The Residence Page 11

  Franklin’s father had started out a soldier. By the end of the Revolutionary War he was named a general, the head of the Eighth Massachusetts Regiment, a member of the Society of the Cincinnati. Honors that marked Benjamin Pierce as a man of bravery and distinction when in fact his primary accomplishments had been forging an acquaintanceship with George Washington and managing not to die.

  Afterward, he turned his farmhouse into a tavern. It suited his disposition perfectly: the tolerance for lewdness, the capacity for roughness on the occasions a fellow had too much ale. Yet if one were to only listen to him one would assume that Benjamin Pierce was among the greatest heroes the Union had ever known. It was true that he had fought the English at Breed’s Hill and Ticonderoga. But beyond that, there were questions the tavern patrons didn’t dare ask. Had he actually killed Englishmen with his bayonet? His hands? How closely was he consulted by General Washington on tactics?

  Only young Frank voiced these queries directly to his father. And he did it only once.

  “There are some things men don’t speak of,” his father told him, which were precisely the same words he used when Franklin asked why some of the men took Caroline, the lunch cook, upstairs from time to time, only for both to return minutes later looking as if they’d beaten the dust out of a rug.

  “Who are you?” Franklin asked the dead man now, his voice enfeebled by the room’s size, the sudden arrival of drunkenness, and in the moment that followed his speaking, the panic that took hold of him.

  “Are your eyes poorly, boy?”

  His father had spoken without moving his lips. Franklin was sure of it. But when he spoke next, the mouth was in alignment with his words, as if a correction to an error he recognized on his first attempt.

  “Speak up when your father’s addressing you, Frank!”

  “No, sir. I can see you fine.”

  “Then you know it’s me.”

  “Not. It’s—”

  “What?”

  “It’s not you.”

  The man waved his hand in dismissal. “We can have a nice debate about that another time,” he said. “I’m here to right your ship. Because you look ready to run her aground.”

  The whiskey’s warmth was gone, leaving only a metallic taste in Franklin’s mouth and a weight in his belly as if he’d eaten a handful of pennies. He was aware that he could get up and leave the room. It seemed impossible that the man who looked like his father would follow if he did. Yet he stayed where he was.

  “This abolition business,” the man across the room said. “All well and good. But you—”

  “Who was that man with you?”

  “I was speaking, if you don’t goddamn mind.”

  Franklin winced at his father’s sharpness. But the question had been tossing around at the back of his mind these past years, and now, unexpectedly, he had the chance to ask it of the only one who might have the answer as to the nature of the thing he’d glimpsed stealing the air from his poor Franky’s lungs. So he asked it again.

  “Who was the stranger next to you on the porch after my wedding?”

  The old man nodded twice and sighed. In life, it was precisely the sequence of gestures he used to show he was addressing an audience he pitied.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know,” he said. “Most of it you couldn’t understand even if you did know it. But I’m trying to help you here, son, and I don’t have a lot of time. That all right with you?”

  Now Franklin was nodding. “Yes, sir.”

  “Now then. This matter of bringing freedom to the enslaved. It will come in time. But rushing it? Like your skinny paddle of a wife would have you do? It’s not the job for a man like you, Frank.”

  “I’m the president.”

  “And what’s that? Someone for dullards to blame their failures on and patriots to pin their hopes to. You’re like a painting of Jesus over a child’s bed in place of Jesus himself—you hear the prayers but have no choice but to let fate have its way.”

  The more the man spoke, the more Franklin came to accept it was his father. Not the man dug free of his grave, but his counsel, his way of thinking being spoken through the too-convincing puppet seated under George Washington’s portrait twenty feet away. It certainly was the sort of thing his father would say, and in his tone too. At once bullying and companionable, as if he was paying Franklin due respect by speaking to him with the hard honesty only afforded to friends.

  “Wasn’t Washington a president who made changes?” Franklin put to him.

  “He certainly did. But it was easier for him. It was the beginning. Now we’re a going concern and there’s no room for saviors. Not in this house.”

  “I want to go now,” Franklin said, and was startled to find that he was crying.

  “Y’see? Look at you! You don’t have the bones to sit there and listen to your father, much less fix the country of all that ails it. You know that much, don’t you? Maybe you learned it when you fell off your horse in front of your men and pissed yourself before fainting like a lady too fat for her corset.” The old man nodded and sighed again. “You’re not made for the hard stuff, Frank. Nothing wrong with that. You look good, talk good—you made it here. Now leave it be.”

  Franklin went to put his glass down on a side table, but when he let it go he saw there was no table there. The glass met the floor with a thump but didn’t break.

  “Pick it up,” his father said. “You’ll want a full one now.”

  Franklin bent over and hooked a finger under the glass’s rim. When he pulled it up and looked across at the settee under the Washington portrait, his father was gone.

  The glass slipped off his finger. This time, it shattered.

  * * *

  A plate of eggs, oatmeal, rack of toast. Franklin was alone in the private dining room when Jane came in. The same as the morning before, except this time she was smiling. Until he looked up and she saw him, read him, and she wasn’t.

