Mickelsson's Ghosts (38 page)

Their first year at Brown, he and his family had been invited to a Halloween party given by some friends, the Vicos—the adults to drink, eat, and talk, the children to go out trick-or-treating together, maybe ten, fifteen kids. Maria Vico, famous for her sewing (she'd later turned professional, opening a store), had “created” something for his daughter Leslie; none of them except Leslie had seen it. Leslie, nine or ten, never wore anything at that time of her life but overalls, some old workshirt, and a baseball cap, her long blond hair stringy, always slightly tangled, usually (like her face and hands) not quite clean. Her greatest happiness was to visit her grandparents' farm in Wisconsin, often with a girlfriend, sometimes with her brother, who liked it less, and devote herself to fishing, pigs, and horses. He and Ellen had not strongly disapproved of her ways; even if they had, nothing much could have been done about her. She'd been as stubborn and independent as she was winsome.

So they'd arrived that night at the Vicos' steep-roofed, ultra-modern house with its lush plants, mysterious lighting, and invisible stereo, Leslie in her usual country-hippy garb, and after a few minutes Maria had gone off with the girls of the children's party to the master bedroom. Joe, Maria's husband, took the boys. When the girls emerged, with much fanfare, all the children transformed, Mickelsson's eye had fallen instantly on Leslie, knowing her at once and, in a way, not knowing her at all. The room had been filled to the brim with noise—ooh's and ah's, exclamations and cries of laughter—but he had felt as if he and Leslie were standing in a great silence. Maria had dressed her as a fairy princess: silver crown, light blue dress nearly floor-length, large transparent wings that seemed lighter than air. Her hair, around the eye-mask, was brushed and shimmering, lighter than the wings, and her face had been subtly colored, so that she looked a little like a doll, or a Sumerian goddess. He stood motionless, baffled as by a psychic vision, and he was not himself until his daughter came to him, obscurely smiling, and, raising her star-tipped silver wand, lightly—impishly—touched him with it on the nose. He stood grinning, dazed. Then the boys came tumbling out from the second bedroom, Joe Vico behind them, Mickelsson's colleague in philosophy; pirates, cowboys, a portly banker with a Godzilla mask, then Mark, his son, dressed as some formal, scientific-looking man, bald, with a long white beard and a kind of scarf draped flat over his shoulders. Though there couldn't have been more than six boys in all, they roared like school letting out. Mickelsson, abruptly coming to himself, had joined in with the laughter and extravagant but not inaccurate praise. Then, before his heart was ready, the children were off trick-or-treating.

Everything he'd seen, smelled, touched that night was alive, unforgettable, transmuted by his vision of Leslie. Maria had made some kind of fish in aspic; other women, including Ellen, had brought other things. There was a black chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries; a large fruit salad that made a picture of a witch. He looked at everything with reawakened vision, the innocent eyes of a child. For all his love of talk—especially his own talk—Mickelsson, that evening, had been unable to follow the conversation and had taken no real part in it. In his mind he saw his daughter approaching strange doors: such beauty as the man in the doorway's glow had never seen before, beauty that might reasonably turn him at once from a furniture salesman or professor of economics into a kidnapper or rapist. Little comfort that the party was led by Olympia Vico, sixteen, and guarded on all sides by sixteen-, fifteen-, and fourteen-year-olds. Everyone in the room where Mickelsson sat was talking of Maria's genius with needle and thread. Mickelsson kept stroking the fern beside him as if he thought it were a dog, often nervously glancing at his watch, and at last he'd said casually, “I think I'll just drive around and see how the kids are doing.” No one seemed to notice the oddity of the remark. No one seemed worried in the least about the children.

