The Residence Page 15

  “I am bound to this place,” Jane said.

  “We have that, the two of us.”

  “Our fates are fixed, then.”

  “Fates? I don’t know about that. But I know the jobs you’re given to do, and the ones they’ll never let you do. I know what’s expected. Don’t you?”

  The truth of this—true for her, the two of them, perhaps for all women—struck Jane with the force of a freezing wind. What’s expected. It’s what Jane had resisted all her life in her nurtured illnesses, her unwholesome obsessions. Franklin had seen it in her from the start. Fallen angel, he’d called her. It’s what excited him, and what made her feel truly recognized by the only man other than her father. But what difference had it made? She was here, transported to the White House, yet she was still a wife, a bereaved mother, a woman. Still trapped.

  “May I share something with you?” Jane said, and before Hany had a chance to accept or decline—before Jane heard how far she was going—she told her almost everything. The pendulum game. Her life with Sir. The ritual with the Fox sisters in her bedchambers. The one piece Jane held back was how she had caused a monstrous Bennie to return to life. It was something she found possible to believe, but impossible to say.

  “Well, good God,” Hany said, and leaned against the wall, shaking her head as if at the confirmation of a privately held suspicion.

  “You have expected this!”

  “No, ma’am. I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Jane attempted a throat-clearing laugh. “Perhaps I’m speaking only of ghosts. And ghosts have likely been here long before our arrival.”

  “There’s ghosts in any place with a past. But you brought something new here. Or not new. Something very old.”

  Jane abandoned her crooked smile. “You’ve seen it?”

  “The best way I could describe it would be to say it’s made itself known to my feelings.”

  “I’m so sorry, Hany.”

  “I’m sorry for you, ma’am. Because that snarly dog? Sir? That what you call it? I know one thing. He doesn’t like us being friendly. He wants you to be alone.”

  Jane’s hunger for understanding had been so great, for so long, that it was everything she could do not to break into sobs at Hany’s words. But while she took comfort in her dresser woman being here, she now had the task of clearing the general away. And to be a friend to Hany required Jane to do so on her own.

  “I’d like to speak more later, if we could,” Jane said. “But for now, could I ask for a moment?”

  Hany didn’t want to go but saw no choice in it. “Of course,” she said, starting away as Jane opened the door to the Blue Room and slipped inside.

  Now that that she was alone again, Jane dreaded even more the idea of putting her hands on the general. It waited on the floor for her to come. The arms and legs twisted around its head, its face framed like the centerpiece of a grisly wreath.

  Jane decided to be brave. That is, she decided to act as if she were brave. She hoped that whatever it was that looked out through its pinhole eyes would see she was ready to destroy it if need be, send it back to whatever shallow grave it came from.

  She cradled the general in her arms and started for the hallway. Part of her wondered why she didn’t just toss it outside instead of returning it to the room across from hers. The answer was emotionally simple, if practically nonsensical: the toy was Bennie’s. Something her son had played with, had held, had loved. Now even more than before Jane was obliged to protect the true memory of her child against the incursions of the false one.

  Yet the soldier reeked. She couldn’t tell if it was from its ongoing exhalations or her memory of the odor from earlier. It didn’t move. There was an additional weight to it that Jane didn’t recall it having, but it didn’t thrash about as she feared. It seemed to her that the general wanted to return to Bennie’s room as much as she wanted to deliver it there.

  Once she made it to the second floor she hustled off to the right. A steward was coming out of her bedroom, presumably from changing her sheets, and when he spotted her he did his best not to stare at the folded-up man held to her breast.

  “Ma’am? May I—”

  “No. Nothing. No.” She cut him off as she passed, slipping into Bennie’s room and closing the door.

  The first thing she wanted to do was put down the general. The feeding chair? Atop the dresser? The bed? Tossed into the crib?

  As she stood there, scanning between these possibilities, an observation arrived: the boy wasn’t there. Not lying, waiting, in the big-boy bed. Not standing by the window. If he was hiding, there were few places he could do so. Behind the curtains? There were no telltale feet beneath them. Beneath the covers? The bed was neatly made. Under a piece of furniture? She bent to look under the crib and bed frame, but there were only gray shadows there.

  Jane rose. The toy soldier shuddered in her arms. A doubling of its smell blown cold against her face.

  She rushed over to the crib and half placed, half dropped the general on the floor. It tottered for a second. A motion of its own making, or simply the weight of it rolling, unbalanced, on its elbows and knees. She didn’t speak until it settled.

  “Benjamin?”

  The silence mocked her.

  He was gone. She didn’t want to think of the possibility of his having escaped, so she focused on him simply returning to some netherworld. He did what other spirits were said to do—he appeared, then disappeared. There was nothing left behind but the experience of it, the doubt of its ever having occurred, and the collision of the two shaping themselves into a story.

  She was talking herself into his never having existed even as she watched the hand slide out from under the crib.

  It couldn’t be happening, but it was. She had looked into the darkness there and seen nothing. Maybe that’s what Bennie was, just as Splitfoot was, what every murderous idea was. The mind’s sculpture of darkness.

