Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

  “Let go of her,” I said. Richard turned and looked at me. “There’s no need for an ambulance. We’ve already been to see a doctor. In Fredericksburg. Dr. Barton.”

  “What did he say? Why didn’t he have her admitted to a hospital?”

  “He did. He took her in and did an EKG on her and ran blood tests. He asked her if she’d been taking any drugs, and she told him Elavil.” I waited to see what effect that had on him.

  “You didn’t say anything about this on the phone.”

  “Doctor Barton wanted to know why somebody had prescribed Elavil for a heart condition.”

  Annie and Broun stood perfectly still, watching him. The room was so quiet I could hear the water from the African violet dripping onto the floor.

  “A mild sedative was indicated for the patient’s insomnia,” he said in his Good Shrink voice. “The record from Annie’s family doctor indicated nothing more than a functional heart murmur, and her EKG confirmed that. There were no symptoms of heart disease, and Elavil is only contraindicated in cases of maximum and long-term dosage. I prescribed a mild dose, monitored the patient carefully, and removed her from the drug immediately when it failed to have any effect on her symptoms.”

  “Her symptoms,” I said. “You mean the dreams?”

  “Yes,” he said. He still didn’t let go of Annie’s wrist.

  “I asked Dr. Barton about the dreams,” I said. “He said he didn’t know what was causing them until he saw her blood tests this morning. They showed traces of Thorazine. He said the Thorazine was probably causing the dreams. He asked Annie who’d prescribed Thorazine for her, and she said nobody. She said she didn’t know what he was talking about, that she’d never taken any Thorazine.”

  “Thorazine was indicated,” he said. “It’s routinely prescribed in cases of sleep disorders.”

  “Dr. Barton said that Thorazine is prescribed for institutionalized mental patients, not for people with bad dreams.”

  “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You still believe she’s having Robert E. Lee’s dreams.”

  “Dr. Barton said it was a crime for a doctor to give a patient a drug without this knowledge. He said a doctor could lose his license for that. Is that true, Richard? Could you lose your license?”

  “You bastard,” my old roommate said, and let go of Annie’s wrist. “I was only trying to help you, Annie. I had a duty as a doctor.”

  “Don’t you talk to me about duty,” Annie said, cradling her arm like a baby against her, “not when you wouldn’t let me do mine.”

  Broun made a sound. His face under the beard was deathly pale. He looked sick, like a writer who had just heard the words he wrote spoken in earnest.

  “Call the ambulance,” Richard said to Broun.

  “No,” Broun said. “She’s having Robert E. Lee’s dreams.”

  “You’ve convinced him, too, haven’t you?” he said to me. “You’re all crazy, you know that?”

  “Like Lincoln?” Broun said.

  “Call an ambulance,” Richard said, and Broun turned and stumbled up the stairs.

  “I told Annie I was going to prescribe Thorazine for her and informed her of its side effects,” the Good Shrink said. “She took the first dose herself, Thorazine will sometimes temporarily impair the patient’s short-term memory.”

  “After the Civil War, Longstreet wrote long, involved explanations of how he hadn’t let Lee down at Pickett’s Charge,” I said, “how it was all Lee’s fault. But it didn’t work. There were too many eyewitnesses.”

  “Is this supposed to be something Robert E. Lee dreamed?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s supposed to be a warning. I have two Thorazine capsules and all those messages you left on the answering machine on tape. You leave her alone or I’ll send them to your boss, Dr. Stone, at the Sleep Institute. I’ll tell him you gave a patient Thorazine without her knowledge. I’ll tell him you gave Elavil to a patient with a heart condition.”

  Broun came down the stairs, carrying the answering machine. He had wrenched it out of the wall. The shredded ends of the wire dragged on the floor beside him.

  “If you still want to call an ambulance, you’ll have to use the phone next door, Richard,” I said, “only I doubt if our neighbor will let you in. Not after she had you arrested once.”

  “You bastard,” he said again. “I’m not going to let you get away with this. I called you, did you know that? To tell you I had a patient who was having terrible dreams and I didn’t know what to do. I called you and you weren’t home.”

  “Did you call me for help or were you trying to establish an alibi?” I said, but he had already slammed the door shut behind him.

  I pulled my coat on. “He may try to follow us,” I said. “He’s parked at least a block away. If we go right now, we can lose him.” I grabbed up Annie’s gloves and thrust them at her.

  “Do you have any money?” I said to Broun. He fumbled in his pockets and came up with a twenty and some change. “Is that all?” I said, shouting at him as if I were trying to wake him up.

  He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket that was still hanging over the bannister with his right hand, still holding the answering machine in the other, and pulled out a wad of bills. He handed it to me and then sat down heavily on the loveseat.

  “Thank you,” I said. I snatched up Annie’s suitcase and hustled her out the door. Broun didn’t answer me. I could see him through the solarium window when I started the car, still sitting there cradling the answering machine against him, like a man asleep.

  The rain was trying to turn into snow. I took side streets as far as Ohio Drive and then turned onto the Memorial Parkway. After we’d crossed the bridge, I looked behind me and then went on past the Washington Memorial Parkway exit.

