Bennie was on his back. Hands over his heart, face up. It was how the boy slept. Franklin knelt next to him, and the hesitation to touch him was, at first, a courtesy not to waken him. He was a man who believed in believing things.
His son’s eyes were open. Held that way, unseeing. The smooth cheeks, chorister’s mouth, the nose that Franklin had often willed himself not to smile at on the occasions the boy’s nostrils flared when setting himself to a difficult task. All of it unharmed. This was his sweet boy’s body, free of twisting or laceration. But some internal absence left it a body only.
He was expecting the skin to be cool as it had been on the other bodies he had been a party to lifting onto wagons in the Mexican War, or his own father’s corpse he’d insisted on helping into the casket. But the boy’s throat—where Franklin laid his hand—was still warm. It allowed him to believe a second longer in the power of pretending. Franklin slipped both his hands under Bennie’s shoulders and pulled him up, but moving the body revealed the wound to the back of the head. A cutaway of the skull from its meeting with the post.
He lay the boy down again. Arranged his hands over the quiet heart. Closed the eyes with his fingertips. He felt an anguished howl pushing up from inside of him, but he forced it down. It left him outside himself, capable of action but lifeless in all other respects.
When he stood his wife was there.
“No, Jeannie. It’s not for you.”
Jane pushed him away. Some of the passengers who were now getting to their knees paused to watch the First Lady’s stick of a frame lowering to her child as if a bird settling to tend its nest.
A man’s cry for help—his legs crushed under one of the benches—tore Franklin’s attention away. It left Jane alone with Bennie. She gazed down at him, prepared for something to happen.
The boy opened his eyes.
His mouth too. His entire face collapsing bloodlessly inward, becoming a passage, tunneling down through the back of his skull, the carriage’s ceiling, into the cold earth below. A darkness into which she felt herself being pulled.
All the boys will die. And all the women broken.
Jane heard her dead son speak. Not with his voice but the one that was always with her.
You will let me in.
She knew the thing inside her son’s body was not her son. It was a thing outside the world. Louder than it had ever been before.
You will open the door.
Jane reared back.
To anyone watching—to Franklin, who turned from where he’d managed to tug the trapped man’s legs free—it would appear as the revulsion of a parent recognizing the violence visited on her child. The truth is Jane pulled away from the boy’s body because it opened its mouth to laugh at her. Because it was no longer Bennie but something else. Something wrong.
“Come away!”
Her husband was tugging at her arm, and Jane wondered if he meant away from having to move to Washington and play the part of president’s wife.
“Come away now.”
She let his hand half guide, half drag her from the car. There was smoke coming from its windows and new kinds of noise outside as men pressed handkerchiefs to their faces and went back through the door to rescue the injured still inside.
Later, they would learn that Bennie was the single fatality.
For now though, Franklin Pierce was the incoming president. He had only his wife left for a family. Even in this instant where he saw all he knew of connection and comfort deserting him, he wouldn’t allow others to see him fall.
He bent his knees. He walked.
First to Jane, where he touched her face and asked if she could stand on her own in the drifted snow at the bottom of the culvert. And then he climbed back up into the train to pull the last survivors from the wreckage.
Jane’s eyes drifted to a woman coming down the slope. One side of her face burned, her dress smoldering as she stumbled through the reeds.
Thank ye—thank ye, Jesus!
Jane saw the child. An infant perhaps two or three months of age held to the woman, its feet wriggling. Alive.
My beautiful boy! O thank ye, God!
The woman looked at Jane and saw it. The loss curdling into something else. It made the woman turn her back on her and veer away through the ice-cracking reeds.
Praise be for saving my little one!
Only Jane heard a second voice under the prayers the woman was casting skyward. A whisper seeping up through the snow, rising like a lover to place cold lips to her ear. A whisper that showed her things.
Bennie staring at her through the bars of his crib.
The thing she brought out of the cellar shadows when she was a girl.
A room in a mansion of white where God himself could not enter.
PART ONE CAMPAIGN
1
For the weeks that followed the accident, Jane stayed in her bed, refusing food, weighing how to free herself from her life. She would lose herself in clouds of paregoric. She would slit her wrists with Franklin’s straight razor. She would suffer, as she deserved to. Moving into the White House was not among the options she considered.
She knew her husband was trying, in his helpless way, to reach her. He wrote her the most gentle letters from Washington. He told her how much he missed her. How he grieved too, but that together they may provide some comfort to each other. It was lovely. It made no difference.
Go to him.
She covered her head in pillows. It didn’t stop the voice from finding her.
There is one more step on the path. Only you can let me in.
Even her screams couldn’t muffle its words.
Open the door for me. And I can open the door for you.
There was no way.
It was the only way.
She started out. When she reached Baltimore she took a suite in the Exchange Hotel and sent word to Franklin asking if he would come.
It was the day before the inauguration. He left the capital immediately.
She opened the door before he could knock. He hadn’t seen her in a number of days and was reminded she was at her most beautiful when she had time to perfect her anguish.
“I feel I ought to ask if I can come in,” he said.
“You are my husband. I cannot hold you.”
It was a reply in which he tried to detect a trace of affection—the hold you, the possessive my husband—but no. Her tone as flat as a solicitor advising a client as to the extent of his property rights.
The room was overdecorated. Too small for the gold-painted Charles X chairs and the chandelier hung so low Franklin had to duck to pass under. It put Jane at an advantage, as she found her place on the scratchy-looking sofa with an ease he could never equal.
“I will not come,” she said.
In the minutes before his arrival she had changed her mind. She would resist him. Not Franklin. The voice. It was what her father would have wanted, what he asked her to promise at his deathbed. She would make an effort in her father’s memory at the expense of her husband’s understanding.
“Do you mean you will not come now, with me? Or tomorrow, for the inauguration?”
She looked up at him. Smoothed her dress over her legs. “I will not come.”
“It’s an important occasion. You are important to me.”
“Those are two arguments. Which do you wish to make?”
He went to the window. The street undulated three floors below, a dizziness within him that made all of Baltimore slither and writhe.