Mickelsson's Ghosts (81 page)

“That's nice, Pete. I didn't know Mark was religious.”

“He isn't—though once when he was in school and they asked him to fill in some form, he put down, as religious preference, ‘Lutheran.' ” He laughed. “That's what I'd been, earlier, before I gave up on theism.”

“You never really gave it up, Pete,” she said. “That must be where he got it. What did Leslie send?”

“Embarrassment of riches. Dark plaid scarf, very nice one, more than she could afford. Also a wallet with a picture of her in it, one of those things where you put a quarter in the slot and then smile at the mirror. It's not bad. She's a wonderful-looking girl. She works, I guess I've told you. Cocktail waitress in one of those big motels—Ramada, I think. Poor kid works her heart out, both highschool and college, waitress several nights a week, and every play that gets produced for twenty miles around, she's in it if she can fit in rehearsals. Takes after her mother that way. She's got kidney trouble, as I think I told you; it's not good for her, all that work. I hate it that after all that she spends money on me.”

“You know it would break her heart if she couldn't send you something.”

“I suppose that's true.”

Jessie asked, “What did you send them?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Junk.” It struck him that he'd sent nothing to Jessie. A fancy shirt had arrived from her; he'd opened it almost without noticing, feeling only a momentary flush of guilt; it was still on the chair in the livingroom.

“I'm sure it wasn't junk,” she said. “What did you send?”

“It doesn't matter much. Mark won't get what I sent him anyway, not till he goes back to U.V.M., if he ever does. It was some things I'd made. Crude pegged boxes, some picture frames. Probably got there late besides.”

“My my, aren't we pitiful,” she said. “By the way, I've been reading your books.”

“Oh?” Her words took a moment to sink in. “What do you think?”

“I can't really judge such things,” she said.

“Take a flying guess.”

“Well … They're interesting.”

“ ‘Interesting'?” he said, mock-horrified.

“You know what I mean. I'm not wild about philosophy, but they're sort of fun.”

“That sounds like high praise,” he said.

“I guess it is.”

When at last the conversation ended and he hung up the receiver and turned from the phone, the ghosts were standing in the livingroom doorway behind him, watching him. It made him jump. The woman's eyes were full of lightning, the man's troubled, as if something of importance had slipped his mind. Mickelsson felt a surge of panic, then angrily flapped his arm at them, like a farmer shooing away geese. They remained where they were. It seemed not right, not possible. Surely it was his own wish—or anyway receptivity—that had conjured them. Out on the road in front of the house, a huge black horse went by, drawing a sleigh full of children. All Mickelsson could see over the snowplowed banks was the top of the horse's head—there was a bright red plume on it—and the children's bright hats. He heard harness bells, a sound out of his childhood.

At his feet, the cat complained for food.

“Parasite,” Mickelsson hissed. But he moved, glad of the cat's foul-smelling solidity, toward the sink where he kept the catfood.

Afterwards, he went to the study to write the letters he'd told Jessie he'd written. He sealed them without reading them over, knowing that if he did reread them he'd never send them. Sentimentality; drunken rant. He drove them down to the box in front of the post office, so that he couldn't retrieve them in the morning. Later, so drunk by now that he could hardly stand up, he phoned Levinson, in sociology; a good man, though he had no power in the department. They talked for two hours. Mickelsson couldn't remember, afterward, a word of what they'd said. It was already full daylight when, placing his feet with care and clinging to the railing, he went upstairs.

He was not a well man. The ghosts he kept seeing, his sense that they were building up to something … He thought of the red coat, back from the laundry, hanging in his closet now. It was only a matter of time, no doubt. It floated through his mind that he could get up right now—he lay with all his clothes on—and drive into town with his murderer severity, his cold, dreadful, drunken frown, and get Blickstein out of bed, tell him in no uncertain terms how he felt, make use of the clout he was forever being told he had. Or he could make an appointment to talk to the president, as he'd said he'd done already.

Clout,
he thought, and moved his head from side to side on the pillow, sweat on his forehead. His clout—he refused to shy from the word—was as fraudulent as that of the Marx brothers. Except for killing a poor half-blind, lonely and enfeebled ex-thief, what had he done worthy of mention in the past five years? Could he honestly say that if he himself taught the course on Karl Marx he'd do it justice?

