Mickelsson's Ghosts (72 page)

“I'm afraid I haven't been in,” Mickelsson said. “We've been having a lot of snow out here, as I assume you've heard.” He heard in his voice the cool, autocratic tone he too often took with students, and quickly made an effort to soften it. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

“I'm sorry to call you at home,” Nugent said. “It's about that term paper, for one thing.”

“Yes,” Mickelsson said, careful, knowing well enough where such openings generally led.

“I didn't hand it in, as I guess you must've noticed by now.” It was the expected tone, half aggressive, half whiney, but unusual in its urgency, emotionally packed. Mickelsson wondered if the boy was drunk. “I really haven't got any very good excuse. I worked a lot on it, but I was getting later and later, and then …” In a strained voice he brought out, “I'd been having a lot of trouble with schoolwork. It's not that I wasn't interested. As I guess you know, I got an A average in your class up to now. And now
this
—” He couldn't finish. He seemed actually to gag on his wretchedness.

“Wait a minute now,” Mickelsson said, growing alarmed. “Take it easy. What's the trouble?”

“It's not … I can't …” At last he was able to say, “I can't do the term paper, and I can't take the final.”

Mickelsson pressed the receiver tighter to his ear. Nugent's voice seemed to be drifting off. “You can't take the final? Are you telling me you want an Incomplete?” he asked. “Look, if you've got a good reason, I'm not likely to object.”

“What I was really wondering …” Now the voice was more controlled, less aggressive, still more urgent. “What I was wondering is, since I've been doing really well so far—I mean I've read all the work, and I got an A-plus on the midterm, and I contributed to class discussions, as well as I could, so you know I was serious—”

Mickelsson could see where the plea was heading. He was tempted to bear down, demand that the boy be just a little reasonable, but something checked him. The emotion in Nugent's voice was peculiar, different from anything he'd encountered before, even from poor mad Nugent. It was normal for students to plead for special favors; no doubt he'd done it himself in his college days, though he could remember no particular instance. But he somehow had a feeling that Nugent's distress was far beyond the usual, as if passing the course without writing the term paper or the final exam were a matter of life or death. And there was something else. The boy sounded changed, as if his mind had weakened, or he was drugged, fighting for coherence.

“A midterm exam is not exactly the same as a final,” Mickelsson said, stalling. As soon as he'd said it he knew that by his tone he'd let Nugent know that the matter was still negotiable. He must quickly correct that impression, he thought, but then cringed guiltily from a mental image of timid, anxious Ed Lawler.
“Do you think he seems well?”
Mickelsson hadn't realized even then, with Lawler forcing his head to it, the full extent of Nugent's illness.

“Professor Mickelsson,” Nugent said, rushing in, his voice tremulous, “I know it's not fair to ask—I mean, I know it's abnormal—” He gave an awful laugh.

Though he couldn't have said for sure how he knew it, he knew that Michael Nugent was crying.
Christ!
he thought, momentarily enraged, put upon one too God damn many times. But then instantly, for no good reason, he thought of Mark. “Listen, Michael,” he said, almost as gently as he'd have spoken to his son, “what's wrong? What's all this about?”

Nugent said nothing. Mickelsson imagined him struggling for control, fighting the random contortions of his mouth, crying as Ellen had sometimes cried when she phoned, back in the days when she'd sometimes phoned. He felt a kind of sickness sweep over him, a strange and baffling feeling like absolute despair, the very soul's prostration. He knew what he should say, that he would give the boy an Incomplete, it was the best he could offer. Nothing else made sense, logically at any rate; but logic seemed not relevant. The boy's anguish, whatever its cause, was so strong that Mickelsson could feel it himself, a sensation of teetering on the rim of the abyss. The power of Nugent's distress was shocking, unheard-of. He said, “Suppose I give you a B-plus for the course, scrap the rules this once. Would that do?”

“That'd be fantastic,” Nugent said. The way he snapped at it made Mickelsson more uneasy than before.

“Listen,” Mickelsson said, “come talk to me next semester, all right? I must say, I was hoping you'd pull an A.”

Nugent said nothing.

“Michael?” Mickelsson said.

There seemed to be no one on the line.

