Authors: Carrie Brown
The garden in front of the Fitzgeralds’ house was badly overgrown. Weedy saplings with leaves like big flapping hands waved over the picket fence. Alice and Theo stopped on the sidewalk and looked over into the yard, where the browning heads of peonies and the heavy canes of old rosebushes had fallen over into the tall grass. The MacCauleys’ car was parked on the street, and from the direction of the garage, Alice heard the sound of a motor—a lawn mower, or maybe it was a chain saw—catching and then dying. Eli must have decided there was more serious work to be done than weeding.
The house was high and square, painted white with black shutters, although both house and shutters needed painting, Alice noticed. The Fitzgeralds’ was among the more formal of Grange's residences; most of the houses on the street, with their narrow front gardens and sheer curtains at the front windows, were what Alice thought of as town houses, with additions that led back away from the street toward the woods and the river, not country houses like her own. The piano lessons, Alice remembered, had been held in a room at the back of the house, reached through a separate entrance by a slate path that ran downhill along the side of the house between overgrown boxwood bushes.
Archie had not sent Alice to Miss Fitzgerald when it had been her turn to begin music lessons, and Alice didn't think Miss Fitzgerald knew that Alice played. She hoped that Miss Fitzgerald would not find out somehow, because Alice felt sure that Miss Fitzgerald would see it as another disloyalty on Archie's part. She didn't know if anyone took piano from Miss Fitzgerald anymore.
Alice knew that she and Theo had lingered too long in the woods—most of the morning, in fact—despite James's injunction not to be late. They had longed to stay there and play, and it had not been easy to leave. On their way up to the road, Theo had consoled himself with grand plans for the afternoon. He wanted to build a shelter on the island highest in the stream, the one with the best vantage upriver. All the way to the Fitzgeralds’ he had described how they would set out fishing lines and string a hammock in the trees (making a hammock was easy, he'd said; all things seemed easy to Theo). He wanted to plant a flag, like the explorers of Everest. He wanted to tame a deer and went on at length about how they might accomplish this; he seemed to know all about it. He wanted to raise a baby raccoon, too—he said he'd seen a nature show on television about this, and to Alice he made it sound inevitable that they would stumble across an orphaned baby raccoon in need of nursing. He wanted to fix up the twins’ raft and moor it near the island, too.
Beneath his eyes he had painted dirty pairs of black stripes like Indian paint, and he had taken off his shirt to tie it around his head. After he'd finished painting his own stripes, he had turned Alice to him, both hands on her shoulders, and looked critically at her face. Then he knelt down and mixed a little spit with the dirt at his feet and with his thumb planted a muddy print on each of her cheekbones, leaning back to examine the effect. Blinking back at him, Alice had noticed that his eyes were golden, like a lion's, and that his eyelashes curled up tightly. For a moment, she
thought of Helen, and her happiness was crossed by a shadow. It seemed wrong that Helen's accident, or illness, or whatever it was, was the cause of Alice's happiness at this moment.
As she and Theo stood on the step at the Fitzgeralds’ front door, Alice realized that her hands had gone clammy. She could feel the telltale prickle of heat on her neck, where she flushed when she was shy or worried. She wasn't sure how long they'd stayed in the woods, but she knew it had been too long. She wiped her hands on her T-shirt and then saw that she had left rusty streaks down her front. She glanced at Theo; he was no cleaner. His hands and knees were filthy and his face still bore the streaks of his war paint. He'd put his shirt back on, though.
Alice reached up and lifted the knocker.
Suddenly, beside her, Theo said, “I've got to pee.” He began to hop up and down in agitation.
Alice glanced around. “Go back there, over by the garage,” she said, trying to keep her voice low. “Hurry up.”
Just as he raced away around the corner, the front door opened.
Miss Fitzgerald stood inside behind the screen, her outline dark and indistinct, like a giant puff of black smoke. Alice stared up at her. Miss Fitzgerald seemed to be about to take a step back and close the door again; it was as if she didn't see Alice standing there on the doormat, though there she was, plain as day. The hallway behind her was dark.
