Mickelsson's Ghosts (66 page)

He nailed up the three Christmas wreaths she'd brought for the doors—the two large doors on the front porch, the smaller door in back—while she sorted out the Christmas tree lights and ornaments. “Where's the tree?” she asked, looking around the room as if she thought it might be there but behind something.

“I'll get the axe,” he said.

Her eyes widened with childish excitement. “We're going to
cut
one?”

“Just like Joseph and Mary out behind the stable,” he said.

Again the shadow passed over her face, but whatever was bothering her she quickly put out of mind (he knew pretty well what was bothering her), and, taking his hand, she stood up. They got their coats on—it was now almost midnight—he got the axe from the shed, and they plowed through the crunchy salt-white snow to the starlit woods higher on the mountain, where there were evergreens of every size and shape, none of them quite right when one looked closely. In the end they chose one almost at random. He could cut off boughs where they grew too thickly and wire them in place where the growth was too sparse. “You're
good
at that!” she cried as his axe bit in, slanting halfway through the trunk at one blow.

“As a child I was an axe murderer,” he said, and grinned at her.

She shook her head, smiling. He had a sense that suddenly she was standing hundreds of yards away, observing him as if from another century.

He swung three times more and the ten-foot tree toppled, falling slowly, softly, as Jessie called, hands beside her mouth, “Tim-burrr!” They put their hands around one another's waists and stood for a long moment gazing at the fallen tree as if at some ancient mystery. Then, like two farm horses, they dragged it between them down the mountain.

As he built the stand for it, cutting, notching, nailing there in the livingroom beside the tree, Jessica fussing with candles, Mickelsson asked, “Jessie, how come there are stretch-marks on your stomach?”

He sensed her sudden stillness behind him. At last she said casually, “I had children. Two of them. Girls. I'll show you their pictures sometime.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“They died,” she said. “Ages three and seven. It was one of those boating accidents. A long time ago.”

He waited for Jessica to say more, but no more came. He heard her move, behind him, to work on the candles at the further window.

“I'm sorry, Jessie,” he said.

After a moment she said, “Me too.”

He nailed the stand to the tree, clipped the excess boughs on one side and with picture-wire affixed them where they were needed. Then they moved chairs out of the way and, with a weight-lifter's heave—branches and pine-needles scratching against his face—he raised the tree and placed it. They put on the lights, Jessica fussily giving him directions as he leaned into the tree from the step-ladder, Mickelsson swearing a little under his breath; then they put on the ornaments and tinsel. When everything was finished they turned off the room lights and sat side by side on the couch, gazing like children at the Christmas tree lights and their reflections in the windows.

Mickelsson said, when they'd been silent for what seemed a long time, “How long ago was the accident?”

“Six years,” she said. Gently, she squeezed the hand holding hers, telling him, he knew, to ask no more.

In his mind he formed the words, “I love you, Jessie,” but then held back, suddenly repelled by the beauty around him, repelled by time and his inadequacy, the deep cruelty of life this Christian mystery was supposed to have transmuted.

“I think it's the prettiest tree I've ever seen,” she said.

They did not make love that night, though they lay side by side on the rug under the tree, hardly talking, eventually sleeping, waking up stiff and half frozen a little after sun-up.

Twenty minutes after Jessica left, Mickelsson, coming into the livingroom from the kitchen, found a visitor sitting under the tree: a cat. It was as large as any he'd ever seen, almost lynx size, made more lynx-like by its bobbed tail, medallion of some old war. The cat was almost all white, sooty white from end to end except for a gray cap around the partly missing right ear and another gray splotch on the rump. One eye was half closed by tissue like Scotch tape. It had an odd lump on its belly, and the turned-inward, absent-minded look of something dying.

“Hello, stranger,” Mickelsson said. His voice surprised him by its calm.

The cat sat on the rug between the tree and the woodstove, in the position of the Great Sphinx of Egypt except that the immense flat head was partly turned, watching him with yellow eyes. The cat's neck was almost as wide as his shoulders. He was motionless except for the stump tail moving slowly from side to side.

Mickelsson put his hands in his pockets. “So you're the mysterious noisemaker,” he said. “I've heard you, my friend, knocking things down in the cellar. I must say, for a cat you're mighty clumsy.”

The tail went on moving. The eyes, aglitter with pinpoints of colored light, never shifted from Mickelsson's face.