After he'd hung up, he thought, still feeling queasy, almost nauseous, how peculiar it was that he'd so easily caved in, not that even now he regretted it; his sense of Nugent's helplessness and misery was still very strong. No doubt he should have demanded that the boy at least give his excuse, he thought. But the thought was no more than a dutiful flicker; he felt, beyond reason or argument, that he'd done the only thing he could have done.

An hour later he still hadn't gotten the strangeness of it out of his mind. All his own troubles, confusing, unsolvable, oppressive as they were, seemed trivial beside Nugent's, though Nugent's hadn't even a name.

What the connection was he couldn't have said, though he sensed some definite connection: brooding on Nugent, he got a sharp image of his father and uncle and his father's friend Hobart kneeling beside a Guernsey cow. The cow was bloated, lying on her side against a fencepost. All around her, up and down the field, there were other cows in the same helpless condition, stomachs swollen, eyes rolling, lips breathing foam. They'd gotten into wet clover, he knew now, though at the time he'd known only what he saw. He'd been four or five. His uncle pushed his fingers into the cow's swollen side, just below the chine, no doubt counting down ribs, and then his father had raised a hunting knife—Mickelsson could see it so clearly it might have been a photograph—and stabbed with all his might. Foul air hissed out, spitting red-yellow liquid—a terrible, filthy mess—and the cow groaned, “Ooof!” In less than a minute the cow was on her feet, angrily tossing her head, mooing in high dudgeon, clumsily running away.

The memory released another. One winter night when Mickelsson was seven, he'd been awakened by a sound it had taken him a moment to identify: every cow in the barn was mooing, in eerie chorus. He'd gotten up and put his clothes on and had run into the kitchen—his bedroom was downstairs—just in time to see his father putting on his old tattered denim frock. They'd gone out to the barn together; a little later his uncle had come, red-nosed and dim-eyed, smelling of whiskey, his hands buried in the pockets of his sheepskin. The cows went on bawling, the strangest sound on earth, the sound reverberating in the big stone barn. His father had looked businesslike and solemn, moving along behind the gutters with his head bowed, trying to make out what the cows were telling him. When he came to the heavy piece of sheet-metal that made a bridge over the gutter, near the middle of the barn, the bellowing dropped off. Every cow's head turned to watch. His father looked around, then down at the sheet-metal under his boots. When he and Uncle Edgar bent to lift the metal away, they found, wedged in under it, a newborn calf. How or why it had crawled into that small, dark cave was hard to say, but by morning it would have been dead. The cows watched silently as Mickelsson's father lifted the calf and carried it over to the empty calfpen and laid it in the straw, then moved the mother cow from her stanchion to the pen.

It was hard to believe in the honor and nobility of the profession of philosophy when he compared it to his father's profession. Humble work, it might seem to some; but standing in his study, looking at the papers and unopened mail on his desk, he regretted his youthful inability, back when he still had choices, to grant proper value to such work. It might have made a difference. Perhaps as a farmer, a cabinetmaker … He thought of Heidegger's mythologizing of “the Folk.”

He must call the Philosophy Department, he remembered.

By now Susquehanna had been “socked in,” as the locals said, for nine days, the roads never open for more than a few hours at a time. It was still windy and bitterly cold—so cold that if one went outdoors without gloves on it was like having one's hands shot with a gun, first terrible pain, then numbness. The roads had at last been cleared all the way to the highway, but the semester was over; Christmas vacation was upon them. Two days after the call from Michael Nugent, Mickelsson phoned in his grades. It was irregular, but he hadn't been the only professor to give no finals, no last-minute conferences. When the secretary had taken down the grades and checked them twice she said, “Professor Mickelsson, I think Professor Tillson was hoping to talk to you. Can you hold while I see if he's in his office?”

“I'll hold,” Mickelsson said.

A moment later, Tillson's old-ram voice was on the line. “Hello, Pete?”

“Hello, Geoffrey.” He leaned his elbows on the limited bare space on his desk—he was phoning from his study—and gazed out the window in front of him at the gleaming white valley, blue-snow mountains in the distance. Though Tillson's voice was friendly, Mickelsson was conscious of waiting impatiently, almost crossly, for the phonecall to be over.

