Mickelsson's Ghosts (60 page)

“Absolutely not.” She spoke with surprising vehemence.

“You're kidding,” he said again; but he felt his smile fading and couldn't bring it back.

She withdrew her hand from his stomach. “I shouldn't brag about it,” she said. “I guess I was badly educated, or there's something wrong with me.” She made her eyes large and batted the lashes. “I'm a whiz at math, and I
adore
the novels of Jane Austen.”

He laughed and kissed her cheek, but he was astonished.

“You're disappointed,” she said. She interlaced her fingers and turned her hands palms down, looking at them sadly.

“No, I'm interested,” he protested. “I've known people who
say
they hate poetry, but then they lean close to the jukebox and listen to words like
‘My gal took my heart and she stomped that sucker flat'
—and then we're on to 'em. But to
really
hate poetry, knowing what you're talking about … No doubt you had some traumatizing childhood experience—some maniac in the woods who hung down from a tree and told you ‘Little Miss Muffet.' ”

“Funny, aren't you. You should be in pitchers.”

“Sorry.”

“It's probably true that it was poisoned for me,” she said. “All those earnest, terribly cultural rabbis' daughters with the boyish haircuts and the pretty black eyes, beating time up in front of the room with a pointer and sing-songing Blake's ‘The Tyger.' And then the recitation on stage, on Parents' Day—little girls folding their dimpled little hands. I never would do it. Shit. They could've killed me, I absolutely wouldn't. OK, buster, why are you smiling?”

“Smiling at the Jessie you used to be,” he said. “I like her.”

“You wouldn't have. She was a blood-drinker.”

“I wish I'd known her. I feel cheated.”

She relented a little and put her hand over his. After a while she said, “What were you like?”

“A monster.”

“You were big for your age?”

“Mammoth—but not fat. I was scared to death of girls—as I would've been of you. That's why I played football. I thought it all out, very philosophical even then. If I played football, even if I wasn't very good, they would come to me.” He paused, then corrected himself, “That wasn't all of it. I had a best friend, Punk Atcheson, who played on the team. And I had a certain amount of hostility in me. I liked slamming into people.”

“Why, Peter?”

He moved his left hand back and forth over hers, closed on his right. If he waited a long while before he answered, it wasn't that he minded telling her; it was simply that he hadn't looked back at those feelings for years, and it was surprising to discover that, now that she'd reminded him, they were all still there, ready to spring back into his heart, both the joy in violence and the guilt. The glow on the walls was steadier now, the flames in the stove giving way to red embers. “Our family was considered somewhat queer,” he said, then lowered his eyebrows. Again he corrected himself: “Maybe the truth is I
thought
my family was considered queer, because that's the way
I
considered it.” He thought of telling her how ever since that business with Miss Minton there had been people, both children and adults, who were afraid of him. Instead he told her, “My father was a dairy farmer—wonderful man, no problem there—though as a matter of fact the psychiatrist I used to go to back in Providence wouldn't buy even that: thought the old man only showed me his best side, with the result that I was stuck with an impossibly noble model. But he was wrong, the psychiatrist. It happens that my father really was noble. He was the most universally beloved man I've ever known.” He paused.

“Go on.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, he was a very good man, and I'm grateful to him for it. I've had friends, Jesuits, and one black Protestant friend, really a friend of Ellen's—Geoffrey Stewart, the one I told you about. … It's good, having a model of perfection. If you don't measure up, then you don't; but at least it's there, it exists. All the words in the world—all the rules and prescriptions—they're not worth sour apples compared to … When my father was dying, the whole countryside was there in his hospital room. He was supposed to have only three visitors at a time, but the hospital gave up. His room was so filled with flowers and plants you could hardly move, and every night my mother would take some of the flowers to other people's rooms. The hospital was like a greenhouse, from one end to the other. We caused an ant plague. No joke. I suppose if I minded anything about it it was that I, a mere kid … I couldn't compete. He was a singer; voice like an angel. He was shy about his voice, but when he let it out, it was golden. I think I've never heard a better one, though I admit that may be blind love. Anyway, all his singing friends were there, and all his farm friends, and people from the stores in town—there was even this banker he used to go to for loans every spring. I used to be scared of him. …

