Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [92]
Frances’s mother repeats, “Adipocere. What a lovely word. It sounds French. Like an exclamation, au contraire. Adipo-cere!” she says in mock dismay, waving her hand.
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