The Residence Page 16

  “Take me,” she said.

  “You?”

  “Let me be your compensation.”

  “For what?”

  “Your leaving this place. In return, you may have what spirit I have left.”

  It was pathetic. Jane heard it. Sir did too. What seemed an enormous sacrifice, the offer of her everlasting life, struck them both as a pittance.

  “I like it here, Jeannie,” Sir said, restraining most, but not all, of the mockery from his voice. “It’s like a church to me.”

  “A church,” she repeated.

  “Oh yes! There’s blessings of the rich and commandments of the ones chosen to speak for them. There’s the saints who’d waged war. Marriages of power.”

  She had to find another way to resist him. Discover a vulnerability in his composition that might be exploited. His pride. She thought this was the way. Yet with every query she put to him, the more convinced she became of his superiority. He revealed himself now with an openness he hadn’t before because there was no need to conceal his intentions. He was here, where he had set out to come when he attached himself to her as a child, just as he had identified her father as a way to her before that. There was no vulnerability in him. He had already won.

  “Why have you done this?”

  “I am always looking for a path,” Splitfoot said using her father’s mouth.

  “Where?”

  “To your thoughts, your choices. To be the loudest voice in your head. And through that voice, to guide you to your ends.”

  Jane wished, hopelessly, that the man standing in front of her actually was her father. She didn’t know how much she missed him. He would understand everything that had happened to her. They would have so much to talk about. But the man with her could provide no comfort. The very notion of his touch made her shudder.

  Sir read her mind and encaged her in his arms.

  “The thinking of a thing gives it a reality. Every cruelty, every murder, every lie. Even the greatest atrocities begin with a harmless musing,” Sir whispered against her cheek. “Thinking a thing makes it want to be a thing.”

  “You want the world to end.”

  “I want it broken.”

  “You can’t do that from here.”

  “It is the best place to do it.”

  “No. We won’t—”

  “From here I can break the world by breaking the mind of the man with power over it. How is that done? You break his heart.”

  He pulled her closer. He would never let her go.

  Behind her, from the other side of the door, she heard someone running down the hall. The steps light and quick. A child.

  27

  The president rushed upstairs toward his dead son’s voice.

  He wasn’t thinking. Not in the way he normally did, arranging his considerations by pros and cons and priorities. Franklin’s mind was alive but in a different way, and he realized this place had been pulling him there since he entered it, opening him to senses and visions he didn’t welcome but, once revealed, were impossible to dispel. It was the dead who did it. The house was full of them.

  Including the man outside the furnace room.

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

  It was also the way Franklin felt around these presences that confirmed they weren’t living. The gut twists, dizziness, the fattened tongue. Speaking with the furnace keeper made Franklin ill. He had the idea that it was not inflicted on purpose but was necessary for the presence to make itself visible, and in the case of the furnace man, converse. Maybe all the dead were like that. To get from there, they had to ride on the shoulders of someone here.

  If he was right, it would go some way to explaining why he hadn’t felt properly himself since coming to live in the mansion. Then again, he wasn’t himself in coming here. He wasn’t Franklin Pierce anymore, a husband, a suffering father of lost children. Here he was president. Greater than a man, though one not permitted to be human.

  He heard the door to the library close at the same time he came to the top of the stairs. It wasn’t where the voice was coming from, which removed any curiosity he might have had as to who was in there. He started to the right. The second floor hall was empty in the way a space is following an act of violence. It was how his father’s tavern felt after being cleared of a brawl.

  He knew the door to the room across from Jane’s would be open. It let him slip inside without touching it.

  There was the neatly made bed, the crib, the dresser, the chair. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But he felt it all the same.

  “I was calling for you, Papa.”

  The boy was standing in front of the window with his back to him. Heavy curtains were lined against his sides so that Franklin had mistaken him for a high-backed chair fixed to let the moonlight in.

  “Are you all right?” Franklin asked.

  It was the wrong question. It wasn’t what he really wanted to know. And it let the boy win the first point: he was here, being treated as a human being would. They were both acting now. Which was the initial step on the way to doing away with the difference between acting a part and being who you really are.

  “I’m fine,” the boy said. “I was just lonely.”

  He turned. The room was dark so that the only light came from whatever dusting of moon and lamp found its way through the window, along with the shaft of yellow cast along the floor from the hallway. But it was sufficient to illuminate two things. One was that the boy’s turning wasn’t the only movement, as there was something else, something to the right, that rose and seemed to unfold itself—cle-clank—at the same time. The other was that the boy’s face was that of his son. His Bennie.

  Fixing his attention on the boy alone was another mistake. It prevented him from getting a good look at the rising, unfolding thing that came at him.

  Fif-fif-fif-fif-fif…

  A dwarf. It’s back and neck and shoulders so stiff it advanced in arthritic lurches. Low and fast as a startled rat. And like a rat, its very nature was repulsive.

