by Andrew Pyper
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“Bringing you here.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “I brought you.”
He straightened. Even in his agitated, underslept state, his pride was capable of being offended.
“You’ve made great sacrifices for my career that I appreciate, and you’ve been a valuable counsel to me over the campaigns,” he said, wrestling his irritation down as he spoke. “But in fairness, I think I had a part in it.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Please share what you do.”
“We’ve been used, Franklin.”
“That is politics. Everyone feels it.”
“Not by the party. Used by a higher design.”
“I don’t believe God has a hand in determining who wins elections.”
“Nor do I.”
She needed him to see it for himself. There would be no way of outright announcing what she knew—the role that Sir had played in her life, their courtship, his presidency, their deceased child’s return—without him rejecting the notion and her along with it. He had to be closer to knowing before she could reveal all she knew. She was confident now that he was halfway there. Jane saw Franklin’s reflex to cling to her literal meanings yielding inch by inch to the mystical, the unspeakable.
“I believe I know what you’re saying,” he said. “I have been used—been an instrument—my entire life.”
Jane recalled Sir describing her in the same terms as she played at the piano the night before. You are the instrument, Jeannie. She wondered if Franklin had heard the voice too. Perhaps he was now about to admit it, and she waited for it.
“Look at us! Here we are in the most powerful house in the nation and yet we’re talking as if we’re no more than pieces in a game!” He cast his eyes toward the general and lifted an arm to point to it, but decided against it, as if even an extended hand would put his fingers too close to the thing. “No more than toys.”
He placed his hand on the cushion between them. She couldn’t tell if it was an offering to her, or to buttress his unsteady balance. Whatever the case, she placed her hand atop his.
“I’m worried of the influence life here may have on you,” he said. “And because I treasure you, because you’re all I have left, I ask if you would consider living elsewhere.”
“Leave you?”
“To be safe.”
She pulled her hand away.
“Would Abigail stay on?”
“It wouldn’t be proper if she did,” he answered, his shoulder twitching as if tapped from behind. “I’ll find another substitute. Or get along without one.”
“I will not go.”
“There are things I have seen in these rooms, Jeannie. The most terrible things.”
“I won’t—”
“The country has called me, not you.”
“I’m not staying for the good of the country, nor for you. I’m staying for my son.”
“Your son?” Franklin stood. He was shaking. “Your son is dead! All our boys are dead!”
Jane heard the accusation threaded through Franklin’s shouting. He was saying she had lost her sanity, that this wasn’t normal grief. She heard something else too: Franklin’s phrasing was again almost the same as Splitfoot’s when his voice came out of Bennie’s mouth in the overturned train car. All the boys will die. Jane had wondered ever since if this referred to her own children, or some cataclysm to come. She saw now that it was both.
“You think the only way to resist the terrible things you speak of, is to escape,” she said, as soft as she could manage. “And seeing as you can’t do that until the end of your term, you’re granting me the opportunity.”
“Yes.”
“But what if you’re wrong?”
“On which account?”
“What if resistance can only be achieved from within? No matter the forces”—Jane moved her eyes about the room, its floor and ceiling, as if indicating the unseen presences all around them—“that seek to reduce us to our expected roles.”
He moved away from her but when he bumped against the chair in which the general sat, he sidestepped farther from them both. It left him stranded in the center of the rug, the painted ceiling of stars cast over him so that he appeared as isolated as a man standing in a rowboat at night.
“You speak of idealism,” he said.
“Perhaps I do. But what if the blather of policy and compromise and costs—what if all we give primacy to is only a distraction from the pursuit of our ideals?”
“This is an intriguing proposition, but there isn’t—”
“Haven’t I always been good counsel to you, Franklin?”
“My finest.”
“Then hear it now: There is no escaping this place. Because to leave it as it is will only hand it over to another man to lose his way. Whatever darkness is yielded to inside this house, the nation outside will yield to as well.”
Franklin folded his arms and it shrunk him by half. “What do you propose?”
“Change.”
“To prove my independence?”
“To prove your humanity.”
“And how is that done in my shoes?”
“By disregarding the machinations of party and electioneers. By the exercise of will. By choice.”
“Change,” he said, as if seeing a new meaning to the term for the first time.
“Of course it can’t be arbitrary. It must be moral. An action taken according to the principles I know you hold deep within yourself.”
Franklin looked down at the floor, and imagined he could look through it to the men who fed the furnace in the oval room directly below where he stood. They come to get warm. Spirits that came here, to America’s house. It was the only way they could. Because outside these walls, in the lives they would live there, they would be required to either show their Certificate of Freedom upon demand or be returned to chains. The ones you can’t see.
“I believe I’m aware of the issue you’re referring to,” he said.
“There is no other.”
“It plagues every matter before me.”
“Because it’s not a matter. It is an offense against—never mind God—an offense against what is right. And so long as it is allowed to stand, whether under the name of respecting the powers of state legislatures or its assistance to commerce, there will be no ridding ourselves of what resides here with us.”
