Mickelsson's Ghosts Page 6

  In the winding, wide, perfect mirror below, hundreds of people, adults and children, stood sunk to the waist or higher. They didn’t seem to be fishing or dredging for a body. … To the man at his right he said, “What’s going on down there?”

  “Mormons,” the man said, and reached out, trying to catch something, perhaps a moth. He was young, frazzle-bearded, dressed in mechanic’s coveralls. His accent was richly Susquehanna. “Every year abowt this time they come owt here and try to drown each other.” He reached out again.

  “Drown—” Mickelsson began, then understood that, despite the man’s tone, and despite the sombre landscape that made it half credible, it was a joke. “Ah,” Mickelsson said, and laughed. He got out his pipe. After a moment he asked, “Why here?”

  “Holy land,” the young man said, then turned to look up at him, interested to meet a being so ignorant, a city feller in a suitcoat, willing to be instructed. “You ever hear of Joseph Smith?” He cracked a laugh.

  Mickelsson nodded, then inclined his head. When he lit the match for his pipe, he saw that the young man’s face was round and dimpled, filthy with oil or maybe soot. The woman and the fat man beyond him had faces creased with age, though they were probably not old. Their teeth were sharply outlined.

  “He used to live right back there.” The young man pointed past Mickelsson into the darkness. “Other side of the graveyahrd. Lived in a lot of diffrint howses arownd here, but that was one of ’em.”

  “Ah!” Mickelsson said again. “So that’s what makes—”

  “Sh!”

  The woman on the other side of the young man, apparently his wife, gat-toothed and pregnant, jerked her gray face forward and raised her fingers to her lips. The two women beyond her and the fat, sighing man, in a Phillies baseball cap, looked over in Mickelsson’s direction with interest. Several feet beyond the fat man stood a small boy in glasses, who never moved or spoke. There were others. Twenty or thirty feet farther on Mickelsson could make out bearded men and women in dark formal clothing—in the darkness that was as much as he could tell. He remembered hearing somewhere, from Jessica Stark, perhaps, that there were Mennonites up in the mountains. A mosquito landed on his neck and he slapped it.

  Now a strange sound came from the river—at first impossible to identify, then the next instant so obviously what it was that Mickelsson could hardly believe it had eluded him. They were singing. The bearded young man poked Mickelsson’s arm with the back of his hand and, when Mickelsson looked down, held something toward him—a bottle, he thought at first, but when he somewhat tentatively accepted the offer, feeling a quick little flush of distress, the bottle turned into binoculars. “Oh. Oh, thank you,” Mickelsson said, still startled by the magical transformation, and raised the binoculars to press them against the lenses of his glasses. At first he could see nothing but a colorful blur. He moved the binoculars from side to side and up and down until large, gawky shapes swung into view, disappeared, then appeared again. He realized for the first time that some of the Mormons were wearing white robelike things, sleeveless. He looked for several seconds. Some of the people looked eighty or more, standing there in the ice-cold water with their mouths open, grimly enduring. Their mouths and eyes were like pits. Fogwisps hovered over the water around them. Then he remembered that the binoculars were on loan and gave them back.

  “Is that robes they’re wearing?” Mickelsson whispered.

  “That’s that underwear they gaht,” the man said.

  His wife shot a look at him to hush him.

  Ah yes, Mickelsson thought. He’d once spent a week at the University of Utah. Someone there had told him about the underwear they wore, with religious writing on it. According to whoever it was that had told him, they never took it off.

  He’d never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce. If stones were to sing, taking their own natural harmonies, or if the restless spirits of dead animals were to cry out, this might be their sound.

  Whispering again, Mickelsson asked, “Do you know what they’re singing?”

  “I’m naht real sher,” the man whispered back. “It don’t sownd like country and western.” He laughed. In spite of herself, the woman beyond him laughed too.

  That night, when Mickelsson was trying to get to sleep, he found the image in his mind—all those Mormons in the river—depressing. The water was still and red, glowing; in the span of sky between the lighted-up mountaintops and bellies of clouds, birds arced slowly back and forth, shrilly crying. He didn’t need Dr. Rifkin to explain why he was gloomy.

