by Andrew Pyper
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To Heidi
January 6, 1853
“Something occurred to me last night.”
Jane Pierce looked up at her husband, her bluish lips tight in what was, for her, a signal of playfulness.
“In a dream?”
“The opposite of a dream,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“I must appreciate you before the nation swallows you up for the next four years.”
“Possibly eight, Jeannie.”
“Eight years?” She laughed, and the sound of it startled Franklin. It was on account of its rarity, but also its alien depth and volume, as if a man resided in her chest for this purpose alone. “I won’t have it! One term only will I let the people take my husband on loan.”
“Four years, then,” he said. “After that, we will run away from the White House together.”
She touched his hand. His skin dry as the mourning lace she wore on her sleeves.
For weeks Jane had been angry with him. It wasn’t the submerged ire that resulted from his drinking, or the long hours he was not at home. This was out in the open between them, as was its source: the way he broke his promise to her.
Two months earlier, days before his birthday, Franklin took the electoral college in a landslide, 254 to 42. He was forty-seven years old. The youngest man the country had made president.
He’d told her it wasn’t possible. He’d given her his word.
Yet now here she was, with her arm linked through his, the two of them standing so close she could smell the tallow of his shaving soap.
Forgive him.
The voice lewd and throaty as a rakehell’s, but empty of passion. A being heard by Jane alone as she lay awake in the paleness of their room that morning.
Soon you will ask to be forgiven too.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” she’d said to her husband over the breakfast table.
She hadn’t spoken to him much over the preceding weeks, her anger at him too great. It’s why she knew this small warmth would be all it required for him to take her back.
Within the hour, they were waiting for the train back to Concord. The Pierces were in Andover, where they had lingered following the funeral of Jane’s beloved uncle Amos in Boston. Now the three of them—Jane, Franklin, and young Bennie—watched the snow click hard as tossed rice against the station windows. It was an inconsequential station that looked out on the rails and, beyond them, a line of hemlock standing in competition for a greater piece of sky. Yet the morning had the quality of the sublime about it. A common beauty that, as Jane admired it, showed to her a glimpse of its inner menace.
“Mama?”
Her boy turned from the glass. A face so guileless and untroubled it required effort for Jane not to break into emotion that would be considered inappropriate for the First Lady to display in a train station.
“Yes?”
“Is it cold in Washington?”
“Frigid in winter. Tropical in summer. A world unto itself.”
“There is spring too? And autumn?”
“For one day each. Congress has outlawed all but the most extreme seasons, I’m afraid.”
The boy weighed this. Nodded his acceptance of it.
“Summer and winter are enough,” he declared, and stepped close, holding her and Franklin both, the boy’s cheek warming Jane’s side even through her long coat.
She had never been embraced by her husband and child at the same time before. It almost took the legs out from under her.
The newspapers invariably spoke of her in the most glum hues. Fragile, sickly, brittle. Heartbroken. What they didn’t acknowledge was how enduring discomfort and the carrying of grief were Jane’s primary talents. They afforded her a privilege too: the avoidance of expectations. She had the choice among a number of symptoms. Headaches that, judging from where she clutched her hands, existed in her stomach as often as her skull. Daily touches of fever. The pains she described to Franklin as “womanly concerns.” All of it—the injustice of her condition—lit a candle of rage inside of her, burning so low as to be unseen but never going out.
Illness was a prison for the innocent. This was how Jane saw it. It’s why even as a child she had wished for children, and then, once born, loved her children as fiercely as she did. She hoped that motherhood would release her from the confinements of her suffering. Her first boy was lost three days after delivery. The second succumbed to typhus at age four. Now she hoped only to hold close to the one life that remained, preserve the light in him, her Bennie.
“There’s the whistle,” a man said from behind them, and then Jane heard it too. The woebegone query—who-who-whooo?—of the steam engine pulling a single passenger car to the platform.
The Pierces untangled themselves to go outside and join the line. Nobody proceeded into the car. One by one the passengers looked back at them and stepped aside.
“Hur-rah !”
A single, jubilant shout before the small group broke into applause.
As Jane went ahead to board she took Bennie’s hand. She knew even this modest celebration would sustain Franklin for the journey. It calmed his doubt that he didn’t have a good reason for seeking the office aside from keeping things as they were. But then he’d catch himself in a mirror when he gave a speech, or see how others saw him, purposeful and steady, and held on to this image the same way believers grip the crosses at their necks.
Franklin sat next to Jane, Bennie asking to be on the wooden bench behind them. Having Bennie sit on his own gave her the slightest tug of concern, but the boy reminded her he was “eleven years going on twelve” and she said “Fine, fine, manly fellow,” as the other passengers streamed up the aisle, staring at them with curiosity and—in the case of a couple of the women—critical assessment of her appearance.
