Mickelsson''s Ghosts by John Gardner

  Miss Minton was not pretty. She was thin as a rail from the collarbone up and from the knees down, and a blimp between. She had such warts as would not be tolerated in the work of a painter who claimed to be realistic, and from half the warts, as from the rest of her body, came soft moss. Her hair was black, her face chalky white except for artificial colors here and there. She was unpleasant in every way, and when later that same year she had died of a brain tumor, Mickelsson had not been as sorry or forgiving as he’d pretended.

  And so, locked in the coatroom that afternoon, Mickelsson, still with his arm in a cast, had begun to look through the art supplies—mainly white paste and construction paper, brushes and dried-up tempera—then look (not for the purpose of stealing) through the other children’s coats. Eventually, in the broomcloset, he’d found Miss Minton’s coat, boots, green felt hat, umbrella, and purse. In the purse he found her make-up. When Miss Minton opened the coatroom door at four o’clock—he had never fully intended this to happen—she met a creature wearing her own coat, hat, and boots, a face painted to look as if it had horribly shattered, splashing blood. That was not the worst. In the creature’s right arm, Miss Minton’s umbrella was raised like an axe. It came down on her. She would remember nothing more for several hours.

  Now all the children began to scream. He chased them with the umbrella, screaming back at them, terrified, trying to make them stop. It seemed the whole world was in reeling, finny commotion, flopping end over end. And then the black janitor, Mr. Pierce, was holding him in his arms, talking to him quietly and squeezing the air out of him. Miss Minton, laid out flatlings with her face turned toward him, over by the coatroom door, was talking. The words dribbling out between her parted lips made no sense.

  No one had knocked yet at Mickelsson’s door. He decided to sit down in the front room with a book, to make doubly sure he didn’t miss them when they came. The clean lines and colors of the candy and apples weighed on his spirit. Still no knock, no laughter in the yard. He was too far out in the sticks, perhaps. No one even crept up to soap his windows. Was it possible that Halloween was last week? Next week? In the end he put the candy away in plastic bags in his refrigerator. For days after that, he ate apples from the bowl in his livingroom or from his pockets.

  He’d been driving to the university, during this period, no more often than he had to, and avoiding people, as well as possible, when he was there. Occasionally he broke this pattern, always to his later grief. Once, travelling down a hallway he seldom used, and glancing in through an open office door, he saw someone he recognized, a young man he’d met at a party somewhere and had enjoyed talking to—they’d talked about football. He glanced at the name on the door—Levinson—then waved and called in, “Hi there! How’s it going?”

  The young man turned his head, looking startled, then pleased to see him. “Hi!” he said. “Terrible!” He laughed, but the left side of his lip jerked up, forming a sneer not meant for Mickelsson but for the world. He was wearing one of those Greek off-white sweaters—more off-white just now than it ought to be, slightly ragged at the cuffs and too short.

  “What’s wrong?” Mickelsson asked seriously, at once genuinely concerned and sorry that he’d stopped.

  “Ahgh, nothing,” Levinson said, regretting that he hadn’t answered, Fine, just fine! He raised a hand to his curly, dark hair, not to touch it but to place the pencil he’d been writing with up behind his ear, like a grocery clerk. “I’m getting killed, these gas prices. I’ve been here eleven years as an associate professor, and all I’m making is twenty-one.” Again his lip lifted in the involuntary sneer. “My son’s in Boston, with his mother. It was a bitter divorce—very painful. I really love him.” His eyes flicked angrily away from Mickelsson’s. “I drive up and see him every two or three weeks.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry,” Mickelsson said.

  Levinson shrugged, an exaggerated heave of the shoulders. “Fucking oil companies. Reagan as President, it’ll be a whole lot worse.”

  “He hasn’t really got much chance, has he?” Mickelsson asked.

