“I came. I brought you,” she said, louder this time. “What do I do?”
It was her own voice that replied. The end of the echo thrown back by the cracked plaster walls.
Do.
* * *
For Franklin, Jane’s isolation was becoming a problem. The Whig opposition, desperate for ropes that might pull them back into relevance, had begun murmuring about the president’s mad wife. A good woman driven over the edge by actions on her husband’s part.
“What actions?” Franklin demanded from Webster in his office. “What imagined injuries have I inflicted on her?”
“They are imagined. And all the more potent for being so.”
“It’s not fair to Jane. She doesn’t deserve such vile gossip.”
Webster shrugged. “It is Washington, sir.”
Franklin vowed to visit her room with greater frequency but found himself putting off going down to her end of the hall. He came to imagine dreadful deformities. Bennie’s Bible now fused to his wife’s hand. The hairs from his dead sons’ heads growing out from the closed locket around her neck. Her shoulders folding inward so that, in her black mourning clothes, she came closer in appearance to a beetle.
He chastised these products of his mind, looping through the reasons such grotesques were undeserved.
Jane had lost her children. She was living in a house that wasn’t hers, in a city she loathed, with strangers outside the windows expecting her to lie about her acceptance of all of it.
And he’d deceived her. He’d let his famous friend, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, talk him into putting his name on the convention ballot in Baltimore. Not to win, but to prevent a fracture within the Democratic Party. The compromise on the matter of slavery was showing itself as anything but. There were those who feared the selection of Buchanan or Cass would lead to disaster, committing the party wholly one way or another, north or south. What the moment demanded was a peacemaker. The hope was that the addition of Franklin’s name would create a space for such a person. His presence at the convention wouldn’t be required.
Jane hated the idea. She understood the tactic but dreaded even the remotest chance of having to return to Washington, a city she found stomach-flippingly gaudy, full of theaters announcing the basest spectacles and magic shows, along with tavern after tavern, all of it fed by a spring of whiskey and the pronouncements of men. She also feared the place, and told Franklin so.
“I feel terrible things await us if we follow this path any farther than we have” was how she put it.
He felt he knew her meaning. The work of politics could draw husbands away from wives and children. She was hinting at losing him to drink, to meeting rooms, to a mistress. Yet why did she speak of these conventional problems in such an oblique way? It was as if what troubled her about the thought of the presidency was a danger unique to the two of them, mysterious and unnameable.
When word came that Franklin had been selected as candidate, Jane had fainted and dropped to the floor. He worried that she would never revive. He worried that she would.
Knock, knock.
He was in bed in his second-floor chambers after deciding it was too late to visit Jane after all. The sound of shoes clipping to the door once more pushed aside his guilty thoughts of what he’d subjected her to. In their place was the distress of spotting new evidence of her turning from the woman he’d danced with in New Hampshire church halls long ago into a monstrosity, her voice lost to hisses, her back a shiny shell.
“Anything else, sir?”
It was Webster. There was no need for these evening farewells of his, but Franklin appreciated how the two of them had entered into a substitute marriage of a different kind. A sexless coupling fueled by fidelity from the one side, and the reward of kindly morsels from the other.
“Nothing, thank you, Sidney.”
“Good night, then.”
“Till the morning.”
The shoes clipped away. Franklin tried to sleep. Failing, he sat up. Forced his thoughts away from work and toward Jane’s substitute.
When Franklin met with Abby earlier in the week to formally thank her for agreeing to help “on social matters,” she presented herself as a widow, not old, lively and practical. In appearance she was a less pretty, less troubled version of Jane. And was there a veiled promise in her smiles to him? A willingness to serve spilling into a more general availability? Over the days since, he couldn’t stop from thinking of her as the physical manifestation of a wish. Were my wife to be the same except for this, and this, and this. Improvements to a gown that fit well enough but could always be bettered by a tailor’s cuts and stitchings.
He lingered in wakefulness. Part of him troubled by the nation’s forebodings of calamity, another part flashing images of his wife’s appalling metamorphosis. Still yet another quadrant of his mind was willing the substitute to approach his room and whisper her request to come in.
That night, he heard it.
The feet bare, sliding over the rug that ran the length of the central hall. He sat straight against the headboard to better conjure the sight of her on the other side of the door. Abby in a nightshirt. This is what he wanted his mind to draw but it betrayed him. Instead, it sketched a beast. A creature made up of multiple parts—goat, rat, snake, Jane—that approached with its tail swishing behind it.
“Abigail?”
His voice barely pierced the murk. There was no way whoever stood outside could have heard him. He was about to speak again when his breath stopped hard in his throat.
Scr-rrrr-aammfff.
A palm drawn down the wood. Reaching inside without opening the door.
He didn’t speak even when he was able because the word he was going to say again—Abigail—didn’t make sense anymore.
Whump.
A solid weight brought against the door. He felt the restraint behind it even as he felt the floor shudder under the bedposts at the force of it. It wasn’t trying to break in. It was showing him what it could do if it did.
He waited for it to go but he never heard it leave.
The dawn seeped through the curtains to signal his first entirely sleepless night in the White House. He remained there, cold and headachy, not daring to pull back the sheets.
The world came for him in the form of Webster. His knock light and harmless.
“Sir?” his secretary said. “Shall we begin?”
5
Jane was prepared to be impressed by the mansion’s grandeur, but with the exception of some of the paintings and the books in the curved-wall second-floor library, she was astonished to find the White House a wreck. She would’ve never guessed it from the exterior, which suggested a country palace that had been lifted from Versailles and dropped into the marshland next to the Potomac. Then she went inside. And the palace turned into an asylum with better art.
There was the cold that even the ground-floor furnace at full fire could only nudge into the corners. The floors warped by humidity. The furniture scarred by pipe smoke and ash. It almost made Jane grateful for the curtains that so completely shielded the interior from light that to open them a crack sent a blade of yellow slicing through the air.
Then there was the odd rhythm to the house’s activity: the halls echoing with the clipped boots of congressmen and servants and various head-lowered clerks during the day, followed by the muffled quiet of night, the rooms and parlors overgrown, foreboding, empty.