Lincoln's Dreams

I was having a new dream now. In it, I dreamed I woke and heard the sound of crying, but when I went downstairs I couldn’t see anyone. There was a guard standing at the door of the solarium, and I asked him, “Who is dead in the White House?” but when he turned around to answer me, it wasn’t the guard at all, it was Annie. She was wearing her gray coat, and she looked beautiful, fresh and rested.

“Are you all right?” I asked her. “Did you go see a doctor?”

“A doctor?”

“A doctor,” I said urgently. “The dreams were a warning.”

“I know. They were trying to warn us about Broun’s heart attack, but we didn’t understand them. We were looking at all the wrong clues.”

“Broun isn’t going to have another heart attack, is he?”

She shook her head. “The dreams have stopped.”

“And you’re all right?”

She smiled at me, a sweet smile with no sadness in it. “I’m fine.”

In April, Broun was hospitalized again with chest pains. “I’ve been thinking about what caused Annie’s dreams,” he said, lying against the pillows. He was refusing to let the nurses near him for fear they might shave his beard, and he looked terrible, grubby and disreputable. “Do you remember Dreamtime?”

“The quacks in San Diego?”

“Yes,” he said. “Remember they had that theory that the dead sleep peacefully until something disturbs them, like Willie Lincoln being dug up, and then they start dreaming. Well, what if something like that happened with Lee? What if they moved his body and that’s what started him dreaming?”

“Lee’s body hasn’t been moved,” I said. “It’s still buried in the chapel at Lexington.”

“Maybe the dreams weren’t because of the angina. Maybe they started because his body was disturbed some way. Was his daughter Annie’s body moved?”

“No. She’s still buried in North Carolina where she died.”

He lay silently for a while, glaring at the door whenever a nurse passed, and then said, “They moved Lincoln’s body. First they moved it to Springfield on the funeral train, stopping at every damned one-horse town and whistle stop along the way.” He pushed himself up against the pillows, and the line on the EKG screen behind his head spiked suddenly. “And then there was that kidnap plot and the guard moved him out of the tomb and buried him in a passage of the Memorial Hall.”

“Annie didn’t have Lincoln’s dreams,” I said calmly, reasonably, watching the screen. “They were Lee’s dreams.”

“In 1901, they moved Lincoln back into the tomb again. He was moved four times altogether, not counting the funeral train.” The screen jerked in sharp, dangerous lines. “What if those Dreamtime quacks were right, and all that jostling woke him up?”

“They weren’t Lincoln’s dreams,” I said. “They were Lee’s.”

“Maybe,” he said, sitting up with a motion that sent the EKG lines to the top of the screen. “I want you to bring me some books.”

He asked for books the next three days, and by the end of the week he had half his library in his hospital room. “I’ve got it all worked out,” he said. He was able to sit up by then without setting off the EKG. “They were Lincoln’s dreams.”

He had it all worked out. Lincoln had been the one who had dreams, not Lee, and their dreams wouldn’t have been all that different. They would both have dreamed about Gettysburg and Appomattox. Lincoln had known about Special Order 191 before Lee did, and the cat didn’t have to be Tom Tita, did it? It could have been one of Lincoln’s kittens. Lincoln loved kittens. He had it all worked out.

“What if they were Lincoln’s dreams?” I said when I couldn’t take it anymore. “What would that prove?”

“Lincoln tried to save Willie’s pony from the burning stable. That’s what the house on fire really is, not Chancellorsville.”

“They weren’t Lincoln’s dreams, damn it,” I shouted. “They were Lee’s.”

“I know,” he said quietly, and the EKG line above his head went right oft the screen. “I know they’re not Lincoln’s dreams.”

“Then why did you do all this?”

“Because then she’d be all right. If they were warnings from Lincoln, they wouldn’t have been about apple orchards, they’d have been about boats. I thought if I could make them Lincoln’s dreams, then that would mean she was all right.”

“He’s in no shape to be upset,” Broun’s doctor said. He had yanked me out into the hall again and down to an empty room. The EKG had set off an alarm at the nurses’ station that brought everybody running.

“I know,” I said.

“You look as bad as he does,” he said. “How are you sleeping?”

“I’m not,” I said. If I slept I dreamed about Annie. She was standing on the porch of Arlington with her arms around my neck, crying, and I kept saying over and over, “I don’t want you to leave.”

“Would you like me to prescribe something for you? To help you sleep?”

“What did you have in mind? Thorazine?”

He didn’t get the joke. He pulled out a prescription pad. “Who’s your regular doctor?”

“I don’t have one. Do you want my family doctor? He’s in Connecticut.”