As the engine started away she stared out at the dull New Hampshire forests and hardened fields. It was as familiar a landscape to her as there was in the world, yet she was alert to the distortions that lurked in it. Ever since she was twelve, and over the years that followed the day when everything changed, she felt that if she looked hard enough she could always find something hidden in the ordinary.
They weren’t a mile out from the station when they felt it.
A shuddering through the car’s frame that popped them up from the benches, hats and purses suspended. A woman’s exclamation of astonishment—Oh!—followed by the shriek of metal.
They were flying.
Jane threw her hand back for Bennie. Her fingers grazed the collar of his coat before the boy was flung away from her, limbs swinging like the hands of a compass. His body passing other passengers, some of them aflight also but none as swiftly as her son, his spiraling interrupted only by the contact of his head with a varnished post before he met the far wall of the car.
The train rolled twice down a culvert and came to rest, upside down, next to a frozen creek bed.
There was a gap of time between the car settling and the passengers landing on the backs of its upturned benches, the metal-ribbed ceiling, each other’s bodies. Franklin was the first to regain his footing. He saw Jane moving—a tendril of blood finding its way out from her ear—and carried on to where Bennie had been thrown.
Even through their shock, the passengers recognized th
e president and crawled aside to let him pass. Franklin noted in their expressions how it wasn’t respect for his office that made them do it but hope. The wish for him to magically right the train, heal the wounded, bring back the dead.
Bennie was on his back. Hands over his heart, face up. It was how the boy slept. Franklin knelt next to him, and the hesitation to touch him was, at first, a courtesy not to waken him. He was a man who believed in believing things.
His son’s eyes were open. Held that way, unseeing. The smooth cheeks, chorister’s mouth, the nose that Franklin had often willed himself not to smile at on the occasions the boy’s nostrils flared when setting himself to a difficult task. All of it unharmed. This was his sweet boy’s body, free of twisting or laceration. But some internal absence left it a body only.
He was expecting the skin to be cool as it had been on the other bodies he had been a party to lifting onto wagons in the Mexican War, or his own father’s corpse he’d insisted on helping into the casket. But the boy’s throat—where Franklin laid his hand—was still warm. It allowed him to believe a second longer in the power of pretending. Franklin slipped both his hands under Bennie’s shoulders and pulled him up, but moving the body revealed the wound to the back of the head. A cutaway of the skull from its meeting with the post.
He lay the boy down again. Arranged his hands over the quiet heart. Closed the eyes with his fingertips. He felt an anguished howl pushing up from inside of him, but he forced it down. It left him outside himself, capable of action but lifeless in all other respects.
When he stood his wife was there.
“No, Jeannie. It’s not for you.”
Jane pushed him away. Some of the passengers who were now getting to their knees paused to watch the First Lady’s stick of a frame lowering to her child as if a bird settling to tend its nest.
A man’s cry for help—his legs crushed under one of the benches—tore Franklin’s attention away. It left Jane alone with Bennie. She gazed down at him, prepared for something to happen.
The boy opened his eyes.
His mouth too. His entire face collapsing bloodlessly inward, becoming a passage, tunneling down through the back of his skull, the carriage’s ceiling, into the cold earth below. A darkness into which she felt herself being pulled.
All the boys will die. And all the women broken.
Jane heard her dead son speak. Not with his voice but the one that was always with her.
You will let me in.
She knew the thing inside her son’s body was not her son. It was a thing outside the world. Louder than it had ever been before.
You will open the door.
Jane reared back.
To anyone watching—to Franklin, who turned from where he’d managed to tug the trapped man’s legs free—it would appear as the revulsion of a parent recognizing the violence visited on her child. The truth is Jane pulled away from the boy’s body because it opened its mouth to laugh at her. Because it was no longer Bennie but something else. Something wrong.
“Come away!”
Her husband was tugging at her arm, and Jane wondered if he meant away from having to move to Washington and play the part of president’s wife.
“Come away now.”
She let his hand half guide, half drag her from the car. There was smoke coming from its windows and new kinds of noise outside as men pressed handkerchiefs to their faces and went back through the door to rescue the injured still inside.
Later, they would learn that Bennie was the single fatality.
For now though, Franklin Pierce was the incoming president. He had only his wife left for a family. Even in this instant where he saw all he knew of connection and comfort deserting him, he wouldn’t allow others to see him fall.
He bent his knees. He walked.
First to Jane, where he touched her face and asked if she could stand on her own in the drifted snow at the bottom of the culvert. And then he climbed back up into the train to pull the last survivors from the wreckage.
Jane’s eyes drifted to a woman coming down the slope. One side of her face burned, her dress smoldering as she stumbled through the reeds.
