Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

  Her eyes focused on me, frightened or surprised. “Where am I?” she said, and looked bewilderedly at the stairs and the fog-shrouded Rappahannock. “Did I have another dream?”

  “Yes,” I said, disengaging her hands gently from my neck. I stepped back and down a step, almost onto the cat. “Do you remember it?”

  “I was at Arlington,” she said. She looked down at her unbuttoned nightgown. “What did I do?—when I was asleep?”

  I shoved down the bar of the door and it opened. “You did a little sleepwalking, that’s all.” I motioned her through the door, standing back, not touching her. The cat stood up and sauntered after her, and I shut the door in its race and then jammed the door down into its lock position and followed Annie into the room.

  She was standing with her head bent, buttoning up her nightgown. I locked the door and put the chain on, which was what I should have done in the first place. If I had, none of this would have happened.

  “You said you were at Arlington in the dream,” I said. “Was it the same dream as before?”

  “No.” She took her blue robe off the bedpost and put it on. “I was standing on the porch with the waitress from the coffee shop, the one with the red hair, and she was getting ready to leave.” She cinched the tie belt of the robe and sat down on the bed, holding the robe closed at the neck with one hand. “We were waiting for the carriage. There were a lot of suitcases piled up on the porch. I didn’t want her to go.”

  “I got that much,” I said, thinking of her arms around my neck, of the beautiful curve of her throat. “Why did you say, ‘No tears at Arlington’?”

  “I didn’t. He …” She frowned and looked past me. “We were standing on the porch and then …” She leaned forward as if she were trying to reach something, though her hand remained fastened on the collar of her robe.

  “Why don’t we talk about this in the morning,” I said. I stood up and pushed the green chair over against the door. “This probably won’t stop you if you sleepwalk again, but it’ll slow you down long enough for me to hear you.” I balanced the volume of Freeman on the arm. It would fall off if she tried to move the chair.

  “Jeff,” she said, clutching the blue robe light against her neck. “I’m sorry I … about all this.”

  I wanted to shout at her, “I’m not Richard. I’d never take advantage of you while you were asleep, for God’s sake,” but I wasn’t sure that was the truth.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You were dreaming,” I said, and went into my room and shut the door.

  My collar was wet from Annie’s tears. I took off my shirt and put on another one and then went over and stood by the window, waiting for it to get light and thinking about Richard. “I wasn’t trying to hit on her, it just happened,” he had said when I accused him of taking advantage of Annie. “I was trying to help her.”

  “That’s no excuse,” I said out loud, and didn’t know if I was talking to Richard or myself.

  When it was light enough to read, I picked up volume one. I had left volume four, the one with the index in it, out on the chair for a sleepwalking alarm, but I didn’t know what to look for anyway, except for the reference to Arlington. If the dream had really taken place there, then this dream was from before the war, which meant my carefully worked-out theory was shot to pieces and I could start over, and volume one was as good a place to start as any.

  I read till eight-thirty and then went out my bedroom door and over to the coffee shop and had breakfast. The redheaded waitress was there. “Your name wouldn’t be Katie, would it?” I asked her when she refilled my coffee cup.

  “No,” she said disapprovingly, as if she thought I was trying to flirt with her in Annie’s absence. “It’s Margaret. Did you guys make it out to the battlefield yesterday?”

  “No,” I said. Maybe we should have, I thought. Maybe then Annie would have dreamed about Fredericksburg again, and I would have known what to tell her when she woke up.

  “We were standing on the porch at Arlington,” Annie had said. “The waitress was leaving and I didn’t want her to go.” Who could Lee have had visit that he wouldn’t want to go home? I didn’t know much about Lee’s life outside the war. All the research I had done for Broun had been about specific battles, and I was not even sure what family and friends Lee had outside of his son Rob, whom he had sent back into battle at Antietam, and the cousin, Markie Williams, who had gone back through enemy lines to fetch the Lees’ belongings from Arlington and found the cat.

