Lincoln's Dreams (6 page)

Annie turned and looked out the side window at the graves she couldn’t see. “I want to go home,” she said.

L
ee didn’t buy Traveller “in the mountains of Virginia in the autumn of 1861,” as he wrote his cousin Markie Williams after the war, but he thought of the horse as his from that meeting on, calling him “my colt” when he saw him again in North Carolina and going out to the stables to visit him. The hostler complained that he was “always pokin’ ’round my horses as if he meant to steal one of ’em.”

Broun had called again, from New York, and left a message on the machine. The weather was even worse to the north. He hadn’t been to McLaws and Herndon yet, but he’d seen his agent, and she’d hit the roof about the scene. She’d told Broun that the galleys had already gone to press and there was no way they’d be willing to stop the presses for a scene Broun’s editor hadn’t even okayed, but Broun was going to try anyway. He’d be home tonight if the weather let up. Otherwise, he’d come back tomorrow morning.

“I want you to call your friend Richard and see if he knows anything about prodromic dreams.” He spelled the word, and then, as if he knew what he was asking was impossible, he said, “Or better yet, call Kate at the library and see if you can get a bibliography on them. And see if you can find out
where Willie Lincoln’s buried. Lincoln dreamed about Willie after he died. I’m determined to run this dream thing to ground.”

I looked at the books lying jumbled on the shelves under the African violets. Broun must have been at them again after he straightened them up. There was a biography of Lincoln lying open on top. I rescued a Freeman from the mess and then put it down again.

I wondered what Annie was doing. I hoped she had gotten out of her wet clothes and taken a hot bath, had something to eat, gone to bed, but I had an image of her standing, like myself, looking out at the snow, still in her gray coat, dripping all over the carpet like I was, and beginning to shiver.

I picked up the biography of Lincoln and went up to the study to put it away. The phone rang.

“I want you to stay away from Annie,” Richard said.

“Are you asking me as her doctor or her boyfriend?”

“I’m not asking you at all. I’m telling you. Stay away from her. You had no business taking her out to Arlington.”

“She asked me to drive her out,” I said. “She told me she asked you to take her, and you refused. So I figure you had your chance.”

“Annie’s emotionally unstable. By taking her out there, you could have sent her into a complete psychotic break.”

“Like that nutso Lincoln?” I said. “You told Broun old Abe was heading for a psychotic break because he’d dreamed, of all things, about his own assassination. Are you trying to tell me that anybody who dreams about the Civil War is crazy?”

“She’s not dreaming about the Civil War.”

“Then where in the hell did the Union soldiers come from?”

“You did this, didn’t you? While I was upstairs talking to Broun, you were filling her head with a lot of nonsense about soldiers being buried in the front
lawn out at Arlington, encouraging this neurotic fantasy of hers. You told her Robert E. Lee had a cat, didn’t you?”

“He did have a cat.”

“And as soon as you told Annie that, she told you the cat in her dream was exactly like Robert E. Lee’s cat, didn’t she?”

I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of Annie clutching the African violet and saying, “Did Robert E. Lee have a cat? A yellow cat? With darker stripes?”

“During dream recall the dreamer’s extremely suggestive,” Richard said. “Anything that’s told to the dreamer then can influence his memory of the dream. It’s called secondary elaboration.”

“Like telling her she’d shot somebody with a cap pistol?” I said. “The Springfield rifle had a percussion cap, did you know that? It looked just like a kid’s cap pistol. The Springfield rifle was used in the Civil War.”

“Did you tell her that?” he said, sounding almost frightened. “You had no business telling her that. You’re interfering with her therapy. As her psychiatrist, I have a duty to …”

“To what? Hit on your patients?”

“I wasn’t trying to hit on her, damn it. It just happened. I was trying to help her. She was afraid to be alone at night. It just happened. Damn it, you’ve seen her.”

I’d seen her, standing in the solarium in her gray coat saying, “You won’t believe me either.” I would have driven her out to Arlington right then, in spite of the snow, if she had asked me to. I would have scaled the locked gates and broken into the attic with an ax to look for Lee’s lost cat. I would have done anything to help her. Help her. Not take advantage of her fear and her helplessness.

