Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

  I said, “What dream?” and watched her drop the empty flowerpot. It crashed at her feet.

  “I’ve been having this dream,” she said. “In it I’m at the house I grew up in, standing on the front porch, looking for the cat. It’s snowed, a wet, spring snow, and I have the idea that he has gotten buried in the snow, but then I see him out in the apple orchard, picking his way through the snow with little, high, funny steps.”

  I did not know what was coming, but at the words apple orchard I sat down on the arm of the loveseat, looking anxiously over my shoulder to see if Richard and Broun were coming. There was nobody on the stairs.

  “I called to him, but he didn’t pay any attention, so I went after him.” She was holding the violet like a nosegay in front of her, tearing the leaves off in absent, desperate movements. “I made it out to the tree all right, and I tried to pick the cat up, but he wouldn’t let me, and I tried to catch him and I stepped on something….” She had torn all the leaves off now and was starting on the flowers. “It was a Union soldier. I could see his arm in the blue sleeve sticking out of the dirt. He was still holding his rifle, and there was a piece of paper pinned to his sleeve. Somebody had buried him in the orchard, but not deep enough, and when the snow had started to melt it had uncovered his arm. I bent down and unpinned the paper, but when I looked at it, the paper was blank. I had the idea it might be some kind of message, and that frightened me. I stepped back, and something gave under my foot.”

  There was nothing left of the violet but the roots, covered in dirt, and she crushed them in her fist. “It was the cap of another soldier. I hadn’t stepped on his head, but where the snow had melted I could see him lying face down with his gun under him. He had yellow hair. The cat went over and licked his face like he used to lick mine to wake me up.

  “Whoever had buried them had just shoveled sod over them where they’d fallen, and the snow had hidden them, but now it was melting. I still couldn’t see them except for a foot or a hand, and I didn’t want to step on them but everywhere I stepped I went through to the bodies underneath. And the cat just walked all over them.” She had dropped what was left of the violet and was looking past me at the door. “They were buried all over the orchard and the lawn, right up to the front steps.”

  I could hear somebody clattering down the stairs, and I moved, for the first time that night, as if I were wide awake. I reached past Annie and scooped up a handful of dirt and torn leaves off the floor. When Richard came in with his coat over his arm, we were both bending down, heads together, picking up the shards, and my hands were as dirty as hers.

  I straightened up with a handful of dirt and clay triangles. Did you two figure out what was causing Lincoln’s dreams?” I asked.

  “No. I told you I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to know,” Richard said. He looked past me at Annie. “We’ve got to go. Get your coat.”

  “I’ll get it, I said, and went out to the hall closet.

  Broun came plummeting down the stairs. “Is he still here?”

  I motioned toward the solarium. He hurried in, and I followed with Annie’s coat. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Madison,” Broun said. “That damned People reporter caught me on the way down. I wanted to say …”

  “You asked me my opinion, and I gave it to you,” Richard said stiffly.

  “That’s right,” Broun said. “I appreciate your giving it to me. And maybe you’re right, and Lincoln was heading for a psychotic break, but you have to remember, there had been a number of attempts on his life already, and it seems to me that it would be normal for him to…

  Richard shrugged on his overcoat. “You want me to tell you the dreams are normal? Well, I can’t. A dream like that is obviously a symptom of a serious neurosis.”

  I looked at Annie. She hadn’t moved. She was standing beside me, her hands full of leaves and pieces of flowerpot, with an expression on her face that told me she had heard all this before.

  “Lincoln was in need of immediate professional help,” Richard said, “and I’m not going to stand by and say nothing. It’s my duty as a doctor to …”

  “I think Lincoln is pretty much beyond help even for a doctor,” Broun said.

  “We have to go,” Richard said angrily, buttoning his overcoat.

  “Well, even though we disagree, I’m glad you came,” Broun said, putting his arm around Richard’s shoulder. “I’m just sorry you can’t stay and have some supper. Those shrimp doodads are wonderful.” He led Richard out into the hall.

  I held the gray coat and wondered if I were really asleep and dreaming all this. Annie came and took the coat off my arm, and I helped her into it. “What was the cat’s name?” I said. “In your dream?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not my cat.” She looked down to button her coat, and then looked back up at me. “It’s not my dream,” she said. “I know you won’t believe me because Richard doesn’t. He thinks I’m heading for a psychotic break, and you probably think I’m crazy, too, but it’s not my dream. I’m dreaming it, but it’s somebody else’s.”

  “Your … he’s getting the car,” Broun said, taking in the whole scene.

  “I’m sorry about your African violets,” Annie said. “I was looking at one of them and…”

  “No harm done, no harm done.” He led her to the front door and out, talking the whole time. “I’m so glad you could come to our reception.”

  When he came back, I was on my hands and knees in front of the bookcase, looking for volume two of Freeman. “I had a very peculiar conversation with your roommate just now,” he said. He sat down on the arm of the loveseat and looked at the pile of dirt and flowerpot fragments that had been his violet. He scratched his scruffy beard, looking more than ever like a horsetrader. “He told me that Lincoln’s dream was a symbol for some deep-seated trauma, probably in his childhood.”