  “You did it,” she said. “Burns. You had him sent back to Virginia.”

  “It’s in the papers?”

  “I could tell from your falsely resolute face. It’s the way you look when you’re being most cowardly.”

  He absorbed her insult so readily she knew he was prepared for it.

  “I was a fool to think I ever had a choice in it,” he said.

  “You’re a fool to believe you don’t have a choice in all things.”

  Jane intended this for him, but heard the way the sentence curled back to become a condemnation of herself. Franklin heard it too. She could see how he wanted to know what she had made a wrong choice about, but dared not ask directly.

  He got up. Pulled back the chair next to his. She sat. He took his seat but didn’t resume eating. The two of them looked at each other for a long while without doing or saying a thing.

  20

  “Bennie?”

  Jane entered through an opening in the door just wide enough for her to squeeze through and closed it with her foot. The room was darker than hers, darker than any other in the house, so that she stood there waiting for her vision to adjust.

  “Momma’s here.”

  She kept her eyes on the orange in her hand and imagined it as a miniature sun, a piece of the sky smuggled underground. The boy never ate again after his first suckling, but she would bring him food anyway. An apple, a slice of buttered bread, a bowl of stew. Every time she would take the item away with her when she left, untouched.

  Over the hours she spent in the Grief Room, Jane had forged a grounding for herself, a mental island of objectivity surrounded by the uncanny. It required the balancing of multiple paradoxes and was subject to erosion, but it held firm for the most part. For instance, she knew the boy was not Bennie, while maintaining the belief that he essentially was. The story she told herself was that he was her child but in a reborn state of some kind, returned from the afterlife but with differences attributable to his time away. He had seen inconceivable things. Of course he wouldn’
t be exactly the same today as he had been before.

  She had answers for every question that demanded to be answered:

  Why didn’t he eat or drink? Angels had no need for bodily sustenance.

  How did he grow from infant to crawling child within hours? For most, time inches forward like the hands of a clock, but for those who have been to heaven, it can also leap ahead.

  If this Bennie was such a blessing, why didn’t she share it with her husband? It would only make him afraid, and what men feared they destroyed.

  As for his origins, she presumed Kate Fox had brought him back. Her, along with Jane. They had achieved a connection to the place where the recently passed go, the good ones, the innocent. They had done it through the power of Kate’s talent and Jane’s love. She tried to prevent Sir’s role in the resurrection from entering her thoughts, but he did anyway, lingering there, a shade in her peripheral view.

  She took pleasure in her time here, though it was of a queer sort. The closest experience she could say it was akin to were the feelings she would have for certain boys when she was young, Bowdoin students she found handsome as they passed by the house, whom she manufactured not only feelings for but a history too. First words, Valentine’s gifts, first kiss. None of it was real, but even its simulation had a fizz of veracity to it, perhaps more than if she’d actually spoken with or kissed them. An image or two. The embrace of fantasy. The compensations of not being alone. That’s all it took.

  Jane and Bennie spent hours together over the late mornings and early afternoons, but it was time that was compressed while in the Grief Room. She would check the clock upon leaving and confirm the expired hours, yet remember only fragments of how they’d passed. The child crawling out from the corner to greet her. Her tidying his untouched clothes in the dresser. Offering him food that he would shake his head at. Sparse moments that amounted to half days.

  She yearned to hold him. Sometimes she resisted this, anxious at how he might respond if she bent to pick him up, though whenever she did so he went voluntarily, if stiffly, into her arms. On other occasions it was the child who came to her. He would climb onto her lap when she sat in the feeding chair and let her stroke his hair or hold him against her with his chin resting on her shoulder. It made her wonder what expression he wore when he was facing away from her.

  On the same morning Jane asked Franklin to consider releasing Anthony Burns, she stood inside the door of Bennie’s room expecting to find him as she had before, sitting up in his bed, waiting for her arrival. When she lifted her eyes from the orange in her hand she found he wasn’t there.

  A different boy stood with his back to her, looking out through the curtained windows. When he heard her he turned and she could see that it was Bennie, though an older version of the boy. Not a toddler anymore. Eleven. As old as life allowed him to become.

  “Stay back from the window,” she said.

  “I won’t open it, Momma.”

  “It’s not—I don’t want people seeing you from outside.”

  He paused. A calculation of whether he was obliged to do as she said. After a measure of time, he drew back the finger that had parted the curtains and let it slide near closed.

  “Nobody can see us now,” he said.

  She stepped closer but left enough space between them that neither could reach the other without taking further steps.

  “You’ve grown,” she said.

  “I’m a big boy now.”

  “Too big to be picked up.”

  “Too big to play?”

  “No, no. Never that.”

  He knelt on the floor and lifted one of the tin soldiers Jane had arranged against the wall. It was clear that prior to this the boy—whether as a toddler or as the eleven-year-old he was now—had never played with any of the toys when she wasn’t in the room. They were always in the same position when she came, which was equally true of the covers on his bed. Everything untouched except the curtains he would part to poke his face through.

