“I don’t have any idea what your dream was,” I said. I dog-eared the page I was on and shut the book. “You’re sure it was at Arlington?”
“Yes. I was standing on the porch. The cat was there, and the apple tree. Its leaves had turned. It must have been in the fall. I’m sure it was Arlington. I mean, it’s always my house, the house I grew up in, but it stands for other houses.” She shook her head as if that weren’t the right word. “It feels like other houses. I think Lee must have to use the images I have in my mind to make the dreams out of, and then he makes them stand for other things. It’s the same with the people. I think he must choose the person who’s most like the person he knew….”
The redheaded waitress bustled over and took Annie’s order, apologizing for not having seen her right away and filling both our coffee cups to the very brim.
“Like the waitress?” I said after she left.
“Yes. It was the waitress, but it wasn’t her really.”
“You called her Katie. Do you know her last name or what her relationship to Lee was? Was she a friend of his, a relative?”
“No, she was a friend of…” She picked up her spoon and stirred her coffee. “I just remembered something about the dream,” she said. “That never happened before.”
“What?”
“The waitress… Katie and I were standing on the porch saying goodbye, and I didn’t want her to go. We were both crying, and laughing at the same time because neither of us had a handkerchief, and then all of a sudden I was out by the apple tree and walking up to the house. You know how sometimes in a dream you’re one person and then you’re somebody else, only you’re still the first person, too? That’s how this was. I was walking up from the apple orchard, too, and I was still on the porch saying good bye to Katie. I had on my white nightgown, and she was in her waitress uniform, and we were both crying, and I went up on the porch and said to them, ‘No tears at Arlington!’ and laughed, and gave Katie my big handkerchief to blow her nose on.”
“Do you know who the girl on the porch was?” I asked. “The girl who was you?”
“No. But coming up from the apple orchard I was Lee.”
Well, at least the Pandora’s box of the whole world’s dreams hadn’t been opened yet, and she was still dreaming Lee’s dreams, even if I couldn’t place this one. “And so then this girl, whoever she is, flung her arms around Lee’s neck and started to cry?”
“No.” She put her coffee cup down and stared into it. “He… I… Lee came up on the porch,” she said slowly, “and said, ‘No tears,’ and all of a sudden I felt that I knew what was causing the dreams.” She looked up at me. “I was myself in the dream right then, not Lee or the girl in the white nightgown. I was myself. And I knew what was causing them. I knew why I was having the dreams.” She put her hand up to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “Poor man,” she said softly. “Poor man.”
It had been Annie with her arms twined around my neck, after all, even though it wasn’t me she clung to. “Do you still know?” I said, wanting to reach across the table and comfort her, but not daring to even touch her. “Do you remember what it was that was causing the dreams?”
She wiped her eyes with her paper napkin. “No. I woke up and found myself hanging all over you. I was so ashamed that I’d been sleepwalking and that my nightgown was half off. I was afraid I’d tried to kiss you or something.”
You didn’t try to kiss me, Annie, I thought. I wasn’t even there. “You didn’t try to kiss me,” I said.
“And then when I tried to remember the dream, I couldn’t…” Her voice trailed off again the way it had the night before. After a minute she shook her head. “Jeff, I think we should go back to Arlington.”
That one had come right out of left field. “We can’t go back,” I said, stammering in my surprise. “Richard’s there.”
“I know, but when I went there before, it helped.”
Helped her to dream the horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, I thought. I could see the look of terror on her face as she stood had there in the snow, looking down at the bodies on the lawn. I didn’t want to subject her to that again, even to solve the puzzle of the dreams.
“We’re only going to be here a couple more days. I need to see the vet again and finish up my research at the library for Broun.” These were useless excuses. I could obviously call the vet from D.C, and the only research I’d done since I’d been here had been on Lee, not Lincoln, but Annie wasn’t listening to me. She was leaning forward, as if she could almost reach out and touch the meaning of the dreams.
“The dreams have something to do with Arlington,” she said in that inflectionless voice she used to recite the dreams. “And the yellow-haired soldier. And the cat. Nobody knows what happened to them.” She looked up at me. “Did Lee have a daughter?”
“He had several, I think,” I said, relieved that she had changed the subject. “I know he had at least one. Agnes, I think her name was.” I stood up. “Go ahead and finish your breakfast. I’m going to go get my notebook and then we’ll go to the library and see what we can find out about Agnes.”
I went back to the room and gathered up the two volumes of Freeman that were by my bed. Annie had left the chair close to the door. Volume four was on the seat. I pushed the chair back where it belonged so the maid wouldn’t think we were trying to steal the furniture and picked up the book.
Annie was standing at the cash register talking to the redheaded waitress when I got back. I hoped she wasn’t pitching the battlefield again.
“The weather’s supposed to turn this afternoon,” the waitress said. “Big cold front moving in.”
Good, I thought. Maybe well be snowed in here.
We walked down to the library. The librarian glared at me when I came in carrying my stack of books, as if she thought I’d taken them the day before without checking them out. Annie borrowed a piece of paper and a pen from me and said she was going back down to the reference section.
“I’ll be in biographies, where we were yesterday,” I said.
I looked up “Lee, daughters of.” He had had three other daughters besides Agnes: Mary, Ann, and Mildred. Since I had no way of knowing which one was in this dream, I used the only other clue I had. An hour into the index references under Arlington, I found what I was looking for.
In the fall of 1858, Katherine Stiles, a friend from Georgia, had come for a visit. When she got ready to leave, Lee had found her and his daughter Annie weeping together. “No tears at Arlington!” he had told them. “No tears!” His daughter Annie.
I looked up “Lee, Annie Carter (Robert E. Lee, daughter of)” in the index and started going through the page references. On March second, 1862, Lee had written her: “My Precious Annie, I think of you all, separately and collectively, in the busy hours of the night, and the recollection of each and every one whiles away the long night, in which my anxious thoughts drive away sleep. But I always feel that you and Agnes at those times are sound asleep, and that it is immaterial to either where the blockades are or what their progress is in the river.”
There it was, the connection I’d been looking for. I had tried to come up with all kinds of complicated rationales for why Annie was having the dreams—Richard’s drugs and chemical imbalances and Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams. It had never occurred to me that Annie might simply be having the dreams because Lee had called out her name in his sleep.
The sharp-faced librarian was leaning over me. “I see you brought your own books with you today,” she said in a voice with a surprisingly gentle tone and a marked Virginia accent. “I’m afraid our Civil War materials are very limited. Most people do their research out at the National Park Service Library.”