Dangerous Neighbors (16 page)

“That fire had a mind of its own,” Katherine says. She shudders and wipes her face with her hand, streaking her fist with a layer of soot.

“Oh well, now,” Laura says. “Don’t we all?” And just as she says it, Lottie rouses—opens her eyes and whimpers.

“She’s a good girl.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“No more than the rest of us. How is your sister?”

“She’s beside herself and might not ever forgive me,” Laura says, but then she smiles. “I better get back to her now, show her Lottie’s fine.”

“You’ll be fine, too, then?”

“We leave for home tomorrow. And you?”

“Home is just across the river,” Katherine says. Lottie’s whimper is threatening to turn into a cry. Laura bounces her slightly, but her fussing continues.

“I need to go,” Laura says. “But here,” she says. She digs a card out of her pocket, an engraved address. “Write me in care of my sister. Write and tell me how you are.”

Katherine kisses little Lottie on the softest part of her
head. She kisses Laura’s cheek good-bye. She will write, she thinks. She will write, she will hold on, but for now, her arms empty, the rooftop crowd dissipating, fighting free, headed home with their strange tales about the future, she has only one thing left to do, and that is to run—to work herself out of the Main Exhibition Building, and out onto the street, in search of William.

D
OWN ON
E
LM IT IS CHAR AND PHOSPHORESCENT LIGHT
. The heat between planks. The splinter pop of barrels. There are ghost faces in the windows that still remain in the ruined shacks of Shantytown—a place built with such haste and consumed inside a single day. On the wing tips of the scattered, dying flames, spirits rise.

Nearly dark, and the throngs of people are headed home, cramming the streetcars and trains, walking side by side over the Girard Avenue Bridge, holding on to each other for dear life. The future has been saved, and always, the future is at risk. Nothing is sure. Nothing is certain.

Alone, Katherine veers too close to the burnt-out side of Elm. She won’t go home, she has decided, until she finds William and his mutt, until she knows that in saving others he has also saved himself, as Katherine, too, has been saved that day. By Laura. By Lottie. Yes, by Bennett.
Your name was Anna’s last word. The last thing your sister ever said
.

“Anna.” Katherine says her sister’s name out loud, and suddenly a scene from the past floats in—a scene of the sisters together, before Bennett, before the Centennial,
before any one of them had come to harm. A scene that she wants to remember today, and also tomorrow. A scene that is Katherine’s to protect.

It is late April, the twins’ birthday. Adelina Patti has come to town, and Pa has gotten the girls tickets to the Academy of Music—two seats near the stage. It is a beautiful day turned almost evening. The girls leave for the Academy just after six—Anna in coral pink and Katherine in a dress that is either black or blue, depending on how she chooses to stand in the sinking sun. Jeannie Bea has helped the girls with their hair, Anna lacing a red rose into hers at the very last moment.

“Look at you,” Pa has said admiringly, looking up from his dinner, which he is eating alone, for Mother has gone out to a meeting. He looks at them both for a very long time. “You are my beauties,” he says. “Happy birthday.”

Arm in arm they go, Katherine and Anna. Through the wide front door, down the marble stoop, where Gemma yawns as Anna touches her slender finger to the pink triangle of the dear cat’s nose. Now they are headed south on Delancey, and over through the square, where lovers are about, women with children, a large man with a larger cigar. Turning onto Walnut, they stroll. Stopping, they press their faces against the glass-fronted stores, exclaiming over the things they’d buy or wouldn’t, for they have time, they have each other, they have everything and cannot know it. Broad
Street is a chaos of horses and streetcars, of vendors, of tin signs. For a moment it looks as if Kiralfy’s Alhambra Palace is on fire—its four domes catching the sun and its stained-glass windows alive. To come upon Broad requires an act of faith, and Katherine and Anna are patient, they wait, they stand together taking the wide scene in, Anna not pulling ahead.

“Do you suppose she’s already inside?” Anna asks, meaning the great Adelina Patti, the dark-haired opera sensation, now in her thirtieth year. She has sung in Saint Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Paris, London, Italy, Spain, on every important American stage. She sang for the Lincolns after the death of their son. She married a marquis. She sings Rossini, Verdi, Donizetti, Mozart, and if the audience demands it, she will sing her intrepid “Home, Sweet Home,” and tonight Katherine and Anna will hear her sing, for they have planned this together; they have planned it for weeks. It is the secret that they have held between them: They will ask the great Adelina to sing them “Home, Sweet Home.” Calling out to her, from their velvet seats.

A carriage drawn by two chestnut horses with plumed harnesses discharges the first proper couple of the evening. The gentleman wears a silk hat and a white tie. His wife gathers her elaborate skirt and begins to ascend the wide stairs of the Academy. Someone has already gone ahead and lit the gas lamps, and now as more carriages arrive the
Academy steps are overwhelmed, and Broad Street becomes a tide. Anna and Katherine, coral and dark, are swept up in the force of it. They’re up the stairs, through the doors into the lobby.

It is another world inside. It is stone sheen, gold, and gaslight. “Oh, Anna,” Katherine says, and Anna presses her hand to her heart. Even then, even before she knows what will be stolen from her, even before she is aware of the possibility, Katherine wants every inch of this one birthday evening for keeps. She wants to lodge it deep, for all of time. She leads the way up the stairs and through the crowds and toward an arch and through a door and down the aisle toward their cushioned seats, holding Anna’s hand. High above is the crystal chandelier, and Anna won’t take her eyes off it; in Anna’s eyes it shines. It’s like the icicles that form on the edge of a roof when the sun gets trapped inside—a cascade of ice and sun.

