“Yes, sir. I surely will.”
Franklin smiled at the man, a gesture of comradeship meant to convey that, despite their different stations, they both had tasks they were obliged to satisfy. Franklin was gratified to see the man’s surprise. Then again, it may have only been his gratitude at not being made to go into the furnace room until whoever he thought was in there had left.
The ones before us.
Franklin was making his way back upstairs when it came to him. The furnace keeper wasn’t speaking of ghosts who had worked in the residence in the past but the ones who had been brought here on the ships. Slaves. Ones he believed were in the president’s house warming themselves around a dwindling fire. Their homecoming.
A person only sees things like that when they’re ready to.
Up on the second floor, Franklin went past doors he hadn’t yet opened. He paused outside the one he felt most likely would have been Bennie’s. A smaller room across the hall from the bedroom he hoped to occupy with Jane.
He gripped his hand to the handle but didn’t open it.
There would be nothing but an empty room on the other side. Yet some part of him felt he may be wrong about that. Wrong about any of these empty rooms being empty.
He drew his hand away from the handle.
Franklin wanted no revelations to be delivered in this place. Not after the train accident that replayed in his dreams every night. Not with his wife so far away she couldn’t wake him when he called out to his sons in his sleep.
3
The First Lady went straight to the second floor upon her arrival a fortnight later, claiming the bedroom on the southwest corner, the farthest from Franklin’s.
When he emerged from a cabinet meeting and was told Jane was upstairs he was stricken with nerves. It came from eagerness to see her. It came from dread of the same thing.
* * *
When Franklin Pierce first approached Jane at a social held in her grandmother’s house in Amherst, more than twenty years ago, he intended to introduce himself as he would to any other girl. Yet something about her—her hair covering all but the pink lobes of her ears, her fingers interlocked in front of her as if they contained a tiny bird—emboldened him. All that mattered was that she see him as unlike the other young men scuffing through the hallways holding cups of punch. He wanted to raise her downcast face to his. He wanted to awaken her.
“You’re meant to be the gloomy one of the three sisters,” he said. “But I see now they are mistaken.”
He was twenty-three, studying law under the tutelage of an established solicitor in town. She was two years younger, living in the house her family had moved to after her father’s death. Jane had heard of Franklin Pierce, mostly from his sisters, who commented on how handsome he was. But as he stood close to her that afternoon, she saw something in addition to good looks. She saw a man who would become important by virtue of competent talents combined with exceptional presentation. She saw a true American.
She blinked up at him before returning her gaze to the hem of her dress.
“You claim a special vision,” she said. “Tell me. What is it you see?”
Her voice was not what he anticipated. There was grit in it, and bass notes he could feel in his chest despite their being hardly audible. The voice of someone who had shouted for hours the day before.
“I see a rebel,” he said.
“Oh?”
“You’re not pleased.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?”
“I thought rebellion was only for militiamen.”
“Or fallen angels.”
He came partway to winning her right there. The other part would take more time. But in that moment, Franklin could see in the way her fingers untangled themselves that he had passed an outer barrier to her affections. He chose to believe that none had done so before.
“Now that, sir, is flattery,” she said.
* * *
Franklin clung to the recollection as he made his way along the residence’s second-floor hallway to Jane’s room, resisting the thought of it being “Jane’s room” when he wished it to be theirs. What is it you see? That had been her question to him, but he’d been drawn less by her looks than the sensation her voice inspired, the provocation in it, the illicit promise. What would he hear in it now? At her door he raised his shoulders straight before touching his knuckles to the wood.
“It’s me, Jeannie,” he said.
“A moment!”
He imagined her undressed. He pictured her spritzing rose water on her wrists or tying up her hair. Yet every second that passed without the call to Come in! pulled these hopes away into greater and greater unlikelihood.
The knob turned, and Jane was there, dressed in mourning clothes. The delay had not been to welcome him but to dry her face from the tears that continued to make a map of her cheeks.
“You look well,” she said in accusation.
“A performance. I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed everything.”
She studied him through the tiny holes of her black veil. And he looked back at her, or tried to. His wife behind a wall she carried with her and that only a show of real suffering—suffering he felt weakening his legs now, so that he had to throw a hand out to the doorframe to hold himself straight—would win a viewing of the woman inside.
Jane lifted the veil. She’d painted her lips red.
“Can we be alone in this place?” she said.
“We have no choice but to be alone in this place.”
He entered the room and closed the door. It was unclear if she would allow herself to be embraced, so he opened his arms to see if she would come to him.
“How is it?” she asked, unmoving. “Being president. Is it as you dreamed?”
“I never dreamed of it.”
“No. You only dreamed of being loved.”
She said this without sarcasm. Because it was also true, he nodded in dismal confirmation and lowered his arms.
“Will you not hold me?” he asked.
“You have your duties, and I have mine. Is that it?”
“I love you, and I’m breaking, Jeannie. There’s no duty in it other than your feelings for me, if you have any.”
She went to him. And when her arms were around him he let his hands rest against her back.
“I don’t wish to punish you, Franklin,” she said.
Which crime would you punish me for? he wanted to ask, but feared her answer. One more than any other. The train. The deceptions that led to his winning the candidacy could be overlooked. Perhaps they already were. But their outcome—stepping into the railcar from the snow-drifted platform in Andover, sitting together, with Bennie behind them, his reaching for her when he should have reached for him—was why he was deserving of imprisonment outside of what remained of his family. Outside of her.
“Do, if it will bring you back to me,” he said.
“You don’t need to be brought back. Don’t you see? You’re here.”
She squeezed his arms hard enough to hurt. He wasn’t sure what she was trying to tell him. But there was life in the pain he felt, the message she was sending through it.
“Where does it go now?” she whispered.