She had to get up. It was good luck alone that had prevented anyone from seeing her crawling out of what was known to be an empty room. She was aware that it was one thing to indulge herself inside it, on her own, but quite another if she was observed acting this way in front of staff, no matter how they’d pledged their discretion to her, no matter how they wished to avoid her altogether.
But she had to check. She had to.
Before she got up, she lay flat on the floor. Put her cheek to the frigid boards. Looked under the door.
He hadn’t made a sound because he hadn’t moved. The bare feet so close she could make out their odd lack of details. Veinless, the nails rounded as if filed, the rest unmarked by blue as the cold would’ve stained skin exposed to the chill as long as his had been.
She rolled away. Scrambled to her room. Locked herself inside.
Once she was there she stood at the threshold the same as Bennie stood at his. Feeling for any trace of a vibration from him. Her prayers that he remain where he was equal to those asking him to come out, come to her, be hers.
19
In the morning Jane mounted an assault against the day. She washed. Dressed. Tied her hair in the twin tails that was her custom before she came to the White House and gave up on tying it at all. Then she went down the main stairs and joined her husband in the private dining room.
At the sight of her, Franklin laid his spoon down in his bowl and rose so abruptly his legs slammed the table’s edge.
“Careful,” she said, “you’ll hurt your sore knee.”
“I can’t feel a thing.”
“It’s the shock of seeing me.”
“Not shock. Relief.”
Jane felt it too. The thought that she could reenter her life, partial and marred as it was, by the application of powders and perfume and ribbons, was thrilling to her. She knew better though. There was the boy in the room upstairs. There was Sir. There was what she’d come down here to say.
She sat next to Franklin at the broad table and shook her head when a steward entered. When they were alone again, his hand strayed toward her. She took it. The memory of his strong fingers and thick palms on her body came simultaneously with the recognition of having missed several meals in a row.
“This is an unhappy place,” she said.
“Is it the place or us?”
“We’re unhappy too. There’s something here with us though, making it worse.”
Franklin nodded. “Tell me.”
“It hasn’t a name. The closest I could come would be to call it a thwarting from goodwill. Forces that constrain us, tell us we have roles now.”
As was often necessary in speaking with Jane, he gave up on thinking through her words and swam with them instead, finding meaning through the quality of their temperature and touch. He wondered if this was the way it was between other husbands and wives.
“Like actors in a play,” he said.
“But in the play, despite the palace we live in and its thrones for king and queen, we are powerless.”
“And you’ve come to tell me you’d like out of the performance.”
“No. I couldn’t leave even if you allowed it. But I wanted to see if we could try to be who we were. If we could resist.”
She looked at her husband and caught a flash of it: the way they once knew each other. A foundation of decency they reinforced together. The concession that while she would never totally know this man, she knew enough. Back then, when she encountered the rare reports of murder in the gossip of Amherst or Concord, she wondered the same thing: Was the killer’s wife surprised? Did she know a shard of malevolence existed in her husband but had pushed it aside until the day he thrust the blade through the overbilling blacksmith or bickering neighbor or disloyal child and she saw that she’d been uselessly correct? Even in the thrall of courtship Jane was aware that Franklin wasn’t guided by principle alone. What man was? The important thing was his goodness. A muddied form of it, to be sure, but one free of meanness or cynical calculation. He was uncomfortable when he lied, soothed when he confessed. His crimes were the fruits of passivity, not action.
“Be who we were,” Franklin said, as if recalling the same time himself. “How would that be done?”
“By reaching beyond these walls. Doing the Christian thing.”
“You’re speaking of something in particular.”
“Anthony Burns,” she said.
All the newspapers were bursting with the name. Burns was a twenty-year-old man who escaped his slave-owners and made his way to Massachusetts, a free state. He’d recently been arrested in Boston and ordered to be returned to Virginia. Under the Fugitive Slave Act the matter was clearly settled, except that abolitionist protesters surrounded the prison where Burns was being held, demanding his release. In the melee, a US Marshal was stabbed and killed.
“You would have me let him go,” Franklin said, pulling his hand from hers and reaching for his coffee cup before changing his mind, his stomach roiling.
“You are the president.”
“It is the law, Jane.”
“We’re speaking of a single case.”
“Cases such as these, if mishandled, can lead to others.”
“Then handle it rightly. Release the man. And if it leads to other men being freed, then we’re all the closer to a bad law melting like ice in June. You’ve said many times that you see the ownership of human beings as a practice that will retreat over time. Here is an opportunity to hasten its end.”
Given her distaste for Washington, Jane’s interest in politics was always surprising to Franklin. She read the newspapers as if preparing for an exam. She was especially alert to the human dramas that lived under the discussions of policy, such as the allowance of women to study medicine or the wagon trains of families headed westward under military escort, killing “all manner of Indian” along the way. For Jane, politics was fueled by the discernment between right and wrong. For Franklin, it was the way a nation remained united.
For the sake of their marriage, the slavery question was one they tried to avoid. Yet every topic seemed to find its way there eventually, forcing them to restate their views. Jane was sympathetic to abolition. While Franklin saw its philosophical merits, he believed it was a risk to national unity to impose on those in opposition to it.
Franklin looked down at the egg yolk smeared over his plate and saw it as a self-portrait.
“I am no advocate of slavery,” he said. “I wish it had no existence upon the face of the earth. But as a public man I’m called upon to act in relation to an existing state of things.”
“And what ought the president do when the existing state of things is in error?”
Franklin could be guilty of underestimating his wife on certain accounts, but he was always alert to her ability to find a way of knotting up the personal and the political. He preferred to see a space between the two, as his legal training had it: what a lawyer argued in court had no bearing on how easily he went to sleep that night. Jane never failed to point out the lie in this on the nights Franklin tossed and moaned in his bedsheets.
He pushed the toast rack her way. “Will you at least join me for some breakfast?”
“Will you consider my appeal?”