Lincoln's Dreams

The message was over for a while before the machine and I realized it. Broun had refused to buy a regular thirty-seconds-and-beep kind of machine. “Nobody worth talking to can state his business in thirty seconds,” was what he said, but what he really wanted was to be able to read long passages of the galleys over the phone or have me dictate the research I was doing in Springfield onto a tape that he could listen to and I could transcribe when I got home. He had had a whole elaborate setup built into the wall behind his desk, with a voice-activated tape that could hold up to three hours of messages and all kinds of fancy remote codes and buttons for fast-forwarding through messages and erasing them.

I pulled on a sweater and waited for the second message. It was Richard. “I’m at the Institute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” He sounded as angry over the phone as he had when he left last night.

I erased both messages and called Annie at Richard’s apartment instead. “It’s Jeff,” I said when she answered.

“I just tried to call you,” she said, “but your line was busy. Do you still have to go out to Arlington to do your research? I want to go with you.”

“I was going out this morning,” I said. “Are you sure you want to go? It’s supposed to get pretty bad.” The snow was coming down faster now and starting to stick to the sidewalk. I could imagine her standing at the phone in Richard’s living room, looking out at it.

“It isn’t snowing very much over here,” she said. “I’d like to go.”

“I’ll pick you up,” I said. “I’ll be there in about an hour.”

“’Don’t come all the way across town. There’s a Metro station right outside of Arlington. I’ll meet you there, all right?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

I got a Styrofoam cup and put what was left of Broun’s breakfast coffee in it to take with me. I had been up half the night, trying to find the answer to Annie’s question about whether Lee had had a cat. It hadn’t been in volume two of Freeman either, or in Connelly’s The Marble Man , I’d found a letter from Lee to his daughter Mildred that mentioned Baxter and Tom the Nipper, but they were Mildred’s cats, and anyway, there was little chance that they had made it through the many moves of the war. Robert E. Lee, Jr., had annotated the letter with the remark that his father was fond of cats “in his way and in their place,” which seemed to indicate that Lee hadn’t had any special cat after all. Nothing I could find in the mess of Broun’s books said anything about the family owning a cat when they lived at Arlington. I had finally had to call one of the volunteers who guided tours at Arlington House. I woke her out of a sound sleep, but even half-awake she knew the answer. “It’s in the letters to Markie Williams,” she said, and told me where to find it.

The snow turned into something that was half-rain, half-snow, and slicker than either as soon as I pulled onto the Rock Creek Parkway. It took me almost twenty minutes to get past the Lincoln Memorial and across the bridge.

Annie was waiting on the sidewalk next to the stairs of the Metro station, hunched against the sleet in her gray coat. She was wearing gray gloves, but she didn’t have anything on her head, and her light hair was wet with snow.

“I’ve already been in this storm once on my way back from West Virginia,” I said as she got in. I turned the car heater up to high. “What say we forget the whole thing and go have lunch somewhere?”

“No,” she said. “I want to go.”

“Okay,” I said. “We may not be able to see much of anything, though.” Arlington was always open, even on days like this. It was, after all, a cemetery and not a tourist attraction, but I had my doubts about the house.

The sleet was coming down progressively harder. I couldn’t even see as far as the Seabees Memorial, let alone back across the bridge. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Why don’t we…”

“I asked Richard if he’d take me out to Arlington last night. On the way home. And again this morning. He wouldn’t. He says I’m trying to project repressed feelings onto an exterior cause, that I’m refusing to face a trauma that’s so terrible I won’t even admit it’s mine.”

“Is that what you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“How many times have you had the dream about the dead soldiers in the apple orchard?”

“I don’t know exactly. I’ve had it every night for over a year.”

“Over a year? You’ve been at the Sleep Institute that long?”

“No,” she said. “I came to Washington about two months ago. My doctor sent me to Dr. Stone because I was what they call pleisomniac. I kept waking up all the time.”

“Dr. Stone?”

“He’s the head of the Institute, but he was in California, so I saw Richard. I stayed at the Institute for a week while they ran all kinds of tests, and then I was supposed to be an outpatient, but the dream started getting worse.”

“Worse? How?”