The Residence Read online

  Discovering what interested Jane Appleton fueled Franklin’s curiosity. He found himself thinking about her more than most of the young women he encountered, replaying their first meeting over and over and wondering what it was that had made her show that glint of mischief.

  Now that, sir, is flattery.

  He was able to speak at greater length of his accomplishments after his election to the New Hampshire state congress. He returned for four consecutive years, the last two as Speaker. All this well prior to his thirtieth birthday.

  Jane was small. Every part of her miniaturized, so that one only noticed her size in comparison to something else. Her eyes were dark, hair parted in the middle and drawn over her ears. A fine nose, animated by flares and twitches, each breath an inquiry. People called her lovely, and she was, but in a way that inspired sympathy as much as desire.

  Franklin’s attraction to Jane felt to him less of a compulsion than finding himself caught in a spider’s web, its threads sticky, inescapable. There was her place as one of the Appleton girls. There was the Amherst house with its respectability and order. There was the way he wished to repair her as if a miraculous, delicate construction, her thousand tiny screws insufficiently tightened. There was her mother’s discouragements, which made Jane a jewel in his mind where she might otherwise have been only another pearl from a good family.

  He told himself he was freely considering all these factors even as the web tightened around him. And so, when Franklin was finally bound, he decided on her.

  It was only when history was watching them, during the time they lived in the mansion, that he wondered if it had been she who had decided on him.

  When he recollected how they fell in love and calculated the costs, years on, he always thought of the day they sat on the banks of Caesar’s Brook. It was Jane’s idea to walk as far as they did, a mile past the cemetery’s stone wall after a Sunday service in August. She suggested they rest before returning to town, and he chose a patch of clover in the shade of a plum tree for them to sit.

  She kissed him in the middle of his guessing aloud about the chances of rain by suppertime. In return he held her so close she slid onto his lap.

  “I’m like a bird in your hands,” she said.

  “Would you fly away if I let you go?”

  “I might. But ride on me and you would rise too.”

  She leaned into him, the warmth of her words blooming over his scalp. His hands lay over her back, and he felt the disks of her spine, the liquid shifts of bone. Her body, slight as it was, aroused him. It came to him with a shiver: She would be more than a wife if he chose her. She would be a conjurer.

  Jane was aroused and frightened too. In fact, her experience of both—the way their power flared when combined—was more acute than his.

  “Do you feel it?” she asked him.

  “What?”

  “Where we could go together.”

  He did feel it. Where we could go. She was speaking of their bodies and the pleasures they could take in them. She was speaking of marital adventure—babies and prosperity and the satisfaction of God’s plan. But she was also hinting at something bigger. Hidden forces they could discover only in each other’s company. Did all lovers think this? Likely so, Franklin considered. But those others were wrong. He and Jane could make something in their union that was more than romance or family or a good name. They could transfigure into a whole new being, mesmerizing and terrible as the unknown approaching from out of the fog.

  “It would be like nothing else, wouldn’t it?” he said.

  “I think not.”

  “The question is, are we brave enough?”

  “Bravery? I’m not sure that’s what’s called for.”

  “What is?”

  “Passion.”

  “A yielding.”

  “Yes. Submission. Total and irreversible.”

  She was laughing, low and smoky. A nervous distraction from the precipice they’d come to. A height so great that if they took one step more they’d find they could either fly as gods or fall the same as any fools who’d gone too far.

  12

  Jane told the residence staff she was expecting guests. The president was not to be informed of the visit. Perhaps because they had so rarely been addressed by the First Lady directly, each of the sentries, service girls, and groomsmen she spoke to had accepted her terms without question, if only to escape her gaze as soon as permissible.

  Franklin was out. A dinner that Abby was attending as substitute. Jane asked her to keep Franklin there as long as possible, which, if precedent held, meant ten o’clock at the latest. She asked the Fox sisters to come to the servants’ entry at the east side of the ground floor at eight. It was a quarter past now. Jane regretted setting the time so late. Seven would have been better. Or six. If these two girls were going to bring her together with Bennie she wanted all the time she could have.

  From what Jane had learned subsequent to Abby’s initial reports was that Kate Fox was the quiet one, the younger at sixteen, and possessed with the most acute abilities. Maggie was three years older and had a reputation as a beauty among the husbands whose wives called upon their services, which is one of the reasons they were so often run out of town. Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, Cincinnati. In one place after another the Foxes would set up shop in a fancy hotel and do sessions by the hour. They were young, unmarried women living on the proceeds of witchcraft. It made them the objects of fascination and scorn in equal measure.

  As instructed, it was Jane’s dresser—a woman named Hany who plainly disapproved of what was going on but whom Jane regarded as trustworthy—who brought the Fox sisters to her door.

  “Thank you, Hany,” Jane said.

