His hand grasped the top of it. Threw the covers back over the vacant half of the bed.
The tin soldier lay on its back. He recognized it as one of Bennie’s. The general. The toy’s medals and uniform and bodily features the same as Franklin recollected. All except for the mouth. Closed in stern determination before, it was now open, the lips reddened as if with fresh paint. Glistening.
Franklin reached out his hand, expecting to be bitten, or have his fingers slashed by the general’s sword, or have it utter a laugh at the string of spit swinging from his chin that he dared not wipe away for fear of losing his balance and falling forward.
It didn’t move.
But when Franklin touched its metal cheek, it was warm as flesh.
24
Webster came to Jane’s room in the morning.
“The president would like a meeting, ma’am,” he said. “Franklin, that is.”
“A meeting?”
“In the Blue Room. If you would be so kind.”
“When?”
“As soon as you’re able.”
Webster continued to stand there with brows raised in what may have been an acknowledgment of his errand’s strangeness. After an awkward stretch, Jane realized he was waiting to accompany her downstairs.
“I’ll need to wash,” she said.
“He’s made a space in the calendar. This present space.”
Jane considered making a remark, something to lower those furry brows of his, but saw there was no point. Webster was doing his job. In this building, in the whole of Washington, when someone took precedence over the will of another, it was only someone doing their job. And she was aware of her place in things. The First Lady. The wife.
Ever since she was a child Jane felt that she alone among the Appleton women saw the full injustice of being born a girl. Her sisters never seemed to notice it, or if they did, they embraced the rules and excelled within them, “getting along” as her sister Mary liked to put it. Her mother did her best to instill her daughters with a sternness that might preserve them. But whether through getting along or a cold heart, Jane didn’t see a way of escaping the constraints of womanhood, at least not in the outside world. So she moved inward. Reading. Music. Daydreaming. She built a wall with a single door around herself.
This is how, as she grew older, Jane came to see love the same way she’d seen the occult: it was a way through the door. She lived inside her mind so much yet longed for the world, its exchanges and caresses. For a boy, such passing between the mind and the body was not only possible but cultivated. For a girl, it would require sorcery.
“Very well,” she said now, tying her hair back in a tail and following Webster to the first floor, where he admitted her into the oval sitting room. Once she was inside, Webster shut the door with a firmness she heard as resentment at not being a party to the discussion about to occur.
A couple of things struck Jane at the same time.
The first was that Franklin stood opposite the door, as far from her as the dimensions of the chamber allowed, yet even from this distance she saw how bloodless his cheeks were, his hair a greasy nest atop his head.
The second was that he stood next to a walnut chair in which sat one of Bennie’s toy soldiers. The general.
She started toward her husband but he raised his hand, as if there was something about himself he wished for her not to observe in any greater detail than she already had.
“Do you remember this?” he asked, and glanced down at the toy.
Jane glanced at it too. The crimson-jacketed assembly of hammered steel and bolts, propped up with its legs out straight, sword raised. Had it been in that position when she first entered? It must have only been the clarity brought by the few steps nearer she’d taken. Yet she believed she could see it grinning now. The slightest curls at the edges of its lips that were stern points before.
“It’s Bennie’s,” she said.
“This may strike you as an odd thing for me to ask, but did you have a hand in putting it in my room?”
“Your room?”
“I found it in my bed. As whoever put it there intended I would.”
“Your bed?”
“Stop parroting me and answer.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Do you know who it was?”
Yes, she wished to say, practicing it in her mind. It was a spirit I’ve called Sir, and whom others have called Splitfoot, others still something else, though it has no true name. It brought Bennie back. It showed me dead soldiers in the East Room mirror, but what it really wanted was to show me the dead to come. It cannot enact change on its own, but it can change people if they let it. As it’s changed me. Changing you now too.
“No,” she said.
He cast his eyes over the ceiling, raised his foot as if to advance, then brought both eyes and foot back to where they had been.
“I’m having the most miserable dreams,” he said.
“Funny you say so.”
“Why?”
“I’m not dreaming at all.”
“None that you can recollect in the morning.”
“There is nothing to recollect. My worst dreams are real here.”
It came out sounding like wifely misgiving and Jane moved closer to him, not stopping this time when he brought up both his hands to hold her back. As she approached she shifted her gaze between her husband and the general, the former losing color with each footfall as the latter grew in vividness, the little face obscenely rouged and eyelashed as one of the whores of unguessable age that Jane had to walk past outside the theater at the end of a play.
“Oh, Jeannie,” he said when she was close enough to be held, though he made no move to do so.
“You’re spent.”
“Do I look so poorly? It’s true that the mirror is not my ally.”
“And after a lifetime of such favorable judgment.”
Once more her comment came out in a tone she hadn’t intended, but Franklin let it go with something akin to a low chortle.
He shuffled backward to take one end of a settee that Walter, the designer, had reupholstered in blue velvet. Franklin’s body sank into the cushions as if they were stuffed with water.
“Come,” he said.
She sat next to him. As it appeared he was unwilling to reach out to her, she thought of putting her hands aside his face to show that she wanted to connect with him, not repeat their old quarrels. But at her approach he involuntarily leaned away and she saw how shaken he was. How he felt unsafe at the idea of her touching him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“Bringing you here.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “I brought you.”
He straightened. Even in his agitated, underslept state, his pride was capable of being offended.
“You’ve made great sacrifices for my career that I appreciate, and you’ve been a valuable counsel to me over the campaigns,” he said, wrestling his irritation down as he spoke. “But in fairness, I think I had a part in it.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Please share what you do.”
“We’ve been used, Franklin.”
“That is politics. Everyone feels it.”