Mickelsson''s Ghosts by John Gardner
Gail Edelman said softly, looking gently at Ms. Morris, perhaps to avoid looking at Mickelsson, “I suppose one might argue that the problem’s partly one of sped-up modern time.” Her hands made a tent on the table in front of her. Her voice was an almost inaudible tinkle. “As Professor Mickelsson has often pointed out, morality is based on reality, including our knowledge that our conduct has future implications.” She smiled a weak, frightened little smile, perhaps intending to tell Ms. Morris in advance that eventually she meant to support her position. Gail’s dark hair was cut short, her Irish-Jewish features perfect, china-doll-like, beautiful in the way a museum piece is beautiful. Her eyes—black irises, and whites that were faintly blue—were astonishing. It had occurred to him, the night of his drunken visit to her, that Helen of Troy might have had such eyes; they were as striking, in a different way, as Jessica’s. The girl said, “The problem is, when social roles and social premises are changing with lightning swiftness, as we all know they are, these days—when one cannot tell what the acceptable and defensible norms are—one’s wisest choice may be to argue one’s own life-necessities, since …” She looked down, as if troubled by a mental conflict. “Of course the difficulty is that, in acting in a way that seems best for the self, leaving the welfare of the other to the other’s self-defense, that is to say, the future, we may in fact be poisoning our own future self. …” She broke off, the outside ends of her eyebrows sinking, as if she were convinced that no one would understand her. No one ever did, no one ever had. She allowed the tent shaped by her two frail hands to collapse.
Mickelsson said, though not entirely sure what she was trying to say, “That’s a good description of the problem, I think.” He swept the table with a glance, then focused on the hands of the Polish girl, knotted in front of her, on her notebook. Her tightly pinned hair seemed more frizzy than usual, the lawless ends catching the light, making a kind of halo. He said, “Sometimes, in practice, we’re so hopelessly confused about the total situation we have no choice but to act on self-interest. Which is fine of course, as long as we fully understand what’s in our interest.” He glanced at Janet Something, who, unobtrusively but not timidly, had her hand up. “Janet?”
“I’d like to know what you think,” she said. “I was watching your face—I guess we all were—” She glanced around, then back at him, the barest suggestion of a smile touching her lips. “I guess I think everything Rachel said was true”—she brushed the hair back from her eyes, quickly, stiffly, almost a karate chop—“but I felt something important might be missing.”
He waited, hoping to lure her on.
She seemed to consider waiting him out, then gave way. “I was thinking of that doctor in one of your articles,” she said, “the pro-abortion doctor who became the head of an abortion clinic which performed, if I remember, sixty thousand abortions without a single maternal death.”
“Bernard Nathanson,” he said, and nodded. For the first time he realized that, all this time, watching him, inscrutably smiling, she’d been an ally. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, as you say in your article—I guess probably everybody’s read it—Nathanson helped get the liberal 1970 New York State Abortion Statute passed, and then suddenly he quit the abortion clinic.” She shrugged. “That’s all I meant to say.” She shrugged again.
“I don’t see,” Ms. Morris began, then looked at Mickelsson, betrayed.
Mickelsson looked down at her notecards to avoid her face. “Nathanson’s problem,” he said, “as he explained in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, was that the foetuses he and his associates vacuum-cleaned out were alive: living human beings, capable of feeling pain, struggling against death—every bit as alive as newborn babies. Sixty thousand of them. He never stopped believing in abortion, at least in certain situations. He just stopped performing them.”
“But you agree,” Ms. Morris said, her head very still, her dark eyes burning into him, “that an adult female human being is a more meaningful and socially valuable person than a foetus.” No hardshell Baptist was ever surer of his ground. Her troubled eyes insisted on the irony of it all: that it was Mickelsson’s own position on the inequality of persons that underlay her argument. “I mean,” she said, inclining her head toward him, “isn’t a grown woman of more value than an unborn thing?”