They didn’t say slavery. They didn’t say evil. Not ghost, nor demon. But these inadequate terms passed between them now in silence. The things to which they referred rendered in specific images, a nightmare collage assembled in each of their minds.
“I feel it too,” he said.
“What?”
“A wish for redemption.”
“You may have it.”
“That assumes my capacity to enact it. But I also feel the shackles that hold me from it.”
“Politics.”
“Not that. The ways that good intentions may be sabotaged by torments of a different kind.”
He tapped a finger to his temple and she understood him to mean the realities seen and felt along with the other things manufactured inside his skull.
“Fight it,” she said.
“Alone?”
“I’m with you.”
“Ah! Then we’re a full battalion!”
“Frank—”
“And what are the two of us armed with? The crusaders’ banner of change? Change!” Franklin paused and cast his eyes about the room just as Jane had done. “It’s as if this office—this very house—conspires against it.”
Jane stood. Her body stiff with defiance. “That is why you must fight it.”
He unclasped the arms belted across his chest and it appeared he might melt into a pool on the rug of stars and heraldic eagles. It wasn’t helplessness this time that threatened his undoing, but gratitude. His wife was on his side again. His ally. Pushing him in an unfamil
iar direction, to be sure, and possibly mistaken to a catastrophic degree. But in that instant of her standing, fists clenched, setting him to a bold purpose and believing in his capacity to carry it out—in her, he saw a way out.
She saw it too. But for Jane, her faith was less in her husband’s strengths than the novelty of resistance. She had never really attempted to deny Sir’s plans, as they were vague to her until only recently, and in any case his intentions for himself had seemed to complement her own prayers. Even now she wasn’t certain what he had planned for herself and Franklin beyond their terror and chaos of mind. Perhaps that was sufficient. Yet she had an idea that Sir’s greatest opposition was to courage. The individual push against the supposedly foregone conclusion that, when joined with others pushing the same way, could reshape the inevitable.
“Jeannie?” Franklin said, opening his arms to her.
She fought against rushing headlong into him, losing herself in the rules and hierarchies of marriage again. But as she drew closer to her husband her body reminded her of all the ways her preceding months of independence were merely isolation. Perhaps it was one of Sir’s tricks to have her confuse anger with strength.
Right away she recognized the mistake she’d made.
She let Splitfoot into her thoughts. Now when she was so close to—
Huummb.
A stretched-out thud from the floor above. A roll of thunder passing over them between the plaster and boards.
A-hummmb… Boom.
Something of enormous weight had dragged itself over the floor before slamming into the door that contained it. Bennie’s room. The weight not that of the boy’s body but the mass inside of it, a malignant concentration of emptiness.
“Jeannie?”
The first time he said her name it was an invitation to be whole again. Now Franklin said it not to stand alone.
Hummmb… BOOM. Humm—
Jane rushed to him. To lend what comfort she could. To feel the thickness of his arms around her and believe there was force within them to shield her as she’d always tried to believe there was.
There was another reason she buried her face in the wool folds of his jacket. She didn’t want him to look directly at her and see that she knew the cause of the noise. She didn’t want to look at him and see that he knew it too.
—BOOM.
The two of them clung together in a fearful embrace. Exposed on all sides, the starry ceiling expanding, breathing ice down on them.
BOOM!
Jane turned Franklin around so that he faced the door. If something was about to enter she wished for him to see it first. But when she leaned her head away from him and looked back in the direction of the velvet settee, it was Jane who saw something horrible.
In the chair that Franklin was positioned close to when she first entered, the general was no longer sitting still, but shifting forward, rolling its hips closer to the cushion’s edge. It wasn’t just grinning anymore either, its lips ovalled to show two rows of teeth, jagged and tartared as a dog’s. Its sword remained raised, the tip touching its shoulder. Its free hand held next to its temple in a salute to whatever master had called it to attention.
“They will come,” Franklin said.
Jane couldn’t guess if he meant the staff to ensure their safety, or the monsters he imagined upstairs, smashing their way through into the house’s interior.
She didn’t answer, her eyes on the general as it slid off the chair.
When its boots met the floor—cle-Clink—it started marching. The little sword shuddering lower until it was pointed at her knees. The mouth wide and stretching wider, the lips still metallic in appearance but the material pliant as flesh. Inside she could see the black gums and, behind them, the bone where a pink throat ought to be.
It wasn’t that the boy’s toy soldier was alive. There was something alive inside of it. The tin shell a skin for the softer parts within.
… Cle-Clink-cle-CLINK…
Jane watched it come at her with the slaloming approach of a cat looking to be scratched. Top-heavy, wobbly.
It would be comical if she didn’t know the nature of what it contained. She glimpsed enough through its mouth to imagine the rest of it: random parts of dead men stitched together into a dwarfish mongrel. Fingers to work the arms. Eyes goggling behind blue-painted pinholes. A purple tongue slapping about, learning to speak again.
