Dangerous Neighbors (12 page)

A
T THE TOP OF THE STEPS
, K
ATHERINE TURNS AND FINDS
Bennett, taller than she remembers, his eyes searching hers. After so much running, Katherine simply yields; she will not be chased any farther. He is a beautiful man, not a handsome one. It hurts to stand here and see him.

“A baby?” Bennett asks, leaning in close, forcing her to lean closer to him.

“A friend’s baby,” Katherine says.

He smells of strawberries and yeast, of a long city day, of leftover flour. He looks vastly ruined in the sky space of his eyes. At the funeral he’d worn his father’s overcoat, had stood there, ravaged, no one beside him, an only child like Katherine is now an only child; both of them chilled through. Even Katherine, who’d refused to meet his eyes, to acknowledge him at all, could see how violently he was shaking. How sorry he was.

“I saw you at the streetcar stop,” Bennett says. “Earlier today.”

“You’ve been chasing me,” Katherine says, “for a long time.” She shifts Lottie in her arms and stares past Bennett
at the accumulating crowd, the too many who have come aloft to get the greater view of Philadelphia, who have never even thought, she’s sure, of spreading their wings and flying.

“I wrote you letters.”

“I couldn’t read them.”

“I waited for you in the square.”

She glares at him.

“I understand you better than you think.”

“You do
not.”
Suddenly the ache and sorrow, the self-recrimination and regret ball up inside her, rage through. “You
could
not. Not possibly.” Her fury is sudden, incisive, but Bennett endures, takes it. He has lost something, too. She won’t let that matter. His heart is broken. It’s her own heart that she’s stuck living with, not his. A long time goes by. Lottie punches out her little fist and Katherine kisses her forehead. She waits for Bennett, and Bennett waits, too, gathering his words.

“There is something you should know,” he says finally, his voice falling far below the tenor of the organ, which has tuned itself up and is blasting a song. “Just one thing, Katherine, and you’ll never need to see me again. I promise.”

“You’ve made other promises.”

“This one will last.”

“I don’t trust you for a second, Bennett.”

“Just listen and I’ll leave.”

“Anna’s gone.” Katherine leans toward him now. “You
were there. You let it happen.” What she says is not true. She knows it but stands by her words.

“I could not stop what happened from happening,” Bennett says as if there’s a difference, and with his eyes he asks,
Is there a difference?
and suddenly Katherine imagines that he has chased her all this time, hunted her down, to find out the answer to that question. To be made safe from asking it only of himself. He is a beautiful man, and beauty breaks, and he is broken.

“You stole her from me,” Katherine says, and she doesn’t mean at the river in February, she means all the days before, the barricaded intimacy, the secrets that Katherine was forced to keep, because,
No, Bennett, if you want to know: no
. Katherine never did confide in her father, never would confide in her mother. Katherine never said,
Anna was in love with that boy who was with her at the river. Anna was in love, and he did not save her. Anna was in love, and I knew it, and I did not save her
. Anna is gone, and this is all that Katherine still can give her—her secret kept, from now through eternity. Katherine and Bennett are the only two people alive who know what sort of love theirs was, and this binds them. Lottie is a warm weight in Katherine’s arms. She turns the child to face forward. She looks away from Bennett’s eyes.

“Katherine,” Bennett says now.

“What?”

He steps closer, for the crowd is behind him, because more people have climbed to this height, as if the real show’s up here.

“I couldn’t reach her. I tried. I couldn’t.”

“You didn’t love her like I loved her, Bennett. Maybe that’s why.” And of course that’s not why, of course not—he would have saved her if he could have; he wouldn’t have lost her, not on purpose; he would have kept her alive, for they would marry someday—wasn’t that the plan of it, they’d marry? Anna in immaculate white and Katherine by her side and big-mouthed tulips in every corner of the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square, and they would have married in spring despite her parents’ warning, a wedding, not a funeral, because in the end Anna would have had to tell, and in the end, Pa’d have said yes, because beauty always wins. The fist of this logic sits somewhere in Katherine’s brain—Bennett would have never let her sister die, never
allowed
it to happen—but Katherine makes the accusation anyway, spits it out:
murderer
. She’d pound her fists against his chest and make him bring her Anna back,
bring her back, she was my sister
, but it’s the two of them and Lottie in this crowd, Katherine’s hands momentarily bound up with the child.

“We loved her differently,” Bennett says. “But Katherine.” His eyes aren’t sky. They’re clouds and storm.

“I don’t know what you want, Bennett. I don’t know what I can give you.”

“I’m not asking for anything. You’re not responsible.…” And of all the things Bennett might have said just then, this is the thing that Katherine won’t withstand. This is what does her in here, at the Centennial, when she was trying to be so righteously brave. For if Katherine isn’t needed for anything, if she is no longer
responsible
for Anna, who is she now? What can she give? He, her sister’s lover, has stripped her of this, too. Lottie whimpers, and Katherine turns her to her shoulder. She howls, and Katherine looks far past Bennett; she succumbs to the drowning moan of the organ.

“Her final thoughts were for
you
,” Bennett says. “That’s it, Katherine. That’s all. That’s all I wanted you to know.” He pulls his fingers through his hair, then touches one finger to Lottie’s ear. He looks for Katherine to meet his eyes—just this one time—and Katherine does. Everything shatters. Every last thing.

“What are you saying?” Katherine sobs.

“Your name,” he says, “was Anna’s last word. The last thing your sister ever said.”

