by Andrew Pyper
“You can punish me—you have grounds for it,” he said, kneeling. “All I’m asking is to have my son with me tomorrow.”
Her fingers gripped the locket tighter but didn’t move to unclip it, the back of her fist turning white.
“He will stay with me.”
“I was his father, Jeannie. If you won’t stand with me, it will leave me to stand alone when—”
“He will stay with ME!”
She tugged. The locket’s chain snapped with a sound like a coin dropped in a pool.
Franklin held out his open hand. But she only gripped the locket tighter against her ribs.
“You think you hold sole ownership over pain. Perhaps you believe you invented it,” he said. “I have my arrogance. But this, Jeannie—this is yours.”
He stood. It made her look even smaller to him. Something a stage magician would introduce in his act as the Shrinking Woman.
“Those suffering voices in your head?” he said. “Has it occurred to you that the only suffering you could ever hear is your own?”
She didn’t relent. The locket stayed buried at her side, and her body withered more and more, transforming her from delicate woman to wrinkled child. When his back came up against the door he realized the illusion of her shrinking was the result of his retreat.
“If I could, I would stop it,” she whimpered.
“Stop what?”
“All that is to come.”
“We are both quite powerless against that.”
It was only when he was out of the room and escaping down the stairwell that he heard it as an odd thing for the president to say.
* * *
The day of the inauguration was blurred with wet snow, the audience scattered and blue-lipped. Those who endured the length of the ceremony shook beneath umbrellas that directed slush onto the coats of whoever stood next to them.
Franklin didn’t feel any of it.
There was a distance between his physical self that stood and spoke, and his inner self, which was nowhere near the steps of the Capitol. That part was with Bennie. And from this remove, he heard his voice begin to speak the words he’d written for the nation and realized they were addressed to Jane.
It is a relief to feel that no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself.…
It was closer to eulogy than celebration. He heard himself go on while feeling himself split wider into two men. One the reluctant president. The other lost in an immense darkness, refining his case against God.
He was never strongly religious, but he was a believer. Now he didn’t see himself as belonging to any church. None that was ruled over by a god that would push a train into a culvert and pluck just one life, the dearest soul among all its passengers, to join him in paradise.
The difference between Bennie’s death—all his children’s deaths—and the deaths of other children was that his had been taken. The world was full of loss, random and senseless. He knew it and accepted it. But his boys had been pulled from him for a purpose.
His standing there was proof of it. To deliver the words he was speaking, to be chiseled into the marble of history, required him to be free from the distractions of children. Maybe other men could be fathers and president at the same time, but he’d been judged to lack the focus to do both. Franklin Jr. gone before he had a chance to lay eyes on him. Franky pushed into the dark by the stranger in the smooth-skinned mask. Then Bennie. What explanation could there be other than the workings of a cosmic malice? A selection and destruction God alone had the power to enact.
Franklin Pierce was only the second American president not to swear his oath on a Bible. The first was Adams, who refused it out of principle. Franklin’s reasons were assumed to be the same, but the truth remained undeclared.
The snow came down, the parade canceled. When Franklin was finished the applause was a sparse thudding of gloved hands, voiceless and brief. It sounded to him like spades biting frozen soil.
2
Franklin Pierce wasn’t a slave owner. But Millard Fillmore was.
Fillmore, Franklin’s predecessor, was bitter at the idea of a Democrat taking his place and indulged his pettiness by leaving most of his belongings in the White House after the inauguration, so that the last possessions to be taken away were the human beings he owned. It meant the new president’s first day in office was consumed by overseeing a rotation of labor. Those who had attended to the residence’s upkeep—the men who kept the furnace burning in the room directly beneath the similarly oval-shaped Blue Room, the women who reached the mops into the corners to rid them of cobwebs—all of them walked off under the watch of guards, their jobs replaced by those who were free, at least in name.
Franklin couldn’t stop himself from watching Fillmore’s people go. He was transfixed by the way that, despite their numbers, they were the only ones who worked in silence. He imagined he alone could see them. It was their aura of nonexistence that lent them the purgatorial aspect of apparitions.
By midafternoon they were gone. So was most of the furniture.
When night fell, Franklin’s room at the northeastern corner of the second floor’s long central hallway possessed neither mattress nor frame. He considered ordering a bed to be brought to him but was concerned about starting his tenure with complaint. So he settled in a chair before the uncurtained windows, slipping into sleep before snorting awake, over and over.
In the morning his back refused to let him stand straight. His bad knee throbbed. He went about the business of setting up his office and chewing on a boiled egg in a haze of discomfort. Over the course of the day, he felt there was more to it than the troubles of his body. The building was unnaturally cold, for one. It had been a timid and soggy spring even by Washington standards, but this was something worse than dampness. The cold seemed to come from within the walls, not outside them.
