The Residence Page 23
“Come,” Franklin said, starting for the steps down and collecting the hammer and chisel on his way.
She thought of touching the back of her hand to the thing’s cheek. She thought of saying something to it. What? That she regretted what had brought it here and the role she’d played in it. That she hoped it wouldn’t suffer too much, even if she knew it had no need for food or water or company. That she saw, even now, a reflection of the love she felt for her son and directed it at this fakery, an error she couldn’t stop herself from making because it came from her sorrow, and her sorrow was endless.
None of it mattered. It would see none of it, feel none of it. It would sink its teeth into her skin sooner than search for a message in her touch.
When Franklin was finished nailing boards over the cell’s one opening she remembered the locket. She saw it on the floor next to where she had sat. The boy saw it too.
“Jane?” Franklin said, and followed her line of sight to the locket.
“Should we—”
“We need to leave it behind,” he said, and she heard him as meaning not only the locket and the creature that looked like Bennie, but the desire to retrieve the living things they were once attached to.
She bent down and blew out the candles.
“Come now,” Franklin said.
He went down first with Jane following after. She knew it was a mistake but she looked back at the spot where they’d left the boy. Just like Sir’s first appearance in the cellar of the Bowdoin house, all she could make out was an outline of darkness. A shadow that, if you weren’t trying to see something in it, would appear as nothing at all.
“You will die barren,” it whispered low so only she could hear.
She carried on downward, careful of her footing, hearing every last one of its words.
“Your children were weak. You were weak. We took the one you loved most and still you looked for a way to cheat God. Think on it or not, deny it or not. There will be no relief from it, ever.”
She said nothing in reply to the things it said. In part because she knew it intended only to cause her the greatest pain it could. In part because everything it said was true.
37
They spent the rest of the night nailing boards over the hole in the Grief Room’s wall and, when they were done with that, troweling plaster over it. It wasn’t a pretty job. It didn’t have to be. Later, they could instruct workmen to make it smooth, invisible. For now it just had to hold it inside.
Once they were finished they closed the door and told the staff who were starting their morning duties not to enter, and to avoid the western end of the second floor altogether. Only then did they summon a physician to tend to their wounds. Jane’s hand slathered in a green-tea poultice before being bandaged. Franklin’s side cleaned and stitched. Any who asked how they’d come upon their injuries were provided the same response. “It is a private matter, and all is well now,” they said, hoping none would dare ask further, and they didn’t.
Later that evening, when they were alone in their room, they shared their worry that the thing in the attic might cry out, or pound on the ceiling, or claw a hole through the roof. Noises that the rest of the house would be unable to dismiss as the squeaks of a bat or skittering of a squirrel.
Indeed the thing was clamorous over the first few days, though not with its voice. The sounds came from the feet that Jane’s poor job tying together had allowed to be freed.
It walked.
The creature’s containment limited its pacing to the ceiling over the room across from where the president and First Lady slept, the two of them sharing a room again. It left those who worked in the offices at the opposite end of the hall largely undisturbed. For long stretches the thing in the attic would sit in quiet—or lie down, or perhaps it stood, staring into the dark—before resuming its back-and-forth. It kept the Pierces from sleep. But they had mostly given up on sleep anyway.
As their time in office went on the sounds from the attic dwindled to rare knockings and random thuds. To hear its voice one had to enter the Grief Room, which only Jane ever did.
Why did she do it? Someone had to. To make sure the thing remained confined where it was. To check the plastered wall for cracks. But also to listen. This was what Jane had always done, whether in the name of self-punishment, or duty, or love: she endured.
She entered as quietly as possible but it always seemed to hear her. It didn’t speak every time. But when it did, it would curse her, or remind her of the loneliness that would follow her the rest of her life. More frequently the thing would make sounds free of language. Laughter, weeping. A low wheezing of the kind that afflicted her brother John before he passed.
Jane visited the room less and less, even though she remained curious about the sounds. In time, she pretended it wasn’t a child’s voice at all up there, only the old house playing a trick with her mind. The wind against the windows. The sandy soil shifting beneath the foundation. Along with the explanation she came closest to actually believing: the sounds were bits of memory from her childhood echoing into the present, so that the voice wasn’t a spirit’s at all, but her own.
PART FOUR HISTORY
38
The Pierce presidency lasted a single term. Even among historians, it’s a legacy more overlooked than debated.
Franklin’s attempts at placating North and South ended in dissatisfaction on both sides, the bloodshed in Kansas and elsewhere pooled at his feet. The Democrats overwhelmingly lost the House in the midterms. At the convention of 1856, just two years after being pleaded with to lend his name to the leadership race, Pierce failed to top a single ballot.
Never before or since has a presidential candidate for reelection not won his party’s nomination.
