Dangerous Neighbors (3 page)

A
NNA WAS THE MORE DELICATE TWIN
. K
ATHERINE, ON
the other hand, was sturdy, so that even though she’d been born last, twenty minutes after Anna, she’d learned early on to keep one eye out for a sister who often stood too dangerously close to things—too close to the hooves of horses, too close to the flame in Jeannie Bea’s kitchen, too close to the trees during storms.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m watching.”

“You can see the same thing from here.”

“Not as well.”

“Well enough, Anna. Please.”

At night in winter Katherine would wake to find Anna at the wide-open window, leaning down toward the walk, where the moon, she said, had fallen. “Look at the moon,” she’d say. “Shattered by snow.”

“Mother will be angry, Anna. You’ll catch your death of cold.”

“She’ll only know if you tell her, and you won’t.”

“You can’t keep a cold a secret.”

“Be nice, Katherine. Come and see the moon.”

They were born twenty minutes apart and had the same ginger hair and green-gray eyes, though Anna’s were greener. Anna’s hair fell in natural curls, Katherine’s in the sort of waves that had to be improved by the J. D. Oppenheimer curling tube. Still, as they got older, Katherine put herself on guard, made herself responsible for interrupting Anna’s drift toward the perilous, for fixing the fences and defining the borders, the edges, the ends. Anna listened to Katherine when it was important, because Katherine’s talent had never been beauty; it was saving, rescue.

“Don’t go any farther than the rocks.”

“But the turtles live beyond the rocks.”

“I’m telling you: Don’t go. You’re not immortal.”

Anna would say that she was a cat like Gemma, with nine entire lives to spend, all nine precious and delicious. Katherine would roll her eyes. Only once, toward the end, when Gemma went and got herself lost, did it seem that Anna finally understood that something bad could happen—that it was within the realm of possibility.

But as soon as Gemma was found again, Anna was back climbing old oaks so that she might collect a nest, snatching a pine-and-berry wreath from a neighbor’s door, having to be dragged along, every day, to Girls’ High and Normal School on Sergeant Street. There the lessons were Shakespeare, algebra, pedagogy, and how to draw the
human figure from an odd clay model that hung like a slave from chains at the front of the room. Anna always sat in the back of the room, passing notes to Mary Phelps, polishing her shoes with the hem of her dress, and sketching Rhonda Whitleaf’s nose in profile.

“Sally Biddle asks too many questions,” she’d say on the way home. “She should have been a bird.”

“A bird?”

“So she could squawk all day and no one would notice.”

“You’re horrid.”

“She
is. Why don’t you notice?”

Then last April something happened; something changed. It was in the hours between noon and supper, and neither Mother nor Father were home. Jeannie Bea was in the kitchen, making terrapin stew, which Anna wouldn’t eat. “It’s disgusting,” she said. “Eating turtles. And besides, I don’t have to eat that; there’s pie for dessert.”

“Pie?”

“From the baker’s boy, Katherine.”

“What pie?”

“Cranberry pie. Delicious.”

“From the bakery?”

“It would have gone on day’s old. He likes me is all.”

Katherine had seen the boy at the bakery on Walnut giving Anna the eye. He was tall and his hair was soft,
disheveled. His teeth were white. Whenever Anna walked in with Katherine beside her, he’d give Anna the pearl of his smile. He’d give her extras of the sweet rolls they came for, and sometimes a slice of coconut pie. Anna had the world’s biggest sweet tooth; that was the truth. She would have eaten dessert for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if Mother had allowed it. What animal or bird or turtle ever suffered for the sake of a strawberry shortcake, a lemon meringue, or a cornstarch pudding, Anna reasoned. “Mother has her causes all mixed up,” she’d say, but never when Mother was near, for Mother would be on her then, with a lecture.

That afternoon in April, Anna had already sent word (by way of Jeannie Bea) to Miss Louise’s School of Elocution that she had fallen a bit under the weather, bribing Jeannie Bea with a pair of Jouvin real kid gloves picked up last fall at King, Seybert & Clothier.

“What did you do that for?” Katherine asked her.

“Because I had a pair already,” Anna said.