  But now Bennie played with the soldier. The one decorated with the most medals on his tin chest. The general.

  He didn’t play the way other boys did. He made no voices for the toy or other imaginary characters, no interaction between the soldier in his hand and the others against the wall. He just moved it over the floor, one way and back again. Not guarding or marching or shooting. Pacing.

  “It’s not right, Momma,” he said without looking at her.

  “What’s that, darling?”

  “Keeping me in here. It’s not right.”

  It hadn’t occurred to her that that was what she’d been doing. Was it imprisonment to ensure a child was safe in his room at night? She was only doing what a mother would do in her own home. Yet she was not the mother of this being who was now staring up at her, the tin soldier still in his hand. He may not be a child in any sense that mattered.

  “I’m not keeping you here. Not like that.”

  “Then am I free?”

  She thought of Anthony Burns and all the men and women like him. This was her own son asking for his freedom, and she was denying him.

  “This isn’t a jail. I’m not a—” she said, and her thoughts became tangled in nuance. “You just have to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll get in trouble if you leave.”

  “I’ll be good.”

  She swallowed and choked on it, her throat narrowed so that she had to concentrate to negotiate the passage of spittle and air.

  “Are you good, Bennie?” she asked once she was able. “Are you my good boy?”

  He stared at her with blank incomprehension. A half second later his face found its animation again, the sweet pout, the widened eyes, and Jane saw the answer to her question in the shift between the two. But just as quickly, when the child spoke again, she pushed what she’d seen from her mind.

  “Of course I’m good, Momma,” he said. “I’m yours.”

  She managed to fight off the reflex to step back when the boy approached her. He stopped a foot away. Closer than the normal space between two people who weren’t embracing, even intimates, even mother and son. It forced Jane to cross her eyes when she looked at him, so that two half Bennies swam in front of her, trading places.

  “There’s no lock on the door,” he said, reading her mind.

  “No.”

  “So I could leave if I wished.”

  For the first time since entering, Jane sensed the lie in what the boy just said. If he could walk out on his own he wouldn’t bother debating the point with her.

  “Do you wish it?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then leave.”

  He glanced past her. Not to the door, but an angle off to its side, as if someone stood there prompting him.

  “I’m a good boy,” he said, looking back at her. “I do as my momma and papa say.”

  “I’m glad of that.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you always do what your daddy said?”

  Her father in his sickbed. Confessing to the connection the two of them shared. We’re curious kitties, aren’t we? The promise he had tried to make her agree to.

  “I was wrong when I didn’t,” she said.

  Bennie stepped into her. He was tall enough now that the side of his head rested against the tops of her ribs, a small weight that doubled her efforts to draw breath. He was not her son. He was irresistible.

  “You’re perfect,” she said. And then, correcting herself: “You look perfect.”

  She meant unharmed. There were no signs of the injuries he suffered in the train accident, or any scars or scabs of any kind. No dried sleep in the corner of his eye, no cold sores on his lips, no hair unaligned from the part combed into the left side of his head, though she had brought no comb or brush into the room.

  “I’m born again,” Bennie said, and did the first truly awful thing since coming back from wherever he’d gone. He raised his chin,
tilted his head back an inch farther than it ought to have gone, and laughed.

  The laugh, when the sound of it came out of him, wasn’t her little boy’s. It was hers.

  PART TWO RESIDENCE

  21

  There was a break in his agenda at lunchtime and Franklin used it to slip outside.

  He found himself walking into the glass hothouse he’d never noticed in his carriage rides past from when he was a congressman peering enviously over the hedgerow. Inside, the wind was filtered out, leaving only the sunlight that warmed the vines and weeds in the pots. A quiet space, smelling of soil and the off-season memory of roses. Webster had called it the orangery. Franklin didn’t know why it went by that name but it sounded right to him.

  The calm allowed his thoughts to stray from duty for a moment. It let the memory of his boys back in.

  Franky pleading for his mother in his final hours.

  Bennie lying on the ceiling of the train car.

  The two of them wrestling—Franky winning, Bennie letting him win—on the parlor floor of the Concord house.

  Franklin’s grief struck him with the force of a fist to the ribs, leaving him doubled over and choking.

  “Sir?”

  A man stood at the far end of the aisle between boxes of magnolias and crab apple blossoms. Franklin couldn’t recall the gardener’s name if he’d ever known it, though he appeared familiar.

  “Good day,” Franklin said, standing and swiping his face with the back of his hand.

  “Are you in search of a cutting?”

  “No, no. I just came out to—well, to be here.”

  The gardener nodded. “You aren’t the first.”

  “Oh? Others have come to smell the flowers today?”

  “No, sir,” the gardener said. “Other presidents. I’ve worked here for some while and each of them has made their way to this place without accompaniment at one time or another.”

  “They must have liked the greenery as much as I do.”