  I found The Gray Fox and looked up “Cats,” and then “Lee, love of pets,” in the index. “Well, what did you expect from a psychiatrist?” I said, wishing he would go back to the party so I could find out whether Lee had had a cat.

  “I told him I thought the deep-seated trauma was probably the Civil War, and that it seemed perfectly normal for him to dream about assassinations and coffins in the White House. Did you know Willie’s coffin was put in the East Room?”

  “Did Robert E. Lee have a cat?” I said.

  Broun looked at me. “Lincoln had cats. Kittens. He loved kittens.”

  “Lee, damn it, not Lincoln. When he lived at Arlington, did he have a cat?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and it was the same placating tone he’d used with Richard. “Maybe Freeman says something about a cat.”

  “Maybe it does, but I don’t have a goddamn clue as to where Freeman is. You keep volume one in the attic, volume three under your bed, and volume four you tear up for mulch and use in your African violets. If you had a library like other people instead of this goddamned disorganized mess …”

  “Your roommate said,” Broun went on, “that all the half-buried bodies in the dream showed that Lincoln was obsessed with death.”

  I looked up from the book. He was watching me with his bright little horsetrader’s eyes. “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I picked up the scattered books and started to put them back on the shelf. “I’m going to bed. I’ve got to go out to Arlington in the morning.”

  He stood up then and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t bother with it,” he said. “It can wait. You’ve just gotten home from a long trip, and I know you’re tired. Go on to bed, son. I’ll take care of that mob upstairs.” His hand was still on my shoulder. “Did you get a chance to read that scene I gave you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I had Ben have a fight with his brother over a girl. I wonder how many soldiers did that, enlisted because of some girl?”

  I looked down at the book I was holding. It was the missing volume two. “I don’t know
,” I said, and moved away from him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Robert E. Lee first saw Traveller during the Big Sewell Mountain campaign in western Virginia. He was riding Richmond then, a big bay stallion that had been given to him by a group of admirers in Richmond. The horse Richmond didn’t have the stamina or the disposition for war. He tired easily and squealed and bucked whenever there were other horses around. When Lee was ordered to the south, he didn’t take Richmond. He took a horse called the “Brown Roan,” who later went blind and had to be retired. After Manassas, General Jeb Stuart gave Lee a gentle mare named Lucy Long to spell Traveller. In 1864 Lucy gave out, and Lee sent her behind the lines to recuperate. She was stolen by stragglers and sold to a Virginia surgeon.

  I didn’t wake up till ten the next day, and when I did it was with the idea that the phone had been ringing. It must have been. The message light was on. I turned on the answering machine and listened to the messages while I got dressed. There were two of them. The first was Broun. It had the grainy sound of his car phone. “Jeff, I’m on my way to New York,” he said. “I called my editor this morning. He says it’s too late to add a scene, that they’re already printing the galleys, so I’m taking the scene up to him myself and making sure it gets in. I’ll be back tonight. Oh, and forget about going out to Arlington. I got to thinking this morning, Arlington wasn’t made into an official cemetery until 1864, and Willie died in 1862. We’ll figure out where he was buried later. Stay home and get some rest, son. It’s supposed to snow. Oh, and I straightened up the books.”

  I looked out the window. It had apparently just sleeted enough to put an icy glaze on the streets last night and then stopped, but now it was starting again. There were only a few large flakes, and they were melting before they even hit the sidewalk, but it had started that way in West Virginia, too, and then turned into a blizzard.

  The message was over for a while before the machine and I realized it. Broun had refused to buy a regular thirty-seconds-and-beep kind of machine. “Nobody worth talking to can state his business in thirty seconds,” was what he said, but what he really wanted was to be able to read long passages of the galleys over the phone or have me dictate the research I was doing in Springfield onto a tape that he could listen to and I could transcribe when I got home. He had had a whole elaborate setup built into the wall behind his desk, with a voice-activated tape that could hold up to three hours of messages and all kinds of fancy remote codes and buttons for fast-forwarding through messages and erasing them.

  I pulled on a sweater and waited for the second message. It was Richard. “I’m at the Institute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” He sounded as angry over the phone as he had when he left last night.

  I erased both messages and called Annie at Richard’s apartment instead. “It’s Jeff,” I said when she answered.

  “I just tried to call you,” she said, “but your line was busy. Do you still have to go out to Arlington to do your research? I want to go with you.”

  “I was going out this morning,” I said. “Are you sure you want to go? It’s supposed to get pretty bad.” The snow was coming down faster now and starting to stick to the sidewalk. I could imagine her standing at the phone in Richard’s living room, looking out at it.

  “It isn’t snowing very much over here,” she said. “I’d like to go.”

  “I’ll pick you up,” I said. “I’ll be there in about an hour.”

