Mickelsson's Ghosts (86 page)

After a while she asked, “What is it you've done, Dad?”

He glanced at her, then frowned briefly and shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing we need to talk about. We'd better go.” Once again, because he was about to leave her, his eyes filled with tears.

At the courthouse, when she stopped the car and got out with him to walk him to the Jeep, she asked, “You're all right, then?”

“Don't worry about
me,
kid,” he said, and put his arm around her.

“Relly!” she said, and smiled.

When he thought back to it later, their actual parting was a blur to him. He remembered only that afterward, when she'd left him, swinging out into the street and vrooming the engine, his heart had stopped. That night, carefully driving home through snow—a black bear-rug in the Jeep seat beside him, Leslie's impulsive gift to him—he suddenly remembered her voice as she said, “We understand if you don't write. I mean, you have things to work out with yourself, OK? I mean relly, don't even think about it!” He thought of Jessie, carefully not holding him responsible. It was not what he wanted. He wanted vows made and kept—dungeons and instruments of torture for those who failed. When they'd parted, he and Leslie, just before she'd gotten into her car and driven off, she had kissed him and smiled, had brushed hair from the side of her face and said, “Don't drive if you get sleepy, OK, Dad? Promise?”

He'd wanted tears, sobs, rage at the world's betrayal.

“I promise.”

She looked at her watch. “Wow! Gotta run!” She'd turned from him, then stopped. “Listen, wait here,” she said, and ran to her car, drew out the bear-rug and ran back to him. She held it up to him. It was heavy, bigger than she was. “Take it,” she said, “it suits you. Present from your dear devoted daughter who forgives you for everything, whatever, in advance.” When he reached out toward it, she changed her mind, spun away, and took it to the Jeep, where she opened the door on the passenger side and threw the rug in. Then she ran back to him, smiling, her eyes filled with tears. Again she brushed his cheek with her lips; then she was gone.

As he drove home, his thought turned to Donnie Matthews. He'd been a fool, insisting that she not get an abortion—and a fool in his class, arguing against abortion on demand. How many women in the world, in fact, would ask for an abortion they didn't desperately need—because of parents who would be ashamed and hateful, or some husband who'd be impossible if he didn't get a boy—would call the girl he got Johnnie or Frank, make her wretched? How long had he been like this, blind, insensitive as a stone, casually murderous, even actual murder not beneath him? Perhaps the fact that he could feel shame at what he'd become was a sign that there was hope. Perhaps. Not much hope, he thought. He could not tell whether his tears were for Mark or Leslie or Donnie Matthews or the buried child-angel in himself or, simply, the world.

Snow fell, mile after mile, sweeping into the headlights. He watched his reflection, the glow of his pipe, in the windshield. At last, to the left and right of him, he began to feel the mountains rising; broad, dark, endless waves.

It was by accident that he stopped that night at the university. First he missed his turn-off down from Route 88, so that he had no real choice but to drive through Binghamton, and then, when he entered the city, his mind was elsewhere—as it had been all this way—and he drove automatically to the school like an old horse heading for the barn. He caught himself only when he was about to turn onto Campus Drive and, looking at the campus ahead of him, saw that it was dark, a graveyard. He felt annoyance at the time wasted by his coming out of the way, then at the last minute changed his mind and turned in, thinking he might as well have a look at his mail, since he hadn't been near the place in weeks. It occurred to him, in fact, that maybe he should try to find a box someplace and take home the piled-up junk on his desk, use what little he had left of vacation to square himself away. The divorce was behind him; it seemed a good time to shake off inertia, get moving. Besides, the campus was quiet as a tomb. He'd meet no one—maybe a janitor, or one of the campus cops.