“Look,” Mickelsson said, holding his right hand out. “I have nothing against cats
per se.
But you'll have to get over the idea that you own the livingroom.”

Though they were fifteen feet apart, Mickelsson moved carefully, making his way to the chair by the stereo twelve feet from the cat. He could feel the quick ticking of some muscle or vein near his heart. His emotions were in a turmoil he had no time to understand. Slowly, carefully, he seated himself. For all his fear of the cat, he knew, with some part of his mind, that he was glad the cat had come.

“OK,” he said, “so you've decided you live here.”

The cat settled toward the floor a little, stating as clearly as he could have done in words that, sick and weary as he was, he was willing to deal. Abruptly but carefully, Mickelsson stood up again and moved toward the kitchen. The cat watched. Mickelsson went to the cupboard and took out a cereal bowl, then went to the refrigerator for the milk-carton, poured milk into the bowl, holding the carton with two hands to check the trembling, then put the milk-carton away and carried the bowl into the livingroom, watching that it didn't slosh, never looking at the cat. He moved toward where the cat waited and, four feet away, set down the bowl of milk. The cat had had dealings with human beings before, it seemed. It watched the lowering of the bowl, the withdrawal of the human hands, then closed its eyes. It would drink in its own good time. Perhaps it was from cats, Mickelsson thought, that human beings had learned the proper way of dealing with gods.

“OK,” Mickelsson said, and sat down again in the chair by the stereo.

The cat went on watching him, eyes little slits, never glancing at the bowl of milk. His tail was still now. Then he turned his head away and, after a moment, began to lick his paws as if he'd lived here all his life.

Mickelsson waited, cold gray light hanging around them like a fog. The cat went on licking its paws.

He thought of his ex-wife. “You're my dearest, dearest, dearest,” she had said to him again and again, year after miserable year. Surely it had been true. “What a good, good face you have,” she had said, touching him. He'd felt the same about her. He couldn't remember why the whole thing had gone wrong.

He turned to look out the window. Across the road there were two hunters starting down through the weeds in the direction of the pond. He closed his eyes.

He remembered for no reason something his son had once told him about whales, how the mother would sometimes swim for miles with the calf cradled under her flipper, not for protection, not for any reason but fondness.

Mickelsson, if he were a decent human being, would be a terrorist in defense of whales, yes. Nasty, self-hired gun to the untainted and lordly. But in fact he would never be a terrorist in defense of anything, not even a writer of vituperative attacks, like his mental life's hero, the mad malicious cackler, dancing, screaming, blowing the cover of anti-Semites, whorish piety, and worshippers of the Reich—Fritz, crazed Fritz, whose dream of perfection was the wise, serene saint, but who himself achieved only the glee of the buffoon, maddening the devils of the moral majority with his cracked and fake-cracked murderous clowning, wisdom full of pranks: “Why I Am So Wise” “Why I Am So Clever” “Why I Write Such Good Books.” …

On the rug between the couch and the woodstove, the cat feigned sleep. Across the road, not far off, the hunters' guns began blasting,
POOM POOM POOM,
like cannons.

9

Alan Blassenheim and Brenda were the first to arrive, triggering Mickelsson's familiar guilt about Nugent. He should certainly have asked Nugent, if he was going to ask them. The boy had a desperate need of friends, as even Lawler had seen, and he'd certainly done everything to deserve Peter Mickelsson's friendship. It was all very well to say, as Jessie had said when he'd mentioned his problem—but Jessie's opinion was not fully informed; he hadn't made clear to her the apparent extent of the young man's desolation—“Look, Pete, it's a party.” She searched his face, then said tentatively, “If you're really convinced that this Nugent would be a wet blanket, then better to leave him out.” The question was, to put it in the mincing language of an ethicist, what would the probable consequences be when Nugent learned that Blassenheim had been invited while he, Nugent, had been excluded? One could give oneself a thousand excuses and palliations. Friendship was not duty, one should consider the good of the group as a whole, et cetera, et cetera—but the trouble was that Nugent, for all his brilliance, would understand none of those excuses in his heart: his portion of unhappiness would be increased. Mickelsson couldn't even say with perfect honesty that in deciding against Nugent he had fashionably (however stupidly) set his own good above another's. He would probably enjoy having Nugent here, getting to know him in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere. No, he'd given in to the side of his heart that was herd-controlled: Nugent would require an excess of attention, limiting Mickelsson's freedom to dispense hostly blessings equally on all. Now, seeing Alan and Brenda drive up, he knew that he had made a mistake.

