Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After the surrender, Lee was offered the job of president of a little college in Lexington. He rode up on Traveller to arrange for a home for his family. “He starts tomorrow,” his wife wrote, “on horseback because he prefers it that way and besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard-fought battle.”

In Lexington he rode Traveller every day, stopping to give rides to little girls and to talk to the students. Lucy Long, the mare that had been stolen, was found and bought back, and one of Lee’s daughters would accompany him on the mare when he exercised Traveller. As time went on Traveller’s hard trot fatigued him more and more, and when he went on a speaking tour, he took the train. “Tell him I miss him dreadfully and have repented of our separation but once,” Lee wrote his wife, “and that is the whole time since we parted.”

I took Annie to Broun’s. “We can take the galleys over to Federal Express later,” I said. “This stuff’s going to turn into snow if we go any farther north. I’m not driving up to New York tonight. I need to check for messages and look at the mail.”

I had told Richard to park several streets over so Annie wouldn’t see the car, but the front door wasn’t locked and Broun’s Siamese was crouched on the bottom step. My first thought was that it had somehow gotten locked in when we left for Fredericksburg, but then I saw that the mail was neatly stacked on the hall table and that there was a jacket hanging over the bannister. Annie was standing in the door of the solarium with her gray coat and her gloves still on, and her left arm still cradled in her right, looking at the African violets. They had been watered—there was muddy water standing in puddles on the table.

“Is that you, Jeff?” Broun said, and came clattering down the stairs. He was wearing a black overcoat that looked like he’d slept in it. “Thank God!” he said, and hugged me. His beard hadn’t grown at all in the week we’d been gone, and the rough stubble scratched my ear. “Are you all right? I called every motel in Fredericksburg, but nobody had you registered.” He pushed me out to arm’s length and peered at me with his sharp little eyes. “You got Richard’s message then?”

“What message?” I said. I pulled away from him, and shrugged out of my coat. “I’m fine, now that the damn galleys are finished. What a mess! Transposed chapters, missing chapters, the works. I finally called Annie here and talked her into coming down to help me finish them. You remember my boss, don’t you, Annie?” I said. I draped my coat over the newel post. “The man who is responsible for all our misery these last few days? Broun, you remember Annie?”

“Yes, of course,” Broun said, and shook hands with her.

“Hello,” she said gravely. I couldn’t read her face at all.

“It’s freezing out here in the hall,” I said. “Didn’t you turn the heat up? Let’s go in the solarium.” I took Annie’s arm and led her into the room. “Good, it’s warmer in here. Annie, let me take that wet coat.”

Broun came and stood in the doorway. “Why didn’t you tell me you were sick, Jeff?” he said. “I thought there was something wrong that night you got in from Springfield. Why didn’t you tell me you were having chest pains? I would have canceled my trip. Have you been to see a doctor?”

“The records from the family doctor show a problem with the EKG,” Richard had said. “Have you noticed any chest pains?” Broun had thought the message was about me, had flown home to help me, but it was too late. I looked at Annie. She had taken her gloves off and had backed up until she was against the table that held the African violets. She stood there twisting her gloves and watching me, waiting to hear what I would say.

“I’m not the one who’s sick,” I said. “Annie is. I brought her home to put her in the hospital.” I took hold of her hands. “I called Richard,” I said. “He’ll be here any time.”

She stood very still for a moment, as though she were going to speak, and then lurched forward, the way Lee had when Traveller bolted, the gloves still in her hands.

“You’re suffering from angina,” I said. “That’s what’s making your wrist hurt. Lee had angina all through the war, pains in his shoulder, along his arm, in his back. He died of a heart attack. The dreams are a warning. Like Lincoln’s dreams. You’ve got to see a doctor.”

“And so you called Richard.”

“Yes.”

She sat down on the couch. “You promised,” she said.

“That was before I knew the dreams were killing you. I’m doing this for your own good.”

“Like Richard,” she said, twisting the gloves in her lap.

I knelt beside her. “Annie, listen to me, the dream you had this morning, it wasn’t about Antietam. I lied to you. The meeting you dreamed was at Grace Church in Lexington. Lee went to that meeting and sat there all afternoon in the cold and then walked home in the rain and had a heart attack! I’m not going to let that happen to you!”

