Dangerous Neighbors (7 page)

“We’ve been at the beach,” Katherine said, “collecting clams.”

“Fine sport that is,” Alan answered, touching his finger to his head, finding the meandering bead of sweat and interrupting its journey.

“I don’t go in for clams myself,” Anna said. “That’s Katherine’s talent.” A flutter of unchaperoned girls had come down upon them, and they were laughing behind their hands, doing a poor job of keeping the various flowers in their hair. One hibiscus had turned upside down and clung to the girl’s auburn hair like a third ear.

“What’s that, then?” asked Alan, leaning forward to hear what Anna had said. She tipped back on her heels. Katherine stopped her with a hard clench of her arm.

“The clams are Katherine’s pleasure,” Anna said. “Not mine.”

“And what would yours be, then?”

“Sweets. My pleasure is sweets.” She nodded her head affirmatively in a way, Katherine realized, that would give Alan instant hope.

“Sherbet?” Alan asked, raising one eyebrow above the frame of his spectacles.

“Heavens no. Pies. Cranberry. I have a friend …”

“Oh, honestly,” Katherine said, and now she looked through the crowds of the parlor hall in search of their father. He wouldn’t be found. She hoped Mother would have a change of heart and salvage the moment with her arrogant competence. She put that hope aside.

“Katherine has many talents,” she heard her sister say.

“Of course,” Alan said politely. What else would he say? “She is your sister.”

“No, actually. I’m hers. Did you know, for example, that Katherine sings?”

“Is that right, then?”

“Sweet as a bird. And at school she wins the prize for elocution. Every single year she does. She hasn’t the least competition.”

Katherine felt her face go warm. She saw Alan straining to give her his attention—a courtesy to Anna, who was growing more animated and beautiful the longer she went on.

“Oh,” Anna said now, as if she’d only just remembered. “And Katherine dances. When Katherine dances, no one else should take the floor.”

“You’re growing tiresome, Anna.” Katherine clamped her upper arm even harder across Anna’s. Anna gave her a look, squeezed back, and continued.

“Surely you must dance, too?” Alan inquired, another bead of sweat forming at that part in his hair. The parlor had grown more crowded, and still Father had not come, and a group of girls in pastel dresses had gained their introduction to the slender commodores. Anna already had her boy at home. Katherine was tethered, doing her duty.

“Anna dances a fine quadrille,” Katherine said.

“Anyone can dance the quadrille,” Anna said. “Katherine excels at the new valse.”

“No,” Katherine said, “I don’t. I’ve hardly practiced.”

“Katherine never needs to practice,” Anna insisted. “All
she needs is music, and when music plays, she dances. She ice-skates, too. Better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Isn’t that so, my Katherine?”

Katherine leaned close to Anna and hissed, “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Embarrassing myself?” Anna said, acting shocked. “How? My sister”—she turned to Alan then, looked him squarely in the eyes, and smiled—“is terribly modest. I have to do all her bragging for her.”

“Anna,” Katherine said loudly now, “stop.”

But Anna continued, pointing past the parlor and in through the door of the ballroom, where the musicians had begun to arrive, carrying their instruments in warped little boxes and taking small steps in their shoes. “The time is nigh,” she said. “The hour approaches.”

“Perhaps you’ll show me your new valse,” Alan said, gnawing the back of his tongue and turning, resignedly, to Katherine. The shoulders he carried up toward his ears had sunk. He’d stopped cradling that pocket watch. It had been a charade for him, too, Katherine realized. Something in him had relaxed. Anna had been right, again. And ruder than Katherine would forgive.

“It would be my pleasure, Alan,” Katherine said, bowing her head and squeezing Anna’s arm so hard in hers that afterward Anna showed her the bloom of the bruise on her arm—the almost midnight colors.

“It would be my pleasure,” Anna said, mocking Katherine later as they lay beside each other in those beds. “My pleasure, my pleasure, my pleasure.”

