by Beth Kephart
The girls can hear the intrepid skaters through the square glass of George’s cab—the high hollers and pitched calls of winter revelers on a river that had refused to freeze until now. The girls are past the dam, on the east side of the reservoir and the Water Works, where the pavilion stands tall over the steep rock garden and yields an impeccable view. They are around the corner, coming onto Boathouse Row. Hank, reluctantly, is being reined in. The journey’s over. George is calling to the girls through the trapdoor. “Here we are then. You’ve picked quite a day for it.” Far away, in the effervescent winter sky, the moon has begun to ascend.
“We’re here,” Katherine says. Beneath the blanket Anna squeezes her sister’s gloved hand until George’s face appears in the scratchy glass. When he opens the door, he offers his arm—to Katherine first, then Anna. He has a craggy face and tender eyes. His hair is long and gray-blond beneath a crushed hat.
“Brisk, isn’t it?” he says as a blast of wind rushes by and catches in Katherine’s ear.
“Glorious,” Anna answers, pulling a scarf down tighter over her hair.
“Someday I’ll get my own blades and join you on the river,” George warns them.
“Oh, you should,” Anna tells him. “Skating is lovely.”
“Hank needs a little stabling,” George says. “We’ll go do our business and be back before sundown. You two make the most of it now, will you?” He blows warm air into his thinly gloved hands, then digs them both into his deep pockets.
“Take as long as you like,” Anna says, smiling.
“I promised your father,” George tells her, and she nods.
From where they stand, the sisters see a game being played out on the river—two groups of boys whooshing a silver pail between them with sticks, one team wearing maroon scarves about their necks. The girls and women tend to hover near the river’s shore, or drift out farther, west and north. One girl in a gray-blue coat is sailing out and fast away on a diagonal, her coattails lifting up and flapping behind, revealing a skirt made entirely of summer yellow. With her shoulders pressed forward and her blades pushing her on, she seems intent on vanishing.
“Where do you suppose she’s going?” asks Anna.
“Perhaps to Birdsboro,” Katherine guesses as they move across the frozen earth toward the frozen ice. “Or Valley Forge.” But just as Katherine predicts a long journey for the skater, the girl performs a miraculous pivot and begins to sail toward the shore, lifting one leg behind her as she does and holding herself up like an L, on an assured leg, causing one of the boys with the stick and the scarf to stop and stare. He hollers for her then and others do, too, and she remains intrepid above the steady foot on the frozen body of the Schuylkill. There are cheers. Applause that would be so much louder if it weren’t for the muffs and gloves.
Katherine is the first to find her balance. She remembers not to walk the ice but to float across, continuous. The river is a million shades of ice—the silver nitrate of a daguerreotype, the veining of white marble, the delicate fiberwork of a spinner’s weave, with sticks and bits of things stuck in. It is the reflection of sky, of the Water Works, of the boathouses, of the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society flag that flies above, on the eastern shore. The boys with the bucket are farther down toward the dam, and the acrobatic girl has sought refuge temporarily—glided off the river onto the tundra beyond, where she can be confused with anybody else, except when her coat reveals her yellow skirt.
Now Katherine hears Anna calling her name from the bank; she skates back to collect her. Anna’s muff is precisely like Katherine’s—the soft fur of a rabbit—but she wears hers like jewelry, and her hair tumbles from the scarf about her head enchantingly unruly. But she becomes instantly comedic when she tries to skate. Already her ankles and knees are buckled in, her elbows are crooked, she has that look of sweet terror on her face. Taking one small, tentative step toward Katherine, Anna skids precipitously. Katherine is right there to catch her.
“Is it always this slick?” Anna wants to know, and Katherine laughs.
“Only where there’s ice,” she answers.
“Somehow,” Anna says, “I’d forgotten.” She opens the wing of her arm and, releasing her hand from the muff momentarily, Katherine slips her own arm into the open space. Anna makes a tiny, pedaling effort with one foot, nearly loses her balance, charms her way out of disaster.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Katherine tells her, struggling to find a balance that suits the two of them.
“Just take me with you,” Anna says. “Until I get the feel of the ice beneath my feet.”
