“Not by the party. Used by a higher design.”
“I don’t believe God has a hand in determining who wins elections.”
“Nor do I.”
She needed him to see it for himself. There would be no way of outright announcing what she knew—the role that Sir had played in her life, their courtship, his presidency, their deceased child’s return—without him rejecting the notion and her along with it. He had to be closer to knowing before she could reveal all she knew. She was confident now that he was halfway there. Jane saw Franklin’s reflex to cling to her literal meanings yielding inch by inch to the mystical, the unspeakable.
“I believe I know what you’re saying,” he said. “I have been used—been an instrument—my entire life.”
Jane recalled Sir describing her in the same terms as she played at the piano the night before. You are the instrument, Jeannie. She wondered if Franklin had heard the voice too. Perhaps he was now about to admit it, and she waited for it.
“Look at us! Here we are in the most powerful house in the nation and yet we’re talking as if we’re no more than pieces in a game!” He cast his eyes toward the general and lifted an arm to point to it, but decided against it, as if even an extended hand would put his fingers too close to the thing. “No more than toys.”
He placed his hand on the cushion between them. She couldn’t tell if it was an offering to her, or to buttress his unsteady balance. Whatever the case, she placed her hand atop his.
“I’m worried of the influence life here may have on you,” he said. “And because I treasure you, because you’re all I have left, I ask if you would consider living elsewhere.”
“Leave you?”
“To be safe.”
She pulled her hand away.
“Would Abigail stay on?”
“It wouldn’t be proper if she did,” he answered, his shoulder twitching as if tapped from behind. “I’ll find another substitute. Or get along without one.”
“I will not go.”
“There are things I have seen in these rooms, Jeannie. The most terrible things.”
“I won’t—”
“The country has called me, not you.”
“I’m not staying for the good of the country, nor for you. I’m staying for my son.”
“Your son?” Franklin stood. He was shaking. “Your son is dead! All our boys are dead!”
Jane heard the accusation threaded through Franklin’s shouting. He was saying she had lost her sanity, that this wasn’t normal grief. She heard something else too: Franklin’s phrasing was again almost the same as Splitfoot’s when his voice came out of Bennie’s mouth in the overturned train car. All the boys will die. Jane had wondered ever since if this referred to her own children, or some cataclysm to come. She saw now that it was both.
“You think the only way to resist the terrible things you speak of, is to escape,” she said, as soft as she could manage. “And seeing as you can’t do that until the end of your term, you’re granting me the opportunity.”
“Yes.”
“But what if you’re wrong?”
“On which account?”
“What if resistance can only be achieved from within? No matter the forces”—Jane moved her eyes about the room, its floor and ceiling, as if indicating the unseen presences all around them—“that seek to reduce us to our expected roles.”
He moved away from her but when he bumped against the chair in which the general sat, he sidestepped farther from them both. It left him stranded in the center of the rug, the painted ceiling of stars cast over him so that he appeared as isolated as a man standing in a rowboat at night.
“You speak of idealism,” he said.
“Perhaps I do. But what if the blather of policy and compromise and costs—what if all we give primacy to is only a distraction from the pursuit of our ideals?”
“This is an intriguing proposition, but there isn’t—”
“Haven’t I always been good counsel to you, Franklin?”
“My finest.”
“Then hear it now: There is no escaping this place. Because to leave it as it is will only hand it over to another man to lose his way. Whatever darkness is yielded to inside this house, the nation outside will yield to as well.”
Franklin folded his arms and it shrunk him by half. “What do you propose?”
“Change.”
“To prove my independence?”
“To prove your humanity.”
“And how is that done in my shoes?”
“By disregarding the machinations of party and electioneers. By the exercise of will. By choice.”
“Change,” he said, as if seeing a new meaning to the term for the first time.
“Of course it can’t be arbitrary. It must be moral. An action taken according to the principles I know you hold deep within yourself.”
Franklin looked down at the floor, and imagined he could look through it to the men who fed the furnace in the oval room directly below where he stood. They come to get warm. Spirits that came here, to America’s house. It was the only way they could. Because outside these walls, in the lives they would live there, they would be required to either show their Certificate of Freedom upon demand or be returned to chains. The ones you can’t see.
“I believe I’m aware of the issue you’re referring to,” he said.
“There is no other.”
“It plagues every matter before me.”
“Because it’s not a matter. It is an offense against—never mind God—an offense against what is right. And so long as it is allowed to stand, whether under the name of respecting the powers of state legislatures or its assistance to commerce, there will be no ridding ourselves of what resides here with us.”
They didn’t say slavery. They didn’t say evil. Not ghost, nor demon. But these inadequate terms passed between them now in silence. The things to which they referred rendered in specific images, a nightmare collage assembled in each of their minds.
“I feel it too,” he said.
“What?”
“A wish for redemption.”
“You may have it.”
“That assumes my capacity to enact it. But I also feel the shackles that hold me from it.”
“Politics.”
“Not that. The ways that good intentions may be sabotaged by torments of a different kind.”
He tapped a finger to his temple and she understood him to mean the realities seen and felt along with the other things manufactured inside his skull.
“Fight it,” she said.
“Alone?”
“I’m with you.”
“Ah! Then we’re a full battalion!”
“Frank—”
“And what are the two of us armed with? The crusaders’ banner of change? Change!” Franklin paused and cast his eyes about the room just as Jane had done. “It’s as if this office—this very house—conspires against it.”
Jane stood. Her body stiff with defiance. “That is why you must fight it.”
He unclasped the arms belted across his chest and it appeared he might melt into a pool on the rug of stars and heraldic eagles. It wasn’t helplessness this time that threatened his undoing, but gratitude. His wife was on his side again. His ally. Pushing him in an unfamiliar direction, to be sure, and possibly mistaken to a catastrophic degree. But in that instant of her standing, fists clenched, setting him to a bold purpose and believing in his capacity to carry it out—in her, he saw a way out.