Dangerous Neighbors (5 page)

She has traveled all this way, Katherine understands, to set the caged bird free. A city bird come home to a paradise, and now the girl glances Katherine’s way and smiles again. Throws back her head and laughs, glad, Katherine is suddenly certain, for the audience.

“I come every day,” the girl says. “My father plays the clarinet.”

“The clarinet,” Katherine repeats.

“My bird’s name is Snow,” the girl goes on.

“Imagine,” Katherine answers, “having so much room to fly.”

The girl tilts her head inquisitively. “I know,” she says.

Above them, the bird traces out its breadth of sky. It wings over the potted palms, through the spritz of the gardenia; it fast-flutters and glides. The oboist sets aside his instrument and tilts his gaze up, and now the violinist does the same, and no one minds that Katherine has come; they assume, perhaps, that she is the child’s friend.

There is a small overturned urn. Katherine arranges her skirts and plants herself there, waits for the bird to stir again. She wonders about the child and her bird, if there are others at home or if, perhaps, she is an only child.

The bird has gone off on some tune. Short, unsustained notes—more like questions than songs. The rustling of its
feathers is like the sound of a hand cupped to an ear—that space between the hand and the ear, where the heartbeat echoes.

Lift.

Drag.

Thrust.

Gravity.

The mechanics, Katherine reminds herself, of flight.

Yes; she has it right: Lift. Drag. Thrust. Gravity. It will be over so soon.

On the other side of a jasmine trellis, a conversation begins. The main door opens and shuts, altering the temperature, corroding Operti’s with the sounds of the outside world, with the sounds of the Centennial down the street.

“Are you going to the fair?” the girl asks, and Katherine stands, nods.

“But nothing,” Katherine tells her truthfully, “will ever again be as lovely as your bird.”

“We come here every day,” the girl reminds her. As if urging Katherine toward a future.

Remember this
, Katherine tells herself. Then she’s out the door, and back on the streets, heading toward the towers of the Main Exhibition Building, where you can climb all the way to the top, take your choice of view, and lean in, hard.

I
T IS THE MIDAFTERNOON OF
S
ATURDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
9, and here is Katherine now, one hundred twenty feet above the Schuylkill River, at the visitors’ gate, Centennial’s south entrance. She’s given the keeper her twenty-five cents and he motions her inside—through the four-armed turnstile. Something clicks; Katherine’s attendance has been noted. In November, when they calculate the total visitor tallies, Katherine will be counted as one of some ten million. Just a single one.

Before Katherine lies the Bartholdi Fountain, a French fantasy of sea nymphs and frogs, cherubs, turtles, and fish. The nymphs hold a cast-iron basin above their heads, as if it weighs nothing, and Katherine envies their strength then looks beyond it—to the rising and falling of the Centennial acres, the glint and silks of the buildings, the fanning women who are being pushed about in their rolling chairs, and now the Centennial rail train has come in on its narrow-gauge tracks, not far from where Katherine is standing.

“All aboard,” the conductor calls, and those who wish to circumscribe the grounds by train before attempting all two
hundred and fifty buildings climb in. Katherine has half a mind to join the herd, to lose herself inside the anonymous hum, but there’s music coming from the Main Exhibition Building—a bold and tragic sound that floats through the building’s stained-glass windows, through the spaces in between the red and black masonry, the iron and wood of the largest building in the world. The very largest one, Katherine marvels.

She rubs her hands across the silk of her skirt and turns toward the main building’s west entrance. The sun has made its way to the keyhole arches. Above them are the towers and the balconies beyond the towers. A family trundles by, a troop of little girls, a man terribly taken with his new clay pipe. A shambling woman holds a package of Centennial Celery Salt to her chest, and Katherine tries to imagine her home, at her hearth, in the evening.

Over all of this the organ weeps, and now other songs have joined the song, so that by the time Katherine makes it to the west-end entrance door, the music fills the spaces in between every other thing. Katherine, exhausted, begins to make her way to the nearest empty bench. An older woman stops her. Is there something she might need?

Need?

“It’s just so huge,” Katherine offers, by way of a noncommittal courtesy, and the woman pats Katherine’s pale hand, as if the two are neighbors or family friends, and
says, “Whatever you do, save yourself for the Saint-Gobain display. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

Katherine gives the woman a pointless smile but does nothing to extend the conversation. She finds a bench as quickly as she can and sits down. She closes her eyes against the cathedral of progress.

S
HE REMEMBERS AN EVENING IN
A
UGUST, THE LAST
summer of Anna’s life, shortly after Jeannie Bea had cleared the plates, when the twins’ father announced his plan. “We’re going,” he had told them, “to the shore.”

“Father?”

“Cape May,” he said. “I’ve made arrangements. A little sea and salt will do us all good.” He’d set the date for the third week in August, he said, to coincide with the Carvers’ vacation. They’d take the ferry at Market Street and board the West Jersey line in Camden, to be met at the shore line by Danny, whose livery carriage would take them anywhere they wanted. Horse hooves on seashells, Katherine thought, taking to the idea at once. Promenades at high tide. The cool shelter of the beach cabin when the sun was at its harshest. Games of tenpins in the alley, and the smell of cigars in the morning, and all those Gypsy hats and flannel suits, the sound of moccasins on the hard, gray sand, corn fresh from the stalk.

