The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  “We've been building you a rope walk!” Theo spoke from behind Alice, his tone unmistakably defensive. He threw out the phrase with disdain and hurt and anger, the way you'd reprimand someone whose curiosity had spoiled a secret you'd been planning for a long time. She whirled around, shocked that Theo had spilled their secret so easily, and with so little provocation; he'd obviously heard something a little unfriendly in Kenneth's tone, too, but that was no excuse. Now they couldn't surprise Kenneth at all. She wrenched her shirt out of Theo's hand. He glared back at her, defiant.

  Over at the table, the young man had opened his big mouth and begun to laugh. “A what?” he said. “What are they building?” He looked at Kenneth as if Kenneth could provide a translation.

  Theo made a sound of fury, turned around, and ran off the terrace.

  Alice stared after him, her face burning. Then she turned back to face Kenneth. She felt completely helpless. Why had Theo spoiled it?

  “Alice—” Kenneth was struggling to his feet.

  The older man stood up quickly and gave Kenneth his arm, his gesture solicitous and kind.

  “I'm sorry,” she said quickly. “I'm sorry we haven't come. He shouldn't have told you, though, because it was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Come in.” Kenneth was crossing the room toward her. “This is Alice,” he was saying to his companion. “My rara avis.”

  “The Lewis and Clark. The ravishing hair.” The man with the ponytail smiled and held out his hand. “Hello, Alice,” he said. “I'm Gifford, an old friend of Kenneth's.”

  Alice shook his hand obediently, but her mind was whirling. Kenneth had told this man about her? He had said her hair was ravishing? She could feel the heat—embarrassment and also, she knew, pleasure—pulsing beneath her skin. No one had ever told her that her hair was ravishing.

  Kenneth's eyelid was taped up again. His eye watered freely down his face, a trail of tears. “I hurt his feelings,” Kenneth said to her. “I'm a monster. It's just that I hadn't seen you in so long, Alice, and you hadn't called …” He stopped. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

  The other man, Gifford, put his hand on Kenneth's shoulder. “Sit down, Ken,” he said. He smiled at Alice. “We're having something ghastly that your friend Kenneth likes to drink— lemonade and beer mixed together—and the best barbeque potato chips in New York, but I can offer you an unpolluted lemonade. And chips. Please.” He smiled at her again, his eyebrows lifted in inquiry, and his smile was charming, full of what Alice took to be an appeal that acknowledged both Kenneth's fragility and her own reputation as his good and caring friend; his smile seemed to say, He needs you. Forgive him. He's suffering.

  The younger man hopped up and, grinning away, found another chair. He looked at her as if now he suddenly knew who she was, but she felt haughty toward him. After all, he had laughed at Theo.

  Gifford poured her a glass of lemonade and passed the potato chips to her; she took one delicately from the bowl and held it in her fingers. Gifford and the young man—Henry de Something; it was a foreign name and Alice didn't hear it properly—were friends of Kenneth's from New York. Gifford was a choreographer, he told her; did she know what that was? She bridled a little at his assumption. Of course, she knew what a choreographer was. And Henry was a photographer, Gifford explained. Alice's eyes flickered skeptically over Henry—she thought she might like to be a photographer one day, but she didn't like the idea of this man and herself sharing similar enthusiasms. Gifford and Kenneth had been neighbors for nearly thirty years, Gifford told Alice. They had apartments in the same building, one right above the other, and years and years ago they'd had a beautiful wrought-iron circular staircase designed by Kenneth— of fish leaping from the waves—installed between their outside terraces, so that they could go between the two apartments without having to bother with the building's creaky old elevator inside or the fire stairs. Gifford and Henry had come to Grange to visit Kenneth, Gifford said, and also so that Henry could see about photographing Kenneth and some of his work for a magazine.

  Gifford leaned back in his chair and gestured to the ceiling, the stirring shapes of the mobiles. “Aren't they wonderful?” he asked her. “Have you seen the great big one at the Guggenheim?”

