Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

  A scrap of paper, a cat, a Springfield rifle. It won’t wash. Dr. Stone.

  “… and in the process of bringing the dream up to the subconscious and then telling it, the dream took on a coherence and an emotional importance it simply didn’t have.” He put both hands on the arms of the chair. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to get back to the Institute.”

  “What if I dreamed I was upstairs in the White House and heard crying but couldn’t see anyone?” I asked. “What if when I went downstairs there was a coffin in the East Room?”

  Broun reached for his cup. Coffee slopped onto his notes.

  “I’d say you’d spent the whole day doing research on Lincoln’s dreams,” Dr. Stone said.

  “Did you dream that?” Broun said, still holding the cup at an angle. More coffee spilled out.

  “No,” I said. “So you don’t think Lincoln’s assassination dream means anything, even though everything in it happened two weeks later? You think it’s all just a matter of what he did that day and what he had for dinner?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Dr. Stone stood up and set his cup on the tray. “I know this probably isn’t the sort of thing you wanted to hear, especially when you’re trying to write a novel. One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my reasearch is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite.”

  You didn’t see her standing there in the snow, I thought. You didn’t see the look on her face. I don’t know what’s causing her dreams, but it’s not random impulses and it’s not indigestion. Annie’s dreams do mean something. There’s a reason she’s having them, and I’m going to find out what it is.

  “You’ve been a great deal of help. Dr. Stone,” Broun said. “I appreciate your giving us so much of your time. I know you’re very busy.”

  He walked Dr. Stone downstairs. I waited till they were almost at the bottom of the steps and then went over and hit the play button on Broun’s answering machine. There still wasn’t any message.

  I tried to call Annie. She didn’t answer. Broun’s cat jumped up on the desk and dipped its head into Broun’s Styrofoam cup and began lapping delicately at the coffee. I put down the phone and picked him up by the back of the neck to throw him off.

  “I take it you didn’t think too much of Dr. Stone’s theories,” Broun said from the door.

  “No,” I said, depositing the cat on the floor. “Did you?”

  “I thought he had some interesting things to say.”

  “About Lincoln’s indigestion or about taking a cattle prod to his patients?”

  “About the real meaning of Lincoln’s dreams being physical.” He sat down heavily in the leather chair. “And about the persistence of dreaming, how we take a lot of unconnected images and make them into one continuous dream.”

  Unconnected images. A carpet slipper, a red wool shirt, a horse with its legs shot off. “I thought it was all a lot of hogwash,” I said.

  “Jeff, are you all right? You’ve seemed upset about something ever since you got back from West Virginia.”

  “I’m just tired. I haven’t caught up from the trip yet,” I said, and then wondered why I didn’t say. No, I’m not all right, I’m worried sick. That young woman you met at the reception is dreaming things she couldn’t possibly know about. I might not be able to tell Dr. Stone, but I could surely tell Broun.

  “Have you been sleeping all right?” He was sitting the way Dr. Stone had sat, his feet flat on the floor and his hands resting on the leather arms of the chair, watching me.

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I thought maybe you … when Richard called from the Institute and wanted to talk to you, I got the idea that maybe you were a patient of his, and then you asked Dr. Stone all those questions about Elavil causing bad dreams. I thought maybe he’d put you on some kind of tranquilizer.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not taking anything. And I’m not having bad dreams.” But Annie was. And now was the time to tell him, to explain my behavior and Richard’s and tell him about Annie’s dreams. The cat made a flying leap onto the desk and right into Broun’s coffee. I dived for the cup and Broun’s notes at the same time. Broun pushed himself up out of the chair and came over to get the cat. I moved the notes out of the way.

  “Broun,” I said, but he had the cat by the scruff of the neck and was putting it out the door. He shut it on its indignant yowl and sat down in the chair again.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” he said. “I was worried about you. Did you know Lincoln had trouble sleeping? After Willie died? I think he must have almost gone crazy.” He was looking past me now, as if I wasn’t even there. “He had Willie’s body disinterred twice so he could look at Willie’s face, did you know that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Poor man. I was thinking about what you said, about dreaming Lincoln’s dreams. That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I said, thinking of Annie. “It would be terrible,” but it was obvious he didn’t hear me.

  “When you were asking all those questions about having Lincoln’s dreams, all I could think of was how wonderful for the book it would be if you were having them,” he said, still not looking at anything.

  “For the book?”

  “Imagine, if you were having Lincoln’s dreams, we’d finally know what he really thought, what he really felt. It’s what every writer dreams about.” He slapped the arms of the chair and stood up. “Jeff, I want you to go to California for me.”

  “No.”

  He was finally looking at me, and his sharp eyes were taking in everything the way they had the night of the reception. “Why not?”

  The phone rang. I snatched it up, knocking the cup of coffee flying, wanting it to be Annie and hoping against hope it wasn’t. I didn’t want to talk to her in front of Broun. A minute ago I had wanted to tell him. I still wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t. He thought Dr. Stone had had “some interesting things to say” about how dreams were only unconnected images. He thought it would be wonderful “for the book” if I were having Lincoln’s dreams.

