by Andrew Pyper
“Will you not hold me?” he asked.
“You have your duties, and I have mine. Is that it?”
“I love you, and I’m breaking, Jeannie. There’s no duty in it other than your feelings for me, if you have any.”
She went to him. And when her arms were around him he let his hands rest against her back.
“I don’t wish to punish you, Franklin,” she said.
Which crime would you punish me for? he wanted to ask, but feared her answer. One more than any other. The train. The deceptions that led to his winning the candidacy could be overlooked. Perhaps they already were. But their outcome—stepping into the railcar from the snow-drifted platform in Andover, sitting together, with Bennie behind them, his reaching for her when he should have reached for him—was why he was deserving of imprisonment outside of what remained of his family. Outside of her.
“Do, if it will bring you back to me,” he said.
“You don’t need to be brought back. Don’t you see? You’re here.”
She squeezed his arms hard enough to hurt. He wasn’t sure what she was trying to tell him. But there was life in the pain he felt, the message she was sending through it.
“Where does it go now?” she whispered.
“Where does what go, my dear?”
“Our love for him.”
The question struck Franklin as impossible to answer. He had loved his son more than he loved Jane, more than his father. Bennie’s memory gnawed at him, strangled him, tossed him on waves of unbearable sadness and, intermittently, a swell of gratitude for his having lived. He wasn’t gone. That was the problem. What Franklin couldn’t know then was that Jane was haunted too, but in a different way. For her it wasn’t the memory of the boy that plagued her but the injustice of his not being with her in body as well as thought.
Don’t you see? You’re here.
“You’re tired,” he said, though it was his own voice that was shattered with exhaustion.
She pulled away and looked around the room as if for the first time. The bed. The curtains visibly thick with dust. The chest with its drawers pulled halfway out like a beast with four tongues.
“Yes, I’m very tired,” she said, and sat down in the room’s only chair.
“There is a small dinner this evening. A half-dozen congressional Democrats to discuss—Lord God I don’t know what they want to discuss. Will you join me?”
As she considered his invitation he noticed she’d been holding a book in one hand the entire time. A Bible. The leather-bound edition that had been Jane’s father’s before she’d given it to Bennie. She turned it about in her lap to make sure he’d seen it, as if a weapon she was prepared to use if necessary.
“I don’t believe I’m able,” she said.
“Of course. You’ll want to get settled.”
“It may be some time before I’m ready to face the world. More than the time it takes to ‘get settled.’ ”
“It sounds like you’re proposing a remedy.”
“We’re too far gone for that,” she said. “But I had in mind something that might be of help to you. A substitute.”
Franklin understood now. It was not unusual for Washington widowers or “dedicated bachelors” to employ the services of a “substitute”—a woman who attended events, curated the social calendar, negotiated conflicts with other women performing the same function. A replacement wife.
“You have someone in mind?”
“My cousin.”
“Abigail?”
“I have written to her, and she’s open to the arrangement.”
Franklin knew her, in the long-standing but superficial way of extended family. Abigail Means was Jane’s aunt, but since childhood went by the title of cousin, given her closeness in age to Jane. Abby entered the family through marriage to the much older Robert Means, who died a decade earlier. She and Jane had been close before their marriages. Abby was someone who always wanted to help. And Jane always needed help.
“She is a sound choice,” he said.
“Good. She will arrive this afternoon.”
“You sent for her?”
“I didn’t anticipate disagreement.”
“Where will she stay? Not here, I should think.”
“No, not here. She has found an apartment nearby.”
“Well. I had no idea you’ve been so busy.”
“She could attend tonight in my place.”
“But you’re right in front of me.”
“Are you sure of that? I’m not.”
He felt the heat of anger at the back of his neck and wondered if one could see it if standing behind him. A redness of the skin or curling of the ends of his hair.
“It’s difficult,” he said, his voice held to a willed softness. “It’s not what we hoped. We are both of us in great pain, Jeannie. But we must endure, do our best. For each other. And—you’ll not want to hear this—for the country too.”
She pushed the Bible to the edge of her knees. It tottered there, back and forth. He watched it and soon felt not only his anger drain away but also his ability to meet his wife’s eyes.
“Endure,” she said finally, as if plucking a random word from the string he’d just spoken.
By the time he was out of the room there was a full moment in which he’d forgotten where he’d just been, where he was now, or what had brought him to this hallway lined with portraits of men who had the bearing of having always known which direction to take.
4
Jane stayed on in the guest room. She attended no formal events, took no visitors, refused to hostess the Friday drawing-room gatherings that had been held continuously by every First Lady going back to Martha Washington.
It wasn’t rebellion alone that fueled Jane’s denials. It wasn’t illness nor idleness either. In fact, she considered herself well occupied over her first days in the residence. She was busy making a room for Bennie.
She chose the room directly across the hall from hers—the same room that Franklin imagined would have been Bennie’s. The difference was that Jane was unafraid to open the door.