  The hand slid out over the floor longer than she thought his arm could stretch. When it stopped, the other hand came after it, extending an inch farther than the first. When they were side by side the fingers bent at the knuckles, gripped hard. The arms bending as they pulled the rest of him out.

  Play…

  The voice wasn’t pretending to be her son’s anymore. It wasn’t Sir’s becalmed tone either. She had never heard a voice like it, but it came to her as something she had always known.

  Play with me.

  A crash. Something heavy clattering to the floor. Jane looked up, expecting to see the place where a chandelier had detached from the ceiling, but there was no chandelier in this bedroom. She looked down. The general. Its knotted limbs still twisted around its head, but now lying on its back. Fallen over. That, or its first attempt to get up.

  Don’t go, Momma.

  She backed away. Her eyes on the boy as he slid free and, without pause, pulled himself erect with the smoothness of a snake rising from the grass.

  The general was moving too. Rocking back and forth.

  Play!

  Jane turned and rushed out to the hallway. She meant to head straight to her room but veered to the left, half running, keeping herself an equal distance from both walls as if the portraits of dead senators and Speakers of the House might reach out to her as Bennie’s hands just had.

  She was halfway along when she saw what had drawn her there.

  On her left was the staircase, on the right the oval-shaped library that sat above the Blue Room below and, another floor down from that, the furnace. That’s where she found him.

  He stood alone in a roomful of books. His expression kindly, patient, suffering. The same surroundings and state of mind she had seen him occupy all his life.

  “Daddy?”

  He gestured for her to come closer. She remembered him doing that too, and in just that way: less a wave than a rounded clenching of his fingers, as if grasping an invisible cane. When he wanted to speak with her it was always a matter of significance. And becaus
e he didn’t want to raise his voice—because so much of what he said had the aura of a secret about it—he needed her to be close.

  Jane went to him.

  She was almost near enough for him to reach out to her, touch her if he chose to, when she remembered she’d left the door to Bennie’s room open.

  26

  He heard the banging from upstairs but felt it from below.

  It’s why Franklin headed down to the ground floor upon leaving the Blue Room. He wanted to fix the problem. He wanted to give someone a piece of his goddamn mind. The house was coming at him, an attack composed of the distortion of everyday things that he guessed was the way insanity presented itself. He wouldn’t let himself entertain the possibility. So he decided: it was the house that was against him. And if it was the house, he would restore his place as its master.

  There were a half dozen staff members in the ground floor’s hall when he appeared. Maids, a brass-buttoned steward, an aproned cook. All but one of them scuttled into the kitchen or cellar or laundry when they saw him. The one who remained stood outside the furnace room. The same man who’d warned him against entering when he’d come down on his first day to complain of the house’s cold.

  “What’s going on in there?” Franklin demanded, striding up to him.

  “Sir?”

  “All the noise. Likes fists against the walls. Didn’t you hear it?”

  “I’ve heard some things, but not that.”

  Franklin couldn’t tell if the man was mocking him. If he had to guess, he’d say the fellow was protecting someone.

  “Step aside.”

  “Sir?”

  “If you won’t stop this nonsense, I will.”

  “I wouldn’t call it nonsense.”

  The man said this with a seriousness that even Franklin’s stare failed to dissolve. At first it seemed he wouldn’t move. And then, with a shake of the head of the kind one gives to someone who insists on drinking another glass of whiskey despite being unable to stand, he moved back.

  Franklin considered the door, listened for movement or voices on the other side. When he could detect nothing he gripped his hand around the brass knob and turned to ask the furnace keeper another question. The hall was empty. Was it possible that the man had retreated so quickly as that? Franklin would have called out his name if he’d known what it was. He would shout an order now—Come back!—if he didn’t want to hear the uselessness of it.

  A person only sees things like that when they’re ready to.

  He was ready now.

  Franklin pushed the door open and stepped into the wall of dry heat.

  The first thing he noticed was the boiler itself: smaller than he would have imagined, a fat steel barrel with a dozen ducts stretching out of it like tentacles punching up through the floorboards. It looked to him like a crab on its back. He remembered peekytoes he found overturned by the tide on the beach at Boothbay, where he visited during breaks at college. Some were dead. Some only looked that way until you tried to pick them up and the claws would clamp on to your skin.

  The second thing he noticed was that the room was unoccupied.

  The man at the furnace room door was a believer. In what? Other worlds. Franklin hadn’t been brought up that way, the world of his father—money, politics, war—decidedly the present one. And then, when Franklin was older, he’d been chosen. Picked out from the crowd to speak for the crowd. There was no room for other worlds in his.

  He drew closer to the boiler. The mansion was big, but the heat blasting out at him was of a volume he was sure could heat all of Washington if the windows were opened. It would melt the ice on the Potomac. Tell the crocuses it was time to rise. Yet he knew that only a floor above the rooms were chilled as those of houses laid to waste by plague.

  The ones you can’t see.