  He remembered that one night when he was a boy of eight or nine, heavy, dark-haired strangers—hairy all over, males and females—had come to the swimming-hole where he and his cousins often went after chores, a place they’d always thought of as strictly their own, though in fact it had been on railroad property. The strangers were loud, the kind of people his mother called “coarse,” always grabbing each other, splashing water, screaming, throwing pebbles. They had beer with them. Though he himself hadn’t seen it, his cousin Erik had whispered into his ear that one of the males had stuck his thing up into one of the females, underwater—she’d helped him, pulling her suit out of the way. From above you’d have thought they were just horsing around, maybe fighting.

  When he finally did get to sleep that night, Mickelsson had bad dreams. In the spillway from the pond at the Bauer place, he found a drowned child. Its pale blue eyes were weighted like a doll’s, closing and opening as the head moved back and forth.

  All the next day he was depressed, morbid. He tried to read a book, The New Nietzsche. The title should have warned him. “The,” as if there were one, and “New,” as if … Toward evening he washed his mountain of dirty dishes, some of them with mould on them, and mechanically went over the floors with a broom. Once the phone rang, Edie Bryant, whose husband was in English, inviting Mickelsson to a party. “I’ll see,” he said, and put his hand on his forehead, closing his eyes. I’ll see. I’ll see. He seemed to have lost the ability to tell the truth.

  3

  Nevertheless—all caution blasted to the moon—he was pleased when the signing of papers in the Montrose lawyer’s office went smoothly, and the house became his. He could call back later only a few moments of the ritual, mainly Dr. Bauer smiling and talking, one arm cocked forward in the shade of her enormously wide hat, the pale hand twisted like a cripple’s, signing the papers left-handed. She’d come dressed in a suit, as if the ceremony were a serious matter, but for all the formality of her dress—midnight blue, heightening the effect of her bread-dough pallor—she chatted pleasantly. Except for Mickelsson, they were all old friends: the ancient, coughing, chain-smoking lawyer with his thick-lensed glasses, white hair in his ears, gnarled, palsied hands; the fat, blond, chinless, large-bosomed secretary who brought them coffee and showed pictures of her children to Dr. Bauer; Tim’s boss, Charley Snyder (Tim wasn’t there), whom Mickelsson mistook at first for the Susquehanna banker (he realized later that Snyder was younger, and talked and dressed more like a man of the world, sporty and natty, quick to grin; he was probably good at golf, probably had a farm somewhere with riding horses); and of course Dr. Bauer, at once gigantic and inconspicuous, shy as a wren.

  Throughout the whole business, Mickelsson’s mind was mostly elsewhere. He’d felt twenty emotions at once, in the beginning, listening to their banter. The lawyer, a Mr. Cook, sat behind an extremely large, cluttered desk elevated on a kind of dais, as if the desk had been intended for use as a judicial bench. He had windows at his back, and all around the rest of the room—the desk took up a third of it—he had high wooden filing cabinets and dully gleaming law books. Mickelsson and the others sat across from him, in forced respect—all but the secretary, who moved back and forth from the outer office to this one, running err
ands for the lawyer. It was a cunning arrangement: except for the windows, the room was quite dark, and against the sunlight, hazed by cigarette smoke, the lawyer’s head was blurry and defeatured, symbolic of the godly power of his position—counsellor, arbiter, guardian of das Recht. In all fairness, he wore his mantle lightly, chatting casually, pausing for a coughing fit or to search his enfeebled memory for a name, or a date, or where the sam hill he’d put his ink-pen. Besides being forgetful and half blind, Mr. Cook was very nearly stone deaf.

  The talk ebbed and flowed like pure Being; Mickelsson refrained from wading in. He liked these people, liked their comfortable ease with one another, but he was by no means one of them, not yet anyway, and in general, he thought, he wanted no more to do with them than need be. He was moving to the country to get off by himself; one could be amused from a distance—one could feel a sort of neighborly rapport, so to speak—without being sworn into the gang. And so he smiled stiffly, playing with his Western gentleman’s hat, rather pleased with himself despite his uneasiness about the lies, the money, allowing his mind to drift to thoughts of how he would fix up the house, someday paint the barns—nodding when by accident he met someone’s eyes. “That’s right,” he would say occasionally, throwing out his look of intense, crazed interest, eyebrows raised, grin eager, hardly aware what he was concurring in.

