The Residence Read online

  Neither Franklin nor Jane declared a favorite child, but the truth they were equally aware of was that they loved Bennie most. Franky was cheeky, ravenous, and loud. But comparison with Bennie put him on the losing side in every instance. Where Franky complained, Bennie endured. Franky blew his nose on his shirt and Bennie reached for the handkerchief his father had given him.

  Both boys contracted typhus within the same week. Jane took Bennie north to care for him at her sister’s house. She wasn’t able to look after two ill children, and the choice of which she would focus her energies on was a matter of choosing the younger between the two. This is what they said aloud. But it was known to all that a preference was being expressed.

  Franklin hoped that in his delirium Franky wouldn’t notice, but in the way his eyes slid shut whenever it was his father who entered his room and not his mother showed the boy knew where he stood.

  Franklin sat next to the bed. There was nothing to be done but he still wondered what he could do. A paradox that invited prayer.

  He cast his thoughts heavenward with little hope of them being received. Because of this, he decided to be honest in what he put before an unlikely God. He prayed for Franky’s recovery but added a clause. He asked that if one of his children must be taken, let it be the one in the bed before him and not the other miles away. It was a hideous thing to think, and he regretted it instantly. Still, it lingered in the room, in silent verification that he had thought it.

  At first he assumed it was his guilt taking shape outside of himself. But it came not just from outside of him, but the house, the world.

  There was something there. Not a person he hadn’t noticed before. Nothing he could see. A presence that occupied a space at the end of the bed, dense with ill will.

  Franklin couldn’t say what it was. He could only be sure of what it wasn’t.

  Not a ghost. Not a shard of his imagination.

  He was certain of the second of these because Franky sensed it too. The boy squinting at the same emptiness as his father and sliding his head up the pillow to get away from it.

  “I’m sorry,” Franklin said.

  The boy looked at him. Franklin saw that he knew. He knew. That he was on the borderland between dying and living and it was even odds which side he’d be on at the end of the hour. That his mother wasn’t there, because she loved his brother more. That his father was as afraid as he was.

  Franklin’s talents were limited to providing the child with assurances. It will be all right. The fever will soon break. There is hope if you hold to it. He rehearsed these lines in his head but knew he couldn’t speak them without his voice cracking.

  “I’ll get some fresh water,” he said, and stepped out into the hallway.

  He stood there fighting for breath almost as loudly as Franky was. Courage, he told himself aloud. It came out sounding like a question.

  Drr-eeee-tip. Drr-eeee—

  It was the oddest thing. A weight on the floorboards moving in the boy’s room. But there was no one there except the bedridden child.

  “Papa?” Franky said, the voice clarified by terror.

  Franklin spun around in time to see the bedroom door move. The boy saw it too.

  The door slammed shut.

  “Franky!”

  The doorknob wouldn’t turn. He noticed that first. And then he noticed how cold it was, his skin sticking to the brass.

  Drr-eeee-tip. Drr-eeee-tip. Drr-eeee—

  The movement inside the room heading away from the door, toward the bed. He could hear Franky’s breathing tighten into squeaks. The heels of the boy’s feet thudding the mattress as he struggled.

  Franklin shouldered the door. There was a dull bump each time he did, but no give, no cracking. He might bring it down if he kept at it another twenty years.

  “Son!”

  He pressed his back to the hallway’s far wall, held his arms out straight—

  The door pulled open.

  It took a moment for the room to be wholly revealed. Once it was, it took another moment to understand what was there.

  Franky lay faceup in the bed, his eyes to the side, trying to find his father and, once they had, holding on him.

  A man stood over the boy on the opposite side of the bed. His eyes were fixed on Franklin too.

  Franklin went for him at the same time he recognized who it was. The tall stranger he’d spotted from the carriage window at his wedding. The one with his arm over his father’s shoulder, drawing the life from him.