“Drag you about, you mean?”
“Not for long, Katherine. Only until I get my footing.”
“All right, then,” Katherine says, leaning into the cold wind and pressing into the ice with her blades. Soon the blades edge in and slowly the two draw away from the bank, where a new family has arrived, a few more boys to play the bucket game, an older woman who is being pushed about on a bladed chair by a man who seems much younger. Anna tries to keep up with Katherine, periodically punching her blade tip to the ice for balance. Like a whirligig, Katherine thinks, and smiles, for the truth is she has her sister precisely where she likes her best—at her side and in her debt. The Humane Society men are here, piling the accoutrements of rescue along the river’s edge and gliding about with their reels of twine.
It’s a magnificent sky—big enough for both the sun and moon, a virgin blue but for whiskered patches of gray. Up on Lemon Hill, all but the pines and spruces are bare. On the river itself, Katherine sees places where the sun seems to come from down below, beaming up through caves of slumbering fish and bearded shells. Beside Katherine, Anna has regained her equilibrium, her natural grace. She wonders out loud whether Bennett will come.
The acrobatic girl has returned to the ice. The boys have grown tired of their sticks and silver pail and form a loose circle around the girl, who is whipping herself into dizzying spins. She begins with her feet spaced far apart and her arms out before her, as if she is hugging a tree. And then somehow she pulls her feet and arms in, and it is in this way that she accumulates speed.
“I’d have to go be sick,” Anna says, for Katherine has steered the two of them toward the crowd and is studying the mechanics of the two-footed spin so that she might try it later, perhaps next Sunday, if the weather holds. Suddenly Katherine has visions of spending all February and March like this: Sundays at the river with her sister. Sunday in the blaze of this rare happiness.
“I hope he’s all right,” Anna says. “Bennett, I mean.”
“Of course he is, Anna. What could happen?”
Anna looks as if she might actually consider answering the question, but Katherine preempts the possibility, pointing to the crowd, where one of the boys with the maroon scarf has joined the girl who spins, and they now stand, facing each other. The daredevils cross arms, hold hands, pump their legs, lean back, and when they finish the whip of their doubled-up spin, their spectators holler, urge them to do it again. The second time they spin, the boy’s scarf unwinds itself—lifts off like a bird, falls to the ice, and skids, causing a blot of boys to yammer after the prize. Clawing at one another, the boys fall upon themselves, until the smallest one, himself hatless and tousled, rises victorious and holds the scarf above his head like a battle flag.
Now the wind kicks in from the east, and the boy puts his hands to his ears, and of course he has made his flag severely vulnerable. Within moments, he loses his prize to an outstretched hand, and now a chase is on—the boys; the girl, too; all of them after one another.
The wildness fractures and weaves past the twins to the south, then circles around, howling, bawling, battering, splitting the group into two separate chases that zag out—one west, the other north. It is from within this chaos that Anna unlocks her arm and pulls away. It is now that Katherine feels the tug and absence. She looks east, and when she finally gains perspective through the rumple of the dissip
ating crowds, she sees Bennett, his eyes like the blue heart of a fire. If his wool coat strains across his shoulders, if his sleeves fall short, if his scarf is splitting along its edges, if he is still and only a baker’s boy, a baker himself now, a life chosen for him, Katherine concedes his beauty. He moves easy and loose and unconcerned with how he might be seen or who might be watching as he slides toward Anna, who stands perfectly still on her own two feet, her arms outstretched. Instinctively Katherine steps aside, and when the lovers embrace she understands that she exists no more, not to Bennett, not to Anna. The wind bristles in Katherine’s ear. If she tries to swallow, she will harm herself. She will not recover. She will die.
“You’ve come!” Katherine hears Anna’s voice up against Bennett’s collar.
“I said I would.”
He takes half a step back and tucks a stray strand of Anna’s hair into her scarf and looks the way he looks into her eyes—as if all the beauty in the world is Anna, as if the world itself is Anna. Katherine’s loneliness is complete, and there is no choice in this: survival means striking the two lovers from her mind. It means leaving now, no warning.