  They were clearly in no hurry, and at times, briefly, their prelapsarian time-sense stirred his irritation. When the fat young woman showed the pictures of her children to Dr. Bauer, who had delivered them (the doctor tilted her large frame forward, nodding under her hat, exclaiming “My! Oh my!”), he felt such a twinge of impatience he had to stop himself and think the feeling out. It came to him at last that his earlier assessment had been entirely wrong. Say what he would about membership in the gang, he was in fact feeling snubbed—and was being snubbed, just a little. If he were seven, he thought, he would have burst into tears. Not surprising, of course. In this new life he’d invested so heavily in—risking, in fact, financial and maybe psychological catastrophe—they, with their smalltown, narrow minds, were keeping their distance as they’d do with some smiling fat banker from New Jersey. Absurd that he should mind. He knew about small towns. Ah, ah, what a ridiculous creature was the whimpering, snivelling human psyche! (He realized with a start that he was whispering, just perceptibly moving his right hand. He checked himself and glanced around the room. No one had noticed.) Given the slightest encouragement, he knew (unbeknownst to him, his right hand was moving again), the secretary would happily have shown him her snapshots. She’d have shown them to a nut-tree if the tree showed interest. She didn’t show her pictures to Charley Snyder either, or the lead-faced, trembling, coughing, wheezing old lawyer; but her smiles and chatter made them part of the conversation. They laughed, tossed her a word now and then like a puppy-treat, but mostly talked with one another. The child of someone they knew had wandered into a cave somewhere and had come across something radioactive. “That sucker came out glowing like a candle,” the lawyer cried in his thin piping voice. Charley Snyder shook his head, sympathetic, but asked with interest, “Uranium, was it?” “Refuse is what it was,” the lawyer yelled, “refuse brought down here from Canada or New Jersey!” Then he doubled over, covering his mouth with his already clenched fist, for a coughing fit. As soon as it was over he pulled again at his cigarette, hollowing his cheeks.

  The conversation of the lawyer and Charley Snyder rippled into the conversation of the secretary and the doctor. As if unaware what it was that had altered the tone of their talk, the two women wondered what the world was coming to, briefly troubled about the future of the secretary’s children. “So many strangers coming in with their different ideas,” the secretary said as if Mickelsson weren’t there. “Lot more Mormons these days, not that I gaht anything against the Mormons.”

  “Course not,” Dr. Bauer said.

  “And all those people from New York City and so on, buying up the land so’s an ordinary person can’t afford it anymore—buying it and not even moving to it.”

  “Buying it for retirement, they say,” Dr. Bauer said, and briefly closed her eyes.

  For all his deafness, the lawyer somehow caught the secretary’s last remark and said to Snyder, as if it were he who’d made it, “Buying it to make the whole state of Pennsylvania their God damn garbage dump.”

  Mickelsson, listening with only half his mind, remembered “Punk” Atcheson, the grinning, freckle-faced, red-headed boy who’d first made friends with him when—timid, knowing no one—he’d transferred to the big highschool in Wausau. One day Mickelsson had been the weird outsider, the next it was as if he’d lived in Wausau all his life. Punk had been on the football team and a star in the highschool chorus, which Mickelsson had quickly joined. They’d become, as they say, inseparable. Again and again they’d gone into laughing fits—Mickelsson could no longer remember the reason—and had been thrown out of classes. That was what he wanted now, of course: a Punk Atcheson to let him through the door.

  Almost the instant he figured out his feelings, Mickelsson began to feel nothing at all, or nothing but the boredom and weariness he felt at faculty meetings. It was of course not that anyone had done anything wrong. His gloom had nothing to do with them—had more to do with his dream of the child in the spillway.

  And so, for these reasons and various others, when he looked back later almost the only image he retained was of the blurred silhouette of the lawyer’s torso and head against the window and, below, the doctor awkwardly twisted above her stack of gray papers, even her mouth twisted hard to one side (he could not see her eyes), signing her name, wherever there was an x, with her curled, long-fingered left hand.

  He also remembered, sometime much later, one joke they’d neglected to let him in on. When Mickelsson was introduced to the secretary, when he’d first arrived, the woman smiled warmly and exclaimed, “So you’re buying the Sprague place! You must have steady nerves!”

  “No,” he’d said, then realized that that must be their name for it (his mind went briefly to Sprague the philosopher), then realized there must be something more he was missing. “Steady nerves?” he echoed.

  They were all laughing, Charley Snyder calling out, “Shame on you, Martha! You trying to make him change his mind?”

