Lincoln's Dreams

She wiped her eyes with her paper napkin. “No. I woke up and found myself hanging all over you. I was so ashamed that I’d been sleepwalking and that my nightgown was half off. I was afraid I’d tried to kiss you or something.”

You didn’t try to kiss me, Annie, I thought. I wasn’t even there. “You didn’t try to kiss me,” I said.

“And then when I tried to remember the dream, I couldn’t …” Her voice trailed off again the way it had the night before. After a minute she shook her head. “Jeff, I think we should go back to Arlington.”

That one had come right out of left field. “We can’t go back,” I said, stammering in my surprise. “Richard’s there.”

“I know, but when I went there before, it helped.”

Helped her to dream the horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, I thought. I could see the look of terror on her face as she stood had there in the snow, looking down at the bodies on the lawn. I didn’t want to subject her to that again, even to solve the puzzle of the dreams.

“We’re only going to be here a couple more days. I need to see the vet again and finish up my research at the library for Broun.” These were useless excuses. I could obviously call the vet from D.C, and the only research I’d done since I’d been here had been on Lee, not Lincoln, but Annie wasn’t listening to me. She was leaning forward, as if she could almost reach out and touch the meaning of the dreams.

“The dreams have something to do with Arlington,” she said in that inflectionless voice she used to recite the dreams. “And the yellow-haired soldier. And the cat. Nobody knows what happened to them.” She looked up at me. “Did Lee have a daughter?”

“He had several, I think,” I said, relieved that she had changed the subject. “I know he had at least one. Agnes, I think her name was.” I stood up. “Go ahead and finish your breakfast. I’m going to go get my notebook and then we’ll go to the library and see what we can find out about Agnes.”

I went back to the room and gathered up the two volumes of Freeman that were by my bed. Annie had left the chair close to the door. Volume four was on the seat. I pushed the chair back where it belonged so the maid wouldn’t think we were trying to steal the furniture and picked up the book.

Annie was standing at the cash register talking to the redheaded waitress when I got back. I hoped she wasn’t pitching the battlefield again.

“The weather’s supposed to turn this afternoon,” the waitress said. “Big cold front moving in.”

Good, I thought. Maybe well be snowed in here.

We walked down to the library. The librarian glared at me when I came in carrying my stack of books, as if she thought I’d taken them the day before without checking them out. Annie borrowed a piece of paper and a pen from me and said she was going back down to the reference section.

“I’ll be in biographies, where we were yesterday,” I said.

I looked up “Lee, daughters of.” He had had three other daughters besides Agnes: Mary, Ann, and Mildred. Since I had no way of knowing which one was in this dream, I used the only other clue I had. An hour into the index references under Arlington, I found what I was looking for.

In the fall of 1858, Katherine Stiles, a friend from Georgia, had come for a visit. When she got ready to leave, Lee had found her and his daughter Annie weeping together. “No tears at Arlington!” he had told them. “No tears!” His daughter Annie.

I looked up “Lee, Annie Carter (Robert E. Lee, daughter of)” in the index and started going through the page references. On March second, 1862, Lee had written her: “My Precious Annie, I think of you all, separately and collectively, in the busy hours of the night, and the recollection of each and every one whiles away the long night, in which my anxious thoughts drive away sleep. But I always feel that you and Agnes at those times are sound asleep, and that it is immaterial to either where the blockades are or what their progress is in the river.”

There it was, the connection I’d been looking for. I had tried to come up with all kinds of complicated rationales for why Annie was having the dreams—Richard’s drugs and chemical imbalances and Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams. It had never occurred to me that Annie might simply be having the dreams because Lee had called out her name in his sleep.

The sharp-faced librarian was leaning over me. “I see you brought your own books with you today,” she said in a voice with a surprisingly gentle tone and a marked Virginia accent. “I’m afraid our Civil War materials are very limited. Most people do their research out at the National Park Service Library.”

“The Park Service?” I said.

“Yes. It’s out at the Fredericksburg battlefield. When I saw you in here yesterday I wondered if you knew about it, but I didn’t like to interrupt your work. All the main source materials are out there. Do you know how to get there?”

Yes. March across an open plain to a defended ridge. “Yes. Thank you.” I gathered up my stack of Freeman. “Do you happen to know when they’re open?”