Lincoln's Dreams

  I thanked her for giving me the message and hung up the phone. Then I went and stood by the window, looking out at the Rappahannock. My precious Annie.

  When Annie woke up, I said, as casually as I could, “The weather’s supposed to get worse tonight. Maybe we should go on up this afternoon.”

  “I thought you said tomorrow,” she said.

  “I did, but I don’t want to get caught in a blizzard the way I did on my way back from West Virginia.”

  She stood up, still cradling the arm. “What about the galleys?”

  “We can stop somewhere for lunch along the way and finish them off. There are only a few pages left.”

  She was looking at the tangled heap of blankets. “What happened?” she said. “Did I have another dream?” She turned to me, her face innocent and trusting, as if this dream were like all the others and I would say it was Antietam or The Further Adventures of little Hen. There was nothing in her face to show she had realized there was something terribly wrong, that with the surrender the dreams were supposed to be over. Over.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I pushed the blankets aside and laid her open suitcase on the bed. “You muttered something about being cold a couple of times. It was cold in here. I put some more blankets on you and I wrapped you up in the bedspread.”

  “I’m still a little cold,” she said, and shivered. She began taking things out of the closet and putting them in the suitcase, and I noticed that now that she was awake she was using both hands, but she moved a little stiffly, as if her back hurt.

  “I’ll go check us out downstairs,” I said.

  “Wait a minute. What about Dr. Barton? Weren’t you going to wait till he got back?”

  “He called,” I said. “His sister said their father never mentioned any dreams.” I shut the door and went down the stairs, thinking how easy that had been, as easy as emptying a capsule into her food. For her own good.

  I went across the street to the phone booth in the coffee shop and called the hospital. “I have a friend who’s sick,” I said, and then stopped. I would never get her to a hospital. They would want to know the name of her doctor, they would have a thousand forms and while I was filling them out she would call a taxi and disappear.

  I called the Sleep Institute and asked for Dr. Stone. “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “Dr. Stone’s in California. Can I take a message?” I called Broun’s hotel in L.A. He had checked out. I asked the clerk whether Broun had mentioned where he was going, and he repeated, “Mr. Broun has checked out.”

  He had checked out, and I didn’t know where his autograph party was being held today or who the neurologist was he was going to see on Monday, and he wouldn’t be home till Tuesday, which was three days from now.

  Annie insisted on having lunch at the coffee shop so she could say goodbye to the redheaded waitress, but she was not there. Her little girl was sick, the manager told us. “Tell her goodbye for me,” Annie said and went on reading galleys as if we were not now cut off from everyone, the rear guard destroyed at Sayler’s Creek, Sheridan already at Appomattox Station, and Meade in the rear and coming up fast. Grant already writing the terms of surrender.

  “No,” Nelly said when he told her, and he could hear the desperation in her voice, but this time he was the cause of it and there was nothing he could do. “The army won’t take you. You can’t even march.”

  “I’m walking pretty good,” Ben said. “Mebbe they won’t take me now, but there’s a time when they will and be glad of me.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I gotta. I don’t know why. It’s the same as when I signed up. I just gotta.”

  “I will never know what happened to you,” she said.

  “I been thinkin’ on that,” he said. He pulled a piece of folded paper out of his shirt pocket. “Friend of mine told me to put my name and my kin in my shoe, but that didn’t do no good. The boot was shot clean off and the paper with it. I want you should keep this.”

  ‘“What good will that do?”

  Ben thought of her sitting by Caleb’s bed, holding his dead hand. “After the war’s over, you show them this paper and you point at one of them bodies and say, ‘That’s him,’ and they’ll put my name on a grave and write my kin, so’s they’ll know what happened to me.”

  “All right,” she said.

  After he was gone she opened up the paper and read it. “Toby Banks,” it said. “Big Sewell Mountain, Virginia.”

  Annie stopped.

  “I did have a dream,” she said. “I remember it now. I think I was in our church, the Presbyterian church on Main Street back home, and they were taking up the collection, only it wasn’t a church service. It was a meeting of some kind.”