  “Don’t kid yourself!” The sneer-tic grabbed fiercely this time. His eyes roved the room. “They should’ve been socialized twenty years ago. Oil companies. Well, what the hell, at least I’m working.” Now Mickelsson remembered who Levinson was: one of Jessica’s Marxist colleagues in sociology. He felt a brief impulse of coolness toward the man, then lost it. Levinson looked like a college freshman, but battered, permanently injured. His Jewish nose was so hooked it looked broken in the ring. “I had a dry spell for a while. Jesus, it drove me crazy.”

  “I know how that feels,” Mickelsson said, raising his hand to the doorframe.

  “Working on Nietzsche,” the young man said. “It’s something that might interest you. I’d be glad to let you see it, maybe get a few comments, when I get the thing in shape.”

  “Ah?” Mickelsson said, both interested and reserved.

  “I’ve been working on pain”—he sneered and smiled at once—“how to put it to work for you. Nietzsche was on to it as early as The Birth of Tragedy. Not really on to it yet, but on to it.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “The sublime as the artistic conquest of the horrible.”

  Mickelsson nodded.

  “You think you’d be willing to look at it?” The young man’s eyes settled on him only for an instant, then roved again.

  “Sure I would,” Mickelsson said. “Of course!” It was a point at which he might easily take his leave, but he remained, for Levinson’s sake, not for his own. “I’ve never known exactly what I think about that particular doctrine,” he said. “Problem of ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ”

  Levinson drew the pencil from behind his ear, as if unconsciously considering writing down some note on the lined white pad on the desk in front of him. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know. The whole question of ‘sublimation.’ Freud’s kind, that’s easy; but Nietzsche’s, I’m not so sure.” It struck him that if he went any further he’d be there all afternoon. “Well, anyway,” he said, “good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Levinson said. Then: “You mean you think it’s possible?”

  Mickelsson smiled. “God knows I hope it’s possible.”

  The young man thought about it, then said, lifting one eyebrow, “Good luck.”

  Every spare minute he could find, all through October, he had worked on his would-be blockbuster book, the book he’d begun with such joy and confidence in the first radiance of his infatuation with Donnie Matthews, but which seemed to him now, like the costly, difficult affair itself, sometimes unbalanced, never really sensible, though at moments as glorious as the autumn weather, the sweet smell of change in Donnie’s hair and breath. At his worst moments he found the project, like the love affair, embarrassing, enslaving, and insipid.

  When he was unable to write, he worked—sometimes far into the night—on the house. He had reason enough for gloom. His son was still missing; and it had been weeks since he’d sent money to his ex-wife and daughter, though he’d caught Ellen up on her house and car payments. When he glanced through his mail, usually without opening it, at least half of it consisted of letters from collection agencies. The Acme would no longer take checks from him—he’d bounced there repeatedly—and even Owen Thomas looked ill-used whenever Mickelsson got out his checkbook, though Thomas did still take his checks, accepted them almost graciously, all things considered, perhaps from kindheartedness or timidity, perhaps because of the large amount of business Mickelsson did at Owen’s store.

  Winter would be trouble, when he had to pay for fuel oil, more wood, and the various extras that inevitably settled in with cold weather. The automatic transmission in the Jeep was behaving oddly, noisily clunking whenever he shifted into drive; some lawyer in Providence was threatening to sue him for fifteen hundred dollars, an old litigation fee Ellen had for some reason refused to pay three years ago; and Mickelsson was no closer than ever
to paying off the I.R.S.—the fines and penalties mounted daily: fourteen thousand a year was about what they’d come to; so Finney claimed. He had, in short, reason enough to be discouraged. At times he angrily wished the whole thing done with, wished some supernal referee would blow a whistle and declare him out, bankrupt. But he was beginning to learn that financial ruin, like death, is not a moment but a process, a slow, merciless grinding down. Sometimes not even an expert could say, in a given case, that ruin has now come, or ruin, though close at hand, has not yet arrived. He sent away for, and obtained by means of lies, a Master Charge card, which meant that his checking account would be guaranteed up to three thousand dollars. He also received, in spite of his execrable credit, an American Express card. Ellen, as a separated woman, could get no credit at all. The news that this was so—news Mickelsson got through a joking phonecall from Finney—filled Mickelsson with righteous indignation, a sentiment Finney did not share. “Prods her ass one step closer to the courthouse, ole pal,” Finney said. “Look at it this way, ole pal ole sock: you didn’t make the world, so mafriend you’re Not Guilty. Whatever falls in your yard, put your fucking flag on it!” Though he had always despised Jake Finney’s worldview, and suspected that even Finney himself despised it—exactly the worldview of Martin Luther, but with no otherworldly alternative—he could not deny, in those moments when he allowed himself sober reflection, that he’d already adopted it in practice. His chief personal expense these days, greater even than the expense of his house, was a seventeen-year-old prostitute.

