by Beth Kephart
The wind is at the fire’s back. It leaps and dazzles and still more boxes are being thrown to the street, and suddenly from one narrow doorway emerges a giantess in a tented dress—the famous fat woman of Shantytown, Katherine realizes—who seems surprisingly fleet on elephantine feet. Elm is all at fever pitch. Elm has been infiltrated, and now the Centennial police have arrived, their whistles shrill above the melee, above the boom of the fire leaping higher.
In Katherine’s arms, Lottie has begun to cry, and when Katherine turns to see the throng behind her on the roof, she understands that the world’s largest building has exceeded its rooftop capacity. Thin as ice, Katherine thinks, pulling Lottie even closer, pulling her straight to her heart.
She would cry for Laura, but Laura won’t hear. Laura is somewhere down below, and right now, right in this instant, again, Katherine is alone with her terrible responsibility.
Now across the bedlam alley, the final roof timber of C. D. Murphy’s falls. The brigade of amateur firefighters has begun its fight—unblenched paladins armed with buckets and basins of slosh. One man is throwing bricks at the conflagration, as if he could break its neck, but there’s too much summer heat in brittle Shantytown. In most every direction there is the crepitating pop of structure giving way, advertisements in a peel on the smudged faces of the shops, the startling demise of cheap curtains, the shattering of lanterns.
“More brigade on its way,” a woman yells, a chambermaid, three brooms in her hands, a mop, as if these were the lives most worth saving. Katherine strains and suddenly she sees William with his wheat-colored hair and the sand-colored mutt, down on the ground, near the tavern where this fire first began. Together they run, and now Katherine sees William stop outside Allen’s Animal Show, where a counting pig and a notorious cow are kept, birds in cages, a pair of titanic sea cows. Everyone knows this. Everyone’s read it. William seems to have taken it to heart.
He pounds at the door and lets himself in. He disappears, and the fire is raging; the fire is coming, Katherine realizes, for him, and her heart stops at the thought, her lungs go airless.
When the mutt emerges from the flames he is unrecognizable soot—dancing on his hind legs. A cat breaks through the flaming door of Allen’s. A collie breaks free of its own rope collar and leaps, teeth bared, onto Elm.
The walls of Allen’s are crumbling. The ceiling is collapsing into embers, and right then, through the almost-nothing of the building that was, a bird comes fluttering free, her wings thwack-thwacking within the grim-gray smoke, a broken chain dangling down from one webbed foot. Katherine remembers Operti’s, the girl with the bird, is suddenly brokenhearted at the possibility of them coming to harm. Where is the girl? Where is the bird? She watches the unchained dove float all the way up through the smoke toward the sky. The fire burns in place and then, with a new ferocity, it launches, again, toward virgin territory, until the entire alley is flame and fury and finally William appears, black-faced and stumbling, alive.
Alive, Katherine thinks. And it’s the most beautiful word that there is.
The fire is white at its most true. It is yellow, orange, smoke, and plasma in the blistered rags above its heart. It will burn harder with the wind, and like a fish caught in a net, Katherine cannot move. She cannot free herself to return Lottie to Laura. She cannot find the stairs or make her way to the street. She cannot join William in whatever mission he has set for himself, for it is clear to Katherine that he has set out for himself the task of saving things, of rescue.
There is so much pressure at Katherine’s back that she cannot so much as turn to glance over her shoulder, to check just in case Laura has, by some miracle, come, but how could Laura come? What was their promise? Five o’clock, at the balcony, on the stairs—an impossible promise. There’s no more getting up to the roof now than there is getting down; there’s nothing to do but hold Lottie safe, this little girl who has grown warm-damp now, whose hair is lying flat against her face. A bright pink is flourishing on Lottie’s face, and she has begun the sort of hiccuping cry that Katherine does not know how to cure.
Beneath her feet the roof feels thin.
Down on Elm, the fire’s evictees keep streaming—through doorways, from alleys, out of the dark into the blazing light, some of them forming a battering ram that seems intent on knocking the Centennial turnstiles down. They want in to the Centennial grounds. To the lakes and the fountains and the miracles of the exhibition, to the seeming safe haven on the north side of Elm. Against the gates they press, against the keepers, who have wakened from the somnolence of the afternoon. No one will be let in, no one let out, until the fire dies, until somebody can kill it. “The second brigade is coming,” someone says, and now the Centennial police are barricading, holding the terrified masses back. The engines must be let through to do their work. Their horses are frightened and rearing.
