by Andrew Pyper
She must have been listening outside the door of the state dining room at breakfast. That, or she enlisted the steward to eavesdrop. How else could she know?
“You seem to know all about it,” he said. “Perhaps you can tell me.”
“It’s not for me to tell. I only heard him from my room.”
“Yes?”
“Thumping up and about. Then he rushed back into his room, locking the door. I believe he had a fright.”
She was enjoying this. He didn’t want to consider too long as to why.
“How does this lead to your conclusion about his writing?”
“It doesn’t. That’s only a guess,” she said. “A whisper in my ear.”
18
Over the days that followed the Fox sisters’ visit, Jane spent most of her waking hours in Bennie’s room. She liked to read there, sitting in the hard chair. Listening to the baby breathe in its crib.
Sometimes she would close her eyes and hum one of her melodies, the one she composed herself on the piano in the Amherst house and later sang to each of her children. The music was mischievous, sportive, a prelude to a fairy tale. But as with all fairy tales, it revealed something else beneath its surface as it went along. Even in Jane’s own ears it eventually curdled, and she would stop, always with the sense of being watched by a presence behind her, outside of view.
When she sang she kept her voice quiet, especially when she felt the footfall of one of the staff pass by in the hallway, though she knew they heard her nonetheless. She was certain they would never enter. They had been ordered not to, for one thing. For another, they were too frightened to attempt it, given the way they slid along the wall opposite to Bennie’s door on the occasions they had to venture to the west end of the second floor. Only Hany lingered there sometimes. Pacing back and forth along the middle of the hall. Waiting for Jane, wishing for her to come out of the forbidden room, but not daring to come within arm’s length of the door.
Jane checked on the infant only when she first came in, confirming it was asleep. The head smooth and warm. The little fingers clenching and unclenching. The mouth pursed as if withholding improper laughter. She picked it up the first day, but not again after that. There was a stillness to the way it lay in her arms that was distinct from sleep. As if it didn’t know how to receive affection. As if it was tolerating her.
She would sit in the feeding chair in a state between waking and sleep. Look to the crib, return to the thoughts she’d already lost.
Once she looked and found the child staring at her. Its face pushed against the bars of its crib as if attempting to slip through. She looked away, then back again. The baby was on its back once more, unmoving. She would have doubted she’d seen it in any other position had it not forgotten to close its eyes.
It never needed to be fed after the night of its arrival. It never soiled its diaper. It never cried.
On the sixth day the baby was gone.
Jane entered the room midmorning as she usually did. Franklin was safely out at Congress, the residence busy downstairs where Thomas Walter’s workmen continued renovations in the public rooms, but relatively still upstairs where the improvements were complete. She closed the door behind her. This was what she’d done every other time she considered announcing herself in some way, or saying her son’s name, but decided against it. She didn’t want to hear herself declare the one thing she wanted most—Bennie—and for the quavering in her voice to allow admission of any doubt.
Her feet took her to the crib. A mother’s obligation. It had to be that, as every other part of her wanted to leave. Jane’s mind was able to convince itself that a baby appearing out of nowhere that resembled her own was acceptable, fortunate. But her body knew better.
The blankets were curved upward into a tent as they had been since she’d swaddled the child in them days ago. Yet now the child inside them was gone. The blankets hollowed out as if a tortoise had abandoned its shell.
Someone had stolen the baby. She thought this for only a second or two before dismissing the possibility. This was the White House. Who would have gained access to do such a thing? And then, more uncomfortably: Who would want it once they picked it up and felt how it didn’t respond, didn’t open its eyes, kept sleeping with a vacancy that was less than sleep?
She pulled back the blankets. Got to her knees to look under the crib. Nothing but pearls of dust. She lay flat to scan the entire floor. Under the bed, the chair, the dresser. That’s where she saw the feet.
The dresser had been pulled out from the wall, leaving a gap between. Too small for an adult to hide. But sufficient space for a child.
One of the feet rose, drifted to the right, stepped down. The left did the same. It had been hiding. Now that it was detected, the game was over, and it was time to show itself.
Jane started for the door on hands and knees. Kept her eyes straight ahead, scuffing in orderly locomotion before tumbling forward, a desperate series of leaps and clawings.
She heard the sounds she was making on the floor. She also heard the child shuffle out from behind the dresser.
“Momma.”
Her forehead was touching the door. She had only to raise a hand to the knob and she could scramble out, kick it closed once she was in the hall. But her son’s voice held her to the spot.
Jane turned her head to the side. She did it slowly so that her neck wouldn’t click, as if any sound from either of them would violate a rule.
Bennie stood there. A boy of the age of six or so, perhaps ten feet away. He had clothed himself from what he’d found in the dresser: pin-striped short pants and a white linen shirt with a lace collar. What Bennie wore to church on hot midsummer days.
“Are you cold?” she said.
