Dangerous Neighbors (9 page)

T
HE SUN SPILLING IN THROUGH THE STAINED-GLASS
windows daubs hatbands and dresses with diluted colors—red gone slightly copper, blue like the final hour of a bruise, green like the eyes of a cat. From the nozzles of the Venus fountain, water geysers toward the ceiling struts then collapses into iron basins and pools, and now Katherine, opening her eyes with a start, feels a trickle of heat run down her cheek, past her ear.

She plays the scenes of her sickness back across her mind’s eye, this time more slowly. She stands at that window in that bedroom on Delancey Street, looking down and waiting for Anna, and studying, as she does, that boy with the oversize boots and the pig, that boy with the gentle hands and the way of speaking, and now at last she knows precisely who he is. The boy with the pig is the boy with the mutt who was there, this very morning, near the streetcar. The boy in the chattering chaos of the Centennial, who had seemed to know who she was. Who had watched her and dared her to speak, to say hello.

It was the same boy—not just from that day with the
pig, but from another, in November—a brisk, unnerving day that had started out all wrong and had only grown worse, and had borne, within itself, more seeds of the coming disaster.

The seeds, in fact, of today. Katherine allows herself to remember because she won’t ever again. Maybe the Centennial Exhibition is the story of the future. Today is the story of Katherine’s past, which was also Anna’s.

That day, last November, had begun with breakfast. It had begun with Anna sitting directly across from Katherine, a million miles away. Anna had been running her spoon over the side of her egg like the egg was a clay sculpture she was smoothing. She’d been sitting there, saving her best thoughts for Bennett, leaving Katherine out in the cold. Time apart from her baker’s boy was a torture for Anna. Still, on that day Katherine desperately wanted to be with her sister. She’d overlook her sullenness. She just wanted company.

So they’d gone out, that Saturday, shopping. They had a list of things that were to be bought, and Katherine, tentative, linked her arm with Anna’s, and Anna let her, dutifully, though they both, Katherine realized, remembered the bruise of Cape May. “We’ll get some ice cream,” Katherine said, but then Anna, of course, had a better idea.

“No. We’ll get shortbread for free at Bennett’s.”

“I’d rather have ice cream.”

“We can have that, too.”

“Do we have to go to Bennett’s?”

“Yes. We do.”

They did their chores. They went out and about, buying buttons for Jeannie Bea and a new kind of tea for their mother and tobacco for their father, and then they stopped at a corner shop to look at ready-made coats, to each try one on for the winter. They left Wanamaker’s with two pairs of muffs instead. Anna’s was white and Katherine’s silver. And then they were on Walnut Street and past Broad, and the puff of bakery flour was floating aimlessly overhead, like the last blow of a train stack. They were there, at the baker’s, where Anna said, “Please, dear. Watch the door.” And so Katherine stood as Anna told her to stand—her face toward Walnut Street, her back to the bakery, her near happiness of just a few moments before threading itself into a black hole.

“Tell whomever asks that the shop is closed,” Anna had instructed Katherine, sliding in through the door, and Katherine had glared at her, and yet she stayed, a sentinel on that mild November day. The skin against her brow and cheeks felt taut. Her new muff hung from her neck; her hands were nervous. She shuffled back and forth in polished boots, waiting for Anna to finish.

And then, from down the street came the young man with wheat-colored hair, his trouser pockets bulging as if stuffed with eggs, his arms filled with a hen so still that Katherine at first concluded that it was someone’s unplucked
dinner. The closer he came, the better Katherine heard the click of eggshell against eggshell, an odd, sweet sound. The nearer he came, the better she saw how the hen in his arms blinked, perfectly calm, perfectly still. Now he was a few feet off and slowing his pace. He dared to stop, to ask Katherine a question.

“Cream biscuits today?” he asked, thrusting his chin in the direction of the shop and waiting for the answer, casual, as if a hen were not sitting squat in his arms, twisting its neck, proudly displaying its comb. As if a breeze had not just now blown in, ruffling the old hen’s feathers.