The roof deck quails. Katherine feels the simple shudder of the grand construction beneath her feet, she hears the creaking of bolts and screws, and all of a sudden she is deluged by an awful premonition. One tight thing will go loose. One isolated beam will wrangle free. The roof will yield. Into the unhinged jaw of the Main Exhibition they will fall—through folderol, corsets, crockery, engines, fizz, the hard white light of the perfect jewel, through Brazil and Spain and Norway.
Without choosing to fall, they will fall. Lift. Drag. Thrust. Gravity.
Even the future can vanish.
Smithereens, Katherine thinks. No air. And now she remembers Anna, thinks as she has tried so desperately hard never again to think of Anna in the suck-down of the Schuylkill, between the teeth of ice. It happened all at once, Bennett said, at the river that day, before his hand could reach hers. It happened. There was the sound of something giving way, a white shattering, and she was gone. Under and into the lick of the winter current, over the dam and down, trapped in the bend and stiff, floating above the cobbled backs of turtles, the hibernating congregations of fish, the undredged leaves and sticks, the slatternly remains of a she-dog. Three days later a boy found Anna at the mouth of the Delaware, her muff still hung about her neck.
“There, there.” It’s the woman beside Katherine, who smells like bratwurst, whose scored and dimpled neck is as thick as a club. She chucks a finger the size of a thumb under Lottie’s chin, and if Lottie stills for one abrupt instant, the corresponding scream is power. She shakes and tosses off the touch of the stranger’s finger, and Katherine shifts her, kisses her forehead.
“It’s all a bit much,” Katherine says, and again Lottie screams, she grows inconsolable. She has become an exhausting weight in Katherine’s arms, kicking a hole in the sky.
“I’ll say it’s much,” the woman harrumphs. “They’ve got us like prisoners up here.” The knot at the back of the woman’s head has come undone, and chunks of auburn hair fall gracelessly forward. Her eyes are small and deep in the full yellow moon of her face, and now Katherine looks past her, to the man on her left, who seems transfixed by the spectacle of fire. Ash bits waft through the air like confetti. There’s the taste of char on Katherine’s tongue.
Lottie wants out. She wants down—her little feet working like pistons so that Katherine has to hold her tight, wrap all her strength around her. “Look, Lottie,” she says, for down below the police have finally succeeded in forging a tunnel with the firefighting steamers. This brigade on Elm has turned its back to the fire. They have raised their nozzled hoses to the pert glass face of the Main Exhibition Building, and now they are firing. Someone near Katherine begins to cry. Long, gulping, inconsolable cries.
“It’s just a precaution, miss,” an old man in a checkerboard vest says as if he’s seen plenty of this in his day.
“Bloody ugly fire,” a British gentleman says, and a British woman answers, “Wait’ll I tell me missus.”
The smoke billows and slows. The fire sends bright ribbons up into the sky and seems to begin to lose some interest in itself. Even as the spectators holler, even as the horses
stomp, even as the attenuated roof of the Main Exhibition Building twitches, the fire seems to sicken of its own mad greed. It has fallen from the height of its early spires and has divided. It has failed to launch across the processional width of Elm. It has bowed its head in places to the streaming river water. William and his mutt have disappeared. Katherine searches for them. She sends her hope out to meet them. Her hope for rescue. For the return to life.
In Katherine’s arms, Lottie is lying perfectly still, asleep now, her face mushed to Katherine’s shoulder, her weight sunk against Katherine’s slim hip. For the first time she wonders how Laura has done this all day and all week, how mothers do it, and she thinks of her own mother, efficient and brisk, trying to calm twins. It is impossible to remember her mother’s touch. Katherine only remembers Anna, the early sweet frustration of confusing her sister with herself.