Even to Jane this struck her as an odd first query to ask, but the truth was she wanted to know. Was he hungry? Was he hurt? All of these preceded what she knew ought to be of greater relevance. Was he Bennie? Was he returned? Was he dead?
Nothing in the boy’s stance or expression altered. Yet she knew he’d heard her question. He just had no interest in it.
“Don’t go, Mother,” he said.
She grabbed the knob. Turned it.
The boy started for her as she pulled the door open. It was harder, at the low angle she was at, for Jane to swing it wide enough for her to fit through than if she’d been standing. She could only tug at it and wait for the door to come back at her before jumping forward.
“Let me… out !”
The boy slammed into the other side of the door the same instant she closed it, so that the two sounds came together in an echoing boom that traveled the hallway’s length.
She waited for Bennie to plead with her, or cry, or screech, but the boy made no sound. He could easily open the door himself, and Jane flipped onto her back, watching the handle, waiting for it to turn. It didn’t move.
Her breaths, taken in clicking gulps, was too loud to hear if another was breathing inside the bedroom, so she held the air in her lungs and slid close, her ear an inch from the wood. Listened. A silence sustained longer than she could deny herself from inhaling.
She had to get up. It was good luck alone that had prevented anyone from seeing her crawling out of what was known to be an empty room. She was aware that it was one thing to indulge herself inside it, on her own, but quite another if she was observed acting this way in front of staff, no matter how they’d pledged their discretion to her, no matter how they wished to avoid her altogether.
But she had to check. She had to.
Before she got up, she lay flat on the floor. Put her cheek to the frigid boards. Looked under the door.
He hadn’t made a sound because he hadn’t moved. The bare feet so close she could make out their odd lack of details. Veinless, the nails rounded as if filed, the rest unmarked by blue as the cold would’ve stained skin exposed to the chill as long as his had been.
She rolled away. Scrambled to her room. Locked herself inside.
19
In the morning Jane mounted an assault against the day. She washed. Dressed. Tied her hair in the twin tails that was her custom before she came to the White House and gave up on tying it at all. Then she went down the main stairs and joined her husband in the private dining room.
At the sight of her, Franklin laid his spoon down in his bowl and rose so abruptly his legs slammed the table’s edge.
“Careful,” she said, “you’ll hurt your sore knee.”
“I can’t feel a thing.”
“It’s the shock of seeing me.”
“Not shock. Relief.”
Jane felt it too. The thought that she could reenter her life, partial and marred as it was, by the application of powders and perfume and ribbons, was thrilling to her. She knew better though. There was the boy in the room upstairs. There was Sir. There was what she’d come down here to say.
She sat next to Franklin at the broad table and shook her head when a steward entered. When they were alone again, his hand strayed toward her. She took it. The memory of his strong fingers and thick palms on her body came simultaneously with the recognition of having missed several meals in a row.
“This is an unhappy place,” she said.
“Is it the place or us?”
“We’re unhappy too. There’s something here with us though, making it worse.”
Franklin nodded. “Tell me.”
“It hasn’t a name. The closest I could come would be to call it a thwarting from goodwill. Forces that constrain us, tell us we have roles now.”
As was often necessary in speaking with Jane, he gave up on thinking through her words and swam with them instead, finding meaning through the quality of their temperature and touch. He wondered if this was the way it was between other husbands and wives.
“Like actors in a play,” he said.
“But in the play, despite the palace we live in and its thrones for king and queen, we are powerless.”
“And you’ve come to tell me you’d like out of the performance.”
“No. I couldn’t leave even if you allowed it. But I wanted to see if we could try to be who we were. If we could resist.”
She looked at her husband and caught a flash of it: the way they once knew each other. A foundation of decency they reinforced together. The concession that while she would never totally know this man, she knew enough. Back then, when she encountered the rare reports of murder in the gossip of Amherst or Concord, she wondered the same thing: Was the killer’s wife surprised? Did she know a shard of malevolence existed in her husband but had pushed it aside until the day he thrust the blade through the overbilling blacksmith or bickering neighbor or disloyal child and she saw that she’d been uselessly correct? Even in the thrall of courtship Jane was aware that Franklin wasn’t guided by principle alone. What man was? The important thing was his goodness. A muddied form of it, to be sure, but one free of meanness or cynical calculation. He was uncomfortable when he lied, soothed when he confessed. His crimes were the fruits of passivity, not action.
“Be who we were,” Franklin said, as if recalling the same time himself. “How would that be done?”
“By reaching beyond these walls. Doing the Christian thing.”
“You’re speaking of something in particular.”
“Anthony Burns,” she said.
All the newspapers were bursting with the name. Burns was a twenty-year-old man who escaped his slave-owners and made his way to Massachusetts, a free state. He’d recently been arrested in Boston and ordered to be returned to Virginia. Under the Fugitive Slave Act the matter was clearly settled, except that abolitionist protesters surrounded the prison where Burns was being held, demanding his release. In the melee, a US Marshal was stabbed and killed.