“So you told her she was crazy and then climbed on top of her?” I said. “Is that how you helped her?”

“Keep away from her. You’re interfering with her therapy.”

“Is that what you call taking your patients home
and fucking them when they’re too scared and tired to say no? What other therapies are you using, Doctor? Have you thought about drugging her so she’ll cooperate?”

He waited so long to say anything that even Broun’s patient answering machine would have switched off. I waited.

“You know what’s really ironic,” he said bitterly, “I tried to call you last week, but you weren’t there,” and hung up.

I looked out at the snow some more and then called the clinic to find out if Richard had phoned me from there. His secretary said, “I’m sorry. He’s not in right now. Can I take a message?”

“Will he be in at all today?”

“Well …” she said as if she were looking at an appointment book. “He has a general staff meeting at four, but that may be canceled because of the weather.”

I didn’t wait for her to ask for my name. “Thanks. I’m a friend of his from out of town, and I’ve got to catch a plane in about five minutes. I just thought I’d give him a call while I was in Washington.”

The phone rang as soon as I pressed down the button. I had the crazy idea that Richard had been listening in on the call and was going to threaten me again, but it was Broun.

“I didn’t make it up here with the last two pages of that damned scene,” he said. “It’s probably on my desk. Can you look for it?”

I rummaged through the pile on his desk. He had stuck it in Randall’s
Lincoln the President.
“It’s right here,” I said. “Do you want me to Federal Express it?”

“There’s no time for that. They’ve got the book all set up to print. If these changes don’t go in right now, they don’t go in at all. You’ll have to read it over the phone. McLaws and Herndon are set up to record your call at this number.” He gave me the number.

“Are you going to try to come home tonight?”

“No. It’s a real blizzard up here,” he said, and then seemed to catch something in my voice. “Are you all right?”

No, I thought. I’ve just had a conversation I would never have believed I’d have with my old roommate over a girl I’ve just met, and I want you to come home and tell me she’s not crazy. I want you to come home and tell me I’m not crazy. “I’m fine,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

He still sounded worried. “You got my message this morning, didn’t you? You didn’t go out to Arlington in this mess?”

“No,” I said. “The weather’s terrible here, too.”

“Good,” he said. “I want you to take care of yourself. I thought you looked kind of peaked last night.” He paused, and I could hear voices in the background. “Listen, they’re getting impatient on this end for that scene. Get some rest, son, and don’t worry about anything till I get back.”

“I’ll call it in right away,” I said.

I hung up and then wished I hadn’t. What would Broun say if I called him back and told him I’d gone out to Arlington after all, and with somebody who’d dreamed about the battle of Antietam and Lee’s lost cat?

He would say, “There’s a logical explanation for this,” and I had already told myself that—that and a lot of other things. I had gone through every argument there was last night, one after the other, the way I had gone through Broun’s books looking for Tom Tita.

They were only dreams. She was ill. She was crazy. It was all an elaborate scam so she could get close to Broun. There was a logical explanation for the dreams. She had read about the cat somewhere. She’d been to Arlington as a child. It was all a joke. She’d been put up to it by Richard. It was some kind of dopey Bridey Murphy phenomenon. It was just a coincidence. Lots of people dreamed about yellow tabby cats. They were only dreams.

There was no point in calling Broun back. He
wouldn’t be able to add any new arguments to that list. Worse, he might not even try to convince me there was a logical explanation. Fascinated as he was by Lincoln’s dreams right now, he might say, “Has she ever dreamed she saw herself in a coffin in the East Room? Do you think you could try to get her to dream Lincoln’s dreams?”

I called the number Broun had given me for calling in the scene, and they put me on hold. I read the scene over while I was waiting.

“You can begin recording now,” a woman said, and I heard a click and then a dial tone. I called again, but the line was busy, so I set the machine to redial the number every two minutes, plugged in the auxiliary mike, and read the revised scene onto the answering machine:

The picket fire slowed up toward dark, and Malachi went back into the woods a little way and built a cookfire.

“What you Rebs havin’ for supper over there?” a voice called from across the river.