“You are so entirely ungracious, Anna,” Katherine declared, her mocha-colored dress in a crumple on the floor, her hair spread out against the pillow, still damp with the smells of the sea. Beyond them the tide came in, and the breeze riffled the flap doors of the striped beach canopies. There was the lifted-high smell of lit cigars. There was laughter from somewhere deep in the dark of the alley. The commodores’ ships, Katherine thought, were anchored in for the night, but the commodores had all gone missing.

“And you, my love,” Anna said. “You’re perfect.”

“You’d be easy to hate,” Katherine said. “If I did not love you.”

A
FTER
C
APE
M
AY
, A
NNA KEPT LYING
. S
HE DID ABSOLUTELY
nothing to reward Katherine for her faithfulness. Katherine should have seen the next thing coming, but she hadn’t. She had allowed herself to believe, in Cape May, that she’d won some part of Anna back. “You’re perfect,” Anna had said. Didn’t she mean it?

But then, on a Saturday, Katherine woke to a fever and the world swam, liquid and hot before her eyes. When she finally focused, Anna was lying propped up on one elbow, watching her.

“You’ve been talking in your sleep,” Anna told her.

Katherine remembered nothing, not even the tail end of a dream. She tried to lift her head, but everything hurt. “My head is buried underground,” she said, her words sticking to the roof of her mouth, to her tongue. A bead of sweat had detached itself from the base of one ear and begun to dribble down her neck.

“I’m going to have Jeannie Bea bring you juice,” Anna told her, rising, planting her bare feet on the floor. Her hair was frizzing all around her face. Her eyes were bright. “You don’t look right.”

“Don’t go, Anna.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Just stay here, won’t you? I can’t even lift my head to drink.” Katherine closed her eyes and allowed a wave of illness to wash in beneath her, then to roll over her like a tide. “I feel seasick,” she said. Cape May returned. The feel of the sun on her neck. The walks beside her father along the sea. The valses—two—that she had danced with Alan while Anna stood along one crowded wall with Father, watching. Alan had led Katherine with surprising grace. He had lost all his tics within the music, and Katherine, for a moment, had imagined him a commodore, someone she had chosen for herself. “You were brilliant,” Anna told Katherine later. Then: “Wait until I tell Bennett.” Katherine had moaned at the thought of it. She moaned now, certain that Anna had already told, that she and Bennett had laughed together at Katherine in a way that Anna would never equate with humiliation, but that Katherine would.

“I’m getting Jeannie Bea,” Anna told her.

“Nothing will help. Just stay.”

“Jeannie Bea will know what to do. She always has the cure.”

Katherine sank her head deeper into her goose-down pillow and conjured the full moon of Jeannie Bea’s face—Jeannie Bea, who had been part of Katherine’s life since forever, when Pa decided (Katherine had always been
certain that it had been Pa) that the girls needed a Jeannie Bea to raise them. That they’d need someone who could warm their milk and fix their hair, who could button them into their dresses. Katherine didn’t know what life would have been without Jeannie Bea, who never married for the family’s sake, who took care.

Anna was slipping across the floor, going out. There was a horse in the street, three stories down. There were birds or something that sounded like birds, and then there was nothing. Katherine closed her eyes and another wave washed in. Her hair was damp, her nightgown, too.

“Child.” It was Jeannie Bea now, her broad hand on Katherine’s forehead. “Child, where did you get this fever?” Jeannie Bea smelled like cinnamon and fried pepper, like the darkened edges of an omelet.

“She was talking in her sleep,” Anna said from within the cook’s shadow.

“It’s just a fever,” Katherine moaned.

“A compress for your head,” Jeannie Bea said. “A glass of fresh-squeezed.” Producing these things, she lifted Katherine’s head with her wide, chocolate-colored hand, and tipped the glass of juice toward her lips. She was slow, she was gentle as a mother. “You take the day off, love,” Jeannie Bea told her. “Get some rest.”

The juice felt hot in Katherine’s mouth. “Thank you, Jeannie Bea,” she said.

“Fever has no business here,” the cook told her. “It’ll be off soon enough.” She tipped in another swallow of juice, then eased Katherine’s head back down to the pillow. She lifted the compress from Katherine’s head and smoothed the wet hair from her face. All this time, Katherine was aware of Anna standing there—a sway of color behind the solid dark of Jeannie Bea. Katherine felt the compress layered in across her brow. She closed her eyes and the wave was still beneath her.