The sun has fallen. Soon the moon will be on its way. In places, still, the fire is being fought, but even more so now, the fire loses, and there is no more need for the brigade on Elm; the horses are being hitched back to their engines. There is no more need to lock the people in or out; there is the sound of turnstiles clicking. There’ll be smoke, Katherine thinks, for days. There’ll be the hovering smell of char and ash, but already now some patches of sky are clearing, like a fog rolling off, and between patches Katherine gains a broader view of Elm and Shantytown below, the spoiled victims of the fire, the porters out in the street, the waiters with their fistfuls of silverware, one cook with a bloody back of beef on a tray. The swappers, vendors, dealers, den masters, chambermaids with pots walk the streets in a daze. The hooligans and harlots. One woman ambulates with a fringed parasol popped high, saunters, almost, among the dazed.
At Katherine’s back, some of the pressure eases, as finally some are making for the stairs, drawing themselves back down into that paradise of progress, the industrious songs of machines and fountains, in search of the ones they left behind. “They’ve got the organ started again,” someone claims, but Katherine only hears the sound of the street below, she only keeps looking out upon the mangle and mess of Shantytown. Her hips, her arms, her spine are aching, but Lottie must not wake, Lottie must be kept in her incubated slumber until she is with her aunt again, and Katherine understands that she must stay here, in this one place. That Laura will come looking. That they will be found.
Now something down below pricks Katherine’s eye. Some distant strangeness that is even more strange than all that has gone before, and in an instant she understands: it’s that mutt. Looking like a wolf or a bear in its mangy, sooted coat, prancing like a circus act at the door of the Trans-Continental Hotel. That mutt. That mutt, alone. Her heart hard-walloping against her chest, Katherine strains to see past the dog, beyond it, to William, who must be near—it is desperately important that William be near. For he rescued that pig from the Chauncers’ garden, and he stood beside Katherine at the bakery door, and he was there—he was there—before Katherine abandoned her sister. He is part of her before, a one right thing in a dangerous world.
Past the fire, past the smoke, through the detritus and ruins, she strains to see, up and down, but she sees nothing. Only the mutt trotting in its circle.
“There, there,” that woman beside her says. “They’re letting us down now, do you see? Everything is fine, the fire’s dying. And look at your baby asleep, look at you. What a good girl. Come on down now. Danger’s over.” She puts a hand on Katherine’s shoulder. Katherine doesn’t turn.
“No,” Katherine says. “No. But thank you.” For she has her eyes on that mutt and she won’t divert herself this time; she cannot afford, ever again, to stop paying attention. If she has learned anything from Anna’s dying, it is vigilance. She will live her whole life forward now, on guard.
The pressure behind her keeps easing. The tarnished sun is gone from the sky. A breeze is bringing evening in, and somewhere high above, the stars have agreed to populate the night, to hang above the hordes below who are desperate for passage over the river, to the city, who are packing streetcars, carriages, cabs, who are giving up and walking home.
“KATHERINE?” SHE HEARS HER NAME NOW. “KATHERINE?” And still she doesn’t turn, still she’s looking down, toward the ruin of Shantytown. She feels Laura’s arms sweep about her from behind at the same time—a long kiss on her cheek now, thanksgiving. “You’re fine,” Laura says. “Both of you are fine.”
“I’m sorry,” Katherine says, turning. “I didn’t mean to lose you. I didn’t mean …” She looks deeply into Laura’s eyes and a sob escapes her—a deep, long sob for all that’s happened, all she’ll never trust herself to say. She looks down again toward Elm, and now even the mutt is gone.
“You didn’t lose me,” Laura says, stroking the stray hair from Katherine’s face. “A fire started.”
“I wanted to show Lottie the world from here. I thought …”
“And you have, and I’m sure she won’t forget it. Here, Katherine, let me take her from you. She can get so heavy when she’s dreaming.” Laura reaches in and extracts the child. She squirms and resists, clamps a fist to Katherine’s hair, which Laura pries loose with a gentle, practiced hand. “Lottie, Lottie, sweet Lottie,” she says, and without ever opening her eyes, Lottie finds the balance in Laura’s arms and settles in. The emptying is sudden, unbearable—a cavern erupts. Katherine wraps her arms about herself and holds tight.
“What really happened out there?” Laura asks, swaying slightly, looking out now upon the bedlam, the uncountable losses of Shantytown.
“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.
DOWN ON ELM 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.