  It was perhaps a half-dozen feet between the doorway and the bed, a distance covered in an instant. Yet it was time enough to watch the man sink into the floor. The stranger lowering with the speed of a man who’d broken through the ice of a frozen lake.

  Franklin fell to his knees and laid his body protectively over his son’s. Franky was still alive—Franklin could hear his heart popping in his chest, wavering, as if unsure whether to make the next beat its last.

  “You’re safe now,” Franklin whispered. “I won’t leave you alone.”

  Franky appeared to shape his mouth around a word. Something intended for his father, whether gratitude or grievance or farewell it couldn’t be known, though Franklin had the idea it might have been a warning. And then the child’s breathing stilled in his throat, and it was Franklin who was alone.

  17

  Nathaniel Hawthorne was the first guest to stay at the White House during Pierce’s tenure. The author, Franklin’s best friend at Bowdoin, was to come for a week, maybe longer if he felt like it. It was a show of gratitude on the president’s part for Nate having written a glowing biography of the candidate in the run-up to the election. It also came from Franklin’s need to have a friend to talk to instead of a general or senator or Jane, who was hardly speaking to him anyway, and when she did it was in her unsettling riddles about a damned path they couldn’t stray from.

  “Would you do me the honor of signing my books, Mr. Hawthorne?” Franklin teased as he wielded a stack of leather-bound novels in front of the author’s face the moment he stepped through the front door.

  “Is this all of them, Frank? I would’ve thought a busy solicitor and congressman—the president now!—was denied the time to read modern literature.”

  “Did I say I read them?”

  While the purpose of fiction had defeated Franklin in college, he had sampled some of Hawthorne’s writing. The most fantastical of the early tales had appealed to him, but it was The House of Seven Gables, published just two years earlier, that halted any further attempts at his friend’s work. The idea of a secret-riddled family and a haunted mansion whose wood and stone remembered the sins of its inhabitants troubled him to a degree he was obliged to turn his back on.

  “I will sign all that our leader puts before me,” Hawthorne said, “but not before a kiss upon the First Lady’s cheek!”

  Jane allowed it. She nodded at the author’s condolences, and wished him a pleasant stay before retreating upstairs once more. The truth, known to the three of them, was that she wasn’t pleased with Nate staying in the house, given his role in eliciting Franklin’s name for the convention ballot. Yet she insisted it wasn’t her grievances about that, only the return of one of her “color headaches,” that prevented her from joining the two of them for dinner on the first night.

  After they’d dined, Hawthorne and Franklin stayed up late drinking whiskey in the Crimson Parlor, confident that Jane wouldn’t venture downstairs to find them. They spoke little of politics, Franklin asking after Hawthorne’s children; his wife, Sophia; his literary triumphs; and the state of works-in-progress. When Nate attempted similar inquiries after Jane, Franklin waved them away.

  “For this evening, let’s pretend this is the old tavern in Brunswick, not the president’s house.”

  “Not a difficult request,” Nate said, filling his glass from the crystal decanter. “I am, as is often stated, a master of the imagination.”

  Franklin and Nate had met in the Bowdoin deb
ating club. Even at only seventeen, the latter introduced himself as “Nate Hawthorne, author.” Before he became the most renowned American novelist of his generation, Hawthorne was Pierce’s tutor. Each was the other’s first best friend. Franklin was about to comment on their remarkable ascendancy when Nate spoke. “I knew this would be your place one day,” he announced, finding himself, then Franklin in the Tiffany mirror over the fireplace. “You’ve always been a man other men will follow.”

  “But you can see through that bluff,” Franklin laughed, sensing a joke at his expense.

  “Me? I’ve been following you from the start.”

  Franklin lowered his glass. He inspected his companion’s face and found something unreadable there, a blend of teasing and affection and weight.

  “Why?”

  “Other men are bound to forge their ways,” Hawthorne answered, taking his time, as if lines he’d written in one of his stories. “But you are bound to have great things happen to you.”