“Cape May,” Katherine said, while Anna repeated, “Father?” until Mother said, “It will be lovely,” settling the question without the slightest enthusiasm.

“I’ve booked two rooms at Congress Hall,” Father went on. “The
Ledger
says the oysters have been fat since mid-July.”

“I despise oyster stew,” Anna said. “Oysters are putrid.”

“Well. It’s been a good year, too, for the tomatoes.”

“But the Carver family? Father?”

“It will be lovely,” their mother repeated blandly, standing, flicking the crumbs from her ferociously plain dress. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She left the rest of them in their dinner chairs. She reached for her hat and turned for the hallway, saying, “Nothing is worse—you remember this, girls—than being late.”

“A meeting, dear?” Father asked, without ever looking up.

“Raising stock,” she said, “for the Centennial.”

“Is that right?” His voice was one note, and it was hollow. It stopped their mother in her tracks.

“I wish you’d take an interest,” she said.

“But you do so much,” Father said. “How is a man to keep track of it all?” There was sarcasm in his voice, a sound new to the house this summer. Katherine sought Anna’s eyes. Anna wouldn’t look up.

“It’s your century, too,” Mother said. “Or haven’t you noticed?”

“I notice many things,” Father said.

“Precisely what things?” Mother asked.

“The noise and crush,” he said, “of progress.”

“Is that right?”

Katherine looked from her father to her mother. She looked at Jeannie Bea, who was keeping all expression off the wide space of her face.

“You girls go on up,” Mother said after a moment. “Get some rest.”

It had been raining earlier in the day, but the rain had stopped. Their mother stood in the doorway now, considering the merits of an umbrella. In the end she chose to go without. The door closed noisily behind her, like a prison door, Katherine thought. They could hear her boots on the pavement until she reached the end of their block.

“Jeannie Bea,” Father said, for the room remained quiet. “I’ll take my sherry on the couch.” His hair was thinning, Katherine observed with shock. The lines across his forehead had ridged into something permanent, and if everyone had always said that the twins were the spitting image of their father, there were more differences between them now than likenesses. Katherine turned to see what Anna had seen, if she’d registered the same impression. But Anna’s mind was somewhere else.

“Can you believe that he would do this, Katherine? Cape May?
Please
. The
Carvers?”
she moaned when the day was done.

“He’s only trying to help.”

“Help?”

“Well, honestly, Anna. You haven’t seemed all that well.”

“I’m better than well, Katherine. I’m in love. I’m happy.”

“You’re not yourself.”

“You don’t know,” Anna sighed, turning over in her bed, propping her head up on one hand—Katherine could see how the shadows rose and fell, shifted themselves—“what love is.”

“No,” Katherine said, turning away. “I guess I don’t.” A spike of heat between them now. A knock against the heart.

“Alan Carver is a bore,” Anna declared.

“Just think,” Katherine said, not kindly, “of all the stories you’ll collect for Bennett. The little secrets you will tell. The shells you’ll bring home to your bakery.”

“A whole
week,”
Anna groaned, either ignoring the sarcasm, or not hearing it at all, which was worse, “with Alan Carver.”

Silence. Katherine closed her eyes against the moon. Anna would soon be dreaming of Bennett, of his shoulders, made broad and strong by the hefting and pounding of dough. Katherine was guilty of having looked too closely, of having pondered too hard, of having imagined his attentions for herself. She was her sister’s identical twin. Identical. But beauty radiated from just one of them. That was the hideous fact.

In Cape May, their mother would sit in a bathing gown and wield a pen above her pad, a scowl on her face that
telegraphed concentration on matters of infinite political concern. Anna would brood and not look up from the castle she carved out of sand. Their father would sit halfway in, halfway out of the cabin, his feet dug into the hot, white sand, a preposterous hat on his head. “Looking for ships,” is what he’d say. “Looking for pirates.” Until finally he would announce that it was time for the daily constitutional. “Do I have takers?” he’d implore. It was a Wednesday when Katherine took the bait—as much to escape the claustrophobia of the Cape May beach cabin as to demonstrate, to Anna, what being left was all about.

They went off in silence, Katherine and her father, until their bare feet touched the advancing tide. They ambled without talking until they encountered something smaller or greater than themselves: A horseshoe crab on its back with its legs still cycling. A succession of perfect pink shells. A boy wearing a bucket on his head. A mountainous ledge of black rock in the distance. A thronging of gulls. A poked-up shovel in the sand.

Each thing was its own provocation, unearthing some memory in her father’s mind, allowing Katherine fleeting access to the man beyond the banker. “The day I met your mother she was laughing,” one story began, and he told that story as long as their shadows dragged behind them and even after they had gone as far as the black rocks and turned back and their shadows ran ahead. “When I was eleven,
I went to the dam to go fishing with my brother,” began another, and beneath his hat his face would change into a younger version of itself. Katherine’s bathing gown flapped with the breeze—its green-and-orange stripes twisting about her feet like a carousel.

The lesson, then, came in clams, an exercise in wading. “Clams work in private,” he told her, leading her toward a less popular stretch of sand, an empty bucket in one hand. He turned from the water’s edge into the sea, calling to Katherine to join him. He’d gone in as far as his knees, and by the time Katherine reached him the water was nearly past her waist, her loose gown swimming all around her like a swarm of green and orange fish.