  A vestry meeting. At Grace Church.

  “I don’t remember very much of it. It wasn’t like the other dreams.” Some of the panic came back in her face as she tried to remember. “It was cold. I remember thinking I should have worn my other coat and wishing they’d stop arguing so I could go home.”

  They had been arguing over a raise of fifty-five dollars for the minister. The meeting had gone on for three hours, and finally Lee had said, “I will give that sum,” just so it could be over. Lee had only worn his military cape, and he walked home through the chilly rain.

  The family was waiting for him at the tea table. He sat down heavily on the sofa, cradling his left arm, and his wife said, half-joking, “Where have you been? You’ve kept us waiting a long time,” and asked him to say grace. He stood up and looked as though he were trying to say something, and then collapsed onto the sofa.

  “What is it?” Annie said.

  “It’s probably Dunker Church at Antietam. Let’s go.”

  “I didn’t say goodbye to the cat.” She insisted on going around to the outside steps. It wasn’t there, and the scraps of chicken were half-buried in the snow. “What if something happened to it, Jeff?” Annie said, rubbing her wrist.

  “Nothing happened to it. It’s holed up someplace nice and warm, in an attic full of mice maybe. There’s no sense waiting around for it to come back. Come on. Let’s go.”

  She slept the whole way up as if she had been drugged. She didn’t even wake up when I stopped at a filling station just outside Woodbridge. It was raining there, a chilly, autumn-feeling rain that might turn to snow any minute.

  I went inside and called the answering machine again. “Pay dirt,” Broun said. “I knew I was on the right track.” I hadn’t erased the messages. I listened to the whole message repeat itself, trying to pick up some clue to where Broun was.

  Broun’s agent said, “I told McLaws and Herndon the galleys would be in by Monday at the latest. If you can’t reach Broun, they’ll have to go in as is.”

  “You have to call me immediately,” Richard said. I had hung up on him before, but now I listened to the message hoping that Broun had called again to tell me where he was, afraid to fast-forward for fear I’d go right over it and miss it. “I just got the test results back from the lab. There’s a problem with the EKG. I don’t know for sure what it is. Have you noticed any chest pains? Any pains in the wrist or the back or down the arm? If it’s unstable we could be looking at a myocardial infarction anytime. You’ve got to come back immediately.” There were no more messages. The machine ran on to the end and then switched off by itself.

  Broun’s West Coast agent’s number was busy. I bought a cup of coffee to go and went back out to the car. Annie was still asleep, curled up in the passenger seat with her left arm cradled against her body. Her short hair was brushed back off her flushed cheeks. I took the lid off the Styrofoam cup, put the cup between my knees, and started the car. Annie shifted slightly and brought her other arm up to support her left arm. “Strike the tent,” she said.

  I turned off the car. After a while I opened the door and poured the coffee out onto the ground and went back inside and called Richard.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After the surrender, Le
e was offered the job of president of a little college in Lexington. He rode up on Traveller to arrange for a home for his family. “He starts tomorrow,” his wife wrote, “on horseback because he prefers it that way and besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard-fought battle.”

  In Lexington he rode Traveller every day, stopping to give rides to little girls and to talk to the students. Lucy Long, the mare that had been stolen, was found and bought back, and one of Lee’s daughters would accompany him on the mare when he exercised Traveller. As time went on Traveller’s hard trot fatigued him more and more, and when he went on a speaking tour, he took the train. “Tell him I miss him dreadfully and have repented of our separation but once,” Lee wrote his wife, “and that is the whole time since we parted.”

  I took Annie to Broun’s. “We can take the galleys over to Federal Express later,” I said. “This stuff’s going to turn into snow if we go any farther north. I’m not driving up to New York tonight. I need to check for messages and look at the mail.”

