Dangerous Neighbors (6 page)

“Dig with your toes,” he told her, and at first she was confused, but then a wave hurled forward from the horizon and slapped high against her and just as quickly was sucked back out to sea, and in the shift of sand beneath her feet Katherine felt the razor’s edge of a clam.

“Got one!” she called out to her father.

“Chip off the old block.”

She pulled her sodden skirts aside and bent low to dig with her hands, the sleeves of her bathing gown turning dark and heavy at once. In the momentary calm of the sea, Katherine saw her own face reflected back at her, and in that instant it was possible to confuse herself with Anna, or to conclude that Anna had left the cabin to join Katherine
and the clams. Saturated with the sea, the clam still beneath her foot, Katherine stood upright and glanced around, but it was only her father standing there, her father with the bucket of clams.

“Did you get it?” he asked her.

“Not yet,” she said.

Now a new wave raised its lathered head on the horizon and began its sprint and threatened to knock Katherine off her feet. All of a sudden, she wanted to tell her father everything—about Anna, about Bennett, about coming apart. She wanted to confess the truth and be done with it, but the wave moved in with such haste that all she could do was plant her feet and hold her ground, and when it hit she felt herself fall backward, felt her father’s hands on her shoulders, correcting her balance.

He was laughing, the way he never laughed, and she was laughing, too, and the gulls that had been hovering somewhat closer to the shore came nearer and screamed down, and for some reason—Katherine couldn’t have said why—this made everything seem even funnier. She laughed so hard she had to gasp for air, and when she turned to see her father she saw that he was done in, too: there was a fat tear on his right cheek, making its way to his chin. When the gulls moved off, it was like a cloud blowing south. On the horizon another wave was getting ready. Katherine dug with her feet, but the clam was gone. Vanished in the shifting sands beneath her.

“I lost it,” she told her father.

“There’s plenty more.”

So they stood, taking the waves on as a team, fixing on the clams with their feet, hoisting them up from the suctioning sand, and dropping them into the bucket, which began to strain with the weight of the thick, ridged shells. Katherine could feel the sun settling into her skin—small bursts of heat deep in her cheek and down the short slope of her nose—and she was aware of the gulls blowing back toward them, a darkening of the sea beneath those wings.

She didn’t know then how much time had passed, and she can’t imagine that now; she only knows, when she looks back, that the world had changed by the time they retreated with their bucket of clams. Low tide, and the wide stretch of beach was divided into the warmed, white crystals near the marsh grass, and the hard, damp sand along the sea. They left their footprints behind them, the carcass of a crab, a cluster of shells knotted with seaweed. Her father cracked the clams with a knife and tossed the pink meat to the gulls, and the gulls flew low and near behind them. The beach cabin was empty when the two returned. The castle Anna had been building had cracked—a shovel daggered right down through its middle.

“Katherine,” her father said as he stood looking in on the cabin’s hollow. “Is everything all right with Anna? Is
there something I should know? If you tell me, Katherine, we both can help.”

She looked up at him, and it hurt; she glanced away. She felt his gaze, his knowing. “I can’t,” is all she managed to say, turning toward him. “I can’t, Pa.” She bit her lip. His eyes searched hers.

“Be careful with her.”

“I am. Always.”

“Philadelphia’s changing. The whole world is. She doesn’t understand, as you understand, that there are among us dangerous neighbors.”

Dangerous neighbors
, Katherine thought. Wasn’t Anna’s baker’s boy one of those?

Later it was the lodging rooms with their crisp white linens (a bed for Anna, a bed for Katherine, a dresser between them, a pitcher of iced water). It was the almost-evening bustle in the main ballroom, the games of cards, the pungency of cigars, that hour in the day when her father would sit by himself in a tall rocking chair reading a hotel copy of the paper. He’d have the sun in his face from the afternoon at the beach, and he’d seem to Katherine so much younger, as if he really had once been nothing more than a boy with a talent for mathematics.

