The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  An image of Miss Fitzgerald emerged in Alice's mind like a figure coming clear out of the gloom, a woman at the end of a dark hallway, all alone and intent as a ghost, with all the power of a ghost to accost and accuse.

  The week before, when Archie had come upstairs one evening to say good night to Alice, he had sat down at the end of her bed and quietly told her that Miss Fitzgerald was planning to leave Grange. There was Kenneth's estate to be settled; it was complicated, all his papers and the art, of course, Archie had said. Apparently Kenneth had bequeathed his books and several valuable drawings to the library in Grange. As soon as all that had been taken care of, Miss Fitzgerald was going away.

  “What about the house?” Alice had looked at Archie in the darkness, thinking of the mess, the boxes and stacks and the bad smell and the darkness, the little paths threading through the confusion like the tracks of small animals in the woods. “Where's she going?”

  “Someone's bought the house,” Archie said. “A friend of Kenneth's from New York.”

  Who would ever buy that house, Alice thought, once they'd seen it inside? “Did she tell you this?” Alice wished she could see her father's face clearly.

  Archie had hesitated. “I have it from a reliable source,” he said finally. “It was … apparently arranged. Kenneth arranged it. She's going to Florida, a cousin there.”

  Archie had stood up then and looked down at her. Then he put out his hand and stroked her hair back from her forehead. “It's all right, Alice,” he said, surprising her, as if he understood, after all, though they had never spoken of it, that for these many months Alice had been terrified she would run into Miss Fitzgerald, that the news that she was leaving now would be a relief to her.

  “Don't think about it anymore now,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you.”

  At his touch, Alice had closed her eyes. I forgive you, her heart had cried inside her, and though she had not said the words aloud, she had felt for the first time since Kenneth's death the possibility that one day she could pardon her father—for his lack of faith in her, for his failure to comfort her, for his denying Theo to her. It would happen with time, perhaps, just as their aloofness from each other had begun to ease slightly over the passing months. The sensation of joyful release that had swept over her for a moment, the reckless sense that she could go back to how things had been before, had been wonderful, as if her body had become buoyant, filled with air.

  Yet now, crouched by the windowsill, listening to the menacing quiet downstairs, she could not banish the figure of Miss Fitzgerald from her imagination. There she was, her lank hair running with rain, her face pressed to the glass, looking for Alice.

  Alice made a wild run for the doorway, out onto the upstairs landing, and clattered downstairs. She would not be trapped up there in a bedroom where she had no chance of escape. Theo would not let himself be cornered like that. Theo would run for it. Downstairs in the front hall she hesitated for a moment, shrinking back—every doorway seemed to contain an ominous threat—and then she fled through the living room and into the old brick passage that led to Archie's study, slamming the door closed behind her.

  There was a little window in the passage with a deep sill and interior shutters, a window Alice had always been drawn to for its cunning proportions, like a window in Mrs. Tiggy Winkle's house. She had been gripped by that story when she was younger, as much for its mysteriousness as its superficial charm, the hedgehog turned washerwoman who carried on a normal-sounding domestic conversation with the little girl of the tale, and then, just as the little girl turned back from their walk together to bid her a polite goodbye, turned into a hedgehog again, running brown and prickly into the gorse. Had little Lucy only imagined it all or was the transformation of hedgehog to washerwoman something that just happened occasionally? Why had Lucy been allowed to see this essentially private transformation? Had she, in fact, somehow caused it? The line between illogic and reality, or between magic and insanity, had been strangely blurred in that story, just as the farm animals’ laundry drying in Mrs. Tiggy Winkle's kitchen—the ducks’ long yellow stockings, the lambs’ wooly coats—had been familiar and reassuring, reasonable explanations in and of themselves for Mrs. Tiggy Winkle's existence.

  Alice stopped at the window, breathing hard, and put her hands on the sill. Rain slid down the windowpane, but no ravaged face met hers in the glass.

  Lorenzo wandered lazily into the hallway from Archie's study and sat down beside Alice's feet, idly lifting a leg to scratch once behind his ear. He gave a mighty yawn.

