by Andrew Pyper
“Pause and consider.”
Marcy repeated Franklin’s words, and the effect was to make the sentiment sound even more ridiculous than in its first articulation.
“A modest request,” Franklin said. “What is the wrong in it?”
“The wrong is that it goes against the very grain of this government,” the secretary of state said. “Expansion is your purpose, sir. Slavery is a fact that we have inherited, not created. In any case, it is only a side cost to our main endeavor.”
“What if we are wrong in weighing the matter in these terms?”
Marcy looked at every man around the room except for the president as if taking a silent vote. When he returned his eyes to Franklin it was with the satisfaction of a cat that held a mouse under its paw.
“And what other terms do you have in mind?”
“The moral,” Franklin answered, holding his voice to a low register in an effort to maintain his authority. “Perhaps we could judge it as Christians.”
“I didn’t know you were such a churchgoer, Mr. President,” Cushing asked with apparent earnestness.
“Unless you’ve joined a new congregation?” Davis suggested with equally apparent sarcasm. “Are you a Quaker now, sir?”
Franklin didn’t answer. He was the only one to see it.
The secret door in the curved wall that he’d pushed open on his first day exploring the residence. Because of his position with his back to the windows, Franklin was alone in seeing it draw inward an inch.
“Can I suggest we avoid the personal insults and return to policy grounds for a moment?” Cushing said, interpreting the president’s silence for contempt.
But Franklin wasn’t listening. He was watching.
The door in the wall trembled, as if breathed upon from the other side, before it slid wider. The dark passage behind it revealing its depth like a curtain swept aside to show the night outside the glass.
“It’s one thing to have your argument run aground,” Guthrie said, “but it’s quite another to ignore the navigation that steered it there, if I may say, sir.”
Franklin slid his eyes past each member of his cabinet and saw, in this instant, the shallowness of their wisdom, the excuses they’d told their wives and children to explain their long absences from home, the lies they told themselves that none of it was ambition, only the compulsion to serve. When he stopped on the gilt Sheraton mirror on the opposite wall he saw all of the same things in his own face, along with something else. The wish to be anywhere but here.
“You must go,” the president said.
None of them moved. Perhaps they suspected Pierce was expressing rare anger, and that someone—Cushing, most likely—would soothe his pique and they would return to their debate. Perhaps they wondered if there was something wrong with him, a failure of the heart or brain, and they were already calculating their new place in the line of succession.
“Go,” Franklin said, a whisper this time, one meant only for himself.
The door pulled all the way inward. A rectangle of darkness cut away from the curved plaster the color of clear-skied dusk.
His dead son walked out from the wall.
The expression the boy wore was the same blankness it had shown when he turned to Jane before skipping down the stairs. But with each step he took, his face twitched something new into its composure: a smile, too wide at first, then fixed, shrunk to a mild grin. Slit eyes opened into curious ovals. The stiff steps lubricated into a skip-hop, as if he was pretending to ride a pony. It took only a second or two. The dead doll of a boy becoming the living Bennie.
One by one the heads of the cabinet members turned to look. Franklin hoped they would see only the open door—pulled ajar by a suck of wind from an opened window elsewhere, or perhaps some clerk’s blundering attempt to spy on the proceedings—and not the boy. Because the boy wasn’t there. He was buried in the ground of Concord, a place the assembled called “a lovely spot” the day he was covered with soil. What Franklin was looking at was a conjuring, and thus an affliction limited to him alone.
“And who are you?” Marcy said as the boy stepped into the room.
Franklin stood up as if to rush between Bennie and the still-seated men, but the child stopped him with a glance. Emptily playful, the tiny failures of its facial adjustments leaving it wearing a grotesque mask of “fun.”
It brought a finger, white as a candlestick, to its lips.
Shhhhh.
“Is that—”
Cushing was the only one who recognized the boy in the moment. And with this recognition came its impossibility.
“Oh my… Lord,” the attorney general said, though with a softness that could have been mistaken for a blessing.
The boy trotted directly over to Marcy. It made the old man uncomfortable to be chosen in this way, but he offered up an expression of benevolent interest, the one forged over years on the campaign trail.
Franklin was three steps away from clutching his hands onto the back of the boy’s shirt when he crawled up onto Marcy’s lap.
“Do you have children, Mr. Secretary?”
“Yes, I do.”
The boy slid a hand around the back of Marcy’s neck, pulling him closer.
“Do you like them?”
“Well,” the secretary of state chuckled. “They’re mine. I’m not sure that—”
“No,” the boy said, and pushed the index finger of his free hand into the old man’s mouth. “Do you like children?”
Franklin watched the implications clatter together in Marcy’s mind. The suggestion behind the child’s question, his too-close presence against his belly, the finger pushed past his lips. The wrongness.
Marcy heaved the boy off his legs. It took more effort than it should have, as if Bennie were twice the weight he appeared to be. Yet when the boy’s body hit the floor it bounced and rolled about as if dropped from a great height.