  “’Don’t come all the way across town. There’s a Metro station right outside of Arlington. I’ll meet you there, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  I got a Styrofoam cup and put what was left of Broun’s breakfast coffee in it to take with me. I had been up half the night, trying to find the answer to Annie’s question about whether Lee had had a cat. It hadn’t been in volume two of Freeman either, or in Connelly’s The Marble Man, I’d found a letter from Lee to his daughter Mildred that mentioned Baxter and Tom the Nipper, but they were Mildred’s cats, and anyway, there was little chance that they had made it through the many moves of the war. Robert E. Lee, Jr., had annotated the letter with the remark that his father was fond of cats “in his way and in their place,” which seemed to indicate that Lee hadn’t had any special cat after all. Nothing I could find in the mess of Broun’s books said anything about the family owning a cat when they lived at Arlington. I had finally had to call one of the volunteers who guided tours at Arlington House. I woke her out of a sound sleep, but even half-awake she knew the answer. “It’s in the letters to Markie Williams,” she said, and told me where to find it.

  The snow turned into something that was half-rain, half-snow, and slicker than either as soon as I pulled onto the Rock Creek Parkway. It took me almost twenty minutes to get past the Lincoln Memorial and across the bridge.

  Annie was waiting on the sidewalk next to the stairs of the Metro station, hunched against the sleet in her gray coat. She was wearing gray gloves, but she didn’t have anything on her head, and her light hair was wet with snow.

  “I’ve already been in this storm once on my way back from West Virginia,” I said as she got in. I turned the car heater up to high. “What say we forget the whole thing and go have lunch somewhere?”

  “No,” she said. “I want to go.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We may not be able to see much of anything, though.” Arlington was always open, even on days like this. It was, after all, a cemetery and not a tourist attraction, but I had my doubts about the house.

  The sleet was coming down progressively harder. I couldn’t even see as far as the Seabees Memorial, let alone back across the bridge. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Why don’t we…”

  “I asked Richard if he’d take me out to Arlington last night. On the way home. And again this morning. He wouldn’t. He says I’m trying to project repressed feelings onto an exterior cause, that I’m refusing to face a trauma that’s so terrible I won’t even admit it’s mine.”

  “Is that what you think?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “How many times have you had the dream about the dead soldiers in the apple orchard?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I’ve had it every night for over a year.”

  “Over a year? You’ve been at the Sleep Institute that long?”

  “No,” she said. “I came to Washington about two months ago. My doctor sent me to Dr. Stone because I was what they call pleisomniac. I kept waking up all the time.”

  “Dr. Stone?”

  “He’s the head of the Institute, but he was in California, so I saw Richard. I stayed at the Institute for a week while they ran all kinds of tests, and then I was supposed to be an outpatient, but the dream started getting worse.”

  “Worse? How?”

  “When I first started having it, I couldn’t remember very much of the dream. The dead soldier was in it and the snow and the apple tree, but it wasn’t very clear. I don’t mean fuzzy exactly, but distant, sort of. And then, after I’d been at the Institute for two weeks, it suddenly got clearer, and when I woke up from it I was so scared I didn’t know what to do.” Her gloved hands were clenched tightly in her lap.

  “Did you go back to the Institute?”

  “No.” She looked down at her hands. “I called Richard up and told him I was afraid to stay alone, and he said to get a cab and come right over, that I could stay with him.”

  I’ll bet he did, I thought. “You said the dream was clearer? You mean, like focusing a camera?”

  “No, not exactly. The dream itself didn’t change. It was just more frightening. And clearer somehow. I started noticing things like the message on the soldier’s arm. It had been there all along, but I just hadn’t seen it before. And I noticed the apple tree was in bloom. I don’t think it was in the first dream.”

  The windshield wipers were starting to ice up. I opened my window and reached around to smack the wiper against the windshield. A na
rrow band of ice broke off and slid down the window. “What about the cat? Was it in the dream from the beginning?”

  “Yes. Do you think I’m crazy like Richard says?”

  “No.” I pulled very carefully away from the curb and onto the wide road.

  I couldn’t see the curving stone gates until we were almost up to them, and I couldn’t see Arlington House at all. You can usually see it all the way from the Mall across the Potomac, looking like a golden Greek temple instead of a plantation, with its broad porch and buff-colored pillars.

  “Robert E. Lee had a cat, didn’t he?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, and turned in at the iron gate that led to the visitors’ center, flashed the pass Broun had that let him drive into the cemetery instead of parking in the visitors’ lot, at a guard in a raincoat and a plastic-covered hat, and drove on up the hill to the back of Arlington House. We still couldn’t see more than a bare outline of the house through the sleet, even after I’d parked the car at the back of the house next to the outbuilding that had been turned into the gift shop, but Annie wasn’t looking at the house. As soon as I’d parked the car, she got out and walked around to the garden as if she knew exactly where she was going.

  I followed her, squinting through the snow at the house to see if it was open to visitors. I couldn’t tell. There weren’t any other cars in the parking lot, and there weren’t any footprints leading up to the house, but the snow was coming down fast enough that it could have hidden them. The only way to tell would be to go up to the front door, but Annie was already standing in front of the first of the tombstones at the edge of the garden, her head bent to look at the name on the wet tombstone as if she wasn’t even aware of the snow.

  I went over and stood next to her. The snow still wasn’t sticking to the grass except in little isolated clumps that melted and refroze, making webs of ice between the blades of grass, but the wind had blown enough snow against the tombstones to make them almost unreadable. I could barely make out the name on the first one.