Mickelsson's Ghosts Read online

  Finney, his lawyer, would stage one of his grand-operatic fits when he heard the price. “Listen, pal. Take an old goat-fucker’s word for it—” he would say.

  Mickelsson wiped his hands on his handkerchief, climbed back into the car, put the gearshift in neutral, and coasted nearer. In front of the house he pushed in the brake, took off his glasses and cleaned them, then fitted them back over his ears.

  The lawn was mowed, the barndoors padlocked. The owner was apparently not at home—so he gathered, though he didn’t get out of the car, much less go up onto the wide, shaded porch and knock. From beyond the largest of the barns, behind him, across the road from the house, came the roar of a waterfall.

  He slid out a cigarette, tamped it on the dashboard, cupped his hands around the end, and lit it.

  Everything below the porch roof lay in shadow, and the gables, now that he looked at them more closely, had a knife-cut sharpness of outline that touched him with foreboding. Beyond the gables the wooded mountain was as gray as a chalkboard, rising into mist. He noticed now for the first time—or anyway for the first time consciously registered—the Pennsylvania-Dutch hex signs on the barns.

  The design of the spindles on the porch balusters, just visible in the dark, still wedge of shadow, was unusually complex, as if the spindles had been wrought for some old-world mansion, perhaps some grand old Victorian hotel for the very rich when they retreated for a weekend to the mountains. It was a beautiful place, no question about it, but the longer he looked the more ambivalent his sense of it became. Over by the plank bridge spanning the creek, just beyond a startling splash of lighted ferns, lay a shape he thought at first to be a bright clump of heather, until it moved, turning into a cat, gray and white, stalking.

  The light changed again. The shadows behind the house and the darkening barns, spilling out across the valley, filling it like a cup, were more blue now, growing darker and bluer by the minute. It was that early span of twilight his father had called “cockshut,” back in that lost age when every slightest flicker of reality had a name—birds, grasses, weathers, times of day and season. The moon had grown brighter, as if sneaking in close. He waited on, breathing in the scents of new-mown hay and honeysuckle. His thoughts drifted. A faint chest-pain brought it to his attention that he was thinking of the student Michael Nugent. Already, it was clear, the boy had decided to make demands on him, urged on by Tillson, probably Dean Blickstein too, and whoever it was that had persuaded Nugent that he, Mickelsson, was the only “real” philosopher. I know how you live. I know how much—Mickelsson sucked in breath and moved the palm of his right hand on his chest. Surely the past should be sufficient trouble, his children and ex-wife; but no, the inevitable future must nag him too, pull like quicksand. Mickelsson had nothing but scorn for the so-called Me generation, emotivism at plague proportions; nonetheless it was true that there were times when a man could help no one. Here stood this house, possibility of escape—increasingly sombre in the deepening twilight—and there, all around it, to his imagination, were the stretched-out bony arms of those with legitimate demands.

  He forgot what he’d been thinking.

  The seeming timelessness was part of it, all right. (The thought welled up into his consciousness abruptly, after a lapse of perhaps minutes.) Dropped out of nowhere into this still shade, one couldn’t have known it wasn’t 1940—or even 1840, except for the electric and telephone lines, harsh against the sky.

  Now the windows of the house were just darker places in the ghostly walls. The steep, stern gables, raised like old shields or defenseworks, dark against the darker mountainside, the darkening sky, had a look both forbidding and forlorn, the look of a stronghold that has outlasted its occupants by centuries. It was now no longer cockshut but purple dusk edging into night.

  “Interesting,” he said aloud. Quite suddenly, all around him, as if they’d leaped out of nowhere, there were shadows cast by the moon. The same instant that he noticed the shadows, he caught, out of the corner of his eye, some movement on the porch. He definitely saw the thing, he would have said, though he couldn’t see it well enough to know what it was—a woman, he would have guessed—but when he looked directly at where the thing ought to be, there was nothing. A pleasurable shiver ran up his back. It had been a long time since he’d imagined things watching him in the dark. (What had it been? A moth, perhaps, much closer to his eye than he’d imagined? A bat?) The place wouldn’t seem so eerie, of course, when you were used to it. In any event, eerie or not, it was beautiful.