He parked in the alley by the library loading dock, switched off his engine and lights, and sat listening for a moment. No one stirring. The bear-rug, bunched up on the seat beside him, was like a large, sleeping animal. He got out, walked over to the metal-plated door, sorted through the numerous keys in his keyring, and let himself in. There was a dim light burning in the entrance-way, another in the corridor beyond. The place smelled of some kind of cleaning fluid and new paint. As he went up the stairs, feeling his way step by step in the darkness, he fingered through his keys again, hunting for the key to the mailroom. In the upstairs hallway there was another dim light, and by holding the keyring up to it he was able to pick out the mailroom key, then the key to his box. When he pulled at the handle of his mailbox, the box wouldn't slide, at first. He pulled hard and, with a sound like a mournful sigh, escaping air, the box came open, crammed with letters and papers. He looked down at the mess, just a vague, cluttered gray in the dimness of the room, and a sensation like drowning came over him. He would hardly be able to carry it all without leaving a wake of scraps. He decided to go look for a large cardboard box, dump the mail in that, then go down to his office for the mail waiting there. There would probably be a large box or two in the department office; he could think of no other source of boxes he had a key for. He started down the long, dark corridor, his overshoes almost soundless on the marble floor, his two hands feeling their way once more around the keyring. At the department door, with its large, Gothic-lettered black and white sign
PHILOSOPHY
—all around the sign, taped notices, announcements, cartoons from
The New Yorker
—he stopped and raised his head, thinking he'd heard some sound; but apparently he'd been mistaken. He turned the key in the lock—a gentle click—then turned the knob and pushed the door open. It made no sound.

He made out—though it shouldn't have been possible in that windowless room, he thought—the large, solid rectangle of the receptionist's desk. Then he saw that, farther in, there was a dim streak of light under Tillson's office door. His heart jumped in alarm, and he looked down at the luminous dial on his watch. Nearly 2 a.m. Burglars? He stood half in and half out of the reception-room door, his hand on the doorknob, trying to decide whether or not he should retreat. Then once again he heard something, just the faintest hint of a woman's voice. He felt himself stiffen, yispicion and curiosity rising in him at once. He let go of the doorknob and moved slowly, without a sound, toward Tillson's closed door. It seemed to Mickelsson that he thought nothing at all as he moved, ghostly in the darkness, toward the band of dim light. All his senses were wide awake, his mind strangely empty, he believed, though in fact he was thinking. He remembered looking in and seeing Tillson asleep on his office couch, a pitiful little doll with his mouth open, and with a part of his mind he believed now that he'd been wrong about the voice: Tillson no doubt had stayed late, working, and had lain down for a nap and had fallen into a sleep deeper than he'd intended. With another, less generous part of his mind, Mickelsson was thinking of the rumor that Tillson had a mistress, dear friend of his wife.

He stood bent toward the door, undecided as to whether he should knock or just open it two inches and look in. It was unlike him, he thought—this stealth, even malevolence. His son Mark would never do such a thing—nor would he have, once. Even when Mickelsson had begun to suspect his wife, he'd avoided spying—though perhaps, as Rifkin had more than once suggested, not for the noblest of reasons. No matter, the world was in its last days.

Ten seconds passed, twenty, and he remained as he was, his hand on the doorknob, his head close to the wood, darkness and unnatural stillness around him, his soul, perfectly balanced in indecision. Then he heard again the woman's voice, soft and gentle, just a whisper, and the very same instant he opened the door and looked in, then closed it at once, turning, striding out of the office, almost running, as from a flood, in his mind the charged image of Jessica Stark staring at him past Tillson's gray head, her eyes serenely passive, or so it seemed; perhaps she had not yet had time to feel shock or alarm. On the couch, under Tillson, sprawled like a goddess, she seemed twice the size of the chalky-skinned, hydrocephalic little hunchback. Her arm lay around him, cushioning him, her hand on his neck in the position of a mother's hand supporting the neck of a baby.

He was halfway home, helpless, borne along by rage, shame, and guilt, before it came to him that she couldn't have seen him; he'd been standing in the dark, the door only open an inch or two.