  “To me?”

  “Like a flame. And consequence is the moth.”

  Hawthorne loved him—loved in the awestruck way of an awkward younger brother for his elder—but now Franklin recognized the selflessness in his friend’s feelings. Nate had a high regard for his own capacities, to say the least. But when it came to Franklin there was no competition, only the ceding of the stage to his perceived better.

  “You’re drunk,” Franklin said.

  “Not yet. Not completely. But perhaps another glass and we can speak of true things.”

  Franklin knew what he meant. The puzzle of marriage. Lonesomeness. Fear. True things. It had been so long that he’d been in the company of a friend, free from the surveillance of politics, that he almost doubled over with relief.

  “I am heartbroken,” the president said.

  “At Jane’s condition.”

  “Of course. But I was speaking of myself.”

  “You are grieving, Frank. What happened to poor Bennie—”

  “Not only him. I’m grieving for the family I lost.”

  “Yet you are still here.”

  “Jane and I are still walking and talking, it’s true. We appear to be living. But what we were together has been stolen from us. It’s as if the death of our sons has left us dead too.”

  There was the sound of choked weeping, and Franklin assumed it was coming from himself. Then he raised his eyes and saw it was Hawthorne, his face oily.

  “More whiskey?” Franklin offered, already reaching for the decanter.

  “Has it ever been wrong to say yes to that?” Nate answered, his empty glass raised high.

  Later, the two of them stumbling and leaning into each other in a frail balance, Franklin put Nate in the guest room down the hall from his, right next to Jane’s. Before parting, Franklin pointed to the light coming from under her door, and the two of them broke into giggles, as if they were college pranksters sneaking back into their dormitory with the dean still awake.

  * * *

  In the morning, Franklin awaited Nate at the breakfast table in the state dining room. He thought it would be amusing for the two of them to eat their oatmeal in the grand chamber beneath the glinting chandelier. But when Hawthorne entered and took his seat Franklin could see his friend had lost the humor of the night before.

  “The whiskey was good, though perhaps we swam too deep in it,” Franklin said in sympathy.

  “I slept poorly, it’s true.”

  “Oh? There was a disturbance?”

  “Yes.” Hawthorne poured himself coffee from the silver pot but didn’t drink it. “A remarkable disturbance.”

  Franklin saw his friend’s upset through the lines of his face that had been deepened overnight. Penciled striations etched in his forehead and temples as if from the effort of holding his eyes tightly shut for hours.

  “This sounds like the sort of thing one of your narrators would say before embarking on a wondrous tale,” Franklin said.

  “There’s not the form for a tale. It was an occurrence.”

  “What sort?”

  “A noise.”

  “Ah. So a yelp? A whinny? A cry of—”

  “A child’s voice. Coming from the bedroom in the northwest corner.”

  Franklin placed his cup down so hard he was surprised the saucer didn’t crack.

  “There are no children here,” he said.

  “That’s why I rose and went to the door where the sound was coming from. When I entered—” He caught himself from speaking something he was not prepared to say aloud.

  “The furnishings,” he went on finally, choosing a different course. “They were Benjamin’s, weren’t they?”

  “Jane brought them here.”

  “I’m not certain that’s all she brought.”

  At this, Franklin suspected a joke. The hangover, the buried rivalry between Nate and Jane, the setup of breakfast in the mansion’s finest dining room. It must be a continuation of last night’s teasing. Because if he was describing an actual “occurrence,” it wasn’t Nate’s way to talk around a thing, even if he sometimes brought an excess of poetry to the point. So the president waited for his friend’s piqued expression to melt into laughter. But Hawthorne’s unease only doubled as he struggled to bring his mind to where it didn’t want to go.

  “There was no child in the room,” Nate said. “But it wasn’t unoccupied.”

  “Who was there? The staff have been forbidden to enter. I will take it up with Webster.”

