by Beth Kephart
“Cape May,” Katherine said, while Anna repeated, “Father?” until Mother said, “It will be lovely,” settling the question without the slightest enthusiasm.
“I’ve booked two rooms at Congress Hall,” Father went on. “The Ledger says the oysters have been fat since mid-July.”
“I despise oyster stew,” Anna said. “Oysters are putrid.”
“Well. It’s been a good year, too, for the tomatoes.”
“But the Carver family? Father?”
“It will be lovely,” their mother repeated blandly, standing, flicking the crumbs from her ferociously plain dress. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She left the rest of them in their dinner chairs. She reached for her hat and turned for the hallway, saying, “Nothing is worse—you remember this, girls—than being late.”
“A meeting, dear?” Father asked, without ever looking up.
“Raising stock,” she said, “for the Centennial.”
“Is that right?” His voice was one note, and it was hollow. It stopped their mother in her tracks.
“I wish you’d take an interest,” she said.
“But you do so much,” Father said. “How is a man to keep track of it all?” There was sarcasm in his voice, a sound new to the house this summer. Katherine sought Anna’s eyes. Anna wouldn’t look up.
“It’s your century, too,” Mother said. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
“I notice many things,” Father said.
“Precisely what things?” Mother asked.
“The noise and crush,” he said, “of progress.”
“Is that right?”
Katherine looked from her father to her mother. She looked at Jeannie Bea, who was keeping all expression off the wide space of her face.
“You girls go on up,” Mother said after a moment. “Get some rest.”
It had been raining earlier in the day, but the rain had stopped. Their mother stood in the doorway now, considering the merits of an umbrella. In the end she chose to go without. The door closed noisily behind her, like a prison door, Katherine thought. They could hear her boots on the pavement until she reached the end of their block.
“Jeannie Bea,” Father said, for the room remained quiet. “I’ll take my sherry on the couch.” His hair was thinning, Katherine observed with shock. The lines across his forehead had ridged into something permanent, and if everyone had always said that the twins were the spitting image of their father, there were more differences between them now than likenesses. Katherine turned to see what Anna had seen, if she’d registered the same impression. But Anna’s mind was somewhere else.
“Can you believe that he would do this, Katherine? Cape May? Please. The Carvers?” she moaned when the day was done.
“He’s only trying to help.”
“Help?”
“Well, honestly, Anna. You haven’t seemed all that well.”
“I’m better than well, Katherine. I’m in love. I’m happy.”
“You’re not yourself.”
“You don’t know,” Anna sighed, turning over in her bed, propping her head up on one hand—Katherine could see how the shadows rose and fell, shifted themselves—“what love is.”
“No,” Katherine said, turning away. “I guess I don’t.” A spike of heat between them now. A knock against the heart.
“Alan Carver is a bore,” Anna declared.
“Just think,” Katherine said, not kindly, “of all the stories you’ll collect for Bennett. The little secrets you will tell. The shells you’ll bring home to your bakery.”
“A whole week,” Anna groaned, either ignoring the sarcasm, or not hearing it at all, which was worse, “with Alan Carver.”
Silence. Katherine closed her eyes against the moon. Anna would soon be dreaming of Bennett, of his shoulders, made broad and strong by the hefting and pounding of dough. Katherine was guilty of having looked too closely, of having pondered too hard, of having imagined his attentions for herself. She was her sister’s identical twin. Identical. But beauty radiated from just one of them. That was the hideous fact.
In Cape May, their mother would sit in a bathing gown and wield a pen above her pad, a scowl on her face that telegraphed concentration on matters of infinite political concern. Anna would brood and not look up from the castle she carved out of sand. Their father would sit halfway in, halfway out of the cabin, his feet dug into the hot, white sand, a preposterous hat on his head. “Looking for ships,” is what he’d say. “Looking for pirates.” Until finally he would announce that it was time for the daily constitutional. “Do I have takers?” he’d implore. It was a Wednesday when Katherine took the bait—as much to escape the claustrophobia of the Cape May beach cabin as to demonstrate, to Anna, what being left was all about.
They went off in silence, Katherine and her father, until their bare feet touched the advancing tide. They ambled without talking until they encountered something smaller or greater than themselves: A horseshoe crab on its back with its legs still cycling. A succession of perfect pink shells. A boy wearing a bucket on his head. A mountainous ledge of black rock in the distance. A thronging of gulls. A poked-up shovel in the sand.
Each thing was its own provocation, unearthing some memory in her father’s mind, allowing Katherine fleeting access to the man beyond the banker. “The day I met your mother she was laughing,” one story began, and he told that story as long as their shadows dragged behind them and even after they had gone as far as the black rocks and turned back and their shadows ran ahead. “When I was eleven, I went to the dam to go fishing with my brother,” began another, and beneath his hat his face would change into a younger version of itself. Katherine’s bathing gown flapped with the breeze—its green-and-orange stripes twisting about her feet like a carousel.
The lesson, then, came in clams, an exercise in wading. “Clams work in private,” he told her, leading her toward a less popular stretch of sand, an empty bucket in one hand. He turned from the water’s edge into the sea, calling to Katherine to join him. He’d gone in as far as his knees, and by the time Katherine reached him the water was nearly past her waist, her loose gown swimming all around her like a swarm of green and orange fish.
