Mickelsson's Ghosts (48 page)

“I'll ask her,” Garret said, smiling. “Off-hand, it sounds great.”

“Nothing fancy,” Mickelsson said, waving his pipe. “Just a few friends.”

As they rejoined the group at the auditorium door, Edie Bryant was saying, smiling, her wattles shaking like fringe, “Well, Jessie, there they are, two people sharing a talent. I'll grant them that. Now, Phil and I, we're as diffrunt as night and day. Outside the sanctuary of the bedroom, all is war.” She winked at Jessica, wicked. Bryant smiled, raising his jaw a little to put on more dignity. Tom Garret, arms folded over his chest again, looked down at the carpet, grinning to himself.

“Phil,” Mickelsson said, “and Jessica, I wanted to ask you this too.” He took her elbow. “I'm having a little party on December twelfth; that's a Friday. If you're free that night and you'd like to come—”

Jessica smiled as if wonderfully surprised and pleased but drew her arm away.

For reasons Mickelsson didn't fully think out, the second half of the concert annoyed him much less than the first. He could have found reasons enough, of course. There was the distraction of Jessica's emphatic coolness beside him, as if he'd somehow insulted her—whether by leaving her for a smoke outside, or by showing too little respect for Art, or by some other mistake, heaven knew. In any event, the discomfort she caused him made the music seem comparatively unworrisome. He glanced at her occasionally, showing his puzzlement, wordlessly asking for explanation; and though she didn't see fit to explain to him, she did at least partly relent, patting his hand, then returning her own hand to her lap and resting it with the other.

And part of his increased appreciation, no doubt, had to do with the effect of the music on the Blicksteins' young friend. She listened with such a rapt expression—head lifted, one diamond ear-ring shooting off needle-sharp arcs of colored light—that it occurred to him to wonder if perhaps the young woman was herself a musician, hearing things inaudible to the common ear. He made a greater effort to feel what the others were feeling. He began to nod, furtively tap his toes inside his shoes, raise his eyebrows in appreciative surprise, smile when those around him smiled.

Once he turned his attention to it, the whole idea of using “serious” modern musical devices (“tone rows,” “clusters,” whatever musicologists would call all this) for comic purposes seemed to Mickelsson rather interesting. Mickelsson knew nothing about the details of music. For all his Lutheran heritage and his father's special love of singing, he himself had never been musical, as a child; in fact he couldn't carry a tune. Not that he hadn't made efforts to inform himself; part of his game was writing articles in aesthetics. He'd read an occasional book—a life of Mahler, another of Berlioz, the memoirs of Shostakovich. But he would hardly have ventured an opinion on Mahler, Berlioz, or Shostakovich in the company of musicians.

Yet for all that, as he listened to the Swissons' music he began to develop a theory.

The devices Britt Swisson used in his compositions were mainly of the kind an ordinary, uneducated listener (like Mickelsson) would describe as “noise”; discord, scrambled rhythms, an occasional little passage of what might have been jazz, another that might have been the slightly “off” thumpings and poopings of a German town band—passages leading nowhere, ripped from their context, not so much “music” properly speaking as fragments of sound, glittering objects from civilization's music dump. Surely these devices had entered the vocabulary of contemporary music in the first place (he reasoned) because they gave expression to feelings left unsatisfied in the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic tradition descended from, say, Bach and the eighteenth century. (It was true that in philosophical circles the emotion/expression theory of art had been taking quite a beating lately; but Mickelsson's money, despite the current fashion, was on Collingwood and his gang.) And surely those unsatisfied feelings—the loss, alarm, paranoia, and vulgar passion in modern music—were none other than the emotions the Enlightenment repressed: the universal or at least very common human sense of vulnerability, encircling chaos, cosmic indifference. Discord and noise, in other words—bits of musical chaos partially ordered by the composer but allowed to stand as chaos, uncancelled or reformed—Being in the rift—were the musician's expression of the godless, all-but-universal modern world-sense: the rage and alarm of an accidental consciousness stripped of its comforting illusions. It was fitting, it struck him now, that Kate Swisson should have said to him, all righteous sobriety, “Britt and I don't believe in ghosts” but also it was the usual modern bullshit, for what was the meaning, intentional or otherwise, of Swisson's comic use of devices invented out of fear and anger if it was not mockery of the devices by misapplication, to demonstrate, by mimicking them, how childish they were in their existential wail—to reveal them, without mercy (but also with no hard feelings), as theatrical rant and hand-wringing? Once all pretensions to tragic grandeur were dashed, once the very scream of “the ungodded sky” was shown for what it was, a self-regarding
Waa,
what could be expected but—what else was possible than—a return to good humor, classical sociability in place of the Romantic yawp? In other words, “Ideals,” as one used to say—value assertions with rounded edges—rushing up into the world as from a wellspring? (To say “We don't believe in ghosts” was an act of truly shocking vulgarity. Who was ever quicker to talk about ghosts than the civilized, the effete genteel, the English? Only the opposite assertion, “We
do
believe in ghosts”—except if it were said by a madwoman—could be more vulgar.)

