Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [93]
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,