He had no business speaking with her.

He knew it. So did she.

He was from another side of town. He was from another place.
Dangerous neighbors
, her father had said.

“Baker’s stepped out,” Katherine informed him. “Come back tomorrow.”

His eyes were the color of a river at night. He smelled like straw or hay, like the tang of a goat’s warm hide, like the eggs warming in his pocket. Katherine studied him, decided against deciding he was handsome, though he was—undeniably he was. This close up he was even more handsome than he’d seemed from her bedroom window, for this was when it struck her: he was the boy with the pig.
My name is William
. She ignored him, best as she could. She stared back out toward the street. Anyone passing might
have thought she’d known him—that a poor boy and a banker’s daughter had gotten themselves into a tangle. Not possible. She felt him studying her face, the fade of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the space between her two front teeth. Her unwillingness to be charmed or to be charming. The lie she was so obviously keeping.

“Warm for November,” he said, almost a game now, to see if he could force a conversation, get her to say something, at least, about the wisdom of a muff in warm weather.

“It is.”

“Birds don’t know what to do”—he stopped, looked for a reaction—“in weather like this.” The hen sat up straighter. Katherine blinked, gave nothing away, didn’t want him to guess that she’d seen this boy once, months ago—felt, indeed, that she already knew him.

Now she watched William glancing back into the shop, toward the gleaming display case and the three glass-domed cake trays, the bowl of glacé cherries, the polished register, the pair of metal tongs. She saw him press his face harder against the door so that he might see even deeper into the shop, and now, afraid for what he might see, for how he might expose the sisters and their subterfuge, Katherine tried to distract him.

“The hen,” she asked, “is it yours?”

“It was lost,” he said. “I went and found it.”

“So that’s your game?”

“My game?”

“What you do?”

“I rescue lost things. Horses, cows, pigs, dogs. Dogs, mostly. Doesn’t pay too bad, either. You should try it.”

He laughed but she didn’t. The hen didn’t stir and William wouldn’t turn. He just stood there, beside Katherine, so close that she could touch him, so close that she saw every inch of what he saw, beyond the bakery door. She leaned forward, despite herself. Felt his sweet breath upon her ear—warm, she thought; she should not have thought it. She took it in, like he did—the row of buttons in the far corner of the shop and how they flared with the sun. The whispering of voices; the rustling of skirts against hands and knees; the single word, “Anna.” Katherine could see her own sister dressed unseasonably in cream, her hair a wilderness, the baker’s fingers low on her neck, the buttons across her chest loose and handled. Bennett was a good head and a half taller than Anna. He had to lean down to take her in, and so she was on her toes, her face spooned up toward him, oblivious to all things but his kisses.

Katherine felt William at her side turn and assess her differently. She felt her face go hot, her eyes go hard as marbles, her whole self deflecting his questions.
Don’t ask me
.

“Come back tomorrow,” Katherine finally said. “Bakery is closed for the moment.”

“As you please.” He stepped back out onto the walk,
took a gentleman’s bow. He said nothing, and he could have; she was defenseless. He doffed his hat and took the hen and the hen’s eggs back to whomever had lost them, and what she felt then, what she registered for later—for now, for right this minute at the Centennial, her last day ever, an hour before her flight—was that he did not walk away in triumph, pleased for her shame, pleased with his knowing. He walked away so that the hen would stay still, so that the eggs in his pocket would not crack. She heard the sound of those eggs in his pocket, moving west, down Walnut Street. She remembered that other afternoon, months before, when the pig was rescued from the Chauncers’—how he had trailed off and left her lonely.

Wait
, Katherine almost cried after him, but he was quick on his feet, and she was alone again, a sentry, condemned to listening to the sounds of Bennett and Anna, within. To the conversation that had, somehow, kicked up furiously between them.

