The Rope Walk Read Online Free

including Alice herself, that Alice should play a girl's role, Wendy instead of Peter Pan, for instance. Who would want to be Wendy?
    In the long gallery that ran the length of the back of the house, a summer porch that had been closed in long ago and lined with cupboards for the boys’ boots and skis and tennis rackets, a rope swing had been suspended from two sturdy eye hooks in the ceiling. Here, when the boys deserted her for their more grown-up activities, Alice swung through the rainy afternoons, sailing over mops and rusty buckets, heaps of dead wasps in the dusty casement windows, her toes grazing a battered ball that traveled slowly, inevitably, to the corner where the floor sloped.
    Children loved the MacCauleys’ house. There was a fireman's pole that ran through a hole from the upstairs porch to the downstairs porch, and, in the branches of a maple tree, a tree house with a drawbridge on a pulley that let down into Tad and Harry's bedroom window. Explorers in the house, Alice silent and unnoticed in their wake, found soon enough the telescope in the attic window, the liquor bottles in the closet with its tiny hidden sinkin Archie's study, the false bottom in the drawer of the desk in the living room, the secret opening beneath full of old copies of
Playboy
which the boys, when Alice first discovered them, snatched away from her.
    This year, with all her brothers gone off to college, Alice sometimes walked aimlessly through the rooms in the quiet that came over the house, and over herself and her father, when the boys were away. She had the notion that along with all the silly voices—those of the Bishop, Vulgar the rocking chair, Brigitte the love seat—that fell silent when her brothers were not at home, her mother's voice was murmuring somewhere at an undetectable frequency in conversation with the possessions among which, as a living, breathing presence, she had once moved. Alice let her hands brush these objects and thought about how her mother's hands had once touched the same places.
    All the family's fun, Alice understood, had begun with her mother.
    Squeak
went the Bishop again, and there was Archie. Alice leaned over and watched her father from the windowsill. He was fifty-six, but already his hair had gone completely white. It shone in the sun, flawless as the wings of the moth prince who had perished in Alice's window casement. Archie, his progress grave as a butler's, came down the steps of the porch bearing a tray of glasses, proceeding one step at a time in a careful sideways attitude like an old man, and made his way through the dining room chairs arranged haphazardly across the front lawn. High above him in her windowsill, Alice detected the tinkling of the glasses trembling on the tray.
    A terrace had been built on the foundation of the old summer kitchen that had burned down before Alice was born, and here atable with a snowy cloth had been laid. The lilacs had dropped a snowfall of tiny purple blossoms over the dishes. Elizabeth had set out platters of sandwiches under a drape of cheesecloth, glass bowls of berries, and an enormous sagging gelatin mold jeweled with pineapple and mandarin oranges. The ice cream—peach and strawberry in brown cardboard five-gallon buckets—would be brought out later.
    In the apple orchard beyond the stone wall that bordered the lawn, Alice could make out from her window her brothers moving under the trees and hear snatches of their distant voices, mostly Tad's and Harry's. They were making a rope walk for her.
    The night before, at dinner, James had leaned over the dining room table, his hair falling over his forehead, and had drawn scribbled curlicues with his finger on the table's mahogany surface, explaining it to her. Many girls had fallen in love with James over Alice's lifetime. Archie said James's romantic lock of black hair worked on them like a hypnotist's watch on a chain.
    “It's like a big spiderweb,” James had said. “The idea is that