  Who would Lee have flung his arms around, have cried over? The answer was nobody. The men who had been in the war with Lee described him almost uniformly as “grave and kind” and “showing no sign of his emotions.” One of his biographers had nicknamed him “the marble man,” and all of them said he was devoted solely to his duty. He never talked about what was troubling him, never wept, not even over Stonewall Jackson. When the war was over, he never spoke of it.

  He had paid dearly for that self-control. He had died of a heart attack, the controlled man’s disease, and he had had bad dreams about the war up to the very end. He had told Hill to come up when he was dying, and then, at the very end, said, “Strike the tent.” But he hadn’t cried or clung to his family, even on his deathbed.

  What if this wasn’t one of Lee’s dreams at all? What if now that the barriers to the collective unconscious were down, Annie would start dreaming other people’s dreams?

  Annie came over at a little before ten, looking like she hadn’t slept either. She was wearing a high-necked blouse buttoned all the way up.

  “I don’t have any idea what your dream was,” I said. I dog-eared the page I was on and shut the book. “You’re sure it was at Arlington?”

  “Yes. I was standing on the porch. The cat was there, and the apple tree. Its leaves had turned. It must have been in the fall. I’m sure it was Arlington. I mean, it’s always my house, the house I grew up in, but it stands for other houses.” She shook her head as if that weren’t the right word. “It feels like other houses. I think Lee must have to use the images I have in my mind to make the dreams out of, and then he makes them stand for other things. It’s the same with the people. I think he must choose the person who’s most like the person he knew….”

  The redheaded waitress bustled over and took Annie’s order, apologizing for not having seen her right away and filling both our coffee cups to the very brim.

  “Like the waitress?” I said after she left.

  “Yes. It was the waitress, but it wasn’t her really.”

  “You called her Katie. Do you know her last name or what her relationship to Lee was? Was she a friend of his, a relative?”

  “No, she was a friend of …” She picked up her spoon and stirred her coffee. “I just remembered something about the dream,” she said. “That never happened before.”

  “What?”

  “The waitress … Katie and I were standing on the porch saying goodbye, and I didn’t want her to go. We were both crying, and laughing at the same time because neither of us had a handkerchief, and then all of a sudden I was out by the apple tree and walking up to the house. You know how sometimes in a dream you’re one person and then you’re somebody else, only you’re still the first person, too? That’s how this was. I was walking up from the apple orchard, too, and I was still on the porch saying good bye to Katie. I had on my white nightgown, and she was in her waitress uniform, and we were both crying, and I went up on the porch and said to them, ‘No tears at Arlington!’ and laughed, and gave Katie my big handkerchief to blow her nose on.”

  “Do you know who the girl on the porch was?” I asked. “The girl who was you?”

  “No. But coming up from the apple orchard I was Lee.”

  Well, at least the Pandora’s box of the whole world’s dreams hadn’t been opened yet, and she was still dreaming Lee’s dreams, even if I couldn’t place this one. “And so then this girl, whoever she is, flung her arms around Lee’s neck and started to cry?”<
br />
  “No.” She put her coffee cup down and stared into it. “He … I … Lee came up on the porch,” she said slowly, “and said, ‘No tears,’ and all of a sudden I felt that I knew what was causing the dreams.” She looked up at me. “I was myself in the dream right then, not Lee or the girl in the white nightgown. I was myself. And I knew what was causing them. I knew why I was having the dreams.” She put her hand up to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “Poor man,” she said softly. “Poor man.”

  It had been Annie with her arms twined around my neck, after all, even though it wasn’t me she clung to. “Do you still know?” I said, wanting to reach across the table and comfort her, but not daring to even touch her. “Do you remember what it was that was causing the dreams?”

  She wiped her eyes with her paper napkin. “No. I woke up and found myself hanging all over you. I was so ashamed that I’d been sleepwalking and that my nightgown was half off. I was afraid I’d tried to kiss you or something.”