  “I’m not going to take you to the airport,” I said. “Richard may not be that far behind us,” I went on hastily so she wouldn’t think this was another trap and that I was taking her to a hospital. “I’m going to take you to the Arlington Metro stop. You can take the Metro to the airport, if you want, or to the train station or the bus, and Richard won’t have any idea where you’ve gone.” And neither will I, I thought.

  Annie nodded without looking at me, her gloved hands clasped tightly in her lap. I pulled the car over next to the white stones that marked the entrance to the Metro station and stopped.

  “I had a dream about you. On the way up today,” she said, still looking straight ahead. “I was in my room at home, in bed, propped up against the pillows, and you came in and said, ‘I’ll drive you to Fredericksburg,’ and I wanted to go with you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even answer you. I just shook my head.” She turned to me, her eyes filled with tears. “It was the first time I ever dreamed about you. I’ve dreamed about Richard and Broun, but never you, Jeff. Who do you suppose you were? I was so glad to see you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, though I had guessed almost from the beginning what part I played. “Lee’s doctor maybe? I would drive you to Fredericksburg, you know. Or anywhere at all.”

  Would I? Knowing where the dreams were leading her, would I be able to take her there? Or would I call Richard again? I got out of the car and took her suitcase out of the trunk and put it on the top of the steps. I opened the door for her. She folded a piece of paper, put it in her pocket, and then got out.

  I gave her Broun’s money and all the cash I had. “There’s about five hundred here. That should get you home or wherever you want to go.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “This is the Blue Line. You can take it straight to the airport. If you want Amtrak, change to the Red Line at Metro Center and that’ll take you to Union Station.”

  She bent her head to fumble in her purse and put the money away. “I won’t know what happened to you,” I said. “Promise me you’ll go see a doctor.”

  “After the war,” she said. She took the folded piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to me.

&n
bsp; I nodded. “After the war.”

  She reached up and brushed the hair off my forehead. “I was so glad to see you,” she said. She picked her suitcase up in her left hand, put it down on the wet sidewalk and picked it up in her right, and went down the stairs.

  I went out to the edge of the platform and stood there long enough for her to get away, holding the folded paper and looking up the hill toward Arlington House. It started to snow. I put the piece of paper in my coat pocket and went back home.

  I didn’t look at it until the next day for fear she had written the address of that house with the wide porch and the apple orchard, and that I, like Richard, would try to follow her.

  It was still wet. I unfolded it carefully, so it wouldn’t tear, and read it. She had written in blue proofreader’s pencil, “Tom Tita, Arlington House.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Lee only lasted two weeks after the rainy afternoon in Grace Church. For most of that time he lay in silence or dozed. Outside it rained, and the rivers around Lexington rose till it was impossible for Rob to make it to his bedside. For several nights the aurora borealis lit up the sky, as it had at Fredericksburg. Lee talked very little though he sometimes muttered in his dreams, but when the doctor told him, “You must make haste to get well; Traveller has been standing so long in the stable that he needs exercise,” he only shook his head, unable to speak.

  He died on the twelfth of October, saying, “Strike the tent,” and then moving off to some old battle, leaving Traveller behind. Traveller walked in the funeral procession, his head bent, his saddle and bridle covered with black crepe. Then he was taken home to his stable to wait out the end. Did he dream of Lee? I wonder. Do horses dream?

  When I got home, Broun was still sitting on the loveseat in the solarium. The Siamese had jumped up on his lap, and he had set the answering machine down on the loveseat beside him so he could pet the cat.

  He stood up as soon as I came in, dumping the cat on the floor to come and put his arm around my shoulders. He didn’t ask me what had happened, and because he didn’t, because he didn’t say, “How could you let her go like that? She’s sick. She needs a doctor,” I told him I had taken her to the Metro station, and then I told him everything else.

  He didn’t say, “They’re only dreams,” or tell me any of the theories he had picked up in California. He only said quietly, “It was a terrible war, the Civil War. So many young people … I had no business going to California. Out on a wild goose chase after Lincoln’s dreams when I should have been here.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, and went up to bed even though it was still early afternoon, and slept for two days. When I woke up, an electrician was there, fixing the wires on the answering machine, putting it back in the wall.

  “In case she calls,” Broun said.

  I took the galleys up to New York. When I got back, we started the Lincoln’s dreams novel. I did Broun’s legwork for him, drove him places, looked up obscure facts that didn’t matter to anyone, and dreamed of Annie.

  While we were in Fredericksburg, I had not had any dreams at all, as if Annie were dreaming enough for both of us, but now I dreamed nearly every night, and in the dreams Annie was fine. I dreamed that she had left a message on the answering machine. “I’m fine,” she said. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “Where are you?” I asked, even though I knew it was only a message, that she wasn’t really there. I had never been able to break myself of the habit of replying to people who were not there, and if I could not, how did I think Annie could, Lee whispering to her night after night, telling her his dreams?

  “I’m fine, Jeff,” she told me in the dream. “They’re taking good care of me.” It was not a message. It was really her on the phone, and she was fine, fine. She had gone home to that house with the wide porch and the apple tree and when she got there she had gone to see the doctor. “I thought you were afraid they’d stop the dreams,” I said into the phone.