“Dig with your toes,” he told her, and at first she was confused, but then a wave hurled forward from the horizon and slapped high against her and just as quickly was sucked back out to sea, and in the shift of sand beneath her feet Katherine felt the razor’s edge of a clam.
“Got one!” she called out to her father.
“Chip off the old block.”
She pulled her sodden skirts aside and bent low to dig with her hands, the sleeves of her bathing gown turning dark and heavy at once. In the momentary calm of the sea, Katherine saw her own face reflected back at her, and in that instant it was possible to confuse herself with Anna, or to conclude that Anna had left the cabin to join Katherine and the clams. Saturated with the sea, the clam still beneath her foot, Katherine stood upright and glanced around, but it was only her father standing there, her father with the bucket of clams.
“Did you get it?” he asked her.
“Not yet,” she said.
Now a new wave raised its lathered head on the horizon and began its sprint and threatened to knock Katherine off her feet. All of a sudden, she wanted to tell her father everything—about Anna, about Bennett, about coming apart. She wanted to confess the truth and be done with it, but the wave moved in with such haste that all she could do was plant her feet and hold her ground, and when it hit she felt herself fall backward, felt her father’s hands on her shoulders, correcting her balance.
He was laughing, the way he never laughed, and she was laughing, too, and the gulls that had been hovering somewhat closer to the shore came nearer and screamed down, and for some reason—Katherine couldn’t have said why—this made everything seem even funnier. She laughed so hard she had to gasp for air, and when she turned to see her father she saw that he was done in, too: there was a fat tear on his right cheek
, making its way to his chin. When the gulls moved off, it was like a cloud blowing south. On the horizon another wave was getting ready. Katherine dug with her feet, but the clam was gone. Vanished in the shifting sands beneath her.
“I lost it,” she told her father.
“There’s plenty more.”
So they stood, taking the waves on as a team, fixing on the clams with their feet, hoisting them up from the suctioning sand, and dropping them into the bucket, which began to strain with the weight of the thick, ridged shells. Katherine could feel the sun settling into her skin—small bursts of heat deep in her cheek and down the short slope of her nose—and she was aware of the gulls blowing back toward them, a darkening of the sea beneath those wings.
She didn’t know then how much time had passed, and she can’t imagine that now; she only knows, when she looks back, that the world had changed by the time they retreated with their bucket of clams. Low tide, and the wide stretch of beach was divided into the warmed, white crystals near the marsh grass, and the hard, damp sand along the sea. They left their footprints behind them, the carcass of a crab, a cluster of shells knotted with seaweed. Her father cracked the clams with a knife and tossed the pink meat to the gulls, and the gulls flew low and near behind them. The beach cabin was empty when the two returned. The castle Anna had been building had cracked—a shovel daggered right down through its middle.
“Katherine,” her father said as he stood looking in on the cabin’s hollow. “Is everything all right with Anna? Is there something I should know? If you tell me, Katherine, we both can help.”
She looked up at him, and it hurt; she glanced away. She felt his gaze, his knowing. “I can’t,” is all she managed to say, turning toward him. “I can’t, Pa.” She bit her lip. His eyes searched hers.
“Be careful with her.”
“I am. Always.”
“Philadelphia’s changing. The whole world is. She doesn’t understand, as you understand, that there are among us dangerous neighbors.”
Dangerous neighbors, Katherine thought. Wasn’t Anna’s baker’s boy one of those?
Later it was the lodging rooms with their crisp white linens (a bed for Anna, a bed for Katherine, a dresser between them, a pitcher of iced water). It was the almost-evening bustle in the main ballroom, the games of cards, the pungency of cigars, that hour in the day when her father would sit by himself in a tall rocking chair reading a hotel copy of the paper. He’d have the sun in his face from the afternoon at the beach, and he’d seem to Katherine so much younger, as if he really had once been nothing more than a boy with a talent for mathematics.
“Your father was always smart,” her mother would say, like that was the only thing that mattered, and Katherine understood that this reduced her father, for whom smart was its own category, incompatible with funny, interesting, charming. “Trust him,” Katherine had pleaded that very afternoon with Anna, but Anna had refused. She would not, she said, forgive their father for the Carvers, for Cape May, for the ball they’d have to attend that night, for this horrid vacation by the sea. Anna’s hair held the smell of the sea in its curls. Katherine’s was collected high at the back of her head, then loosened in places by the breeze that yawned occasionally through the open window. Earlier that afternoon Anna had spread her hair across her pillow to let it dry, while Katherine had pinned hers up wet. Each in preparation for the ball that, Anna said, would be her ruin.
“I’m not going through with it,” Anna announced finally. “I won’t.”
