“Now then. This matter of bringing freedom to the enslaved. It will come in time. But rushing it? Like your skinny paddle of a wife would have you do? It’s not the job for a man like you, Frank.”
“I’m the president.”
“And what’s that? Someone for dullards to blame their failures on and patriots to pin their hopes to. You’re like a painting of Jesus over a child’s bed in place of Jesus himself—you hear the prayers but have no choice but to let fate have its way.”
The more the man spoke, the more Franklin came to accept it was his father. Not the man dug free of his grave, but his counsel, his way of thinking being spoken through the too-convincing puppet seated under George Washington’s portrait twenty feet away. It certainly was the sort of thing his father would say, and in his tone too. At once bullying and companionable, as if he was paying Franklin due respect by speaking to him with the hard honesty only afforded to friends.
“Wasn’t Washington a president who made changes?” Franklin put to him.
“He certainly did. But it was easier for him. It was the beginning. Now we’re a going concern and there’s no room for saviors. Not in this house.”
“I want to go now,” Franklin said, and was startled to find that he was crying.
“Y’see? Look at you! You don’t have the bones to sit there and listen to your father, much less fix the country of all that ails it. You know that much, don’t you? Maybe you learned it when you fell off your horse in front of your men and pissed yourself before fainting like a lady too fat for her corset.” The old man nodded and sighed again. “You’re not made for the hard stuff, Frank. Nothing wrong with that. You look good, talk good—you made it here. Now leave it be.”
Franklin went to put his glass down on a side table, but when he let it go he saw there was no table there. The glass met the floor with a thump but didn’t break.
“Pick it up,” his father said. “You’ll want a full one now.”
Franklin bent over and hooked a finger under the glass’s rim. When he pulled it up and looked across at the settee under the Washington portrait, his father was gone.
The glass slipped off his finger. This time, it shattered.
* * *
A plate of eggs, oatmeal, rack of toast. Franklin was alone in the private dining room when Jane came in. The same as the morning before, except this time she was smiling. Until he looked up and she saw him, read him, and she wasn’t.
“You did it,” she said. “Burns. You had him sent back to Virginia.”
“It’s in the papers?”
“I could tell from your falsely resolute face. It’s the way you look when you’re being most cowardly.”
He absorbed her insult so readily she knew he was prepared for it.
“I was a fool to think I ever had a choice in it,” he said.
“You’re a fool to believe you don’t have a choice in all things.”
Jane intended this for him, but heard the way the sentence curled back to become a condemnation of herself. Franklin heard it too. She could see how he wanted to know what she had made a wrong choice about, but dared not ask directly.
He got up. Pulled back the chair next to his. She sat. He took his seat but didn’t resume eating. The two of them looked at each other for a long while without doing or saying a thing.
20
“Bennie?”
Jane entered through an opening in the door just wide enough for her to squeeze through and closed it with her foot. The room was darker than hers, darker than any other in the house, so that she stood there waiting for her vision to adjust.
“Momma’s here.”
She kept her eyes on the orange in her hand and imagined it as a miniature sun, a piece of the sky smuggled underground. The boy never ate again after his first suckling, but she would bring him food anyway. An apple, a slice of buttered bread, a bowl of stew. Every time she would take the item away with her when she left, untouched.
Over the hours she spent in the Grief Room, Jane had forged a grounding for herself, a mental island of objectivity surrounded by the uncanny. It required the balancing of multiple paradoxes and was subject to erosion, but it held firm for the most part. For instance, she knew the boy was not Bennie, while maintaining the belief that he essentially was. The story she told herself was that he was her child but in a reborn state of some kind, returned from the afterlife but with differences attributable to his time away. He had seen inconceivable things. Of course he wouldn’t be exactly the same today as he had been before.
She had answers for every question that demanded to be answered:
Why didn’t he eat or drink? Angels had no need for bodily sustenance.
How did he grow from infant to crawling child within hours? For most, time inches forward like the hands of a clock, but for those who have been to heaven, it can also leap ahead.
If this Bennie was such a blessing, why didn’t she share it with her husband? It would only make him afraid, and what men feared they destroyed.
As for his origins, she presumed Kate Fox had brought him back. Her, along with Jane. They had achieved a connection to the place where the recently passed go, the good ones, the innocent. They had done it through the power of Kate’s talent and Jane’s love. She tried to prevent Sir’s role in the resurrection from entering her thoughts, but he did anyway, lingering there, a shade in her peripheral view.
She took pleasure in her time here, though it was of a queer sort. The closest experience she could say it was akin to were the feelings she would have for certain boys when she was young, Bowdoin students she found handsome as they passed by the house, whom she manufactured not only feelings for but a history too. First words, Valentine’s gifts, first kiss. None of it was real, but even its simulation had a fizz of veracity to it, perhaps more than if she’d actually spoken with or kissed them. An image or two. The embrace of fantasy. The compensations of not being alone. That’s all it took.
Jane and Bennie spent hours together over the late mornings and early afternoons, but it was time that was compressed while in the Grief Room. She would check the clock upon leaving and confirm the expired hours, yet remember only fragments of how they’d passed. The child crawling out from the corner to greet her. Her tidying his untouched clothes in the dresser. Offering him food that he would shake his head at. Sparse moments that amounted to half days.
She yearned to hold him. Sometimes she resisted this, anxious at how he might respond if she bent to pick him up, though whenever she did so he went voluntarily, if stiffly, into her arms. On other occasions it was the child who came to her. He would climb onto her lap when she sat in the feeding chair and let her stroke his hair or hold him against her with his chin resting on her shoulder. It made her wonder what expression he wore when he was facing away from her.
On the same morning Jane asked Franklin to consider releasing Anthony Burns, she stood inside the door of Bennie’s room expecting to find him as she had before, sitting up in his bed, waiting for her arrival. When she lifted her eyes from the orange in her hand she found he wasn’t there.
A different boy stood with his back to her, looking out through the curtained windows. When he heard her he turned and she could see that it was Bennie, though an older version of the boy. Not a toddler anymore. Eleven. As old as life allowed him to become.