Authors: Carrie Brown
The only other notable public building in Grange was the old mill; a collection of town residents, Archie among them, had formed a nonprofit corporation and purchased the building many years before. It was used now as a community center for the town, with the summer theatricals staged there, dances held at Christmas and at the end of the summer, and a potluck dinner on the Fourth of July. The Red Cross set up a blood drive inside twice a year, and town meetings were held there, too.
Alice and Theo jogged down the street toward the Fitz-geralds’.
“You know what you don't have here?” Theo said out of the blue, puffing along beside her. “Dog poop. There's no dog poop anywhere on the sidewalks here.”
“Is there a lot in New York?” Alice remembered seeing people in New York walking dogs on leashes. At Christmas, many of the dogs had been wearingjackets.
“Oh, my god,” Theo said. “You wouldn't believe how much.” He bounced along for a moment, apparently lost in reflection. “You're lucky, Alice,” he said after a minute, and Alice, who understood suddenly that she had never really considered herself or her circumstances in relation to other people before, felt the morning darken slightly around her. She
was
lucky, she realized. She was lucky, and some other people were not, dog poop everywhere they put their feet. Yet somehow, this feeling of being lucky was not a good thing, the way you might have expected feeling lucky would be. On the contrary, it was a disquieting
feeling, as though she'd been given a very large helping of cake when a hungry child next to her had been given none at all.
“Maybe you could move here,” she said to Theo. “I mean, permanently.”
There had been no discussion of Theo going home. It was still shocking to Alice that no one seemed to want him or even really miss him—not O'Brien; not, apparently, Theo's own mother or father. She knew, however, that having Theo with her forever was an eventuality too good to hope for; one was bound to be disappointed, the way she had been disappointed—so embarrassingly, miserably disappointed—on the Christmas when she had hoped she would be given a baby elephant to raise. Now, of course, she understood that asking for an elephant had been ridiculous, but how was one to know at the time whether one's longings were impossible to fulfill, when all you could feel was the strength of that wanting?
Theo lurched unevenly along next to her, one foot on the sidewalk, one in the gutter. “My dad would hate it here,” he said.
Alice thought about this reply. She wanted to understand. “Because he's black?” she said. “Because there aren't any other black people here?”
“Alice.
I'm
black,” Theo said obscurely. “Remember?”
Alice felt rebuffed somehow, but she didn't understand the logic of his comment.
“Maybe I'll move here when I'm grown up,” Theo said then, sighing, and Alice had the sense again that there were things he was not telling her, that he did not know how to explain.
“Do you think you'll still be here then?” Theo asked. He stepped up out of the gutter and they stopped for a moment on the sidewalk to look at each other. Alice noticed a tiny green caterpillar, no bigger than a fingernail, swaying on an invisible
thread in the air near Theo's ear. It hung there, curling and uncurling, twisting like a gymnast.
She paused. “I think so,” she said, but as she spoke she realized uncomfortably that she might not be wholly in control of what happened in her future. “I hope so.”
Theo regarded her for another moment, and then he shrugged and resumed his crooked walk along the sidewalk and gutter. “I'm probably going to get drafted anyway,” he said. “That's what happens to guys. I'll probably get drafted and have to go to war and fight somewhere.”
“Well, when you get back then,” Alice said, breathless, hurrying to catch up with him. She did not want to think about war. “When you get back, you could come here.”
“Okay,” Theo said. “As long as I'm not dead.”
They could hear voices as soon as they pushed open the gate to the Fitzgeralds’ back lawn. At first Alice thought Kenneth had on the radio. Peals of theatrical laughter floated out the door, and she could hear piano playing, a Scott Joplin rag; she recognized the tune from Wally, who liked to run through it on the piano for fun. Alice and Theo, panting a little, climbed the steps to the terrace but stopped abruptly at the French doors.
There were two men sitting with Kenneth at the round table in the big room. Their backs were to the children, but they turned around at the sound of Alice and Theo's approach. Theo fell in quickly behind Alice. She felt his hand catch the back of her shirt and hold on.
“Well, well,” Kenneth said. “I thought you had been eaten by bears.”
Alice hesitated, uncertain. There was something a little mean
about his tone. Was he mad at them? She stood uncomfortably in the door.
The two strangers in the room regarded Alice and Theo. One of them was Kenneth's age, an older man with a silver ponytail and deeply carved creases in his cheeks that reminded Alice of the face of an old Indian chief in her American history book at school; the other man was younger, with fuzzy blond hair, a wide mouth like a frog's, and an expression of hilarity and surprise. He was wearing a pink and white bow tie and, Alice noticed, no shoes.
“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 at 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.