Dangerous Neighbors (2 page)

No, Bennett. We cannot talk. We will
never
talk. I’ve nothing to tell you
.

But that is the past, behind her. Today is today, and Katherine hurries up Chestnut, past the banks, past the Custom House and Independence Hall. At Eighth Street she turns and heads south, then turns again, west onto Locust, until the Academy of Music is in sight. On her side of Broad Street is Kiralfy’s Alhambra Palace—Moorish and tight, arched, a bright splash of white and color out of sync even with a city that has turned itself into a circus for the year.

From high above Broad, chimes announce the hour: four o’clock. In the street the horses twitch their ears toward the song; the chestnut vendors lift their chins. An old woman staggers to the street to get a view. Katherine waits until the traffic clears, then lifts her skirts and runs. By the time she reaches the arched entrance of the Colosseum, her lungs feel sucked of air.

She moves through the door, and pays. She turns and stands before the globular world of the cyclorama—“Paris by Night,” the advertisements call it. Either the wide
boulevards of that French city no longer live in Paris, or someone has, as all the papers promised, pulled off a masterly trick. There are the painted gaslights that seem to flicker. There is the streaming and surging of the Seine. There are the buildings projecting and receding, the shadows in doorways, the women talking, a cat asleep in an alley set to stir, and one man in particular, putting a flame to his pipe. “Paris by Night” has been canvased onto the round interior walls of the Colosseum, more alive than anything.

In the press of the strangers around her, Katherine is aware of a girl with dark hair at her elbow, taking the spectacle in and turning now to Katherine for some kind of an explanation, but Katherine hasn’t time for that. “Your mama’s that way,” Katherine says, turning her shoulder like her mother might have done and walking toward the celestial sky, where it is night, and the moon is bright, and the stars can see.

“They didn’t miss a detail, did they?” a stranger remarks. “Saves you the trouble of a long boat ride.”

“I wouldn’t mind the ride,” Katherine murmurs.

“The sea is fine,” declares the woman, “save in a storm.”

An odd thing to say, except—no sooner has the stranger spoken than the whole Colosseum goes dark and a storm drives in, and now rain falls hard over Paris, torrents of it streaming down. Amid shouts of astonishment and applause, the rains still come, until gradually, soundlessly,
the clouds rub off and the moon again shines high. The stranger is gone. Another child stands beside Katherine, a little boy dressed in a blue sailor suit, who calls for his father until his father comes and hoists him up onto his shoulders.

“It was raining,” the boy tells his father.

“I know it was.”

“It was raining and I didn’t get wet.”

“It’s the age of miracles, son.”

Beneath the moon and the stars, Paris is shining. The boulevards, the river, the haberdasheries, the windows of pastry shops, the streetlamps. At an open-air café, a couple dances, and at the far end of the widest boulevard a poodle at the end of its leash wags its tail. Katherine takes it all in, for here she is, spending her last day on earth in Paris, after a storm. It is more beauty than she bargained for. It hurts to think about all that goes on in the world that she has never known and will not now. It hurts that the real Paris is far away across the ocean and that she will never see it.

She takes her time. She finds her way to the Otis elevator and when the big doors slide open, she climbs in, rides the smug machine with the wild-eyed crowd all the way to the balconied tower, where there are yet more stairs to climb, views to be had, but there is also—Katherine has planned on this—a band of windows just above the thick drum of the cyclorama. The windows open easily onto the slanted roof. Where the roof completes itself there is a straight drop
toward the hard scape of the city. Katherine has stood at Broad and Locust, looking up, calculating the distance. She has considered the unbending nature of the street. The smack of absolution.

The others climb high. Their voices disappear into the narrow channel above. Katherine bends down to retie her boots with excruciating deliberation, until at last she is alone with her plan—alone in this round room with its unlocked windows, with Paris below and the balconies above. She moves with the utmost care—one leg through the nearest window and then the other, both hands steady on the wooden frame. A splinter catches in one finger. Her feet adjust to the mathematics of the roof. She turns to face the sky. Now with her heels dug in, she stands unnoticed on the slanting round of the roof, loosening the skirts around her knees with one hand and then the other, chewing at the splinter, which is not so deep. It waggles loose. She spits it out. She bleeds a little bit.

It is her day. She has only to shimmy herself down the slant of the roof toward the low parapet, then only to stand on the parapet and fly. Only to wait until five o’clock, when the final crowd of the day will surge onto the elevator and sink toward the bowels of Paris.

She breathes.

She listens to the exclamations of the onlookers above her head—the scrape of their boots on the elevated
platform, the tipsy exhilaration of their voices, the loud insistence, by a man with a contralto voice, that you can see Manayunk in the distance. “Look there,” he says, and the boots above Katherine’s head hurry over in one direction, and now a bird, a hawk with red in its feathers, flies near, and Katherine envies its wings.

She closes her eyes and when she opens them the eastern sky is still blue and the chestnut vendors on Broad are doing a fair business, and now Katherine smells the dying ashes of one well-behaved fire, the split skin of chestnuts. She thinks of how it will be in the air, and of how she must not rush this, must do it right, must do nothing at all at this very instant but watch the skies and the city. Lowering herself onto the roof, she braces herself against the angle with her heels, and sits with her back just shy of the window through which she has climbed.

