The Residence Read online

  “Then perhaps we can shed the cold from each other,” she whispered.

  That night he waited for her in his room. He placed his hands on the mattress on either side of him to sense the vibrations of her approach. Listened.

  Less than nothing. As if a presence had drawn all sound into another dimension altogether.

  Franklin pulled the sheets off his legs and went out into the hallway. It was empty save for a lone sentry standing at the top of the stairs. Franklin saluted him, but whether the guard didn’t see in the dimness or whether he’d been ordered not to enter into any exchange with the president, he remained still at his post.

  There was a line of light coming from the bottom of the door across from Jane’s. The room he wouldn’t let himself enter. The one he thought of as Bennie’s room.

  He could just make out the orange flickering of candlelight over the floorboards from where he was. It grew brighter with each passing second. This is how he came to see that he was walking closer to it.

  Franklin hesitated before knocking. Even he found this odd. It was almost certainly his wife in there. He could be with her if—

  How do I know it’s her?

  He asked this from outside himself. And he answered from outside himself too.

  She’s talking.

  Jane’s voice coming from inside. A low, serious questioning.

  She’s talking with someone.

  A man. He could hear this too. The sluggish delivery of words he couldn’t quite make out. A sound that came from deep inside a cave, distorted by curving its way through tunnels and over black pools.

  Something about the two voices held him there. There was a sense of wrongness about whoever was inside and, in turn, a sense of wrongness about him hearing them. He felt certain it wasn’t infidelity he’d discovered but a blasphemy. An unspeakable act or communion beyond all understanding. Witchcraft, perhaps. A grotesque crime. He couldn’t picture what Jane and the man might be doing, because he was sure, even as he tried to detect the words they parlayed, that it wasn’t a man inside the room.

  He hoped only not to be noticed. And then they noticed him.

  Jane’s murmured questions and the other’s slow explanations—they stopped at once. He felt them look at him through the wood.

  He started back toward his room. His walk quickening to a run that caused the sentry to turn his head. The president was sprinting away as if pursued, although he was alone in the long hallway. There was nothing for a guard to protect him from.

  6

  The president was obliged to attend the opening of the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York the following week. Given Jane’s fondness for the city, Franklin was confident he could coax her to join him for a few days. She wouldn’t go.

  “You’re disappointed,” she told him. “But as you can see, I’m not up to the travel.”

  In fact, Jane looked better than she had since her arrival at the White House. The black veil had been removed, her hair pinned up to show a complexion pinkened by a walk in the sun or exercise he was unaware of.

  “I could make time for us,” he said.

  “We’ll have time when you return. Take Abby with you. God willing, I’ll be stronger four days hence.”

  He was going to ask what she was doing in the room across the hall the previous night talking to herself—it had to be an exchange between her Jeannie voice and the other, mischievous self that produced her oddly deep laugh—but she prevented him by offering a cheek to be kissed. When he lingered she turned her head and met his lips with hers.

  Franklin could feel the excitement thrumming within her slight frame. It took some doing to convince himself that he was the cause of it.

  * * *

  On his last night in New York, Franklin met with lawmakers who argued over whether to purchase Cuba or invade it. Abby went out to see a show on Broadway.

  Abigail Means was aware that she was the perfect choice to act as substitute for the First Lady. Once widowhood became her lot, she worried that the rest of her life would be spent husbandless, a fate she was prepared to face with dignity. And then her beloved cousin Jane was pulled to Washington when Franklin took the election, and even before the letter came asking her to come, Abby knew the role she would play. Pretend wife. Celibate mistress. It provided half the life she’d lost. But there were times she yearned for the other half as well.

  It’s why she constantly reminded herself that this was her part in the play. She was to act as spouse to the president, not become her. Yet being in New York with Franklin—rooms on separate floors, of course, and dining together only when formalities obliged—nudged her closer to confusing her role with reality. By the end of the trip she was grateful for the distraction of a night out on her own.

  It was a musical revue that veered from sentimental ballad to idiotic skit. There was, however, one moment that stood out from the rest. A chilling tune that told the story of the two Fox sisters who could speak with the dead. The performers who played the parts of Maggie and Kate Fox portrayed them as sultry seductresses, astonishing their female clients and leaving the men so flustered they stole the ladies’ fans to cool their passions. The program listed the number as “The Rochester Knockings at the Barnum’s Hotel.”

  Abby had never heard of the Fox sisters. But the next morning, she found a newspaper story about them being the sensation of New York, holding spiritual readings in which rappings were heard, tables levitated, and canes, Bibles, and hats were flung across the room by unseen forces.

  She intended to bring it up with Franklin after breakfast before departing for Washington, but when she arrived at his suite she was surprised to see the rooms filled with wooden crates.

  “I was hoping you would give me your opinion,” he said, his usually guarded smile stretched wide.

