Philadelphia Noir

by Carlin Romano

  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?

  “There’s no need, Vaughan,” her mother says, but he lifts a hand to silence her.

  “Yes,” Frances declares. “They ought to be buried.”

  Vaughan looks from Frances to her mother. “Then they shall be,” he says.

  Frances feels her tears dry on her cheeks. Her face was wreathed in smiles—she read that line somewhere, and it comes back to her as she beams at Vaughan.

  “Any objection to the dead butterflies, Frances?” her mother asks sarcastically.

  “No,” Frances says. What has come over her mother? This woman in the lacy white dress—Thank heavens for this dress, her mother confided during the courtship. One nice dress and my good complexion. Is this the same woman who struggled to keep their house clean, who sewed clothing for the rich relatives, who made Frances say her prayers every night?

  “They can go to a museum, Vaughan,” her mother says. “Aren’t they valuable examples for science?”

  “Yes, and I’ll miss them.” Vaughan strolls over to the soap woman to stand beside Frances. “This one, of course, we could just use her up,” he says and laughs.

  “Keep her, at least,” Frances’s mother urges him.

  Vaughan says, “No, I’ve had their acquaintance long enough. I’ll see that each one is decently interred.”

  “Thank you,” Frances says. Generosity has always embarrassed her. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go to bed.”

  “Of course,” replies her mother coldly, and Vaughan nods.

  Then Frances realizes something else that is amiss, aside from a basement full of bodies. With a wedding tomorrow, shouldn’t there be neighbors and friends calling to wish them well? She and her mother don’t know anyone here, but Vaughan has lived in Philadelphia all his life. Where is his own family? He is not old; he is possibly younger than her mother. Is he alone in the world? She is overcome by the sudden conviction that the wedding will not take place, that this is all some ruse.

  “Goodnight,” she says and turns. She hurries up the stairs, to the first floor. She flings open the door that connects the basement with the rest of the house, runs across the deep carpet of the central hallway, and dashes up another staircase and another, to reach the guest room with the high feather bed and the cheval mirror.

  There she opens the mullioned windows and breathes in the fresh air that smells of pine and spruce. The window overlooks a dark terraced garden. She hears little peepers that must be tree frogs, insects buzzing, and some low, croaking call from an animal or a bird of prey. Their songs and cries ar
e old familiar ones of summer ending, of autumn beginning. The nighttime emits a glow, as if starlight is catching on blades of grass.

  She is alone, like the soap woman. She has no friend to tell her fears to, no one to write a letter to. Since leaving school two years ago, she has kept close company only with her mother, assisting with the sewing, anticipating and dreading the invitations from relatives, when she and her mother would go forth bravely, in hopes that someone like Vaughan would rescue them. Her mother, donning the lace dress, once asked in anguish, How many times must we do this?

  “And here I am,” says a voice behind her, and Frances whirls from the window.

  There stands Vaughan. In the light of the wall sconce, he looks taller than ever, his face ruddy, hair golden, brow smooth. He asks, “May I sit down?”

  She nods, and he takes a seat on a slipper chair. She remains standing, awkwardly. She wonders whose room this was, who chose the rose-colored damask for the chair, whose face has been reflected in the mirror.

  Vaughan says, “You’re scared, Frances. How can I set your mind at ease?”

  “Do you love my mother?” she asks.

  “I love you,” he says. “You knew tonight. Didn’t you?”

  She has longed to hear these words, yet now she feels only alarm. He rises from the chair and reaches for her hand. His fingers are warm and strong.

  “It’s not too late,” he says. “You and I can be married.”

  “What of Mother? Would she live here, with us?” Frances’s head spins. She can’t believe she’s saying these things.

  Vaughan says, “I’ve been trying to figure it out. Things have moved rather fast. And just now, I’m sorry to say …” His voice trails off.

  “What happened?” Frances asks. She pulls her hand out of his grasp. “Where’s Mother?”

  He looks at her with an expression of great gravity. After a pause, he speaks softly and urgently about her mother, saying she felt ill, then began clutching at her heart, then collapsed. “She seemed to recover a little, and staggered. She got as far as the Young Master, and then she, well, died. She’s dead.”

  Terror ripples along Frances’s spine. She tries to scream, but only a sigh comes out. Vaughan pulls her to him and settles onto the slipper chair with Frances on his lap. He says, “A young woman and her mother travel north. The mother is to marry a scientist. On the eve of her wedding, she suddenly dies. The man marries the lovely, innocent daughter instead. It was just as well, since he’d begun to find the mother tiresome, with a ghoulish streak.”

  “She was angry with me,” Frances murmurs, stunned. “This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made her mad.”

  “You wanted to do the decent thing,” he says. “Bury those bodies. A man wants a woman who’ll make him do the proper thing.”

  “Is this a horrible joke?” Frances asks.

  “This house knows no jokes,” says Vaughan.

  She leaps from his lap and runs for the door. He says, “Think it over, Frances.”

  She hurtles down the stairs, into the basement, and spies the still form of her mother.

  “Mother,” she cries, and touches her mother’s cheek, which is already cool. She pulls at her shoulders, but the body sags in her arms.

  She takes the steps again, two at a time. If she can reach the door, she can get outside, to some safe place. She can almost feel the dew on the grass, the distance she’ll have to cover.

  II.

  “So that concludes the Ghost Walk,” Annie says, as her tour group applauds. “The Beverly mansion used to be right here. It was torn down a long time ago, but that’s a true story.” She adds the capper: “And Frances was my great-great-grandmother.”

