Connie Willis - Lincoln’s Dreams

“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll go myself.”

I looked down at Broun’s notes, afraid my relief would show in my face. The sodden pages were matted together. I tried to peel the top sheet off, and half the page came off in my hand. I looked at it. The ink was blurred so badly I couldn’t read what he had written.

“Look, I just think you should keep a little perspective on things. You got totally wrapped up in The Duty Bound , and look what happened. And now you’re getting obsessed with this.”

“I said I’d go myself, damn it.” He stood up. “Give me the damned notes before you ruin them. And call McLaws and Herndon. Tell them to wait on the galleys. I’m changing another scene.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “They’ve already set the type. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“I don’t care what you tell them. Tell them I’m obsessed with The Duty Bound. ” He grabbed for the notes, and they tore across without any sound. He yanked the torn pieces out of my hand. “Tell them you think I’m a little tetched in the head like Lincoln was after Willie died. Tell them I want to dig up the body to have one last look at it before it goes to press. Like that crazy Lincoln.”

When I went downstairs to the kitchen to call McLaws and Herndon, he shut the door of his study, and I could hear the uneven stutter of his typing like sniper fire from across the river.

Around Christmas of 1861, during the Carolina campaign, Robert E. Lee bought Traveller for a hundred and seventy-five dollars, adding an extra twenty-five dollars to counteract the falling value of Confederate money. “He has been my patient follower ever since,” he wrote Markie. “He carried me through the Seven Days battle around Richmond, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, the last day at Chancellorsville, to Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, and back to the Rappahannock… to the final days at Appomattox Court House.”

Broun didn’t ask me to call in the scene this time. He called it in himself the next morning and then left to talk to a Lincoln expert in Georgetown. “I’m leaving for California tomorrow,” he said belligerently. “Did you find out where Willie Lincoln was buried?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going over to the library right now. Do you want me to go get the ticket first?”

“You can pick it up this afternoon,” he said.

“Fine,” I said, wishing I could say something that would make him less angry with me. I couldn’t apologize because an apology meant an explanation, and I couldn’t explain. Maybe it was just as well he wasn’t talking to me because then there wouldn’t be any questions either. “What about the galleys?”

“What about them?”

“McLaws and Herndon called this morning before you were up. They said they were sending them down Federal Express, they want them back in two weeks at the latest, and no major changes.”

“You can give them the first reading, and I’ll finish them when I get back.”

“Which will be when?”

“I don’t know. A week maybe.”

I waited till he had left for Georgetown and then went upstairs and made sure the answering machine was set on “message.” I drove over and picked up Broun’s ticket from the travel agency and then went to the library.

Kate didn’t have the bibliography ready, and I told her I wasn’t in any hurry, I was going to be there awhile. I spent the rest of the day there, looking up information about Willie Lincoln and thinking about Annie.

She hadn’t called last night. Broun had gone out for dinner, and I had spent the whole evening in his study waiting for her to call, but the phone hadn’t rung even once. By ten o’clock I had come to the conclusion that Richard was somehow keeping her from using the phone, but this morning I didn’t really believe that.

Richard had made it plain he didn’t want me talking to her, but he was hardly going to have the phone disconnected or tie her up to keep her from answering it. She was his patient, not his prisoner, and she had disobeyed him before. He hadn’t been able to keep her from going out to Arlington. He wouldn’t be able to keep her from calling me either, if she really wanted to.

If she really wanted to. Maybe she didn’t want to. She had seemed almost uninterested when I called her and offered her my services. What made me think she wanted to hear about Special Order 191 any more than she wanted to hear about traumas in the subconscious? She hung up on you, I told myself, and she’s still at Richard’s. You don’t need Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to tell you what that means. She doesn’t want to talk to you. So stop calling her and find out what the hell they did with Willie Lincoln.

I didn’t believe that either, but I pulled out every book on Lincoln and tried to concentrate on the research. I couldn’t find a word about Willie’s burial, I found out what had happened to the pony he’d been riding “in bad weather” when he came down with whatever it was that killed him, though. Several months after Willie’s death, the White House stables caught fire. Lincoln ran across the lawn and leaped a boxwood hedge to save it, but he was too late. The guards hurried him back into the White House, afraid the fire had been started by an assassin to lure him out. Willie’s pony was burned alive.

Every hour or so I went outside to the pay phone and called the answering machine, but there weren’t any messages. By two o’clock I had run out of change and had to ask Kate for a dollar’s worth of quarters. “I’ll have the bibliography ready for you in a few minutes,” she said.

I went out and called the answering machine. Broun’s agent had called, wanting to know why in the hell Broun was still making changes. She’d just talked to McLaws and Herndon and they’d had to reset the type for the galleys. They were talking about charging Broun for the extra plates.

I called Annie.

“I’m glad you called,” Richard said. “I wanted to apologize for my outburst the other day.”

“I want to talk to Annie.”

“She’s asleep right now,” he said, “and I don’t want to wake her up. I know I was out of line the day before yesterday. I was just so upset about her condition. She was obsessed with the idea that she could obtain factual verification for her dream.”

He sounded completely different from the man who had warned me to keep away from Annie. His voice was calm and professional. “It’s a common phenomenon, but a dangerous one. The patient attempts to distance threatening dream images in his dreams by believing they have an objective reality of their own.”

I recognized the voice now. He had worked on it all through medical school. The voice was one of the psychiatrist’s most important tools, he had told me when he was studying psychoanalysis. The proper voice could be used to obtain the patient’s trust, inspire confidence, and convince the patient that the psychiatrist had his own best interests at heart. I had told him I didn’t care what it could do, just not to use it on me.

He was using it now.

“By convincing herself that the house in her dream is Arlington House,” he said, “she is trying to protect herself from the latent material in the dream. The half-buried dead man becomes a Union soldier instead of the image of her own personal trauma, the cat becomes a real cat instead of the symbol of her need to uncover the repressed memory that’s causing the dreams.”

“The cat is a real cat. His name’s Tom Tita. He got left behind when Lee moved out of Arlington.”

“You’re confusing manifest content with latent content,” he said, inspiringly, compassionately. “We all dream real things, objects and people we’ve seen, things we’ve read about or seen in the movies, memories. They make up the visible content of our dreams. But the subconscious puts those real people and objects and memories to its own uses. It’s a process called dream precipitant conversion. Let’s say Annie had a cat as a child.”