But Mickelsson's self-excoriation was brief. By the time he opened the door for Alan and Brenda, he was already smiling, Nugent's unhappiness almost banished from his mind. They'd started out early, they explained, blushing and laughing as they took off their coats. They'd expected to have difficulty finding the place, but the map (Jessie's work) was foolproof, and after stalling for half an hour, driving around sightseeing, wasting precious gas, they'd given up at last and driven—sheepishly, as Mickelsson had seen—into his yard. The minute they'd stepped out of the car, Mickelsson's cat had vanished as if by magic. Mickelsson, nowhere near ready for guests—Jessie, who'd promised to help him, had been delayed—fixed Alan and Brenda drinks and allowed them to assist. They laid the white tablecloth in the newly finished diningroom, set up the candles, put out plates and silverware, started the mulled wine, set out the liquor and ice. By that time others were beginning to arrive—the ever-merry Bryants, wearing matching shepherd coats, holly in their lapels, the Garrets, the Rogerses, the Blicksteins and their friend (pale as a ghost, evasive of eye, but smiling), the Tillsons (Jessie had insisted that they be invited, really for Ruth's sake), Jessie herself—in a purple coat baffling to Mickelsson, queer and untamable as something in a New York store window, and obviously expensive—and with Jessie, Kate Swisson, who was unable to drive a car. Her husband was not with her, away on another tour, she said. She wore a full-length mink over a Paris designer dress, and bore a fruitcake redolent of rum. In her startling attire she suddenly seemed to him—whether authentically or not he couldn't tell—a creature from another world, the purlieu of movie-stars, TV personalities, maybe opera singers. (He wondered if it was Kate's odd attire that had made Jessica come as a gypsy.) Kate Swisson's shyness struck him differently now from when he'd first met her. If she was chilly and aloof, even when she smiled and bobbed her head forward on its long, white stem, her distance from the ordinary, common world seemed to him now (to his annoyance) perhaps not so much helpless as Olympian. The SUNY-Binghamton Music Department was supposed to be outstanding. It had two Tchaikovsky Prize winners, one of the finest opera departments in America—so they claimed—and a history of launching great chamber groups (and losing them)—the Guarneri, the Lenox. … Perhaps Ms. Swisson had a right to her mink. Whether or not that was so, he disliked her. She seemed to know it, smiling harder and harder at him, widening her gazelle eyes more and more, sinuating her long neck left, right, forward with increasing meekness. “Good to see you,” he said, suddenly conscious that while his mind drifted he'd been glowering. He took the cake from her with his right hand, then stepped around her and, with his left, caught the collar of her mink as one would the loose shoulder-skin of a kitten.

“Thank you,” she breathed, turning her head around at him, submissively smiling. (“Gratitude,” says Nietzsche, “is a mild form of revenge.”)

There was a knock at the door and he stepped over to answer it, still carrying the coat and cake. It was the graduate-student contingent, Wolters and Stearns, Ms. Cohen and Ms. Orinsky. “Come in! Come in!”

“This must be the place!” Christmassy laughter.

One moment, from Mickelsson's point of view, the house had been quiet, elegantly—maybe even exquisitely—prepared, the next it was abuzz with talk and movement, Edie Bryant raving about the Christmas decorations—“Nicer than the ones down in Rich's Department Store, that's in Atlanta” (as she spoke, stealing the floor from Jessie's art, the candles and ornaments were instantly diminished to mere prettiness)—Mabel Garret drifting here and there in stony silence, picking up everything and looking at the underside, presumably to see who'd made it, Phil Bryant and Blickstein heatedly arguing over President-elect Ronald Reagan's proposed tax cut and decontrol of oil, Jessie and Kate Swisson talking earnestly about Binghamton child-care centers, though neither of them had children.
(Living,
he corrected himself, and fought a shock of gloom.) It struck Mickelsson, no doubt unjustly—he was liking Kate Swisson less and less—that she was coyly faking interest in having a baby. If he was right, Jessie was not fooled: sweetly cool, smiling, regal. He could not help feeling that some of the coolness was meant for him, though he'd given her no cause. He imagined his old friend Luther saying, with that scorn he'd always been a master of, “What a child you are!” “Old fart,” Mickelsson whispered. Mabel Garret's dark eyes turned slyly to meet his.