She didn’t complain about any of it except the odor.
“It smells of wet peat,” she’d tell Franklin when he came to her room in the early evenings. Of a pig barn. Of meat left out on the cutting block. It smells of an undressed wound.
He resolved to make improvements. His first decision was to install a dazzling convenience just down the hall from Jane’s room: a bathroom with running water. Once completed he had to insist she come and see it, watch the billows of steam rise from the tub.
She looked up at him. Her nose pushing against her veil.
“I would prefer to be alone,” she said.
He rushed out in shame without another word.
His next appointment was to hire the famed designer, Thomas Walter. Within days the crates and paint cans he brought in went beyond the president’s instructions to “make it more of a proper New England home,” instead installing love seats and satin cushions everywhere and brightening every wall by several shades. Worse, every minor repair on the first floor only brought the discovery of more serious damage. Tradesmen carrying planks and saws and ladders became a regular feature of any walk through the meeting rooms and salons. Not to mention the man-size holes they left in the walls.
The one change Franklin approved of were the new draperies held to the sides by gold ropes, so that sunlight became less alien to the place. In Jane’s room, if he came by during the day, he would open them only to have to do the same thing again next time.
“The light will do you good,” he said.
“So I can see?”
“So you can feel its warmth.”
She startled him by touching his jaw with her free hand.
“You are trying, aren’t you?”
“I only want you back to what you were,” he said. “Or half that, for now.”
Her fingers traced around the edge of his lips.
“You need to be warmed too, don’t you, my husband?”
The gratitude at this small tenderness was so great he worried that to say anything in the moment would trigger a flood of tears.
“Then perhaps we can shed the cold from each other,” she whispered.
That night he waited for her in his room. He placed his hands on the mattress on either side of him to sense the vibrations of her approach. Listened.
Less than nothing. As if a presence had drawn all sound into another dimension altogether.
Franklin pulled the sheets off his legs and went out into the hallway. It was empty save for a lone sentry standing at the top of the stairs. Franklin saluted him, but whether the guard didn’t see in the dimness or whether he’d been ordered not to enter into any exchange with the president, he remained still at his post.
There was a line of light coming from the bottom of the door across from Jane’s. The room he wouldn’t let himself enter. The one he thought of as Bennie’s room.
He could just make out the orange flickering of candlelight over the floorboards from where he was. It grew brighter with each passing second. This is how he came to see that he was walking closer to it.
Franklin hesitated before knocking. Even he found this odd. It was almost certainly his wife in there. He could be with her if—
How do I know it’s her?
He asked this from outside himself. And he answered from outside himself too.
She’s talking.
Jane’s voice coming from inside. A low, serious questioning.
She’s talking with someone.
A man. He could hear this too. The sluggish delivery of words he couldn’t quite make out. A sound that came from deep inside a cave, distorted by curving its way through tunnels and over black pools.
Something about the two voices held him there. There was a sense of wrongness about whoever was inside and, in turn, a sense of wrongness about him hearing them. He felt certain it wasn’t infidelity he’d discovered but a blasphemy. An unspeakable act or communion beyond all understanding. Witchcraft, perhaps. A grotesque crime. He couldn’t picture what Jane and the man might be doing, because he was sure, even as he tried to detect the words they parlayed, that it wasn’t a man inside the room.
He hoped only not to be noticed. And then they noticed him.
Jane’s murmured questions and the other’s slow explanations—they stopped at once. He felt them look at him through the wood.
He started back toward his room. His walk quickening to a run that caused the sentry to turn his head. The president was sprinting away as if pursued, although he was alone in the long hallway. There was nothing for a guard to protect him from.
6
The president was obliged to attend the opening of the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York the following week. Given Jane’s fondness for the city, Franklin was confident he could coax her to join him for a few days. She wouldn’t go.
“You’re disappointed,” she told him. “But as you can see, I’m not up to the travel.”
In fact, Jane looked better than she had since her arrival at the White House. The black veil had been removed, her hair pinned up to show a complexion pinkened by a walk in the sun or exercise he was unaware of.
“I could make time for us,” he said.
“We’ll have time when you return. Take Abby with you. God willing, I’ll be stronger four days hence.”
He was going to ask what she was doing in the room across the hall the previous night talking to herself—it had to be an exchange between her Jeannie voice and the other, mischievous self that produced her oddly deep laugh—but she prevented him by offering a cheek to be kissed. When he lingered she turned her head and met his lips with hers.
Franklin could feel the excitement thrumming within her slight frame. It took some doing to convince himself that he was the cause of it.
* * *
On his last night in New York, Franklin met with lawmakers who argued over whether to purchase Cuba or invade it. Abby went out to see a show on Broadway.
Abigail Means was aware that she was the perfect choice to act as substitute for the First Lady. Once widowhood became her lot, she worried that the rest of her life would be spent husbandless, a fate she was prepared to face with dignity. And then her beloved cousin Jane was pulled to Washington when Franklin took the election, and even before the letter came asking her to come, Abby knew the role she would play. Pretend wife. Celibate mistress. It provided half the life she’d lost. But there were times she yearned for the other half as well.
It’s why she constantly reminded herself that this was her part in the play. She was to act as spouse to the president, not become her. Yet being in New York with Franklin—rooms on separate floors, of course, and dining together only when formalities obliged—nudged her closer to confusing her role with reality. By the end of the trip she was grateful for the distraction of a night out on her own.
It was a musical revue that veered from sentimental ballad to idiotic skit. There was, however, one moment that stood out from the rest. A chilling tune that told the story of the two Fox sisters who could speak with the dead. The performers who played the parts of Maggie and Kate Fox portrayed them as sultry seductresses, astonishing their female clients and leaving the men so flustered they stole the ladies’ fans to cool their passions. The program listed the number as “The Rochester Knockings at the Barnum’s Hotel.”