Lincoln's Dreams

Would I? Knowing where the dreams were leading her, would I be able to take her there? Or would I call Richard again? I got out of the car and took her suitcase out of the trunk and put it on the top of the steps. I opened the door for her. She folded a piece of paper, put it in her pocket, and then got out.

I gave her Broun’s money and all the cash I had. “There’s about five hundred here. That should get you home or wherever you want to go.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“This is the Blue Line. You can take it straight to the airport. If you want Amtrak, change to the Red Line at Metro Center and that’ll take you to Union Station.”

She bent her head to fumble in her purse and put the money away. “I won’t know what happened to you,” I said. “Promise me you’ll go see a doctor.”

“After the war,” she said. She took the folded piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to me.

I nodded. “After the war.”

She reached up and brushed the hair off my forehead. “I was so glad to see you,” she said. She picked her suitcase up in her left hand, put it down on the wet sidewalk and picked it up in her right, and went down the stairs.

I went out to the edge of the platform and stood there long enough for her to get away, holding the folded paper and looking up the hill toward Arlington House. It started to snow. I put the piece of paper in my coat pocket and went back home.

I didn’t look at it until the next day for fear she had written the address of that house with the wide porch and the apple orchard, and that I, like Richard, would try to follow her.

It was still wet. I unfolded it carefully, so it wouldn’t tear, and read it. She had written in blue proofreader’s pencil, “Tom Tita, Arlington House.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Lee only lasted two weeks after the rainy afternoon in Grace Church. For most of that time he lay in silence or dozed. Outside it rained, and the rivers around Lexington rose till it was impossible for Rob to make it to his bedside. For several nights the aurora borealis lit up the sky, as it had at Fredericksburg. Lee talked very little though he sometimes muttered in his dreams, but when the doctor told him, “You must make haste to get well; Traveller has been standing so long in the stable that he needs exercise,” he only shook his head, unable to speak.

He died on the twelfth of October, saying, “Strike the tent,” and then moving off to some old battle, leaving Traveller behind. Traveller walked in the funeral procession, his head bent, his saddle and bridle covered with black crepe. Then he was taken home to his stable to wait out the end. Did he dream of Lee? I wonder. Do horses dream?

When I got home, Broun was still sitting on the loveseat in the solarium. The Siamese had jumped up on his lap, and he had set the answering machine down on the loveseat beside him so he could pet the cat.

He stood up as soon as I came in, dumping the cat on the floor to come and put his arm around my shoulders. He didn’t ask me what had happened, and because he didn’t, because he didn’t say, “How could you let her go like that? She’s sick. She needs a doctor,” I told him I had taken her to the Metro station, and then I told him everything else.

He didn’t say, “They’re only dreams,” or tell me any of the theories he had picked up in California. He only said quietly, “It was a terrible war, the Civil War. So many young people … I had no business going to California. Out on a wild goose chase after Lincoln’s dreams when I should have been here.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, and went up to bed even though it was still early afternoon, and slept for two days. When I woke up, an electrician was there, fixing the wires on the answering machine, putting it back in the wall.

“In case she calls,” Broun said.

I took the galleys up to New York. When I got back, we started the Lincoln’s dreams novel. I did Broun’s legwork for him, drove him places, looked up obscure facts that didn’t matter to anyone, and dreamed of Annie.

While we were in Fredericksburg, I had not had any dreams at all, as if Annie were dreaming enough for both of us, but now I dreamed nearly every night, and in the dreams Annie was fine. I dreamed that she had left a message on the answering machine. “I’m fine,” she said. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Where are you?” I asked, even though I knew it was only a message, that she wasn’t really there. I had never been able to break myself of the habit of replying to people who were not there, and if I could not, how did I think Annie could, Lee whispering to her night after night, telling her his dreams?

“I’m fine, Jeff,” she told me in the dream. “They’re taking good care of me.” It was not a message. It was really her on the phone, and she was fine, fine. She had gone home to that house with the wide porch and the apple tree and when she got there she had gone to see the doctor. “I thought you were afraid they’d stop the dreams,” I said into the phone.