scene. She’d told Broun that the galleys had already gone to press and there was no way they’d be willing to stop the presses for a scene Broun’s editor hadn’t even okayed, but Broun was going to try anyway. He’d be home tonight if the weather let up. Otherwise, he’d come back tomorrow morning.
“I want you to call your friend Richard and see if he knows anything about prodromic dreams.” He spelled the word, and then, as if he knew what he was asking was impossible, he said, “Or better yet, call Kate at the library and see if you can get a bibliography on them. And see if you can find out where Willie Lincoln’s buried. Lincoln dreamed about Willie after he died. I’m determined to run this dream thing to ground.”
I looked at the books lying jumbled on the shelves under the African violets. Broun must have been at them again after he straightened them up. There was a biography of Lincoln lying open on top. I rescued a Freeman from the mess and then put it down again.
I wondered what Annie was doing. I hoped she had gotten out of her wet clothes and taken a hot bath, had something to eat, gone to bed, but I had an image of her standing, like myself, looking out at the snow, still in her gray coat, dripping all over the carpet like I was, and beginning to shiver.
I picked up the biography of Lincoln and went up to the study to put it away. The phone rang.
“I want you to stay away from Annie,” Richard said.
“Are you asking me as her doctor or her boyfriend?”
“I’m not asking you at all. I’m telling you. Stay away from her. You had no business taking her out to Arlington.”
“She asked me to drive her out,” I said. “She told me she asked you to take her, and you refused. So I figure you had your chance.”
“Annie’s emotionally unstable. By taking her out there, you could have sent her into a complete psychotic break.”
“Like that nutso Lincoln?” I said. “You told Broun old Abe was heading for a psychotic break because he’d dreamed, of all things, about his own assassination. Are you trying to tell me that anybody who dreams about the Civil War is crazy?”
“She’s not dreaming about the Civil War.”
“Then where in the hell did the Union soldiers come from?”
“You did this, didn’t you? While I was upstairs talking to Broun, you were filling her head with a lot of nonsense about soldiers being buried in the front lawn out at Arlington, encouraging this neurotic fantasy of hers. You told her Robert E. Lee had a cat, didn’t you?”
“He did have a cat.”
“And as soon as you told Annie that, she told you the cat in her dream was exactly like Robert E. Lee’s cat, didn’t she?”
I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of Annie clutching the African violet and saying, “Did Robert E. Lee have a cat? A yellow cat? With darker stripes?”
“During dream recall the dreamer’s extremely suggestive,” Richard said. “Anything that’s told to the dreamer then can influence his memory of the dream. It’s called secondary elaboration.”
“Like telling her she’d shot somebody with a cap pistol?” I said. “The Springfield rifle had a percussion cap, did you know that? It looked just like a kid’s cap pistol. The Springfield rifle was used in the Civil War.”
“Did you tell her that?” he said, sounding almost frightened. “You had no business telling her that. You’re interfering with her therapy. As her psychiatrist, I have a duty to…”
“To what? Hit on your patients?”
“I wasn’t trying to hit on her, damn it. It just happened. I was trying to help her. She was afraid to be alone at night. It just happened. Damn it, you’ve seen her.”
I’d seen her, standing in the solarium in her gray coat saying, “You won’t believe me either.” I would have driven her out to Arlington right then, in spite of the snow, if she had asked me to. I would have scaled the locked gates and broken into the attic with an ax to look for Lee’s lost cat. I would have done anything to help her. Help her. Not take advantage of her fear and her helplessness.
“So you told her she was crazy and then climbed on top of her?” I said. “Is that how you helped her?”
“Keep away from her. You’re interfering with her therapy.”
“Is that what you call taking your patients home and fucking them when they’re too scared and tired to say no? What other therapies are you using, Doctor? Have you thought about drugging her so she’ll cooperate?”
He waited so long to say anything that even Broun’s patient answering machine would have switched off. I waited.
“You know what’s really ironic,” he said bitterly, “I tried to call you last week, but you weren’t there,” and hung up.
I looked out at the snow some more and then called the clinic to find out if Richard had phoned me from there. His secretary said, “I’m sorry. He’s not in right now. Can I take a message?”
“Will he be in at all today?”
“Well…” she said as if she were looking at an appointment book. “He has a general staff meeting at four, but that may be canceled because of the weather.”
I didn’t wait for her to ask for my name. “Thanks. I’m a friend of his from out of town, and I’ve got to catch a plane in about five minutes. I just thought I’d give him a call while I was in Washington.”
The phone rang as soon as I pressed down the button. I had the crazy idea that Richard had been listening in on the call and was going to threaten me again, but it was Broun.
“I didn’t make it up here with the last two pages of that damned scene,” he said. “It’s probably on my desk. Can you look for it?”
I rummaged through the pile on his desk. He had stuck it in Randall’s
“There’s no time for that. They’ve got the book all set up to print. If these changes don’t go in right now, they don’t go in at all. You’ll have to read it over the phone. McLaws and Herndon are set up to record your call at this number.” He gave me the number.
“Are you going to try to come home tonight?”
“No. It’s a real blizzard up here,” he said, and then seemed to catch something in my voice. “Are you all right?”
No, I thought. I’ve just had a conversation I would never have believed I’d have with my old roommate over a girl I’ve just met, and I want you to come home and tell me she’s not crazy. I want you to come home and tell me I’m not crazy. “I’m fine,” I said. “I was just wondering.”
He still sounded worried. “You got my message this morning, didn’t you? You didn’t go out to Arlington in this mess?”
“No,” I said. “The weather’s terrible here, too.”
“Good,” he said. “I want you to take care of yourself. I thought you looked kind of peaked last night.” He paused, and I could hear voices in the background. “Listen, they’re getting impatient on this end for that scene. Get some rest, son, and don’t worry about anything till I get back.”
“I’ll call it in right away,” I said.
I hung up and then wished I hadn’t. What would Broun say if I called him back and told him I’d gone out to Arlington after all, and with somebody who’d dreamed about the battle of Antietam and Lee’s lost cat?
He would say, “There’s a logical explanation for this,” and I had already told myself that—that and a lot of other things. I had gone through every argument there was last night, one after the other, the way I had gone through Broun’s books looking for Tom Tita.
They were only dreams. She was ill. She was crazy. It was all an elaborate scam so she could get close to Broun. There was a logical explanation for the dreams. She had read about the cat somewhere. She’d been to Arlington as a child. It was all a joke. She’d been put up to it by Richard. It was some kind of dopey Bridey Murphy phenomenon. It was just a coincidence. Lots of people dreamed about yellow tabby cats. They were only dreams.
There was no point in calling Broun back. He wouldn’t be able to add any new arguments to that list. Worse, he might not even try to convince me there was a logical explanation. Fascinated as he was by Lincoln’s dreams right now, he might say, “Has she ever dreamed she saw herself in a coffin in the East Room? Do you think you could try to get her to dream Lincoln’s dreams?”