He hung fire. “Sometimes,” he said at last.
She paled. The ex-highschool teacher, C. J. Wolters, looked at Mickelsson, not sure what to write in his notebook.
“I’ll tell you a funny story,” Mickelsson said suddenly. He let his eyes rest on the tall, thin Polish girl’s hands. “Last spring as I was trimming the hedges around my house”—it was a lie; in fact it was something he’d read in a newspaper—“I disturbed a bird’s nest—a robin’s nest. An egg fell out on the ground, and when I picked it up it felt heavy. For some reason—I’m not sure why—I cracked it, then opened it up, and behold, what I found inside was a tiny, living bird. I was a little upset. I’m a farmboy, I have experience in these things, and I knew there was no way in the world I could keep that little robin alive—eyedroppers and all that, if they did anything at all they’d just prolong the misery. I didn’t want to leave the baby bird to be eaten by snakes or to be found by my neighbor’s cat or dog; and though I myself felt pity for the thing—the way it opened its bill to me, blindly hoping behind those sealed-shut eyes—I knew the mother bird would never accept it, now that it had my smell on it. So I put it down gently on the ground and put the heel of my shoe on it and crushed it.”
Ms. Morris stared.
“As I say,” he said, “a funny story.” He opened his hands and raised his eyebrows, apologetic. “It was only a bird.” He smiled, then glanced at the Polish girl, then quickly down. She looked gray. So that was it, he thought. He’d walked into it but good, this time.
“So you’re against abortion,” Pinky Stearns said sharply, triumphantly aiming his cigar at Mickelsson.
“I didn’t say that, in the first place,” Mickelsson said, equally sharp, perhaps hoping to throw the guilt onto poor Stearns. “I happen to be pro-abortion, within limits. And in the second place, what I think has nothing to do with it. We’re talking about ethics, not personal opinions.”
“No one’s mentioned the question of ensoulment,” the mousey brownhaired girl next to Gail said abruptly, but no one, not even Mickelsson—though he heard her—noticed.
C. J. Wolters said, holding his hand up, palm out, to keep Mickelsson from answering too fast, “What I’d like to know is, what should we think about abortion, and why?”
No one seemed aware of the misery of the Polish girl.
Ms. Morris said, “That’s what my whole report deals with.”
A mousey blond girl, whose name he did not know, seated next to the mousey brown-haired girl—the blond girl had never before spoken in class—said, bored-looking, speaking in a comically flat Midwestern accent, “All Professor Mickelsson’s saying is that if abortion’s too casual it’s dehumanizing. A society where people can kill people ‘on demand,’ so they don’t have to go through the embarrassment of explaining why, is a crappy society.” Was her glance at him hostile?
“I suppose that’s it,” Mickelsson said.
The tall Polish girl took a slow, deep breath, and still none of them seemed to notice.
“Anyway,” he said, “that’s it once we’ve added in the individual agony, fear, guilt, anger, and helplessness, the things that make abortion a philosophical issue in the first place.”
He suspected that only one of them understood for sure what he was saying. Perhaps “one” not including himself. All truths are for me soaked in blood.
In the parking lot he found he had congratulated himself too early on escaping the campus without having to deal with Michael Nugent. As he was getting out his keys, preparing to heave himself up into the Jeep, a voice called out, “He was investigating some kind of fraud.”
Mickelsson turned to see who it was
“What?” he called.
“I don’t know if it had to do with chemistry or not,” the young man called, “but I know he was investigating some kind of fraud.”
Mickelsson looked down, gathering his wits, wondering why it was here, on the high parking lot overlooking the campus, dark blue waves of mountains in the distance, that Nugent and his friend had chosen to waylay him. It seemed strange, to say the least, that Nugent should wait for him here, in this isolated place, and then shout his information from thirty feet away. After he’d mused a moment, Mickelsson put the keys back in his pocket and walked over to Nugent—since apparently Nugent did not wish to come to him. The black boy went on smiling, his elbows on his knees, then tipped his head up to look at the sky. Towering black clouds were moving in, drawing together, tumbling. Occasionally one of them would brighten with buried lightning, then go dark again. There was as yet no sound of thunder. The trees above the parking lot were perfectly still. In a moment the smallest branches would begin to move, and after another moment it would begin to rain. Mickelsson’s shadow fell over Nugent.