“There’s something at the door,” Franklin said, and once more Jane couldn’t tell what he meant, whether it be the portal to the Grief Room, the main entrance, or a figurative meaning of some kind, a way into himself about to be breached.
She held her shoulder hard to the middle of his back. He would understand it as her using him as a shield against whatever might enter. What she in fact wanted was for him not to turn because for Franklin to see the general too would confirm she wasn’t mad.
Until this moment she hadn’t realized the comfort thinking herself insane had brought her.
… Clink-cle-Clink-cle…
She remembered the scene in the East Room mirror. A future vision of human butchery. Now she had the idea that the general’s steel skin contained some of those boys’ parts. Grave-robbed. Or pieces that were never buried at all. Soldiers fallen in the field and left for the carrion and flies to dispose of.
The toy soldier stopped at Jane’s feet. It craned its head back to look up at her, which allowed her to look down past its throat. Gray bones fused into a web. A bruised heart, pulsing. A pair of lungs squeezing out a breath she could feel before she could smell.
The Blue Room’s door opened. She heard it over her shoulder and wondered, in the distant way one does about something that occurred some time ago, who was entering.
The general drew its sword back to its side. Readying for the swing.
Jane was moving too. Her slippered foot drifting back, tapping against the side of Franklin’s knee. Then driving forward. Her toe meeting the toy’s painted rows of medals.
Franklin remained facing the door. But he had to have heard the impact of Jane’s slipper to the general’s chest, its tumbling contact with the rug and hardwood as it fell backward.
“Ma’am?”
Jane pivoted to see her dresser woman, Hany, stopped mid-stride at the door. Judging by the look on the woman’s face she’d seen at least something of the general’s walking. Or perhaps more. The thing inside it.
“What was that?” Franklin demanded. It took a moment for Hany to recognize he was speaking to her, then another moment to interpret the question.
“I’m not sure I—”
“Did you hear it?”
Hany shifted her gaze from the general to the president. She hadn’t forgotten her duty to the latter. But it was the former she feared more.
“Hear what, sir?”
“The banging! Coming right through the ceiling. Shaking the whole house.”
“I heard none of that. Only the child.”
Jane stepped out from behind Franklin. Her head moving between Hany and the toy that had come to rest in a twisted jumble against the chair leg in what she sensed was only a pose of brokenness.
“What child?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Hany said.
“How old? Was it a boy or girl?”
“Just a boy.”
“What was it saying?”
“He wasn’t saying anything.”
It was Franklin’s turn to shout at the woman, not from anger or impatience but the ravaging of grief finding its way to the surface.
“Then why in the hell did you think it was a child?”
“Because he was laughing, sir.”
25
Franklin walked out without a glance back at Jane and for close to a full minute both she and Hany waited for his return. When neither heard shouted orders from the Cross Hall or the president’s distinctive footfalls approaching—the crisp snik of his boot heels, the pace deliberate, self-aware—it settled on them that he wasn’t coming back.
His haste was so that neither of the women saw his distress. What Jane could only guess was whether this state was brought on by fright, or heartbreak. She imagined his face twisted into a similar shape in either case.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am, if I offended.”
“You needn’t apologize, Hany. But I would ask if you would keep this conversation—this entire episode—to yourself.”
The older woman nodded so deeply the folds of her chin touched her chest. She knew what it was to be discreet. It was as much her job as the cleaning of gowns and stitching of holes. “Of course, ma’am.”
Jane wanted to ask if Hany would take the toy soldier back upstairs but saw the problems such a request would create. The first was that Hany, as far as she knew, hadn’t been inside Bennie’s room, and her seeing the arrangement of furniture there—not to mention the possibility of her encountering Bennie himself—would test her loyalties. The second was that it wasn’t fair to ask Hany to carry the general and the monstrous life within it upstairs when it was Jane who had, however indirectly, been the cause of its enchantment.
“Can I help with anything, ma’am?” Hany asked, her eyes on the tin soldier as if reading Jane’s mind.
“I’m quite fine, thank you.”
“Forgive me, but you don’t look it.”
Jane saw the kindness in Hany that had always been there, a sympathy that went well beyond the obligations of servitude. A tenderness that opened her.
“Shall we step into the hallway?” Jane said.
“If you wish.”
The two women moved outside, and Jane closed the door behind her.
“I have no right to complain,” Jane said in a lowered voice, though they were alone in the hall. “My husband is the president. This palace is my home.”
“With respect, ma’am, I don’t believe you see this as your home.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No person who’s ever known a proper house ever could.”
Jane thought of the college president’s residence at Bowdoin, the Amherst house where she played piano, the stately house in Concord they couldn’t quite afford where she and Franklin sat together, listening to the music of their two boys’ laughter before breaking into laughter themselves. Those were proper houses. This was a prison, no matter its splendor.