  The thing passed so close he felt some part of it graze his pant leg. Franklin moved deeper into the room to be farther from it in case it leapt on him from behind. But as he spun around to meet the attack, he caught sight of it. The general. Bennie’s toy soldier banging its arm against the door, swinging it shut. The shaft of light from the hall skinnying to nothing.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Bennie said.

  Franklin didn’t reply, didn’t move. Another point won by the boy. He didn’t mean to calm his father, just hold him there. That wasn’t his only victory. By not denying the boy’s claim that he was afraid only proved that he was.

  The floor squeaked. It was the boy stepping closer. Franklin turned from the dwarfish shadow standing guard at the door. Now that the boy was away from the window it let more of the scant light in, silty and brown as a disturbed creek bed.

  “Do you know who I am?” the boy asked.

  “I know who you were.”

  “Were?”

  “None of this is real.”

  “How best to show that you’re wrong?”

  The boy seemed to ponder his own question. And then Franklin saw it wasn’t a question meant for a response from either of them. They both already knew the answer.

  “Do you know who I am?” the boy asked again, precisely the same as before, a mimicry that smuggled a threat inside it the second time.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you say it?”

  “You are Benjamin Pierce,” Franklin said, his throat on fire. “My son.”

  He was expecting it. The figure at the window he’d seen from the orangery. The cries that had traveled down through the vents. The calls for him that sounded so much like the ones that awakened him when he still had living sons, the shouts for their father to come and push away the bad dreams that invaded their sleep. And he had responded with the same reflex to help. To shield.

  But wha
t was it?

  It was Bennie in the sense that its resemblance to his son made him remember his son. Jane carried the locket with the boy’s hair for the same reason. Yet for all that, looking at the boy who kept his distance as if hiding the flaws that would give him away if he came too close, Franklin saw even less than a clipping of hair. He saw a betrayal. It was an agent sent here to build a bridge between where it came from and where Franklin existed using his love as building material. From what he could tell, it was almost all the way there.

  “May I go, Papa?”

  The boy took a step closer. He seemed pleased when Franklin neither retreated nor told him to stay away.

  “Where would you go?”

  “Not far.”

  “You wish to leave.”

  “No!” The boy giggled. “I’ll never leave!”

  The more Franklin kept his eyes on the boy the louder the second voice grew in his thinking.

  Did the child have to be devilry? The dead rose from time to time in the Bible, did they not? Lazarus. Jesus. Couldn’t this be such a case? He was aware of the facts against it. He’d watched his boy die, tried to lift him up and felt him come undone, his sweet head damaged beyond all fixing.

  Yet here he was. Proof that questions lingered.

  Was God real? Was he kind? Did he know how broken Franklin’s heart was, how heavy the strain of keeping his country together when so much conspired to tear it apart? Who other than God had the power to bring his boy back?

  “Why do you need my permission?” Franklin said.

  “I only do as I’m told. I’m a good boy, Papa.”

  He saw it then. A part of this boy who truly was Bennie. How could that be? Perhaps it was that his son’s spirit had been commandeered. Perhaps this wasn’t a trick. It was an opportunity. A miracle in waiting.

  It made him remember himself as a child, as a man, a father: Franklin had always tried to figure out ways to be loved. Yet his son Bennie simply loved.

  Where did the boy come to it, this ease of feeling? Not from Franklin, certainly. And not Jane, who felt deeply but translated its excess into pains and aversions.

  Now here was a way to go back. To love as openly as he ought to have done from the start. Not many men were lucky enough to stare at it as he was doing now. A second chance.

  “Papa? Please?”

  It was exhaustion that made him do it. He was tired of having people stolen from him. He was tired of being lost, sounding lost even in his most strident speeches to Congress and letters to foreign leaders. More than anything, Franklin was tired of not being a father anymore.

  He went to the door. The general stepped aside. Fif-fif-fif-fif. Franklin opened it and looked back at his son. On his face a creeping smile yellowed by the lamplight from the hall.

  A single word. Quick as a snapped finger.

  Despite its brevity, Franklin wasn’t finished speaking it when he heard the error he’d made.

  “Yes.”

  28

  Her father unclasped the hands at her back. Raised his lips all the way to the gums.

  “Let me go,” Jane said, but he was already stepping away from her.

  As he went the particulars that made him appear as her father blurred. The gray brows became a line over his eyes, the veined hands a pair of white mittens.

  She spun around. Opened the door.

  Her dead son was running down the hall.

  When Bennie saw her he paused. His face betrayed no feeling of any kind, the eyes not even assessing her, merely looking. It made her think of feral dogs encountered on the street: people had no way of guessing whether the dogs would walk on, or whine for food, or bite.

  “Benjamin,” she said.

  The boy looked back down the hallway. Jane looked too.

  Franklin stood outside the Grief Room. Even from this distance she could see how ruined he was. She recognized it from the image of herself she saw in every mirror now: a place beyond failure, beyond sorrow. He had been pulled so far out of himself there was no self to return to.

