To look at a dead body is shocking, Frances thinks. To look at a person dead more than a hundred years is astonishing. She asks Vaughan, “How do you know she’s soap?” She imagines Vaughan in a bathtub, humming and lathering. She heard him humming last night, while she searched for towels in a cupboard in the hallway outside his lavatory. Strange that in a house so ornate and well-appointed, there are no servants.
“I have washed with her,” says Vaughan. He laughs, and Frances’s mother joins in. Vaughan adds, “If you mix a bit of this body with some crushed lavender, it’s the finest soap you’ll ever have. I can open the case, Frances, and you can pinch off a piece.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right,” Frances says.
Frances feels light-headed, and she assumes it’s from the company of the dead. Vaughan’s collection includes a mummified woman and baby, a pickled horror of indeterminate gender floating in formaldehyde, and a remarkably fresh-looking boy about Frances’s age.
Vaughan thumps the glass cover of the casket holding the boy. “Meet the Young Master,” he says. “He was almost certainly a soldier. He turned up near the site of the Mower Hospital, a Civil War hospital in this neighborhood which was torn down after the war.”
“Turned up?” asks Frances, determined to challenge him. “Did you dig for him?”
“He was brought to me,” says Vaughan, “and I have given him a home. He was already embalmed. Someone did a first-rate job. All I had to do was clean him up and put clothes on him. He was naked. I found this uniform in the attic, and it fits as if made for him.”
Frances dares to ask, “Does the constable know these people are here?”
Frances’s mother frowns at her.
“The authorities have enjoyed this same tour,” says Vaughan. He points to a table pushed into a corner. “We’ve played poker here, with the soap lady and the Young Master looking on.”
Frances feels Vaughan’s fingers on her back, just the lightest pressure. She has felt the fingertips before, and has assumed the touch was an accident. Does her mother see? No, her mother is absorbed by the Young Master. Vaughan takes the empty wine glass from her mother’s hand and slips an arm about her shoulders.
He says, “He’s one of those people who just don’t rot.”
“Who brought him to you?” Frances asks.
“An old fellow who used to be a guard at the hospital. I’ll introduce you to him, if you like. He has wonderful stories. The hospital was the best in the nation. If you got shot or got sick, it was where you hoped to go. We’ll stroll over to the grounds some time.”
Frances returns to the soap woman and gazes at the mute face, its closed, webbed-looking eyes, the dark pit of the slightly open lips. The glass is cloudy over the mouth, as if the soap woman breathes now and again. Frances feels she’s in the presence of a marvel. To think that this woman lived and spoke and ate, perhaps loved a man and bore children, then fell ill and suffered and died. And her body, without her soul in it, went on to have a separate life of its own, somehow being brought to this mansion in the northwestern part of the City of Brotherly Love.
For the past three days, Vaughan has entertained them. They rode in his carriage through the leafy avenues of Chestnut Hill, with Vaughan calling out in a clarion voice: “Shawnee Street! Mermaid Lane!” They explored the cool splendor of Fairmount Park. Vaughan’s horses pulled to the edge of a ravine, and Frances held her breath as she looked down into Wissahickon Gorge.
It is the end of summer, the last year of the century. Frances felt a keen nostalgia as she breathed in the unfamiliar scent of the northern forest. Today, they took the trolley down Germantown Avenue, fast, faster than Frances ever moved before, flying over the Belgian-block cobblestones of the swerving street, while pedestrians ran pell-mell out of the way. Down and down the trolley plunged, with the passengers holding their hats during the steep careening slide, as if from the top of the world. Vaughan pointed out great houses that belong to friends of his, mansions where they will dine and dance, where Frances will meet young people “who will be congenial,” he promised. Frances couldn’t help but thrill to the thought, even though she knows she must run away from Vaughan’s house, away from these bodies that Vaughan waited until tonight to show them, as a pièce de résistance.
She and her mother are being saved by Vaughan, and all three of them know it, saved from a wretched district of Baltimore where laundry flaps on lines and streets smell of garbage. Frances’s mother has never allowed Vaughan to visit them there; in the three months they have known him, he has courted her mother in the homes of the prosperous Watkins relations who have kindly pretended that Frances and her mother are closer kin than is the case. Frances can’t remember her father, who died when she was young. She feels like an old woman, as if she and her mother have switched places in a fairy tale. It should be Frances marrying a prince, not her mother marrying strange, compelling Vaughan Beverly.
Yes, Frances is in love with him, she admits to herself as she regards the soap woman’s ravaged face. Frances keeps a tiny photograph of Vaughan in a locket around her neck, and when she is alone, she examines it, admiring his dark golden eyes, his Roman nose and high cheekbones, the slight puffiness of his lips. In Frances’s fantasies, something happens to her mother-oh, not anything bad, but something clean and painless that simply takes her mother away-and then it’s Frances whom Vaughan falls in love with, and they marry and live happily in this cavernous house on West Evergreen Avenue, and when she steps into this basement as Mrs. Vaughan Beverly, it’s like any other basement, holding only damp bricks and piles of ashes. She would make him wait until they were actually married-unlike her mother, who has occupied his bedroom these past three nights. It was not only Vaughan humming in the lavatory last night, it was her mother too: Frances heard them both. In the mornings, there have been plates piled high with eggs that Vaughan scrambles in his enormous kitchen in a great iron skillet, and the three of them in dressing gowns have eaten the eggs with butter and thick slices of toast that Vaughan pulls from his blazing oven. Maybe there are servants after all, because Frances never sees a dirty dish from one morning to the next.
Frances consults the soap woman silently about her dream: Can it be? Will I be with him? The glass of the casket fogs a little, as if the soap woman has answered. No, it’s just her own breath, condensing there. She takes out her handkerchief and rubs at the spot. How can she long to stay with him, yet know that she must run away? Where will she go? Back to Baltimore? No. She’s in a new place now. In Chestnut Hill. The very name rings in her mind like a bell. When I was seventeen, I came to Chestnut Hill, she imagines telling the soap woman. Then the story in her head stops, because she can’t imagine what might be next. Probably nothing will ever happen to her, and she will always be her same plump self, with freckles.
When she looks up again, her mother and Vaughan are kissing.
“But the question is why?” Frances demands. “Why would someone bring you a dead body? Why would you take it, and keep it? And why do you have so many?”
“Francie,” her mother scolds, from within the circle of her fiancé’s arms. “Vaughan’s a man of science. You know that.”
Science seems to represent all that Frances will never understand. She bursts into tears.
“Would it make you happy, Frances,” Vaughan asks, “if I buried them? There’s a cemetery at Gravers Lane and Bowery, the Old Free Burying Ground. I’ve spent enough time there to learn names on tombstones: Frederick Detwiler, Alexander Parks, Catharine Antieg.”
Frances stares at him. Will it be this easy? To object, to cry, and thus to get her way?