He drove up and down street after street and saw no trace of them. His heart began to pound. He seriously examined how a murderer might capture fifteen children all at once and leave no sign outside his door. Then at last he spotted them and at once pulled the car over to the curb and extinguished the lights. His son was bowing grandly, swinging down his top-hat to reveal the pink cloth bald dome, and the man and woman at the door were laughing. His son was obviously the star, the leader. His daughter was nearly at the back of the flock, just another child in dress-up. She was smiling and slapping the hand of the girl beside her as Mickelsson had seen black people do on TV.

When he returned to the party, one of the men from the Art Department was doing a sword-dance, and Maria Vico was flamboyantly playing the piano. Mickelsson thought her beautiful. Then he noticed that all the women in the room were beautiful. Let the demon of eternal recurrence come speak to him now!

He remembered other Halloweens, at Hiram, in California, the sad one in Heidelberg where they couldn't find masks, no matter where they looked (only the children had taken it in stride). He remembered the Halloweens in graduate school, when they were poor; how they'd watched the glass dish of M&M's beside the door, praying they wouldn't give out. …

Suddenly he remembered, only for a moment, a rather different occasion.

He wasn't certain how old he'd been. Nine, maybe. And he was no longer clear on exactly what had led up to it. He was in fourth grade. His teacher was Miss Minton. He hated her as he'd never hated anyone before or since. For some reason she'd sent him to the coatroom, or rather, led him there by the ear—a particularly grisly punishment because no one after second grade was ever sent to the coatroom. (He understood it now. Proper form would have been to send him to the principal, but Miss Minton was notoriously cruel, maybe crazy; the principal would not have supported her, or anyway not to her satisfaction.) He could remember vividly only one thing from his year with her: “Sssmart, aren't you! Oh yess, you're
sssmart!”
Her lips shook, a hairy, warty lump on the upper one. She was a stupid woman (so Mickelsson had believed), and no doubt, overgrown and stubborn as he was, and a smart-aleck besides, he had challenged her more than he knew. He remembered, though he couldn't recall details, that he'd mocked her, made fun of her, mimicked her; and he knew that the wilder she became the more stubborn and despairingly reckless he grew. No one quite believed him about her or, so far as he knew, took his side. It was no trifling business. Once when he had had his desktop open and was munging around inside for a book, she, passing down the aisle, had slammed the desktop down on his forearms with all her angry might. When the school nurse came—Miss Minton couldn't prevent it—the nurse found his left arm was broken. Mickelsson had believed absolutely at the time—and tended to believe now—that he'd given his teacher no provocation. In any case she'd lied, or tried to, saying he'd fallen while running—wicked child—in the classroom. Much as all the children feared her, someone had told on her, and at last, bitterly weeping, blaming Mickelsson, Miss Minton had admitted what she'd done. When he'd complained, theatrically crying, to his parents, faking more pain inside the cast than he felt, they'd insisted that he must have done something very wrong—“There's two sides to every story,” his father said, not ungently but with finality—and the principal had pretended to hold the same opinion. (She'd been as kind as she was able to be. The principal had suggested, in subtle ways, that if he endured through this year he would next year have Mrs. Wheat, who would make up for it all—which in fact had proved true.)

Miss Minton would slap your hand with the ruler—so hard that the fingers would sting for minutes—if you said “Hell-o-copter” instead of “helio-co-peter.” She would also hit you with the ruler if you said “stuff,” as in “books 'n' stuff”—“except when you're talking about Thanksgiving,” she said. (“That's not ‘stuff,' that's
stuffing,”
Mickelsson had said scornfully. She'd hit him with the ruler.) She also hit you for reading “David Cooperfield,” as she called it. Why it was wrong to read
David Copperfield
she did not explain; perhaps because he read it through arithmetic class—but he loved arithmetic and had finished and handed in all the book's exercises weeks ago. Pretty clearly her madness had in it, among other things, something twistedly sexual. When she'd finally admitted slamming the desktop on his forearms, she explained to the principal that she'd done it because he was “playing with himself.” No one questioned this, though the physical contortions the claim suggested were extreme—as extreme as his small-boy prudery and shyness.

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.”