  Alice touched her fingertip to the cold glass of the window and watched the raindrops jerking down the pane. Outside, the leaves on the trees hung down darkly, clumped like braces of dead birds.

  Here was only the ordinary rain, she thought, her ordinary finger. Here was the ordinariness of her two shoes, the frayed cuff of her sweater against her wrist, the dust thick on the windowsill. Here was the dead fly on its back, curled up like a tiny, weightless sarcophagus. Here were two spiral peppermints, one cracked into pieces inside its wrapper like an ancient mosaic. Here was a dirty mug, on its side a faded and chipped painting of the state of Texas, and in its depths a dry, cracked film of something sad and brown, old tea or coffee, like the surface of the desert.

  Alice thought of Theo and wondered if it was raining in New York, if he was looking out the window just as she was. In New York, though, one did not have to stand around and stare out at the rain, she thought. There were too many interesting things to do and see. Theo would not be bored. He was never bored. And he was not thinking of her. Perhaps he had stopped thinking of her long ago, wanting to put the whole summer with its sad ending out of his head. He had never called her.

  She leaned her forehead against the window's cold glass and closed her eyes. At her side, Lorenzo lay down, sighing.

  Alice opened her eyes and looked down at the windowsill; it was piled with stray belongings that had found their way there over time. There was a stack of books, three with long German titles; a tennis ball the color of a spoiled lime; a black felt-tipped pen missing its cap, frayed like an exploded, spent firecracker. A tarnished silver dish holding a collection of intricately shaped foreign coins balanced on top of the stack of books. Several torn envelopes of what looked like junk mail, the paper yellowed, stuck out from between them.

  Below all these was a mysterious black case with a zippered top. Alice felt interest flicker inside her, a flame struggling in the damp, but it did not blow into something strong enough to move her.

  The rain moved down the windowpane. Behind Alice in the silence of the afternoon lay the bright lights of the empty living room, like a stage that had been cleared after a performance. Ahead of her was the open door to Archie's darkened study.

  Somewhere in what now felt like her distant past there had been a beautiful May morning when she had turned ten years old, and for the first time happiness and sadness, beauty and cruelty had begun to join together inside her, entwining themselves inextricably like the tendrils of a vine up the trunk of a tree. There had been a dead moth on the windowsill, she remembered, a lovely moth in a powdered wig. She had worn on her arm the silver bracelet her father had given her. The light of the day had balanced for a few minutes just at the horizon's edge.

  When Archie came home just after six o'clock, Alice was in the living room, the contents of the mysterious black case from the windowsill spread over the floor beside her, the camera and its different lenses lined up on the rug. She was reading the instruction book. She had spent the afternoon looking through the camera, figuring out how to attach the lenses, adjusting the focus. She had looked at the rain. She had looked through the crack under the door to the bathroom. She had looked at the spines of books and their chipped golden letters. She had looked at the blossoms of the pink geranium fallen to the radiator in the kitchen, an ant on the cutting board like a pilgrim crossing the Sahara, the cracked surface of the old globe in Archie's study, with its ornate, itali
cized labels.

  She heard the back door open and close and then Archie's voice.

  “In here,” she called back.

  Archie came into the living room and sat down on the couch behind her, unwinding a scarf from around his neck. “Where'd you find that?” he said. He sounded surprised.

  Alice looked around at him. “It was on the windowsill in the hall by your study,” she said. “Underneath some junk.”

  Archie leaned over and picked up one of the lenses, hefting it thoughtfully in his hand.

  “Why?” Alice said. He might try to take it away from her. “No one wanted it,” she said quickly.

  For a moment, Archie was quiet. Then he said, “It was your mother's, Alice. She loved to take pictures. I should have remembered about it long ago.”

  Alice felt her cheeks redden and heat bloom over her neck. Her mother's camera. This had been her mother's. A deep comfort, tugging at her ankles like a tide as if to bring her down into its arms, sang in her ears.