  He’s not like Dr. Stone, I told myself, or Richard. He’s never been anything but kind to you. If you tell him about Annie, he’ll be as worried as you are, he’ll do anything he can to help her. Maybe, I thought, and maybe he’ll look at her with his bright little eyes and say, “This is what every writer dreams about.” I couldn’t risk it. Not with Annie.

  “Hello,” I said cautiously into the phone.

  “Hi, this is Kate from the library. How do you spell ‘prodromic’? I’ve looked through our stuff, and we don’t have a thing on it, so I’m going to call over to the Library of Congress, but I wanted to make sure I was spelling it right. Is it …” She spelled it for me, and I held the phone, hardly listening.

  I couldn’t tell him about Annie, but I would have to tell him something. I had to talk him out of sending me three thousand miles away from Annie when she might call anytime, when she might need me.

  “That’s the way it’s spelled,” I said to Kate, not knowing whether it was or not: “Thanks.” I hung up and started wiping up the spilled coffee with one of the paper napkins on the tray.

  “I’m determined to find out what caused Lincoln’s dreams,” Broun said, still watching me. “There’s a man in San Diego who’s been working on prophetic dreams.”

  Broun’s notes were soaked. I blotted them with the napkin.

  “I want you to fly out tomorrow and talk to him about Lincoln’s dreams,” he said.

  “What about the weather? They said on the radio this morning that the airport was closed.”

  “Then you can go the next day.”

  “Look, I really don’t see the point of all this running around, I mean, can’t you just call the guy? There’s nothing he can tell me in person that he can’t tell you over the phone, is there?”

  “You can watch him while he says it,” Broun s
aid, watching me dab at the sodden notes. “You can tell whether he’s telling the truth or not.”

  “And what difference will it make if he is?” I said angrily. “Lincoln’s dead, and this guy won’t know what caused his dreams any more than Dr. Stone or Richard did. No matter how many experts you ask, you’re never going to find out what really caused the dreams. You’ve already got plenty of explanations. Pick the one you like the best. What difference does it make?”

  “It made a difference to Lincoln,” he said slowly. “It makes a difference to me.”

  “The way it made a difference to you when Lee bought Traveller? You didn’t need to know that. No matter when he bought him, it was before Antietam. But you sent me chasing all over West Virginia looking for bills of sale, and now you want to send me to California on another wild goose chase.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll go myself.”

  I looked down at Broun’s notes, afraid my relief would show in my face. The sodden pages were matted together. I tried to peel the top sheet off, and half the page came off in my hand. I looked at it. The ink was blurred so badly I couldn’t read what he had written.

  “Look, I just think you should keep a little perspective on things. You got totally wrapped up in The Duty Bound, and look what happened. And now you’re getting obsessed with this.”

  “I said I’d go myself, damn it.” He stood up. “Give me the damned notes before you ruin them. And call McLaws and Herndon. Tell them to wait on the galleys. I’m changing another scene.”

  “You can’t do that,” I said. “They’ve already set the type. What am I supposed to tell them?”

  “I don’t care what you tell them. Tell them I’m obsessed with The Duty Bound.” He grabbed for the notes, and they tore across without any sound. He yanked the torn pieces out of my hand. “Tell them you think I’m a little tetched in the head like Lincoln was after Willie died. Tell them I want to dig up the body to have one last look at it before it goes to press. Like that crazy Lincoln.”

  When I went downstairs to the kitchen to call McLaws and Herndon, he shut the door of his study, and I could hear the uneven stutter of his typing like sniper fire from across the river.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Around Christmas of 1861, during the Carolina campaign, Robert E. Lee bought Traveller for a hundred and seventy-five dollars, adding an extra twenty-five dollars to counteract the falling value of Confederate money. “He has been my patient follower ever since,” he wrote Markie. “He carried me through the Seven Days battle around Richmond, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, the last day at Chancellorsville, to Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, and back to the Rappahannock … to the final days at Appomattox Court House.”

  Broun didn’t ask me to call in the scene this time. He called it in himself the next morning and then left to talk to a Lincoln expert in Georgetown. “I’m leaving for California tomorrow,” he said belligerently. “Did you find out where Willie Lincoln was buried?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going over to the library right now. Do you want me to go get the ticket first?”

  “You can pick it up this afternoon,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said, wishing I could say something that would make him less angry with me. I couldn’t apologize because an apology meant an explanation, and I couldn’t explain. Maybe it was just as well he wasn’t talking to me because then there wouldn’t be any questions either. “What about the galleys?”

  “What about them?”

  “McLaws and Herndon called this morning before you were up. They said they were sending them down Federal Express, they want them back in two weeks at the latest, and no major changes.”

  “You can give them the first reading, and I’ll finish them when I get back.”

  “Which will be when?”

  “I don’t know. A week maybe.”

  I waited till he had left for Georgetown and then went upstairs and made sure the answering machine was set on “message.” I drove over and picked up Broun’s ticket from the travel agency and then went to the library.

  Kate didn’t have the bibliography ready, and I told her I wasn’t in any hurry, I was going to be there awhile. I spent the rest of the day there, looking up information about Willie Lincoln and thinking about Annie.

