Lincoln's Dreams

“Me, I was drafted,” Toby said, “I bet there was a girl in it somewheres, you signing up thataway.”

“You keep on like that, you might get yourself shot,” Malachi said mildly, “setting yourself up for a target that way.”

I rewound the tape and waited. The call-completed button came on. I picked up the phone and gave the editor the remote code so she could receive the recorded message without redialing and waited again while she set up a recorder on her end.

“We’re all set here,” she said.

“Call me again if it doesn’t work,” I said, and hung up.

It was two-thirty. The snow looked like it had let up a little. Richard should be able to make it to his staff meeting. If he wasn’t sitting by the phone making sure I didn’t talk to Annie.

I picked up Randall’s Lincoln the President . Maybe he knew where Willie was buried. If he knew, he wasn’t telling, but he did say what Willie had died from. It was something called bilious fever, and God only knew what that was. Typhoid probably, though that was already a disease with a name in 1862, and a lot was made of his having caught a cold from riding his pony in bad weather, so it might have been a simple case of pneumonia.

Finding out what people died of a hundred years ago is almost impossible. Letters written by the grief-stricken relatives say that the daughter or son died of “milk fever” or “brain fever” or frequently just “a fever,” and even that is something. Sometimes the patient simply died, “having progressed weaker and more sickly through the winter till we held out little hope.”

Doctors’ accounts are no better. They diagnose agues and heavy colds and “diffusion of the heart.” Robert E. Lee, who had almost certainly suffered from angina throughout the war and died of a heart attack, was variously diagnosed as suffering from rheumatic excitement, venous congestion, and sciatica. The modern diagnosis had been pieced together only because somebody thought to write down the symptoms. Otherwise, nobody would have the slightest idea what he died of.

At any rate, Willie Lincoln “took cold” and died of pneumonia or typhoid or possibly malaria—whatever it was was probably contagious, because his brother Tad was sick, too—or something else altogether, lay in state in the Green Room, and then was moved to the East Room for the funeral

The funeral was well documented, though I had to put down Randall and rummage through the mess in Broun’s study to find the details. The government buildings were closed on the day of the funeral, which irritated Attorney General Bates, who commented that Willie had been “too much idolized by his parents.” Lincoln, his son Robert, and members of the Cabinet attended, and Mrs. Lincoln didn’t. The Reverend Dr. Gurley performed the service, Willie was bundled into a hearse, and then, like Tom Tita the cat, dropped out of sight.

Randall stopped cold after the funeral; everyone else I read quoted Sandburg, and Sandburg said blithely that Willie’s body had been sent back west for burial. It had, but not until 1865. I was sure of that. Lloyd Lewis had chronicled every detail of Lincoln’s funeral and the long train trip to Springfield, including Willie’s coffin, which lay in front of his father’s in the funeral car, so it wasn’t “sent back west” for over three years, and Sandburg, of all people, should have known that.

Sandburg had known Lewis back in the Chicago newspaper days. He had called him Friend Lewis when he wrote the introduction to Lewis’s Myths After Lincoln . I wondered if Sandburg had forgotten what Lewis wrote about Willie, or it something else had happened between them, something that made Lewis no longer a friend, something that meant they didn’t read each other’s books anymore. And was there a girl in it somewhere?

But even Lewis, who was a treasure trove of Lincolniana, didn’t say where Willie’s body had been for three long years. Was I supposed to assume that it lay in the East Room all that time, giving Lincoln bad dreams? Or had they buried it in the front lawn of the White House?

It was a quarter of four. I put the books back where maybe they would be next time I wanted them and called Annie.

She sounded sleepy, and that reassured me. She hadn’t been standing by the window in her wet coat looking out at the snow, listening to Richard tell her she was crazy. She had been asleep.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, but slowly, with a question in her voice.

“Good. I was worried about you. I was afraid you might have caught a chill out at Arlington.” Caught a chill. I sounded like a Civil War doctor.

“No,” she said, and this time she sounded a little more sure of herself. “Richard fixed me some hot tea and made me lie down. I guess I fell asleep.”