He followed the sound up the stairs to the sitting room at the back of the house. When he pushed open the door, there she was. She’d set up her chair and music stand by the window. Against the late sun, not just the brass of the instrument but the entirety of her shone like gold. The floor vibrated like a deck and the very air shook when the low notes sounded. Their son was at her feet, propped on his elbows, oblivious to everything but the magazine he was looking at.
Movement caught her eye, and she saw him. Without missing a beat, she raised her eyebrows in a greeting. Sebastian managed a smile, and wondered at the patience of their new neighbors. They’d discussed the possibility of occasional disturbance with them, of course. Both neighbors had thanked them for their thoughtfulness and insisted that they would not mind. But after a certain amount of
Robert was scrambling to his feet, his dime novel forgotten. He’d seen his father. He came running toward Sebastian and, avoiding his offered embrace, punched him in the leg as hard as he could before slithering by and away. Sebastian could hear Frances calling after him as he scuttled down the stairs.
Elisabeth lowered her euphonium and laid it down with care, before crossing the room to her husband.
“What’s the matter with him?” Sebastian said.
“He’d convinced himself you were going to be early,” Elisabeth said. “That’s all.”
“I never said I would.”
“I know.”
She rose on tiptoe to give Sebastian a kiss of greeting, steadying herself with a hand against his chest. He sensed her sudden tension as she became aware of the Bulldog revolver under his coat, even though her outward attitude showed no change.
“What’s wrong?” she said, dropping back to her usual height.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“I thought English policemen didn’t like to carry guns.”
“I’m no longer a policeman, and this isn’t England.”
“Is someone looking for you?”
He thought about showing her the telegraph message, and decided against it.
“Stop worrying,” he said. “It’s only a precaution.”
“Against what? Can we still go out?”
From most of the women he’d ever known, such a question would have been thrown down as a challenge or with a pout. But not from his wife.
“We can still go out,” he said.
TWO
After church the next day, and in their summer Sunday best, Sebastian and his family boarded a trolley to the park at Willow Grove. He wore his dark suit and a straw boater. The women wore long, light dresses and Robert a white sailor suit. In deference to Elisabeth’s worries, Sebastian had hidden the revolver in the waistband of his pants. He’d tucked it right around in the small of his back so that she wouldn’t be aware of it, even if the movement of the trolley should throw them together. He hadn’t anticipated its effect in church, where sitting in the hard pew had made the service into an even greater torture than usual.
But he expected no trouble today. Today he was just a man with his family, one face in a very big crowd. The park at Willow Grove had been opened by the Rapid Transit Company to give people a reason to ride on their line, and its model of free concerts and fairground entertainment was being imitated in cities all over the nation. Brooklyn had its Steeplechase Park, Salt Lake City its church-run Saltair. But Willow Grove, Philadelphia’s Fairyland, was ahead of them all. Sousa, the March King, had brought his band to play there two years before, and now his visits were becoming an annual fixture.
Elisabeth loved the sound of a marching band. She always said that she’d inherited the love from her maternal grandfather, an old soldier who would forget everything when he heard one in the street. He would follow the musicians until they stopped playing, whereupon he’d discover himself lost in some unfamiliar part of town and unable to find his way home.
At the terminal station, they moved with the crowd through a tunnel under the tracks to emerge into the park. Frances took the boy off toward the midway while Elisabeth took Sebastian’s arm, and together they crossed to the pavilion of music. Elisabeth’s sister was good with the child, there was no doubting that. She lived with them for that very reason, and earned her keep as his tutor. He did not attend any school.
Sebastian found his son difficult to fathom. He had not begun to speak until he was five, and now cared for little other than his dime novels. Sebastian had forbidden them at first, thinking them inappropriate. But Robert’s interests were not engaged by anything else. He was a shy boy, indifferent to friendships or learning unless it was a subject that drew him. In the end, Elisabeth had allowed him one new dime novel every two weeks. He’d go down to the newsstand with Frances and could take anything up to an hour over his choice. He saved them, reread them, could recite entire passages by heart. Frank Reade, Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill. He could give you tables of contents with page numbers, list all the back-page ads for any issue. And yet a schoolteacher, whose name they’d agreed would never again be spoken in their house, had once tried to persuade them that their son might be an imbecile.
The band was playing “The Belle of Chicago” as Sebastian and Elisabeth took their seats. Sebastian cared little for music of any kind, but he cared for Elisabeth and as she watched the band, his eyes were on her. At thirty-one, she was his junior by a number of years.
After a while, she became aware of his attention.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“You’re bored, aren’t you?”
“How could I be?”
She smiled and looked toward the stage, where the forty members of the Sousa orchestra were turning pages and making ready to strike up again. She tilted her chin up a little to catch a cooling breeze that came and went in a moment, and Sebastian’s heart seemed to swell in his chest.
She said, “Daddy once told me he’d buy me an orchestra to play in.”
“The euphonium?”
“The price was that I’d have to learn the cello instead. But that was before he lost his fortune.”
That was typical of Elisabeth’s father. When her family had money they’d lived in one of the big houses north of Market Street. Not quite the “best” district, North of Market was where the new money settled. Elisabeth had spent most of her childhood in a mansion on North Sixteenth Street, just below Columbia. Their neighbors had included families like the Stetsons and the Gimbels.
Despite his own humble background, her father had been a terrific snob, and even financial ruin hadn’t managed to knock any of that out of him. He’d disapproved of Sebastian—too old for Elisabeth, an immigrant, a lapsed Catholic with a Jew name, a paid-by-the-hour Pinkerton Man—and disapproved of him still. Only Frances passed between the two households, and brought them whatever news there was.
Until her teenage years, Elisabeth had been a princess of the nouveau riche. She’d owned several horses and had a servant of her own. She’d had Sebastian walk her by their old mansion once. He’d gazed at it in awe, while she gripped his arm and looked the other way. It had been quite something.
Now he said, “What do you miss most?”
“I’m the richest woman in town,” she said. “There’s nothing to miss.”
The band played “Liberty Bell.” Men tapped their feet, and women waved their programs in time. When it ended, Sousa turned and bowed to the applause. He was a slight, balding and bearded figure in pince-nez. As this was a Sunday concert, he wore a white uniform and gloves.
Joining in the applause, Elisabeth leaned over to Sebastian and said, “I wish you could tell me more.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Sebastian said.
“It’s not for my sake,” she said, “it’s for Frances and for Robert. How can I warn them if I know nothing at all?”
Sebastian looked away, took a breath, and sighed it out. What could he do? It went against his instincts, but