  He ground out his cigarette, let smoke float slowly out through his nostrils, and decided to make an offer.

  That night, when he climbed the crooked, dimly lit stairs to his apartment—in his left arm his meagre week’s supply of groceries, in his right hand his mail, all of it depressing (bills, two letters marked “Occupant,” another computerized stern complaint from the I.R.S.)—he found a note poking out from below his door. He froze, then looked around as if whoever it was that had crept in on him might still be lurking near, in the shadows just beyond the reach of the cheaply shaded bulb. All around his door stood bulky, misshapen cardboard boxes—junk books he’d never bothered to unpack, junk appliances (the portable radio he had no use for anymore, his iron, probably his toaster, he wasn’t certain)—the shadows of the boxes low on the wall, as if trying to hide behind the boxes. There was no one there. He unlocked the door, carried the groceries in and set them down, then went back to stoop over and pick up the note. It was written in a stiff, old-mannish hand, and signed, with a sudden dissilient flourish, Michael Nugent. He read the first words: “It is extremely urgent that …”

  He closed the door and, without reading further, crumpled the note in his fist.

  2

  “A what?” Finney wailed, dramatic. It was the omnipresent potential for theater that had gotten him into the law-game, Mickelsson was convinced. It was better than acting; he wasn’t impeded by some humdrum playwright’s lines.

  “House,” Mickelsson repeated, reaching toward the pocket where he kept his pipe, then changing his mind, getting out his cigarettes and hunting around under papers and books for matches. No luck.

  “House! Well, saints preserve us!” Finney said. He cracked his voice, old-time Irish. Mickelsson could see him: fat and sweat-washed; gold-rimmed glasses; black toupee, gray sideburns below; little blue eyes crossed with anger or, more likely, impatience as he stared for just an instant at the phone. While he talked he’d be reading and signing letters, motioning to his secretary, furtively scratching himself, raising his rear end off the chair to catch a breeze. “That’s good, Pete! Cute! Give the feds something solid to aim their pissers at.”

  “I know,” Mickelsson said. “Look—”

  “Also makes your generous offer to your wife more interesting.” Abruptly solemn.

  “Believe me—”

  “I can see you’re not wild for good advice, Professor, but take it from me, ole pal ole sock, by all the little golden, curly hairs on—”

  “It’s relatively cheap, Finney. If I can’t manage it, then I can’t. Are you listening?”

  “OK.” There was a pause, no doubt while Finney ran his eyes over some paper, then handed it back to his secretary. “OK, cheap. Gotcha. Spare me the details! I don’t suppose you could get it in a friend’s name? That might be a very good idea, you know. Keep the feds’ sticky fingers off the moola—”

  “No chance.”

  Finney laughed. “You oughtta be nicer to people, you know that, Professor? Let ’em see your sweet side! But OK, OK. I dig. I’m glad you touched base on this. If it looks like this is where the cheese starts to bind I’ll get back to you.” Another pause, then: “OK, I’m prepared—like they say, ‘Ahm protected.’ What the hell, you only live once, hey, pal? OK, I hear what you’re saying. All right! So good luck to ya for once, you poor bastard!” Even his voice was half elsewhere.

  “Thanks. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it all right.”

  “
‘What, me worry?’ ” He laughed. “Well, love ya, Professor. Anything else?”

  “That’s it for now.”

  “For now.” He laughed again. “OK, blood-brother, keep the wick clean, hey?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  It would have served no useful purpose to explain to Finney that he was far past keeping his wick clean, in whatever sense Finney might have meant it—though it was true that with the one woman who made his heart race Mickelsson was clean as a whistle.