  “I was, but then I thought about what you said about Tom Tita. What good would it have done for me to follow Lee through the Civil War? I would just have gotten myself killed. My first loyalty was to myself.”

  “That was what you meant in the message,” I said, clutching the receiver. “That was what you meant when you wrote Tom Tita’s name.”

  “Of course,” she said. “What did you think the message meant?”

  “That you were locked in. That you couldn’t get out.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “They’re taking good care of me.”

  We worked on the book all summer. In the fall, The Duty Bound came out, and we went to New York to promote the book. “I’m glad to see Broun looking so well,” his agent told me at the McLaws and Herndon reception. “I was afraid all that running around in California would be too much for him, but he looks wonderful. I also can’t tell you how relieved I am to see that book in print,” she said, jabbing her finger at a stand-up display card of The Duty Bound. “Did you know he called me after the galleys were in and wanted to change the ending? He wanted to have Ben and Nelly get married. Can you believe that?”

  “When did he do that?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. After you brought the galleys up. Luckily, he called me first and not McLaws and Herndon. I managed to convince him it wouldn’t work at all.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Well, I mean, it was obvious from the very beginning she was in love with that boy who died, what was his name?”

  We were in New York till after Christmas, doing autograph signings and talk shows. On the day we got home, while I was next door getting the Siamese cat back from Broun’s neighbor, Broun had a heart attack. It was very small. There was hardly any damage. He was only in the hospital a week, and he seemed more upset about the fact that a battle-ax of a nurse had shaved his beard off than he did about the heart attack.

  “Didn’t you have any symptoms?” I demanded of him. He was lying in the hospital bed, propped up against the pillows.

  “A little indigestion,” he said. “Or what I thought was indigestion.”

  “Didn’t your arm hurt? Or your wrist?”

  “No,” he said. “I thought I’d eaten too much.”

  “Didn’t you dream anything?”

  “I was awake when I had it, son,” he said gently.

  “Before the attack, I yelled.” “What did you dream about?”

  Broun’s doctor pulled me out into the hall. “I know you’re under a lot of stress, but so is he.” He looked at Broun’s chart. “And so am I. I don’t want him having a third heart attack on me.”

  “A third?” I said.

  “Of course,” he said, still frowning at the chart. He looked up and saw the expression on my face. “Why, the old son of a gun! He never told you, did he? It was three years ago,” he pulled back several pages on the chart, “in September. September twenty-eighth. You were out of town, I think. He said he called you.”

  Three years ago in September I had been in Springfield, looking at Lincoln’s tomb and being driven crazy by Broun, and halfway through the trip the calls had stopped, the messages had stopped, and when I got home, he was willing to let me do his legwork for him.

  “How bad was the first one?” I asked.

  “Bad enough to scare him. He was convinced he was going to die. That’s why I believed he’d told you.” He let the pages fall back and tucked the chart under his arm. “Now, I’ll agree he needs yelling at for not telling you, but as his doctor I’m not going to let you back in to see him unless you promise not to mention this heart attack thing to him until he’s in better shape than he is right now. He must have had his reasons for not telling you about the heart attack.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I went back into the room and apologized for yelling at him. “I didn’t have any dreams before my heart attack,” Broun said. “I didn’t have any warning at all.”

  “Annie did,” I said. “The dreams were trying to war
n her. Only she wouldn’t listen.”

  He leaned back against the pillows. “If I’d dreamed I was in a boat before my heart attack, traveling toward a shadowy, indefinite shore, I wouldn’t have listened either. If Lincoln was letting me dream his dreams for him, there is nothing on this earth I would let stop me. Not even somebody I loved.”

  “Even if you ended up having a heart attack? Even if it killed you?”

  “Even then,” he said softly. “Maybe she’s all right. Maybe she went to see a doctor when she got home, like she promised.”

  Broun started back to work on the Lincoln book as soon as he was out of the hospital, in direct defiance of doctor’s orders. “I’m going to finish this damn book if it kills me,” he said, scratching at his unshaven chin. He was trying to grow another beard.

  “Which it will at this rate,” I said. “At least let me do the legwork for you.”

  “Fine,” he said, and sent me to the White House to take notes on the purple-hung Guest Room where Willie Lincoln died and the stairs Lincoln had descended in his dream and the East Room, where Willie’s coffin and then his father’s had lain.

  I was having a new dream now. In it, I dreamed I woke and heard the sound of crying, but when I went downstairs I couldn’t see anyone. There was a guard standing at the door of the solarium, and I asked him, “Who is dead in the White House?” but when he turned around to answer me, it wasn’t the guard at all, it was Annie. She was wearing her gray coat, and she looked beautiful, fresh and rested.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her. “Did you go see a doctor?”

  “A doctor?”

  “A doctor,” I said urgently. “The dreams were a warning.”

  “I know. They were trying to warn us about Broun’s heart attack, but we didn’t understand them. We were looking at all the wrong clues.”

  “Broun isn’t going to have another heart attack, is he?”

  She shook her head. “The dreams have stopped.”