  On the June evening three months later when the lights went out in the Grange library, the power failed first with a precipitous diving descent in the register of sound. The lights shuddered once and then went out. A resonant hush spread around Alice in the darkness of the reading room.

  On Wednesdays, in the summer months, the building was open until nine p.m., and Archie allowed Alice to stay until it closed on those nights and walk home by herself. Few people came in for the evening hours. Except for the librarian, Alice was usually the only person there after seven p.m. In the short aisle between the stacks at the back of the room, Alice reached out and took hold of the bar of the rolling book cart that had been next to her when the lights went out. She couldn't even see her own hands; she tested them against the cart's handle. The darkness had a way of taking away the sensation of things, as well as the sight of them. Her feet felt as if they had fallen away beneath her. She waited. Like a swimmer going deep underwater beyond the light of the sun, she felt the palpable weight of nothingness like water around her. Then suddenly, in the silence, she could hear again the rain outside. The room, though still invisible, settled back around her in the darkness.

  Alice stood there quietly, alert. She was not frightened, though she could feel the possibility of fear waiting for her. It was strange how electricity masked the actual sound of things, she thought, this deep silence that must be there all the time, lying beneath the hum of the lights. How quiet it was, an immense, blanketing quiet like a snowfall. She closed her eyes for a moment, but that was too much. She opened them again, straining to see. Relaxing her grip on the book cart for a moment, she gave it a little shove, keeping her fingertips on the bar. She knew where she was, after all, even if she couldn't see anything. She began to shuffle forward, but though she would have said that she could have felt her way blindfolded across the familiar room, it was as if the proportions of the space had been dramatically and unpleasantly altered. She stopped. Dark continents poured out beneath her, tilting away toward an invisible horizon, a precipice of further blackness. She was aware less of what she might run into than the feeling that she might run into nothing at all. The lights had gone out, and with them the whole world had emptied, all of it sliding away fast.

  Then she remembered the watch that James had given her for her eleventh birthday a few weeks before. Her hand emerged from somewhere to find her wrist, to feel for the face of the watch. In its green glow she saw that it was just before nine o'clock. She pressed it again. The watch, her wrist, her arm, rose up out of the darkness for a moment and then, when her fingers released the knob, vanished.

  She lifted one hand from the cart's handle and touched the camera hanging at her neck. Since discovering it on the win-dowsill outside Archie's study a few months before, she had kept it with her almost all the time, taking so many pictures at first that Archie finally balked at the cost of developing the film and told her she would have to learn to use more discretion. At Alice's insistence, he had finally opened up some boxes in the attic and retrieved her mother's old albums, the photographs she had taken, as a young girl, of the streets and buildings in Oxford, the flowers in her father's garden, the horses she had ridden. The weight of the camera reassured Alice now, and blindly she felt for the lens cap, took it off, and aimed the camera into the darkness.

  The click of the shutter was like a gunshot going off in the room. Her pulse leaped forward in the echoing silence that followed. Why hadn't the librarian, Mrs. Emerson, come to find her and see if she was all right? Maybe she was in a back room or had gone to use the Xerox machine? Maybe she, too, like Alice, was paralyzed somewhere in the darkness of the library? Alice called out, but there was no answer.

  She was aware of Kenneth's mobiles moving gently and invisibly high above her head in the reading room; a memory of him in his torn straw hat on the terrace, sketching the line of trees at the edge of the lawn, came to her. Somewhere in that tree line had been the dark opening where the rope walk had begun.

  Alice took hold of the cart's handle again—there it was, surprising her with its solid familiarity—and pushed the cart a few steps forward. It tried to sway away from her on its wobbly wheels, and she tightened her grip on the handles. She was not afraid of the dark, she thought. She had never been afraid of the dark.

  It had been Theo who had been afraid.

  Archie had carried Theo into her bedroom that first night, and now it was as if she could feel Theo's fingers gripping the back of her shirt the way he did when he was nervous or unsure, feel his breath on the back of her neck.

  When she heard Mrs. Emerson call her name, she started with relief.

