Connie Willis - Lincoln’s Dreams

“I think Lincoln is pretty much beyond help even for a doctor,” Broun said.

“We have to go,” Richard said angrily, buttoning his overcoat.

“Well, even though we disagree, I’m glad you came,” Broun said, putting his arm around Richard’s shoulder. “I’m just sorry you can’t stay and have some supper. Those shrimp doodads are wonderful.” He led Richard out into the hall.

I held the gray coat and wondered if I were really asleep and dreaming all this. Annie came and took the coat off my arm, and I helped her into it. “What was the cat’s name?” I said. “In your dream?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not my cat.” She looked down to button her coat, and then looked back up at me. “It’s not my dream,” she said. “I know you won’t believe me because Richard doesn’t. He thinks I’m heading for a psychotic break, and you probably think I’m crazy, too, but it’s not my dream. I’m dreaming it, but it’s somebody else’s.”

“Your… he’s getting the car,” Broun said, taking in the whole scene.

“I’m sorry about your African violets,” Annie said. “I was looking at one of them and…”

“No harm done, no harm done.” He led her to the front door and out, talking the whole time. “I’m so glad you could come to our reception.”

When he came back, I was on my hands and knees in front of the bookcase, looking for volume two of Freeman. “I had a very peculiar conversation with your roommate just now,” he said. He sat down on the arm of the loveseat and looked at the pile of dirt and flowerpot fragments that had been his violet. He scratched his scruffy beard, looking more than ever like a horsetrader. “He told me that Lincoln’s dream was a symbol for some deep-seated trauma, probably in his childhood.”

I found The Gray Fox and looked up “Cats,” and then “Lee, love of pets,” in the index. “Well, what did you expect from a psychiatrist?” I said, wishing he would go back to the party so I could find out whether Lee had had a cat.

“I told him I thought the deep-seated trauma was probably the Civil War, and that it seemed perfectly normal for him to dream about assassinations and coffins in the White House. Did you know Willie’s coffin was put in the East Room?”

“Did Robert E. Lee have a cat?” I said.

Broun looked at me. “Lincoln had cats. Kittens. He loved kittens.”

“Lee, damn it, not Lincoln. When he lived at Arlington, did he have a cat?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and it was the same placating tone he’d used with Richard. “Maybe Freeman says something about a cat.”

“Maybe it does, but I don’t have a goddamn clue as to where Freeman is. You keep volume one in the attic, volume three under your bed, and volume four you tear up for mulch and use in your African violets. If you had a library like other people instead of this goddamned disorganized mess…”

“Your roommate said,” Broun went on, “that all the half-buried bodies in the dream showed that Lincoln was obsessed with death.”

I looked up from the book. He was watching me with his bright little horsetrader’s eyes. “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I picked up the scattered books and started to put them back on the shelf. “I’m going to bed. I’ve got to go out to Arlington in the morning.”

He stood up then and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t bother with it,” he said. “It can wait. You’ve just gotten home from a long trip, and I know you’re tired. Go on to bed, son. I’ll take care of that mob upstairs.” His hand was still on my shoulder. “Did you get a chance to read that scene I gave you?”

“No,” I said.

“I had Ben have a fight with his brother over a girl. I wonder how many soldiers did that, enlisted because of some girl?”

I looked down at the book I was holding. It was the missing volume two. “I don’t know,” I said, and moved away from him.

Robert E. Lee first saw Traveller during the Big Sewell Mountain campaign in western Virginia. He was riding Richmond then, a big bay stallion that had been given to him by a group of admirers in Richmond. The horse Richmond didn’t have the stamina or the disposition for war. He tired easily and squealed and bucked whenever there were other horses around. When Lee was ordered to the south, he didn’t take Richmond. He took a horse called the “Brown Roan,” who later went blind and had to be retired. After Manassas, General Jeb Stuart gave Lee a gentle mare named Lucy Long to spell Traveller. In 1864 Lucy gave out, and Lee sent her behind the lines to recuperate. She was stolen by stragglers and sold to a Virginia surgeon.

I didn’t wake up till ten the next day, and when I did it was with the idea that the phone had been ringing. It must have been. The message light was on. I turned on the answering machine and listened to the messages while I got dressed. There were two of them. The first was Broun. It had the grainy sound of his car phone. “Jeff, I’m on my way to New York,” he said. “I called my editor this morning. He says it’s too late to add a scene, that they’re already printing the galleys, so I’m taking the scene up to him myself and making sure it gets in. I’ll be back tonight. Oh, and forget about going out to Arlington. I got to thinking this morning, Arlington wasn’t made into an official cemetery until 1864, and Willie died in 1862. We’ll figure out where he was buried later. Stay home and get some rest, son. It’s supposed to snow. Oh, and I straightened up the books.”

I looked out the window. It had apparently just sleeted enough to put an icy glaze on the streets last night and then stopped, but now it was starting again. There were only a few large flakes, and they were melting before they even hit the sidewalk, but it had started that way in West Virginia, too, and then turned into a blizzard.

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.”