Lincoln's Dreams

“We were standing on the porch at Arlington,” Annie had said. “The waitress was leaving and I didn’t want her to go.” Who could Lee have had visit that he wouldn’t want to go home? I didn’t know much about Lee’s life outside the war. All the research I had done for Broun had been about specific battles, and I was not even sure what family and friends Lee had outside of his son Rob, whom he had sent back into battle at Antietam, and the cousin, Markie Williams, who had gone back through enemy lines to fetch the Lees’ belongings from Arlington and found the cat.

Who would Lee have flung his arms around, have cried over? The answer was nobody. The men who had been in the war with Lee described him almost uniformly as “grave and kind” and “showing no sign of his emotions.” One of his biographers had nicknamed him “the marble man,” and all of them said he was devoted solely to his duty. He never talked about what was troubling him, never wept, not even over Stonewall Jackson. When the war was over, he never spoke of it.

He had paid dearly for that self-control. He had died of a heart attack, the controlled man’s disease, and he had had bad dreams about the war up to the very end. He had told Hill to come up when he was dying, and then, at the very end, said, “Strike the tent.” But he hadn’t cried or clung to his family, even on his deathbed.

What if this wasn’t one of Lee’s dreams at all? What if now that the barriers to the collective unconscious were down, Annie would start dreaming other people’s dreams?

Annie came over at a little before ten, looking like she hadn’t slept either. She was wearing a high-necked blouse buttoned all the way up.

“I don’t have any idea what your dream was,” I said. I dog-eared the page I was on and shut the book. “You’re sure it was at Arlington?”

“Yes. I was standing on the porch. The cat was there, and the apple tree. Its leaves had turned. It must have been in the fall. I’m sure it was Arlington. I mean, it’s always my house, the house I grew up in, but it stands for other houses.” She shook her head as if that weren’t the right word. “It feels like other houses. I think Lee must have to use the images I have in my mind to make the dreams out of, and then he makes them stand for other things. It’s the same with the people. I think he must choose the person who’s most like the person he knew….”

The redheaded waitress bustled over and took Annie’s order, apologizing for not having seen her right away and filling both our coffee cups to the very brim.

“Like the waitress?” I said after she left.

“Yes. It was the waitress, but it wasn’t her really.”

“You called her Katie. Do you know her last name or what her relationship to Lee was? Was she a friend of his, a relative?”

“No, she was a friend of …” She picked up her spoon and stirred her coffee. “I just remembered something about the dream,” she said. “That never happened before.”

“What?”

“The waitress … Katie and I were standing on the porch saying goodbye, and I didn’t want her to go. We were both crying, and laughing at the same time because neither of us had a handkerchief, and then all of a sudden I was out by the apple tree and walking up to the house. You know how sometimes in a dream you’re one person and then you’re somebody else, only you’re still the first person, too? That’s how this was. I was walking up from the apple orchard, too, and I was still on the porch saying good bye to Katie. I had on my white nightgown, and she was in her waitress uniform, and we were both crying, and I went up on the porch and said to them, ‘No tears at Arlington!’ and laughed, and gave Katie my big handkerchief to blow her nose on.”

“Do you know who the girl on the porch was?” I asked. “The girl who was you?”

“No. But coming up from the apple orchard I was Lee.”

Well, at least the Pandora’s box of the whole world’s dreams hadn’t been opened yet, and she was still dreaming Lee’s dreams, even if I couldn’t place this one. “And so then this girl, whoever she is, flung her arms around Lee’s neck and started to cry?”

“No.” She put her coffee cup down and stared into it. “He … I … Lee came up on the porch,” she said slowly, “and said, ‘No tears,’ and all of a sudden I felt that I knew what was causing the dreams.” She looked up at me. “I was myself in the dream right then, not Lee or the girl in the white nightgown. I was myself. And I knew what was causing them. I knew why I was having the dreams.” She put her hand up to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “Poor man,” she said softly. “Poor man.”

It had been Annie with her arms twined around my neck, after all, even though it wasn’t me she clung to. “Do you still know?” I said, wanting to reach across the table and comfort her, but not daring to even touch her. “Do you remember what it was that was causing the dreams?”