  Jessica Stark said, in the hallway—her office was just a few doors down from his, and it was there, just as she was leaving, that he’d caught her—“It sounds great!” She was wearing jeans and a mannish shirt, and her face had that electric look it sometimes got, supercharged, thunder behind the eyes. He hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant—maybe something to do with the death of her husband, a year ago—but it alarmed him. Everything about her alarmed him. She was tall enough to play quarterback to Mickelsson’s fullback, and in some ways she was tough enough, he suspected. She was supposed to be a force to be reckoned with, in her field—so someone had told him, possibly his chairman, Tillson—and it was easy to believe. Mickelsson had thought a good deal about Jessica, carefully and futilely, as one thinks about Free Will and Determinism; in fact, after the first time he’d met her, he’d thought about nothing else for weeks. She was so beautiful it made him uncomfortable to be around her—but also, whenever they happened to meet, made him hang around longer than he should, and later mention her too often in conversation. If she was for real, he’d once told Tom Garret jokingly—though he’d been drunk at the time, something had kept him from particularizing: her smile, the absurdly Playmate shapeliness of shoulders, breasts and hips, her apparent good-heartedness, the dangerous sharpness of her mind and the unabashed Jewish directness (she asked personal questions no one else would ask, as if nosiness were the highest of civilized virtues, and indeed so she made it seem)—if all those were real, then everything one thought one knew about reality must be scrapped.

  At first, passing mention of Jessica Stark—Jessica Tauber, as she signed her articles—stirred Mickelsson to instant erection. Several times he’d drawn the blinds on his office windows and locked the door, and had thus brought the tendency of his reflections to conclusion. But little by little, through mental discipline, he’d been able to place her in the ordinary. She was in early-middle-age, thirty-five or so, he guessed; hence one could be sure, considering the shape she was in, that she was careful about exercise and diet. Every morning at the crack of dawn, someone had told him, she went jogging, three or four miles. Obviously something was wrong with anyone who gave that much care to appearance—or, for that matter, got up that early. Moreover, it was unthinkable that a woman so good-looking should be a first-class scholar. That was not cynicism but realism. All Nature uses only what it needs to thrive, and Jessica, with those murky gray eyes and outward-arching eyebrows, sensual mouth and perfect teeth (Mickelsson was morbidly fascinated by teeth), had no reason to develop deep talents of the heart and mind. At last it had come to him, one afternoon as he was standing in the mailroom staring unseeingly at a mimeographed letter, that Jessica Tauber Stark was a woman to be pitied. The revelation had cleansed him like a new idea; but so far his knowledge hadn’t helped him to meet her eyes, much less deal with her rabbinical wit. Only when Mickelsson hadn’t seen her for a while could he confidently deny that she frightened him. Her office (behind her now, the door still open) was dark with books and journals, far more crammed than his own—more books than anyone could possibly read, so it was fair to assume that she kept them for the power they lent, though also, to some extent, for reference. She edited a magazine, Historical Sociology, alleged to be somewhat right-wing (but it was one of her enemies who’d said that, one of the department’s child-faced Marxists: “Slightly to the right of Adolf Hitler” was in fact what he’d said) and she was supposed to be the first woman in her field to have done … something or other. It was all very vague in Mickelsson’s mind. Secretly he suspected that the whole discipline was a magic trick: snap your fingers and it would turn into a quivering white rabbit or an array of silk flags. Nevertheless, only a maniac would dare raise objections in the flame of that quick, tense smile. She seemed to be always in a hurry, at least when he met her in the hallway (at parties she relaxed somewhat, though even then there was something ready-to-spring about her, at once intensely engaged and wary), so when she stopped to talk with him, usually at his instigation, as now, he felt uncomfortable, dutifully saying whatever she seemed to expect till she dismissed him. She stood with her legs apart, braced, long and lean, her feet in engineer’s boots. In his mind her lines were unnaturally firm, for all their softness, like stones in a clear mountain lake.

  “Yes, it’s really wonderful in Susquehanna,” he said. “Remote.” When she narrowed her dark-circled eyes, he added guiltily, “I need to get someplace quiet, get some work done. It’s like the nineteen forties there. You hardly hear a sound.”

  “Good,” she said. “If that’s what you want.” Her smile flashed, vanished. Her right hand went furtively to push a lock of silver-streaked dark hair back from her ear. No doubt what he was doing was part of a dangerous national trend. He was suddenly conscious of his paunch, his rumpled trousers; conscious above all of the widowhood she seemed to carry just out of sight, like a dagger. Nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do, would serve.

  “Can you afford it?” she asked. “I know things are cheaper down there—”

  “No problem,” he said, and waved it away.

