The Residence Read online

  “Perhaps they did. Though I believe they came seeking refuge.”

  Franklin regarded the man. He appeared old, but he stood straight and strong. There was too great a distance between them to make out the expression he wore.

  “I’ll leave you in peace,” the gardener said before Franklin could demand his name, and slipped out the hothouse’s rear door.

  Franklin pushed aside a pot of hibiscus and sat on the wood bench next to it. Seeking refuge. He closed his eyes.

  His thoughts reached out to Jane. Given how far off she was from him now, it forced him to remember her in the past. Dancing in a Peterborough church annex, waltzing without the acceptable gap between their bodies.

  There wasn’t much to her, bodily speaking, then or now. Other girls offered a softness through their dresses. Jane’s frame suggested only unwavering lines, boyish and taut. Yet it was her form that excited him most as he commanded his feet to slide with hers—ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three—and nudged close enough that his belt buckle left a fold in her sash. He wondered what it would be like to have her atop him, to submit to someone who, in her public manners, was always first to submit. He wondered what it would take for her to lose herself.

  Even by the proper standards of the day their courtship was physically innocent. Held hands, his skin denied contact with hers by gloves worn even in the wilting July heat. Kisses like burns, brief and scalding and nursed for days after.

  It was talk that took up their time together. Memories of childhood. Town gossip. Most of all they spoke of lost brothers. There was a strange excitement that accompanied their recollections of little John and strapping Charles, Franklin’s older brother who was taken by fever. The passion for an absent body similar to what lovers feel for the presence of their beloved.

  “There is nothing like seeing trust in another’s eyes. The real thing,” he recollected her saying one afternoon when they were walking on a river path that skirted under the willows.

  “How do you know that’s what it is?”

  “Have you ever thought you’ve seen it?”

  “I can’t be sure.”

  “Ah, then you haven’t,” she said. “Because when you see trust, you know it.”

  He heard how certain Jane was, a confidence bordering on mania.

  “When I sat by John’s sickbed,” she went on, “the two of us with full knowledge that he would not recover, he believed me when I told him it would all be right. That God would protect him. That I would never let him go.”

  “He trusted you even though what you said wasn’t true.”

  Jane stopped.

  “Of course it was true,” she said. “I would never let him go.”

  “Say it to me then.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me you’ll never let me go. Look into my eyes. Read my trust.”

  She nodded several times as if counting the ticks of a clock in her head. Then she stared into him without blinking.

  “I will never let you go,” she said.

  The gorgeousness of the words struck him like a line from a psalm, transporting and pure. And then the feeling that followed: a warmth in the pit of himself like the dawn of a tiny sun.

  He had been in love with her for some time but only recognized the fullness of it now. In her eyes he saw that she loved him too, and more. She had fostered it from the beginning, made their love grow into the oddly beautiful thing she had pruned it into being.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding deeper this time. “I see it.”

  Franklin remembered the strange conviction of her face, and with its memory Franklin sensed someone in the orangery with him. He opened his eyes expecting to see Jane standing there, or the gardener. But it was neither. It was Abby.

  “I knew you liked to hide out here,” she said.

  “It’s a glass box. How could I be hiding?”

  “Nobody would look for the president in a greenhouse.”

  “You did. You found him, too.”

  He didn’t intend this to be flirtatious, but heard it as such. He could have said the exact same things to Jane and it would leave a ring of accusation, or self-pity, or resignation in the air. How could I be hiding? But with Abby, they were veiled provocations no matter his caution. You found him, too. He wondered if she heard it, and if she liked it if she did.

  “If you would prefer your privacy—”

  “No, please stay.”

  There it was again. His genuine want for her company coming through where he intended to convey mere politeness. Abby looked along the rows of pots and found the only possible place for her to sit was right beside him, so she remained standing.

  She was struggling to find a way in to whatever she wanted to say. Franklin was content to wait, remembering the woman in front of him from the dinners she’d attended as Jane’s substitute. She had a dress he liked. Dark violet, with a thread in it that caught the candlelight, sparking. He would look at her across the long table of the State Dining Room and always, at first, see her as Jane. And then, in the following moment, he corrected himself. What distinguished Abby from his wife was her cheerfulness. Attentive nods to whatever tired anecdote the man next to her was repeating, a warm smile for the guest of honor at the raising of glasses.

  It may have only been a performance of her duties. What difference did it make if it was? A marriage often amounted to the same thing. Kindnesses offered when one least felt like it, providing an audience when one’s mind longed to be elsewhere. Why couldn’t Jane at least appear alive, even if her inner world was fixed on death? She could do it for herself, if not for him. Franklin had found that, sometimes, pretending to be something was the first step toward convincing yourself of it.

  “I came to speak to you about— There is— I’m concerned for you, Franklin. For both you and Jane,” Abby started, and touched her cheek, checking her finger as if to see if a cut had healed. “I’m concerned for my own well-being too.”

  “Is there someone troubling you?” he said, disappointed to see Abby so downcast, so much like Jane. “I’ll remedy it if there is.”

