the end of the war really for the Confederacy, though Broun would fight me on that.
He claimed that Antietam was the decisive battle, that with the failure of Lee’s push into Maryland the war was effectively over for the Confederacy, even though there were three more years of killing left and Lee knew it.
Whether it was or not, and, more important, whether Lee was aware of it, he certainly knew it at Gettysburg a year later, and if anything would have given him bad dreams, it was that misbegotten battle. The high-water mark of the Confederacy. Lee made it all the way into Pennsylvania before the Union army stopped him, and then for three days he unleashed one assault after another that made it look like he could win after all.
On the morning of the third day, Lee met with Longstreet outside a schoolhouse. Longstreet didn’t like Lee’s plan of attack. Later Longstreet claimed he had said, “It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position,” and had considered the matter settled. Lee never blamed anybody but himself for the failure of Pickett’s Charge, but when his aide Colonel Venable said bitterly that he’d distinctly heard Lee direct Longstreet to send up Hood’s division in support, Lee had said, “I know! I know!”
Lee’s plan was to send Pickett’s men directly on a frontal assault at the Union center, and it almost worked. Pickett’s men made it up to the famous bloody angle of a stone wall and held it for almost twenty minutes, without any support at all, in spite of the fact that this time it was Fredericksburg in reverse, Lee’s men in an open field marching toward a defended ridge. But Longstreet didn’t send up the supporting divisions, and they couldn’t hold the wall. When the soldiers began to fall back, Lee rode down to meet them and send them back to Seminary Ridge, speaking encouragingly to nearly every man who passed.
“Try to reform your division in the rear of this hill,” he had told Pickett, and Pickett had said, “General Lee, I have no division.”
Annie went to sleep around ten, the covers pulled up over her shoulders as if she were cold. I called the answering machine, and Richard gave me his new theory, this one about sexual guilt and repressed Oedipal attachments.
I had felt all along that these calls, these theories, were leading somewhere, that they were all part of a pitch to persuade me to bring Annie back, but now I was not so sure. The theories didn’t fit together. Sometimes they even contradicted each other, and he jumped from one to another with the same quiet urgency of a man recounting a dream. He still used his Good Shrink voice, but, listening to him, I had the feeling that it was not me he was trying to convince, but himself.
“I talked to a Jungian psychiatrist today,” Broun said after Richard ran down. He pronounced Jung to rhyme with “hung.”
“He’s got a theory that our subconscious is really a storage bin for everything that’s ever happened in the past. Jung’s collective unconscious, only he says it’s not just common racial memories, it’s everything.”
He sounded excited, agitated. Maybe he
I erased the messages, thinking about what he’d said. If a hormonal imbalance could unlock the collective unconscious, maybe a chemical imbalance could, too, and that was where the drugs came in. It would explain why the dreams had suddenly gotten clearer when Annie was on the Elavil. Maybe the phenobarbital had started to let down some kind of guard in the subconscious, and then the Elavil had completed the process, so that Lee’s dreams came through loud and clear.
If that was the case, then the dreams would gradually lose their power and clarity now that Annie was off the drugs, and the best thing to do was to wait them out till the chemical balance in her brain was restored and the dreams faded away.
I shut off the lights and went back into Annie’s room to wait it out with her, and was asleep in the chair within minutes. When I woke up it was three-thirty by the lighted dial of my watch. Annie was still sleeping peacefully, though she had flung most of the covers off. I thought, with the confused logic of the half-awake, that I must somehow have slept through her dream, but her breathing wasn’t the heavy, almost drugged-sounding breathing she had after the dreams, and my next thought, even more confused, was that I had stopped the dreams simply by telling her what caused them, and went back to sleep.
I must have heard the door slam because when I woke up again I was already halfway to it, only barely glancing at the bed because I knew she wasn’t there. I had it open and was out in the hall in time to hear the outside door close. The outside door that opened on the fire escape.
I ran to the end of the hall and pushed down on the metal bar. The bar gave, but the door wouldn’t open. Annie must be pushing on it from the outside. Or be lying crumpled against it. “Annie!” I shouted through the door, and then stopped. You weren’t supposed to startle a sleepwalker. If they were somewhere dangerous, on a cliff or something, they might fall. I tore back down the hall, down the front stairs, and through the empty lobby to the front door. It was locked, but from the inside. I got it open and raced around to the side of the building.
Annie was standing at the top of the stairs in her white nightgown, looking like a ghost in the gray, indistinct light of dawn. The cat was sitting on the top step, watching her.
“Annie,” I said quietly from the bottom of the stairs, “you’re having another dream.”
She was looking toward the Rappahannock. Fog lay along the line of trees like a gray blanket. “Goodbye, Katie,” she said with a catch in her voice. “Promise you’ll come back.”
“Stay there,” I said, “I’m coming.” I started up the stairs, one hand on the railing and the other held out to catch her if she fell. “What are you dreaming, Annie?”
She half-raised her hand in its full white sleeve as if to wave. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she said, and then buried her face in her hand and began to cry. The cat watched her incuriously.
I stepped onto the landing and put my hand gently on her shoulder. “Annie, can you wake up? You’re having a bad dream.”
She took her hand away from her face and turned to me, her face alight. “No tears at Arlington!” she said brightly, “no tears,” and flung her arms around my neck and sobbed.
“Annie, don’t cry!” I put my arms around her. Sobs shuddered through her. “Honey, oh, don’t cry!”
She clung tighter to me, shivering in the thin nightgown. I patted her back and reached behind me for the door with one hand. I was afraid it would be locked from the outside, and how would I ever get her down these narrow stairs and back inside the inn? The metal bar gave under the pressure of my hand and opened. “Let’s go inside, Annie,” I said. “It’s cold out here, honey. Let’s go back to the room.”
She tightened her arms around me and pressed her face against my neck. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said, and lifted her tear-stained face up to mine, her face full of love and sorrow. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at me. Whoever she was clinging to, begging them not to go, it wasn’t me.
Her nightgown had come unbuttoned at the neck and was pulled away from the long curve of her throat. I could feel the uneven catch of her sobs through the thin cotton of the nightgown. “Annie,” I said, and the pain in my voice brought her awake.
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