Her dress was the color of strawberries, her skin was cream. The twins sat knee to knee on their side-by-side beds, Katherine feeling sun-glazed and dark in her mocha-colored silk. A small distance away was the lull of the tide, the high chatter of gulls picking through the day’s debris. There was the harmless creaking of a squadron of yachts that had arrived just that day from New York, the glamorous exchange of commodores. Between the cracks of the substantial door hazed the smell of a cigar from down the hall, the talk of a regatta, the anticipation of a train, promising the next wave of suitors. The waiters were already in their white ties and swallowtails, paying no attention whatsoever to the generalized hum of clerks. The evening was getting ready for itself.
“It’s only a ball, Anna. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” Katherine kept her eyes on her hands, which seemed warped, still, by the sea. Like crepe, she thought, burying them deep inside her skirt.
“Alan stands like a vulture, haven’t you seen him?” Anna complained. “His shoulders come up to his ears. He hardly knows where to put his hands; they just hang there, or else they go off on some fidget.”
“But he dances, Anna. Beautifully. I’ve seen him. The new valse. The Merrie England. The Spanish Dance.”
“Valse.” Anna blew the word through her nose.
“Well, it’s something, anyway. This matchmaking business is no more his fault than your own. Maybe he has his own Bennett somewhere. Some chambermaid or farmer’s daughter. A forbidden love.”
“He wouldn’t, Katherine. I’d like him more if I thought he did.”
“He comes from money.”
“Why should that matter?”
“Because everything is easier with money, Anna, and you like costly things.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Now Katherine blew a snort through her nose, which provoked a nasty look from Anna.
“They’ve put me on the auction block,” Anna said. “And you don’t care. Or have you been too busy playing up to Father to notice?”
“Playing up?”
“You’re already his favorite, Katherine. You always were. You could have used that to my advantage. Put a word in on my behalf. No ball. No Alan Carver.”
“Anna!” Katherine leveled her sister with a glare. “I have never been his favorite, and you know it.” She growled the words. “I’ve been responsible for you, Anna. He trusts me. That’s different.” Katherine felt her neck grow warm, her cheeks. She inhaled deeply, slowly deflated. She felt the seams of her mocha-colored bodice stretch, the buttons down the front put up resistance.
“We should never have come,” Anna said, refusing to meet her sister’s glare.
“It’s not my fault that you’ve kept your secret a secret, Anna. If you’d have been honest …”
“How could I be honest? How can I be, with a mother like ours?”
“You’re being unfair.”
“Unfair?”
“To Father. To Bennett. To yourself. To me, worst of all. Putting me in the middle.”
“I just need time.”
“Is that so?”
“Don’t do that, Katherine. Honest to God. Don’t talk to me like that.”
“I’ll do what I please, Anna, actually, since you seem to do what you please, only and always.”
Katherine rose from the bed and walked to the other side of the room, where more breeze had begun to blow through the window and a child’s cry had got caught up with a gull’s squawk, below. She looked out, then down, couldn’t find the source of the commotion. When she glanced up again she saw the mist above the sea, the first small smudges of dusk above the pink horizon. She waited for Anna’s rebuttal, but there was nothing, until, from that side of the room, there came the sudden shudder that one sister senses in another, a shift in things. Katherine turned.
“Why can’t you stop?” Anna murmured, dragging a bent knuckle across the low path of a tear. She looked so helpless, so lost in her own beauty and in the folds of her new dress, and Katherine knew, she always knew, that she would never win against Anna. She was vulnerable, always, to the love that rose from some dark, indeterminate place within her.
You have abandoned me, Katherine wanted to answer, but the anger was entirely gone, and now she walked back across the wide-planked floor to the long, white bed, where her sister sat, face in her hands. “It will be all right, I promise,” Katherine told her.
“I hate the valse,” Anna sniffled. “I hate the Pop Goes the Weasel, and t
he polka. The galop and the reel. I hate them all. They aren’t natural. Matchmaking isn’t. It’s the nineteenth century, after all.”
“Father only wants what he thinks is best. Even if his choice is horrendous, Anna, he thinks he’s looking out for you, putting you in fortune’s way.”
“It’s a charade, Katherine, and you know it. The worst part is disappointing Father.”
“I don’t think the valse is so awful, Anna,” Katherine said. “I’ll ask him to dance.”
Anna snorted behind her hands. “You’ll do that? You should be sainted.”
“But you have to tell Father about Bennett, Anna, and soon. Promise me that. You’ve turned us both into liars.”
“Katherine?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Look at me, Katherine. What do you see?”
Katherine was silent.
“Be honest. Tell me you understand.” She was begging now.
“I understand,” Katherine said after several long minutes ticked by. “I understand, but only partly.”
“I’d protect you, Katherine. I’d keep every one of your secrets safe. I’d do anything for your sake.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It is and you know it.”
“What sort of secrets would I have, Anna? What isn’t plain as day about me?” She said it beseechingly, heard the hurt in her voice. Hoped that her sister would hear it and take care.
“No heart is plain as day,” Anna said instead. “Not even yours.”
Later Alan Carver stood, hinged—it seemed—to the parlor wall beneath the flame of an octagonal lamp. Behind his spectacles his eyes were swollen black, and the top button of his jacket was too high, pulled tight. In one hand he cradled his pocket watch. With his free hand he kept making a fist—crunching his big bones together, then shaking them loose, like fringe. Katherine saw him first and hurried to distract her sister.