  Sometimes late at night, especially when he was drunk, he thought about the money he’d seen in the apartment of the fat man. Hardly knowing he was doing it, he would go through in his mind how one might run three hard steps from across the hallway and smash the tall door in, sometime when the fat man was down on the street, then rush over to the chest beside the fat man’s TV chair, gather up the money and be gone, all in less than a minute. He envisioned it so clearly it might have been a memory floating up out of the gumbo at the bottom of his mind. Then, realizing what he was thinking, half seriously toying with, he would shudder like a sick man and whisper, “Stupid!” or, sometimes, “Insane!” When he was in downtown Susquehanna he would catch himself gazing thoughtfully up and down the street, seeing if the fat man was out. He never was. Sometimes, going up the dark, narrow stairway to Donnie’s room, his coat collar turned up, his hat flat on his head like an Indian’s, he would pause, in spite of himself, at the landing on the fat man’s floor.

  She no longer charged him seventy-five dollars a visit. She’d grown somewhat fond of him—or so he hoped, since his heart was slaughtered by just the rustle of her dress, the little joking pout she put on when he lost his erection, or the way that, making a face, she would cross her eyes. But she was, she insisted, a professional, and would not “put out” for less than twenty dollars, or spend the whole night with him for under sixty. (She would not accept checks.) Before Donnie, he’d never visited a prostitute, neither did he any longer know anyone who did, so he had no way of telling whether or not she was cheating him. She probably was, he supposed, but he was afraid to press. Once when he cautiously touched on his suspicion that the price was exorbitant, she said, “Why don’t you check with the police?” She knew him, all right! The thought that the police might burst in on them some evening or afternoon (which somehow seemed worse) made him sick with dread. When he was teaching classes, the approach of that thought would make everything he was saying fly at once from his mind. He would imagine dire headlines: UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR HELD FOR CONTRIBUTING TO DELINQUENCY OF MINOR. PHILOSOPHER CAUGHT WITH SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL. He would rack his brain, standing there empty-headed in front of his class, too sick at heart even to remember to take a Di-Gel. Sometimes he could do nothing to get his wits back but go over to the window and stand for a few minutes rubbing his forehead and staring out.

  His fear of the police and his distress at how much his addiction was costing him were by no means the only griefs she gave him. He worried about disease. He thought of poor syphilitic Nietzsche, who in 1889 had run into a street to throw his arms around the neck of a horse as its master, like some brute from Dostoevski, was beating it to its knees, after which moment “the Antichrist” was never again sane—the best mind in Europe reduced in one instant of passionate sympathy (“I am not a man, I am dynamite”) to rubble, one at last with Jesus of Nazareth as Nietzsche had understood him—Jesus the “idiot.” No one went mad from syphilis anymore, of course, or so Mickelsson believed. Nonetheless, he knew that Donnie Matthews wasn’t careful, and some of the people with whom she dealt looked—to say the least—unhealthy. He worried as much about her as about himself and couldn’t help furtively checking up on her at times—rather frequently, in fact—finding reasons to loiter in front of Reddon’s Drugstore, as if waiting for a prescription, or chatting with Owen Thomas on the sidewalk in front of his hardware store, conveniently nearby. He couldn’t bring himself to go sit on her landing—she might get angry, and her anger was a terrible thing—but he knew by now all the people who lived in the other apartments and could pretty well tell who her customers were. (Sometimes he would say, unable to help himself, “You’re a hard worker, I’ll grant you that. Five this afternoon?” She would roll her eyes.) They were a ghastly company, Donnie Matthews’ clientele, not just filthy, scarred, pimply, but downright deformed. Get them all together in one room, it would look like a Fellini cast party.

