Franklin regarded the man. He appeared old, but he stood straight and strong. There was too great a distance between them to make out the expression he wore.
“I’ll leave you in peace,” the gardener said before Franklin could demand his name, and slipped out the hothouse’s rear door.
Franklin pushed aside a pot of hibiscus and sat on the wood bench next to it. Seeking refuge. He closed his eyes.
His thoughts reached out to Jane. Given how far off she was from him now, it forced him to remember her in the past. Dancing in a Peterborough church annex, waltzing without the acceptable gap between their bodies.
There wasn’t much to her, bodily speaking, then or now. Other girls offered a softness through their dresses. Jane’s frame suggested only unwavering lines, boyish and taut. Yet it was her form that excited him most as he commanded his feet to slide with hers—ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three—and nudged close enough that his belt buckle left a fold in her sash. He wondered what it would be like to have her atop him, to submit to someone who, in her public manners, was always first to submit. He wondered what it would take for her to lose herself.
Even by the proper standards of the day their courtship was physically innocent. Held hands, his skin denied contact with hers by gloves worn even in the wilting July heat. Kisses like burns, brief and scalding and nursed for days after.
It was talk that took up their time together. Memories of childhood. Town gossip. Most of all they spoke of lost brothers. There was a strange excitement that accompanied their recollections of little John and strapping Charles, Franklin’s older brother who was taken by fever. The passion for an absent body similar to what lovers feel for the presence of their beloved.
“There is nothing like seeing trust in another’s eyes. The real thing,” he recollected her saying one afternoon when they were walking on a river path that skirted under the willows.
“How do you know that’s what it is?”
“Have you ever thought you’ve seen it?”
“I can’t be sure.”
“Ah, then you haven’t,” she said. “Because when you see trust, you know it.”
He heard how certain Jane was, a confidence bordering on mania.
“When I sat by John’s sickbed,” she went on, “the two of us with full knowledge that he would not recover, he believed me when I told him it would all be right. That God would protect him. That I would never let him go.”
“He trusted you even though what you said wasn’t true.”
Jane stopped.
“Of course it was true,” she said. “I would never let him go.”
“Say it to me then.”
“What?”
“Tell me you’ll never let me go. Look into my eyes. Read my trust.”
She nodded several times as if counting the ticks of a clock in her head. Then she stared into him without blinking.
“I will never let you go,” she said.
The gorgeousness of the words struck him like a line from a psalm, transporting and pure. And then the feeling that followed: a warmth in the pit of himself like the dawn of a tiny sun.
He had been in love with her for some time but only recognized the fullness of it now. In her eyes he saw that she loved him too, and more. She had fostered it from the beginning, made their love grow into the oddly beautiful thing she had pruned it into being.
“Yes,” she said, nodding deeper this time. “I see it.”
Franklin remembered the strange conviction of her face, and with its memory Franklin sensed someone in the orangery with him. He opened his eyes expecting to see Jane standing there, or the gardener. But it was neither. It was Abby.
“I knew you liked to hide out here,” she said.
“It’s a glass box. How could I be hiding?”
“Nobody would look for the president in a greenhouse.”
“You did. You found him, too.”
He didn’t intend this to be flirtatious, but heard it as such. He could have said the exact same things to Jane and it would leave a ring of accusation, or self-pity, or resignation in the air. How could I be hiding? But with Abby, they were veiled provocations no matter his caution. You found him, too. He wondered if she heard it, and if she liked it if she did.
“If you would prefer your privacy—”
“No, please stay.”
There it was again. His genuine want for her company coming through where he intended to convey mere politeness. Abby looked along the rows of pots and found the only possible place for her to sit was right beside him, so she remained standing.
She was struggling to find a way in to whatever she wanted to say. Franklin was content to wait, remembering the woman in front of him from the dinners she’d attended as Jane’s substitute. She had a dress he liked. Dark violet, with a thread in it that caught the candlelight, sparking. He would look at her across the long table of the State Dining Room and always, at first, see her as Jane. And then, in the following moment, he corrected himself. What distinguished Abby from his wife was her cheerfulness. Attentive nods to whatever tired anecdote the man next to her was repeating, a warm smile for the guest of honor at the raising of glasses.
It may have only been a performance of her duties. What difference did it make if it was? A marriage often amounted to the same thing. Kindnesses offered when one least felt like it, providing an audience when one’s mind longed to be elsewhere. Why couldn’t Jane at least appear alive, even if her inner world was fixed on death? She could do it for herself, if not for him. Franklin had found that, sometimes, pretending to be something was the first step toward convincing yourself of it.
“I came to speak to you about— There is— I’m concerned for you, Franklin. For both you and Jane,” Abby started, and touched her cheek, checking her finger as if to see if a cut had healed. “I’m concerned for my own well-being too.”
“Is there someone troubling you?” he said, disappointed to see Abby so downcast, so much like Jane. “I’ll remedy it if there is.”
“It’s not mistreatment. It’s that I’m—such a strange thing to say—I’m losing myself.”
A number of interpretations arose in Franklin’s mind as to what she might mean. She was dissatisfied with her work. She had diagnosed herself of unsound mind. She was falling in love with him. He had always been hopeless at feeling his way to indirect meanings.
“Perhaps you’re tired,” he said. “Heaven knows that Jane found these dinners and luncheons exhausting to the point—”
“I know what Jane feels,” she interrupted. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s like I’m not just her substitute anymore. I’m her.”
He saw it the same instant she said it. More than the similarity in appearance the two of them shared, there was a merging of Abby into Jane he could detect in the lines at the corners of her eyes, the too-tightly-pulled-back hair, the suppressed alarm in her voice.
“I’m asking too much of you.”
“Please don’t take this as complaint, Franklin. I don’t mind getting dressed up and minding my manners at your events. What disturbs me is knowing with such closeness what it is for Jane to have lost… all she’s lost. And knowing that now, in this place, there is nothing to stop her from getting a piece of it back.”