  All the while Kenneth sat silently, chin lowered to his chest, mouth turned down, brooding. He hadn't shaved in a few days and there was gray stubble on his chin and over his cheeks; Alice thought it made him look a little frightening. The only time she'd ever seen Archie unshaven was once when he was sick with the flu.

  Alice had her back to the French doors, but when she heard the bird call from outside—a completely unpersuasive imitation of the pileated woodpecker's hoarse cry—she knew it was Theo.

  Henry began to laugh again; it was obvious no bird had made that noise. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Is that your friend? That is so funny!”

  But Kenneth looked up from his unhappy reverie, and Alice saw his gaze meet Gifford's. They both smiled, a sad, private smile, Alice thought, shared between them.

  “Let him hear your loon,” Kenneth said, and after a hesitation Gifford closed his eyes and cupped his hands to his mouth and tilted back his head.

  There was a silence in which the fluting call of the loon reverberated, just as if a real loon had called across a lake in the darkness for its mate; the hair rose on Alice's arms, and the look exchanged between the two men was so powerful, so charged, that she felt a lump come in her throat, though she did not understand why.

  And then Theo answered from outdoors with another insane woodpecker's call.

  Kenneth began to laugh. Gifford leaned over and put his arms around him and Kenneth's hands came up and clutched at the back of Gifford's shirt.

  Alice stood up and waited, her throat thick with an emotion she could not name. “I have to go now,” she said finally in a quiet voice. “I hope you feel better, Kenneth.”

  Gifford looked around at her. He gave her another little smile and a nod, as if to say that he understood, that she should run along.

  Alice waited on the terrace for a moment, searching the edge of the woods, and then she saw Theo, crouched just inside the shade by a fallen tree. She ran over the grass toward him.

  Henry came out of the French doors onto the terrace, a camera in his hands. “Hey!” he called. “Children! What's a rope walk? Come on, tell me!”

  Alice reached Theo and ducked down under a branch to join him. Together they watched Henry standing on the terrace in his bare feet and foolish bow tie, one hand shading his eyes.

  “Yoo hoo!” he called. “I'll give you twenty bucks!” He started to laugh again.

  “He's going to die, Theo,” Alice said. She looked away from the stupid, annoying Henry into the dirt at her feet. “That other man is his friend, and he knows it, too. Kenneth's really dying.”

  “I know,” Theo said.

  For a moment Alice wondered how Theo knew this, but she did not doubt, as sometimes she did, that he was telling the truth. Somehow she knew that Theo had understood before her that Kenneth was dying. She stared down between her feet. It was amazing, she thought irrelevantly, distracted, how much stuff was on the ground in just one tiny little square: knobbed and smooth twigs, half-moon and palmate and tear-shaped leaves, even different kinds of dirt, gritty and flaked with mica or granular as sugar, black berries and green berries and tiny red berries like drops of blood, tendrils and vines and curls of silver or brown bark. There were hundreds of things, she saw, peering closer, things she couldn't even identify, just right here. She put up her hands to her eye and made her pretend camera, drawing a border around the tiny square of tapestry between her feet. It was hypnotic, like a hole drawing her down into it, Alice in Wonderland's magic rabbit hole. She dropped her hands and sat up, dizzy and sick at heart.

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  “Me, too,” Theo said.

  • • •

  That night, Archie came home as promised by five p.m. Alice was already a
t the piano when he looked in at the door to the living room and smiled at her, a stack of books under his arm and his jacket held over his shoulder with one finger. She played the piano that evening for almost two hours, her concentration focused and sharp in a way that felt new to her, as if she was trying to block out everything around her, the whole teeming, crowded world, so as to make room for something else, something inside her head. Outside, the sun fell lower in the sky, lingering at the horizon and flooding the sky with pink light against which the trees stood out, black as ink. A few stars began to wink in the blue vault of the evening sky. Alice played Chopin's Prelude in B Minor and Bach's Prelude in C Major again and again.

  At seven-thirty, when she finally stopped, Elizabeth called to her from the kitchen.

  “You hungry? Go call your father, okay? Dinner is ready.”

