She was looking at me. And she had put her hand in the flowerpot. “Did he have a cat?” she said.

I turned and looked behind me at the door, thinking Broun’s Siamese had come down here to get away from the party, but it wasn’t there. “What?” I said, looking at her hand.

“Did Robert E. Lee have a cat? When he lived at Arlington?”

I was too tired, that was all. If I could just have gotten a nap instead of looking up Willie Lincoln and talking to reporters, I would have been able to take all this in—me asking her out when she was living with Richard, her asking me if Lee had a cat while she scrabbled in the dirt of the flowerpot as if she were trying to dig a grave.

“What kind of cat?” I said.

She had pulled the violet up by its roots and was holding it tightly in her hand. “I don’t know. A yellow cat. With darker stripes. It was there, in the dream.”

I said, “What dream?” and watched her drop the empty flowerpot. It crashed at her feet.

“I’ve been having this dream,” she said. “In it I’m at the house I grew up in, standing on the front porch, looking for the cat. It’s snowed, a wet, spring snow, and I have the idea that he has gotten buried in the snow, but then I see him out in the apple orchard, picking his way through the snow with little, high, funny steps.”

I did not know what was coming, but at the words apple orchard I sat down on the arm of the loveseat, looking anxiously over my shoulder to see if Richard and Broun were coming. There was nobody on the stairs.

“I called to him, but he didn’t pay any attention, so I went after him.” She was holding the violet like a nosegay in front of her, tearing the leaves off in absent, desperate movements. “I made it out to the tree all right, and I tried to pick the cat up, but he wouldn’t let me, and I tried to catch him and I stepped on something….” She had torn all the leaves off now and was starting on the flowers.