  Franklin felt something come up behind him.

  More than one thing. Bodies. Doubling in number, coming not through the doorway, not previously hidden and now revealing themselves, but deciding the same thing he’d decided. It was time.

  He turned.

  He was encircled by men. A growing number of them squeezing together in rows. Staring at him, but not touching. They didn’t speak, but in their looks Franklin was certain none of them were freemen. Or they hadn’t been while alive.

  They drew closer.

  “I am—” he started, but had no way of ending the statement that would make any sense. I am Franklin Pierce. I am a friend. I am the president of the United States. Each utterance irrelevant, hollow, fictional.

  The men didn’t appear to hear him anyway. Franklin could peek over their shoulders to see that the entire room was now full, yet still more pushed out from the oval walls. The density of their bodies compounded the heat. Franklin couldn’t breathe. He tried to step forward, but whether they refused to move or couldn’t, there was no passage through them.

  “Please. I need to—”

  The child’s cry traveled down through the vents. Franklin heard it. The dead men did too, their heads rising to look into the brick ceiling above them.

  The voice shouldn’t have been able to reach the furnace room, buried as all of them were in the foundation and surrounded by tons of timber and brick. Yet the cries found Franklin’s ears with the clarity that comes from being separated by nothing more than a pane of glass.

  “It’s my son,” he said.

  There was a pause of a kind, the hush of people drawing breath. And then the men in front of Franklin stepped aside. Behind them, tight row after row, others did the same. A parting that left a space just wide enough for him to sidestep through.

  He tried not to look at their faces as he went, an aversion he intended to communicate as respectful thanks. It didn’t stop him from noticing the expressions some wore. They weren’t letting him go out of deference to his position, nor pity for being the father to a mewling child. It was grim satisfaction at possessing knowledge he didn’t. Knowing what awaited him upstairs.

  Once he was out in the hallway Franklin closed the door. The furnace keeper was there again.

  “You saw,” the older man said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “By name?”

  “By what they did.”

  “No.”

  The furnace keeper grinned toothlessly. “They built this house.”

  Franklin glanced back at the furnace room door. Imagined the dozens, hundreds of men on the other side.

  “Why are they in there?”

  “This is America. This house. You and the missus up top, the paintings and crystal in the middle for the men to do their bargains, and down here the ones who do the work. And the ones in there—” The furnace keeper tilted his head toward the door. “They made these walls. But once they did, they weren’t allowed inside them.”

  “And it’s cold outside.”

  “It’s cold on either side, Mr. President, depending on your situation.”

  The child’s crying started again. Not just alarmed anymore, but in pain.

  “You hear that?” Franklin said.

  The furnace keeper shrugged. “Hear what?”

  A wave of illness washed over Franklin and he doubled over, sure he was going to be sick.

  Papa?

  Franklin jolted. The furnace keeper cast his eyes up at the ceiling too.

  “I know who that is,” Franklin said.

  “Oh?”

  “That’s my boy.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Pa-pa!

  Franklin started away toward the stairs. With each step he felt less ill, less likely to spill his stomach onto the floor.

  When he looked back he found the hall empty. The furnace keeper was gone.

  * * *

  The second floor’s library was the same oval shape and size as the Blue Room below it. Yet from the start Jane found this space so much smaller than its twin, almost suffocating. Even more so now with her father standing at t
he center of it.

  She had assumed the claustrophobia that limited her previous visits to a quick snatching of a new book to read resulted from the shelves that held the volumes, the towering weight of them all around. She saw now that her aversion had come from Sir being here all along. His presence hiding among the histories and atlases, looking back over the worlds he had traveled.

  “You’re not my father,” she said.

  “I thought it would be a solace for you to see me.”

  “You don’t give solace. You can’t.”

  The lines on her father’s forehead folded like a plowed field, the lips gluing and ungluing. This was Sir trying to make a smile out of wet clay.

  “Would you care to tell me what else I can’t do?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Then come in. Or do you want your husband hearing you talk to yourself ?”

  At the same instant he mentioned Franklin—your husband—she heard his distinctive step coming up the stairs across the hallway.

  She closed the door. Moved just far enough so that her back wasn’t touching it.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Dear Jeannie. You wanted me to come.”

  Had she? Jane struggled to work through the recent hours of her life and found nothing but a soup of unnatural images and sounds. Yet buried in it was the sense that there was a purpose to her being there. An attempt to prevent catastrophe.

  “I would like to ask you to do something for me,” she said.

  “Something else, you must mean. Something in addition to all I’ve already done?”

  “I’ve asked for nothing.”

  He approached her with small, sliding steps. The voice shifting from Jesse Appleton’s to Splitfoot’s word by word.

  “I came to you because you invited me. I brought your boy back because you wished it. I lifted your polished shell of a husband to a mountaintop.”

  He stopped an arm’s length from her. It let Jane hear the last of what he said as the partial lie it was. She also saw the distinction between asking and wishing, and was about to present him with it, but as was so often the case when in his company, such nuance slipped away before she could speak.