“No, I meant …”

Spared her elocution lesson, Anna was free to go, and why in the world wouldn’t Katherine consent to join her on a walk to Crowell & Granger, where the finest silks were on sale? From there they might go to the tailor at Dewees, who would fit them both, Anna was saying, for new dresses. Anna wanted one of those long jackets, to be drawn in tight
at the wrists and finished with wide cuffs and a deeply flounced skirt. She thought Katherine would look best in a one-piece dress with a darted bodice. It would be their birthday in a couple of weeks, and, Anna said, they had no choice but to turn seventeen in style together. Always together.

“We have the Christmas money,” Anna pleaded, and finally Katherine decided, What harm could be done? Did she really want to be her mother’s child? “It’s your minds that matter, girls,” Mother was perpetually saying, over peas, over stew. “Knowledge prepares you for life, not fashion.” Mother would prove her point by wearing the most disappointing styles. She’d leave her bonnets too wide. She’d wear the plainest cotton dresses. On the rare evenings when she accompanied their father to a function, she’d wear bustles from seasons past. The twins, especially Anna, tried not to be seen around town with their mother, but then again, Mother made that easy, with her schedule, her web of commitments to the Women’s Centennial Executive Committee and the Pavilion subcommittee and the general gatherings of the Froebelists, and the special convocations to discuss the suffrage planks and the massing of like-minded females inside the Unitarian Church. “It’s
your
future,” Mother would say with that glare of hers, “that I am fighting for.” Fighting so hard for the advancement of women that she was hardly ever at home.

“I have a gift for Bennett,” Anna confided that April day.

“A gift? What gift?”

“You’ll see,” she said.

“Father would kill you if he knew,” Katherine warned. “He’s got Alan Carver in mind for your future.”

“Alan Carver,” Anna said, “already wears glasses.”

“You can’t be serious.
That’s
your argument against Alan Carver?”

“That,” Anna said, “and one other thing: Alan Carver isn’t Bennett.”

“The Carvers take care of their women,” Katherine parroted her father in a false baritone.

“As if I need taking care of,” Anna said, and because she laughed, Katherine did, though suddenly she felt uneasy. She sensed that something had shifted between Anna and the baker’s boy. Katherine set her book of Homer aside, the pen with which she’d been making notes in a tight, blue script. She stood up to join her sister on yet another expedition. To stand guard. To make sure that nothing unforgivable happened in the pitch of an adventure.

Crowell’s was but a few doors from Dewees; for once Anna’s plan had some logic. Together they cut through Rittenhouse Square and headed down Walnut, where a flower vendor had set up a stall and was selling tulips, ivory-colored and, to Anna, irresistible.

“You couldn’t have waited until the way back home?”
Katherine asked as Anna settled a bunch into the crook of her arm.

“I’d have risked losing them,” Anna said.

It was a Saturday in April, full of sun. The harnesses on the horses in the streets looked gold instead of leather brown. The tulips in Anna’s arms were already beginning to undo themselves, but Anna was oblivious.

“Did you see?” she said, for they’d crossed the broadest boulevard and were reaching 13th. “His door was open.” Katherine turned and looked back. There had been a cloud of flour just outside the bakery door, the beginnings of tomorrow’s bread wafting out.

“Why are we hurrying?”

“So that he won’t see me.”

“I thought the point was for him to see you.”

“Not yet,” Anna said, the color high in her cheeks. “The point is not yet. The point is to come in later, when there’ll be no one but us in the store.” They walked then in silence.

At Crowell’s they encountered bolts upon bolts of silk; soon enough Katherine found the whole thing radically confusing. From across the room, Mrs. Childress noticed the girls and came to their aid. “What are we looking for today?” she wondered, asking first after their mother and father. Father was taking lunch at the Union League. Mother was hosting a butter sculptor on behalf of Mrs. Gillespie.

“A butter sculptor?” Mrs. Childress blinked.

“The artist,” Katherine explained, “of the head of Iolanthe. You know the one, at the Pavilion? She’s come all this way, from across the country.” Katherine had more to say and she would have said it, but Anna interrupted.

“We’re looking for something new,” she said, and Mrs. Childress, turning at once from Katherine to Anna, said as if Anna had been absolute and particular, “Ah. Then. I know just the thing.”

Within moments Mrs. Childress had cleared the long walnut counter and placed upon it swatches and samples so that Anna could study their choices. Anna took her time predicting just how they each would look in their proposed new colors folding into a carriage or spilling over the edge of the velvet couch in the living room. Anna knew how the dresses would appear in the glaze of the sun, and in the cameo photograph the sisters would have taken, a few weeks on, as they had for every birthday Katherine could remember. “Peridot for Katherine,” Anna said. “And crimson.” Looking up into Katherine’s eyes, then at Mrs. Childress. “Don’t you think?”