He asked his secretary, a fussy but reliable man named Sidney Webster, if he would see to it that the furnace be stoked.
“My apologies, sir,” Webster began when he returned. “You set me to a task more difficult than I would’ve guessed.”
“Why’s that?”
“I had a time finding the men who work the furnace. And when I did find them—well, one of them, anyway—he was reluctant to enter.”
“Reluctant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was he asleep? Drunk?”
“It appeared he was frightened, sir.”
Franklin feigned exasperation and announced he would tend to the matter himself before starting the day’s work. The truth was, it wasn’t frustration that made him want to get away from Webster but the unsettled look on the man’s face.
As Franklin moved through the hallways that remained dusky even in the middle of the day, he searched for something Jane might like. An offering to mention in the day’s letter to her that could lure her back to him.
The first floor seemed to hold the most promise. He liked the Green Room’s wallpaper, which was sprinkled with gold stars leading up to a dark blue ceiling, all of it creating an illusion of being adrift in the cosmos. The East Room was the most impressively immense, his footfalls echoing in every direction so that it sounded like a hundred men approaching. He was also intrigued by the curved walls of the Blue Room, and the false door Webster had previously told him about. Once Franklin had located the small crack around it, he pushed hard at its corner. A narrow piece of the wall swung inward. He poked his head in to find a short hallway that appeared to lead to an exterior office.
“Escape,” Franklin whispered.
Back in the Cross Hall he headed left. The drama of the space was undercut by repairs started by Fillmore that had been left incomplete, so that the floors were partly carpeted by canvas sheets, the walkway interrupted by ladders and buckets holding plastering tools. This wasn’t the only off-putting aspect. As he went along, Franklin had to end
ure the gaze of the presidents before him whose portraits hung between the holes in the walls. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Madison. Each of them hung at a taller height than Franklin, taller than any man, so that they looked down at passersby with cool indifference.
What would his look like when the time came? He couldn’t imagine it in any detail, but knew the setting of his frame that he would hold: wide-shouldered, his expression darkly troubled but with eyes ahead, showing he was more than capable of meeting whatever challenge was to come. Would any of it be true? The dark troubles, certainly. The rest of it, he feared, would only be a pose.
He quickened his pace and made his way down to the ground floor. It smelled of soap. Usually this was a scent Franklin liked, as it made him think of Jane. But in this case it was too strong to be inviting. This was the smell of the hospital, or the funeral parlor. The effort to mask one odor with another.
“Ah,” Franklin said with a wave when he came upon a man outside the furnace room. “You must be the one committed to our deaths by freezing.”
“I’m sorry, sir. We’ll get back to it in a moment and have the place warm as July before you know.”
Franklin was astonished. This man—short, old, black—was being directly addressed by the president about shoveling coal into the boiler and his answer was to refuse him. But then he saw it. The look on the man’s face that wasn’t defiance but profound disturbance. It could be fear, as Webster had guessed. Or what Franklin thought he could see just beneath it. A mournfulness.
“What’s wrong?” Franklin asked.
The man looked down the hall as if hoping for the arrival of someone who was already late. When the two of them remained alone, he looked at Franklin directly.
“They come to get warm,” the man said with a glance at the furnace room door. “I give them the time they need.”
“There’s people in there?”
“I believe so.”
“Who?”
“The ones before us.”
“Fillmore’s men?”
“No, sir. The ones you can’t see.”
So this was a man who believed in ghosts. Franklin was aware that the idea of the dead inhabiting the world was often taken to quite literal interpretations in the churches he assumed men like the furnace keeper adhered to. He’d certainly seen a good many maids and caretakers over the years speak directly to invisible aunties and fathers. On one occasion he’d been sitting on a settee in his own house in Concord when a young girl they’d hired to help in the kitchen came out to utter a startled laugh at the sight of him.
“I would appreciate to know the joke too,” he’d said, but the girl didn’t seem to detect the seriousness of her overstepping.
“It’s my sister, Mr. Pierce. She’s right next to you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir. She went home last year.”
Franklin knew that some of the servants referred to passing on in terms of homecoming.
“And you say she’s right here?” he said, pointing his chin at the vacant air beside him.
“She surely is.”
“Well. What is she doing that’s so funny?”
“She likes your hair,” the girl said, breaking into giggles again. “She’s stroking your hair.”
In a reflex, Franklin’s hand rose to his head. Before he could rebuke the girl he felt the briefest touch of warmth. Soft as a child’s skin.
“If I opened this door,” Franklin said now to the man outside the furnace room, “would I see them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why’s that?”
“A person only sees things like that when they’re ready to.”
Franklin was annoyed. But he was aware of the moment possibly being part of a story someday, an anecdote shared by this man with others and taking on mythic resonance, perhaps even finding its place in a history book. A telling illustration of the understanding and patience of President Pierce.
