Dangerous Neighbors (4 page)

D
AYS HAVE GONE BY
. A
UGUST LEANS INTO
S
EPTEMBER
. The sun is incessant, greedy, filling the rooms of the house on Delancey Street with the thin trails of smoke. Now Katherine stands at the window of the bedroom she and her twin once shared, watching a gull on the sill. It’s as if the bird has gotten lost all these miles from the ocean, all this distance from the color blue. It is no place for a gull, not this September. But there the bird is, improbably clinging to the sill, casting a shadow on Anna’s pillow. Katherine turns to see what is there. Absence, always, and condemnation. There is no escape.

And yet, Katherine thinks, this is the year of the Centennial, when all the people of the world, it seems, have come to Philadelphia. They have brought their languages, their chattering, their machines, their howling hogs and fork-tongued snakes. They have built their towers across the abominable river.
Towers
, Katherine thinks.

Katherine’s mother has gone off to a meeting. Mrs. Gillespie’s again, Ninth and Walnut. There are rising tensions, Mother said, among the education advocates at the
Women’s Pavilion who have been drawing such a crowd at the Centennial grounds this summer. Elizabeth Peabody of Boston has raised a fuss about the handiwork of the eighteen orphans whose classroom has been put on display. “Too perfect,” she has said, and this has aggravated Ruth Burritt, the teacher, who was trained for the teaching job by the country’s very best. “It’s growing unsightly,” Mother said before she impaled her straw hat with the hard crown of her head and left. Now Katherine’s father will be taking his beef and beans alone this afternoon, eating his pudding by the gas lamp in the living room.

Katherine runs her hands through the mess of her hair, and turns. She strides across the room, too big by half. She floats her hand down the banister, and her heart thumps, and her lungs hurt, and she takes one more look around—
remember this
—before she is out the door and down Delancey, cutting through Rittenhouse Square and toward Walnut Street. She reaches the southwest corner at 18th out of breath. The streetcar, she knows, will come to an eventual stop. It will take her away. It will let her finish things.

The clouds smoke across the sky and the seagulls keep their distance. A locket hangs from a ribbon of black velvet at Katherine’s neck. There had been a knot of people when she first arrived at the streetcar stop, and now there are so many more. Glancing down, Katherine notices a girl, a child, with corkscrew bangs and a plaid woolen dress who
is holding a bright white bird in a cage shimmered with gold.

Let the bird go
, Katherine wants to say, but she doesn’t.

There are women hiding from the sun beneath the silk saucers of black parasols. There are two brothers whose coats have been cut from the same pin-striped wool. An elderly man holds a top hat in his hand. The clouds are pulling away from the sun. Now the girl with the locked-up bird is singing, “Here they come!” Telling the bird, because everyone else at 18th and Walnut has already turned to see the streetcar horses dragging their cargo along. The torsos of the sorrel horses are so low to the street, their muscles so exceedingly strained, that Katherine fears the beasts will scrape their knees and topple. They pull more Philadelphians than Katherine can count—the passengers piled wide and high in the single streetcar, crammed through windows, one man clinging to the
CENTENNIAL
sign.

“All aboard,” the cry goes out, and Katherine is swept, with the others, into the muddle that somehow absorbs the 18th-and-Walnut crowd and will quaveringly absorb the crowds all the way up to 22nd, when the horses will turn and the streetcar will heave, whining and creaking, down Chestnut, then out onto Lancaster Avenue, straight on up to the doorsteps of the Trans-Continental Hotel.

The girl with the bird holds the cage high, and the
bird beats its wings, like a fire caught behind lantern glass. Katherine’s thoughts turn to Anna, two winters ago, before Bennett. Katherine had gone to market and was on her way home. She had crossed the square and had come to the white marble steps of her redbrick house, and looked up, catching a glimpse of Anna in the third-floor bedroom window, dressed only in her nightshirt, holding Gemma aloft. Even from down below, Katherine could see that her sister’s cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were a green, brimming brightness. Taking her hands out of her muff to wave, Katherine called to her. “Anna!” And now Anna above her was lifting Gemma high, gesturing her twin sister in. There were only six steps, a door, two flights of steps between them, and that was too much in that moment, when they both had so much to say and no one else they wanted to say it to.

Now Gemma was moping about the house as if the cat herself had suffered the greatest loss.

The streetcar is stopped now, at 20th. Someone is a penny short of the seven-cent fare and an argument breaks out until a passenger from up above tosses a penny down and others yell, “Just get on with it. Please!” Finally they are moving again, the poor horses frothing with the heat. There is a breeze coming on. Katherine ducks an interfering elbow and glances down again at the bird, which has lifted one wing like a shoulder.

Nothing in this world is safe. Clouds form. Trees split. Horses rear. Ice breaks. Fire rages. Maybe the bird in that girl’s cage is better off, but then again, Katherine thinks, the cage could crack, the prison could itself perish, along with its prisoner.

T
HEY ARE HEADED WEST, THE RIVER BENEATH THEM, THE
hogs and the mules and the carriages all fighting for their lives, and now Katherine senses the music pulsing from the Centennial fairgrounds. She sees the colored flags blowing, smells the popcorn, the sausage, the loaves of bread. The glass face of the Main Exhibition Building flares in the sun, and everything goes on for miles.