“Your father was always smart,” her mother would say, like that was the only thing that mattered, and Katherine
understood that this reduced her father, for whom
smart
was its own category, incompatible with
funny, interesting, charming
. “Trust him,” Katherine had pleaded that very afternoon with Anna, but Anna had refused. She would not, she said, forgive their father for the Carvers, for Cape May, for the ball they’d have to attend that night, for this horrid vacation by the sea. Anna’s hair held the smell of the sea in its curls. Katherine’s was collected high at the back of her head, then loosened in places by the breeze that yawned occasionally through the open window. Earlier that afternoon Anna had spread her hair across her pillow to let it dry, while Katherine had pinned hers up wet. Each in preparation for the ball that, Anna said, would be her ruin.

“I’m not going through with it,” Anna announced finally. “I won’t.”

Her dress was the color of strawberries, her skin was cream. The twins sat knee to knee on their side-by-side beds, Katherine feeling sun-glazed and dark in her mocha-colored silk. A small distance away was the lull of the tide, the high chatter of gulls picking through the day’s debris. There was the harmless creaking of a squadron of yachts that had arrived just that day from New York, the glamorous exchange of commodores. Between the cracks of the substantial door hazed the smell of a cigar from down the hall, the talk of a regatta, the anticipation of a train, promising
the next wave of suitors. The waiters were already in their white ties and swallowtails, paying no attention whatsoever to the generalized hum of clerks. The evening was getting ready for itself.

“It’s only a ball, Anna. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” Katherine kept her eyes on her hands, which seemed warped, still, by the sea. Like crepe, she thought, burying them deep inside her skirt.

“Alan stands like a vulture, haven’t you seen him?” Anna complained. “His shoulders come up to his ears. He hardly knows where to put his hands; they just hang there, or else they go off on some fidget.”

“But he dances, Anna. Beautifully. I’ve seen him. The new valse. The Merrie England. The Spanish Dance.”

“Valse.” Anna blew the word through her nose.

“Well, it’s something, anyway. This matchmaking business is no more his fault than your own. Maybe he has his own Bennett somewhere. Some chambermaid or farmer’s daughter. A forbidden love.”

“He wouldn’t, Katherine. I’d like him more if I thought he did.”

“He comes from money.”

“Why should that matter?”

“Because everything is easier with money, Anna, and you like costly things.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

Now Katherine blew a snort through her nose, which provoked a nasty look from Anna.

“They’ve put me on the auction block,” Anna said. “And you don’t care. Or have you been too busy playing up to Father to notice?”

“Playing
up?”

“You’re already his favorite, Katherine. You always were. You could have used that to my advantage. Put a word in on my behalf. No ball. No Alan Carver.”

“Anna!” Katherine leveled her sister with a glare. “I have never been his favorite, and you know it.” She growled the words. “I’ve been responsible for you, Anna. He trusts me. That’s different.” Katherine felt her neck grow warm, her cheeks. She inhaled deeply, slowly deflated. She felt the seams of her mocha-colored bodice stretch, the buttons down the front put up resistance.

“We should never have come,” Anna said, refusing to meet her sister’s glare.

“It’s not my fault that you’ve kept your secret a secret, Anna. If you’d have been honest …”

“How could I be honest? How can I be, with a mother like ours?”

“You’re being unfair.”

“Unfair?”

“To Father. To Bennett. To yourself. To me, worst of all. Putting me in the middle.”

“I just need time.”

“Is that so?”

“Don’t do that, Katherine. Honest to God. Don’t talk to me like that.”

“I’ll do what I please, Anna, actually, since you seem to do what you please, only and always.”

Katherine rose from the bed and walked to the other side of the room, where more breeze had begun to blow through the window and a child’s cry had got caught up with a gull’s squawk, below. She looked out, then down, couldn’t find the source of the commotion. When she glanced up again she saw the mist above the sea, the first small smudges of dusk above the pink horizon. She waited for Anna’s rebuttal, but there was nothing, until, from that side of the room, there came the sudden shudder that one sister senses in another, a shift in things. Katherine turned.

“Why can’t you stop?” Anna murmured, dragging a bent knuckle across the low path of a tear. She looked so helpless, so lost in her own beauty and in the folds of her new dress, and Katherine knew, she always knew, that she would never win against Anna. She was vulnerable, always, to the love that rose from some dark, indeterminate place within her.

You have abandoned me
, Katherine wanted to answer, but the anger was entirely gone, and now she walked back
across the wide-planked floor to the long, white bed, where her sister sat, face in her hands. “It will be all right, I promise,” Katherine told her.