“Anyway,” Mickelsson said, “it wasn't my father—or my mother either—that made me feel odd. I had an uncle Edgar who went berserk during the war. He'd been peculiar all his life, in various ways—very secretive, also fussy, punctilious. Wouldn't speak English: beneath his dignity. But when the war came, and people began to talk about the Swedes as collaborators—not too openly, but somehow you knew they were talking … Certain movies, maybe. Uncle Edgar joined up, to everyone's surprise, and set off, mad as a hornet, to vindicate the race, or at any rate that was the family interpretation. He was a Seabee, one of the ‘old men,' as they were called. They'd go in before everybody and build the landing strips. On some island in the Pacific something went wrong: he started machine-gunning his own people. My theory is it came to him that everyone was evil, the Americans as much as the Japanese—but I don't know, of course. Projection, my psychiatrist claims. Maybe so. They sent him home, and he spent fifteen years in a V.A. mental ward. When they finally released him he was crazier than ever, but he was no longer violent—probably hadn't been in years. After he was back, he almost never said a word to anyone, and if he did speak, it was almost never English. He visited us in California, a time or two. He'd sit up with Ellen half the night—I'd go to bed: every time he came he'd get me drunk—not on purpose; I couldn't keep up. I'd hear them out in the kitchen, Uncle Edgar gibbering away in Swedish, Ellen saying, ‘Ya, ya, ya!'—she didn't speak a word of Swedish, but maybe with Uncle Edgar she thought she did. He gestured a lot. I'd stare at the furniture, trying to keep it from swimming around, and I'd hear them going on and on, the crazy old Seabee taking nectar from her hand. … Of course that was long afterward. I meant to explain why I felt the way I did in highschool.”

“So explain,” she said and smiled. She squeezed his hand.

It was almost dark now. He thought of putting on another chunk of wood but did nothing.

“I guess the horror of it was, he got off, more or less. He knew what he'd done, killing those people. It has something to do with Nietzsche's idea of pity—I'm sorry I keep prattling about Nietzsche.”

“You don't,” she said. “Or if you do, I haven't really noticed.”

He said, “Nietzsche thought the pitier becomes infected by his pity—becomes weak, like the person he's sorry for. What he forgot to mention is that the pitied person becomes weaker than before, from his shame at degrading the one who pities him. It's true.”

“Which is why you won't take a loan,” she said, looking smug.

“Once the offer's made it's already too late.”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes toward God. “You see,” she said to God, “he's hopeless.”

“And then there's my grandfather,” he said.

She stifled a yawn, turning her eyes to him.

“For years and years he was a stern, boring Christian minister. I suppose I might not think him so boring if I knew him now. He was a good Luther man; had the whole hundred volumes in German. Anyway, in his seventieth year he got the gift. Did I tell you all this?”

“What gift?”

“According to the story, he was standing beside the marsh on my father's place, watching my father and uncle fish, when suddenly, there in the water, exactly like a reflection, or so he claimed—or is said to have claimed—he saw my great-aunt Alma clutch her throat and suck for air and die. He said to my father, ‘Alma's dead. Heart attack, looks like.' My father and Uncle Edgar hardly knew what to say, they argued back and forth, but the old man made his claim with such conviction that eventually they pulled their lines and went home. Aunt Alma was dead, exactly as he'd said she'd be.

“After that he had these visions all the time. He knew trivial things—that a tire would go flat, or a dog would get mange—but also important things: he saw the hurricane Agnes weeks before it came. Various things like that. Believe me, we could've made money off him.”

Jessica extracted her hands from his and got up to put a log on. Sparks flew, making her jerk back. When the fire settled, she put the screen in again. She came back and sat once more beside him, not so close now, cautiously erect. “Did you ever
see
any of this?”