  Hany was stout in the legs, lithe in the arms, black, and wore wire spectacles so tight they pinched the flesh at her cheeks and temples. She was not excessively warm or conversational, but Jane found her a comfort in their encounters. There was a patience in Hany—an understanding extended to her own imperfections, to Jane’s—that was communicated through small shakes of the head or a chit sound she made between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

  “You may leave us,” Jane said, and Hany pulled the door closed with a grimace.

  When it was just the three of them Jane saw how young the girls appeared for their ages. Kate especially. There was something wounded about her, as if she’d spent the last hour being shouted at. It didn’t seem to Jane that the older sister, Maggie, would be the one to do the shouting. She looked to be hardly aware of her sister, let alone angry at her. The elder girl observed Jane with undisguised frankness. Jane tried to believe it was part of Maggie’s professional approach to measure people in this way, so that she and her sister could customize their methodology to each client. Yet it left Jane with the distinct impression that she was only gauging how much she could get away with.

  “The White House,” Maggie said, and sucked at her teeth. She heard the sound it made and straightened herself in exaggerated humility.

  “Welcome.”

  “We’ve been reading up since we got your letter. Our condolences.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I must confess I never thought we’d find ourselves in this place,” Maggie said, a strained formality to her speech as if acting the part of a cultured lady and, in doing so, mocking cultured ladies. Mocking Jane.

  “Your accomplishments have been widely celebrated,” Jane said. “I suppose there are many who would wish an audience with those who have left this life too soon.”

  “Oh, you can be sure of that, Mrs. Pierce.”

  “Well then. I don’t want to hold you here any longer than you need to be. Is there a way we ought to seat ourselves?”

  Maggie looked at the three chairs set around the table in the middle of the room as if for the first time. “Mr. Pierce won’t be joining us?”

  “No.”

  “That’s unfortunate. I’m sure he has some interesting spirit friends.”

&n
bsp; “The hour is getting rather late. Would you mind if we—”

  “Please, we mustn’t rush things,” the girl interrupted, winking. “This isn’t like getting your future on a scroll at the penny arcade.”

  “Of course.”

  Maggie walked around the room, inspecting perfume bottles and powders on the bureau top and pouring herself a glass of ice water from the crystal pitcher next to the bed.

  “Is there someone in particular you wish to contact this evening, Mrs. Pierce?” she asked once she’d returned to stand next to the table.

  “My son.”

  “Bennie.”

  “His name was in the papers you were reading?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I didn’t know a child’s death is worthy material for public gossip.”

  “With respect,” Maggie said disrespectfully, “it’s not just any child’s death when the father is the president.”

  It had taken Jane more time than it should have, but she saw now that Maggie was drunk. She held her liquor well, which was part of why it eluded immediate detection. She also had a way of adapting her inebriation into an attitude, one that vacillated between amused and bored, so that one found oneself tempted to try to hold her attention by saying or doing something outrageous or aggressive.

  While Jane could see how such a charm could work on others, she was immune to it. She wasn’t offended that a woman of Maggie’s age had chosen to present herself aglow with liquor at the presidential mansion. It was the lack of seriousness she brought to her extraordinary vocation. If Jane could do what it was said Maggie Fox could do, she would devote herself to refining her powers, not dulling them with gin. It angered Jane to think of such squandering—she could speak with Bennie now, herself !—so she tried not to. Yet within minutes of Maggie stepping into her room she found herself seething with jealousy. This cheek-painted, smirking harlot? She had the power to communicate with her Bennie, her poor father too, with all who had passed and left the ones who loved them cratered by loss? It filled Jane with an urge to slap the child’s cheeks redder still.

  “I’d like to begin now,” Jane said.

  She sat in one of the chairs at the table and smoothed the lace over its top. Maggie seemed to consider making another provocation, but whether she couldn’t think of one or she considered the risk of losing their double-the-usual fee, she held her tongue and took her seat. A moment later Kate did the same.

  “It’s done through rappings and knocks,” Maggie said, launching into what was her standard explanation of the procedure. “We’ll ask the spirit a question, and they will answer by choosing letters of the alphabet according to the number of raps. One is a, two is b, and so on. A pause between means a new letter. Are you ready, Mrs. Pierce?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what is your question?”

  Jane had been speaking with Bennie in her mind, writing letters to him, dreaming of him for so long that now that she had the chance to address him directly she didn’t know what she wanted to know first. Was he in pain? Would he wait for her so they could be together when her time came? Did he know that she loved him, would always love him?

  All these queries and others jostled to be front of her mind. But there was one piece of knowledge she dreaded the answer to, yet was most desperate to know.

  “Bennie?” she said. “Can you see me?”

  The sounds came right away.

  … pop, pop, pop, pop…

  Hollow raps in a steady sequence that none of them counted aloud, but Kate silently mouthed the number to herself. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. A pause.

  “Y,” Maggie announced. Then the raps started again.

  It was so plainly one or both of them cracking a joint in their legs—an ankle or knee under the table and therefore undetectable—that at first Jane almost laughed. Pop, pop, pop, pop. Her piano teacher at Catherine Fiske’s Boarding School for Girls made a bigger noise bending back her fingers to “open the knuckles” before attempting Bach’s French Suites. It was astonishing that anyone seated farther back than the fifth row in the theaters these two had performed this trickery in could detect any sound at all.