  He pulled off the lid of the nearest crate. She had to come close to see what was inside.

  “It’s stunning,” she said.

  “You think so?”

  “How could one not?”

  He picked a dinner plate out from the top and smoothed his finger around its edge.

  “Hand-painted. Made in France. And do you see the little stars? I thought it patriotic.”

  “It’s lovely, Franklin.”

  “There’s two hundred and eighty-seven pieces, I’m told. Which makes me wonder, if each place setting is composed of an even number, what’s the two hundred and eighty-seventh? I suppose we’ll just have to dig through it all to find out.”

  “The White House is lucky to have a president possessed of such good taste.”

  “In point of fact,” he said, “I purchased it not for the White House, but for you.”

  “Well.”

  “Seeing as you’re the only one eating off the old plates as much as me. I consider it service—friendship, whatever it is—deserving of recognition. And my gratitude.”

  It was an innocent speech in its wording. But one that bore additional meanings and invitations in his speaking of it.

  “Jane will love it,” Abby said.

  Franklin heard it clearly enough. He’d come to a boundary.

  “Yes, of course,” he mumbled, lifting the top back onto the crate. “They’re her colors, after all.”

  7

  When the carriage rode past the gate Franklin’s first thought was that black vines had burst from the ground to grow over the mansion.

  “What is this?” he asked walking up the steps where Webster was waiting for him.

  “Bunting, sir.”

  “I have eyes. Why is it here for all of Washington to see?”

  “Come inside,” Webster said. “See what Washington can’t see.”

  Black ribbons. Yards and yards of it tied and looped around every pillar and post all the way along the central hall. Mourning bunting.

  “Jane did this?” Franklin asked.

  “She’s been out and about since your departure and only returned to her quarters today.”

/>   “To avoid me.”

  Webster puckered his chin, which was his way of indicating mutual suffering. “In my experience, a wife can sometimes leave bread crumbs to be followed instead of saying a thing plainly,” he said.

  “Oh? And where does the trail lead?”

  “A locked door, as often as not.”

  Franklin touched his hand to the nearest ribbon and, before he knew he was intending to, tore it off the wall.

  “Have this taken down,” he said. “Every inch. And if there are bread crumbs sweep them up before the goddamned mice find them.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, Jane was not alone.

  Abby had rushed to greet her before Franklin could because she wanted to calm whatever impulse had prompted her cousin to decorate the place like a mausoleum. If she were to be honest, Abby also wanted to alleviate the lingering guilt she felt about Franklin’s “gift” in New York. Her plan was to be the first to tell Jane her husband had bought her the most thoughtful surprise. To keep things breezy, she would mention the show she went to and the song about the Fox sisters.

  But once Jane heard this last part she asked about nothing else. Abby replied as best she could based on her reading of the article in the Daily News.

  “Bring them here,” Jane said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Invite the sisters. I’ll write the letter, but I ask you to deliver it. I’d tend to it myself, but I would prefer the staff—the wretched newspapers too—not to know.”

  “Will you—”

  “No, I won’t tell Franklin. And neither will you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Abby said.

  “It’s not for you to understand.”

  “But if Franklin were to—”

  “You are my friend, not his.”

  Was this true? In any other place, she was certain that a dalliance with another woman’s husband—let alone Jane’s—would be so far from possible it would hardly enter her mind. But here it was different. In this house, there was space that suggested one could be released from what they normally were.

  “When will the letter be ready?” Abby asked.

  Jane came close, and Abby expected to receive a hug of gratitude, but instead her cousin leaned her face to the side of hers without touching.

  “Stay a moment,” Jane said. “I’ll write it now.”

  8

  Abby was hardly gone when Franklin called on the First Lady. She asked him about the exhibition, and he reported on some of the amazing things he’d seen—a steam-powered elevator, seamstresses who used machines instead of their hands. He also climbed up the Latting Observatory, a wooden tower that was the tallest building in New York, from which one could see all the way across the Hudson. It was the sort of news Jane usually liked hearing about, yet he had the impression that her interest was feigned.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve been up and about,” he said. “You’ve made the White House into a proper tomb.”

  “I thought it was fitting.”

  “When will you attempt returning to the world?”

  “You mean returning to you.”

  “You’re right. When will you be my wife again?”

  He’d lashed out in anger only ten seconds earlier but landed, with his final question, in a place of genuine misery. In return she offered him the look of a kindly nurse visiting a double amputee.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He almost accepted it. If he hadn’t noticed the stack of letters on her desk he would have made a step closer. Instead, he picked them up, one by one.

  “These are all addressed to Bennie,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Bennie’s gone.”

  “I believe he hears me just the same.”

  Franklin opened the envelope at the top of the pile. Began to read parts of it aloud.

  “ ‘My dearest love, I can feel you close to me. It is only a pane of glass that separates us. Come to me, my sweet boy. If you reach for me I will do the same and we will break the glass.’ ” He looked up from the page. “Where do you send these?”