He slept for hours, woke up with a headache, drank water and took aspirin then returned miserably to his bed and slept hours more.

When he went out to empty the mailbox, late that afternoon, he found, mixed in with everything else, a
Pipedream
—one of the university student papers—that someone had stamped and addressed to him. He hardly ever bothered with the student newspapers, but he was puzzled as to why anyone should have sent it, so when he'd dropped the rest of the mail onto the couch, he opened up the paper and put on his glasses to look at it. The headline on the front page was “soc. dept. battles.” Under the headline was a picture of a stodgy, middle-aged professor at his desk. Wide face, heavy-lidded, sleepy P.L.O. eyes. On the second page there was a large, quite striking picture of Jessie at a lectern, and beside the picture, in bold-faced italics, a quotation:
“Sociology is basically nonsense, like philosophy or poetry. That's why we have to be as alert and open-minded as possible.”
Under the quote, the
Pipedream
asked, “should this professor be fired?” He moved heavily to the far end of the couch, opposite the mail, and sat down to read.

The article was blatantly pro-Jessie, which pleased him, though he'd been around universities long enough to know it didn't mean much. Odds were, the writer was a student of hers—he looked at the by-line: Leonard Zweig—probably a male student, in love with her. Still, it was a good piece; the boy had done his research well—chosen witty quotations, quoted her enemies in a way that, without obvious manipulation, made them seem irrationally belligerent or doltish. He read slowly, intently, leaning closer to the paper than he needed to and gripping the scalloped sides tightly between his fingers. Facts: she'd gotten her Ph.D. from Harvard at twenty-two, had taught for three years at Washington University in St. Louis, had married E. Q. (“Buzzy”) Stark, and had taught with him at Indiana University, then Entebbe, eventually Binghamton. She'd earned numerous awards (one from the World Health Organization), gotten honorary degrees—mostly from unheard-of places presumably in Africa—and had published dozens of articles, no books. On the fourth page of the newspaper, where the article was continued from page 2, Mickelsson was startled to find a picture of Jessie at age twenty-five. She was wearing a white dress with large black polkadots and a wide white hat, her hands shyly folded in front of her, on her face the smile of someone uneasy in front of cameras but not unaware that she is beautiful. “Christ,” Mickelsson whispered, and drew the paper closer. Her face was like a child's, not yet touched by the shadow of family deaths. Behind her there was a white, Spanish-looking building, large, spear-shaped fronds, and a wide, bright expanse of water. Sunlight fell everywhere, not least (one felt) in the young woman's heart. He had never seen anyone more beautiful, he thought; he was reminded of those French art films of the fifties. Staring at the face, he felt baffled, suddenly depressed. The Jessie of the picture was one he would never know, and childish, irrational as the feeling might be, he felt cheated, a little angry.

He closed the newspaper, the photograph still in his head, and sucked in his lower lip, biting down, considering the idea of driving in to Binghamton and beating the shit out of some Marxist. Mickelsson the avenging angel. He would wear the red huntsman's coat, carry the silver, lioness-head cane. At the thought his shoulders tensed a little, and his hands, of their own accord, made fists.

It was late. They'd be at home, maybe just finishing supper with their families. That would make it harder, but Mickelsson had the blood of Vikings in him. He could handle it.

The image of the dead fat man came into his mind, and abruptly, to get rid of it, he stood up, reaching down in the same motion to pick up the paper from the coffeetable for one last look at the wide-faced, stodgy professor on the front page. He imagined what the face would look like terrified, just before Mickelsson pushed it in. But he knew now that he wouldn't do it. Without wanting to, he turned again to the picture of Jessie when she was young.

Then, with a sigh, he folded the paper, dropped it on the table, and made his way down to his basement workshop. He had decided to make an oval window for the high gable in front.