“Yankees,” Toby said, and then ducked as if he thought they’d shoot at the sound. There was laughter from across the river, and another voice called, “Any of you Rebs come from Hillsboro?”

“Yeah, and we are on our way to Washington.” Toby shouted back. He put his gun down and leaned on it, “Myself I hail from Big Sewell Mountain, What you want to know ’bout Hillsboro?”

The voice across the river shouted, “I am looking for my brother. His name’s Ben Freeman, You know him?”

Toby stepped forward in plain sight to say something funny, Ben stood up and fired across the river. There was a rapid volley of rifle fire, and Toby dived for the ground, his arms around his gun. Ben walked into the woods and sat down by Malachi’s fire. Malachi didn’t say anything, and after a minute Ben said, “I don’t think we should go talking to the enemy that away.”

Malachi stirred the fire and hung a can over it to boil the coffee in. “How’d you and your brother come to be on opposite sides of this thing?”

“We just did,” Ben said, staring at the can.

Toby came up to the fire and squatted down in front of it, “You and your brother fight over some girl?”

“We didn’t fight,” Ben reached for his rifle and laid it across his lap, “He just one day signed up, and I knew I had to, too, and there we was, enemies.’

“Me, I was drafted,” Toby said, “I bet there was a girl in it somewheres, you signing up thataway.”

“You keep on like that, you might get yourself shot,” Malachi said mildly, “setting yourself up for a target that way.”

I rewound the tape and waited. The call-completed button came on. I picked up the phone and gave the editor the remote code so she could receive the recorded message without redialing and waited again while she set up a recorder on her end.

“We’re all set here,” she said.

“Call me again if it doesn’t work,” I said, and hung up.

It was two-thirty. The snow looked like it had let up a little. Richard should be able to make it to his staff meeting. If he wasn’t sitting by the phone making sure I didn’t talk to Annie.

I picked up Randall’s
Lincoln the President
. Maybe he knew where Willie was buried. If he knew, he wasn’t telling, but he did say what Willie had died from. It was something called bilious fever, and God only knew what that was. Typhoid probably, though that was already a disease with a name in 1862, and a lot was made of his having caught a cold from riding his pony in bad weather, so it might have been a simple case of pneumonia.

Finding out what people died of a hundred years ago is almost impossible. Letters written by the grief-stricken relatives say that the daughter or son died of “milk fever” or “brain fever” or frequently just “a fever,” and even that is something. Sometimes the patient simply died, “having progressed weaker and more sickly through the winter till we held out little hope.”

Doctors’ accounts are no better. They diagnose agues and heavy colds and “diffusion of the heart.”
Robert E. Lee, who had almost certainly suffered from angina throughout the war and died of a heart attack, was variously diagnosed as suffering from rheumatic excitement, venous congestion, and sciatica. The modern diagnosis had been pieced together only because somebody thought to write down the symptoms. Otherwise, nobody would have the slightest idea what he died of.

At any rate, Willie Lincoln “took cold” and died of pneumonia or typhoid or possibly malaria—whatever it was was probably contagious, because his brother Tad was sick, too—or something else altogether, lay in state in the Green Room, and then was moved to the East Room for the funeral

The funeral was well documented, though I had to put down Randall and rummage through the mess in Broun’s study to find the details. The government buildings were closed on the day of the funeral, which irritated Attorney General Bates, who commented that Willie had been “too much idolized by his parents.” Lincoln, his son Robert, and members of the Cabinet attended, and Mrs. Lincoln didn’t. The Reverend Dr. Gurley performed the service, Willie was bundled into a hearse, and then, like Tom Tita the cat, dropped out of sight.

Randall stopped cold after the funeral; everyone else I read quoted Sandburg, and Sandburg said blithely that Willie’s body had been sent back west for burial. It had, but not until 1865. I was sure of that. Lloyd Lewis had chronicled every detail of Lincoln’s funeral and the long train trip to Springfield, including Willie’s coffin, which lay in front of his father’s in the funeral car, so it wasn’t “sent back west” for over three years, and Sandburg, of all people, should have known that.