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 debating 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.