He was still brooding on Jessie's Marxists when, hours later, he shut off the cellar light and went up to bed. He knew almost nothing, about them except that he despised Marxists in general—as, if he told himself the truth, he despised everyone with whom he disagreed—and knew them to be fashionable with fools. It was clear even from the pro-Jessie article in the student paper that they were passionately engaged in the work they did, concerned about making sociology not just a science (as they called it) but a force for change. How the two went together was a little hard for Mickelsson to understand, but never mind. They cared about the world and had strong, noble-hearted opinions. Like uneducated Baptists, or leather-jacketed knife-wielding punks, they turned deaf ears to even the best counterarguments. There was something (not much) to be said for that.

“Fucking swine,” he whispered in the darkness.

Once after a movie he'd had a run-in with the Marxist with the pockmarked face and the long, thick fingers. It was a pleasant, devotedly made little movie about stone-cutters and bicycle riders; he'd seen it in the grungy little theater in Endicott. In the lobby, accidentally pressed up close to the pock-marked Marxist he'd seen at the party—there was another of them with him, a small, timid man with hair down to his shoulders; also the two young Marxists' wives, potentially angry though at the moment expressionless—Mickelsson had said, merely for politeness (and because no one in his right mind could deny it), though maybe he'd put a little edge in his voice, making it a challenge, and maybe he'd widened his eyes a little, and lifted his eyebrows, daring the son of a bitch to disagree: “Nice movie!”

The pock-marked one had looked at him, grinning, and had raised his head, pulling his chin in, like a horse on checks. “There are no nice movies,” he said. “There are stupid movies and movies that wake you up.”

“Maybe so,” Mickelsson had said, and smiled. He slowly rubbed his palms together. The scene was going well.

“ ‘Maybe so.' Listen!” The young man raised a finger, somewhat cautiously, to touch Mickelsson's tie.

The crowd was all around them, so that Mickelsson couldn't have backed off if he'd wanted to. He smiled on.

The young man said, pretending to be merely reasonable, “Come on, what's it about? These stone-cutters build buildings that are better than
they
are. What kind of shit is that? And then the business dies, the stone-cutting, and what are they? Used-car salesmen! Crap!” He ran his tongue over his teeth, then grinned again, glancing around as if anxiously. “You liked that? What the fuck!”

“That's true,” Mickelsson said. “They should have organized.”

With a jerk, the man turned his head away. But then, unable to resist, he turned again to Mickelsson. “Young love. That's what the movie's about. First the kid loves this girl, then he loves that girl.
That's
what it's about. Let me tell you something.
That's
the real opiate of the people!”

“You're right,” Mickelsson said. “Love is crap.”

The man looked at him. “You're something,” he said. “Don't worry, I read your book. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution.” He laughed.

“I agree with you,” Mickelsson said. Without his approval, his heart was pounding and blood stung his cheeks. He could not deny that he was enjoying himself. What would these good, patient people say if he were abruptly to reach out and strangle the man?

The pock-marked man sensed Mickelsson's pleasure, apparently. No doubt he too was enjoying himself, though he'd probably have denied it. He tapped twice on Mickelsson's tie, as if intending to provoke. His wife moved closer to him, scowling like a child, and the other woman smiled, blank as pie. The small man was staring at the floor, trying to get his pipe lit. “You agree with me. That's nice,” the pock-marked one said. “As long as we have movies like this we'll have a country like this.”

“I agree with you,” Mickelsson said again.

“Terrific,” the man said, nervous, and turned away again, seething but definitely uneasy, and this time he did not turn back.

Mickelsson considered hitting him in the ear with his fist, like one of those Brazilian torturers. He could think of no good reason not to; but he refrained.

The small man said,
“De gustibus non disputatus,
right?” He glanced at his wife, maybe to see if his Latin was correct, then at the other man's wife.

“I agree with you,” Mickelsson said.

But now, staring up at the not quite visible ceiling of his bedroom, Mickelsson envied the Marxists. Their truth might be moronic, but ah, what joy to believe whole-heartedly! One couldn't even honestly claim that they were stupid. Einstein's whole achievement had come down to simply this, from one point of view: that he refused to consider any theory of the universe that ruled out God. Working within that limit, ruling out vast areas of the possible, he'd discovered what he'd discovered. When serious physicists of the next generation had begun to answer him, proponents of chaos against the old-style Jew, Einstein—angry and possibly confused—had quit the business, turned Zionist.