The Rope Walk Read Online Free Page A

everyone has a string, and you have to untangle it to get your surprise. There's a surprise at the end of every one, a present,” he said. “How do you like the sound of that?”
    The rope walk sounded fine. But then Alice liked almost everything the boys did, except when they excluded her from their adventures. Eli had turned seventeen that year. Tad and Harry, April fools, had recently celebrated their eighteenth birthdays. Wallace was twenty; James, the elder statesman, twenty-two. This year, they had all left for college on the same day, including for the first time, Eli. Alice, embarrassed to cry in front of Elizabeth and Archie, had gone upstairs to lie on her bed with her face in the pillow. At least Tad and Harry stayed in Vermont to attend Frost, where Archie was a dean. Alice knew that it hadto do with their bad grades and their general failure to take anything seriously that the twins had not, like their father and grandfather, and like James and Wallace and now even Eli, gone to Yale. They didn't seem to be sorry about it, though. They had come home to attend her piano recital in November, where they stamped their feet and whistled appreciatively as she made her embarrassed curtsey. In March they had showed up for public speaking night at school, where they made faces at her from the audience in the auditorium and succeeded in making her laugh, and then, her face aflame with mortification, fall silent, unable to remember another word in her recitation of “Hiawatha.”
    Usually Elizabeth went home on Friday evenings—she had kept her own house as long as she'd been with the MacCauleys; various grandchildren had moved in and out over the years—but she had stayed last night to bake Alice's cake, a three-tiered coconut one with curls of real coconut on it. Alice had been given the hammer the night before and had aimed several ineffectual blows at the coconut, but it had been Eli who'd cracked it finally, the milk splashing onto the floor.
    Pushing open the door with her hip, an avalanche of the boys’ ironed shirts over her arm, Elizabeth had been upstairs once already this morning to check on Alice after her bath.
    Alice was on the forbidden windowsill, still in her undershirt, when Elizabeth surprised her, looking around the door.
    “Alice! Get
down
from there! You going to fall off! Get down, get down!” Elizabeth glared at her. “You find your shoes? Eli polished them last night. He said he put them on the stairs.”
    Alice swung her legs around hastily so that her feet grazed the floor. Yes, she'd found the shoes, the black patent leather smellingof polish. Yes, she'd hung up her towel. And yes, her dress had been where Elizabeth had said it would be, hanging up in the airing cupboard off the upstairs back hall where the ironing board was kept, a fancy white dress with a blue sash and bunches of cherries appliquéd on the collar. She hated the dress. It was a baby's dress, chosen by Elizabeth.
    “Fix your hair,” Elizabeth said on her way out.
    Archie called the sweaty tumble of red curls on Alice's head her glory; he liked to brush his hand over the coils. Alice hated her hair. It was painful, having Elizabeth brush it, and she herself only tore ineffectually at her head with her mother's old ivory-handled hairbrush. She would have to brush it today, even though it was her birthday.
    Squeak
went the Bishop.
    Alice leaned over again to look. Archie had gone back indoors, and the lawn below was empty now except for the dining room chairs. Already the morning shadows had contracted, drawing in on themselves to become soft shapes disappearing against the brightening grass. Soon the guests would arrive and Alice would come downstairs in her dress. There would be lunch, and running among the children, and the singing of happy birthday and the cutting of the cake, the first slice to go to the youngest guest and the next to the eldest and the very last to Alice herself.
    People did not look at the MacCauley