“It's Alice,” Alice said, for suddenly it occurred to her that maybe Miss Fitzgerald might not know who she was, might not remember her. Miss Fitzgerald had never actually spoken to Alice directly. When she came by to see Archie, her eyes would graze over you, even if Archie politely introduced you to her. And yet
Alice felt sure somehow, as she stood there separated from Miss Fitzgerald by the insubstantial and distorting surface of the screen door, that Miss Fitzgerald
did
know who Alice was; that she knew her, and she knew Alice knew her in turn, despite the fact that they never spoke, and that she could not bear something about that mutually reluctant acknowledgment that passed between them.
Miss Fitzgerald's form approached the screen from inside the hallway, as if she were trying to get a better look at whatever had addressed her from the doormat. Behind the mesh of the screen, her face looked like a terrorist's with a stocking pulled over it, featureless and flat and vaguely frightening. Alice felt her heart begin to pound inside her chest.
“Go around to the side. Your feet are terribly dirty,” Miss Fitzgerald said and closed the door.
Alice's cheeks burned, but she backed off the front step obediently. She was not used to being spoken to like this. Elizabeth was dictatorial about baths and clothes and manners at the table, but Alice understood that this was Elizabeth's job; she was supposed to be severe about such things, and she was not mean, anyway, just no-nonsense:
give me none of that yakking
, Elizabeth said, or
hurry up, time's up
. She was never rude.
Alice glanced around for Theo. She called his name in a loud whisper but he didn't answer.
She jumped when the front door was abruptly opened again. From inside, Wally pushed open the screen door. He had a small, rolled-up carpet over his shoulder.
“Where have you been?” he said. He resettled the rug on his shoulder. “Where's Theo?”
“He had to pee,” Alice said. “He went by the garage.”
Wally craned out the front door to look in that direction, but there was no sign of Theo. “Well, you'd better come in,” Wally said. “I'll leave the door open for him.”
Alice hesitated. “She told me to go around to the side. She said my feet were dirty.”
Wally's eyes widened. “She's worried about your dirty feet?” He gave a snort. “Come on,” he said. “It doesn't matter. You'll see.”
Inside, there was hardly enough room for Alice and Wally to stand side by side. The dark hallway was lined with stacks of boxes and paper, some as tall as Alice herself. Alice followed Wally down a little path between them. A carpeted staircase rose up to their left. It, too, was crowded with piles of things. Alice could see cobwebs like garlands looping from place to place across the flocked wallpaper.
“See what I mean?” Wally said quietly over his shoulder.
At first Alice thought that all the boxes and bags and piles of loose papers were Kenneth Fitzgerald's belongings, that he had moved in and been too sick or weak to arrange anything. But soon she saw that the teetering stacks were made up mostly of old newspapers and broken-down boxes, crates heaped with clothing and dishes and bits and pieces of things: she saw doorknobs, drawer pulls, casters, lampshades, hangers. She followed Wally carefully along the narrow passageway, her mouth hanging open.
“Pretty much the whole house is like this,” Wally said from in front of her, his voice still low. “He's got the addition at the back of the house, where she used to do the piano lessons. It wasn't as bad back there, and we got it pretty much cleared out already. Tad and Harry took a load of stuff to the dump in the truck. He said not to even look at any of it. Just to get rid of it.” Wally hoisted the rug higher on his shoulder. “She says she's collecting for the poor.”
Alice was speechless. She clutched the books close to her chest, her elbows held in tightly along her sides, so as not to brush against anything. The air smelled terrible—like maybe something
had died somewhere in the heaps of stuff. She tried to breathe through her mouth.
Ahead of her, Wally turned a corner in the hall and descended a half flight of stairs. The walls on either side were hung thickly with framed photographs. Alice tried to see the faces in the portraits, but the images were obscured behind a layer of dust. Wally shifted the rug on his shoulder again and opened a set of double glass doors. The sharp scent of lemon furniture oil cut through the stale air. Though more of the same stacks lined the walls, a long mahogany dining table was completely clear, glowing with fresh polish; it looked as if the occupants of a recent feast had vanished, along with their dishes, into thin air. Wally dropped the rug from his shoulder and pushed it out of the way with his foot against the far wall, near a window seat piled with what looked like folded blankets and coats. The heavy drapes at the window were gray, nearly colorless, though once they'd had some sort of pattern on them, Alice saw. Wally turned around to face Alice. She could hear, from somewhere distant in the house, her brothers’ voices, the thud of their footsteps. Miss Fitzgerald was nowhere in sight.