  She hadn’t called last night. Broun had gone out for dinner, and I had spent the whole evening in his study waiting for her to call, but the phone hadn’t rung even once. By ten o’clock I had come to the conclusion that Richard was somehow keeping her from using the phone, but this morning I didn’t really believe that.

  Richard had made it plain he didn’t want me talking to her, but he was hardly going to have the phone disconnected or tie her up to keep her from answering it. She was his patient, not his prisoner, and she had disobeyed him before. He hadn’t been able to keep her from going out to Arlington. He wouldn’t be able to keep her from calling me either, if she really wanted to.

  If she really wanted to. Maybe she didn’t want to. She had seemed almost uninterested when I called her and offered her my services. What made me think she wanted to hear about Special Order 191 any more than she wanted to hear about traumas in the subconscious? She hung up on you, I told myself, and she’s still at Richard’s. You don’t need Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to tell you what that means. She doesn’t want to talk to you. So stop calling her and find out what the hell they did with Willie Lincoln.

  I didn’t believe that either, but I pulled out every book on Lincoln and tried to concentrate on the research. I couldn’t find a word about Willie’s burial, I found out what had happened to the pony he’d been riding “in bad weather” when he came down with whatever it was that killed him, though. Several months after Willie’s death, the White House stables caught fire. Lincoln ran across the lawn and leaped a boxwood hedge to save it, but he was too late. The guards hurried him back into the White House, afraid the fire had been started by an assassin to lure him out. Willie’s pony was burned alive.

  Every hour or so I went outside to the pay phone and called the answering machine, but there weren’t any messages. By two o’clock I had run out of change and had to ask Kate for a dollar’s worth of quarters. “I’ll have the bibliography ready for you in a few minutes,” she said.

  I went out and called the answering machine. Broun’s agent had called, wanting to know why in the hell Broun was still making changes. She’d just talked to McLaws and Herndon and they’d had to reset the type for the galleys. They were talking about charging Broun for the extra plates.

  I called Annie.

  “I’m glad you called,” Richard said. “I wanted to apologize for my outburst the other day.”

  “I want to talk to Annie.”

  “She’s asleep right now,” he said, “and I don’t want to wake her up. I know I was out of line the day before yesterday. I was just so upset about her condition. She was obsessed with the idea that she could obtain factual verification for her dream.”

  He sounded completely different from the man who had warned me to keep away from Annie. His voice was calm and professional. “It’s a common phenomenon, but a dangerous one. The patient attempts to distance threatening dream images in his dreams by believing they have an objective reality of their own.”

  I recognized the voice now. He had worked on it all through medical school. The voice was one of the psychiatrist’s most important tools, he had told me when he was studying psychoanalysis. The proper voice could be used to obtain the patient’s trust, inspire confidence, and convince the patient that the psychiatrist had his own best interests at heart. I had told him I didn’t care what it could do, just not to use it on me.

  He was using it now.

  “By convincing herself that the house in her dream is Arlington House,” he said, “she is trying to protect herself from the latent material in the dream. The half-buried dead man becomes a Union soldier instead of the image of her own personal trauma, the cat becomes a real cat instead of the symb
ol of her need to uncover the repressed memory that’s causing the dreams.”

  “The cat is a real cat. His name’s Tom Tita. He got left behind when Lee moved out of Arlington.”

  “You’re confusing manifest content with latent content,” he said, inspiringly, compassionately. “We all dream real things, objects and people we’ve seen, things we’ve read about or seen in the movies, memories. They make up the visible content of our dreams. But the subconscious puts those real people and objects and memories to its own uses. It’s a process called dream precipitant conversion. Let’s say Annie had a cat as a child.”

  “She never had a cat. And she didn’t see this cat, either, or read about it someplace. It’s Tom Tita.”

  “I’m sure she was convinced of that when she insisted on going to Arlington, and that was why I objected to the trip. But I was wrong. The trip produced a catharsis, a breakthrough. She realized the house in the dream was really her own house, and that the half-buried soldier was a symbol of her own repressed guilt.”

  “What’s the cat a symbol for?” And what about her bandaged hands? I was about to say when I realized that Richard, calm and inspiring and compassionate, hadn’t said a word about the second dream. And what did that mean? That she hadn’t told him? Or that she didn’t want to believe what I had told her and had chosen to accept Richard’s explanations: repressive guilt and manifest content and dream precipitant conversion. Terms that meant no more than bilious fever and rheumatic excitement and were as much help to the patient.

  “I want to talk to Annie,” I said.

  “I’ll let her know you called as soon as she wakes up,” the Good Shrink said. “I have to warn you that she may not want to talk to you. She identifies you with her rejection of her psychosis.”

  I hung up on him and went back inside to Lincoln, who had had terrible dreams, too. But nobody had tried to convince him the East Room wasn’t the East Room. Nobody had told him the corpse with the black cloth over its face was a symbol for repressive guilt or a neural impulse chosen at random by his hormones. Nobody had asked him what he’d had to eat before he went to bed.