“Naturally.”
“Then pass the butter, please.”
* * *
That evening, when the congressional visitors and daytime staff were gone and the house was quiet, the hours when Jane was reading or weeping or writing letters to the dead or doing whatever it was she did in the room across the hall from hers, Franklin slipped down to the first floor, went into the Crimson Parlor, and poured himself a drink.
The whiskey was warm and alive in him. It felt like the only part that was.
When he wasn’t occupied with his work, the residence closed in on him, stifling him with a combination of anxiety and heartbreak that sometimes left him gasping. He wasn’t allowed to grieve his sons during public hours, and when he was in Jane’s company he was obliged to be strong, show her what a recovery to normalcy might look like. The result was that he only permitted himself the full freight of his sadness in stray moments like these, always alone, always at night.
His tears made him cough so he cleared his throat with the rest of the amber in his glass. He took his time with the second measure, more generous this time. He sat in one of the straight-backed chairs that Thomas Walter had said was “traditional American design” but felt to Franklin like something churches made the choir sit on to prevent them from falling asleep.
He was drinking. Breaking his promise to Jane. But it was all right, because he was keeping another. In his mind, he forced his thoughts away from his boys to consider what his wife had asked of him.
It would be recklessness to make a decision of the kind she wanted him to. No matter the injustice of returning Anthony Burns to chains, this was a national issue, and he was the leader of the nation. Franklin had been chosen by his party to carry on in the predictable way he’d conducted himself as a congressman and senator, which is to say he would run the country by the same rules his father ran his tavern:
Appear to be in favor of both sides of any argument.
Business is always business.
If there were beatings to be done, one didn’t hear them so long as they happened off premises and at night.
And it wasn’t just the offense to Democrat insiders that made Jane’s idea so imprudent. If Franklin Pierce were to start making freemen out of fugitives willy-nilly it would show a boldness he hadn’t demonstrated in his career. History would note it, and as history tended to judge abrupt turns, condemn it. This is what made saying yes to Jane so dangerous.
It’s also what made it appealing.
The party pleaders, the congressional flatterers, the New Hampshire fundraisers—they had all trapped him here in this sorrowful place, frigid as a crypt and with ladders and holes in the hallways from repairs that would never be completed. Now he had a chance to break out of the blinders they’d fixed to him. Stability, compromise, balance. They left him no room for change, for daring, for decision.
He took another sip.
He would do it. Letting Anthony Burns walk away from the stockade in Boston would be the closest he could come to letting himself walk away from the White House. And if they all saw him as reckless, at least they would see him. A president for once, instead of a custodian.
The glass was empty. Franklin didn’t like seeing it that way.
He was about to get up to refill his glass when he spotted his father sitting on the satin banquette on the far side of the room.
The old man didn’t appear as a ghost might. If anything, he was more real-seeming than if he were alive. There was a density to his presence, a particularity to his clothes, the shine of his boots, the filaments of hair reaching out from the tops of his ears, all the parts of him visible even at this distance. His face aglow not from fresh air or liquor but the over-stated colors of a painter’s brush.
Franklin’s father had started out a soldier. By the end of the Revolutionary War he was named a general, the head of the Eighth Massachusetts Regiment, a member of the Society of the Cincinnati. Honors that marked Benjamin Pierce as a man of bravery and distinction when in fact his primary accomplishments had been forging an acquaintanceship with George Washington and managing not to die.
Afterward, he turned his farmhouse into a tavern. It suited his disposition perfectly: the tolerance for lewdness, the capacity for roughness on the occasions a fellow had too much ale. Yet if one were to only listen to him one would assume that Benjamin Pierce was among the greatest heroes the Union had ever known. It was true that he had fought the English at Breed’s Hill and Ticonderoga. But beyond that, there were questions the tavern patrons didn’t dare ask. Had he actually killed Englishmen with his bayonet? His hands? How closely was he consulted by General Washington on tactics?
Only young Frank voiced these queries directly to his father. And he did it only once.
“There are some things men don’t speak of,” his father told him, which were precisely the same words he used when Franklin asked why some of the men took Caroline, the lunch cook, upstairs from time to time, only for both to return minutes later looking as if they’d beaten the dust out of a rug.
“Who are you?” Franklin asked the dead man now, his voice enfeebled by the room’s size, the sudden arrival of drunkenness, and in the moment that followed his speaking, the panic that took hold of him.
“Are your eyes poorly, boy?”
His father had spoken without moving his lips. Franklin was sure of it. But when he spoke next, the mouth was in alignment with his words, as if a correction to an error he recognized on his first attempt.
“Speak up when your father’s addressing you, Frank!”
“No, sir. I can see you fine.”
“Then you know it’s me.”
“Not. It’s—”
“What?”
“It’s not you.”
The man waved his hand in dismissal. “We can have a nice debate about that another time,” he said. “I’m here to right your ship. Because you look ready to run her aground.”
The whiskey’s warmth was gone, leaving only a metallic taste in Franklin’s mouth and a weight in his belly as if he’d eaten a handful of pennies. He was aware that he could get up and leave the room. It seemed impossible that the man who looked like his father would follow if he did. Yet he stayed where he was.
“This abolition business,” the man across the room said. “All well and good. But you—”
“Who was that man with you?”
“I was speaking, if you don’t goddamn mind.”
Franklin winced at his father’s sharpness. But the question had been tossing around at the back of his mind these past years, and now, unexpectedly, he had the chance to ask it of the only one who might have the answer as to the nature of the thing he’d glimpsed stealing the air from his poor Franky’s lungs. So he asked it again.
“Who was the stranger next to you on the porch after my wedding?”
The old man nodded twice and sighed. In life, it was precisely the sequence of gestures he used to show he was addressing an audience he pitied.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” he said. “Most of it you couldn’t understand even if you did know it. But I’m trying to help you here, son, and I don’t have a lot of time. That all right with you?”
Now Franklin was nodding. “Yes, sir.”