The Residence Page 8

  “From drink,” she corrected.

  Franklin was so happy not to have to debate his conjugal privileges that he promptly accepted. It seemed an easy vow to honor. He liked whiskey, and imbibed it publicly with political men and clients from time to time. In private, he kept a bottle in his office to dull the longest days. But Franklin wasn’t his father. Drink was something he could walk away from if he chose.

  “Soon,” she said, offering her hand to be held.

  He didn’t know what she was referring to exactly—the start of their married lives, their bed, the arrival of children—but all of it delighted him. He took her hand. So wonderfully small in his.

  Franklin knocked his fist against the carriage’s ceiling and the coachman click-clicked the horses into motion. With her free hand, Jane waved out her window facing the road, and he did the same toward those who remained standing on the porch. It was then that he saw a strange thing.

  Next to his father stood a younger man he hadn’t noticed at the wedding. In fact, it was someone he was sure he’d never seen before in his life. Tall, straight, his skin shining as if from some internal fire that emitted gray light but mostly smoke. His suit well pressed but plain, like an undertaker before he’d had a chance to put on his vest and tie. The features of his face individually fine—the word lovely came to Franklin—but together had the appearance of a mask designed to hide some wriggling horror beneath it.

  Franklin’s hand froze. His father didn’t look his way. It may have been from too many glugs from his flask, or perhaps the bittersweetness that was visiting him upon witnessing his son’s last step into manhood, but Franklin had the distinct impression that he was ill. Lost. His decades of self-certainty bled out of him from his contact with the stranger, whose arm, Franklin saw, lay resting over the old man’s shoulders.

  A moment on and the carriage was wheeling distance between themselves and the wedding party, turning his father and the others on the porch and the roadway into porcelain miniatures. Yet he was sure of it nonetheless. Before they were around the first bend and the Amherst house was swept out of view, Franklin saw that the only one still waving at him with his swan-white hand was the stranger.

  15

  In the morning, once Franklin had left her with a kiss to her forehead, Jane returned to her room on the residence’s second floor to write a letter to Kate Fox. A request to know the girl’s interpretation of the previous night’s events.

  “My curiosity is greatest,” Jane wrote, “concerning the word you uttered in the midst of the queerness. Or was it a name? I heard it as Splitfoot.”

  Three days passed. Jane supposed she would never hear from either of the Foxes again. And then Hany brought an envelope that hadn’t come by regular mail, but was hand delivered by a boy who’d been given a dollar to do it.

  Dear Mrs. Pierce—

  I have read your letter several times. I have also thought about the night at the mansion more times still. There is so much to say, yet great difficulty on my part to find a way to say any of it. I will try. For you. But also for the good of the country, given your husband’s position and the grave possibilities that have come into it.

  We are much alike, Mrs. Pierce. I don’t know the precise nature of what we share, but I write in the anticipation that you will recognize the unwanted gifts of my life as something also bestowed upon yours.

  I will tell you a story.

  I had a secret friend as a child. This was back in Hydesville, a fine enough place but of no significance whatever. Many children have imaginary playmates—a talking dog or guardian angel who fades away as the years pass and reality finds a firmer footing in their lives. In my case, the friend never went away.

  It wasn’t a fellow child or singing pony. It was a man. His skin so white it appeared to be brushed with flour. Eyes a color that could be seen but never recollected the moment you looked away. His voice was low and dirty and made you feel low and dirty too. He said he would be the only friend I would ever need. He said he’d never leave me, and in truth, up til the other night, he never has.

  He first came to me when I was five years old. I was playing with a dead bird the cat had brought to the door. It’s a stupid thing to think of now, but I was stretching its wings out, trying to help it fly again. This was behind our house, my older sisters arguing inside, so they hadn’t yet noticed what I was doing.

  I heard something. Like somebody had whistled a note on a bent flute. I looked up and a man stepped out from behind the big oak at the back of the yard.

  “Hello, Katie,” he said. “Do you like that bird?”

  I said that I did. He said the mean kitty killed the bird and that maybe it was the mean kitty that should be dead.

  These were strange things to say to a child, but he said them so naturally it seemed honest and fine. It was later that I realized that what he was saying was exactly what I had been thinking to myself.

  I asked his name.

  “Mr. Splitfoot,” he said.

  When he didn’t join me in laughing I became frightened for the first time. He asked what was funny, and I said the name he’d given himself was the nickname for a demon. Other children had been given thrashings by their fathers just for saying it aloud.

  “It’s only a word. What harm can come from saying a thing? The truth is in what you can see. Look at me. Do I not look more like a man than a devil?”

  I told him he looked like a very nice man. What I didn’t say—what I couldn’t say, Mrs. Pierce—was that a nice man is just what a demon might try to look like if he was to visit a little girl and tell her he would never leave her. I thought to point this out but worried it would make him angry, and although he was as calm as a surgeon, I didn’t want him to be angry.

  I swear to God I knew one thing. He could do things. Awful, amazing things.

  Like that time in the backyard.

