“Yes. But that is—”
“What if you could take that grief and push it further still? Extend it to where he is now so that he might grab hold of it and follow it home.”
“Stop.”
“He isn’t far.”
“This—”
“He’s right here. And if you help me reach—”
“Stop it!”
He didn’t shout, but she recoiled as if he had. His fury visible beneath the surface like a red leaf in a frozen lake.
“Is that who you were talking to?” he asked.
“When?”
“Before I left for New York I came to the room across the hall. You were speaking with someone. It sounded like a man.”
Jane looked at him without expression. “A man?”
“I guessed it was you, conversing with yourself.”
“Really.”
“You’ve always been capable of sounding different on occasion. As if you were two people in one.”
“That would make me a very strange bird.”
“Good Lord, don’t you know? You are the strangest bird of all!”
There was a moment when they both came close to laughing. If they had—if one of them had—their course might have altered.
“There was no man in my room,” she said.
“So it was yourself.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What are you saying?”
She appeared to consider one way of responding before choosing another. “I’m not a madwoman,” she said.
“I’m glad of it. Tell me, then. What is going on in this place, Jane?”
Even Franklin wasn’t clear what he meant by this place. This room, this house, this space between them.
“I am being a good mother,” she said, so deliberately it gave her time to walk to where Franklin stood and take up the stack of yellow letters, including the one he held, and press them to her breast. “I am doing all I can.”
“As am I.”
“When the time comes, will you do even more?”
He had no idea what she meant. Yet he had a sense of her implications, how they were straying off into—did it have a name? Sorcery, perhaps. Sacrilege.
“I wish I believed in prayer. I would pray for us both.”
“Say the words anyway,” Jane said, turning her back on him. “You might be surprised who hears them.”
9
Jane found the pendulum game in the bottom drawer of her father’s desk in the Bowdoin house. It was autumn of the first term of 1818. She was twelve years old.
The clapboard mansion at the edge of campus was the only home Jane had ever known, but there were still secrets about it, unseeable things she felt peeking at her from around corners or hovering inches from the back of her neck. She couldn’t tell if these apparitions were connected to the building itself or the people who lived in it. As she aspired to be a holder of secrets herself, she wondered if the house recognized a talent in her that might be of use.
Jane’s father, Jesse Appleton, a Congregational church minister, had been appointed the second president of Bowdoin College after being passed over for professor of divinity at Harvard. He and Jane’s mother, Elizabeth, had their daughters—Mary, Frances, and Jane—prior to moving north to Maine from New Hampshire, but both of their sons were born in the house where the college president resided. Jane was the middle child. Understudy to her outgoing, teenaged sisters. Nanny to her indulged brothers. Pretty, but not widely designated a beauty. Bright, but not exceptionally enough to overcome the barriers to scholarship that came with her sex. When her father sermonized about purgatory Jane heard it as the dimension she dwelled in, though unlike the souls who suffered there, she appreciated its advantages. Privacy. Camouflage. A gray-skied immortality.
Jane Appleton would be an overlookable sort of girl if not for an inner quality detectable to only a few, and even for them it was hard to say what it was. An old soul’s gravitas. The quiet that came from witnessing the unspeakable, so that one wanted to show her the small redemption of sunshine or the protection of a walled garden.
For her part, Jane was conscious of these perceptions, and of the people who held them versus those who simply saw her as sad. But Jane didn’t think either were right. Her hidden aspect, as she saw it, was curiosity. A hunger for knowledge, transgressions that would break the minds of others but heal the fissures in her own. She assumed it to be a complex attribute, sophisticated and interesting. But there were also occasions when Jane worried that it was no different a thing from malice.
The college president’s house was, on its surface, full of activity: the children shuttling between the rooms (all of them schooled at home through childhood) along with the social events that came with Jesse’s position, the faculty gatherings and suppers with visiting scholars. On another level, Jane experienced the house as a place of solemnity. There was a gloom that followed her up and down its stairs and along its creaking hallways. It was so constant a companion that she never experienced loneliness there, which was funny, because she was aware that the thing that pursued her was loneliness itself.
Even at her age she knew these feelings were inherited from her father. He was given to headaches just as she was, ones that filled their skulls with colors and unbearable lights. Like her, he suffered from frequent illnesses the physician could diagnose no more specifically than “nervousness” or “fatigue.” Jane felt another commonality between them that was confirmed in silence when she met her father’s eyes. The shared vision of something bad coming their way, a calamity only they could apprehend but were helpless to stop.
It was her sister Mary who told Jane about the pendulum game.
Mary was five years older, openly mischievous in a way Jane wasn’t, physically sturdy, and liked by boys. She had whispered to Jane lying next to her one night months earlier about finding “magic things” in their father’s desk. Jane had guessed her sister meant items whose purpose she didn’t understand but whose discovery their father would disapprove of. In fact, the house rule was that children were not allowed in his study. But why would their father, a man allergic to foolishness, keep a game in his desk? And if he did, why would they be forbidden from playing it?
Mary never mentioned the magic things again, but the thought of them enflamed Jane’s dreams every night.
Jane entering a room locked to all but her, the door opening at her touch.
Jane floating to a cabinet, or a vault, or a sealed box.
Jane speaking a word that opened its door with a bony pop.
The dreams would always end before she could see what was inside.
She decided to enact the dream. In truth, there wasn’t much of a decision in it. She had to do it because she wanted to do it. It was as if she was caught in a loop of desire, an inquisitiveness she felt around her middle like a leather belt, and only touching the magic things would let her carry on with her life.
The September day outside was bright. Walking along the main floor hallway she heard students heading to class on the other side of the windows, felt the vibration of their guffaws, the effort of boys trying to sound like men. But the brightness and the laughter might as well have been taking place in someone else’s mind. The last of it sucked away the second she turned the knob and entered her father’s study.