  I had told Richard to park several streets over so Annie wouldn’t see the car, but the front door wasn’t locked and Broun’s Siamese was crouched on the bottom step. My first thought was that it had somehow gotten locked in when we left for Fredericksburg, but then I saw that the mail was neatly stacked on the hall table and that there was a jacket hanging over the bannister. Annie was standing in the door of the solarium with her gray coat and her gloves still on, and her left arm still cradled in her right, looking at the African violets. They had been watered—there was muddy water standing in puddles on the table.

  “Is that you, Jeff?” Broun said, and came clattering down the stairs. He was wearing a black overcoat that looked like he’d slept in it. “Thank God!” he said, and hugged me. His beard hadn’t grown at all in the week we’d been gone, and the rough stubble scratched my ear. “Are you all right? I called every motel in Fredericksburg, but nobody had you registered.” He pushed me out to arm’s length and peered at me with his sharp little eyes. “You got Richard’s message then?”

  “What message?” I said. I pulled away from him, and shrugged out of my coat. “I’m fine, now that the damn galleys are finished. What a mess! Transposed chapters, missing chapters, the works. I finally called Annie here and talked her into coming down to help me finish them. You remember my boss, don’t you, Annie?” I said. I draped my coat over the newel post. “The man who is responsible for all our misery these last few days? Broun, you remember Annie?”

  “Yes, of course,” Broun said, and shook hands with her.

  “Hello,” she said gravely. I couldn’t read her face at all.

  “It’s freezing out here in the hall,” I said. “Didn’t you turn the heat up? Let’s go in the solarium.” I took Annie’s arm and led her into the room. “Good, it’s warmer in here. Annie, let me take that wet coat.”

  Broun came and stood in the doorway. “Why didn’t you tell me you were sick, Jeff?” he said. “I thought there was something wrong that night you got in from Springfield. Why didn’t you tell me you were having chest pains? I would have canceled my trip. Have you been to see a doctor?”

  “The records from the family doctor show a problem with the EKG,” Richard had said. “Have you noticed any chest pains?” Broun had thought the message was about me, had flown home to help me, but it was too late. I looked at Annie. She had taken her gloves off and had backed up until she was against the table that held the African violets. She stood there twisting her gloves and watching me, waiting to hear what I would say.

  “I’m not the one who’s sick,” I said. “Annie is. I brought her home to put her in the hospital.” I took hold of her hands. “I called Richard,” I said. “He’ll be here any time.”

  She stood very still for a moment, as though she were going to speak, and then lurched forward, the way Lee had when Traveller bolted, the gloves still in her hands.

  “You’re suffering from angina,” I said. “That’s what’s making your wrist hurt. Lee had angina all through the war, pains in his shoulder, along his arm, in his back. He died of a heart attack. The dreams are a warning. Like Lincoln’s dreams. You’ve got to see a doctor.”

  “And so you called Richard.”

  “Yes.”

  She sat down on the couch. “You promised,” she said.

  “That was before I knew the dreams were killing you. I’m doing this for your own good.”

  “Like Richard,” she said, twisting the gloves in her lap.

  I knelt beside her. “Annie, listen to me, the dream you had this morning, it wasn’t about Antietam. I lied to you. The meeting you dreamed was at Grace Church in Lexington. Lee went to that meeting and sat there all afternoon in the cold and then walked home in the rain and had a heart attack! I’m not going to let that happen to you!”

  “I have to do this.” She twisted the gloves. “I have to see it through. Please try to understand,” she said, gravely, kindly. “I can’t leave him. I promised to have his dreams. Poor man … I have to try and help him. I can’t leave him. He’s dying.”

  “He’s not dying, Annie!” I shouted. “He’s dead. He’s been dead over a hundred years. You’re holding on to the hand of a corpse. You can’t do anything for him! Don’t you see that?”

  “I promised.”

  “And I made some promises, too, but I’m damned if I’m going to let you die for the sake of a goddamned answering machine! That’s what it is, some kind of biological prerecorded message that switches on when you’re going to have a heart attack and leaves a message for you to call the doctor.”