* * *
He couldn’t honestly say that the whiskey helped his performance over the last months of his term, but Franklin came to rely on it more and more nonetheless. His duties were tended to, letters and proclamations signed, speeches delivered, all through a fog of controlled drunkenness. Like his father, he became an expert drinker. Not that he was able to hide the effects entirely, but for those few who knew the quantity he imbibed, there was a sad awe at how he could stand up straight let alone address Congress or raise a toast to the prime minister of Wherever.
It helped dull the apprehension that came with the banging in the walls, the specters of dead soldiers and slaves he would come around a corner to be confronted by. In place of horror, the whiskey brought him to a place of bleak amusement. He was a man surrounded by ghosts who came to see himself as a ghost.
* * *
On the Atlantic crossing of the trip they took upon their retirement Jane and Franklin agreed not to mention the things they had experienced in the White House for the time they traveled. It was a relief for them both.
They decided on their European destinations based on reports of the prettiest locales by season: Portugal and Spain in winter, France and Switzerland in the warmer months. All places Jane thought beautiful but taxing on her health. Franklin suggested recuperation in the Bahamas, which he didn’t seriously think would make much improvement but was pleased when he was proven wrong. Jane, arriving weak as a puppy and pale as a plate, thrived in the Caribbean heat. Her complaints dwindled to misgivings about the food and the glorious flowers that could induce sneezing if sniffed too closely. She felt well enough, in fact, that she suggested they return to Concord, buy the farmland Franklin had long talked about. Be at home.
“We’ll be two ancient fools out in the fields together, not a clue in our heads,” he said.
“It’s a lovely picture,” Jane said, and it was, though she’d always regarded pictures as holding back as much as they revealed, because no matter how closely you looked, you could never know what the subjects were thinking.
* * *
Over the months the Pierces were abroad, three-quarters of a million men and boys died in civil war, their bodies buried in the fields where they fell.
Given the suspected number of undiscovered graves, neither a precise accounting of the dead, nor their names, will ever be known.
* * *
Abraham Lincoln’s beloved son Willie died a year after moving into the White House.
Pierce wrote the president a letter of condolence. Jane wrote an even longer one to the First Lady. What appealed to Mary Lincoln over their correspondence was how Jane did more than empathize with her grief: she seemed to be searching for practical remedies to it, not a salve to the pain but the solution to its cause.
Some of the newspapers reported that Mrs. Lincoln conducted séances in the residence and that even her husband secretly attended them. It was said that they were driven by grief, a harrowing need to speak with their departed child one last time.
Jane was inclined to believe the rumors.
* * *
A year after Jane’s death, word reached Franklin that Nathaniel Hawthorne wasn’t well. Despite his poor health, the author wished to go on a trip with his old friend Pierce.
Nate assured his family that it would do him good to be on the road for a time with his Bowdoin brother. What in fact motivated Hawthorne to travel alone with Franklin was to talk about something he’d kept to himself for years, namely the reason he hadn’t produced any stories or novels of significance since his appointment to England—how he’d effectively stopped writing the day he visited his friend in the White House and opened the door to Bennie’s room.
Franklin and Nate started out for Dixville Notch in the farthest corner of New Hampshire. Along the way they rediscovered the voices they used in the grubby Brunswick tavern of their college days. They ridiculed the pretensions of rivals, mocked the mustache of Poe and the “gimp’s gait” of Lincoln, spat out the names of the critics lined up against them in the Tribune and the Herald as if comical inventions. More than anyone, they laughed at themselves. How they had always doubted their abilities even as they collected laurels and were ushered to seats of influence.
On their first night, Hawthorne pushed away the glass of whiskey Franklin poured for him and combed his beard with yellowed fingernails.
“I have pondered something for many years, and I wonder if you would allow me a question.”
Hawthorne looked at him in a way that made Franklin worry he was going to be asked about what happened in the mansion. It prompted him to take a fortifying swallow from his glass.
“Of course,” he said.
“Why Jane?”
Hawthorne’s face contorted, and Franklin initially mistook it for a flare of pain. But the longer the expression rested there he saw it as genuine puzzlement.
“You had your choice,” Nate continued. “The great Franklin Pierce! You had your pick. And it was Jane Appleton. Why that girl?”
“Because I could take better care of her than anyone else.”
It came out too quickly, too hard. Yet now that he’d said it he heard it as the truth. He had disappointed his wife in many ways, and couldn’t shield her from the unseen terrors that pursued her. But he had done as much as a husband could. He often worried he’d done more for her than for his country.
After two more days they stopped at Plymouth, where Hawthorne’s health took a turn. Pierce suggested sending for a physician, but Nate waved off his concern.
“If I’m done with writing, I’m sure as hell done with doctors too,” he said.