She called it the Grief Room.
The servants brought up the items she’d arranged to be delivered from Concord. Using a seamstress’s tape she measured out the dimensions in relation to the corners and two windows, directing each piece be placed as close as possible to the same position as they had been in the Pierce house.
Once on her own, she spent the next hours adjusting the placement of everything. These were relics. Holy things.
There was what he called his “little boy bed.” His crib too. The three-foot-tall tin soldiers he loved that had swinging legs and arms that lifted rifle butts to their shoulders. The chair she sat in when breastfeeding. The honorary sword Franklin had been given after the Mexican War and that Jane had secretly let Bennie keep in his closet to be taken out at night, polished and admired.
When Jane was finished she sat in the feeding chair. She felt the ribs of its back push against her spine with familiar discomfort. From a sewing bag she pulled out a leather journal and placed an ink pot on the arm of the chair.
As she wrote, she spoke her words aloud.
My precious child, I must write to you, altho’ you are never to see it or know it. How I long to see you and say something to you as if you were as you always have been: near me.
The room had grown cold. Her breath exited her nostrils like gray smoke from the end of a barrel, one firing south, the other north.
She checked the positions of the furniture, the tucked-in sheets on the bed, the tiny lace-trimmed pillow in the crib. Nothing stirred. But something had altered from only the moment before.
Oh! how precious do those days now seem, my darling boy—and how I should have praised the days passed with you had I suspected they might be so short—Dear, dear child. I know not how to go on without you
Jane put down her pen.
“Ben?”
She asked it with equal parts hop
e and horror. Only once it was spoken did she look up from the page.
One of Bennie’s tin soldiers sat on the floor directly in front of her. The general. His uniform lined with painted medals, circles of rust around the screws. The legs obscenely spread. A grin on its face Jane felt sure was wider, toothier than before. Its rifle raised so that its one eye stared down its length. Aimed at her.
“What do I do?”
She asked this not of the general, nor of Bennie’s spirit, which she knew wasn’t there. The boy wouldn’t have set his toy on the floor in such a crude manner. He wouldn’t have tried to make his mother as frightened as she was.
“I came. I brought you,” she said, louder this time. “What do I do?”
It was her own voice that replied. The end of the echo thrown back by the cracked plaster walls.
Do.
* * *
For Franklin, Jane’s isolation was becoming a problem. The Whig opposition, desperate for ropes that might pull them back into relevance, had begun murmuring about the president’s mad wife. A good woman driven over the edge by actions on her husband’s part.
“What actions?” Franklin demanded from Webster in his office. “What imagined injuries have I inflicted on her?”
“They are imagined. And all the more potent for being so.”
“It’s not fair to Jane. She doesn’t deserve such vile gossip.”
Webster shrugged. “It is Washington, sir.”
Franklin vowed to visit her room with greater frequency but found himself putting off going down to her end of the hall. He came to imagine dreadful deformities. Bennie’s Bible now fused to his wife’s hand. The hairs from his dead sons’ heads growing out from the closed locket around her neck. Her shoulders folding inward so that, in her black mourning clothes, she came closer in appearance to a beetle.
He chastised these products of his mind, looping through the reasons such grotesques were undeserved.
Jane had lost her children. She was living in a house that wasn’t hers, in a city she loathed, with strangers outside the windows expecting her to lie about her acceptance of all of it.
And he’d deceived her. He’d let his famous friend, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, talk him into putting his name on the convention ballot in Baltimore. Not to win, but to prevent a fracture within the Democratic Party. The compromise on the matter of slavery was showing itself as anything but. There were those who feared the selection of Buchanan or Cass would lead to disaster, committing the party wholly one way or another, north or south. What the moment demanded was a peacemaker. The hope was that the addition of Franklin’s name would create a space for such a person. His presence at the convention wouldn’t be required.
Jane hated the idea. She understood the tactic but dreaded even the remotest chance of having to return to Washington, a city she found stomach-flippingly gaudy, full of theaters announcing the basest spectacles and magic shows, along with tavern after tavern, all of it fed by a spring of whiskey and the pronouncements of men. She also feared the place, and told Franklin so.
“I feel terrible things await us if we follow this path any farther than we have” was how she put it.
He felt he knew her meaning. The work of politics could draw husbands away from wives and children. She was hinting at losing him to drink, to meeting rooms, to a mistress. Yet why did she speak of these conventional problems in such an oblique way? It was as if what troubled her about the thought of the presidency was a danger unique to the two of them, mysterious and unnameable.
When word came that Franklin had been selected as candidate, Jane had fainted and dropped to the floor. He worried that she would never revive. He worried that she would.
Knock, knock.
He was in bed in his second-floor chambers after deciding it was too late to visit Jane after all. The sound of shoes clipping to the door once more pushed aside his guilty thoughts of what he’d subjected her to. In their place was the distress of spotting new evidence of her turning from the woman he’d danced with in New Hampshire church halls long ago into a monstrosity, her voice lost to hisses, her back a shiny shell.
