn't more than thirty or forty feet wide at that point, and that was nothing compared with how far they'd come already, he said. He leaned over the paper in the lamplight and drew various designs, some more elaborate than others, geometric shapes that looked to Alice like cat's cradle, the string game she played at school, where the patterns you made on your fingers—the Crane Flying Away, Apache Door, Pillars of the Sun—could be passed from person to person. He showed her what the rigging of the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River looked like, sketching across the page with a fast hand, and the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River; you could make up endless variations on those themes, he said, showing her. It was all just a matter of engineering. The bridges he drew looked like lace; they looked like spiderwebs.

  For their friend Kenneth, Theo said, this would be the crowning moment of his journey on the rope walk. He could stand by himself above the falls and hear that sound, feel the water on his face. Even if he couldn't see very well anymore, even if he was weak and couldn't walk very far, their rope walk would bring him out into the world, the wild world. And not like a baby with a babysitter, but by himself, just like Lewis and Clark. He would be an adventurer again, just like when he was younger and climbing up mountains.

  Could they really do this? Alice wondered. Did Theo really know how to build a rope bridge? How would they get it across the river? Where would they get the rope to make it? How did he know it would hold someone's weight, Kenneth's weight?

  “You'll see,” he said. “You'll see. Kenneth can even help us. He can design anything.”

  Archie came through the room at one point, a book in his hand. He stopped at the desk and leaned over to look, resting a hand on Alice's head. She pulled away from his hand and sat up. Archie glanced at her, but then he looked away, and he didn't try to touch her again.

  “Building bridges?” he asked Theo.

  “Mmm-hrnm.” Theo ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. His upper lip had become red and chapped. Alice had noticed that prolonged hard thinking did this to him; it was as if his mouth had to work to siphon off some of the overflow energy from his brain.

  “Very nice,” Archie said. He leaned closer, pulled his glasses down off the top of his head and settled them over his nose. “Your grandfather ever show you the designs for the bridges he built?”

  Theo stopped drawing and looked up Archie.

  “You could ask him,” Archie said. “You've clearly inherited the talent.” He looked at his watch then. “It's been a long day,” he said, straightening up. “Time for bed.”

  “Ten minutes,” Theo said, turning back to his drawing.

  “Now,” Archie said.

  “Five,” Theo said.

  “Now.” Archie tapped his watch.

  “Okay,” Theo said. He tossed his pencil to the table. “Come on,” he said to Alice.

  “Good night, Theo. Good night, Alice,” Archie said, when they had reached the doorway.

  “Good night,” Theo said. Alice said nothing.

  “Alice?”

  She knew she ought to say something. She knew she would regret it if she didn't. “See you,” she said finally, flinging it over her shoulder in a casual way. It lacked all the intimacy of a true good night, of a kiss or an embrace, and she knew that. But it was the best she could do. Hearing it, she thought she'd struck just the right note of casual indifference.

  TWELVE

  IN AUGUST, the weather turned hot and still, and Theo and Alice began a list of insects. In the attic they uncovered earwigs, a plague of ladybugs, and a wasp's nest that whirred alarmingly when they put their ears to it. Black crickets and grasshoppers and the otherworldly praying mantis hid in the grass, elephant stag beetles and grubs labored under the pine trees, cornucopias of white larvae grew in the damp and chilly brick basement. They discovered shiny green beetles in the vegetable garden, fat gray ticks on the dog, katydids that issued their lisping chirps in the azaleas. Bees crawled out of their nests and gathered in Eli's flower borders near the house. A colony of anthills behind the barn disgorged hundreds of red ants, and flies collided against the window screens. Here and there, swarms of gnats created mysterious places where the air seemed to shiver and vibrate like a kind of weak warp in the fabric of the sky. For days, Alice and Theo went around with a magnifying glass and Archie's field guide, trying to identify what they found. Alice was not squeamish about bugs, but she had never focused on them so intently as she did in Theo's company. The experience made her feel big and ungainly, like a giant swollen balloon figure bobbing along in the sky at the Macy's Day Parade, which Archie had allowed her to watch on television at Thanksgiving. The ethereal damselflies, the lacewings and orb weavers, the ruffled caterpillars with their fiery fringes of red hair, the water striders skimming the river on their filaments of legs, all these delicate creatures made a living, moving tapestry of the earth, wondrous and strange.

  One weekday afternoon, Theo was stung between the eyes by a yellow jacket. His forehead swelled so dramatically that his eyes were almost squeezed shut. Elizabeth drove him in to the doctor's office in Brattleboro.