  Alice wandered through the house in her bare feet, the soft light in the rooms setting everything aglow, the burnished wood of her mother's old secretary desk, the tarnished silver trophy bowls on the mantelpiece, the living room's rose-colored drapes that had worn thin over the years, the setting sun's golden light behind them now. She felt tired after playing the piano for so long, but peaceful, too. The painful scene at Kenneth's from earlier that afternoon, Kenneth and Gifford hugging each other, had dulled a little in her mind. Like exploring a recent wound, she probed gently at the idea of Kenneth and found she could just bear it. Was it possible that she and Theo were wrong, she thought, and Kenneth wasn't dying, after all? Maybe he was just very, very sick and everyone was worried he would die.

  She found Theo and her father in Archie's study, where Archie was tilted back in his chair with a tumbler of Scotch in his hand, watching the television. Theo sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, his chin in his hands.

  When Alice came to the door, Theo turned around. “They bombed the Tube in London,” he said importantly. “I told you they were everywhere.”

  Alice stopped at the door.

  “That's the London subway,” Archie said, not turning away from the television screen. “People used to take shelter in the Tube stations during the Blitz.”

  Alice didn't know what the Blitz was, but it didn't sound like a good thing, or else why would people have needed to take shelter? She glanced out the window; an evening breeze had come up, and the leaves on the trees against the hillside moved a little, like a dark crowd in a stadium.

  “And a hurricane wiped out a whole island,” Theo said. “Hundreds of people died. There's another one getting ready out in the ocean, too. Also, there was a mud slide in California. Some dad went out to get ice cream and his kid's birthday cake, and when he came back his whole house was gone.” His voice sounded oddly excited, and Alice saw Archie sit up in his chair and take notice of Theo as if for the first time.

  “Dinner's ready?” Archie said to Alice. He drained his glass and set it on his desk. “Turn off the television, please, Theo.”

  With an expression of reluctance, Theo crawled forward and hit the button on the television set. “Don't you guys have a remote?” he said. “Remotes are great.” But his face looked drawn and pale. Alice wondered how so many bad things could have happened in the world in just one day. It made her feel a little sick to imagine how many bad things lay ahead, if one day could contain so much tragedy.

  • • •

  “Let's not go in if these guys are still there,” Theo said as they walked to the Fitzgeralds’ the next morning.

  They had decided to go straight to Kenneth and explain everything to him, if his friends had left. Theo had already spoiled the secret about the rope walk, they figured, and it might cheer up Kenneth to hear about it.

  “It could be the thing that, you know …” Theo said.

  “What?” Alice was carrying a bunch of black-eyed Susans that Eli had cut from the garden that morning. A bee swerved in front of her, and she waved the bouquet to shoo it away.

  “You know …” Theo put his hands in his pockets. “Maybe it will make him want to live,” he said. “Maybe it will save him.”

  Alice walked beside him, contemplating the enormity of this possibility. Could that really happen?

  As if he were reading her mind, Theo said, somewhat stiffly, “Miracles do happen, you know.”

  Something about his tone made the remark sound a little too easy, Alice thought, even a little condescending. She frowned. She didn't believe in miracles, not really. Santa Claus had been a miracle, for instance, and he wasn't real.

  Theo seemed to sense her skepticism, “My mom wants to go on a pilgrimage and have a miracle,” he said, defensively. “In Spain. People have been going there for thousands of years. It's called the Road to Ipanema.”

  Alice frowned again. She knew a song called “The Girl from Ipanema” about a girl walking to the beach. Archie liked it. Regardless, this was more than Theo had ever divulged about his mother. “What do you do on a pilgrimage?” Alice asked.

  “Get cured, dude! That's why people go.”

  He had begun to walk very fast. Alice hurried to keep up with him. “What's wrong with your mom?”

  “Oh, she has depression.”

  He spoke breezily, but Alice knew him now, and she knew that he was telling her something important, that it had taken a great effort.

  “That's like when you're sad,” she said.

  “Really, really sad. Like, kill-yourself sad.”

  He had slowed down a little. Alice leaned into him with her shoulder and bumped him gently. She didn't know what to say. He bumped her back a little.