  “It’s not mistreatment. It’s that I’m—such a strange thing to say—I’m losing myself.”

  A number of interpretations arose in Franklin’s mind as to what she might mean. She was dissatisfied with her work. She had diagnosed herself of unsound mind. She was falling in love with him. He had always been hopeless at feeling his way to indirect meanings.

  “Perhaps you’re tired,” he said. “Heaven knows that Jane found these dinners and luncheons exhausting to the point—”

  “I know what Jane feels,” she interrupted. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s like I’m not just her substitute anymore. I’m her.”

  He saw it the same instant she said it. More than the similarity in appearance the two of them shared, there was a merging of Abby into Jane he could detect in the lines at the corners of her eyes, the too-tightly-pulled-back hair, the suppressed alarm in her voice.

  “I’m asking too much of you.”

  “Please don’t take this as complaint, Franklin. I don’t mind getting dressed up and minding my manners at your events. What disturbs me is knowing with such closeness what it is for Jane to have lost… all she’s lost. And knowing that now, in this place, there is nothing to stop her from getting a piece of it back.”

  “What piece? I don’t understand.”

  Abby tapped her heels on the dirt floor, trying to think of another way of getting to where she wanted to go. She had said far too much already. But she wouldn’t let herself turn around and go. So she decided on a direct query.

  “Couldn’t you and Jane live elsewhere?”

  “It’s the presidential residence. I’m the president.”

  “Of course. But there’s nothing to stop the president from sleeping and working across the street, or in Baltimore, or Boston, is there?” She glanced over her shoulder at the building looming behind her. “Anywhere but there?”

  Franklin wondered
if Abby and Jane were working in concert. Or perhaps what Abby was saying was meant in the literal sense. She was sharing Jane’s mind. And whatever illnesses dwelled there had passed over to her.

  “There would be an outcry,” Franklin explained deliberately, working for the balance of gentleness and authority he tried to hold with his wife in such discussions. “ ‘Not good enough for the Pierces? They’ve left a mansion so the rats can call it home?’ You know better than anyone that half of what I do is pageantry. And having the man the people voted for live in that big house is part of it.”

  As he spoke, Abby came to a decision. She would tell him. About the revue she saw in New York, the tune about the Fox sisters she’d told Jane about, the invitation the First Lady made that brought the mediums to the residence to perform a ritual of some sort. How everything had changed since then. An enmity brought into the White House capable of assuming different forms. All of them delivering the same message of hopelessness, leaving your spirit depleted, disenfranchised.

  She was lining up the sequence of details in her head when she heard someone call her name.

  It didn’t come from outside but directly behind her.

  A-bi-gail.

  A man stating one word, slow and clear yet with each syllable corrupted. It made her swing around. No man was there. But the house was. She saw something in it that held her, erased the confession she was composing like a wet cloth clearing a slate.

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  “Where?”

  She pointed. “There. Do you see?”

  Franklin stood next to her. Followed her trembling finger to a window at the end of the second floor.

  “A child,” he said. “A boy.”

  “What’s he looking at?”

  “Us.”

  It was hard to make out much through the smudged windows of the hothouse, the glare of the sun, the distance between them and the mansion. Yet there was enough for Franklin to piece together. As his mind grappled with the impossible, the boy in the window stood still, gazing down at him, as if wishing to be observed.

  The window he stood in belonged to the room across from Jane’s.

  There were no children in the White House.

  The brown suspenders and lace-collared shirt the boy wore were Bennie’s. His hair parted like Bennie’s. His grin an unfriendly version of his son’s.

  “Oh… Christ.”

  Abby swung around to find Franklin kneeling on the floor. Her first thought was that he was moved to prayer. Then she saw how the hands in front of his face weren’t palm to palm, but covering his eyes.

  “Franklin! Are you—”

  “Is he gone?”

  She looked up at the house. The boy was no longer standing at the window, though the curtains had slid shut to prove that, until a moment ago, someone had been.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “There’s no one there.”

  He pulled his hands away yet still refused to look through the glass. His eyes held to Abby’s.

  “I must return to work,” he said, standing.

  “You saw who that was, didn’t you?”

  “I saw a child, nothing more.”

  “Franklin. That’s not—surely you—”

  “I must return.”

  He moved past her, their shoulders meeting as he went. It brought forward the breath she’d held and he felt it against his face. Warm and smelling of licorice.

  “Perhaps I’ll see you tonight?”

  Once more he was muddled by possible meanings. Did she mean a chance meeting in the hallways? Was she mistaken about a dinner scheduled in the evening’s calendar? Or was she opening herself to another kind of intimacy altogether?

  “Yes,” he said, anything more risking misapprehension. But yes was enough.

  22

  When Jane’s youngest brother, John, took ill at the age of three, he was assigned to a bed in the nursery. Jane discovered his dying offered her a new power: the observation of horror. She stayed at his side, tending to his fever as best she could, but mostly watching him. Death wrapped itself around her little brother, everyone’s favorite, and Jane was at once panicked and awestruck.

