“Where does what go, my dear?”
“Our love for him.”
The question struck Franklin as impossible to answer. He had loved his son more than he loved Jane, more than his father. Bennie’s memory gnawed at him, strangled him, tossed him on waves of unbearable sadness and, intermittently, a swell of gratitude for his having lived. He wasn’t gone. That was the problem. What Franklin couldn’t know then was that Jane was haunted too, but in a different way. For her it wasn’t the memory of the boy that plagued her but the injustice of his not being with her in body as well as thought.
Don’t you see? You’re here.
“You’re tired,” he said, though it was his own voice that was shattered with exhaustion.
She pulled away and looked around the room as if for the first time. The bed. The curtains visibly thick with dust. The chest with its drawers pulled halfway out like a beast with four tongues.
“Yes, I’m very tired,” she said, and sat down in the room’s only chair.
“There is a small dinner this evening. A half-dozen congressional Democrats to discuss—Lord God I don’t know what they want to discuss. Will you join me?”
As she considered his invitation he noticed she’d been holding a book in one hand the entire time. A Bible. The leather-bound edition that had been Jane’s father’s before she’d given it to Bennie. She turned it about in her lap to make sure he’d seen it, as if a weapon she was prepared to use if necessary.
“I don’t believe I’m able,” she said.
“Of course. You’ll want to get settled.”
“It may be some time before I’m ready to face the world. More than the time it takes to ‘get settled.’ ”
“It sounds like you’re proposing a remedy.”
“We’re too far gone for that,” she said. “But I had in mind something that might be of help to you. A substitute.”
Franklin understood now. It was not unusual for Washington widowers or “dedicated bachelors” to employ the services of a “substitute”—a woman who attended events, curated the social calendar, negotiated conflicts with other women performing the same function. A replacement wife.
“You have someone in mind?”
“My cousin.”
“Abigail?”
“I have written to her, and she’s open to the arrangement.”
Franklin knew her, in the long-standing but superficial way of extended family. Abigail Means was Jane’s aunt, but since childhood went by the title of cousin, given her closeness in age to Jane. Abby entered the family through marriage to the much older Robert Means, who died a decade earlier. She and Jane had been close before their marriages. Abby was someone who always wanted to help. And Jane always needed help.
“She is a sound choice,” he said.
“Good. She will arrive this afternoon.”
“You sent for her?”
“I didn’t anticipate disagreement.”
“Where will she stay? Not here, I should think.”
“No, not here. She has found an apartment nearby.”
“Well. I had no idea you’ve been so busy.”
“She could attend tonight in my place.”
“But you’re right in front of me.”
“Are you sure of that? I’m not.”
He felt the heat of anger at the back of his neck and wondered if one could see it if standing behind him. A redness of the skin or curling of the ends of his hair.
“It’s difficult,” he said, his voice held to a willed softness. “It’s not what we hoped. We are both of us in great pain, Jeannie. But we must endure, do our best. For each other. And—you’ll not want to hear this—for the country too.”
She pushed the Bible to the edge of her knees. It tottered there, back and forth. He watched it and soon felt not only his anger drain away but also his ability to meet his wife’s eyes.
“Endure,” she said finally, as if plucking a random word from the string he’d just spoken.
By the time he was out of the room there was a full moment in which he’d forgotten where he’d just been, where he was now, or what had brought him to this hallway lined with portraits of men who had the bearing of having always known which direction to take.
4
Jane stayed on in the guest room. She attended no formal events, took no visitors, refused to hostess the Friday drawing-room gatherings that had been held continuously by every First Lady going back to Martha Washington.
It wasn’t rebellion alone that fueled Jane’s denials. It wasn’t illness nor idleness either. In fact, she considered herself well occupied over her first days in the residence. She was busy making a room for Bennie.
She chose the room directly across the hall from hers—the same room that Franklin imagined would have been Bennie’s. The difference was that Jane was unafraid to open the door.
She called it the Grief Room.
The servants brought up the items she’d arranged to be delivered from Concord. Using a seamstress’s tape she measured out the dimensions in relation to the corners and two windows, directing each piece be placed as close as possible to the same position as they had been in the Pierce house.
Once on her own, she spent the next hours adjusting the placement of everything. These were relics. Holy things.
There was what he called his “little boy bed.” His crib too. The three-foot-tall tin soldiers he loved that had swinging legs and arms that lifted rifle butts to their shoulders. The chair she sat in when breastfeeding. The honorary sword Franklin had been given after the Mexican War and that Jane had secretly let Bennie keep in his closet to be taken out at night, polished and admired.
When Jane was finished she sat in the feeding chair. She felt the ribs of its back push against her spine with familiar discomfort. From a sewing bag she pulled out a leather journal and placed an ink pot on the arm of the chair.
As she wrote, she spoke her words aloud.
My precious child, I must write to you, altho’ you are never to see it or know it. How I long to see you and say something to you as if you were as you always have been: near me.
The room had grown cold. Her breath exited her nostrils like gray smoke from the end of a barrel, one firing south, the other north.
She checked the positions of the furniture, the tucked-in sheets on the bed, the tiny lace-trimmed pillow in the crib. Nothing stirred. But something had altered from only the moment before.
Oh! how precious do those days now seem, my darling boy—and how I should have praised the days passed with you had I suspected they might be so short—Dear, dear child. I know not how to go on without you
Jane put down her pen.
“Ben?”
She asked it with equal parts hope and horror. Only once it was spoken did she look up from the page.
One of Bennie’s tin soldiers sat on the floor directly in front of her. The general. His uniform lined with painted medals, circles of rust around the screws. The legs obscenely spread. A grin on its face Jane felt sure was wider, toothier than before. Its rifle raised so that its one eye stared down its length. Aimed at her.
“What do I do?”
She asked this not of the general, nor of Bennie’s spirit, which she knew wasn’t there. The boy wouldn’t have set his toy on the floor in such a crude manner. He wouldn’t have tried to make his mother as frightened as she was.