  You didn’t try to kiss me, Annie, I thought. I wasn’t even there. “You didn’t try to kiss me,” I said.

  “And then when I tried to remember the dream, I couldn’t …” Her voice trailed off again the way it had the night before. After a minute she shook her head. “Jeff, I think we should go back to Arlington.”

  That one had come right out of left field. “We can’t go back,” I said, stammering in my surprise. “Richard’s there.”

  “I know, but when I went there before, it helped.”

  Helped her to dream the horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, I thought. I could see the look of terror on her face as she stood had there in the snow, looking down at the bodies on the lawn. I didn’t want to subject her to that again, even to solve the puzzle of the dreams.

  “We’re only going to be here a couple more days. I need to see the vet again and finish up my research at the library for Broun.” These were useless excuses. I could obviously call the vet from D.C, and the only research I’d done since I’d been here had been on Lee, not Lincoln, but Annie wasn’t listening to me. She was leaning forward, as if she could almost reach out and touch the meaning of the dreams.

  “The dreams have something to do with Arlington,” she said in that inflectionless voice she used to recite the dreams. “And the yellow-haired soldier. And the cat. Nobody knows what happened to them.” She looked up at me. “Did Lee have a daughter?”

  “He had several, I think,” I said, relieved that she had changed the subject. “I know he had at least one. Agnes, I think her name was.” I stood up. “Go ahead and finish your breakfast. I’m going to go get my notebook and then we’ll go to the library and see what we can find out about Agnes.”

  I went back to the room and gathered up the two volumes of Freeman that were by my bed. Annie had left the chair close to the door. Volume four was on the seat. I pushed the chair back where it belonged so the maid wouldn’t think we were trying to steal the furniture and picked up the book.

  Annie was standing at the cash register talking to the redheaded waitress when I got back. I hoped she wasn’t pitching the battlefield again.

  “The weather’s supposed to turn this afternoon,” the waitress said. “Big cold front moving in.”

  Good, I thought. Maybe well be snowed in here.

  We walked down to the library. The librarian glared at me when I came in carrying my stack of books, as if she thought I’d taken them the day before without checking them out. Annie borrowed a piece of paper and a pen from me and said she was going back down to the reference section.

  “I’ll be in biographies, where we were yesterday,” I said.

  I looked up “Lee, daughters of.” He had had three other daughters besides Agnes: Mary, Ann, and Mildred. Since I had no way of knowing which one was in this dream, I used the only other clue I had. An hour into the index references under Arlington, I found what I was looking for.

  In the fall of 1858, Katherine Stiles, a friend from Georgia, had come for a visit. When she got ready to leave, Lee had found her and his daughter Annie weeping together. “No tears at Arlington!” he had told them. “No tears!” His daughter Annie.

  I looked up “Lee, Annie Carter (Robert E. Lee, daughter of)” in the index and started going through the page references. On March second, 1862, Lee had written her: “My Precious Annie, I think of you all, separately and collectively, in the busy hours of the night, and the recollection of each and every one whiles away the long night, in which my anxious thoughts drive away sleep. But I always feel that you and Agnes at those times are sound asleep, and that it is immaterial to either where the blockades are or what their progress is in the river.”

  There it was, the connection I’d been looking for. I had tried to come up with all kinds of complicated rationales for why Annie was having the dreams—Richard’s drugs and chemical imbalances and Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams. It had never occurred to me that Annie might simply be having the dreams because Lee had called out her name in his sleep.

  The sharp-faced librarian was leaning over me. “I see you brought your own books with you today,” she said in a voice with a surprisingly gentle tone and a marked Virginia accent. “I’m afraid our Civil War materials are very limited. Most people do their research out at the National Park Service Library.”

  “The Park Service?” I said.

  “Yes. It’s out at the Fredericksburg battlefield. When I saw you in here yesterday I wondered if you knew about it, but I didn’t like to interrupt your work. All the main source materials are out there. Do you know how to get there?”