  The group gasps, and Annie savors the effect of her tale. Where the Beverly mansion used to stand, there’s only a depression in the ground. Across the street, there’s a massive Victorian-style apartment house, where Annie herself lives, with towering sycamores out front. Annie has heard the tree frogs, just like she said. Besides, this is the perfect place to wind up the Ghost Walk, because the Irish-themed bar where Annie works is a five-minute walk away. She went on too long about Frances and Vaughan, though. She doesn’t have time to return her oil lantern to the Chestnut Hill Welcome Center.

  “I think he murdered Frances’s mother. He was a serial killer,” a woman in a trench coat says. “Is that what we’re supposed to believe?”

  Annie’s legs hurt. It was a mistake to wear platform sandals to traipse around these sidewalks in the dark. She says, “Frances died before I was born, but the story was handed down. She did escape, and she married somebody else.”

  “Did she tell the police?” asks the trench-coated woman. “If she didn’t, then she let him get away with killing her own mother.”

  Annie feels her authority fading. It would be so much better if the house were still here. “I don’t know all the details. The Beverly mansion stood empty for years, and people claimed to hear screams coming from the basement.”

  “It’s a legend,” a bearded man tells the woman. “Ghost stories are supposed to leave you hanging. They’re not about closure.”

  “Well, I’m disappointed,” the trench coat says flatly. “If it’s true, she ought to know the rest of it.”

  Annie is chilled to hear herself spoken of in third person. And she wants to say, It’s not just a legend.

  A child pipes up: “I saw leeches at the other place.”

  The child’s mother, a young woman in a pink tracksuit, says, “We went to the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion. He’s talked about leeches all day.”

  “Have you ever eaten eyeballs?” the child asks Annie.

  “No,” Annie says. “How do they taste?”

  The mother says hastily, “They were gumdrops, with M&Ms stuck in.”

  “And there was brains!” the child gloats. “All red and squishy.”

  “Cold spaghetti,” the mother explains. “They turned off the lights and let the kids stick their hands in it.”

  “Well, I want a latte,” the woman in the trench coat says. “Join me, anyone?” and she looks pointedly at the bearded man, who edges away.

  Annie says, “You can get apple cider and cookies at the Welcome Center. It’s free.”

  She feels a tug of regret as her little group disperses, heading for cars or hiking north to Germantown Avenue. She forgot to ask their names. What’s the matter with her? She was with them for an hour, ever since they gathered at the side entrance of the Chestnut Hill Library and paid five dollars each to benefit a youth group. She volunteers because she loves to tell the stories of these old streets, the old churches, and especially the tale of Frances and Vaughan. She grew up with it; her mother remembered seeing the Beverly mansion as a child. The story makes Annie proud. It’s her heritage.

  It’s practically all she has, she admits to herself. She grew up in the neighborhood, on Highland Avenue, went to college in Altoona for two years, came back, and allowed the job at the bar to become her career.

  For one spooky, lively evening every October, she’s a star.

  She hurries toward Germantown Avenue, wondering if anyone ever guesses that pieces of her own life, not only her great-great-grandmother’s, are embedded in the story. An old boyfriend had seen a soap woman at a museum. Captivated, Annie worked her into the spiel. She has no idea what Vaughan Beverly looked like, so she made up a description. Her own widowed mother can be maddening and oblivious, like Frances’s mother. Yet Annie feels she has not found the right ending. It’s not enough, somehow, that Frances gets away.

  Annie and her mother used to entertain each other by embellishing the few known facts. Then her mother left Chestnut Hill for a retirement home in Jenkintown. The last time Annie brought up the Frances story, her mother gave a sheepish smile and said, “It’s bunk, for all I know. I’ve forgotten what’s true and what isn’t.” Annie went cold, for if the story is bunk, then her whole life feels like a lie.

  When Annie reaches the corner, one
platform sandal twists loose. She trips, falls, and skins her knee. The lantern flies out of her grip and smashes on the sidewalk. Its light sputters out, and she smells the spilled kerosene.

  “Are you all right?” someone asks.

  She looks up. A streetlight illuminates the bearded man from her tour.

  “Here,” he says, taking her hand and helping her to her feet.

  “Thanks,” she says, feeling shaky. “These stupid shoes.”

  How quickly he vanishes. Her knee stings, and there was that brief panic of losing her balance. She gathers the shards of the lantern and tosses them in a trash can. Another Ghost Walk group passes by. Annie doesn’t recognize the guide, a woman with a booming voice and silver eye shadow. This group looks jollier than Annie’s was.

  The bearded man is gone, but Annie’s hand still tingles from his touch.

  She has given the Ghost Walk for ten years, and she suddenly feels too old, at thirty-nine, to speak in the exaggerated cadences she uses for drama, and to wear navy-blue nail polish and a tight black dress: her witch outfit. Did the man even recognize her? She hurries along, her ankle aching. Trees and restaurants along the avenue twinkle with strands of tiny white lights. Every store, every bank, has a glowing jack-o’-lantern out front, or cornstalks and baskets of gourds. She smells the raw squash of pumpkins and the potpourri of candles. Fake cobwebs drape the doorway of the Irish bar. She lifts them up and ducks inside.

  It’s a busy night, but Dale, the manager, seeks her out to talk.

  “It’s like this,” Dale says. “Everywhere we go, people give my wife pigs. Knickknacks and stuff. Always pigs. She don’t even like them. She don’t know how it all got started.”

  Dale never talks to her, not like this. Annie can’t get rid of him, because he’s her boss, so she has to listen and keep busy, cleaning the bar, wiping it down with a towel until it shines.

  Dale says, “It started when she was little. She had a birthday party, and all the kids brought toy pigs. My wife thought her mother told them to, but her ma said no, she didn’t. So my wife grows up and meets me, and we get engaged, and her friends give her a shower.”