  Mickelsson had meant to press her for what she’d meant, though he’d assumed he more or less knew. It was an odd-looking house, “Pennsylvania Gothic,” as Tim had said, laughing. Mickelsson laughed now with the others, trying to concentrate on the continuing introductions—the lawyer and Charley Snyder; Dr. Bauer he’d met before—and when the introductions were over, something else coming up immediately, the joke he wasn’t sure he’d understood had slipped his mind. It was no grave matter; it would be weeks, in fact, before Mickelsson would remember that he’d forgotten.

  At the door, as he was leaving, the old lawyer pinched at his sleeve and cried out, “You’ve been here to Montrose before, Professor?”

  “Yes,” Mickelsson said, nodding, poking tobacco into his pipe. “I looked at a couple of houses here.”

  “You oughtta run up and see Lake Avenue before you leave,” the old man said. He interrupted himself, coughing, and took out a wadded gray handkerchief to press to his lips. When he’d finished he patted Mickelsson’s arm, old-womanish, his fingers like sticks. “Right up toward the courthouse and bear left by the bandstand. Can you see the bandstand? They use to hang people up there, in the old days.” He smiled, baring his teeth. “Lake Avenue, as I was saying—” He stepped out onto the concrete stoop so he could point the way.

  “I’ve seen Lake Avenue,” Mickelsson said, raising his voice. “You’re right, it’s a beautiful sight.”

  “Prettiest place you ever laid eyes on,” the old man said. Again he raised the handkerchief to his lips, but no cough came. “Just bear left at the bandstand. Go on, just walk up and have a look at it.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Mickelsson said, almost shouting now, stif
fening.

  The old man stood with the handkerchief near his mouth, nodding and waiting, smiling as if pleased that the professor had at last been persuaded. Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, the lawyer’s eyes were all gray, swimming iris.

  In the end, with what seemed to Mickelsson himself an abrupt and rather crazy laugh—consciously giving himself up to absurdity and feeling, as he did so, suddenly light, as if someone had switched off gravity—Mickelsson turned, pushed his hands into his pockets, and set off for the bandstand, bore left when he came even with it, then stopped for a moment and stood looking, his hat pushed back. “Nice,” he said aloud, broadly gesturing with his pipe. He waved at the cupolas, the rose-trellised porches, whatever people might be peeking from behind their lace curtains and heavy drapes. “Beautiful!” He laughed somewhat sharply, then put his hands and pipe into his coatpockets, his expression growing thoughtful.

  It was true that the village of Montrose was beautiful—quite remarkable if you came to it from Binghamton, with its vast wrecked-car piles and cluttered freightyards, its four- or six- or eight-lane highways sectioning the town, looking at the scabby backs of poor people’s houses; its grim miles of black, decaying factories and failing warehouses, its trucker stops (Texaco, Shell, Sunoco; between them short-order restaurants, bars, and shoddy little rental stores) mighty Binghamton, blasted by the idiocy of Urban Removal, so that the city’s once-grand old downtown section was like a beautiful old lady with teeth knocked out … though at sunset, in all fairness, Binghamton too could be beautiful in its way, with its thousands of lights reflected in its two wide gentle rivers and sweeping grandly up misty, dark hills, here and there the gleaming golden onion domes, or the paired golden domes, of a Polish church, to the south the brick, glass, and aluminum towers of the State University. After Binghamton, the village of Montrose suggested another reality entirely (neither had it anything at all in common with cracked-voice, puffy-faced, sooty Susquehanna, sister city twenty miles east). Montrose was the mythic American past, westernmost settlement of the Connecticut Land Grant—large white houses set like gleaming palaces or grand old-fashioned inns on broad side-hill lawns or shrubbed, well-cared-for hill-crests, the tallest, darkest evergreens in the world rising along their driveways. Inside each house there were innumerable rooms, occasionally a small, discreet apartment, a side-door physician’s office. Sunlight, filtering down through the trees onto the high lawns and green-shuttered houses of Montrose, the rounded, fading red brick of Lake Avenue (Susquehanna’s brick streets were asphalt-patched, shabby and lumpy as the skin of a witch), gave an effect that, in a sentimental fifties movie, would call for a background of angels’ music. Indeed, music something like that might actually be heard there, in summertime at least, since at the far end of Lake Avenue stood the buildings and grounds of the Montrose Bible Conference.