“You’re agreed, dears?” Mrs. Childress asked after Katherine nodded yes,
Crimson, I guess, and peridot
.

“This one for me,” Anna said, fingering the one bolt of creamiest silk, silk the color of her tulips, of a wedding.

“You’re sure, then?” asked Mrs. Childress.

“I am.” And then it was time to measure out the yardage, to talk about styles and trim, to sort through button boxes, spools of colored thread. In all of this, there was a leftover length of velvet ribbon—a bright red with just a hint of blue. “We’ll take this, too,” Anna said, and then, turning to Katherine, said, “For Bennett.”

It was three thirty before the girls were done at Crowell’s and then Dewees, where Samuel Black, the family tailor, had been happy to see them. The sun was laying itself down Walnut Street and the girls were walking, shading their eyes against the yellow glare. Once they reached 12th, Anna hurried faster—afraid, Katherine was left to assume, of Bennett’s bakery closing for the day. She was a whole half block ahead and then an even greater distance, the tulips still there, in the crook of her arm. Finally she disappeared into the puff of fallen bakery flour, as if she were the last act in a smoke-and-mirrors magic show.

Katherine walked on, feeling too queasy to walk any faster. When she reached the door of the bakery she stopped and leaned against it, out of the glare of the sun, forcing herself to look toward the street, to betray not a hint of curiosity. If Anna wouldn’t tell, Katherine wouldn’t ask. She would act as if this didn’t matter to her, as if Bennett were still nothing more than a passing fancy.

Only later would Anna volunteer the secret that she’d
kept from Katherine all afternoon long. “I found a nest,” she said. “In the locust tree out front. Right there on one of the lowest branches. Inside was the half shell of an egg. A robin’s egg. Oh, Katherine. It was gorgeous.”

It was evening. They were in bed. They’d had their supper, but Anna hadn’t eaten. Anna had suggested to Katherine, across the table, that the real meal waited for them, under her bed.

“You found a nest?” Katherine asked, sucking the juice of cranberry pie off of one finger. It wasn’t the secret she’d expected.

“It fit inside my purse,” Anna said. “I tied it with the red ribbon.”

“But I was with you.”

“Not the whole time.”

Katherine lay in her bed, considering the wedge of moon that was beginning to push its light through their square window. She lay there in silence, weighing questions, consequences, Bennett and Anna, and Anna and Katherine, the mathematics of three against two. She considered the hard, intractable fact that Anna and Bennett would soon have words they would not have to say and a habit of turning toward one another that shouldered others away. How many times had Anna hurried east down Walnut, humming some song, holding a polished shell in her hand, a perfect pod of peas, a picture postcard acquired from the old bookseller
at the farmer’s market? Always something in her bag or her pockets for Bennett. “I didn’t steal it, Bennett. I asked the man how much it was and he said that I could have it for free if only I could guess where the card came from. I guessed Paris, Bennett, and I was right. That woman’s dress? That fall of her collar? That’s how I knew.” How many times? And Katherine had allowed herself to think that none of it meant very much.

She’d allowed herself to go on believing that it was still, in the end, the invincible twins. That she was equal half to an equal. Now and forever.

“He’s just a boy,” Anna said that night after the moon had grown brighter. “A baker’s boy. Katherine?”

But Katherine made like she’d fallen asleep. She felt the ache in her teeth from too much cranberry sugar. She felt her whole heart heavy in her chest. It was true: Anna had fallen in love with Bennett; Katherine had lost her.

“What is the harm?” Anna insisted, against the silence. “Who am I hurting?”

And Katherine wanted to say,
Me, Anna! Me!
But the losses were Katherine’s alone. She imagined Anna confiding in Bennett, tracing out a future. She saw now how Anna’s dreams were filled with marzipan and apricot kernels, how they were pierced by a boy whose eyes were sky—changeable and cloud-swept.

That night, Katherine imagined, Anna dreamed of
Bennett—her eyes wide to the moon beyond their windows, alert to the first hint of sun. That night Katherine also dreamed of Bennett. She dreamed of Anna with Bennett. But mostly she dreamed of Anna before Bennett, when Anna was hers alone.