  “What will they do to me?” Theo worried in the car, holding a towel full of chipped ice to his head.

  “You might have to get a shot.” Alice sat beside Theo in the backseat with a bowl of ice and a dish towel in her lap. The degree to which the swelling altered his appearance was shocking. He looked like a freak. “Eli has to get them for bee stings,” she said, trying to give Theo the comfort of company in his misery. “He can even give them to himself.”

  She was not prepared for the tragic dimensions of Theo's horror at this prospect.

  “Oh, God,” Theo moaned, clutching the armrest. “Oh God, oh God …” He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, which were already squeezed nearly shut from the swelling in his face. “I have to try and clear my mind,” he said. “Otherwise I'm just going to … freak out.”

  “No freaking out!” Elizabeth said, alarmed, from the front seat, glancing at Alice in the rearview mirror. “Tell him no freaking out.”

  At the doctor's office, Theo screamed as if he were being murdered. Alice, sitting in the waiting room and listening to him, staring without seeing at an ancient copy of Highlights, was both mortified on his behalf and sorry for him. Other patients exchanged worried looks. Alice's heart beat as though she'd been running for miles, and when Theo finally came out, led into the waiting room by a nurse and Elizabeth, who gripped his arm as though he were a dangerous prisoner of war, he looked defeated and humiliated, and his face was even more swollen than before.

  For a day he looked very strange, with a bulging Neanderthal brow and beady eyes. Once he got over the trauma, however, he could not keep away from his own image in the mirror. “Man! I look like something out of Star Trekl” he said to Alice, enraptured.

  It was cooler down by the water, and there were fewer bees, so Alice and Theo spent a lot of time splashing in the river and fishing, experimenting with bait: marshmallows, cherry tomatoes from Eli's garden, bits of fungus foraged from the woods. After heavy lobbying from Theo, Archie was persuaded to allow them to build a cook fire on the stones at the little beach, and Alice showed Theo how to construct a careful tent of kindling, adding bigger pieces once they had a good blaze going. On most days they grilled hot dogs there for lunch. Theo said they were the best hot dogs he had ever eaten and that he would never tire of them. Alice thought she had never enjoyed a hot dog more, either.

  The late summer evenings lasted a long time, gold and silver hours with the sun setting at one end of the sky and the moon rising at the other, a phenomenon that thrilled Theo, who liked to pull Alice down onto the grass to lie with him and watch the stars come out. He was transfixed by this alignment of the planets, the fact of their own position as a tiny speck on the celestial curve.

  “You know what? Sci
entists have proven that the human mind cannot really even think about distances like those up there,” he told Alice, head tilted back, eyes traveling across the sky. “We just can't imagine it.”

  For a boy who relished the barrage of factual information available on television, Theo was, Alice discovered, surprisingly superstitious. He believed, for instance, that a simultaneous sunset and moonrise was auspicious. On these occasions, he informed Alice, the ancient Mayans staged bloody ceremonies to propitiate the gods; he'd seen a National Geographic special about this. He also developed a secret handshake that he and Alice should exchange for good luck, a complicated choreography including a midair finger wagging that Theo said was actually a gang symbol Alice should take care never to duplicate on the streets of New York. Once they got it down, Theo wanted to perform this handshake dance every ten minutes. It was fun, jumping up and down, dropping to a squat and kicking like a Cossack, leaping up to slap hands in the air, wriggling around in a contorted dance, shaking fingers and bumping hips, ending with a double palm slap, one up high, one down low.

  “Yo Alice,” Theo would say, and hold up his hand invitingly. That was the signal to go into the routine.

  Theo didn't like to be alone at all if he could help it. He even peed with the door to the bathroom ajar, facing the toilet but craning his head around to yell things to Alice through the open door. “Alice,” he said one day, slinging an arm around her shoulder. “You know what? You are a good listener.”

  Was she? No one had ever told her that before. It was a whole new way to think about herself. Not quiet. Not shy. Just a good listener.

  Listening and looking. A whole life could be spent that way, she sensed, and there would be no end to the discoveries possible. It must be how Lewis and Clark had felt, she thought. The world never ran out of ways to surprise you.

  • • •

  Kenneth's absence from home on the day Alice and Theo had found the Fitzgeralds’ house empty was only the start of what turned into a prolonged stay in the hospital; Kenneth had pneumonia, Archie had told them at dinner the night after their sorry exploration of the Fitzgeralds’ house.