  “Here I am,” she called back, and she saw the little beam of Mrs. Emerson's flashlight come bouncing toward her across the room.

  “Alice? Are you all right? Of course I couldn't find the flashlight,” Mrs. Emerson said in exasperation, reaching Alice and directing the light into her face. Alice cringed. Mrs. Emerson was only the Wednesday-night librarian, working part-time just to give her something to do, she had told Alice, who felt a little sorry for her—often Mrs. Emerson seemed to need someone to talk to; she liked to show Alice her needlepoint efforts, complain of the difficulty of the patterns. Mrs. Emerson had drawn-in, reddish eyebrows that reminded Alice of a clown's.

  “I was in the lobby coming back from the ladies’,” Mrs. Emerson said in an accusing tone, as if the power failure had been specifically arranged to inconvenience her in the bathroom. “And then the lights went out!”

  She turned around and began walking back across the room. Alice abandoned the cart and followed the bouncing point of light that was Mrs. Emerson.

  “I'll have to try and find the keys,” Mrs. Emerson was saying, and then suddenly there was a roar, and the lights came back on. They dimmed once, filling the room with a damp brown light, and then they flared again.

  Alice blinked.

  Mrs. Emerson bustled across the room to the librarian's desk. “I'm going to put this flashlight right here in this top drawer,” she said. “You'll remind me what I've done with it, Alice, in case the lights ever go out again while we're here.”

  She stepped behind the desk and then stopped. A worn cardboard box had been set crookedly on the surface of the desk, balancing halfway atop the keyboard of the computer. Mrs. Emerson leaned over the box and lifted the flap. “Well, who brought this in?” she said. She lifted out a couple of books from inside the box, glanced at them, and then set them back inside. “Well, it can wait,” she said impatiently. “I'm going to go find those keys. I think they're in the Xerox room, and then we can lock up and go home.” She left the room, clicking away on busy heels.

  Alice moved toward the desk and the carton of books. Her nose had detected something, something familiar, but for a moment she could not place it. Then, with distaste, she realized what it was.

  It was the Fitzgeralds’ house.

  James would have said she was lying, but she knew she was right. She could smell it.
/>   She put her hands on the box and opened the flaps. Inside was a stack of books, perhaps twenty volumes jumbled together. Alice began lifting them out of the box and stacking them on the desk, but she knew even before she reached the bottom of the carton and her fingers found the familiar shape of Lewis and Clark's journals, the furred binding of its cover, that it would be in there. And inside the book, as she had known it would be, was Kenneth's letter.

  The envelope, with her name printed on it in Kenneth's big handwriting, was not sealed, but it was impossible to tell if it had been sealed once and then opened carefully without tearing the paper—opened carefully, read, considered, and then in a moment of incalculable suffering and cruelty put away again— or whether it had been overlooked entirely, never been opened, never been seen at all. She would never know, Alice realized, and for a moment she was angry at being denied this final knowledge. It was quite possible, she realized, that she would never see Miss Fitzgerald again now, that their last meeting had already taken place. Heat rose into her cheeks. She had aimed her camera into the darkness when the lights had been out, sensing something in the room. Had Miss Fitzgerald been standing there when Alice took the picture?

  Alice opened the envelope and took out the letter.

  Dear Alice, Kenneth had written. I know you will forgive me, for the hand that made you fair hath made you good, as well. That's a weak paraphrase of Shakespeare, I think, but you know that already, being your father's daughter. Thank you for everything you and Theo have done for me in these my last weeks and, most especially, for my beautiful rope walk, which will take me away from the certain awful end I fear so much and lead me instead to the places I remember from my boyhood, the woods, the river, the clouds in the sky, the underwater filled with bubbles. If I'd ever had children, you are the ones I would have chosen—hardworking, brilliant, generous. If lam brave enough for the one necessary moment ahead, I want you to know that I hope by it to spare everyone, including myself, a lot of trouble. Word of the day: redivivus. Your great friend and admirer, Kenneth Fitzgerald.