  “That won't happen,” Alice said.

  “I know,” Theo said.

  Then he sped up and started to run. “Race you,” he called over his shoulder.

  When they arrived at the house, Kenneth was alone, puttering around in the big room in a distracted way. He appeared surprised by their arrival, whirling around when Alice said his name from the French doors.

  His friends had gone back to New York, he told them, but they were flying back again the next weekend to take the photographs. He was jittery and restless, and the prospect of his friends’ return seemed to worry him or make him a little angry. He said, “I think they feel they need to … hurry it up.” And then he added nonsensically, “I haven't been sleeping well,” staring at them as if he were making some sort of appeal.

  Miss Fitzgerald came in as they stood there. She was wearing what looked like an old pair of men's trousers, bunched up around her waist with a belt. She paused at the door, just long enough to convey to Alice and Theo her surprise and unhappiness at finding them there before she crossed the room to set a tray on the table. “Mr. Fitzgerald needs his medicine now,” she said, as if this situation called for Alice and Theo's immediate departure.

  “For God's sake.” Kenneth came over to the table and sat down. “I'm just swallowing pills, Hope. Give me that.” He reached out for the glass.

  They hadn't seen Miss Fitzgerald in several days, and Alice thought she looked exhausted, almost worse than Kenneth. Alice turned away, embarrassed; it was awful, looking at Miss Fitzgerald and remembering how messy her house was and how nobody liked her. The twins had said they'd cleared out everything except the furniture from the first floor, but they hadn't been able to make much of a dent in the second floor before they'd gone back to Frost, and it had smelled horrible upstairs.

  “You've had a lot of excitement, Ken,” Miss Fitzgerald went on patiently and soothingly, as if she hadn't heard him, “a lot of visitors and—”

  Kenneth burped suddenly, a loud, wet, fantastic burp. He gripped the arms of the chair, his face surprised, and Alice felt herself growing hot all over; it had sounded as if he might throw up.

  Miss Fitzgerald's head swung around toward him; he looked up at her, his eyes desperate. Then he held up his hand. “I'm all right,” he said. But he was breathing hard and sweat stood out on his forehead.

  Suddenly, Theo approached the table. “Do you want to hear about the rope walk now, Ken
neth?” he said.

  Kenneth turned vaguely in Theo's direction; he was still breathing hard.

  “It's so you can go out into the woods and walk by yourself. Alice and I have been working on it,” Theo said, his voice quiet and steady. “It's just like those guard ropes in museums or the ropes along a ship's deck. We've got them going from tree to tree, and the path is completely clear, so all you have to do is walk along with the rope under your hand and walk for as long as you want and then you can turn around and come back. Nobody has to go with you. You can go by yourself.” He took a few steps away, gliding over the floor as if he were skating, with one hand held out to his side. “We've got all the roots and rocks and everything out of the way, and we've nailed the ropes so they're the right height and everything.” He skated back to Kenneth, sweeping over the imaginary ice. “See?”

  Alice, who had been holding her breath while Theo spoke and now let it out in a gasp of relief, wondered whether Kenneth had just that moment gone completely blind, for his expression showed bewilderment.

  “It's a rope walk. They had one at Alice's party,” Theo said patiently. “That's where we got the idea.”

  Kenneth stared at him. “Extraordinary,” he said at last. “Extraordinary, extraordinary children.”

  “It's not finished,” Alice said hurriedly, coming to join Theo.

  “We've got a lot of work to do,” Theo said. “A lot.”

  “But it's going to be great,” Alice said. Kenneth looked stunned; she wanted to reassure him.

  “Tell me, Hope,” Kenneth said then, turning away from them to speak directly to his sister. “Tell me what great act I performed in my life that has brought them to me, here and now, when I most need them,”

  But Miss Fitzgerald looked away from him and began busily putting the pill bottles and the water tumbler back on the tray. “Well, I don't know, Kenneth,” she said, but her voice sounded angry. Alice, standing there watching her, thought with sudden, unhappy clarity that Kenneth had not been nice enough to his sister.