“Everybody did. It was common as ducks. It was so common the family didn't even talk about it except if some stranger came, and then they'd get interested again.”

Now the wall was bright once more, flames leaping in the stove.

“Strange,” she said. They sat for several minutes without speaking, Mickelsson painfully conscious that all the talk was about himself. Then she leaned back onto his arm. “He just saw things, clear as day, and they were always true?”

“It was more complicated than that.” He hesitated, then gave in. “Sometimes he saw things clear as day; sometimes he saw things but not the things you wanted him to see. Once a cousin of ours called. Her father was very sick, down in Florida. She wanted my grandfather to tell her what to do, that is, whether or not her father was really dying. My grandfather said, ‘I don't know. I can't see it. If I were you I'd just go back to the kitchen and finish supper.' There was no way he could know she'd just left the kitchen, where she was making supper, to use the bedroom phone.” Mickelsson smiled to himself, flooded now with memories, more than he could tell her. He said, “Sometimes he'd get things in dreams, all muddled and distorted. And sometimes all he'd get was hunches. He'd ask himself a question—‘Is so-and-so going to happen?'—and he'd give himself an answer—‘Yes it will'—and if it really was going to happen he'd have a powerful hunch that Yes was right. He almost never made mistakes, like those psychic guessers in the
National Enquirer.
There was one broad area of exception—the usual one, I guess. If he wanted very badly for something to happen, he would sometimes have a false hunch; so he was unreliable on important matters involving himself or his family. And sometimes he couldn't tell ordinary dreams from psychic dreams. It was a tricky gift—just like ordinary sight—in the sense that it could shade off from certain to doubtful. Some things he saw the way you see things on a bright, clear day; other things he saw as if in fog, or at night during a thunderstorm. He moved back and forth through time like a prophet, as if one really could slip out of time into eternity. He did see things, there was no doubt of that. If he saw a thing happening—plainly saw it—then if it was something in the past you could be sure it had happened exactly as he said, and if it was something in the future, then all the armies in the world couldn't prevent it. Pretty often the vision was trivial, as I said. He'd know what his birthday presents were before he opened them. He'd mention things he'd read in the paper before the paper came.”

This time when Mickelsson stopped speaking, Jessica said nothing, and she was silent for so long he turned his head to look at her, to see if he'd put her to sleep. She opened her eyes as he did so, looking straight into Mickelsson's, and said, “You want to know something? I think
you're
psychic, Pete. I've had a feeling all along that you might be, but what you tell me about your grandfather makes me sure of it. I think that whoever it was that came to your bedroom was actually somebody.”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Listen, let's try something.” She was suddenly wide awake. “Tell me something you can't possibly know. Tell me something about my mother!”

He laughed.
“I
can't do that. She walks with a limp, she has trouble sleeping, her hair's very white—”

“That's
right,
Peter! That's
good!”

Again he laughed. “All I did was guess her age.”

“Oh, Pete,” she said, petulant, still determined. “Well, let's think of something else.” She was silent for a moment. Then: “Tell me what will happen to the Spragues.”

Reluctantly, he closed his eyes. All he could see was an image of flickering light from the woodstove, which his mind somehow imposed upon the doors and windows of the old, gray Sprague house up the mountain. As the image began to feel nightmarish he opened his eyes and said, “I forgot to tell you one thing about my grandfather's second sight. Anything he saw, if it wasn't absolutely trivial, was horrible. He never saw somebody winning his race, or a woman being handed her healthy new baby. He saw railroad bridges buckling and the train spilling over. He'd get an image of a wrecked car sitting beside a highway, and a young girl's head in the grass. He'd get an image of somebody's child screaming, running out of the house with her nightdress on fire. That's how it is with psychics, or so I've read. It's somehow pain and death that cry out to be noticed; the rest floats by and gets forgotten—maybe sufficient to itself.”

“How awful!” Jessica said. Then immediately, so that once again he was almost alarmed by the quickness of her mind, “What made you think of that? Did you see something frightening when I asked you to tell me about the Spragues?”