Lincoln's Dreams Read Free

but no thanks.” I wondered if he was calling now with another job offer. Broun had said Richard wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to talk to me about, which meant it probably was, and I was in no shape to listen to it.
    I took a hot shower instead and then tried for a nap, but I found myself still thinking about Richard and decided to call him and get it over with. I went back into Broun’s study to use the phone. I thought maybe the girlfriend Broun had talked to would answer, but she didn’t. Richard did, and he didn’t have any job offers.
    “Where in the hell have you been? I tried to call you,” he said.
    “I was in West Virginia,” I said. “Seeing a manabout a horse. What did you want to talk to me about?”
    “Nothing. It’s too late, anyway. Broun said he’d have you call me,” he said almost accusingly. Why was I constantly finding myself in conversations I couldn’t make heads or tails of?
    “I’m sorry I didn’t call. I just got home. But listen, whatever it was, we can talk about it tonight at the reception.”
    There was dead silence on the other end.
    “You are coming, aren’t you?” I said. “Broun’s really anxious to talk to you about Lincoln’s dreams.”
    “I can’t come,” he said. “It’s out of the question. I have a patient I—”
    “We’re closer to the Sleep Institute than your apartment is. You can give the Institute Broun’s number, and they can call you here if there’s an emergency. I’d really like to see you, and I want to meet this new girlfriend of yours.”
    Another dead silence. He said finally, “I don’t think Annie should—”
    “Come with you? Of course she should. I’ll take good care of her while you talk to Broun. I’ll tell her all about your wild undergraduate days at Duke.”
    “No. Tell your boss I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything to tell him about Lincoln’s dreams that he’d want to hear.”
    Somewhere along in there I started to ache all over. “Then tell him that. Look,” I said, “you don’t have to come for the whole thing. The reception starts at eight. You can talk to Broun and still have this Annie person home in bed by nine watching her rapid eye movements or whatever it is you psychiatrists do. Please. If you don’t come, Broun’ll send me to Indiana in this blizzard to look up nightmares Lincoln had as a kid. Come on, for me, your old roommate.”
    “I can’t stay after nine.”
    “No problem,” I said. I gave him Broun’s address and hung up before he could say no, and then just sat there in front of the fire. Broun’s cat jumpedon my lap and I sat there petting it, thinking I should get up and go lie down.
    Broun woke me up. “How long was I asleep?” I said, rubbing my hands over my face to try and wake up. However long it had been, the aches were worse than ever.
    “It’s six-thirty,” Broun said. He had changed into a dinner jacket with a pleated shirt and string tie. He still hadn’t shaved. Maybe he was trying to grow a beard. If he was, it was a terrible idea. The grayish black stubble seemed to take all the color out of his face. He looked sharp and disreputable, like an unscrupulous horsetrader. “I wouldn’t have wakened you, but I wanted you to take a look at this.” He thrust a sheaf of typewritten pages into my hand.
    “What’s this?” I said. “Willie Lincoln?”
    He poked at the fire, which had died down to almost nothing while I was asleep. “It’s that first scene, the one I was worried about. I just couldn’t see Ben signing up for no reason at all, so I rewrote it.”
    “Do McLaws and Herndon know about this?” Broun’s cat jumped off my lap and started batting at the poker.
    “I’m calling it in to them tomorrow, but I wanted you to look at it first. Ben had to have some motivation for enlisting.”
    “Why? What about later in the book when he falls in love with Nelly? He doesn’t have any motivation for that. She gives him one spoonful of laudanum, and bang,