  Before he stepped behind the oak tree again, he whispered something I couldn’t hear. And when the whispering was done, the dead bird flapped its wings.

  It was alive once more! It hopped and thrashed away, bitterly tweeting. I watched it throw itself into the hedgerow. In its broken state, it would soon be food for a fox or possum or the cat.

  It was brought back just to die again, a worse death the second time. He could do that, but he couldn’t do the beautiful thing. He couldn’t make it fly.

  He came back many times over the next years. Sometimes he had something to tell me, other times it was only to watch me.

  When I was nine, Mr. Splitfoot told me what the dead were saying from the other side. The raps and knocks act came later. For that’s what it was—what it is. An act. Maggie’s invention. We both have ankles and toes that can make loud cracks with the merest adjustment, and my sister proposed we employ the talent to play tricks on our neighbors.

  Maggie was cheeky. I wanted to have fun too. But she couldn’t hear the spirits, only I could. And I heard them only when Splitfoot whispered their answers in my ear.

  It took us further than either Maggie or myself ever guessed. Theater performances, stories in the papers, meetings with people paying good money to hear us crack our toes under the table and spell out how their uncle Willy still loved them or that their momma was so proud. Sometimes I got tired of that and asked Mr. Splitfoot to join the proceedings. That was when people learned things from the dead that went beyond any trickery. The name of the child who’d died as a newborn and was buried in an unmarked grave, or the date when a lost husband first saw his wife with her knickers off.

  Trouble was, Splitfoot could be unpredictable. Sometimes he didn’t just answer the questions. Sometimes he threw plates against the wall or released odors so fierce they made people sick or growled like a beast that had leapt out of the walls.

  But it was different in the White House. It was like he was there for you, Mrs. Pierce, as much as he was there for me.

  I’m very sorry for what happened. Your lost sons. My failure to bring you into communica
tion with Bennie.

  Yet I am left hopeful in this one respect—ever since that night in your room, Splitfoot has not returned to me. I have neither seen him nor heard his voice. Perhaps I have rid myself of this hellish companion for good.

  Wishing you peace,

  Kate

  It left Jane shaking. The last paragraph more than the rest of it. What it meant for her.

  Along with the memory of her father it returned.

  * * *

  After little John’s passing, Jesse Appleton’s physical decline was a spectacle the entire college couldn’t turn its eyes from. The president’s once stiff-backed strides across the quad crumpled into arthritic shuffles within the space of months. It was like watching a walking suicide.

  When he took to his bed one afternoon for a “good sleep” he never left it again. He asked to speak with each of his children. They came to him one at a time, closing the door behind them. Jane last. As she waited her turn, she couldn’t guess if this position of being her father’s final visitor was an honor or a punishment. What if he succumbed before she had a chance to sit in the chair by the bed and say whatever needed to be said? She feared what her father might share with her more than the prospect of her failure to provide any comfort.

  Mary came out of the bedroom in tears just as all her siblings had. It made Jane resolve to be the only one who left dry-eyed when she exited. Brave Jane. It was important that her anguish be understood as greater than all others so that it could be seen as being endured with the greatest forbearance.

  Her mother squeezed Jane’s shoulder harder than necessary. Every one of her touches was harder than necessary. To Jane it seemed that her mother was always trying to wake her from a troubled dream.

  “He’s waiting,” Elizabeth said, an unmistakable alarm stretching her features. Jane took it to be her mother’s apprehension at losing her husband. But as she closed the bedroom door behind her she saw it as dread of something about Jane herself.

  “Come here.”

  Jane’s father was thin as a birch branch, but his voice arrived from a greater distance than the bed. It seemed that he was speaking from the woods that surrounded town, already drawing back into its leaves and soil.

  She sat on the hard pine chair. It was difficult to look directly at him for any length of time. She was unsettled by his appearance and lonely at the idea that she would soon be without him. What upset her most was the prospect that he was about to say something that would reshape her, put her in a condition beyond her capacities to hide or repair.

  “Are you comfortable?” she asked.

  “I’m cold. And full of sleep. Yet these are only God’s hands showing the way home.”

  She tried to imagine where her father was going. A frigid place where one felt ill and sleepy for eternity. She didn’t think it sounded welcoming at all.

  “I will miss you, Father.”

  “I will miss you too. But I will take condolence in my memory of you, as I hope you will take condolence in your thoughts of me.”

  Jesse Appleton was a kind man, if not warm, and these words were the most tender he’d ever spoken to Jane. She leaned back in the chair, and it cracked as if in amplification of the breaking inside of her.

  The bedsheet moved. A rolling mound coming up and pushing through to the air. Her father’s hand. Its fingers flexing with invitation. Jane placed her hand in his palm and the fingers closed around it.

  “It’s a paradox, isn’t it?” he said. “Especially for those like us.…”

  His voice trailed off, as if he expected Jane to finish his thought for him. But which thought? What was the paradox? Why was it one with special meaning for the two of them?