  Franklin raised his arm. Pointed at the boy.

  Jane saw what he was asking. She started toward the child. Not to hold him or speak with him but to capture him. Drag him back down the hall to his room. Lock him inside and never open the door again.

  Bennie was too fast for her. He moved to the top of the stairs—not running, but skipping. He did it without turning from her, so that his body was faced forward and his head behind. The unnatural twisting of a boneless doll. As he descended she expected him to show her something of his nature, a grimace or snarl. But his face didn’t change, revealed nothing, which was worse than if he had.

  Franklin appeared next to her.

  “We have to find him,” he said.

  Jane heard the way he bypassed all the questions he might need answered. How is he here? Did you know? Was it you who brought him back? Perhaps he already guessed the replies she would give.

  “What will we do with him?”

  He coughed in her face. It smelled of sourdough and bourbon.

  “Let’s find him first,” he said, and started down the stairs.

  * * *

  The two of them searched every room on the first floor. The Blue Room, the Crimson Parlor, the State Dining Room, the pantry. The president and First Lady entered them all and peered wordlessly behind every settee and cupboard, murmuring vague explanations to the staff—Just looking; Dropped something—if they asked if they could be of assistance.

  They encountered Webster on their way out of the Green Room.

  “Have you seen a boy?” Jane asked him.

  “A boy, ma’am?”

  “He was running about.”

  “No. I’ve neither seen nor heard the running of a boy.”

  “Keep your eye out,” Franklin said, and Webster turned to him.

  They saw it then. The image of themselves in the face of the president’s secretary. And in it, they saw too the only conclusion he or anyone could come to. The Pierces were more than grief-stricken. They had slid away from their sanity, and for those who worked around them in the residence, the question was now how best they be handled, contained, avoided.

  “I will, sir,” Webster said.

  * * *

  They talked through the dinner hour in Jane’s room. When the candles guttered out she lit more and returned to sit on the edge of the bed across from the chair where Franklin was slumped. A dozen confused years had been added to his features. Yet Jane found he remained handsome, possibly more so, in the way that older men can tell heartbroken stories with the lines in their faces.

  “Will you stay with me tonight?”

  He went still at her question.

  “In your room?”

  “In my bed. Our bed.”

  “You must be very afraid to want that.”

  “I am afraid. But that’s not the reason I’m asking.”

  “What is it?”

  “We haven’t had something together, something to share, for a long time.”

  She offered her hand. He took it. Let himself be guided to the mattress next to her.

  “I just wish—” she began.

  “That none of this was real.”

  “That it was real. That the boy was real—our Bennie.”

  Given all that she’d told him over the preceding hours—her invitation to the Fox sisters, the summoning of Bennie’s spirit, the infant that had leapfrogged in its growth in the room across the hall—she would have granted Franklin the right to be angry for her making a remark like this. It was her “just wishing,” after all, that had led to a sweet-faced ghoul moving about the mansion. Not to mention the other presences. Their fathers. The enslaved dead in the furnace room. And then there was the way she’d kept from him the presence that had followed her out of the Bowdoin president’s house of her girlhood and walked alongside her all her life. It was like an adultery, shaming and selfish. In this case something worse than that, as it was born of an offense again
st God.

  But Franklin wasn’t angry at her. He had a sense of the power of the shadow she called Sir from his own encounter with it at Franky’s deathbed. How could a being like that be shaken if it was decided in its interests? He didn’t blame Jane for keeping it a secret from him, because he kept what he’d seen a secret from her now. He told himself he was doing it to protect her from knowledge that could only cause pain. The same reason, she’d tried to convince herself, justified her deception of him.

  As for her calling Bennie up out of the soil—he couldn’t fault her for that either. He felt it too. The longing so deep it would do anything, break any law, for the briefest reunion with the lost. The way the heart could be fooled by a likeness. The closeness of the thing that hid somewhere in the White House to the child he had loved so dearly it was enough for two lives, a thousand.

  “It can’t be real,” he said. “That child—it is a treachery.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “I do. You only wanted the same thing I have wanted.”

  “I went further than that.”

  “You brought something into this house that has no right to it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I forgive you that too. Because I’ve come to suspect I have little right to be in this office myself.”

  “Why do you say that? You’ve committed no fraud.”

  “Not by intention. But I wasn’t called to be here by purpose, Jeannie. Just like that boy who looks like our Bennie. I’m more puppet than president.”

  Jane’s reflex was to defend her husband from this attack against himself. Yet she said nothing. Because Franklin was right, in a way she hadn’t grasped before. She had been too occupied in aiding Sir, keeping Sir a secret, waiting for Sir to give her what she ached for, that she’d failed to see how she had used Franklin the whole time. Her willing marionette. Just as she had been Sir’s.

  “You say you weren’t called by purpose,” she said. “Even if that’s so, could you not find it now?”