  Yes. March across an open plain to a defended ridge. “Yes. Thank you.” I gathered up my stack of Freeman. “Do you happen to know when they’re open?”

  “Nine to five,” she said in that impossible Southern belle voice. “The battlefield itself is open until dark, I believe.”

  I went and found Annie, who was in the encyclopedias, surrounded by the Ls. “I found what I needed. Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  The librarian was standing at the front desk looking as forbidding as ever. I hustled Annie past without even telling her thank you, for fear she would say something to Annie about the battlefield, and suggested we walk downtown and get something to eat. “I saw a drugstore on the way up that had a soda fountain, believe it or not,” I said.

  “I’m not very hungry,” Annie said.

  “Well, then something to drink. A lemonade or something.”

  The drugstore did have a fountain, though it was pretty decrepit-looking. The faded pictures of ice cream and grilled cheese sandwiches and root beer floats looked like they’d been up since the Civil War, and there was nobody behind the counter. A balding pharmacist was filling prescriptions in a booth at the back, but he didn’t look up, even when we sat down on two of the plastic stools.

  “I’ll go ask if the fountain’s open,” I said and started toward the back, but before I got there the phone rang and he answered it. I waited for him to look up, reading the labels on the medicines. Half the rack was devoted to sleeping pills: Sominex, Nytol, Sleep-Eze. Richard would have felt right at home.

  The pharmacist cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered, “Be right with you.”

  I nodded and went back up to the front. Annie was looking at the rack of postcards next to the counter. I hoped to God they didn’t have one of Arlington.

  “The pharmacist said he’ll wait on us as soon as he gets oft the phone.” I leaned over her shoulder to see the postcard she was holding. It was a photograph of Lee’s tomb at Lexington. The marble statue was of Lee asleep on his camp cot in his dress uniform and boots, with a blanket draped over him. One arm lay at his side, the other was folded across his chest. “I think I know what’s causing the dreams,” I said. “The girls on the porch were Katherine Stiles and Annie Lee.”

  She put the postcard back in the rack with infinite care. “Annie Lee?”

  “Lee’s daughter. You were ri
ght about it being one of his daughters. Annie didn’t want her friend to leave. Both girls were crying, and Lee told them, ‘No tears at Arlington.’”

  Annie sat down at the counter. “No tears,” she said and put her hands on the volume of Freeman, one over the other.

  “Don’t you see what this means? The dreams aren’t meant for you. Lee was thinking of his daughter, and through some freak of time, the message got sent to you by mistake. I don’t know how. Maybe you heard your name being called down in the collective unconscious or something.”

  “Mistake,” Annie said, and shook her head. “He’s trying to tell me something. That’s what the paper on the soldier’s sleeve is, only I can’t read it. It’s a message of some kind.”

  “But not to you,” I said. “You were right in more ways than one when you said they weren’t your dreams. They belong to Annie Lee. Her father was sending them to her.”

  “There are messages in all the dreams except this last one,” Annie said. “There’s the message that the Union soldier was carrying when he got captured at Fredericksburg, and the message about Jackson’s arm being amputated. And Special Order 191.”

  “And the reason you can’t make out the messages is because they weren’t meant for you. They were meant for Annie Lee. She’d recognize Katherine Stiles and she’d remember that day at Arlington and Tom Tita. She’d know what all of it meant. They’re her dreams, Annie, not yours.”

  The pharmacist came bustling up to wait on us and tell us a long and involved story about Lila who usually took care of the front for him but who had broken her foot. “Messing around with horses at her age,” he said without explaining what she’d been doing. He stuck two paper cones into metal bases. “She should have known better.” He squeezed lemons into the paper glasses. “You folks tourists?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “We’re here for a few days.”

  He held the glasses under the soda water siphon one at a time, stirring the lemonades with a long-handled spoon. “You been out to the cemetery yet?”