  “Our time here is so unbearably long, and yet so short there isn’t opportunity to say what we need to,” he went on. “I have been a poor father in this respect, and I’m sorry for that. But here we are. Our last words. And you are my only child whom I wish to hear those words from, instead of you to hear them from me.”

  He stared at her from the sweat-soaked pit of his pillow with a look of expectation she thought must be a misreading, a side effect of his pain.

  “My only words are that I love you, Daddy.”

  “Yes. Yes,” he said, blinking. “What else is there you need to tell me, my daughter? We aren’t members of the Roman faith, but think of this room as a confessional. A chance for forgiveness, and also for counsel. For both of us, I hope.”

  “Is there something you wish me to speak about?”

  His hand tightened on hers.

  “Please don’t lie to me,” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Don’t call me what you already call another!”

  He knew. Sir. She heard him say it without him saying it.

  He knew she was the one to take the pendulum game from his desk, that she played with it the way he had also done himself, that someone had come to her, claimed a small but essential part of her as it had claimed him. She understood exactly. They both did.

  “I don’t understand, Daddy,” she said.

  His face softened. This time it wasn’t another increment in the gradual disappearing act of his passing but a show of sympathy. She was aware that her father loved her. But in this instant she grasped how much he did, how unique this love was for her and only her.

  “I’m worried for you, Jane. Desperately so,” he said, and eased his grasp of her hand without letting it go. “I know a little of what you know. About the—otherness. But there are only the two of us who share this knowledge. We’re curious kitties, aren’t we? Devoted to God but also devoted to knowing what he keeps from us.”

  Her father was speaking to her in the way of a sermon. Indirectly, seriously. In church, this kind of communication bored her. But now she not only comprehended what was being said, she was also riveted by it.

  “Who did you lose, father?”

  He winced. It was as if her question was the poke of a needle to his back.

  “I tried to bring back someone who’d passed on a long time ago,” he answered. “Someone who hurt me when I was a boy.”

  “So you could hurt them back.”

  “No. That wouldn’t be possible. There was never anything I could have done or said that would have left a mark even when they were alive. Nothing they could ever feel.”

  He shook his head, and she wished he wouldn’t because it showed the bulging tendons in his neck, the fluttering pulse against the inside of his skin.

  “Why did you want the person back?” she said.

  “I wanted to ask them why.”

  “Why they hurt you.”

  “Why he chose me.”

  Jane heard the shift from they to he, but she already knew it was a man her father was speaking of. She was of an age of intuiting that only men hurt in the way her father was suggesting, even if she didn’t know the precise nature of the offense.

  “Did you?” she said. “Did you get the chance?”

  “Someone came back, yes. But it wasn’t the person who hurt me. It was…”

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “Can I get you any—”

  His eyes opened. His hand tight again. Pulling her closer as he spoke, inch by inch, so that there was no way for her to breathe without inhaling the mildewed onion scent of his skin.

  “We are made of our losses, Jane. Sorrow is God’s will. To look for ways around it is to open a pathway for the devil. It is unholy not to suffer as we are meant to suffer. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, but wasn’t at all sure that she did.

  Her father let go of her hand and she brought it to her side quicker than she meant to. He seemed not to notice. There was more activity under the sheets, more waves moving upward, and Jane worried that more hands were about to appear, some belonging to him and others not. He was propping himself up on his elbows so he
could rest higher on the pillows stacked against the headboard. It took some time. She didn’t offer to help him. When he was done, she could see all of him from the ribs up. A whiteness made whiter by the interruption of nipples and moles and hairs.

  “The Bible is a book of teachings. But it’s also a history. Not parables, not children’s tales. Real occurrences. Most of us, even the devout, don’t see the other world that lies”—he slapped his palms together—“atop our world. But some of us remain open. You are one, aren’t you? You’ve seen the unseen?”

  She didn’t want to reply but felt her head nodding the affirmative.

  “Now here is what you must remember. Just because you can see a way from this world to another doesn’t mean you should travel the course between them. It is the serpent’s temptation as often as it is a vision of the spirit. And we have no way of knowing which. Do you hear?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Will you promise me?”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise me that if a passage opens you know to—”

  The door opened.

  Jane swung around to see her mother entering, cheeks flushed. She’d been listening through the wood, or trying to. Even if she hadn’t comprehended most of the phrases, she’d heard enough.

  “Your father is tired,” she said.

  Jane went to the door without looking back at him, not even when he whispered promise once more. She didn’t want the way he looked to be the way she remembered him. More than this, she didn’t want to stop so that she’d be forced to deny his plea for her word.

  * * *

  Once she was able to still her hands Jane folded Kate Fox’s letter twice, dropped it in her wash basin, and touched a lit match to its corner. The flame rose. Its orange tongue lengthening, bending, like the outstretched arm of a lover reaching to touch her face.

  She took a step back and watched the flame chew through what was left of the paper’s white.

  16

  Bennie’s birth was the only one Franklin was present for. The first bubbled cry. The body in his hands. The cord attaching the child to Jane in a way he would never equal.