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 the 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.