  She was there for it, closest to it, because she was her mother’s “little helper.” While she attended to her housecleaning and laundry chores with languor (her illnesses were most severe when asked to do things she didn’t want to), Jane was a devoted caregiver to the boys. She hovered around the three of them with hands that wiped and stroked and slapped, calling them “my tiny ones,” doting on them with a maternal passion that well surpassed their own mother’s. In a practical sense, Jane was their mother. And she cherished the license that came with the position: the responsibility, the discretion as to who was fed or warmed first, the choice between offering or denying comfort.

  John’s passing—the moment itself—was transformative. For the boy. But also for Jane. The life in him undeniably there. Then undeniably not. A line between the two that most couldn’t see, or turned away from. Not Jane. She saw it for the arbitrary thing it was. A rule that, like any rule, might be broken if you were possessed of the will and means.

  Three days after John died Jane entered her father’s study and took the pendulum game out of the bottom drawer.

  That was why she was able to do it without being detected, why the house was empty except for her. It was the boy’s funeral. All of the Appletons were gathered by the hole in the ground of the Bath Road cemetery, tossing earth upon the box. Jane was too ill to attend. Her stomach. Her headache. She offered her parents different excuses but they weren’t really listening, ascribing her pains to grief.

  The truth was Jane wasn’t interested in putting things into the ground. She wanted to see what would come out of it if you asked.

  * * *

  Ever since she’d arranged her son’s furniture there and Kate Fox helped deliver a child to its crib, Jane hadn’t gone an entire day without visiting the Grief Room until today.

  She made excuses to herself as to why. A fever that lurked in her chest. The need to sign off on one more letter to her sister, or finish one more chapter in her book. In fact, twice she had made the thirty-foot journey across the hall to stand by its door. And twice she had returned to her quarters, shivering, as if she’d walked the perimeter of the South Lawn in a nightdress and bare feet.

  She wanted to see Bennie. It was her duty as a mother to ensure his comfort. He might be afraid. He might be hurt. While it was defensible to keep the boy safe inside, it was wrong to leave him there all on his own. These thoughts formed one side of the ledger in her mind. On the other were more troubling calculations. The child in Bennie’s room was a danger to her and anyone else who came close. He was a creature that was in part hers, in part Sir’s. He would try to get out if she opened the door.

  In the evening she left her room and kept to her side of the hallway. She made a point of not looking at Bennie’s door in case she could see the shadow of his feet on the other side, or if it was ajar, or if her looking triggered his voice to call out. There was no one else in the second floor’s central hall. While her intention was to find Franklin in his office or in the room where he slept close by, when she came to the top of the main staircase she abruptly turned and started down.

  She knew there were other people currently in the White House with her. During the day there were sentries, maids, stewards, the women who cooked and baked, the men who tended the furnace, along with the workers on the first floor inching forward on the structural renovations. But the political business and carpenters’ work was over now, dinner served and cleared, so many would have left. In fact, the White House at night was a mostly empty place. How many remained? Six, seven? Ten? Whatever the number, they would most likely be on the ground floor. So long as she didn’t go down that far she could feel as if she was the only living soul in the mansion.

  On the first floor the gaslights had been lowered so that Jane had t
o pause at the bottom of the stairs to orient herself. Perhaps it was because the ceiling was higher here than on the residential floor, but it felt to her that she had descended into a much larger building, or perhaps not a building at all. A living thing in the midst of transforming from a house to what now stretched out before her as an endless tunnel.

  It made her dizzy. To find her balance, she walked.

  Past the closed doors of the state dining room on one side and the pantry on the other. In her peripheral view she could see that the entry to the private dining room was open wide, but she refused to look inside. She was certain that if she did, she would find something awful there. A being—a smudge was how she thought of it—that watched her as she passed on and shuffled to the Crimson Parlor, where she appeared about to carry on before abruptly slipping inside, eluding the emptiness that pursued her.

  The room was brighter than the hallway. Had the staff forgotten to shut off the gas? It seemed unlikely. Which made her being alone unlikely too.

  “It’s Mrs. Pierce,” she announced, introducing herself to the unoccupied chairs and settees. “Is anyone here?”

  No one replied. But something moved.

  She didn’t hear it exactly, nor see it. There was the room as it was, and then the room that followed her query, the two atmospheres distinct in the way of the sun slipping behind a cloud in the time you blinked.

  She hadn’t noticed the piano when she first entered. Could that have been the difference? A baby grand piano appearing between one second and the next? In any case, it was here for her. Certainly she had never heard it played. Perhaps music was what was missing from this place. It would be her holy water, or burnt sage, or whatever talisman she’d read that witches or priests used in the cleansing of befouled homes.

  The bench squeaked when she sat on it. Once the quiet was restored, she lifted the polished lid. The keys shone like animal teeth. She set her fingers down to begin, then raised them. She did the same thing again without pressing a note. Her mind was clear of the sheet music she’d studied at Fiske’s Boarding School, and she was unable to remember any of the Mozart or hymns she once knew by heart.