“Like sitting inside a jewelry box,” Anna whispers, and Katherine nods.

Everything is tiered. Everything is solid. The Corinthian columns at the proscenium. The private boxes at the theater’s edge. The sapphire star in the hair of the woman seated directly ahead. For the moment it is forgotten that Adelina Patti has come to sing, that somewhere backstage she is transforming herself into Zerlina, but soon the curtain will rise. Soon. Though Katherine hopes that it will take forever.
That Katherine and Anna will belong, from now on, to all of this.

Katherine lifts her eyes to the balcony nearest the stage, along the east side of the Academy, which seems, like all the balconies, to float on air, like a bank of clouds in a gold and cranberry sky. The box is crowded with the well-dressed rich eager for Patti to take the stage—eight of them leaning and bending toward one another, two women with fans batting the air, one woman in black, the plainest woman Katherine has ever seen, even plainer than her mother.

Beside her sits a man with a straight back and a preoccupied aspect, as if he’s come for obligation’s sake but is somewhere else entirely in his head. He leans forward for a moment, rests his chin in one hand, and when he leans back, Katherine sees a woman, perhaps forty years old, looking grim and lifeless—immune, it seems, to the anticipatory chitter, the starlit chandelier, the stone sheen and jeweled gold, the curtain that will soon reveal all. She is stern, unyielding, while the conversation around her goes on, the batting of the air with oversize fans. It’s as if the woman isn’t really there at all, as if it is, in fact, a cloud she is on, a height she has ascended to on her own. A distance she has forged and holds to and must, Katherine thinks, be interfered with, broken.

Anna leans against Katherine and asks, “What are you staring at?”

“That woman. There. Do you see her?” Katherine gestures.

“Oh,” Anna says, for she’s Katherine’s twin; she understands all.

“However does one grow so sad as that?”

“Or so old?” Anna says, and she shudders.

“She seems lonely, doesn’t she? Seems like she’s not really here.”

“Don’t let me get old,” Anna says. “You have to promise.”

Katherine turns and looks deep inside her sister’s green eyes. “I promise you,” she says.

And now the lights are going down, the curtain rising. Now all of those who have gathered here turn their attention to the stage. Now the flower in Anna’s hair seems to open even broader, and Adelina Patti takes the stage.

“She’s singing to me,” Anna says. “Do you hear it?”

“She’s singing to both of us,” Katherine says.

T
HE BRIGADES ARE GONE
. T
HE
S
HANTYTOWN FIRE
has been beaten to the ground. The rescued exiles of the Centennial are crossing the widest bridge ever built, headed home. It is night, it is dark, the battle’s over. The Schuylkill holds the reflections of the gas lamps on its back.

Over shoulders, between satchels, through the windows of passing carriages, Katherine strains to find him. Down the smoldering alleys that break south off of Elm, she turns. The investigators are already stomping about. The tavern owners are spent, dazed, culpable, gaunt. The fat lady lies in a heap beside the still-standing Titusville well, as if waiting for someone to sign her up for a new show. The guests of the Globe and the Trans-Continental are pacing the streets, confused and undecided, their best worldly goods in their hands. A cook runs about with a silver bowl inverted like a hat upon his head. But where is William, and his mutt?

The end of the day has become the certainty of night. The stink of the dead fire is overwhelming. Katherine has circled around, has circled back. Someone calls to her and asks if she is all right, but she doesn’t dare to answer. For right
then, from a distance down Belmont, Katherine hears the barking of a dog, and something tells her—a hunch—that it’s that mutt. Lifting her skirts to her knees, she runs—past the Globe toward Operti’s, where there is no music in the air, only the evening’s aftermath, the
sizzle-pop
.

The moon is high and lights her way. The sound of the mutt draws nearer. Katherine hears the
thwack
and
thwack
of the mutt’s sooted tail, and sees the dog at last. Now she looks past it, toward Operti’s, which has miraculously escaped the wrath of the fire. On Operti’s steps sits the girl—her gold cage in her hand, empty.

“Honey,” Katherine calls to her, breathless. “Honey, what happened?”

“I can’t find my bird,” the girl cries out.

Katherine throws her arms around the child and sits. She presses her cheek against the child’s cheek, trying to assess the situation, to imagine where the child’s father has gone, how an entire orchestra has vanished. The fire began before Signor Giuseppe Operti could have ever lifted his baton. But where are the musicians? And where is the bird? And where is William?

“Birds fly,” Katherine tells the child. “I’m sure your Snow is all right. Safe somewhere in a tree.”

But the girl can no longer hold back her tears. She crumbles inside Katherine’s arms, buries her head in Katherine’s shoulder. She lets the gold cage topple onto the ground,
and the mutt, hearing the clatter, comes closer, barks again.

“Snow’s my best friend,” the child murmurs.

“I understand,” Katherine says.

They sit in the dark on those steps, and the mutt barks and chases its tail. Katherine is sure the child’s father is out there, looking for his girl—panicked, too, over what seems lost, over all that will always be lost until and unless it is finally found. Katherine remembers the day on the river, the sight of Bennett sprawled out, plunging his hand through the portal of ice. He would have gone in after Anna. They wouldn’t let him. He’s lived with that. She must forgive him. She must forgive herself.

“What if Snow doesn’t come back?” the child asks, and Katherine says, “Then you will always have Snow in your heart,” and now the child sobs harder, and Katherine, too, allows her own tears to fall. Anna in her heart, she thinks. Katherine living, staying alive, so that Anna lives within.