“I have to do this.” She twisted the gloves. “I have to see it through. Please try to understand,” she said, gravely, kindly. “I can’t leave him. I promised to have his dreams. Poor man… I have to try and help him. I can’t leave him. He’s dying.”

“He’s not dying, Annie!” I shouted. “He’s dead. He’s been dead over a hundred years. You’re holding on to the hand of a corpse. You can’t do anything for him! Don’t you see that?”

“I promised.”

“And I made some promises, too, but I’m damned if I’m going to let you die for the sake of a goddamned answering machine! That’s what it is, some kind of biological prerecorded message that switches on when you’re going to have a heart attack and leaves a message for you to call the doctor.”

“No, they’re not,” Annie said. “They’re Lee’s dreams.”

“Lee’s dreams,” Broun said. He took hold of the door jamb and leaned against it as if he couldn’t stand.

“They’re prodromic dreams, Annie! They’re caused by the angina!”

Broun took a step toward Annie. “Are you having Robert E. Lee’s dreams?” he said in a labored, uncertain voice, as if he could not get his breath.

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Annie said.

Broun groped blindly behind him for a chair and sat down heavily. “Lee’s dreams,” he said.

“Annie, don’t you understand?” I said. “You’re in danger. I have to get you to a hospital.”

“I can’t. I promised.”

“What did you promise? To march up to the Bloody Angle and get yourself killed? You’re not one of Lee’s soldiers! His soldiers had to stay with him. They’d have been shot for deserting.”

“That isn’t why they stayed,” Annie said.

It was true, barefoot and bleeding, they still hadn’t deserted him, not even at the end. We’ll go on fightin’ for you, Marse Robert.

“Lee’s soldiers knew when they signed up they could get killed. You didn’t. You didn’t sign up at

“I did sign up,” Annie said. “That day we went to Shenandoah. I realized then that I couldn’t leave him, that I had to stay and help him have the dreams.”

“That day we went to Shenandoah you didn’t know you had angina!”

“Yes, I did.” She put the gloves down on her lap. “I figured it out that morning in the library. My wrist hurt, and I thought maybe it was a side effect of the drugs I’d been taking, so I looked it up. It said Elavil was contraindicated for patients with heart conditions.”

“Elavil?” I said stupidly.

“A year ago when I went to my doctor for the insomnia, he told me I had a minor heart condition.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have taken you to a doctor.”

“I couldn’t go to a doctor.” She looked at me. “The dreams are a symptom. If you cure the disease, the symptoms go away. And I can’t leave him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said again.

She didn’t say anything. She sat with her hands in her lap.

“Because I would have tried to stop the dreams,” I said for her. Like I was doing now.

The doorbell rang. Broun put his hands on the arms of the chair and made a motion to get up, then sat down again watching Annie. She stood up. Her gloves fell to the floor, unnoticed. “You promised,” she said.

“I’m doing this for your own good,” I said, and opened the door to Richard.

He didn’t have a coat on. His sweater and jeans were wet clear through. His hair was wet, too, and he looked tired and worried, the way he had the night of the reception when he was still my old roommate, still my friend.

“Where is she?” he said, and swept past me into the solarium.

Annie had backed into the table holding the African violets and was standing there, her hands at her sides. She had knocked one of the violets over, and muddy water dripped off the edge of the table onto the floor.

“Thank God you’re all right!” he said, and took hold of her wrist. “I’ve called the hospital, and they’ll have a room ready when we get there. Are you feeling any pain?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked across the room at me. Broun stood up.

“Where? In your arm?”

“No,” she said, still looking at me. “Not in my arm.”

“Well, where then? Back, jaw, where? This is important!” he said angrily, but he didn’t wait for her answer. He turned to look at Broun, and as he did he pulled Annie with him, her arm coming up smartly, like a corpse’s.

“Call an ambulance,” he said.

“No,” Annie said, to Broun, not to me. “Please.”

