the dream from the beginning?”
“Yes. Do you think I’m crazy like Richard says?”
“No.” I pulled very carefully away from the curb and onto the wide road.
I couldn’t see the curving stone gates until we were almost up to them, and I couldn’t see Arlington House at all. You can usually see it all the way from the Mall across the Potomac, looking like a golden Greek temple instead of a plantation, with its broad porch and buff-colored pillars.
“Robert E. Lee had a cat, didn’t he?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, and turned in at the iron gate that led to the visitors’ center, flashed the pass Broun had that let him drive into the cemetery instead of parking in the visitors’ lot, at a guard in a raincoat and a plastic-covered hat, and drove on up the hill to the back of Arlington House. We still couldn’t see more than a bare outline of the house through the sleet, even after I’d parked the car at the back of the house next to the outbuilding that had been turned into the gift shop, but Annie wasn’t looking at the house. As soon as I’d parked the car, she got out and walked around to the garden as if she knew exactly where she was going.
I followed her, squinting through the snow at the house to see if it was open to visitors. I couldn’t tell. There weren’t any other cars in the parking lot, and there weren’t any footprints leading up to the house, but the snow was coming down fast enough that it could have hidden them. The only way to tell would be to go up to the front door, but Annie was already standing in front of the first of the tombstones at the edge of the garden, her head bent to look at the name on the wet tombstone as if she wasn’t even aware of the snow.
I went over and stood next to her. The snow still wasn’t sticking to the grass except in little isolated clumps that melted and refroze, making webs of ice between the blades of grass, but the wind had blown enough snow against the tombstones to make them almost unreadable. I could barely make out the name on the first one.
“John Goulding, Lieutenant, Sixteenth New York Cavalry,’” Annie read.
“These aren’t the soldiers who were originally buried here,” I said. “Those were all enlisted men. Officers were buried on the hill in front of the mansion.”
The second gravestone was covered with snow. I bent and wiped it off with my hand, wishing I’d worn gloves. “See? ‘Gustave Von Branson, Lieutenant, Company K, Third U.S. Vermont Volunteers.’ Lieutenant Von Branson wasn’t buried here till 1865, after Arlington had become a national cemetery.” I straightened up, rubbing my wet hand on my jeans, and turned around. “Then Commander Meigs had the enlisted men moved to—”
Annie was gone. “Annie?” I said stupidly and looked down the row of tombstones, thinking maybe she had gone past me, but she wasn’t there. She must have gone into the house, I thought. It must be open today after all.
I walked rapidly back along the gravel path and up the slick steps onto the porch. The wind was blowing snow up onto the brick-tiled porch and against the buff-colored pillars so they looked almost white.
I tried the door and then pounded on it. “Are you open?” I shouted, trying to see in through the windows. There weren’t any footprints on the porch except mine, but I kept on pounding for another full minute, as if I thought Annie might have gotten locked in, before my rational self told me she’d probably gotten cold and gone back to the car, and I went back around the house to see.
She wasn’t in the car, and the gift shop was locked up tight, and I gave up all pretense that I wasn’t worried and went tearing back to the front of the house to look down the hill at the lawn where the bodies had been buried.
The wind had picked up in the time it took me to get to the car and back, and I couldn’t see more than a few yards down the hill. “Annie!” I shouted.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear her if she answered, but I shouted again, ready to take off down the hill, and then I caught a glimpse of gray moving between trees on the far side of Arlington House and took off running after her. She must be on the Custis Walk, the wide cement sidewalk that came up from the road below. It made a wide curve around the hill so the view of the house wouldn’t be spoiled, and I wondered as I ran if that was why they had moved the bodies, too, because they had spoiled the view.
The walk was hardly snowy at all, protected as it was by the big trees that were planted all along its length, and I took the cracked, uneven steps two at a time, trying to catch up with her, and found myself suddenly at the curved wall and marble terrace of the Kennedy Memorial. The eternal flame burned on the grave in the center of a circle of rough, smoke-charred stone, melting the snow around it as it fell.
I looked back up the hill. The snow was blowing almost horizontally across the hill and I couldn’t see Arlington House, but I could see Annie. She stood halfway up the hill behind a low wall, looking down at the snow- covered lawn where nothing was buried anymore. I must have gone right past her, missing the turnout in my headlong pitch down the stairs. She didn’t see me, standing there looking helplessly up at her, or the eternal flame that seemed to flinch away from the wet flakes of snow falling on it, but I could see her clearly in spite of the snow and the distance between us. I could see the expression on her face.
She had looked frightened last night, telling me her dream, but it was nothing compared to the terror in her face now. I could see them, the yellow-haired soldiers with their arms flung out across the snowy grass, their rifles still under them, and the ink on the scraps of paper pinned to their sleeves beginning to blur as the snow hit the paper and melted. I could see all of it, even the cat, reflected in Annie’s face, and I knew I had had no business bringing her out here.
“Annie!” I yelled, and sprinted up the steep slope, my shoes slipping on the icy grass. “Hold on!” I shouted as if I thought she might fall. “I’m coming!”
I scrambled over the pebbled cement wall. “I lost you,” I said, trying to get my breath. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said, still looking down the hill. “Tell me about Robert E. Lee.”
The shoulders of her coat were covered with snow. Her hair was wet past curling. She must have been standing there the whole time I was looking for her.
“I had no business bringing you out here,” I said. “You’re going to catch your death of cold. Let’s go back to the car.”
“Did he ever come back here?”
“I know a great place just across the bridge. Big fireplace. Great coffee. We can talk about Lee there.” I took hold of her arm. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
She gave no indication that she even felt my hand on her arm. “Did he come back here after the war?”
“No,” I said. “He saw it once. From a train window.”
She nodded as if I had confirmed something she already knew.
“Let’s at least go up on the porch of Arlington House. We’ll be out of the wind there.”
“He was a good person, wasn’t he? They always say that, that he was a good person, don’t they?”
I wanted to get her in out of the snow and out of her wet coat and sopping shoes and in front of a fire so she wouldn’t catch pneumonia, but I was never going to get her to budge until I had answered her questions. I let go of her arm. “He was a good person, I guess, if you can call anybody who directed the slaughter of two hundred and fifty thousand men good,” I said. “He was brave, dignified, forgiving, kind to children and animals. Everybody loved him, even Lincoln.”
“His soldiers loved him,” Annie said. She had taken off her gloves and was twisting them in her hands.
“Yes,” I said. “One time at Cold Harbor, a column of his soldiers saw him resting under a tree and passed the word that ‘Marse Robert’ was asleep. The whole column went past him practically on tiptoe so they wouldn’t wake him up. His soldiers loved him. His horse loved him.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand men,” she said. “If he was a good man, how could he bear that, all those young boys? He wouldn’t ever be able to get over it, would he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe that’s why he can’t sleep. Because of all those boys.” She turned to look at me. “This is the house in my dream. In the dream it looks like my house, but it’s not my house. It’s this house. And it’s not my dream.” She turned and looked back down the hill at the Kennedy Memorial. The eternal flame, burning inside the circle of blackened stone, looked like a soldier’s campfire. “Tell me about the cat.”
“Did you ever have a cat? When you were a child?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she said. She had dropped both gloves. Her hands, flat on the low rough wall, were red and wet.
“No.”