“You mean Professor Warren?” Mickelsson asked.
Nugent blinked rapidly, then nodded.
“How do you know?” Mickelsson asked.
“I talked to some people,” Nugent said. It was clear that no amount of prodding would make him more specific.
After a while Mickelsson asked, “Something to do with the university, you think? What was his interest in this fraud?”
Nugent shrugged as if it hardly mattered to him, but his eyes showed interest. They stared straight into Mickelsson’s. Disconcerting.
“That’s all you know? He was investigating some fraud?”
“I guess that’s right.”
Now he did hear thunder, a low, long-drawn-out roll that made him think of his grandfather, in those final years, listening as if God’s voice were in the sound.
“You think it was just intellectual curiosity?” he asked.
Nugent seemed to ponder the question, then finally said, “He was a clown, in a way. The sort of person who liked to go on—you know—intellectual benders. I remember he told me he was a member of an ashram in Boston for a while, after he’d abandoned conventional religion—he was at Harvard then. Later, when he was teaching at Riverside, in California, he got into Rolfing and the Alexander method—I forgot what all. I don’t mean he was stupid, or just a joker, or anything like that. When I say he was a ‘clown’ all I mean is—” He stopped smiling and rolled his eyes heavenward, grotesquely, as if saying what he wanted to say, getting it just right, took total concentration and God’s help. “You know how it is in the circus. The acrobat does something, and the clown tries to imitate it, but the clown’s not human, like the acrobat, he’s just this creature with straw in his head. That’s why clowns are at the same time funny and sad: they imitate exactly what human beings do, and if the Nicomachean Ethics were right, they really would become human. But no matter what they do they remain just clowns.”
Mickelsson smiled crossly and, still with his head down, looked at the boy up-from-under, reserved. The black boy on the van was still looking up into the darkness of the clouds, watching them with fascination, as if their movement were writing. “I guess I don’t really follow,” Mickelsson said.
Nugent gave a quick, eager nod, as if that were completely understandable, exactly as it should be. “I just mean that you have to believe things, to be human—you know? You have to feel that things are true. A clown is someone who’d give his soul to believe, if he had one, but he never can, he just goes through the motions, harder and harder, to no avail. We laugh at him because we recognize that, in a limited way, that’s how we are too. That’s what I was trying to say in class, about Kafka and the lost language and everything.”
Mickelsson thought about it—thought, tentatively, hastily, about many things. “And Warren was a clown,” he said at last—vapidly, waiting for something more.
Nugent nodded; two quick jerks. “I didn’t understand it at the time—and I don’t mean I was wrong to admire him. Gosh no! When he got married … I guess you’ve probably heard he was homosexual?”
“I hadn’t, but—” He dismissed it with a wave.
“But that was typical, you see! The Truth of Science, Liberal Causes, Marriage and the Family …”
“Mr. Nugent,” he said—again the young man’s first name had escaped him—“you seem to be telling me that you have no beliefs, you feel like a clown. It seems to me that with a mind like yours—an extraordinary mind, if you’ll forgive my saying so—”
“Mind! Oh yes, certainly!” He was smiling, ready to burst out any moment into raucous laughter. “Mind! No question!—e to the iπ equals minus one; this is the absolute proof of God’s existence! Shall I demonstrate?”
Mickelsson reached out and touched his arm. “You stole that,” he said.
Now the leaves were moving, filling the air with a whirring sound. One second ago the trees had been as still as marble. Western light slashed in under the darkness, yellowing the drab brick buildings below, burning the aluminum verticals and windows of the towers.