I had thought I could do it. She had already lived through that other surrender. I had not thought this one would be so bad. But that surrender had been different. Lincoln had told Grant to “let ’em up easy,” and Grant had. He hadn’t taken Lee prisoner at Appomattox. He hadn’t even demanded Lee’s sword. He had arranged for rations to be distributed to the men and for the officers to keep their horses, and then he had let Lee go.

I looked at Broun standing there in his black overcoat, his arms hanging at his sides as if he were overcome with fatigue or sorrow, and then back at Richard. I could have surrendered to Lincoln, I thought. I could have surrendered to Grant. But not to Longstreet. Not to Longstreet.

“Let go of her,” I said. Richard turned and looked at me. “There’s no need for an ambulance. We’ve already been to see a doctor. In Fredericksburg. Dr. Barton.”

“What did he say? Why didn’t he have her admitted to a hospital?”

“He did. He took her in and did an EKG on her and ran blood tests. He asked her if she’d been taking any drugs, and she told him Elavil.” I waited to see what effect that had on him.

“You didn’t say anything about this on the phone.”

“Doctor Barton wanted to know why somebody had prescribed Elavil for a heart condition.”

Annie and Broun stood perfectly still, watching him. The room was so quiet I could hear the water from the African violet dripping onto the floor.

“A mild sedative was indicated for the patient’s insomnia,” he said in his Good Shrink voice. “The record from Annie’s family doctor indicated nothing more than a functional heart murmur, and her EKG confirmed that. There were no symptoms of heart disease, and Elavil is only contraindicated in cases of maximum and long-term dosage. I prescribed a mild dose, monitored the patient carefully, and removed her from the drug immediately when it failed to have any effect on her symptoms.”

“Her symptoms,” I said. “You mean the dreams?”

“Yes,” he said. He still didn’t let go of Annie’s wrist.

“I asked Dr. Barton about the dreams,” I said. “He said he didn’t know what was causing them until he saw her blood tests this morning. They showed traces of Thorazine. He said the Thorazine was probably causing the dreams. He asked Annie who’d prescribed Thorazine for her, and she said nobody. She said she didn’t know what he was talking about, that she’d never taken any Thorazine.”

“Thorazine was indicated,” he said. “It’s routinely prescribed in cases of sleep disorders.”

“Dr. Barton said that Thorazine is prescribed for institutionalized mental patients, not for people with bad dreams.”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You still believe she’s having Robert E. Lee’s dreams.”

“Dr. Barton said it was a crime for a doctor to give a patient a drug without this knowledge. He said a doctor could lose his license for that. Is that true, Richard? Could you lose your license?”

“You bastard,” my old roommate said, and let go of Annie’s wrist. “I was only trying to help you, Annie. I had a duty as a doctor.”

“Don’t you talk to me about duty,” Annie said, cradling her arm like a baby against her, “not when you wouldn’t let me do mine.”

Broun made a sound. His face under the beard was deathly pale. He looked sick, like a writer who had just heard the words he wrote spoken in earnest.

“Call the ambulance,” Richard said to Broun.

“No,” Broun said. “She’s having Robert E. Lee’s dreams.”

“You’ve convinced him, too, haven’t you?” he said to me. “You’re all crazy, you know that?”

“Like Lincoln?” Broun said.

“Call an ambulance,” Richard said, and Broun turned and stumbled up the stairs.

“I told Annie I was going to prescribe Thorazine for her and informed her of its side effects,” the Good Shrink said. “She took the first dose herself, Thorazine will sometimes temporarily impair the patient’s short-term memory.”

“After the Civil War, Longstreet wrote long, involved explanations of how he hadn’t let Lee down at Pickett’s Charge,” I said, “how it was all Lee’s fault. But it didn’t work. There were too many eyewitnesses.”

“Is this supposed to be something Robert E. Lee dreamed?”

“No,” I said. “It’s supposed to be a warning. I have two Thorazine capsules and all those messages you left on the answering machine on tape. You leave her alone or I’ll send them to your boss, Dr. Stone, at the Sleep Institute. I’ll tell him you gave a patient Thorazine without her knowledge. I’ll tell him you gave Elavil to a patient with a heart condition.”