  “There was no person, Frank. Yet there—”

  He stopped. Sipped from his cup. Winced as he swallowed.

  “It’s not my place to tell you what to do,” Hawthorne continued. “But I wouldn’t enter that room. Never. I certainly wish I hadn’t.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re jabbering like one of the bloody witches in the Scottish play!”

  Franklin was hoping this would, at last, pull a laugh out of Hawthorne. But the author remained severe, his pallor bleached.

  “I’ve forged my vocation on the translation of experience into words,” he said. “But there are no words for what I experienced last night. Or if there are, I choose not to speak them. I’m sorry.”

  This was absurd. Franklin tried to convince himself of it. He was mostly successful, as he was now concerned for his friend’s state of mind, given he was saying such nonsense as this. He sounded like Jane. And yet a part of Franklin thought he understood him, believed him. Just as part of him understood and believed Jane.

  “I’m sorry too,” Franklin said, shaking his head. “I realize this is a strange old house. And I feel even stranger for having to live in it.”

  “You are committed to these walls,” Nate said, rising from the table. “But I’m not. I won’t stay here another night.”

  Franklin was astonished. Hawthorne was serious. More than serious—he was leaving. Running away.

  “Dear Nate, don’t go. We drank too much last night, and you slept poorly. Dreamed poorly. But we’re not children.”

  “No, we’re not,” Hawthorne said, and took another step away from the table. “We’re fathers. Which is why I must go.”

  “You miss your little ones so much after only one night?”

  “I cannot explain this to you. But it’s not just that I miss them. I feel that I must be near them. Protect them.”

  As you failed to do for yours. Franklin heard this, even if it went unsaid.

  Hawthorne started for the door. At the sight of his retreat, Franklin felt at once a powerful sadness and stirring temper.

  “You came here at my invitation!” the president shouted. “To leave like this—you couldn’t blame a man for taking offense.”

  “I don’t blame you for it,” Nate said, looking back at him.

  “Then make it right.” As abruptly as it arrived, the anger in Franklin drained away, leaving only a gutted desolation. “Stay on, my friend.”

  Hawthorne didn’t move. Even this plea wouldn’t draw him back, though th
e regret of it knotted his brow and shrunk his frame.

  “There’s no way I will risk another hour here. I apologize for that,” he said. “Not for the impoliteness of it, which I know you will forgive, but for my cowardice.”

  “Will you not speak directly of what you saw?”

  “I won’t. For my sake, for yours. For Jane’s.”

  “And what of Jane? Why do you speak of her?” Franklin said, his voice rising again. “Your condescension toward me is one thing, but to direct it at my wife is another. Once Jane is well, I will be sure to bring this up with—”

  “Jane is no longer of this world! I’m not sure she ever was!”

  Franklin lurched in his chair as if he’d been punched. Nate had insulted his wife. No matter how troubled their union since coming to the mansion—no matter how right Hawthorne might be—he would not stand for anyone to hurt her.

  “I believe you were right,” Franklin said, standing himself, fists clenched. “You must go. And I ask you to do it now.”

  Hawthorne left the room and was gone from the premises before Franklin could find him to take back the threat in his tone, if not the words themselves. For the rest of that day the president hoped, after some conciliatory correspondence, his friend would return and stay longer his next visit. But the first letter came from Hawthorne. While it made clear his fondness for Pierce, it made clearer his intention to never set foot in the presidential mansion again.

  Despite Franklin’s repeated invitations, he never did.

  * * *

  Within the fortnight, Pierce awarded Nathaniel Hawthorne a choice post: United States consul in Liverpool.

  “He will like it there,” Jane remarked, not unkindly, when Franklin told her.

  “I hope that he will.”

  “Yet I fear he will never write anything of consequence after this.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  Jane blinked at him, her eyelids thick and slow.

  “He told you, didn’t he? The night he stayed?” she said. “He had a disagreeable encounter.”