“Once they’re gone then, would you please fill the boiler’s belly with coal?”
“Yes, sir. I surely will.”
Franklin smiled at the man, a gesture of comradeship meant to convey that, despite their different stations, they both had tasks they were obliged to satisfy. Franklin was gratified to see the man’s surprise. Then again, it may have only been his gratitude at not being made to go into the furnace room until whoever he thought was in there had left.
The ones before us.
Franklin was making his way back upstairs when it came to him. The furnace keeper wasn’t speaking of ghosts who had worked in the residence in the past but the ones who had been brought here on the ships. Slaves. Ones he believed were in the president’s house warming themselves around a dwindling fire. Their homecoming.
A person only sees things like that when they’re ready to.
Up on the second floor, Franklin went past doors he hadn’t yet opened. He paused outside the one he felt most likely would have been Bennie’s. A smaller room across the hall from the bedroom he hoped to occupy with Jane.
He gripped his hand to the handle but didn’t open it.
There would be nothing but an empty room on the other side. Yet some part of him felt he may be wrong about that. Wrong about any of these empty rooms being empty.
He drew his hand away from the handle.
Franklin wanted no revelations to be delivered in this place. Not after the train accident that replayed in his dreams every night. Not with his wife so far away she couldn’t wake him when he called out to his sons in his sleep.
3
The First Lady went straight to the second floor upon her arrival a fortnight later, claiming the bedroom on the southwest corner, the farthest from Franklin’s.
When he emerged from a cabinet meeting and was told Jane was upstairs he was stricken with nerves. It came from eagerness to see her. It came from dread of the same thing.
* * *
When Franklin Pierce first approached Jane at a social held in her grandmother’s house in Amherst, more than twenty years ago, he intended to introduce himself as he would to any other girl. Yet something about her—her hair covering all but the pink lobes of her ears, her fingers interlocked in front of her as if they contained a tiny bird—emboldened him. All that mattered was that she see him as unlike the other young men scuffing through the hallways holding cups of punch. He wanted to raise her downcast face to his. He wanted to awaken her.
“You’re meant to be the gloomy one of the three sisters,” he said. “But I see now they are mistaken.”
He was twenty-three, studying law under the tutelage of an established solicitor in town. She was two years younger, living in the house her family had moved to after her father’s death. Jane had heard of Franklin Pierce, mostly from his sisters, who commented on how handsome he was. But as he stood close to her that afternoon, she saw something in addition to good looks. She saw a man who would become important by virtue of competent talents combined with exceptional presentation. She saw a true American.
She blinked up at him before returning her gaze to the hem of her dress.
“You claim a special vision,” she said. “Tell me. What is it you see?”
Her voice was not what he anticipated. There was grit in it, and bass notes he could feel in his chest despite their being hardly audible. The voice of someone who had shouted for hours the day before.
“I see a rebel,” he said.
“Oh?”
“You’re not pleased.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?”
“I thought rebellion was only for militiamen.”
“Or fallen angels.”
He came partway to winning her right there. The other part would take more time. But in that moment, Franklin could see in the way her fingers untangled themselves that he had passed an outer barrier to her affections. He chose to believe that none had done so before.
“Now that, sir, is flattery,” she said.
* * *
Franklin clung to the recollection as he made his way along the residence’s second-floor hallway to Jane’s room, resisting the thought of it being “Jane’s room” when he wished it to be theirs. What is it you see? That had been her question to him, but he’d been drawn less by her looks than the sensation her voice inspired, the provocation in it, the illicit promise. What would he hear in it now? At her door he raised his shoulders straight before touching his knuckles to the wood.
“It’s me, Jeannie,” he said.
“A moment!”
He imagined her undressed. He pictured her spritzing rose water on her wrists or tying up her hair. Yet every second that passed without the call to Come in! pulled these hopes away into greater and greater unlikelihood.
The knob turned, and Jane was there, dressed in mourning clothes. The delay had not been to welcome him but to dry her face from the tears that continued to make a map of her cheeks.
“You look well,” she said in accusation.
“A performance. I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed everything.”
She studied him through the tiny holes of her black veil. And he looked back at her, or tried to. His wife behind a wall she carried with her and that only a show of real suffering—suffering he felt weakening his legs now, so that he had to throw a hand out to the doorframe to hold himself straight—would win a viewing of the woman inside.
Jane lifted the veil. She’d painted her lips red.
“Can we be alone in this place?” she said.
“We have no choice but to be alone in this place.”
He entered the room and closed the door. It was unclear if she would allow herself to be embraced, so he opened his arms to see if she would come to him.
“How is it?” she asked, unmoving. “Being president. Is it as you dreamed?”
“I never dreamed of it.”
“No. You only dreamed of being loved.”
She said this without sarcasm. Because it was also true, he nodded in dismal confirmation and lowered his arms.