The skater with the yellow skirt has retreated to the bank. She is teaching a young girl in a cherry-colored coat to spin.
“Tell me how you do it,” Katherine asks her. “Please?” She has waited until the skater has grown idle; she has kept her distance until now. She has to call out twice for the girl to hear her, and when she finally turns, the skater fixes her eyes on Katherine and smiles.
“Hello,” she says. She’d be an ordinary-seeming girl, except for her eyes, which are stoked and bright. She’s tied her walnut-colored hair behind her in a loose knot. Her cheeks are red. Her coat is old, Katherine can see from up close—missing a button and patched on one sleeve. Still, Katherine envies her and makes no secret of it.
“You’re the best I’ve ever seen,” she says. “I wonder at how it all gets done.”
The girl’s smile widens. Her lips are chapped and slightly green-blue. “My mother,” she says, “was a skater. She taught me everything. You just have to give in to it, and when you do, it’s easy.”
“I’d give anything to spin like you do,” Katherine confesses.
“You could if you’d like.”
“But how does it happen?”
“Speed,” the skater says. “Power. Balance.” She cocks her head, and Katherine sees how her teeth are crooked and her face is freckled, and how altogether she makes a striking picture.
Katherine considers: Speed. Power. Balance.
Beyond them another game has started up with the silver pail; it hisses and hollers across the ice. The older woman on the bladed chair has been pushed toward the river’s edge, where she sits like a spectator watching the girl in the cherry-colored coat practice the lesson she’s been given. Girls skate with girls, and boys with girls, and husbands and wives with each other, while the Humane Society men lean into the wind, clasping their gloved hands behind their backs, blowing frosted Os out of their serious mouths. The sky has changed again; the sun is lower. The river is dusted with shavings of ice, scribbled into, bruised; the light seems to have gone out from it.
The skater is coming toward Katherine, arms outstretched. “It isn’t that hard,” she says, “once you get the knack of it.”
She takes Katherine’s hands into her hands. Her grip is strong. She strokes toward an empty place, and Katherine glides beside her. “I’m Katherine, by the way,” she says.
“Oh,” the skater laughs, “I’m Elizabeth. But most people call me Lizzy.”
It’s a good name, Katherine decides at once. She breathes and it doesn’t hurt as much. She swallows, and she’s still alive.
“Think of stretching your arms around a huge patch of sky,” Lizzy begins. “And then of pulling the sky in hard, against your heart.” Lizzy takes several quick strokes in a straight line, does something with one foot, holds out her arms. “Like this,” she shouts. “Like this. You see?” Her coat kicking up, her summer skirt whirling.
It turns out not to be so very hard. Speed, power, balance, the sky pulled toward the heart—she’d never be able to explain it to another, but it works somehow, an alchemical mix that blurs Katherine’s edges and gives her a fizzing, fuzzed-out feeling. She’s taken her muff off and moved it out of the way, she’s untied the scarf from about her neck, and she’s gone at it again and again, until she’s strong enough on her own for Lizzy to join her, and now side by side they spin, collecting a small audience of their own. Whenever she stops, she feels dizzy, but then she starts again, and even one of the men from the Humane Society has taken himself off duty so that he might admire the spinning skaters.
The moon and the sun have become the same thing. Katherine can’t tell one from the other, and she doesn’t care, and when she hears the shouting from far away, near the dam, she assumes it’s another game of chase and spins on and on. It’s Lizzy who finally touches her arm. “Katherine?” she says. The startle of a question.
“Yes?”
“Katherine, do you hear that?”
“What?” But now she does. Now she’s steadying herself, separating north from south, sky from ice, moon from sun. She’s aware of the bedlam of skaters scuttling toward the dam; of the Humane Society rescuers racing to the banks for their poles and hooks, racing back out again, south; and of how all this while the panic on the river grows, the desperate cries of those who wish to help, and sure as the heart that is beating in her chest clangs on, Katherine knows. Katherine calls her sister’s name: “Anna! Anna! Anna!” She screams it, she screams the name.