“Don’t,” Katherine says. “Please don’t,” but he says, “I loved her, too,” and now the crowd is coming on, the crowd is pushing in, and Katherine reaches past Lottie, toward Bennett, but he is gone.

T
HERE IS A LONG WHITE PLUME OF SMOKE RISING FROM
the Centennial train in the distance. There are crowds everywhere. Katherine has climbed. She has carried Lottie to the highest spot—to this balcony above the city from which, all day, Katherine has imagined soaring, swooping, falling. Bennett is gone now, and Katherine is devastated, holding Lottie tight, telling her to look, to see—see that smoke; see that long strut of Machinery Hall next door; see that procession of windows and steeples, thin as weather vanes; see the future, Lottie. Touch it and take it; it is yours.

But Lottie wants to take in the whole protuberating thing at once. Her head bobs and her fingers fan, and if she could walk, she would; if she could fly—up above Belmont Avenue and the Bartholdi Fountain; above the Glass Magazine and the Torch of Liberty; above Tunis, Chile, Brazil, France, Spain; above the states of the union, the palaces of arts and white gardenia, the Women’s Pavilion (for there, in the distance are the glorifying flags and the palace geometries of Mrs. Gillespie’s monumental
Women’s Pavilion)—it would be so much better. Fly, but never fall.

Far to the west rises the tower of George’s Hill, and to the north, the trees and ravines and grass and sky from which this Centennial city has been carved, and when Katherine turns herself and Lottie south, out of the blare of the fat sun, the view is of Elm and of Shantytown beyond, standing on its cheap peg legs. There’s a jam of horses, hackneys, four-in-hands, gigs, streetcars at the corner near the Trans-Continental. There’s a passel of balloons, the coming and going and stopping of seersucker and serge, of uniforms and skullcaps, of licorice-colored satchels and mahogany canes, of a pale wooden crate of bright yellow flowers, an island unto itself. There are two flour-dusted boys carrying sacks of bread, and the carmine flash of a bold silk hat, and the gleam of Tufts, and the sausage man, and Lottie kicks her little feet and punches her fist. She gurgles and squirms. Katherine lifts the child higher in her arms, gives her as much room as she can so that she might see for the both of them, as much space as can be salvaged among the crowds that have gathered here with them, upon the roof of the main building.

Anna’s final thought was of her. Anna’s final word was
Katherine
.

“Let’s watch,” Katherine whispers in the baby’s ear, “and see what happens,” and while they stand facing south,
Katherine turns her head east and looks out upon the spires, rooftops, bridges, and factories of Philadelphia, her city. The redbrick and white lintels and brownstones and green swaths and temples of home. It is flat-roofed, peaked and pompous, congested and incomplete. Katherine’s eyes cannot possibly hold it all, until finally they settle on the dark bracelet of the Schuylkill River, which arrives from the north, pools and calms, before hurrying away with itself.
Cure yourself
, she thinks.
Look away
. But she cannot. Winter returns. February 6. The day she lost Anna.

“Katherine, come with us. Please,” Anna is demanding. “It’s the only way.” But Katherine doesn’t turn. It’s so bitter cold outside that ice has crystallized the view from their window, so cold in their room that Katherine has pulled the quilt up past her nose, curled her knees toward her chin. She breathes into her cupped hand, using her lungs like a furnace. She stares through the gray light of the room, toward Anna, who has cast her covers off and who stands before the window in her soft green sleeping gown. She wears her feet bare, and her hair, her fantastically unruly hair, rises out above her head like a woolen muff. Immune to the temperature, she traces Bennett’s name against the glass with a long, pale finger.

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” Katherine scolds, yanking her quilt up higher, toward her ears. “Get back into bed.”
Downstairs Jeannie Bea is preparing the morning meal—sausage, it seems; eggs; their father’s coffee. Katherine can smell the butter as it begins to heat, hear the bang of a spoon against a pan, and now she hears Mother down the hall, buttoning herself into her Sunday suit, no doubt. The same forbidding suit each Sunday, the same stiff hat, the same pair of commonsense boots.

“You’re impossible,” Anna says.

“And you’re like a child.”

“Nearly a full moon last night,” Anna says. “Didn’t you see?”

“I was sleeping,” Katherine says.

“But the moon,” Anna says, “was huge.” She takes two dainty steps toward Katherine’s bed and then yanks the quilt straight down—a sudden draft of cold.

“Anna!” Katherine protests. Her eyes are small, swollen ridges of exhaustion.

Anna crawls in, piling the quilt on top of them both.

“I could sell you,” Katherine says, “as ice.” Despite the abhorrent blast of arctic air, she laughs into her sister’s hair, which has massed itself over her pillow like lost spring vines.

“They could sell you as coal,” says Anna. “Kindling. You’d make someone a fortune.”

“I’ll make my own fortune someday, thank you.”

“Don’t start. You’ll sound like Mother.”

Katherine shudders, and Anna laughs, and for a moment
they lie there taking the heat and the cold from each other until finally Katherine’s warmth wins out.

“Mother’s going to insist on church,” Katherine says. “I’ve heard her getting ready.”

“We’ll go, and I’ll be perfectly well behaved,” Anna says. “I’ll sing the hymns, say my hellos. Give a nod to Alan Carver.”

“Your Mr. Carver’s found his match,” Katherine reminds her, though of course she doesn’t need to, of course it was scandalous the way Anna carried on, flouting the poor man at every turn until finally—it took a laughably long time—he dispensed with her, too, showing up at the Academy one evening with Sophia Crawford on his arm—Sophia, with her leonine face and unavoidably colossal nose.