“I hate the valse,” Anna sniffled. “I hate the Pop Goes the Weasel, and the polka. The galop and the reel. I hate them all. They aren’t natural. Matchmaking isn’t. It’s the nineteenth century, after all.”

“Father only wants what he thinks is best. Even if his choice is horrendous, Anna, he thinks he’s looking out for you, putting you in fortune’s way.”

“It’s a charade, Katherine, and you know it. The worst part is disappointing Father.”

“I don’t think the valse is so awful, Anna,” Katherine said. “I’ll ask him to dance.”

Anna snorted behind her hands. “You’ll do that? You should be sainted.”

“But you have to tell Father about Bennett, Anna, and soon. Promise me that. You’ve turned us both into liars.”

“Katherine?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Look at me, Katherine. What do you see?”

Katherine was silent.

“Be honest. Tell me you understand.” She was begging now.

“I understand,” Katherine said after several long minutes ticked by. “I understand, but only partly.”

“I’d protect
you
, Katherine. I’d keep every one of your secrets safe. I’d do anything for your sake.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is and you know it.”

“What sort of secrets would I have, Anna? What isn’t plain as day about me?” She said it beseechingly, heard the hurt in her voice. Hoped that her sister would hear it and take care.

“No heart is plain as day,” Anna said instead. “Not even yours.”

Later Alan Carver stood, hinged—it seemed—to the parlor wall beneath the flame of an octagonal lamp. Behind his spectacles his eyes were swollen black, and the top button of his jacket was too high, pulled tight. In one hand he cradled his pocket watch. With his free hand he kept making a fist—crunching his big bones together, then shaking them loose, like fringe. Katherine saw him first and hurried to distract her sister.

“Maybe we’ll find us a commodore,” Katherine said, nudging Anna to look toward the parlor’s opposite wall, where the men who had come in with the sea stood at ease in their visored caps, their crisped collars.

“Us?”
Anna answered, biting the haggard flesh beneath
one nail. “Every last commodore is yours, Katherine. I give them to you.”

“All the better,” Katherine said, “all for me.”

Katherine touched the row of buttons on her dress and wished she’d packed a lighter color gown or had taken a flower from the hotel garden for her hair, something to distinguish her from the other girls who, in groups of three and four, fussed with their skirts and their hair, glanced sidelong toward the men of the sea. Mother was, she said, sitting the whole affair out; she’d had a letter from Mrs. Gillespie concerning the declaration of women’s rights. Father was out on the veranda with a banker friend who was long on finishing his cigar. He had told the girls to go on; he would catch up to their good time. Anna had rolled her eyes and sighed conspicuously.

“Be good, girls,” he’d said, and Katherine had said, “Pa,” and Anna had squeezed Katherine’s hand to make certain that she’d say nothing more, but now here was Alan Carver chewing on his tongue, and Anna, ignoring the commodores in honor of her poor, sweet baker’s boy, had seen him and had let loose a little shudder. “Like a goat,” she said. “There’s still time before he sees us.” But he’d looked up already and pipped Anna’s name, and Katherine dragged her along—linked her arm into Anna’s, tight—so that they might be right and proper and not embarrass, at least not yet, their father’s name.

“Evening,” Katherine answered for them both.

“Evening,” Alan said. His eyes went from Katherine to Anna and remained there, buggy and hopeful. Anna gave him nothing—turned her gaze steadfastly toward Katherine, as if Katherine were some kind of oracle, a brand-new fascination.

“Have you had the oysters?” Alan asked, biting the back of his tongue.
A tic
, Katherine decided.
A ghastly one
. She’d not hear the end of it later that evening.

“Oysters are putrid,” Anna said, not turning for an instant from her sister.

“Forgive her,” Katherine told Alan. “She’s being funny. Aren’t you, Anna, being funny?”

“Have you had a game of croquet, then?” Alan asked. “Or a bit of tenpins, in the alley?” A small bead of sweat had formed at the part in Alan’s wavy hair, and Katherine watched as it slowly worked its way down his forehead. He had freckles, Katherine noticed, pale vestiges of sun, and if you took away the glasses and the tics, the erupted rictus of his helpless nervousness, there was something kind in him, if only Anna would turn her head and notice.