Connie Willis

by Lincoln's Dreams

  “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 ma
king 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.

  Sandburg had known Lewis back in the Chicago newspaper days. He had called him Friend Lewis when he wrote the introduction to Lewis’s Myths After Lincoln. I wondered if Sandburg had forgotten what Lewis wrote about Willie, or it something else had happened between them, something that made Lewis no longer a friend, something that meant they didn’t read each other’s books anymore. And was there a girl in it somewhere?

  But even Lewis, who was a treasure trove of Lincolniana, didn’t say where Willie’s body had been for three long years. Was I supposed to assume that it lay in the East Room all that time, giving Lincoln bad dreams? Or had they buried it in the front lawn of the White House?

  It was a quarter of four. I put the books back where maybe they would be next time I wanted them and called Annie.

  She sounded sleepy, and that reassured me. She hadn’t been standing by the window in her wet coat looking out at the snow, listening to Richard tell her she was crazy. She had been asleep.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Fine,” she said, but slowly, with a question in her voice.

  “Good. I was worried about you. I was afraid you might have caught a chill out at Arlington.” Caught a chill. I sounded like a Civil War doctor.

  “No,” she said, and this time she sounded a little more sure of herself. “Richard fixed me some hot tea and made me lie down. I guess I fell asleep.”

  “Annie, does Richard have you taking anything? Any medication?”

  “Richard?” she said, and that faint note of questioning was there in her voice again.

  “Is Richard there?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, and it was the only thing she’d sounded sure about so far. “He’s at the Institute.”

  “Annie,” I said, and felt like I was shouting to her from the bottom of a hill, “are you taking any medicine, any pills?”

  “No,” she said through a yawn.

  “When you first came to the Sleep Institute, did Richard prescribe anything for you? Any medicine?”

  “Elavil,” she said, and I grabbed my notes on Willie and scribbled it in the margin. “But then he took me off of it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He just took me off of it.”

  “When did he do that?—take you off the Elavil?”

  It took her a long time to answer. “It was after the dreams got clearer.”

  “How long after?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And he didn’t put you on anything else?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Listen, Annie, if you have any more dreams or if you need anything, if you want me to take you somewhere, anything, I want you to call me. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Annie, last night you said you thought you were dreaming somebody else’s dream. Are you sure it was a dream?”

  There was another long wait before she answered, and I was afraid the question had upset her, but she simply said, “What?” as if she hadn’t heard the question.

  “How do you know it’s a dream, Annie? Could it be something that really happened?”

  “No, they’re dreams,” she said, and her words were blurred a little, as if she still weren’t awake.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they feel like dreams. I can’t describe it. They …” She all of a sudden sounded more awake. “What message was I looking for? Was it the message I sent to Hill at Harper’s Ferry?”

  “No,” I said. “On the twelfth of September Lee issued campaign orders for the drive into Maryland. One of them was lost. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but a Union soldier found the order and gave it to McClellan.”

  “There couldn’t have been a hundred and ninety-one copies of it, though,” she said, as if she were trying to convince herself. “Lee didn’t have that many generals. There probably weren’t that many generals in the whole Civil War.”

  I said, “You’ve had a rough day. I don’t want you to catch pneumonia. Go back to bed, and we’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  “If there weren’t a hundred and ninety-one copies, why did I dream that number?”

  “It was Special Order 191. It was addressed to D. H. Hill, the man you saw on the gray horse in your dream. He claimed the message was never delivered.”

  She hung up. I stood there holding the receiver until the phone began beeping. Then I went and stood by the window and looked out at the snow till it got dark.

  It had started snowing again, thick heavy flakes that would cover the graves at Arlington like a blanket. I hoped Annie was asleep and dreaming of something pleasant, a dream without dead Union soldiers in it, a dream without messages.

  She hadn’t asked me about D. H. Hill, and I hadn’t told her. Hill had ridden a gray horse at Antietam. He had been surveying the troops on an exposed knoll when Lee and Longstreet rode up. They dismounted to scan the field, but Hill stayed in the saddle in spite of the artillery fire. “If you insist on riding up there, and drawing the fire, give us a little interval,” Longstreet had said angrily.

  Hill hadn’t even had a chance to answer. The cannonball took the horse’s front legs off, and it plunged forward onto its stumps. Hill had had one foot in the stirrup, and when he tried to get off the horse he had been unable to get his other leg over the croup of the saddle, just the way Annie had described it. Just the way she had seen it. In her dream.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Traveller was a Confederate gray gelding with a black mane and
tail. He was probably not a thoroughbred, though historians have gone to incredible lengths to provide him with aristocratic breeding lines, one of them even claiming he was descended from Diomed, the famous English Derby winner. He did have a thoroughbred’s intelligence and courage and incredible endurance. “He never needs whip or spur,” his owner wrote to Lee, “and will go anywhere.”

  I got up early and went to the library to see what I could find out about Elavil. The drug compendium said it was a fairly mild tricyclic antidepressant with a sedative effect, and that it was frequently used in connection with insomnia. It had an assortment of minor side effects and a couple of major ones. It was contraindicated for patients with heart conditions and those who had shown a previous hypersensitivity. It didn’t say anything about dreaming of dead Union soldiers. In fact, if Richard had had Annie on Elavil she shouldn’t have been dreaming at all. The tricyclic antidepressants increased the amount of time spent in delta sleep and decreased REM sleep, which was the stage most dreams occurred in.

  I asked the librarian what she had on dreams. “Not much,” Kate said. “Some pseudoscience things and Freud’s Interpretation. No, wait, I think that’s checked out.” She hit some buttons on her computer and waited for the book’s status to come up. “Yeah, that’s checked out till April ninth. Do you want to reserve it?”

  “I was really looking for current research.”

  She tapped some more buttons. “We’ve got a few things in the one hundreds, but nothing very up-to-date. If you know exactly what you want, I can get it through interlibrary loan. If not, I suppose the Library of Congress. Have you tried the Sleep Institute? They’ve got a really good reference library.”

  “I’ll take my chances in the one hundreds,” I said.

  Kate was right. There wasn’t much, and what there was was do-it-yourself dream interpretation: “To dream about a house means you are sexually repressed,” that kind of thing. Cats were a symbol of animal instincts, guns of sex, dead bodies of—surprise! —death. Horses with their front legs shot off weren’t mentioned.