Broun came down the stairs, carrying the answering machine. He had wrenched it out of the wall. The shredded ends of the wire dragged on the floor beside him.

“If you still want to call an ambulance, you’ll have to use the phone next door, Richard,” I said, “only I doubt if our neighbor will let you in. Not after she had you arrested once.”

“You bastard,” he said again. “I’m not going to let you get away with this. I called you, did you know that? To tell you I had a patient who was having terrible dreams and I didn’t know what to do. I called you and you weren’t home.”

“Did you call me for help or were you trying to establish an alibi?” I said, but he had already slammed the door shut behind him.

I pulled my coat on. “He may try to follow us,” I said. “He’s parked at least a block away. If we go right now, we can lose him.” I grabbed up Annie’s gloves and thrust them at her.

“Do you have any money?” I said to Broun. He fumbled in his pockets and came up with a twenty and some change. “Is that all?” I said, shouting at him as if I were trying to wake him up.

He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket that was still hanging over the bannister with his right hand, still holding the answering machine in the other, and pulled out a wad of bills. He handed it to me and then sat down heavily on the loveseat.

“Thank you,” I said. I snatched up Annie’s suitcase and hustled her out the door. Broun didn’t answer me. I could see him through the solarium window when I started the car, still sitting there cradling the answering machine against him, like a man asleep.

The rain was trying to turn into snow. I took side streets as far as Ohio Drive and then turned onto the Memorial Parkway. After we’d crossed the bridge, I looked behind me and then went on past the Washington Memorial Parkway exit.

“I’m not going to take you to the airport,” I said. “Richard may not be that far behind us,” I went on hastily so she wouldn’t think this was another trap and that I was taking her to a hospital. “I’m going to take you to the Arlington Metro stop. You can take the Metro to the airport, if you want, or to the train station or the bus, and Richard won’t have any idea where you’ve gone.” And neither will I, I thought.

Annie nodded without looking at me, her gloved hands clasped tightly in her lap. I pulled the car over next to the white stones that marked the entrance to the Metro station and stopped.

“I had a dream about you. On the way up today,” she said, still looking straight ahead. “I was in my room at home, in bed, propped up against the pillows, and you came in and said, ‘I’ll drive you to Fredericksburg,’ and I wanted to go with you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even answer you. I just shook my head.” She turned to me, her eyes filled with tears. “It was the first time I ever dreamed about you. I’ve dreamed about Richard and Broun, but never you, Jeff. Who do you suppose you were? I was so glad to see you.”

“I don’t know,” I said, though I had guessed almost from the beginning what part I played. “Lee’s doctor maybe? I would drive you to Fredericksburg, you know. Or anywhere at all.”

Would I? Knowing where the dreams were leading her, would I be able to take her there? Or would I call Richard again? I got out of the car and took her suitcase out of the trunk and put it on the top of the steps. I opened the door for her. She folded a piece of paper, put it in her pocket, and then got out.

I gave her Broun’s money and all the cash I had. “There’s about five hundred here. That should get you home or wherever you want to go.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“This is the Blue Line. You can take it straight to the airport. If you want Amtrak, change to the Red Line at Metro Center and that’ll take you to Union Station.”

She bent her head to fumble in her purse and put the money away. “I won’t know what happened to you,” I said. “Promise me you’ll go see a doctor.”

“After the war,” she said. She took the folded piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to me.

I nodded. “After the war.”

She reached up and brushed the hair off my forehead. “I was so glad to see you,” she said. She picked her suitcase up in her left hand, put it down on the wet sidewalk and picked it up in her right, and went down the stairs.

I went out to the edge of the platform and stood there long enough for her to get away, holding the folded paper and looking up the hill toward Arlington House. It started to snow. I put the piece of paper in my coat pocket and went back home.

I didn’t look at it until the next day for fear she had written the address of that house with the wide porch and the apple orchard, and that I, like Richard, would try to follow her.

It was still wet. I unfolded it carefully, so it wouldn’t tear, and read it. She had written in blue proofreader’s pencil, “Tom Tita, Arlington House.”