Connie Willis: Lincoln’s Dreams

“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.”

“I don’t like to prescribe without seeing a patient’s records.” He wrote busily on the prescription pad. “I’ll give you something mild for now and then wait till I have your records to put you on anything stronger. You don’t have any health problems I should know about, do you? Diabetes, heart condition?”

“No.” I told him my doctor’s name. “How long will it take to get the records?”

“Depends. If they’re computerized, we’ll have them in a few days. If not, it could take several weeks. Why? Are you having that much trouble sleeping?”

“No,” I said and pocketed the prescription with out looking at it. But Annie had been having trouble sleeping. She had been having so much trouble sleeping that Richard had put her on Elavil right away. He hadn’t done an EKG. He had told me in that phone message that the EKG was just back from the lab, but EKGs didn’t have to go to the lab. Broun’s doctors read his as they came off the machine. He had said Annie’s records showed a functional heart murmur, but how could they when it took two weeks to a month to get the records? Annie had told me he put her on Elavil right away. Richard hadn’t done an EKG, and he hadn’t waited for the records from her family doctor. The Elavil had made the dreams worse, but Richard hadn’t taken her off the Elavil then. He had taken her off of it when her records came, when he saw she had a minor heart condition and he had had no business putting her on Elavil in the first place.

He had panicked and called me, only I wasn’t there. I was in West Virginia. What if I had been there? Would he have told me the truth, that he had been so frantic with worry that he had made a terrible mistake, that when he had seen the dreams and what they did to Annie, all he could think about was stopping them and how the hell could he wait for the family doctor’s records when they might take a month to get there? Or would he have used his Good Shrink voice on me even then?

Why had he put her on the Thorazine? To try to stop the dreams? Thorazine could have stopped a train, and it wasn’t contraindicated. (Now: Sudden death apparently due to cardiac arrest, has been reported, but there is not sufficient evidence to establish a relationship between such deaths and the administration of the drug.) Or did he give it to her to keep her from going back to the Institute, from telling Dr. Stone he’d given her a medicine that was explicitly contraindicated for heart patients? Why didn’t Longstreet send his troops up at Pickett’s Charge?

Lee never gave any indication after the war that he considered Longstreet’s actions at Gettysburg as anything more than “the error of a good soldier.” But after the battle, when Colonel Venable said bitterly, “I heard you direct General Longstreet to send Hood’s division up,” Lee had blamed him. And I blamed Richard. I’m trying to do my duty as a doctor. I have your best interests at heart.

I took the prescription out of my pocket and looked at it. Broun’s doctor had written a prescription for Elavil.

In July Broun finally let his doctor perform the bypass he had been resisting. He came through it fine, jubilant because nobody had shaved his beard off while he was under the anesthetic, but he didn’t show any interest in working on the Lincoln book.

He sent me to Springfield, complaining that he couldn’t go any farther with the book till he knew where Willie Lincoln had been buried. I spent nearly a month there trying to find out, and then came back and started through the grave registries of the D.C. cemeteries. I had had the prescription for the Elavil filled while I was in Springfield. It stopped the dreams completely, repressing REM sleep the way it was supposed to.

Broun still wasn’t doing any work on the book, even though Willie Lincoln’s burial site was a fact he could add after he got it. He had me do a lot of research he never even bothered to look at, and in the fall he started having chest pains again.

In October he insisted I take him out to the Lincoln Memorial. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said. “It has steps. You know you’re supposed to take it easy on steps.”

He climbed the steps, shaking off my assistance, and went into the memorial to look at the statue of Lincoln. “You know what theory nobody came up with in all that traipsing around California?” he said, looking at Lincoln sitting in the big marble chair with his too-big ears and wide nose and his too-long legs, his too-large hands resting on the marble armrests. “That he was lying about the dreams.”

“Lying?” I said.

“He loved the Union,” he said. “He would have done anything he could to save it, even if it meant trumping up some dream about a boat and a shadowy shore to keep the Cabinet off his back.” His words echoed in the cold room. “He would have sacrificed his own son to save his precious Union.”

“He didn’t sacrifice Willie,” I said. “He loved Willie. He would never have done anything to hurt him. Willie died of typhoid.”

“He should have been home taking care of him instead of off gallivanting around some battlefield,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “He wasn’t off gallivanting. He was right there by Willie’s side the whole time.”

“I never should have gone to California,” Broun said, still looking at Lincoln. “I should have stayed home.”

“It isn’t your fault,” I said.

Broun let me help him back down the stairs. At the bottom he turned and looked back up at the memorial. “It’s been over a year, hasn’t it?”

“A year and a half,” I said.

I was almost out of the Elavil. I called Broun’s doctor and asked him if I could refill the prescription. “Is it helping you sleep?” he asked me. “You’re not having any side effects, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“Your records are here. I want to check them, and then if everything’s okay I’ll call it in for you. By the way, is Broun still interested in Lincoln’s dreams?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if he is, there’s a paper by a psychiatrist he might be interested in, a Dr. Madison. He has a theory that you can dream yourself into ulcers or asthma—”

“Or a heart attack?”

“Yeah. Interesting theory.” He read me the title of the paper and the journal he’d read it in. “It says here Dr. Madison’s degree is from Duke University. You went to Duke, didn’t you? Maybe you know him. Richard Madison?”

Longstreet became quite successful after the war, in spite of Southern criticism that the failure of Pickett’s Charge had been his fault, becoming president of a cotton factory and then an ambassador to Turkey. He wrote articles and a book, and in them he defended his actions at Gettysburg until I think finally he convinced even himself that he had done the right thing and was not to blame for anything that had happened.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know him.” I started taking the Elavil two at a time.

After that trip to the Lincoln Memorial, Broun had put the Lincoln book aside, boxing up all the research and the rough draft and having me carry it up to the attic for him. I spent most of my time at the library. I was still trying to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, even though Broun wasn’t interested anymore. I checked all the grave registries in the towns around Washington and even called Arlington, thinking maybe Commander Meigs had buried Willie in the front lawn of Lee’s house.