Lizzy wrenches her arm, and they go—flying not skating over their blades, calling out cautions to any gang, clot, cluster in the way, and knot after knot unties itself to give the two room to tunnel through toward the dam, where a patch of ice has given way and Bennett is on his knees, prostrate.
No, Katherine thinks. No. This cannot be, and her legs beneath her slide, and she cannot breathe, and Lizzy, beside her, wrenches her arm again, yanks her up short, warns, “Katherine, look: the ice is cracking. We cannot go any farther.” Pointing with her free hand to the skeins of splinters that blast their way across the ice, the fractures and snaps of distress.
“But it’s my sister,” Katherine pleads, pounds at those who lock her in. “My Anna.” She fights Lizzy, but Lizzy will not let her go, the men from the Humane Society will now not let her go, the crowd wedges itself up against her—You’ll fall, too; you’ll drown; you watch yourself—and they are dragging Bennett from the ice-patch edge, holding their poles over the dark, running current, unreeling their twine. They are shouting, “Stand back,” and waving their arms, and now here is George beside Katherine, smelling of horses and wool, a pint of beer; George in his boots, looking immensely terrified; George who will never set foot again on a river.
“It’s Anna,” Katherine says, and she collapses into him. “My Anna.” Her legs leave her. Her strength. By strangers and a horseman, she is held aloft while the rescue men pole and dig and reach. While Bennett stands there, frantic.
Katherine feels the kick in her gut and knows it’s Lottie. She feels the elbows now of the Centennial crowd, the push and grab of strangers on a roof beneath a vanishing sun, the day moving on, past itself. “But do you see that?” she hears someone say, and when she glances toward Shantytown, she sees the spire of a flame.
THE FIRST FLAMES POKE THROUGH THE RAW-BONED roof of C. D. Murphy’s Tavern like the ears of a tabby cat, a striping of ocher and black that keeps to itself at first, prowling and small. “But do you see that?” the stranger repeats, and by the time Katherine understands that it is not some Centennial spectacle being ogled but a fire across Elm, others have got the story, too. The sun is playing its duplicitous tricks, and all about the Centennial grounds shoals of people—one hundred thousand in all—move saturated, stupefied. “But do you see that?” Katherine turns, and just then the fire leaps high and begins to waggle west. In a day of won
ders it seems but another one, a shameless curiosity, but right as Katherine has this thought, the fire doubles up on itself and cleaves. Lottie sees it. Lottie punches out her fist and grabs at the nearest hunk of sky.
Down below, in the jumble of Elm, gawkers have arrived, sudden evictees, porters, a tall man in plaid pants, a collection of waiters, a crowd of children running ahead of their mothers. Some of the horses in their harnesses are rearing back, bucking to rid themselves of the weight of the carriages for which they’ve been responsible all day. “The engines are coming,” someone says, but Katherine’s eyes are on the insolent, fast-raging fire, which does not burn in place but keeps on multiplying, pushing its tongue through more burst windows of Shantytown now, as its victims pour onto Elm. One of the hansom cab horses has taken off on his own, his driver galloping behind.
The fire burns in place, seems to consider. It maintains its hold on the east, drops a final curtain on two saloons, blackens Theodore Bomeisler’s hotel, puts an end to Ullman’s eatery. It turns the sky to smoke and now arrives at the door of the Ross House, which is sturdy brick, not wood, four stories high, and where the boarders are working their own rescue like bees in a hive, tossing through windows their trunks, their bedsheets, their instruments of beauty, their twelve-cent Ledgers, as if they cannot bear to leave the news behind. Leave the news be, Katherine thinks, the news is dead.
Now come paired men and a woman with a trundle bed between them; a ransomed velvet chair; a settee with carved swan’s feet and dimpled, upholstered hearts; a gilt frame; a pail of brushes and an artist’s palette. Men and women who seem to have stripped the Oriental runners from the stairs within, who seem determined to go nowhere without a corset box, an umbrella stand, a pair of candlesticks. The Ross House cooks stagger about in the streets with their arms clasping blackened cooking pots, soup tureens, porcelain platters, dessert bowls. The salvaged and the salvagers have no discernible plan, and now the fire brigade has come in, and river water pounds from all directions—hard, white, spitting streams.