by Beth Kephart
EGMONT
We bring stories to life
First published by Egmont USA/Laura Geringer Books, 2010
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © Beth Kephart, 2010 All rights reserved
www.egmontusa.com
www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kephart, Beth.
Dangerous neighbors / Beth Kephart.
p. cm.
Summary: Set against the backdrop of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Katherine cannot forgive herself when her beloved twin sister dies, and she feels that her only course of action is to follow suit.
eISBN: 978-1-60684-290-4
[1. Twins—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Death—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction.
5. Guilt—Fiction. 6. Centennial Exhibition (1876 : Philadelphia, Pa.)—
Fiction. 7. Philadelphia (Pa.)—History—19th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K438Dan 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2010011249
CPSIA tracking label information:
Random House Production • 1745 Broadway • New York, NY 10019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
v3.1
For
Laura Geringer.
Because.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Sources
End Notes
About the Author
IT IS 1876, THE HEIGHT OF THE CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION in Philadelphia. Katherine has lost her twin sister, Anna, and though it was an accident, Katherine remains convinced that Anna’s death was her fault. One wickedly hot September day, Katherine sets out for the exhibition grounds to cut short the life she is no longer willing to live.
This is the story of what happens.
FROM UP HIGH, EVERYTHING SEEMS TO SPILL FROM ITSELF. Everything is shadowed. The cool at the base of trees. The swollen lip of river. The dark beneath the cliff stones at Rockland, where Katherine had gone last week—taken the steamer, hiked to the summit, and stayed until almost too late. “Oh, Katherine,” her mother had sighed the next day, her hand on the door, the velvet streamers falling crooked from her hat, her eyes fixed on the mud on Katherine’s skirt. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“I know what you wish.”
“I’m off to Mrs. Gillespie’s.”
“I know that, too.”
Never enough sky. Never near enough to the scooped-out wings of the hawk. Katherine walks the ridge above the river or goes all the way to George’s Hill and stands two hundred and ten feet above high tide—keeping her distance from the boys and their kites, the foreigners with their funny talk and funny way of climbing. Keeping her distance to find the courage for what will be, she has decided—her last escape. Because Anna, her twin, has died, and she had no business dying. Because Anna’s body, once a mirror of Katherine’s own, is in a cherrywood box dug deep into the side of Laurel Hill.
Don’t let me get old, Katherine can almost hear Anna saying. And look: Congratulations, Katherine! You have granted your sister her one ill-begotten wish.
Katherine climbs and tells no one where she is. She’s climbed through February and March, through April and May, June and July. Sometimes Katherine has left the house in a light wool dress with a scarf looped loose around her neck and then, of a sudden, the weather has changed. In has blown an infiltrating wind and there Katherine has stood on Belmont Plateau, all the way up, inside the cage of the Sawyer Observatory, securing the scarf around her chin. She has stood and stared out onto the coves and hollows of the Centennial park; the great copper dome of Saints Peter and Paul; the houses, theaters, banks set tight upon the city’s checkerboard squares. She has studied the unfinished pile of City Hall—like a half-baked cake, she has thought, with too much buttercream. It has never mattered how fiercely the weather has blown: Katherine has remained up high, seeking reconciliation or redemption, and finding neither.
“Anna,” Katherine says aloud, “how could you?”
At home, meanwhile, Katherine’s mother and father have gone on living—climbing down the stairs in the morning and taking their places in the dining room, where the sun falls flat across the table and where Jeannie Bea, the cook, serves eggs and scrapple. She brings Katherine’s father The Public Ledger and her mother the latest issue of The New Century for Women. Afterward Katherine’s mother plucks an old straw hat from the hook on the back wall. She fixes the contraption on her head and trails back toward the kitchen to check her reflection in the bottom of Jeannie Bea’s biggest copper pot. Then she steps through the hall and toward the front door, the whisper of her black overskirt fading to silence.
All the while Katherine’s father folds and unfolds the pages of his Ledger, scanning the advertisements for news of missing mules and piano lessons, proposals for coal, the offer for sale of hoisting machines and dumbwaiters, all of which, he firmly believes, are economic measures, portents. Katherine’s father has a mind for calculations. He has a knack for looking ahead and seeing the future, which is his job at the Philadelphia National Bank, but he had not looked ahead on behalf of Anna, and maybe Katherine will never forgive him for that. Maybe she will never forgive her mother either. Nor will her mother, preoccupied with tea and crackers, with women’s rights and unrealized freedoms, speak of it. There was to be no investigation—that’s what her mother had said. Katherine has slumped on the stoop of their house at night, waiting for her mother to come home from one of those inexorable ladies’ meetings. She has stood outside her mother’s bedroom door, afraid to knock. Let me tell you what happened, she has tried to say. Blame me so that you might forgive me, so that I might forgive myself.
But her mother has said, “What is gone now is gone.” She is brisk, efficient above all. The future lies in the future, she says, and never in the past. Katherine knows now what will happen when she, too, dies young. Life, more or less, will go on.
Katherine roams. Sometimes heading for the dark cave of bones at the Academy of Natural Sciences, sometimes for the chess room at the Mercantile Library, where she watches the games without comment. But mostly Katherine goes to the highest places she can find; and today, her very final day, she chooses the Colosseum. She has a plan; she will fly and soon feel nothing.
The summer has been stifling, but today there is air, at least. Katherine is wearing navy blue—an improvement, her mother had said, and that was all her mother had said earlier that day, staring at her over Jeannie Bea’s eggs at breakfast: “You’re looking more your age now, Katherine. Blue isn’t black; it’s more becoming.” Were Anna alive, she’d have rolled her eyes behind her hand and laughed at their mother talking about fashion. She’d have said, while they lay in bed that night, “And what color is Mother’s dress, is Mother’s every dress? Oh yes, I nearly forgot: she favors black.”
They buried
Anna in February when the ground was frozen. It took two men one week to ready the hole—to dig it out and shimmy it smooth. It was Katherine’s father who held Katherine back when the cherrywood box went in—his arm around her waist, one hand on her shoulder. She’d have jumped in, fallen. She’d have taken her place beside her sister—her dress muddy at the hem. “Let her go now, my darling. Let her go.” Her father’s words in her disbelieving ear.
Into a hole in a hill? Inside a box?
In the weeks following the funeral, in the interminable months, Katherine would go to Laurel Hill—take the steamboat to the foot of the cliff and rise up under the inverted U of the stone bridge and wander through the city of the dead beneath the slight shade of the junipers and the obelisks, past the neighborhoods of mausoleums. It was marble against sky. It was the gleam of granite. It was the beginning or ending of rhododendron blooms, and always Katherine came bearing gifts. A single white tulip. A red silk string. The architecture of a robin’s nest. As if it would be possible to return Anna to herself. Katherine would sit, talking to Anna, imploring Anna, making promises she could not keep, giving Anna the news of the house, the latest on Mother, and when the shadows shifted, Katherine would lie down, her head on the pillow of her hands. That’s when Bennett would come. When she would open her eyes and see him cresting the hill or standing there by the scruff of roses. He would call out to her, saying, “Can’t we talk?” and she would run—down past the stones, urns, vases, yews, past the cast iron and the sandstone, over the tangle of exposed roads, under the arch.
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.”