“It didn't used to be like this,” Wally said after a minute, staring around the room. “It was always kind of cluttered, but …” He looked back at Alice. He regarded her for a minute and then gave her a rueful smile. “You'll catch a fly in there,” he said.
Alice closed her mouth.
“Come on,” he said. “He's back here. There are a couple of rooms that are pretty much just his stuff now. They're okay.”
The first room into which Kenneth Fitzgerald had been installed was at the end of the house. It was long and lined with bookshelves under a low ceiling. A small fireplace beneath a thick mantelpiece that appeared to have been made out of a single, massive timber stood at one end of the room. Alice knew enough
about old houses to guess that this might have been a summer kitchen once. A set of French doors in the middle of the room opened out onto a flagstone terrace, and beyond the terrace, an overgrown expanse of lawn, the long, silvery grass stirring in the breeze, stretched to the edge of the woods. The floorboards inside had been recently mopped and polished; Alice could smell the lemon polish again. A large round pedestal table stacked with books had been pushed into the center of the room, and several armchairs, their red leather seats shiny with age, arranged around it. Near the table was a heavy settee with a faded green velvet slipcover and a fur throw. Several tall boxes that, because of their shape, Alice thought must contain paintings leaned against the bookshelves. On the floor by the French doors, where bees buzzed in from the garden, stood a tall glass vase of enormous white and purple irises, their heads heavy and their scent overripe and sweet. Near the flowers, a white rag lay on the floor as if it had been thrown down in surrender.
Alice looked up and saw herself and Wally reflected in an oval gold-framed mirror at the end of the room over the fireplace; their figures were tiny, like two people hesitating at the mouth of a cave.
At that moment, Miss Fitzgerald bustled into the room from the terrace outside, carrying a mop and an empty bucket. Instinctively, Alice drew near to Wally. Miss Fitzgerald's apron was the sort Elizabeth would have laughed at, all French frills and a big bow behind. She moved busily past them.
“I've just mopped,” she said briskly, as if she cleaned and mopped all the time. “Don't track anything on the floor in here.” She did not meet their eyes as she hurried past them.
Alice did not know where to look. When Miss Fitzgerald had left the room, Alice glanced up at Wally.
He puffed out his cheeks. “Has Archie ever said anything
about this, Alice?” he asked quietly. “About the house being like this?”
Alice shook her head. But how would someone have described it, anyway?
Wally rubbed his forehead. “Either she's completely crazy and can't see what a mess this place is, or she's so mortified she can't let on that she sees it… because that would mean that we're seeing it, too. I don't know what Kenneth must have said to her to get her to call this morning and ask for help.” He looked down at Alice, who was still clutching her books. “Alice,” he said quietly. “This is really strange.”
Alice looked away from him and gazed around the room. The sense of cleanliness and order here, the glimpse through the French doors of the overgrown stretch of lawn beyond the terrace, the feeling of fresh air in the room, the sounds of the birds, the vase of flowers—even if they were, oddly, on the floor— all these were a relief after the horrible clutter of the rooms they had just passed through. It was as though this room had been enchanted, or perhaps spared the terrible enchantment that had fallen over the rest of the house.
“What good will it do to read to him?” Wally appeared to have posed the question rhetorically. He gazed around the room. “But maybe Archie is right, that it will be a kindness.” He stopped once more, and then, seeming to remember that Alice stood there beside him, he squatted down in front of her. “Are you afraid?”
Alice shook her head, but Wally's question had unnerved her.
“There's nothing to be afraid of,” Wally said. “He's just like anybody else. Only now he's sick. And that's not his fault. Do you understand that?”
Again, Alice nodded, though she wasn't sure what Wally meant.
“He's out on the terrace, in the sun,” Wally said. “Come on.”
Kenneth Fitzgerald was sitting with his back to them at the edge of the terrace on a black metalwork chaise longue heavy with fancy scrolling. He wore a battered straw hat on his head and in his lap he held what looked to Alice like an open sketchbook. When Alice and Wally stepped outside onto the terrace, he closed the book and turned around in the chaise longue.