Beneath the lid of the balcony a shadow has crept in. Above Katherine’s head the onlookers have quit their hopes of Manayunk for the eastern view, where a Spanish man-of-war and its parchment-colored masts has appeared on the long arm of the Delaware, or so she hears someone say. Katherine hears the grinding maw of the Otis on its way back up—how many more elevator trips, she wonders, until the Otis is put to bed for the night? She hears the rush and scuffle of feet above her head and in the tower stairways. She has, she reminds herself, all the time in the world. She
has Philadelphia and Paris at her feet, and the sky above, and now she fits her hand over her heart to quiet its patter.

Be still
.

Pulling her knees up to her chin, she loosens her hair. Down on Broad she sees the boy in his blue sailor suit being tugged along by his father, out of the way from the impatient hoof of a horse that seems atrociously ill-suited to its carriage. “Pay attention,” the father demands, loud enough for Katherine to hear, but the boy seems disoriented and undecided in the sunny streets of Philadelphia. He seems to have gone to Paris and stayed.

The bird, Katherine notices, is back. The hawk with its blood-colored feathers has circled near and come to rest on the parapet that rims this wide, circular roof, as if marking the spot from which Katherine herself will fly. The bird stares at her suspiciously, then cranks its head. It lifts its wings and settles them, tilts its head until she understands that it has a fascination with the window through which she has climbed. Its fascination spooks her.

“What is it?” Katherine asks the bird, and suddenly she suspects that she has been found out. It is in the bird’s stance, in the curious fixing of its stare, in the sudden darkening of the shadows above her, and when Katherine turns her own head and looks up, toward the window, she understands that once again Bennett has stalked her; he has come. As if Anna had sent him out on a mission to shadow
and protect her. As if her supremely selfish sister will not allow Katherine the one thing that she most wants and must have by the end of this day.

Katherine blinks, but the baker’s boy is still right there in the open window, insistent.

“Don’t,” he says as if he can read her mind. “Don’t do it.”

“How dare you?” She feels her heels slipping on the angled roof and digs them in. She presses her palms into the slant to gain more traction. She turns and looks again at him.

“I saw you running across Broad,” he says. “I knew.”

“I’m none of your business, Bennett. I never was. If you come within another inch of me, I’ll do it now,” she says. “I swear I will. Leave me be.”

He stays suspended—one leg through the window, his face too near. “I can’t let you,” he says.

But she can do anything she likes. She can still spread her wings and fly; let him explain it to somebody later; let him try, this time, to be the hero. When she is gone, what will it matter? Above her head, a baby has started to cry. Katherine digs her heels in harder and starts to stand, but the angle of the roof works against her. Instinctively she leans into the thick stone wall to catch her imperfect balance.

“Think of Anna,” Bennett says. “Think of her before you do this.”

“I
am
thinking of Anna,” Katherine says. “All the time.”

“So don’t be stupid.”

“Stupid?”
she says.

“Stupid, yes!” His anger is shocking. This gentle boy. Her sister’s lover. This baker of cranberry pies, sugar cookies, pecan tarts.

“I’m through serving Anna,” Katherine says. “I won’t walk in her shadow anymore. I make my own decisions, Bennett.” But the more she talks, the more she feels the purpose of the day burning off her courage. She knows as well as she knows anything at all that as long as she is alive, Anna’s ghost will be alive with her. A flicker and a flame. A hard knock against the heart. A voice she cannot altogether silence, nor altogether hear.

“Anna wouldn’t want this,” Bennett says, his one leg with its white trouser still punched through the window.

“You know nothing,” Katherine answers, “about what Anna wants right now. You hardly knew what she wanted when she was alive. She let you think that you did.”

But Katherine can’t hurt Bennett; she knows that. She can’t stop him from coming toward her, if that’s what he wants. Only one window is open, and he stands within it. He reaches out his hand; she will not take it.

“Leave me alone.”

“Climb off the roof.”

“You’ve no business here.”

“I’ve something to tell you.”

“Don’t you dare,” she says, “start with that.” But he has beat her. He has ruined everything, again. “Promise you’ll leave me alone, if I leave here.”

“I promise.”

“Prove it to me, Bennett.”

“Just trust me.”

“I don’t, and I won’t. You’re in my way.”

“Not anymore,” he says, retracting his long leg, leaving the window clear, all but for his hands. He reaches for her now—hauls her awkwardly up and through the window frame, which had released her to the sky. It is so much harder crawling back inside. The window is no longer wide, and she is no longer narrow. Bennett’s hands on her are an abrasion.

“I’m not doing this for you,” she says when her feet are through, her legs, her arms, the last trailing wisps of her too-many skirts. She shakes herself loose of him, straightens her hair, and stands by the window staring him down, daring him to say another word.

“Don’t follow me, Bennett,” she warns him. “Don’t ever again.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
P
HILADELPHIA IS A STEAM SWELL, AN ASH
pit, a scorcher. The next day and the next and the next, Katherine does not leave her house.

“Please,” Jeannie Bea, the cook, pleads with her. “Eat.”

“Love,” she says. “The strawberries are sweet.”

“Listen,” she says. “They’re bringing Master Charles’s honey to the door.”

But Katherine will have none of it. She paces, watching the world beyond her window. She hears the music of the fairgrounds. She remembers the beauty of Paris, the seduction of near flight, the unwanted touch of her sister’s lover. His hands pulling her to safety—the very same hands, she thinks, that could not save Anna. When she falls asleep she thinks of Anna. When she wakes, her sister’s ghost is near.

“It’s been months.” She hears her mother’s voice, the shrill of it, rising up the stairs.

“Let her be,” she hears her father answer. “Give it time.”

Time is all that Katherine now has, too much time to remember.