Lincoln's Dreams

“I was, but then I thought about what you said about Tom Tita. What good would it have done for me to follow Lee through the Civil War? I would just have gotten myself killed. My first loyalty was to myself.”

“That was what you meant in the message,” I said, clutching the receiver. “That was what you meant when you wrote Tom Tita’s name.”

“Of course,” she said. “What did you think the message meant?”

“That you were locked in. That you couldn’t get out.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “They’re taking good care of me.”

We worked on the book all summer. In the fall, The Duty Bound came out, and we went to New York to promote the book. “I’m glad to see Broun looking so well,” his agent told me at the McLaws and Herndon reception. “I was afraid all that running around in California would be too much for him, but he looks wonderful. I also can’t tell you how relieved I am to see that book in print,” she said, jabbing her finger at a stand-up display card of

The Duty Bound. “Did you know he called me after the galleys were in and wanted to change the ending? He wanted to have Ben and Nelly get married. Can you believe that?”

“When did he do that?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. After you brought the galleys up. Luckily, he called me first and not McLaws and Herndon. I managed to convince him it wouldn’t work at all.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Well, I mean, it was obvious from the very beginning she was in love with that boy who died, what was his name?”

We were in New York till after Christmas, doing autograph signings and talk shows. On the day we got home, while I was next door getting the Siamese cat back from Broun’s neighbor, Broun had a heart attack. It was very small. There was hardly any damage. He was only in the hospital a week, and he seemed more upset about the fact that a battle-ax of a nurse had shaved his beard off than he did about the heart attack.

“Didn’t you have any symptoms?” I demanded of him. He was lying in the hospital bed, propped up against the pillows.

“A little indigestion,” he said. “Or what I thought was indigestion.”

“Didn’t your arm hurt? Or your wrist?”

“No,” he said. “I thought I’d eaten too much.”

“Didn’t you dream anything?”

“I was awake when I had it, son,” he said gently.

“Before the attack, I yelled.” “What did you dream about?”

Broun’s doctor pulled me out into the hall. “I know you’re under a lot of stress, but so is he.” He looked at Broun’s chart. “And so am I. I don’t want him having a third heart attack on me.”

“A third?” I said.

“Of course,” he said, still frowning at the chart. He looked up and saw the expression on my face. “Why, the old son of a gun! He never told you, did he? It was three years ago,” he pulled back several pages on the chart, “in September. September twenty-eighth. You were out of town, I think. He said he called you.”

Three years ago in September I had been in Springfield, looking at Lincoln’s tomb and being driven crazy by Broun, and halfway through the trip the calls had stopped, the messages had stopped, and when I got home, he was willing to let me do his legwork for him.

“How bad was the first one?” I asked.

“Bad enough to scare him. He was convinced he was going to die. That’s why I believed he’d told you.” He let the pages fall back and tucked the chart under his arm. “Now, I’ll agree he needs yelling at for not telling you, but as his doctor I’m not going to let you back in to see him unless you promise not to mention this heart attack thing to him until he’s in better shape than he is right now. He must have had his reasons for not telling you about the heart attack.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I went back into the room and apologized for yelling at him. “I didn’t have any dreams before my heart attack,” Broun said. “I didn’t have any warning at all.”

“Annie did,” I said. “The dreams were trying to warn her. Only she wouldn’t listen.”

He leaned back against the pillows. “If I’d dreamed I was in a boat before my heart attack, traveling toward a shadowy, indefinite shore, I wouldn’t have listened either. If Lincoln was letting me dream his dreams for him, there is nothing on this earth I would let stop me. Not even somebody I loved.”

“Even if you ended up having a heart attack? Even if it killed you?”

“Even then,” he said softly. “Maybe she’s all right. Maybe she went to see a doctor when she got home, like she promised.”

Broun started back to work on the Lincoln book as soon as he was out of the hospital, in direct defiance of doctor’s orders. “I’m going to finish this damn book if it kills me,” he said, scratching at his unshaven chin. He was trying to grow another beard.

“Which it will at this rate,” I said. “At least let me do the legwork for you.”

“Fine,” he said, and sent me to the White House to take notes on the purple-hung Guest Room where Willie Lincoln died and the stairs Lincoln had descended in his dream and the East Room, where Willie’s coffin and then his father’s had lain.