Nugent jerked his arm back. “Nobody wants to be a clown,” he said, “except Emmett Kelly, who was human.”
Now the rain began, huge warm drops falling softly and neatly, as if aimed.
3
That Friday morning (all but the oakleaves had fallen now, and the smell of November was distinct in the air, all but the scent of woodsmoke, which would only come with the month itself in Pennsylvania), Mickelsson slept late. A little before noon a knock came at the door. He lay waiting for whoever it was to go away, but the knock came again, and, changing his mind, he got up, put on his slippers and robe, and hurried down to answer. He was hung over from drinking while he worked on the house, the night before, and his arms, his back, and the backs of his legs ached from pushing too long and hard at his weight-lifting, just before he’d fallen into bed. As soon as he opened the door he saw that he’d been mistaken to come down. On his front porch stood two young men, wearing ties and long black coats. Their plain black, carefully polished shoes looked like government-issue, and both young men had their hair cut short, like marines. He clung to his first thought, that they were I.R.S. men, or maybe F.B.I. men come to speak with him of Mark, bring him some news or warning; but he knew all the while that that was wrong. There was something drab, even pitiful about them. They wore no gloves, and their faces, especially the noses and ears, were red from the cold. Their breath made steam.
The blond one said, “Mr. Mickelsson, we’re representing the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints. We understand you recently paid a visit to Salt Lake City—”
Whatever the young man said next Mickelsson didn’t hear. He stared, a confusion of emotions leaping up—horror, anger, morbid interest. It was true that he’d visited Salt Lake City, but it was three or four years ago, an aesthetics conference. How had they found out? Some student? Faculty member? Their network didn’t miss a trick, he’d give them that. Or was it possible that they used the line on everyone, since more often than not whoever they talked to would at one time or another have visited that exalted tourist trap? If the person they talked to happened not to have been there, no harm: the sober black foot was in the door. Did they have psychologists working for them, he wondered—people who figured out the angles of entrance, understood the insidious advantage of taking the prospect off guard, addressi
He realized that almost unconsciously he’d said “Yes,” nodding, admitting that he had once visited Salt Lake City, yes. Perhaps, the blond one said, he would like to know more about the Mormons. Again Mickelsson failed to react. He could have told them he knew a good deal about the Mormons. He’d had a student, some time ago, who’d broken away from the Mormon Church and had been hounded for months by their soft-spoken, black-suited squads. He’d had a colleague in California who’d been hounded in the same way for fifteen years. Mickelsson thought of the underwear he’d been told their women wore, marked with holy gibberish and never taken off, not even in the shower—a sin against life, if it was true, he would have told them—and once, in a motel somewhere, he’d read a ways into their incredibly dull bible, the adventures of the archangel Moron. He knew the good that could be claimed for their company—their music, mainly (according to Ellen, it was vastly overrated); also the fact that they were family people, unusually successful in business and agriculture, non-drinkers, non-smokers, statistically more healthy and longer-lived than any other group in America. He would even grant that sometimes, as individuals, they were apparently good people, no real fault but dullness. The daughter of a family of Mormons had been a babysitter for his children when they’d lived in California. Perhaps these two young men at his door, if Mickelsson got to know them, would seem to him as admirable as his California neighbors. In all fairness, he couldn’t condemn them for coming to him as missionaries. They all had to do it for a year of their lives, or so he’d been given to understand—always in twos, each for all practical purposes a spy on the other. Indeed, it was possible that they earnestly believed whatever foolishness it was they came with. Zeal and credulity were common among the young. Ecology, politics, animal rights … He thought of Alan Blassenheim and then of his own son, as pale as this pink-lipped young man now explaining to him the desperate condition of humanity—speaking not by rote, quite, but not altogether from the heart, either; prepared to be harshly interrupted and sent on his way. The dark-haired, red-nosed young man beside the blond one stood leaning slightly forward, looking at Mickelsson, listening to his partner with keen interest.