“How's the weather out there? I bet it's beautiful!”

“It is.”

“God, how I envy you! I imagine the skiing must be wonderful!”

“I suppose so. I don't ski, myself.”

Tillson laughed. “To tell you the truth, I don't either.” He laughed again, then asked, “Listen, Ruth wants to know if you could come to a party. Just a few friends—the usual, pretty much. But you know how it is, Christmas season and all that. Also—” He hesitated, no doubt hoping to be interrupted. When Mickelsson said nothing, Tillson said awkwardly, probably grinning, cheeks twitching, “I thought maybe we could kill two birds with one stone, get some people together and have a talk about you-know-who.”

“You-know-who?”

“Well, you know, the Marx brothers, as Jessie says.” He laughed. “They really are becoming quite a nuisance, to tell the truth. They're not kidding, this business about wanting to teach our courses.”

“Blickstein's putting up with it?” Mickelsson asked.

“Not actively,” Tillson said. “But of course it's not his business to interfere.”

“Ah, it's interdepartmental politics now!”

“You
may not think so, and
I
may not think so,” Tillson said. “I may as well mention another thing too, on the chance you haven't heard. They've begun their assault on Jessie.”

Mickelsson took what Dr. Rifkin would call a neurotic's deep breath. “I'm not surprised.”

“That's all you've got to say?” Tillson laughed again, this time caustically.

“It's all I've got to say at the moment,” Mickelsson said.

Perhaps Tillson caught the sound of hopelessness in Mickelsson's voice. At any rate, he backed off a little. “Yes, I see what you mean. Well, as I say, it might be a good thing if we could talk, you and Garret and I, Phil Bryant, maybe Freddy Rogers, a few others, old Meyerson. … Mix business and pleasure …”

“When is the party?” Mickelsson asked.

“Friday night.” Tillson's voice was lively again. “I know it's short notice … we'll have a little singing, egg-nog, that sort of thing—”

“Ah. Friday.”

“That's a problem?”

“Well,
something
of a problem,” Mickelsson said.

“You're out of town that night?”

Mickelsson seized on it. “I'm supposed to be. I'll see what I can manage.”

“I do hope you will, Pete.” He sounded hurt, trying to disguise the fact. “For Jessie's sake. We need your feistiness.”

“I'll see what I can manage,” Mickelsson said again.

“One other thing,” Tillson said. “I know you don't always take time to read the papers.” He paused, loath to go on, though he must. “Did you hear about that student of ours, young Nugent?”

Mickelsson closed his fingers on the telephone cord. Something stopped him from mentioning that he'd just talked to the boy. “What about him?”

“I'm afraid he's—killed himself. It's a shocking thing. Always terribly shocking when they're so young. Slit his throat in the dormitory bathtub—I think it was three days ago. It's a miracle nobody found him; apparently he might have been saved. Poor devil! You hadn't heard?”

“It can't have been three days ago,” Mickelsson said. A soft hiss came into his brain, the sound of a TV after the station goes off.

“It was, I'm sure. I have a note here. Sunday evening; that's why he wasn't found.”

“I see,” Mickelsson said after a moment. (“Well?” he imagined Rifkin saying; and himself answering, “Just hang on a minute, will you?”)

“I'm sorry to be the one to—”

“That's all right.” His tone was sharp. To Tillson it would seem inexplicably so. Mickelsson would have said something to cancel the effect, but nothing came to him. It was as if his mind had stopped dead. Like Nugent's—if Nugent's had.

After a moment Tillson said, “Friday night then, around seven? You won't forget? I know it's short notice. You'll write it down?”

“I'll write it down,” Mickelsson said, almost a whisper. He picked up a pencil from the desk and lowered the point toward a slip of gray paper containing some old, no longer intelligible notes, but he wrote nothing. He heard Michael Nugent's voice again, wretchedly pleading from the shadows for a grade.
“I know it's not fair to ask
—
I mean I know its abnormal. …”
He tried to think about it, but he could find no hand-hold. For an instant he had a vision of ghosts everywhere, all through the valley, filling all valleys, crowding every street—stewing, groaning, clutching their hands over business undone.