“You would have me let him go,” Franklin said, pulling his hand from hers and reaching for his coffee cup before changing his mind, his stomach roiling.
“You are the president.”
“It is the law, Jane.”
“We’re speaking of a single case.”
“Cases such as these, if mishandled, can lead to others.”
“Then handle it rightly. Release the man. And if it leads to other men being freed, then we’re all the closer to a bad law melting like ice in June. You’ve said many times that you see the ownership of human beings as a practice that will retreat over time. Here is an opportunity to hasten its end.”
Given her distaste for Washington, Jane’s interest in politics was always surprising to Franklin. She read the newspapers as if preparing for an exam. She was especially alert to the human dramas that lived under the discussions of policy, such as the allowance of women to study medicine or the wagon trains of families headed westward under military escort, killing “all manner of Indian” along the way. For Jane, politics was fueled by the discernment between right and wrong. For Franklin, it was the way a nation remained united.
For the sake of their marriage, the slavery question was one they tried to avoid. Yet every topic seemed to find its way there eventually, forcing them to restate their views. Jane was sympathetic to abolition. While Franklin saw its philosophical merits, he believed it was a risk to national unity to impose on those in opposition to it.
Franklin looked down at the egg yolk smeared over his plate and saw it as a self-portrait.
“I am no advocate of slavery,” he said. “I wish it had no existence upon the face of the earth. But as a public man I’m called upon to act in relation to an existing state of things.”
“And what ought the president do when the existing state of things is in error?”
Franklin could be guilty of underestimating his wife on certain accounts, but he was always alert to her ability to find a way of knotting up the personal and the political. He preferred to see a space between the two, as his legal training had it: what a lawyer argued in court had no bearing on how easily he went to sleep that night. Jane never failed to point out the lie in this on the nights Franklin tossed and moaned in his bedsheets.
He pushed the toast rack her way. “Will you at least join me for some breakfast?”
“Will you consider my appeal?”
“Naturally.”
“Then pass the butter, please.”
* * *
That evening, when the congressional visitors and daytime staff were gone and the house was quiet, the hours when Jane was reading or weeping or writing letters to the dead or doing whatever it was she did in the room across the hall from hers, Franklin slipped down to the first floor, went into the Crimson Parlor, and poured himself a drink.
The whiskey was warm and alive in him. It felt like the only part that was.
When he wasn’t occupied with his work, the residence closed in on him, stifling him with a combination of anxiety and heartbreak that sometimes left him gasping. He wasn’t allowed to grieve his sons during public hours, and when he was in Jane’s company he was obliged to be strong, show her what a recovery to normalcy might look like. The result was that he only permitted himself the full freight of his sadness in stray moments like these, always alone, always at night.
His tears made him cough so he cleared his throat with the rest of the amber in his glass. He took his time with the second measure, more generous this time. He sat in one of the straight-backed chairs that Thomas Walter had said was “traditional American design” but felt to Franklin like something churches made the choir sit on to prevent them from falling asleep.
He was drinking. Breaking his promise to Jane. But it was all right, because he was keeping another. In his mind, he forced his thoughts away from his boys to consider what his wife had asked of him.
It would be recklessness to make a decision of the kind she wanted him to. No matter the injustice of re
turning Anthony Burns to chains, this was a national issue, and he was the leader of the nation. Franklin had been chosen by his party to carry on in the predictable way he’d conducted himself as a congressman and senator, which is to say he would run the country by the same rules his father ran his tavern:
Appear to be in favor of both sides of any argument.
Business is always business.
If there were beatings to be done, one didn’t hear them so long as they happened off premises and at night.
And it wasn’t just the offense to Democrat insiders that made Jane’s idea so imprudent. If Franklin Pierce were to start making freemen out of fugitives willy-nilly it would show a boldness he hadn’t demonstrated in his career. History would note it, and as history tended to judge abrupt turns, condemn it. This is what made saying yes to Jane so dangerous.
It’s also what made it appealing.
The party pleaders, the congressional flatterers, the New Hampshire fundraisers—they had all trapped him here in this sorrowful place, frigid as a crypt and with ladders and holes in the hallways from repairs that would never be completed. Now he had a chance to break out of the blinders they’d fixed to him. Stability, compromise, balance. They left him no room for change, for daring, for decision.
He took another sip.
He would do it. Letting Anthony Burns walk away from the stockade in Boston would be the closest he could come to letting himself walk away from the White House. And if they all saw him as reckless, at least they would see him. A president for once, instead of a custodian.
The glass was empty. Franklin didn’t like seeing it that way.
He was about to get up to refill his glass when he spotted his father sitting on the satin banquette on the far side of the room.
The old man didn’t appear as a ghost might. If anything, he was more real-seeming than if he were alive. There was a density to his presence, a particularity to his clothes, the shine of his boots, the filaments of hair reaching out from the tops of his ears, all the parts of him visible even at this distance. His face aglow not from fresh air or liquor but the over-stated colors of a painter’s brush.
