Franklin couldn’t stop himself from watching Fillmore’s people go. He was transfixed by the way that, despite their numbers, they were the only ones who worked in silence. He imagined he alone could see them. It was their aura of nonexistence that lent them the purgatorial aspect of apparitions.
By midafternoon they were gone. So was most of the furniture.
When night fell, Franklin’s room at the northeastern corner of the second floor’s long central hallway possessed neither mattress nor frame. He considered ordering a bed to be brought to him but was concerned about starting his tenure with complaint. So he settled in a chair before the uncurtained windows, slipping into sleep before snorting awake, over and over.
In the morning his back refused to let him stand straight. His bad knee throbbed. He went about the business of setting up his office and chewing on a boiled egg in a haze of discomfort. Over the course of the day, he felt there was more to it than the troubles of his body. The building was unnaturally cold, for one. It had been a timid and soggy spring even by Washington standards, but this was something worse than dampness. The cold seemed to come from within the walls, not outside them.
He asked his secretary, a fussy but reliable man named Sidney Webster, if he would see to it that the furnace be stoked.
“My apologies, sir,” Webster began when he returned. “You set me to a task more difficult than I would’ve guessed.”
“Why’s that?”
“I had a time finding the men who work the furnace. And when I did find them—well, one of them, anyway—he was reluctant to enter.”
“Reluctant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was he asleep? Drunk?”
“It appeared he was frightened, sir.”
Franklin feigned exasperation and announced he would tend to the matter himself before starting the day’s work. The truth was, it wasn’t frustration that made him want to get away from Webster but the unsettled look on the man’s face.
As Franklin moved through the hallways that remained dusky even in the middle of the day, he searched for something Jane might like. An offering to mention in the day’s letter to her that could lure her back to him.
The first floor seemed to hold the most promise. He liked the Green Room’s wallpaper, which was sprinkled with gold stars leading up to a dark blue ceiling, all of it creating an illusion of being adrift in the cosmos. The East Room was the most impressively immense, his footfalls echoing in every direction so that it sounded like a hundred men approaching. He was also intrigued by the curved walls of the Blue Room, and the false door Webster had previously told him about. Once Franklin had located the small crack around it, he pushed hard at its corner. A narrow piece of the wall swung inward. He poked his head in to find a short hallway that appeared to lead to an exterior office.
“Escape,” Franklin whispered.
Back in the Cross Hall he headed left. The drama of the space was undercut by repairs started by Fillmore that had been left incomplete, so that the floors were partly carpeted by canvas sheets, the walkway interrupted by ladders and buckets holding plastering tools. This wasn’t the only off-putting aspect. As he went along, Franklin had to endure the gaze of the presidents before him whose portraits hung between the holes in the walls. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Madison. Each of them hung at a taller height than Franklin, taller than any man, so that they looked down at passersby with cool indifference.
What would his look like when the time came? He couldn’t imagine it in any detail, but knew the setting of his frame that he would hold: wide-shouldered, his expression darkly troubled but with eyes ahead, showing he was more than capable of meeting whatever challenge was to come. Would any of it be true? The dark troubles, certainly. The rest of it, he feared, would only be a pose.
He quickened his pace and made his way down to the ground floor. It smelled of soap. Usually this was a scent Franklin liked, as it made him think of Jane. But in this case it was too strong to be inviting. This was the smell of the hospital, or the funeral parlor. The effort to mask one odor with another.
“Ah,” Franklin said with a wave when he came upon a man outside the furnace room. “You must be the one committed to our deaths by freezing.”
“I’m sorry, sir. We’ll get back to it in a moment and have the place warm as July before you know.”
Franklin was astonished. This man—short, old, black—was being directly addressed by the president about shoveling coal into the boiler and his answer was to refuse him. But then he saw it. The look on the man’s face that wasn’t defiance but profound disturbance. It could be fear, as Webster had guessed. Or what Franklin thought he could see just beneath it. A mournfulness.
“What’s wrong?” Franklin asked.
The man looked down the hall as if hoping for the arrival of someone who was already late. When the two of them remained alone, he looked at Franklin directly.
“They come to get warm,” the man said with a glance at the furnace room door. “I give them the time they need.”
“There’s people in there?”
“I believe so.”
“Who?”
“The ones before us.”
“Fillmore’s men?”
“No, sir. The ones you can’t see.”
So this was a man who believed in ghosts. Franklin was aware that the idea of the dead inhabiting the world was often taken to quite literal interpretations in the churches he assumed men like the furnace keeper adhered to. He’d certainly seen a good many maids and caretakers over the years speak directly to invisible aunties and fathers. On one occasion he’d been sitting on a settee in his own house in Concord when a young girl they’d hired to help in the kitchen came out to utter a startled laugh at the sight of him.
“I would appreciate to know the joke too,” he’d said, but the girl didn’t seem to detect the seriousness of her overstepping.
“It’s my sister, Mr. Pierce. She’s right next to you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir. She went home last year.”
Franklin knew that some of the servants referred to passing on in terms of homecoming.
“And you say she’s right here?” he said, pointing his chin at the vacant air beside him.
“She surely is.”
“Well. What is she doing that’s so funny?”
“She likes your hair,” the girl said, breaking into giggles again. “She’s stroking your hair.”
In a reflex, Franklin’s hand rose to his head. Before he could rebuke the girl he felt the briefest touch of warmth. Soft as a child’s skin.
“If I opened this door,” Franklin said now to the man outside the furnace room, “would I see them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why’s that?”
“A person only sees things like that when they’re ready to.”
Franklin was annoyed. But he was aware of the moment possibly being part of a story someday, an anecdote shared by this man with others and taking on mythic resonance, perhaps even finding its place in a history book. A telling illustration of the understanding and patience of President Pierce.
“Once they’re gone then, would you please fill the boiler’s belly with coal?”