“What piece? I don’t understand.”
Abby tapped her heels on the dirt floor, trying to think of another way of getting to where she wanted to go. She had said far too much already. But she wouldn’t let herself turn around and go. So she decided on a direct query.
“Couldn’t you and Jane live elsewhere?”
“It’s the presidential residence. I’m the president.”
“Of course. But there’s nothing to stop the president from sleeping and working across the street, or in Baltimore, or Boston, is there?” She glanced over her shoulder at the building looming behind her. “Anywhere but there?”
Franklin wondered if Abby and Jane were working in concert. Or perhaps what Abby was saying was meant in the literal sense. She was sharing Jane’s mind. And whatever illnesses dwelled there had passed over to her.
“There would be an outcry,” Franklin explained deliberately, working for the balance of gentleness and authority he tried to hold with his wife in such discussions. “ ‘Not good enough for the Pierces? They’ve left a mansion so the rats can call it home?’ You know better than anyone that half of what I do is pageantry. And having the man the people voted for live in that big house is part of it.”
As he spoke, Abby came to a decision. She would tell him. About the revue she saw in New York, the tune about the Fox sisters she’d told Jane about, the invitation the First Lady made that brought the mediums to the residence to perform a ritual of some sort. How everything had changed since then. An enmity brought into the White House capable of assuming different forms. All of them delivering the same message of hopelessness, leaving your spirit depleted, disenfranchised.
She was lining up the sequence of details in her head when she heard someone call her name.
It didn’t come from outside but directly behind her.
A-bi-gail.
A man stating one word, slow and clear yet with each syllable corrupted. It made her swing around. No man was there. But the house was. She saw something in it that held her, erased the confession she was composing like a wet cloth clearing a slate.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“Where?”
She pointed. “There. Do you see?”
Franklin stood next to her. Followed her trembling finger to a window at the end of the second floor.
“A child,” he said. “A boy.”
“What’s he looking at?”
“Us.”
It was hard to make out much through the smudged windows of the hothouse, the glare of the sun, the distance between them and the mansion. Yet there was enough for Franklin to piece together. As his mind grappled with the impossible, the boy in the window stood still, gazing down at him, as if wishing to be observed.
The window he stood in belonged to the room across from Jane’s.
There were no children in the White House.
The brown suspenders and lace-collared shirt the boy wore were Bennie’s. His hair parted like Bennie’s. His grin an unfriendly version of his son’s.
“Oh… Christ.”
Abby swung around to find Franklin kneeling on the floor. Her first thought was that he was moved to prayer. Then she saw how the hands in front of his face weren’t palm to palm, but covering his eyes.
“Franklin! Are you—”
“Is he gone?”
She looked up at the house. The boy was no longer standing at the window, though the curtains had slid shut to prove that, until a moment ago, someone had been.
“Yes.”
“Are you certain?”
“There’s no one there.”
He pulled his hands away yet still refused to look through the glass. His eyes held to Abby’s.
“I must return to work,” he said, standing.
“You saw who that was, didn’t you?”
“I saw a child, nothing more.”
“Franklin. That’s not—surely you—”
“I must return.”
He moved past her, their shoulders meeting as he went. It brought forward the breath she’d held and he felt it against his face. Warm and smelling of licorice.
“Perhaps I’ll see you tonight?”
Once more he was muddled by possible meanings. Did she mean a chance meeting in the hallways? Was she mistaken about a dinner scheduled in the evening’s calendar? Or was she opening herself to another kind of intimacy altogether?
“Yes,” he said, anything more risking misapprehension. But yes was enough.
22
When Jane’s youngest brother, John, took ill at the age of three, he was assigned to a bed in the nursery. Jane discovered his dying offered her a new power: the observation of horror. She stayed at his side, tending to his fever as best she could, but mostly watching him. Death wrapped itself around her little brother, everyone’s favorite, and Jane was at once panicked and awestruck.
She was there for it, closest to it, because she was her mother’s “little helper.” While she attended to her housecleaning and laundry chores with languor (her illnesses were most severe when asked to do things she didn’t want to), Jane was a devoted caregiver to the boys. She hovered around the three of them with hands that wiped and stroked and slapped, calling them “my tiny ones,” doting on them with a maternal passion that well surpassed their own mother’s. In a practical sense, Jane was their mother. And she cherished the license that came with the position: the responsibility, the discretion as to who was fed or warmed first, the choice between offering or denying comfort.
John’s passing—the moment itself—was transformative. For the boy. But also for Jane. The life in him undeniably there. Then undeniably not. A line between the two that most couldn’t see, or turned away from. Not Jane. She saw it for the arbitrary thing it was. A rule that, like any rule, might be broken if you were possessed of the will and means.
Three days after John died Jane entered her father’s study and took the pendulum game out of the bottom drawer.
That was why she was able to do it without being detected, why the house was empty except for her. It was the boy’s funeral. All of the Appletons were gathered by the hole in the ground of the Bath Road cemetery, tossing earth upon the box. Jane was too ill to attend. Her stomach. Her headache. She offered her parents different excuses but they weren’t really listening, ascribing her pains to grief.
The truth was Jane wasn’t interested in putting things into the ground. She wanted to see what would come out of it if you asked.
* * *
Ever since she’d arranged her son’s furniture there and Kate Fox helped deliver a child to its crib, Jane hadn’t gone an entire day without visiting the Grief Room until today.
She made excuses to herself as to why. A fever that lurked in her chest. The need to sign off on one more letter to her sister, or finish one more chapter in her book. In fact, twice she had made the thirty-foot journey across the hall to stand by its door. And twice she had returned to her quarters, shivering, as if she’d walked the perimeter of the South Lawn in a nightdress and bare feet.
She wanted to see Bennie. It was her duty as a mother to ensure his comfort. He might be afraid. He might be hurt. While it was defensible to keep the boy safe inside, it was wrong to leave him there all on his own. These thoughts formed one side of the ledger in her mind. On the other were more troubling calculations. The child in Bennie’s room was a danger to her and anyone else who came close. He was a creature that was in part hers, in part Sir’s. He would try to get out if she opened the door.