  “No, they’re not,” Annie said. “They’re Lee’s dreams.”

  “Lee’s dreams,” Broun said. He took hold of the door jamb and leaned against it as if he couldn’t stand.

  “They’re prodromic dreams, Annie! They’re caused by the angina!”

  Broun took a step toward Annie. “Are you having Robert E. Lee’s dreams?” he said in a labored, uncertain voice, as if he could not get his breath.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” Annie said.

  Broun groped blindly behind him for a chair and sat down heavily. “Lee’s dreams,” he said.

  “Annie, don’t you understand?” I said. “You’re in danger. I have to get you to a hospital.”

  “I can’t. I promised.”

  “What did you promise? To march up to the Bloody Angle and get yourself killed? You’re not one of Lee’s soldiers! His soldiers had to stay with him. They’d have been shot for deserting.”

  “That isn’t why they stayed,” Annie said.

  It was true, barefoot and bleeding, they still hadn’t deserted him, not even at the end. We’ll go on fightin’ for you, Marse Robert.

  “Lee’s soldiers knew when they signed up they could get killed. You didn’t. You didn’t sign up at

  “I did sign up,” Annie said. “That day we went to Shenandoah. I realized then that I couldn’t leave him, that I had to stay and help him have the dreams.”

  “That day we went to Shenandoah you didn’t know you had angina!”

  “Yes, I did.” She put the gloves down on her lap. “I figured it out that morning in the library. My wrist hurt, and I thought maybe it was a side effect of the drugs I’d been taking, so I looked it up. It said Elavil was contraindicated for patients with heart conditions.”

  “Elavil?” I said stupidly.

  “A year ago when I went to my doctor for the insomnia, he told me I had a minor heart condition.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have taken you to a doctor.”

  “I couldn’t go to a doctor.” She looked at me. “The dreams are a symptom. If you cure the disease, the symptoms go away. And I can’t leave him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said again.

  She didn’t say anything. She sat with her hands in her lap.

  “Because I would have tried to stop the dreams,” I said for her. Like
I was doing now.

  The doorbell rang. Broun put his hands on the arms of the chair and made a motion to get up, then sat down again watching Annie. She stood up. Her gloves fell to the floor, unnoticed. “You promised,” she said.

  “I’m doing this for your own good,” I said, and opened the door to Richard.

  He didn’t have a coat on. His sweater and jeans were wet clear through. His hair was wet, too, and he looked tired and worried, the way he had the night of the reception when he was still my old roommate, still my friend.

  “Where is she?” he said, and swept past me into the solarium.

  Annie had backed into the table holding the African violets and was standing there, her hands at her sides. She had knocked one of the violets over, and muddy water dripped off the edge of the table onto the floor.

  “Thank God you’re all right!” he said, and took hold of her wrist. “I’ve called the hospital, and they’ll have a room ready when we get there. Are you feeling any pain?”

  “Yes,” she said, and looked across the room at me. Broun stood up.

  “Where? In your arm?”

  “No,” she said, still looking at me. “Not in my arm.”

  “Well, where then? Back, jaw, where? This is important!” he said angrily, but he didn’t wait for her answer. He turned to look at Broun, and as he did he pulled Annie with him, her arm coming up smartly, like a corpse’s.

  “Call an ambulance,” he said.

  “No,” Annie said, to Broun, not to me. “Please.”

  I had thought I could do it. She had already lived through that other surrender. I had not thought this one would be so bad. But that surrender had been different. Lincoln had told Grant to “let ’em up easy,” and Grant had. He hadn’t taken Lee prisoner at Appomattox. He hadn’t even demanded Lee’s sword. He had arranged for rations to be distributed to the men and for the officers to keep their horses, and then he had let Lee go.

  I looked at Broun standing there in his black overcoat, his arms hanging at his sides as if he were overcome with fatigue or sorrow, and then back at Richard. I could have surrendered to Lincoln, I thought. I could have surrendered to Grant. But not to Longstreet. Not to Longstreet.