As she pondered this, Franklin considered telling her of the presence he glimpsed standing over Franky. The same stranger who had revealed the unspeakable crimes to him in the East Room, and whose namelessness they struggled with now. But it was close to the end for her, and such a disclosure, coming so late, struck him as needless. So he turned his face so that his voice brought a small warmth to her cheek.
“Let’s speak of something else, then,” Franklin whispered.
“What?”
“The secret.”
She hadn’t thought of it exactly that way before—the secret—but it struck her as the right conception.
The two of them drew closer and shared what they had learned in their time in the mansion: that at the very heart of America there lives a darkness. Material and intelligent and alive. One that would outlive them both to sculpt the country in ways that, over time, might not be recognized as a darkness at all.
They were an old couple already half-forgotten by history and so with nothing of themselves to lose, yet neither Jane nor Franklin could capture the specific thing they were referring to. It could be spoken about, yet resisted any one identity. It had a shape but could never be drawn. As when seeing the form of something in a cloud, the very act of pointing skyward—There!—prompted it to shift into something else. The war. Their lost sons. The people sold and resold. The devil that hides in the White House. The dead rising up to claim the living even as they walked in sunlight.