Little by little Mickelsson came to be so taken by his theory that he began actually to enjoy the music, even its overwrought performance. Tentatively, he smiled, nodding his approval. He knew well enough how Ellen's theories, many of them published in
Modern Drama
and
The Educational Theatre Journal,
could make crap intellectually majestic; and he remembered how, when they'd gone to Cornell to decide whether or not Mark should go there, and had visited the conspicuously expensive art museum, Mark had said, looking around at the sculptures, paintings, drawings, and photographs, “Any freshman that comes here would know right away that it's all stupid, but I bet you after four years of art education, he's not sure anymore.” Mickelsson knew, in other words, how aesthetic theory can steal the wall from the aesthetic object. Nevertheless it seemed to him that his theory of the Swissons' music was right, not just concept juggling, not just an exercise, on his part, of the age-old human inclination to make peace with even the most outlandish opinions of the tribe. True, it was possible that the stuffiness of the place had mellowed him: audience heat and the scarcity of oxygen made it harder and harder to keep from yawning. And no doubt he'd been influenced by pity for the Warren woman. It was always tempting to reason away the defects of an essentially benevolent community. Nevertheless he smiled and nodded now—even raised and lowered the toes of his shoes—with firm commitment. Jessica glanced at him, still reserved, even sulky, but tentatively pleased by the improvement in his attitude. He considered reaching for her hand. The same moment, he saw, close to the stage, right in front of Katie Swisson's teal-colored shoes, his student Alan Blassenheim. The sight of Blassenheim warmed Mickelsson's heart almost as a glimpse of his own son would have done. The young man's dark, soft-looking hair, set off against the stagelights, had purple highlights and a rainbowed halo at the edges. Mickelsson was reminded of the half-despairing Jesus in the dust-obscured picture from the workroom floor. It was true, he reflected; Blassenheim was a classic case: the desperate good boy, eager to please, lifted up beyond the physical now, devoted to the Best, whatever in the world the Best should prove to be. His devotion alone witnessed to its existence. Perhaps it was the same with his son. Ah, the pity! With all one's heart one longed to give young people the key to it all, but … He saw in his mind the blackened wooden cheesebox and its cargo of rust-pitted, hundred-year-old keys, keys once so precious that someone had actually buried them in a wall! He shivered, smiled, then stifled another yawn. Blassenheim had his head turned, apparently conscious that Mickelsson was behind him. Mickelsson bowed across the intervening rows with exaggerated sociability.

Automatically, when the song ended and the applause began—he couldn't remember a single note of it—Mickelsson joined in.

“Cheer up,” Jessica said in his ear, possibly meaning to injure—her scent rushed to his heart—“it's almost over.”

“I like it,” Mickelsson said. “They're very good.”

She gave him a sidelong, utterly inscrutable look.

He smiled, clapping on, thinking about her anger and the scent of her perfume, distinct, yet too subtle to identify with any earthly flowers, landscape, weather. …

Kate Swisson bowed and bowed, left, right, center, smiling at the students in the front row. Alan Blassenheim, broad-shouldered, handsome as a latter-day Hercules or Apollo, clapped with his hands above his head, like a Greek dancer. At last the audience stopped applauding and settled back for more. Mickelsson glanced at his watch and thought, mistakenly, that it had stopped.