After that, Katherine sank into near oblivion. She was aware, but only vaguely, of voices and faces, in and out. She felt her father near, in his dark suit. She heard her mother’s voice in the hallway. Anna was there, then Anna was gone, then Anna didn’t come back, and the waves washed in and Katherine rode them. Once she heard the squeal of a pig out in the street, the sound of someone chasing. Twice the compress on her brow was changed. Sometimes Jeannie Bea cradled Katherine’s head and lifted a glass to her lips.

“Where’s Anna?” Katherine remembered asking.

“She’s gone off,” Jeannie Bea told her. “She’ll come back.”

It was morning, then noon. On the third floor of Delancey Street the air was hot. Katherine’s nightgown was like a crust of skin. Her hair soaked through, then dried. When Katherine opened her eyes now, she didn’t
feel so seasick. She felt the silence instead, the absence of Anna.

“Jeannie Bea,” Katherine said when the cook arrived with toast, “where has she gone to?”

“Don’t know, my child. I’ve had my eyes on you.”

By two in the afternoon, the fever had broken. Still the room tilted when Katherine tried to stand up. “You just stay put,” Jeannie Bea said when she brought Katherine a large pitcher of iced water with which she might rinse her crusted limbs.

“Anna’s been gone too long.”

“It’s early afternoon, child. Your sister will come back.”

Time wobbled. Katherine worried. She could sit up now on her own, look across the room without a wave washing in, and calculate the many hours Anna had been gone, the possibilities suggested by her absence. The implications. Had Anna been sick, Katherine would not have left her side. She knew as much for certain.

Katherine ran the sponge down her long limbs, felt the cool of the pitcher water. She slipped from the old nightgown into a new one. She sat in bed and turned the pages of
Moby-Dick
, comprehending nothing, the words a blur, the room around her only eventually losing its wobble. Finally Katherine stood at the bedroom window and waited for her sister to come home. Stood there braced against the windowsill, the heat of that summer day still rising.

Beyond the window there was a gathering of clouds at the far end of the sky, no threat of rain. One block east Sarah O’Brien was playing the piano with her window shoved open, that tedious Schubert she’d been flat-fingering all month, for her cousin’s wedding. Which cousin, Katherine couldn’t remember and wouldn’t now, for Anna was the one who’d collected the gossip in the first place and had brought it back, and the truth was, with Anna gone, Katherine didn’t feel safe. She felt a flush of heat, and then, odd and wonderful, a breeze.

There was a squabble outside, a clatter. A razzling disturbance two neighbors’ yards down. Pig bedlam, Katherine realized, the same pig, it must have been, that she’d heard earlier on, and now there it was, in the blooming front garden of the Chauncers—an anarchy of spotted skin, corked tail, hoofed feet, and a young man in too-big, broken boots, with a tear up the seam of one sleeve and trousers loose at the hips, the seat of his pants good and faded. He was crouching to make himself pig-sized, cornering the hot squealing near an old bush. Thrusting the window higher and leaning out into the day, Katherine could make out the sweet talk between him and the pig, the young man doing most of the talking, promising home, that’s what he was saying: “Boy, I’m taking you home. You’ve done and gotten yourself lost. Your master is waiting.”

Katherine felt unsteady on her feet. She felt blessed by the
breeze and by the young man below, who kept on standing and standing, half-crouched at the Chauncers’, while the pig pawed the dirt and wagged its head and looked for an out. He was the most patient creature Katherine had ever seen—the young man in his loose trousers. He was going to wait, and he would not threaten. He would win, in the end, and take that pig home.

It was as if, Katherine decided, the young man utterly understood the pig’s predicament—had put himself right in its place. As if he knew how the pig felt to be found after all the trouble the pig had done to get itself lost. “You get yourself together, now,” the young man was saying. “You don’t be afraid. Folks is missing you.” The whole transaction going on in profile and the pig out there with the long slash of a smile, not squealing and not quite so angry, not plowing trenches into the shade of the red camellia bush.