Lincoln’s Dreams

“I had Ben have a fight with his brother over a girl. I wonder how many soldiers did that, enlisted because of some girl?”

I looked down at the book I was holding. It was the missing volume two. “I don’t know,” I said, and moved away from him.

CHAPTER TWO

Robert E. Lee first saw Traveller during the Big Sewell Mountain campaign in western Virginia. He was riding Richmond then, a big bay stallion that had been given to him by a group of admirers in Richmond. The horse Richmond didn’t have the stamina or the disposition for war. He tired easily and squealed and bucked whenever there were other horses around. When Lee was ordered to the south, he didn’t take Richmond. He took a horse called the “Brown Roan,” who later went blind and had to be retired. After Manassas, General Jeb Stuart gave Lee a gentle mare named Lucy Long to spell Traveller. In 1864 Lucy gave out, and Lee sent her behind the lines to recuperate. She was stolen by stragglers and sold to a Virginia surgeon.

I didn’t wake up till ten the next day, and when I did it was with the idea that the phone had been ringing. It must have been. The message light was on. I turned on the answering machine and listened to the messages while I got dressed. There were two of them. The first was Broun. It had the grainy sound of his car phone. “Jeff, I’m on my way to New York,” he said. “I called my editor this morning. He says it’s too late to add a scene, that they’re already printing the galleys, so I’m taking the scene up to him myself and making sure it gets in. I’ll be back tonight. Oh, and forget about going out to Arlington. I got to thinking this morning, Arlington wasn’t made into an official cemetery until 1864, and Willie died in 1862. We’ll figure out where he was buried later. Stay home and get some rest, son. It’s supposed to snow. Oh, and I straightened up the books.”

I looked out the window. It had apparently just sleeted enough to put an icy glaze on the streets last night and then stopped, but now it was starting again. There were only a few large flakes, and they were melting before they even hit the sidewalk, but it had started that way in West Virginia, too, and then turned into a blizzard.

The message was over for a while before the machine and I realized it. Broun had refused to buy a regular thirty-seconds-and-beep kind of machine. “Nobody worth talking to can state his business in thirty seconds,” was what he said, but what he really wanted was to be able to read long passages of the galleys over the phone or have me dictate the research I was doing in Springfield onto a tape that he could listen to and I could transcribe when I got home. He had had a whole elaborate setup built into the wall behind his desk, with a voice-activated tape that could hold up to three hours of messages and all kinds of fancy remote codes and buttons for fast-forwarding through messages and erasing them.

I pulled on a sweater and waited for the second message. It was Richard. “I’m at the Institute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” He sounded as angry over the phone as he had when he left last night.

I erased both messages and called Annie at Richard’s apartment instead. “It’s Jeff,” I said when she answered.

“I just tried to call you,” she said, “but your line was busy. Do you still have to go out to Arlington to do your research? I want to go with you.”

“I was going out this morning,” I said. “Are you sure you want to go? It’s supposed to get pretty bad.” The snow was coming down faster now and starting to stick to the sidewalk. I could imagine her standing at the phone in Richard’s living room, looking out at it.

“It isn’t snowing very much over here,” she said. “I’d like to go.”

“I’ll pick you up,” I said. “I’ll be there in about an hour.”

“’Don’t come all the way across town. There’s a Metro station right outside of Arlington. I’ll meet you there, all right?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

I got a Styrofoam cup and put what was left of Broun’s breakfast coffee in it to take with me. I had been up half the night, trying to find the answer to Annie’s question about whether Lee had had a cat. It hadn’t been in volume two of Freeman either, or in Connelly’s The Marble Man, I’d found a letter from Lee to his daughter Mildred that mentioned Baxter and Tom the Nipper, but they were Mildred’s cats, and anyway, there was little chance that they had made it through the many moves of the war. Robert E. Lee, Jr., had annotated the letter with the remark that his father was fond of cats “in his way and in their place,” which seemed to indicate that Lee hadn’t had any special cat after all. Nothing I could find in the mess of Broun’s books said anything about the family owning a cat when they lived at Arlington. I had finally had to call one of the volunteers who guided tours at Arlington House. I woke her out of a sound sleep, but even half-awake she knew the answer. “It’s in the letters to Markie Williams,” she said, and told me where to find it.

The snow turned into something that was half-rain, half-snow, and slicker than either as soon as I pulled onto the Rock Creek Parkway. It took me almost twenty minutes to get past the Lincoln Memorial and across the bridge.

Annie was waiting on the sidewalk next to the stairs of the Metro station, hunched against the sleet in her gray coat. She was wearing gray gloves, but she didn’t have anything on her head, and her light hair was wet with snow.

“I’ve already been in this storm once on my way back from West Virginia,” I said as she got in. I turned the car heater up to high. “What say we forget the whole thing and go have lunch somewhere?”

“No,” she said. “I want to go.”

“Okay,” I said. “We may not be able to see much of anything, though.” Arlington was always open, even on days like this. It was, after all, a cemetery and not a tourist attraction, but I had my doubts about the house.

The sleet was coming down progressively harder. I couldn’t even see as far as the Seabees Memorial, let alone back across the bridge. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Why don’t we…”

“I asked Richard if he’d take me out to Arlington last night. On the way home. And again this morning. He wouldn’t. He says I’m trying to project repressed feelings onto an exterior cause, that I’m refusing to face a trauma that’s so terrible I won’t even admit it’s mine.”

“Is that what you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“How many times have you had the dream about the dead soldiers in the apple orchard?”

“I don’t know exactly. I’ve had it every night for over a year.”

“Over a year? You’ve been at the Sleep Institute that long?”

“No,” she said. “I came to Washington about two months ago. My doctor sent me to Dr. Stone because I was what they call pleisomniac. I kept waking up all the time.”

“Dr. Stone?”

“He’s the head of the Institute, but he was in California, so I saw Richard. I stayed at the Institute for a week while they ran all kinds of tests, and then I was supposed to be an outpatient, but the dream started getting worse.”

“Worse? How?”

“When I first started having it, I couldn’t remember very much of the dream. The dead soldier was in it and the snow and the apple tree, but it wasn’t very clear. I don’t mean fuzzy exactly, but distant, sort of. And then, after I’d been at the Institute for two weeks, it suddenly got clearer, and when I woke up from it I was so scared I didn’t know what to do.” Her gloved hands were clenched tightly in her lap.

“Did you go back to the Institute?”

“No.” She looked down at her hands. “I called Richard up and told him I was afraid to stay alone, and he said to get a cab and come right over, that I could stay with him.”

I’ll bet he did, I thought. “You said the dream was clearer? You mean, like focusing a camera?”

“No, not exactly. The dream itself didn’t change. It was just more frightening. And clearer somehow. I started noticing things like the message on the soldier’s arm. It had been there all along, but I just hadn’t seen it before. And I noticed the apple tree was in bloom. I don’t think it was in the first dream.”

The windshield wipers were starting to ice up. I opened my window and reached around to smack the wiper against the windshield. A narrow band of ice broke off and slid down the window. “What about the cat? Was it in