Lincoln's Dreams

“No,” she said, still watching the rain turn into sleet. “That’s a term he reserves for me these days.” She turned and looked at me. “I’m a patient of his. I have a sleep disorder.”

“Oh,” I said. “Can I take your coat?” I said, to be saying something. “Broun keeps this room like an oven.”

She gave it to me, and I went and hung it in the hall closet, trying to make sense of what she’d just told me. Richard hadn’t contradicted me when I’d called her his girlfriend, and Broun had told me she answered the phone at Richard’s apartment, but if she was his patient, what was he doing living with her?

When I came back into the solarium, she was looking at Broun’s African violets. I went over to the windows and looked out, trying to think of something to talk about. I could hardly ask her if she was sleeping with Richard or if her sleep disorder had anything to do with him.

“I’ve got to go out to Arlington National Cemetery in this mess tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve got to try and find where Willie Lincoln was buried, for Broun. Willie was Abraham Lincoln’s little boy. He died during the war.”

“Do you do all of Broun’s Civil War research for him?” Annie said, picking up one of the African violets.

“Most of the legwork. You know, when Broun first hired me, he would hardly let me do any of his research. It took me almost a year to talk him into letting me run his errands for him, and now I wish I hadn’t done such a good job. It looks like it’s turning into snow out there.”

She put the flowerpot back down on the table and looked up at me. “Tell me about the Civil War,” she said.

“What do you want to know?” I asked. I wished suddenly that I had had that nap so I could give my full wits to this conversation, tell her stories about the war that would get that somehow sad expression out of her blue-gray eyes. “I’m an expert on Antietam. Bloodiest single day of the Civil War. Possibly the most important day, too, though Broun will argue with that. General Lee needed a victory so England would recognize the Confederacy, and so he invaded Maryland, only it didn’t work. He had to retreat back to Virginia and …”

I stopped. I was putting myself to sleep, and God only knew what I was doing to Annie, who had probably never heard of Antietam. “How about Robert E. Lee? And his horse. I know just about everything there is to know about his damned horse.”

She brushed her short hair back from her face and smiled. “Tell me about the soldiers,” she said.

“The soldiers, huh? Well, they were farm boys mostly, uneducated. And they were young. The average age of the Civil War soldier was twenty-three.”

“I’m twenty-three,” she said.

“I don’t think you’d have had too much to worry about. They didn’t draft women in the Civil War,” I said, “though they might have had to if the war had gone on much longer. The Confederacy was down to old men and thirteen-year-old boys. If you’re interested in soldiers, there are a whole slew of them buried out at Arlington,” I said. “How would you like to go out there with me tomorrow?”

She picked up another of the potted violets and traced her finger along the leaves. “To Arlington?” she said.

Richard and I had roomed together at Duke for four years. I had never even looked at one of his girls, and tonight I had told him I would take care of? her for him. “Arlington’s a great place to visit,” I said, as if I hadn’t spent the last three days and nights living on No-Doz and coffee and wanting nothing more than to get back to Broun’s and sleep straight through till spring, as if she weren’t living with my old roommate. “There are a lot of famous people buried there, and the house is open to the public.”

“The house?” she said, bending over another one of the violets.

“Robert E. Lee’s house,” I said. “It was his plantation until the war. Then the Union occupied it. They buried Union soldiers in the front lawn to make sure he never got it back, and he never did. They turned it into a national cemetery in 1864. I’ve done a lot of research on Robert E. Lee lately.”

She was looking at me. And she had put her hand in the flowerpot. “Did he have a cat?” she said.

I turned and looked behind me at the door, thinking Broun’s Siamese had come down here to get away from the party, but it wasn’t there. “What?” I said, looking at her hand.

“Did Robert E. Lee have a cat? When he lived at Arlington?”

I was too tired, that was all. If I could just have gotten a nap instead of looking up Willie Lincoln and talking to reporters, I would have been able to take all this in—me asking her out when she was living with Richard, her asking me if Lee had a cat while she scrabbled in the dirt of the flowerpot as if she were trying to dig a grave.

“What kind of cat?” I said.

She had pulled the violet up by its roots and was holding it tightly in her hand. “I don’t know. A yellow cat. With darker stripes. It was there, in the dream.”

I said, “What dream?” and watched her drop the empty flowerpot. It crashed at her feet.