Davis and Guthrie both gasped at once.
The boy stayed there, his legs tangled around each other in a way that wouldn’t seem possible without one or both of them broken, but none of the men went to see if he was all right. They sensed that the child on the floor, still grinning, was unnatural in some way. It wasn’t just the indecency of his question. It wasn’t the way his body ought to be in pain yet showed not the least discomfort. It was the way they could feel how the child knew them. The secrets and shames so well covered they hardly thought of them day to day all pulled up like bile from their stomachs by the briefest connection with his vacant eyes.
“Get out,” Franklin said.
The boy settled his stare on the president, and he felt it too. Exposure. The cowardice that lay behind his relief when his injuries kept him from the Mexican battlefields. The lustful imaginings for his substitute wife. The answered prayer he’d sent up for one son to die instead of the other.
Franklin was first to move. A stride toward the boy that almost resulted in his tumbling to the floor as well, his bad knee screeching at being bent the wrong way. He leaned to the other side, dragging the stiff leg behind him. It was far from the best moment to lay hands on the boy and pull him from the room, his cabinet a witness to whatever struggle might result. But this could be his only chance to capture the creature.
The boy untangled his legs. Jumped to his feet.
“Twenty million souls suffering alone,” the boy said.
It didn’t sound like him, because the words weren’t his. They were Jane’s. Precisely what she’d said to Franklin in their bed, clinging together.
This time, Franklin came at the boy and didn’t stop. It prompted the child to retreat toward the secret door, still open, behind him. But he showed no fear at what Franklin might do if he grabbed him.
The boy looked back at them all when he reached the threshold.
“Won’t you follow, gentlemen?”
Franklin found that his curiosity slowed him.
Follow the boy? To where? Being closest, and standing, allowed Fra
nklin the best vantage to look past Bennie and down the passage. Except it didn’t appear like a passage now, certainly not as it had when he’d opened the door previously. There was no light from the inner office he remembered it leading to, no detectable shape to the walls. It was as if the Blue Room had exposed a portal into the starless heavens, vacant and infinite.
“That’s—” Davis said.
“Pierce’s boy,” Cushing said.
“Come,” Bennie said.
The cabinet members sat in silence. Guthrie alone made a sound, something in his throat that began as a grunt of denial but dwindled to a whine.
The boy turned his back to the room and started deeper inside the wall. They didn’t hear his footsteps because he wasn’t walking, nor floating, but giving himself to the darkness. It reached out to him and he let it take him, detail by detail, color by color, until there was only the shining hair at the back of his head, the white hands.
Franklin went after him.
“Sir!”
A voice behind him. An urgent plea—Marcy’s—for him to stop.
He pulled up when he reached the line between the Blue Room and the doorframe. Or was there something from the other side that nudged him back? An unfelt wind coming from the nothingness requiring his full commitment to let him through?
There was no time to take a second run at it.
As the president stood at the chasm’s edge, the blue door swung into view from within. When it clicked shut his nose was so close to its surface he could smell the recently applied paint, the deep turquoise it had taken three coats to get just right so that Jane might see it as sky.
30
In Concord, just months earlier, when they were still a family, what Bennie loved most was to go on walks with his father through the woods that surrounded the town. Franklin had a naturally long stride and Bennie half ran to keep up. After a time the boy would have to stop for a break, winded from the effort.
“I’m sorry,” Franklin remembered saying on what turned out to be their last walk together. “I forget my legs are longer than yours.”
“That’s true today. But one day mine will be longer.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t you see? I’m going to be tall.”
And he did see it. The height waiting inside the child.
“You can’t wait to be bigger than me,” Franklin said.
“No, Papa. I can wait. I like to wait for things.”
“Why’s that?”
“Thinking of good things is even better than the good things when they come. Because once they do, they’re gone.”
Bennie had reeled at this, as if the wisdom he’d spoken had come from a future version of himself. The world around them took note of it—the breeze quieting, the sun holding the trees’ shadows like charcoal on parchment. What struck Franklin even more than the truth of Bennie’s sentiment was how it spoke to the very moment the two of them found themselves in. That was the good thing. A walk with his boy in an unremarkable New Hampshire forest. He would remember it as such even as the accomplishments he’d long dreamed of, including the presidency, were delivered to him.
Franklin had a glimpse of all this at the time. But what he couldn’t have known then was how desperately he would cling to it later: the towering hickories and the root-ribbed trail and the boy reaching for his hand without embarrassment. What Franklin saw in Bennie was how much better his child already was than he would ever be. Bennie should be the senator, the candidate for anything. He was the natural leader, not his father, because it was his boy who held so firm to the clarity of his nature.
They walked on. The advance of the day—the movement of air, the arc of the sun—resumed. Yet through the almost overwhelming rush of love and the gratitude to Jane for giving him this child, Franklin was nagged by discomposure. They had made their way home before he saw where it came from.