At last the streetcar pulls to a stop at the doors of the Trans-Continental. Just down Elm, at the depot, a train is chugging to a stop. The crowd surges. Something has spooked a hackney horse; it rears, fighting with the bit in its mouth, and now the girl with the bird in the cage takes off and Katherine, too, hurries toward the patch of shade beneath the towering triangle of the Trans-Continental. It is strange here, on this side of Elm—the brick establishments plunked down between the shacks, the flimsy advertisements, the Titusville well, the famed Allen’s Animal Show, promising an educated pig, a talking cow, and the rarest of sea mammals.

Katherine is caught in a swarm of hucksters with striped
shirts and canes and watches that swing from gold chains. Inside their black sack jackets and bustles and aprons they move about like hornets, and now Katherine feels a pair of eyes on her and, fearing Bennett, turns.

But it isn’t Anna’s baker’s boy who has found her. It is a young man, his hair like wheat at the end of its season, his hands large and capable, his boots too big, a sand-colored mutt at his side. There is something familiar about him, but Katherine can’t place it. She meets his stare for longer than she should, her face flushing red:
How do you know me?
Perhaps he knew Anna instead, perhaps he’s a friend of Bennett’s, perhaps in his mind he is seeing a ghost. She stares at him, as if she can, at this distance, unearth the truth.
Who are you?

He is watching Katherine with bright, dark eyes. He knows her. She knows him, but vaguely. The press of the day, the crowds, her purpose, have left her disoriented.

It will all be over soon. It doesn’t matter.

He isn’t Bennett. That’s all that counts.

There are people pushing in from all sides. There’s the rising smell of beer and pie, a tainted column of smoke escaping a flue. “Out of the way, miss.” Katherine hears the hackney driver when it’s almost too late, when the brown horse in a lather veers near. Katherine leaps back, catching the heel of an old woman’s boot.

“Madam,” she says, bowing slightly. “Excuse me.”
Regaining her footing, she turns in all directions, then back toward Shantytown, but the young man with the mutt is gone. What Katherine sees are shacks shouldered up against grand hotels—restaurants and beer gardens; ice-cream saloons; the museum, which is tattooed with advertisements for Borneo men and Feejees. She sees silks streaming down—yellows, pinks, the colors of the night—and flags running high into the sky. On the flat roofs of the shacks, big, messy mobs have gathered, and when Katherine looks up, she sees a pack of women dancing, lifting their skirts above the top lines of their boots, then lifting them higher as the men around them cheer. Close by, high, soars the mansard roof of the Trans-Continental Hotel, which contains, Katherine has read, five hundred rooms that can be let for five dollars a day. In the beer gardens music is playing.

In the near distance there’s that girl again, the one with the bird; she’s running. Across the wide avenue and down, past the Globe Hotel, leaving Elm for Belmont, where hordes of people sit sipping drinks on the open-air veranda, and couples stroll among the flower beds and horses wait for cabs to empty. All of a sudden, Katherine is on the chase, imagining, in the girl and her bird, some kind of instruction, a sign. This time she has to get it right. Soar. Swoop. Fall. She will take her instruction from a bird.

She goes down and down, through the tangle of vendors, of horses, of crowds, until finally she is out of breath and
stops. She is lost in the sun-baked afternoon. There is some kind of music washing through, an overcast of sound, and Katherine folds in half and gasps for air.

When she stands straight again, her eyes settle on the sign for Operti’s Tropical Garden. Signor Giuseppe Operti and his sixty-piece orchestra are set to perform this very night, Katherine learns, reading the sign, and now she decides that it’s the rehearsal she hears—the tuning-up. Flutes reeling off in one direction. A violin arcing, leveling, striking a somber attitude. Drums being whisked, frenzied cymbals, the sweet duel of two oboes.

A man carrying a pleated music stand hurries by, a frail woman in an emerald skirt, a stout man with a lumpish nose, a student no older than Katherine herself, and now, coming down Belmont from the direction of the Globe, is the girl with the caged white bird. She sweeps past Katherine, innocent and untarnished by Katherine’s intention to steal the bird’s wisdom. She sweeps up the stairs to Operti’s as if this is where she and the bird have always belonged and throws open the door, releasing a lavender scent. The girl has a square-shaped face and a minor bulb for a nose. She leans her slight weight against the door and smiles, inviting Katherine in.

Katherine follows.

Operti’s is an aromatic cove of high skies and blooms. Gas lanterns float like kites overhead. Potted trees shadow
the paths. There are the bright flags of celosia and astilbe, the yellow sleeves of forsythia forced well past their season, begonias the color of dandelions and fire, and in the midst of it all, the orchestra stage. On every wall, frescoes, and in the very back someone has painted a rock cliff of schist and granite, then turned some sort of spigot on, so that water, real water, cascades down. The sound of Operti’s is gush and violins, the squeak of a chair, the leak of gas in a jet above, a stifled sneeze in the vicinity of the gardenias, and above that the silence of every single place that has ever lain in wait for an evening audience. By the time that Katherine has taken it all in, the girl, the mysterious mistress of the bird, has disappeared.

Katherine breathes. Miraculously, she is not asked to leave. This much beauty, she decides, is a painful thing. Paris in Philadelphia wasn’t right, and Operti’s isn’t either.

Now from behind, from above comes a
swish-wash
of sound, and when Katherine turns, she sees the creature’s wings—white as a magnolia bud in spring. The bird has been set free. It flies high, arcs wide past the suspended color globes, toward the cliff of painted rocks, the waterfalls. It swoops low and to the right, extending its wings and holding, ascending again and holding. It is the freest bird Katherine has ever seen. It leans, swoops down, and descends over the room of empty chairs and flowers and palmy heads. It drifts toward the orchestra stand where—on
the very edge, between pots of calla lily and candytuft—the child sits with the empty gold cage.