  “With all your tax troubles, and all that money you pay your wife …” That was the least of what she’d wormed out of him, yawning behind her hand but leaning forward with interest, the night he’d stayed late after her party. They’d talked till nearly 6 a.m. He frowned now, suddenly startled by the notion that she was hinting at offering him money. At once he dismissed the idea and almost laughed.

  She said, “People say there are rattlesnakes in Susquehanna.”

  “I doubt it. It’s possible, I suppose.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?” she asked. When she saw that he didn’t intend to tell the truth, she let her smile flash again, not at full voltage. “Well, good luck,” she said. She looked down the corridor, then thoughtfully back at his face, only for a moment. Abruptly—untruthfully, he thought—she said, “I’m sorry I can’t talk longer, Pete. Gotta run.” She reached back and closed her office door. She tried the knob, making sure the door had locked.

  “Sure. I’m sorry if—”

  “You’ll remember to bring me that book?”

  “Book?” he asked.

  She grinned like a woman ten years younger. “I knew you wouldn’t remember. Something by someone named Hare. We talked about it at Bryants’.”

  “Oh, that!” He smiled, pretending to remember.

  She shook her head, giving up on him, and, as Mickelsson stood flat-footed, she went past him, patting his arm. He turned heavily, watching her go, her free arm waving back to him without her turning. She walked quickly, in long, smooth strides. He thought again of what it might be like to be her lover—a thought that always depressed him. He was overweight, wrecked, no doubt half crazy, and Jessica’s husband had been, everyone said, “just wonderful!” Whenever the man was mentioned Mickelsson would prick up his ears, secretly hoping to hear that the man had not been wonderful, that he was a dullard, and ugly as death. It never happened. He realized now how ridiculous he must have looked, intensely smiling, fake as a peddler of snake-oil, waving away her near-offer, if it was that. No problem. He thought of the long, intense conversation they’d had at Bryants’, not a word of which he remembered. Old devil gin.

  Mickelsson went back into his office and closed the door.

  Almost nothing he’d written on the loan application was strictly true. Strange affair! No one who had known him two years ago, not even his wife, could have anticipated this radical change of charact
er—or rather, loss of character. It was astonishing, in fact: conscious, utterly indefensible falsehood from Mickelsson the moralist, howler in the wilderness of his desiccate age, ranter against sloganers and simplifiers, both Communists and capitalists, liars and lob-wits of every persuasion—Professor Peter Mickelsson, indefatigable shamer of the shallow-minded, fulminator against the frivolous and false, who had written scornfully of both fundamentalist straight-world bigotry and the latest campus fad, homosexual uncloseting—et cetera, et cetera. Yet it was so: his application was (not to put too fine a point on it) a pack of lies. His enemies, if they heard, would whinny with glee. He had a demon in him, his friends would have to say; there was no other reasonable explanation.

  But what was he to do? (He sat bent forward, his right hand making small gestures two inches under his chin. The banker went on skimming the papers in front of him, his glasses low. He breathed audibly, steadily, like a man who smoked too much or had trouble with his digestion, or like a large animal asleep.) Mickelsson would never have gotten the loan—it was surely a fact—if he’d mentioned his unpaid taxes and penalties, or the payments he’d doubtless have to make to his wife, if ever he could get her to meet him in court (meanwhile he was sending her monthly checks—odd amounts, now more, now less, as much as he could manage—a generous act, as any reasonable observer would admit)—not, in fact, that he fooled himself for a minute.

  Perhaps he really was in the possession of some demon, that is, some daemonic idea. Though all his life he’d trumpeted rationality, circumspect behavior in the deepest, broadest sense, self-mastery, it could hardly be denied that, for all his care, his ship was foundering, had foundered. He was reeling yet from the surprise of his wife’s demand that he get out. (“Just beat it, Professor. I’m not interested in debating it. You see that door? Just glide on through it.”) His career was on the skids. … Yet on the other hand, on the other hand … “The Übermensch is ‘dumb,’ his ideas unrestricted by the language of the herd”—F. Nietzsche. “Great truths are felt before they are expressed,” says Teilhard de Chardin. “Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying,” says Camus. Or Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every man’s life is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.” (But then again, of course: “Men will find reasons for the harm they intend to do anyway.”) It was not as if Mickelsson acted with his own approval.