“I don’t know where she is, how she got out,” Anna was saying. “Katherine will blame me. She’ll say it’s all my fault.”

“You’ll find her,” Bennett reassured.

“But I’ve looked already, and Gemma is lost. And she’s such a sweet cat, Bennett.”

“Cats come home.”

“I won’t be forgiven. Oh, Bennett. You can’t possibly
know what it’s like to have a sister whom you’re forever disappointing.”

Forever disappointing
. It was, Katherine thought that day, the end. It was irreparable—Anna saying such a thing to the baker’s boy. That day, Katherine went home and did not wait for her sister. She marched upstairs and slammed the door. When Jeannie Bea called up after her, asking for Anna, Katherine said, “I’ve no idea where she is, and I don’t care.”

She thought she’d be able to live with that. From now on. To not know and to not care.

For weeks it went on like that. For weeks, Katherine pretended that she had no more interest in her twin—their roads had diverged; their futures were separate. At school, Katherine consorted with Libby D. She stayed afterward, or walked home separately. She wouldn’t wait for Anna when she called.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” Anna would ask her at night.

“What’s wrong with
me
?” Katherine would say. And that was all.

But then, there was New Year’s Eve, just weeks before Anna disappeared altogether. Katherine was more lonely than one person can survive. That night, when Anna sighed, “Oh, I’d love to see the fireworks,” and Katherine realized that the baker’s boy wasn’t a likely escort, Katherine said, “I’d like
that, too,” and they bundled into their coats, and went out.

Katherine and Anna cut through Rittenhouse Square, where the society people had gathered in their wools and silks, hats on the men’s heads, muffs hiding the porcelain hands of women who left their work to others. The banners strung from the upper stories of Walnut Street snapped whenever a wind blew through. The twins had gone out wearing matching gray coats and blueberry silks. In the gaslight, Anna’s hair shone bright as the flesh of a ripe peach, then faded to a glimmer in the shadows. A mist was either falling or rising; in the amber of the gaslight it wasn’t possible to tell. The air seemed bothered.

Already the revelers were out. Masked mummers with banjos thrown across their backs, feathers trailing. Gangs of toughs. Children who ran, squealing, one after the other, in the direction of Independence Hall, their parents and neighbors on the streets behind them, beneath the banners and the flickering lamplight, behind a young man who carried a goat in his arms, a sandy-colored mutt following at his heels. The crowd was thickening. The children taunted one another with the promise of dynamite, with the sight of Mayor Stokley, getting ready to raise the flag. Like everybody else, Anna and Katherine went east—their wraps blown open by the wind, the mist at their feet, Anna scanning the crowd for Bennett, Katherine trying to pretend she didn’t see.

From Ninth all the way to Sixth and north to Chestnut, they went, Katherine trying to tease back Anna’s attention, Anna sometimes unlocking her arm from her sister’s, darting ahead, before Katherine could reach her again. Finally, at Independence Hall, they were stopped with the crowd, and Anna had nowhere to be but beside her sister. One mummer had raised his banjo over his head and was finger-strutting on the strings. An old hag was keeping time with the blunt end of her cane. A boy was daring another with a stick tipped with fire, and the goat in that young man’s arms stayed still. Anna was tied, too, but looking out over the crowd, ready to bolt at any instant.

Now Mayor Stokley was hitching the flag up the pole. Now the flutes began to play, the drums and banjos, clarinets, piccolos, cymbals—not a song, but bass against fiddle against the cries of the crowd, against the hiss of the fire on the one boy’s stick, a wild din. Then the mayor was making an announcement, and the crowd, all in one voice, cheered, and then, piercing and unmistakable, came the steel whine of the first firework—a white wail through the misted night that burst wide open into suspended sparks of color.
Like a spider’s web
, Katherine thought, watching the color scatter across the sky. Another cannon went off. The sky was scrambled. Katherine stared skyward and for one forgetful moment thought only of herself and the sky.