  “Mostly the good-looking people don’t need me,” she said with a little shrug when he mentioned it. “Everybody puts out, these days. You ain’t heard of the Pill? My people, they’re naturally the desperate ones. Love for the unloved.” She smirked. “I should get that printed on a card.”

  “The Mother Seaton of the demi-monde,” he said.

  Donnie looked uneasy, as she always did when he used unfamiliar expressions.

  He said, “How can you do it, though? That one tonight. No bath for at least a year, I’ll bet, and a week’s growth of whiskers, and—”

  She laughed. “I know. That fucking thing in his eye.”

  He rolled toward her. “Well, how can you?”

  “A person has to get ahead,” she said. “That’s the American Way.” She pursed her lips, looking at him. Gently, coyly, she poked his nose with one finger. The gesture filled him with an almost sickening, guilty desire. “You’re jealous,” she said.

  “God knows!” Mickelsson said, and took her hand.

  The house, in any case, was beginning to be beautiful, and he was thankful for its demands, since, to some extent at least, work on the house, besides toughening him up, kept him from making a fool of himself downtown. The newly painted and wallpapered rooms, though for the most part still empty of furniture, gave the place the brightness of a New England inn, even when the day outside was dark, as days in the Endless Mountains often were. He’d found junk light fixtures, which he’d patched and polished and fitted with clearglass bulbs. The brighter and trimmer the house became, needless to say, the more absurd the legends of its haunting seemed—legends still obscure, since while everyone in Susquehanna claimed to know the place haunted, no one so far had been able to tell him any more than old Pearson about who might be haunting it or why. Some thought it was the Sprague ghosts who troubled the place; some thought it was the ghosts of the people who’d lived there before the Spragues. The U.P.S. man, when he came by with the fruit trees Mickelsson had ordered, claimed he’d heard an entirely different story, one no longer very clear in his head but given to him on the best authority—something about buried treasure, or perhaps a mysterious grave … a curse, possibly. … “Well, no matter,” Mickelsson had said, smiling, turning back to his work, which was, that day, the sanding of the downstairs floors. He must put the whole stupid haunting legend out of his mind.

  He could not entirely drive from his consciousness the strangeness of what he was doing, fixing the place up when he had no one but himself to do it for; but he carefully
kept himself from thinking too much about that. Even more studiously he kept himself from thinking about his son. Ellen had had a card from him, from Rochester, New York. She had the police out hunting him.

  Mickelsson received a letter from his daughter—a long, chatty one that he read over and over until he knew it by heart, and between readings, kept on his pile of manuscripts on the table in his study. Though the letter was in English, only a few hints here and there of her increasing inclination to shift to French, it seemed to Mickelsson that she spoke to him already in a foreign tongue. The letter seemed all surfaces, as if the words were not windows into her thought but mirrors, maybe rapidly moving mirrors made of steel. Strain as he might, he couldn’t hear the sound of her voice in the writing—whether it was the letter’s fault or his own, he couldn’t tell. He would stand by the curtainless window of his study, holding the letter in his two hands, reading through it slowly, word by word, as if he were brain-damaged, and though a thousand thoughts pressed through his mind—dream-thoughts crowding like shadowy deer through a meadow at night—none would stand plain. She assured him that Mark was all right; he knew what he was doing if anyone did in this crazy, fichu world. Then she spoke of a young man named David as if Mickelsson should know him; spoke of her new doctor, a chiropractor and nutritionist, and of the theory of chiropractic: electrical circuits, stimulation of weak organs. He, Mickelsson, should take vitamins, she said, especially vitamin E, for the heart. She included a list of the supplements he needed, with dosages. “Well, Papa, bon soir,” she ended. “Baisers …”