Lincoln's Dreams

“It’s six-thirty,” Broun said. He had changed into a dinner jacket with a pleated shirt and string tie. He still hadn’t shaved. Maybe he was trying to grow a beard. If he was, it was a terrible idea. The grayish black stubble seemed to take all the color out of his face. He looked sharp and disreputable, like an unscrupulous horsetrader. “I wouldn’t have wakened you, but I wanted you to take a look at this.” He thrust a sheaf of typewritten pages into my hand.

“What’s this?” I said. “Willie Lincoln?”

He poked at the fire, which had died down to almost nothing while I was asleep. “It’s that first scene, the one I was worried about. I just couldn’t see Ben signing up for no reason at all, so I rewrote it.”

“Do McLaws and Herndon know about this?” Broun’s cat jumped off my lap and started batting at the poker.

“I’m calling it in to them tomorrow, but I wanted you to look at it first. Ben had to have some motivation for enlisting.”

“Why? What about later in the book when he falls in love with Nelly? He doesn’t have any motivation for that. She gives him one spoonful of laudanum, and bang, he’s ready to do anything for her.”

The cat wrapped a paw firmly around the poker, but Broun didn’t notice. He stared into the fire. “It was the war. People did things like that during the war, fell in love, sacrificed themselves—”

“Enlisted,” I said. “Most of the recruits in the Civil War didn’t have any motivation for enlisting. There was a war, and they signed up on one side of it or the other.” I tried to hand the scene back to him. “I don’t think you need a new scene.”

He put the poker back in the stand. The cat lay down in front of it, tail switching. “Anyway, I’d like you to read it,” Broun said. “Did you call your roommate?”

“Yes.”

“Is he coming.”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Good. Good. Now we’ll run this dream thing to ground. Be sure and tell me when he gets here.” He started out the door. “I’m going to go check on the caterers.”

“Hadn’t you better shave?”

“Shave?” he said, sounding horrified. “Can’t you see I’m growing muttonchop whiskers?” He struck a pose with his hands in his lapels. “Like Lincoln’s.”

“You don’t look like Lincoln,” I said, grinning. “You look like Grant after a binge.”

“I could say the same thing about you, son,” he said, and went downstairs to talk to the caterers.

I tried to read the new scene, wishing I had the time to run a few dreams of my own to ground. I felt tireder than I had before the nap. I couldn’t even get my eyes to focus on Broun’s typing. The reporters would be here any minute, and then I would stand propped up against a wall for endless hours telling people why Broun’s book wasn’t ready, and then tomorrow I would go out to Arlington and poke around in the snow, looking for Willie Lincoln’s grave.

If I could find out where he was buried, I might not have to spend tomorrow out wiping snow off old tombstones. I put down the rewritten scene and looked for Sandburg’s War Years.

Broun has never believed in libraries—he keeps books all over the house, and whenever he finishes with one, he sticks it into the handiest bookcase. I offered once to organize the books, and he said, “I know where they all are.” He might know, but I didn’t, so I had organized them for myself—Grant and the western campaign in the big upstairs dining room, Lee in the solarium, Lincoln in the study. It didn’t do much good. Broun still left books wherever he finished with them, but it was better than nothing. I had at least an even chance of finding what I needed. Usually. Not this time, though.

Sandburg’s War Years wasn’t where I’d put it, and neither was Oates. It took me almost an hour to find them, Oates in the upstairs bathroom, Sandburg down in the solarium underneath one of Broun’s African violets. Before I even got upstairs with them, a young woman from People snowed up and tried to pump me about Broun’s new book.

“What’s it about?” she asked.

“Antietam,” I said. “It’s in the press release.”

“Not that one. The new one he’s starting.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said, and turned her over to Broun and went back into the study with the books I’d found and looked up Willie Lincoln. He had died in 1862, when he was eleven years old. They had had a reception downstairs in the White House while he lay dying upstairs. And probably people had kept ringing the doorbell, I thought, when the doorbell rang.

It was more reporters, and then it was somebody from the caterer’s and then more reporters, and I began to think Richard wasn’t coming after all, but the next time the doorbell rang it was Richard. With Annie.

“We can’t stay very long,” Richard said before he even got in the door. He looked tired and strung out, which wasn’t much of an endorsement for the Sleep Institute. I wondered if the way he looked had anything to do with his having called me when I was in West Virginia.