Later that night, Franklin heard the coughing and sighs from across the hall and wondered, before returning to sleep, if Hawthorne was dying. He reminded himself that both of them were: Franklin’s end hurried on a current of grain whiskey and Nate’s by lungs slowly filling like jugs in the rain. There was nothing to be done. They had already said their goodbyes to each other, indirectly, as men do.
In the morning Franklin rose to find Hawthorne lying faceup, and he knew the skin was cold before he crossed the hall and put his fingers to it, closing the lips and smoothing the brow to erase the expression of startled horror he’d been left with.
* * *
His last days were an unremarkable descent. Alcoholic, wifeless, childless. Ready.
Just as Jane had urged him to, Franklin ended his life a farmer, where that term applies to a man who purchased his acres too late in life to tend them. Still, he enjoyed the view from his bed. He would lie there and drink and chortle at the bitter humor that came with realizing all that could have been avoided by staying the boy who loved to walk in the woods, rather than the portrait who was chosen to hang in the long hallway of white. A man told that he looked the part so often he assumed he had no choice but to play it, following the duties that now seemed as empty as the lies shared over brothel pillows.
* * *
Jane’s passing came six years before her husband’s. She was fifty-seven. Still young among ladies of her class, though she judged she’d done well to endure as long as she had.
It was early in December, at her sister Mary’s house in Andover, where she’d been taken after the diagnosis of consumption was confirmed. It was stated aloud among the family that Franklin obviously couldn’t take care of the farm in Concord as well as Jane in such serious condition. What went unsaid, but was just as apparent, was that Jane would not recover.
Following the bowls of boiled lamb and potato that would prove to be their last meal together, they sat up in bed and talked. Because it wasn’t their own home, because Jane’s coughing was impossible to stop once started, and because they spoke of things that no one else should hear, they lay shoulder to shoulder. The resulting intimacy let them converse not as president and First Lady, nor as husband and wife, but with the frankness of lovers.
Bennie tumbling away the length of the overturned train car.
The true legacy bestowed on them by their fathers.
The horrors of the Washington residence.
Jane was the only one who spoke of Sir. For the first time, she described the experience as being “possessed by an intrusion of the spirit,” and attempted to state outright what the intruder was. Give it a name of her own. None came.
As she pondered this, Franklin considered telling her of the presence he glimpsed standing over Franky. The same stranger who had revealed the unspeakable crimes to him in the East Room, and whose namelessness they struggled with now. But it was close to the end for her, and such a disclosure, coming so late, struck him as needless. So he turned his face so that his voice brought a small warmth to her cheek.
“Let’s speak of something else, then,” Franklin whispered.
“What?”
“The secret.”
She hadn’t thought of it exactly that way before—the secret—but it struck her as the right conception.
The two of them drew closer and shared what they had learned in their time in the mansion: that at the very heart of America there lives a darkness. Material and intelligent and alive. One that would outlive them both to sculpt the country in ways that, over time, might not be recognized as a darkness at all.
They were an old couple already half-forgotten by history and so with nothing of themselves to lose, yet neither Jane nor Franklin could capture the specific thing they were referring to. It could be spoken about, yet resisted any one identity. It had a shape but could never be drawn. As when seeing the form of something in a cloud, the very act of pointing skyward—There!—prompted it to shift into something else. The war. Their lost sons. The people sold and resold. The devil that hides in the White House. The dead rising up to claim the living even as they walked in sunlight.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While The Residence is a work of fiction, it is sourced from a number of events known to the historical record. The Pierces’ unlikely courtship, Franklin’s preordained ascent to the presidency, the train accident, Jane’s letters to her dead son asking him to return to her, and her subsequent insistence that he did, as well as her participation in spiritual readings and summonings in the White House—all of this is true.
Also true are the stories of
apparitions that have appeared to guests, staff, and residents at the presidential mansion over the decades since the Pierces’ term of service. President Truman wrote of hearing banging and scratches at his office door as he authorized the development of the atom bomb. Winston Churchill encountered a figure in his bedroom that disturbed him to such a degree he refused to ever spend another night there. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands opened the door of her second-floor guest room to see something that caused her to collapse in shock.
The forms these presences have taken vary from witness to witness, but one phantom that is uniform in its playful but unsettling appearances is a preadolescent child. A boy. One that, until 1911, when President Taft forbade any further mention of the entity, was referred to as the Thing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude to the following for lending their aid to me or to this book: Michael Braff, Laurie Grassi, Joe Monti, Sara Kitchen, Erica Ferguson, Kirby Kim, Jason Richman, Anne McDermid, Craig Davidson, Kevin Hanson, and my beloved family, Heidi, Maude, and Ford.
More from the Author
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDREW PYPER is the internationally bestselling author of nine previous novels, including The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Hardcover Novel, and The Killing Circle, which was selected as a New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year. He lives in Toronto. Visit AndrewPyper.com or @AndrewPyper.