Bennie wished to be like his father so much it shamed Franklin that he was not a better man. Did every father feel this way? It would explain so much. The ones who got into fights to appear stronger, the ones who lied to appear honest, the ones who gave up and ran away.
Bennie was gone now.
But Franklin wouldn’t give up. For the memory of his one good thing, he wouldn’t run away.
* * *
Franklin turned from the door in the wall of the Blue Room. The members of his cabinet were all standing, looking at him, waiting. For what? A reasonable explanation that would ease their minds, or a confession of necromancy, or denial that they’d even seen what they’d just seen. Mostly, they waited to be dismissed.
“That boy,” Franklin started, reconsidered, started again. “That boy is not my son.”
Each of the four men’s mouths moved but their lips remained closed, as if they’d commenced sucking on lemon peels at the same time.
“But he—” Cushing began.
“He looks like our Bennie, but he’s not,” the president said.
“A visitor then?” Guthrie offered.
“Yes.”
“One of Webster’s?” Marcy said.
Franklin shook his head. “Just a visitor.”
They had questions of course. As far as Franklin knew, they always would. But there can be a reluctance to speak of the astonishing in the moments after its occurrence, whether beautiful or terrible in its form. Even these men, politicians, professional talkers, were held speechless by it.
Franklin cleared his throat. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said.
One by one they filed out. He could hear their shoes tap over the tiles of the entrance hall, heard the main door open and close as they collected their overcoats and stepped outside.
Marcy was last. He lingered at the threshold, looking back with an imploring pout, the lower lip trembling.
Franklin knew what he was saying without the man saying it. Something had been exposed about Pierce, just as something had been exposed about Marcy, even if it couldn’t be said precisely what it was in either case. The two men stood in silence in the way of gravediggers standing over the hole before filling it with earth.
“Sir,” Marcy said, with a nod of the head, and left without closing the door.
31
He headed straight from the Blue Room to Jane’s room. But he didn’t have to go as far as that to find her.
“Jeannie?”
She was standing with her back to him, her ear to the door of Bennie’s room. When she heard Franklin’s voice she spun around and put her finger to her lips just as the dead boy had done after coming out from the wall downstairs.
Shhhhh.
He came closer. When she gestured for him to listen he did as she asked.
Voices. A pair of them. One deep, strangely flat. The other the higher pitch of a young boy. The former was doing most of the talking while the other answered with obedient replies.
Yes.
I will.
Yes, yes.
Franklin pulled away. Took Jane’s hand in his. “Is it them?”
Jane nodded at the same time the voices from inside the Grief Room stopped. There was a shuffling as if one or both of them were approaching to listen through the wood just as Jane and Franklin had.
“Come with me,” he said.
He led her downstairs. She attempted to ask where they were going but he refused to answer. They exited by the west door on the ground floor. When the staff stopped to watch them pass Franklin offered a brisk wave but made a point not to meet their eyes.
Once outside, the daylight struck them with a force that knocked all the questions out of them both. Jane slowed to feel it on her face but Franklin urged her on. She wondered if he was leading her away from the residence once and for all. An elopement.
She followed him to the orangery. They entered and carried on to the far end, Franklin asking the gardener he’d spoken with before if they could have the place to themselves for a time.
“Pleasure to have you both,” the old man said, as if an innkeeper
meeting expected guests.
When he was gone and it was only the two of them, instead of rushing into disclosures, Jane and Franklin sat on a bench in silence, breathing in the organic stew of lilies and sheep dung.
“Something’s happened,” Jane said first.
“Sit close. Let me say it in your ear.”
He told her about the cabinet meeting. His failure to sway them to change the course of government, followed by the opening of the secret door. The boy that came out.
“What he said to you, about the twenty million souls,” Jane said after mulling his account. “Are you sure you heard it correctly?”
“I’m certain.”
“But that’s what I said to you.”
“Yes.”
“Which means he was there. So close to our bed.”
“That’s why I brought you out here. So we may speak beyond reach of their ears.”
“We ought to try again,” she said. “Perhaps your men may yet be convinced.”
“It’s too late for that. They are here to carry out their instructions just as I am.”
“Then defy them alone.”
“To what end? A vote that’s soundly defeated by Congress in a week? And they’d be seeking my resignation the week after that.”
Jane smoothed her hands over the soil in a clay pot by her feet.
“You mustn’t leave,” she said.
“I thought you’d be grateful at the suggestion.”
“I would have. Before. But I know now that if you were to go it would only leave Splitfoot here.”
“And with new residents who have no knowledge of him. They would be devoured.”
“You’re right,” she said. “On two counts.”
“Two?”
Jane pushed her hands deeper into the dirt. The coolness felt good. She had the idea that she was planting herself. Soon, in this sun, she would start to grow.
“We can’t singlehandedly alter the policy of the nation with a change of one man’s conscience, even if it’s the president’s,” Jane said. “We were wrong to think it was so, just as we were wrong to think a good deed would cast Splitfoot out of the house in any case. It might quiet him for a time, but he would stay on, wait for new opportunities to come.”