  “An e,” Maggie said, feigning excitement.

  Jane listened to the raps start up again as if from a great distance, her disappointment pulling her out of her body, out of the room.

  “And a s. That’s yes! Mrs. Pierce, I believe your child is present with us!”

  I believe you’re a vulgar charlatan, Jane wanted to say but didn’t.

  This was now an occasion, like so many in her life, that she had to make it to the other side of. Throwing these children out after being scolded by the First Lady wouldn’t do any good, and might end up insulting them enough to report the episode to the press. Despite their assurances that this session was to be kept confidential, and the extra money paid to ensure it, Jane had little doubt that Maggie Fox was the sort who would break a promise if she felt she’d been crossed.

  “Remarkable,” Jane said.

  Kate, who’d been silent to this point outside of their initial introductions, sat forward in her chair and regarded her with open pity. She saw that Jane wasn’t fooled. She also saw how this disillusionment hurt her more than the waste of an hour and a hundred dollars.

  “Sometimes it helps if we join hands,” Kate said.

  Maggie shot her sister a look. It was hard to be sure, but Jane interpreted it as a warning. As if Kate was venturing somewhere that had proven dangerous. As if the girl was proposing to make the game real.

  “Like this?” Jane asked, picking up Kate’s hand in hers before Maggie had a chance of preventing her.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Maggie? You too.”

  Maggie wrinkled her nose. Jane read it as an attempt to appear indifferent to what was happening now, but it didn’t entirely mask something else that changed in the elder sister’s expression. A stiffening of her back, the formerly slouched shoulders now high as if she’d been told to sit properly by a teacher. But it wasn’t a response to authority. It was a response to fear.

  “Hands,” Kate said.

  Maggie took Jane’s and Kate’s free hands in hers.

  “Mrs. Pierce?”

  “Yes?”

  “Forgive me, but I’m going to ask you to do something that may be a trial.”

  “Ask it.”

  “Think of Benjamin.”

  “That’s not a trial. I think of—”

  “Don’t remember him. Bring him.”

  “How?”

  “See him.”

  “I always see him!”

  “Not from the past. Here. Now.”

  She felt foolish playing along with such an obvious ruse, but Jane found it hard to deny the younger Fox girl. Partly because she was a child. Partly because there was something more convincing—some buried intensity even the girl herself was uncertain how to contain—that made Jane curious to see what might be revealed if she went all the way to the edge.

  She focused. Brought up Bennie’s face, let her mind conjure the tiny wrinkles and dimples of him as a newborn. And then those same markings as they deepened or shrank over time. A microscopic scan of her son’s face.

  “I see him.”

  “Now bring him to us,” Kate said.

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Ask him. Pull him. Order him.”

  “How do—”

  “Make him.”

  Jane exhaled for so long that, when she breathed in, it was like she had broken the surface of a lake after nearly drowning.

  “Come to me, Bennie,” she said.

  “Clear as light so he can follow it to you.”

  “Come to me!”

  “Good. Now open yourself to the other side.”

  As vague a command this was, Jane knew exactly what the girl was asking. She had been waiting to be given permission to let herself try since her children’s passing. And before that too. In some way Jane had been waiting to yield herse
lf to the realm of death all her life. If Franklin’s fate was the shouldering of power, hers was this: to be a bridge between the underworld and the living world she only half-inhabited ever since she took her father’s pendulum game from his desk drawer.

  “Please, my sweet boy!” she cried. “I am here!”

  “You are the door. Open it.”

  “Come to your mother, Bennie!”

  “Open the door inside of you,” Kate said, her voice rising. “Open it wide to your lost child. To all who wish to enter!”

  “Bennie!”

  “Open it now!”

  Jane pulled her hands away from Maggie’s and Kate’s to swing her arms out to her sides. It expanded her. As if the smallness of her body had sprouted new appendages, a metamorphosis from woman to spider. When she spoke her voice was altered. Even Jane heard it, and would have screamed if she wasn’t so far away, so open.

  It was Sir’s voice.

  Come… through…

  The temperature dropped with the abruptness of stepping into the ocean. It wasn’t a mere sensation either. Jane exhaled, shuddering, and her breath reached out to Maggie and Kate in gray billows.

  “He’s here,” Jane said.

  There was a shape advancing from out of the shadows in the corner of the room. Clear, material, unmistakable. She was used to seeing things that others didn’t, so when she looked to Kate and Maggie she expected the blank, trancelike expressions they wore as part of their theatrics. But they saw it too. Maggie’s mouth hanging open so wide her spittle made the inside of her lower lip shine. Kate’s neck stretched so long it was as if she was about to float up from her chair.

  What Jane also noted was the sisters’ differences of expression. Maggie’s was astonishment. Kate’s was recognition.