  “They aren’t intended for the mail. My thinking them delivers them.”

  “This matter of the broken glass,” he said with a baffled laugh. “It sounds like you’re asking him to come back to you.”

  “When you grieve him, do you not sense that he is near?”

  “Yes. But that is—”

  “What if you could take that grief and push it further still? Extend it to where he is now so that he might grab hold of it and follow it home.”

  “Stop.”

  “He isn’t far.”

  “This—”

  “He’s right here. And if you help me reach—”

  “Stop it!”

  He didn’t shout, but she recoiled as if he had. His fury visible beneath the surface like a red leaf in a frozen lake.

  “Is that who you were talking to?” he asked.

  “When?”

  “Before I left for New York I came to the room across the hall. You were speaking with someone. It sounded like a man.”

  Jane looked at him without expression. “A man?”

  “I guessed it was you, conversing with yourself.”

  “Really.”

  “You’ve always been capable of sounding different on occasion. As if you were two people in one.”

  “That would make me a very strange bird.”

  “Good Lord, don’t you know? You are the strangest bird of all!”

  There was a moment when they both came close to laughing. If they had—if one of them had—their course might have altered.

  “There was no man in my room,” she said.

  “So it was yourself.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She appeared to consider one way of responding before choosing another. “I’m not a madwoman,” she said.

  “I’m glad of it. Tell me, then. What is going on in this place, Jane?”

  Even Franklin wasn’t clear what he meant by this place. This room, this house, this space between them.

  “I am being a good mother,” she said, so deliberately it gave her time to walk to where Franklin stood and take up the stack of yellow letters, including the one he held, and press them to her breast. “I am doing all I can.”

  “As am I.”

  “When the time comes, will you do even more?”

  He had no idea what she meant. Yet he had a sense of her implications, how they were straying off into—did it have a name? Sorcery, perhaps. Sacrilege.

  “I wish I believed in prayer. I would pray for us both.”

  “Say the words anyway,” Jane said, turning her back on him. “You might be surprised who hears them.”

  9

  Jane found the pendulum game in the bottom drawer of her father’s desk in the Bowdoin house. It was autumn of the first term of 1818. She was twelve years old.

  The clapboard mansion at the edge of campus was the only home Jane had ever known, but there were still secrets about it, unseeable things she felt peeking at her from around corners or hovering inches from the back of her neck. She couldn’t tell if these apparitions were connected to the building itself or the people who lived in it. As she aspired to be a holder of secrets herself, she wondered if the house recognized a talent in her that might be of use.

  Jane’s father, Jesse Appleton, a Congregational church minister, had been appointed the second president of Bowdoin College after being passed over for professor of divinity at Harvard. He and Jane’s mother, Elizabeth, had their daughters—Mary, Frances, and Jane—prior to moving north to Maine from New Hampshire, but both of their sons were born in the house where the college president resided. Jane was the middle child. Understudy to her outgoing, teenaged sisters. Nanny to her indulged brothers. Pretty, but not widely designated a beauty. Bright, but not exceptionally enough to overcome the barriers to scholarship that came with her sex.
When her father sermonized about purgatory Jane heard it as the dimension she dwelled in, though unlike the souls who suffered there, she appreciated its advantages. Privacy. Camouflage. A gray-skied immortality.

  Jane Appleton would be an overlookable sort of girl if not for an inner quality detectable to only a few, and even for them it was hard to say what it was. An old soul’s gravitas. The quiet that came from witnessing the unspeakable, so that one wanted to show her the small redemption of sunshine or the protection of a walled garden.

  For her part, Jane was conscious of these perceptions, and of the people who held them versus those who simply saw her as sad. But Jane didn’t think either were right. Her hidden aspect, as she saw it, was curiosity. A hunger for knowledge, transgressions that would break the minds of others but heal the fissures in her own. She assumed it to be a complex attribute, sophisticated and interesting. But there were also occasions when Jane worried that it was no different a thing from malice.

  The college president’s house was, on its surface, full of activity: the children shuttling between the rooms (all of them schooled at home through childhood) along with the social events that came with Jesse’s position, the faculty gatherings and suppers with visiting scholars. On another level, Jane experienced the house as a place of solemnity. There was a gloom that followed her up and down its stairs and along its creaking hallways. It was so constant a companion that she never experienced loneliness there, which was funny, because she was aware that the thing that pursued her was loneliness itself.

  Even at her age she knew these feelings were inherited from her father. He was given to headaches just as she was, ones that filled their skulls with colors and unbearable lights. Like her, he suffered from frequent illnesses the physician could diagnose no more specifically than “nervousness” or “fatigue.” Jane felt another commonality between them that was confirmed in silence when she met her father’s eyes. The shared vision of something bad coming their way, a calamity only they could apprehend but were helpless to stop.