Thank ye—thank ye, Jesus!
Jane saw the child. An infant perhaps two or three months of age held to the woman, its feet wriggling. Alive.
My beautiful boy! O thank ye, God!
The woman looked at Jane and saw it. The loss curdling into something else. It made the woman turn her back on her and veer away through the ice-cracking reeds.
Praise be for saving my little one!
Only Jane heard a second voice under the prayers the woman was casting skyward. A whisper seeping up through the snow, rising like a lover to place cold lips to her ear. A whisper that showed her things.
Bennie staring at her through the bars of his crib.
The thing she brought out of the cellar shadows when she was a girl.
A room in a mansion of white where God himself could not enter.
PART ONE CAMPAIGN
1
For the weeks that followed the accident, Jane stayed in her bed, refusing food, weighing how to free herself from her life. She would lose herself in clouds of paregoric. She would slit her wrists with Franklin’s straight razor. She would suffer, as she deserved to. Moving into the White House was not among the options she considered.
She knew her husband was trying, in his helpless way, to reach her. He wrote her the most gentle letters from Washington. He told her how much he missed her. How he grieved too, but that together they may provide some comfort to each other. It was lovely. It made no difference.
Go to him.
She covered her head in pillows. It didn’t stop the voice from finding her.
There is one more step on the path. Only you can let me in.
Even her screams couldn’t muffle its words.
Open the door for me. And I can open the door for you.
There was no way.
It was the only way.
She started out. When she reached Baltimore she took a suite in the Exchange Hotel and sent word to Franklin asking if he would come.
It was the day before the inauguration. He left the capital immediately.
She opened the door before he could knock. He hadn’t seen her in a number of days and was reminded she was at her most beautiful when she had time to perfect her anguish.
“I feel I ought to ask if I can come in,” he said.
“You are my husband. I cannot hold you.”
It was a reply in which he tried to detect a trace of affection—the hold you, the possessive my husband—but no. Her tone as flat as a solicitor advising a client as to the extent of his property rights.
The room was overdecorated. Too small for the gold-painted Charles X chairs and the chandelier hung so low Franklin had to duck to pass under. It put Jane at an advantage, as she found her place on the scratchy-looking sofa with an ease he could never equal.
“I will not come,” she said.
In the minutes before his arrival she had changed her mind. She would resist him. Not Franklin. The voice. It was what her father would have wanted, what he asked her to promise at his deathbed. She would make an effort in her father’s memory at the expense of her husband’s understanding.
“Do you mean you will not come now, with me? Or tomorrow, for the inauguration?”
She looked up at him. Smoothed her dress over her legs. “I will not come.”
“It’s an important occasion. You are important to me.”
“Those are two arguments. Which do you wish to make?”
He went to the window. The street undulated three floors below, a dizziness within him that made all of Baltimore slither and writhe.
“You’re all I have, Jeannie. I’m embarking on a journey, and I don’t know the way.”
“You have Nate Hawthorne and your senators for that.”
“I’m not speaking of politics. I’m speaking of the direction we must take together
.”
“You don’t require me for direction, Franklin.”
It was hopeless. She would win at a contest of blame because he was the only one deserving of it. His one way out was through her mercy, and she wasn’t ready to show him any of that, if she ever would again.
“I thought perhaps—” he said, turning, but stopped short at the sight of her crying.
“Something is happening,” she said. “Can I tell you?”
“Of course.”
“There are voices inside me.”
She hesitated, as if to go any further would be to provoke some third presence in the room only she could see.
“Are they yours?”
“They are the voices of the world,” she said. “The people on the train. My little brother John. My father. So loud you can’t make out one from another, so their agony sounds as one. But then it stops.”
“And you find relief ?”
“There is no relief in realizing its cause.”
“Which is what?”
“One voice that is apart from the others.”
Franklin had heard this kind of talk before. Campaigning in small towns where he would come across a tent or barn where a preacher would be quoting fire from the Bible. He dreaded entering those places. What unsettled him most was when one of the assembled would stiffen or start to shake, spellbound, and speak to the congregation with a message of salvation or destruction. They called it the touch of the Holy Spirit. To Franklin it seemed less a touch than an invasion.
“If you won’t come to Washington, will you please give me the locket?”
Her fingers went up to it. Rubbed the silver where it lay in the hollow at the base of her throat. The locket contained the hair of her two dead sons. A brown curl of Franky’s and dark strands from Bennie tied with ribbon cut thin as thread.
“Why do you ask for this?”
“Bennie wished to be at my side for the swearing-in,” he said. “I’d like to keep my promise to him.”
“And what of your promises to me?”
He reached out to her and she slid to the end of the sofa as if against attack.