“Anything else, sir?”
It was Webster. There was no need for these evening farewells of his, but Franklin appreciated how the two of them had entered into a substitute marriage of a different kind. A sexless coupling fueled by fidelity from the one side, and the reward of kindly morsels from the other.
“Nothing, thank you, Sidney.”
“Good night, then.”
“Till the morning.”
The shoes clipped away. Franklin tried to sleep. Failing, he sat up. Forced his thoughts away from work and toward Jane’s substitute.
When Franklin met with Abby earlier in the week to formally thank her for agreeing to help “on social matters,” she presented herself as a widow, not old, lively and practical. In appearance she was a less pretty, less troubled version of Jane. And was there a veiled promise in her smiles to him? A willingness to serve spilling into a more general availability? Over the days since, he couldn’t stop from thinking of her as the physical manifestation of a wish. Were my wife to be the same except for this, and this, and this. Improvements to a gown that fit well enough but could always be bettered by a tailor’s cuts and stitchings.
He lingered in wakefulness. Part of him troubled by the nation’s forebodings of calamity, another part flashing images of his wife’s appalling metamorphosis. Still yet another quadrant of his mind was willing the substitute to approach his room and whisper her request to come in.
That night, he heard it.
The feet bare, sliding over the rug that ran the length of the central hall. He sat straight against the headboard to better conjure the sight of her on the other side of the door. Abby in a nightshirt. This is what he wanted his mind to draw but it betrayed him. Instead, it sketched a beast. A creature made up of multiple parts—goat, rat, snake, Jane—that approached with its tail swishing behind it.
“Abigail?”
His voice barely pierced the murk. There was no way whoever stood outside could have heard him. He was about to speak again when his breath stopped hard in his throat.
Scr-rrrr-aammfff.
A palm drawn down the wood. Reaching inside without opening the door.
He didn’t speak even when he was able because the word he was going to say again—Abigail—didn’t make sense anymore.
Whump.
A solid weight brought against the door. He felt the restraint behind it even as he felt the floor shudder under the bedposts at the force of it. It wasn’t trying to break in. It was showing him what it could do if it did.
He waited for it to go but he never heard it leave.
The dawn seeped through the curtains to signal his first entirely sleepless night in the White House. He remained there, cold and headachy, not daring to pull back the sheets.
The world came for him in the form of Webster. His knock light and harmless.
“Sir?” his secretary said. “Shall we begin?”
5
Jane was prepared to be impressed by the mansion’s grandeur, but with the exception of some of the paintings and the books in the curved-wall second-floor library, she was astonished to find the White House a wreck. She would’ve never guessed it from the exterior, which suggested a country palace that had been lifted from Versailles and dropped into the marshland next to the Potomac. Then she went inside. And the palace turned into an asylum with better art.
There was the cold that even the ground-floor furnace at full fire could only nudge into the corners. The floors warped by humidity. The furniture scarred by pipe smoke and ash. It almost made Jane grateful for the curtains that so completely shielded the interior from light that to open them a crack sent a blade of yellow slicing through the air.
Then there was the odd rhythm to the house’s activity: the halls echoing with the clipped boots of congressmen and servants and various head-lowered clerks during the day, foll
owed by the muffled quiet of night, the rooms and parlors overgrown, foreboding, empty.
She didn’t complain about any of it except the odor.
“It smells of wet peat,” she’d tell Franklin when he came to her room in the early evenings. Of a pig barn. Of meat left out on the cutting block. It smells of an undressed wound.
He resolved to make improvements. His first decision was to install a dazzling convenience just down the hall from Jane’s room: a bathroom with running water. Once completed he had to insist she come and see it, watch the billows of steam rise from the tub.
She looked up at him. Her nose pushing against her veil.
“I would prefer to be alone,” she said.
He rushed out in shame without another word.
His next appointment was to hire the famed designer, Thomas Walter. Within days the crates and paint cans he brought in went beyond the president’s instructions to “make it more of a proper New England home,” instead installing love seats and satin cushions everywhere and brightening every wall by several shades. Worse, every minor repair on the first floor only brought the discovery of more serious damage. Tradesmen carrying planks and saws and ladders became a regular feature of any walk through the meeting rooms and salons. Not to mention the man-size holes they left in the walls.
The one change Franklin approved of were the new draperies held to the sides by gold ropes, so that sunlight became less alien to the place. In Jane’s room, if he came by during the day, he would open them only to have to do the same thing again next time.
“The light will do you good,” he said.
“So I can see?”
“So you can feel its warmth.”
She startled him by touching his jaw with her free hand.
“You are trying, aren’t you?”
“I only want you back to what you were,” he said. “Or half that, for now.”
Her fingers traced around the edge of his lips.
“You need to be warmed too, don’t you, my husband?”
The gratitude at this small tenderness was so great he worried that to say anything in the moment would trigger a flood of tears.