The clinking of the piano suggested one of those dread-filled moments in a horror film, or an awesome shot in a space-buster, star sparks plummeting toward the camera. With a wild look of either madness or terror, Kate Swisson wailed in
Spreehstitnme,

“In the timelessness,

                     
the spacelessness of heaven,

after 33,ooo performances of Handel's
Messiah,

            
I cried out.

In utter desperation I forced my way
through masses of bodiless spirits
that surrounded the throne.

There was a clamor of voices,
   all wanting to get out.
      I was not alone!”

Mickelsson laughed. Very clever! Interesting! Not at all with the intention of sleeping, he closed his eyes and slept.

He dreamed he had a long, friendly conversation with his wife. The dream was in vivid color, and his wife wore a dress decorated exactly like a wedding cake, sugar-white, as blinding as snow on a sunny, cold day. Her hair was once more its original golden yellow. They were the best of friends, as close as two children together, and everything in the dream was filled with light, rich and surprising, like morning to a very young child. The village where they found themselves had brown streets, bright yellow and red flowers in windowboxes, and red brick houses like those in a young child's picturebook. He heard her say clearly, with such sweetness his heart went light with joy, “This way, Mick.” She lifted off the ground, flying like a candied angel on a string. He too began to fly, but then, high above the lovely picturebook world, he suddenly realized that he'd lost the trick of it.

He jerked awake, reaching out to catch himself, and looked around, startled, crushed inward by the auditorium's darkness, though the dream-voice was still in his ear. To his outer, merely fleshly ear, Kate Swisson sang, in her overly meticulous, phoney way:

“ ‘But there's nothing here in my book,' God said,
‘nothing but miserable lives,
of toil and tears and human suffering.
Look here,
there is an opening for a black
unemployed, unskilled, uneducated laborer,
who will go from job to job,
from booze to drugs,
from woman to woman. …' ”

There was a pause, a rising melodic phrase on the piano, and then:

“ ‘Halleluyah. I'll take it!'
         God smiled
               and I was born again.”

With a tavern-piano glissando and three funky chords, the concert ended.

The people around Mickelsson clapped and clapped, some of them shouting “Bravo! Bravo!” or whistling. He saw Gail Edelman, in an aisle seat to his left, lean forward with shining eyes, clapping and nodding. She was dressed in light blue, like a highschool girl, and had on rouge and lipstick. Alan Blassenheim and his friends, then some older people, stood up and clapped with their hands in front of their faces. He saw that the Rogerses, Garrets, and Tillsons were standing, then the Blicksteins and the girl. Jessica got to her feet, brushing the seat of her skirt as she rose. Mickelsson rose too. “Brav-o!” Jessica's eyes were shiny, glinting. “Brav-o!” Mickelsson shouted, cupping his mouth, then clapped harder, cupping his hands to get maximum noise.

In the lobby, afterward, pressed against the wall, out of the crowd's way, Tom Garret said, “I hear you're the Cupid behind the Great Romance.”

“Me?” Mickelsson said gruffly, “What romance?”

Garret pointed, the ceiling lights blanking out his glasses as he did so, and when Mickelsson turned to look he saw his student Alan Blassenheim with his arm around the waist of the class nihilist—as he'd thought her once—Brenda Winburn. Blassenheim was laughing, holding forth to those around him, gesturing with his free right hand and arm. He looked grown-up tonight; successful young lawyer or politician. Brenda's eyes were hooded, her expression unreadable, yet there could be no denying that her own right arm was clinging to Blassenheim's waist as if for dear life, and when suddenly she smiled at him, looking at his forehead, one saw that there was definitely something going on. If the smile made her beautiful—changed her completely—no one was quicker to notice than Blassenheim, pulling his chin back, grinning and widening his dark brown eyes as if Brenda Winburn were his personal creation and now, watching her, he were amazed at how he'd outdone himself.

Mickelsson said, “They're in my class together, if that's what you mean.”

“The way
I
hear it,” Garret said, his smile going up into both plump cheeks, “you practically commanded the thing. Isn't that the truth, now?” Again his glasses became silver blanks.