4

Mickelsson slept through the whole next day and the night that followed, his telephone off its hook. At times he would awaken briefly to sharp, nameless dread, like one buried alive, and then he would remember, his spirit would struggle, and before he could even know clearly what he felt, drug-heavy sleep would avalanche down over him again. What he ought to feel, he believed as lucidity crept back, was disgust; but he did not. It was chiefly a crippling shame that he felt, for moving in on them like an angel of the Lord while they clasped in their arms what little peace and goodness they could find in the world. His anger and revulsion, Rifkin would say, had turned into repression. But Rifkin would be wrong, as usual. His first thought, when he peeked in at them, was that Jessie was beautiful. It was as if all he had been through, these past months, had stripped him of the last vestiges of herd opinion, so that from his dark pit of guilt he saw with eyes like an innocent's: saw her grace and gentleness, and no more judged the act they were engaged in than he'd have done if no one had ever told him it was “wrong.” He'd achieved, perhaps, Nietzsche's higher unconsciousness. It was as if his grandfather's righteous, stern opinions—ideas he himself had ingeniously elaborated, even after he'd abandoned theism, by his ethical speculations—had been washed from his memory, thrown down, ground to bits, as by a tidal wave. He had looked at the pair with the same clear child-eyes that had looked, thoughtfully, open to anything, at the picture of the snake painted on the wall of the church. Now, in his bed, his mood more complex—his guilt no longer foremost but still coloring the rest—he saw Tillson in a new way, as a pitiful man, no fool, fighting like a half-drowned rat for the possible—fighting for the department, giving slack to his rainbowed youthful ideals, compromising, feinting, fighting by every means at his disposal to save whatever might be saved in these foundering times; and fighting heroically though no doubt futilely for Jessie as well, not because she was his lover but because what she stood for was right—while he, Mickelsson, stood aloof from it all, too grand for petty skirmishes, too self-absorbed and disdainful of the trivial to risk getting pigshit on his soft, pink hands. He felt his animal spirits flying inward toward his heart, squeaking like bats, his limbs becoming dry, quiet stone in their absence, and again he slept.

Minutes or hours later, when he awakened again, and again lay staring upward in the darkness, his mind and heart took up where they'd left off. He thought of all he ought to have done, ought to be doing, all he ought not to have done and could never atone for. He thought of the book he'd begun, messy hill of manuscript pages down by the typewriter, originally the “blockbuster” Donnie Matthews had inspired, gradually modified to something duller, more closely reasoned, probably no more useful or important. He resisted the impulse to destroy it. Maybe the worldview of Jake Finney was right: maybe life was shit and doom inexorable; but if anything could clean up the world, stop Armageddon, clear vision was the hope: a book honest politicians (if any could be found) might read, think about, understand; or stock investors, ordinary citizens, the people on whose blindness and indifference the Kingdom of Death, physical and spiritual, depended. A man owed something, that was the thing. Not only to the future; to the past as well—to those who had put their trust in him. It was an idea Mickelsson's old teacher McPherson had talked about once, in connection with Homer. Mickelsson, thinking about his father, operatically singing while he plowed, his mother, dressed up, all aflutter, hurrying them to the car so they wouldn't be late again for church, McPherson soberly wincing in front of class, struggling to get an idea just right—like Wittgenstein, he was famous for never teaching the same thing twice, never simply passing on dead information—Mickelsson, remembering these things, thought Finney's weary cynicism not just sick but insane. He
should
be writing the book—for Donnie, for Mark and Leslie, for Ellen in her new life—but then he remembered that he'd killed a man and would eventually go to prison: his advice to the world would be poisoned at the source. Whose wasn't? He had lost forever his clout.

Thoughts of his father kept coming back to him, memories groping toward revelation. He remembered how, when he, Mickelsson, was a child, his father, his father's friend Hobart, and his uncle Edgar had torn out the partition between what had once been the pantry and the original diningroom to make one large room, the new diningroom, how they'd put in new lath, plastered, hammered in an oak frame to replace the partition, then put up new wallpaper (light blue) and painted the doors, casements, mop-boards, and mouldings white. They'd worked in frantic haste, all of two days and nights, because his mother had been away somewhere and it was meant as a surprise for her. When Mickelsson had gone to bed—they'd allowed him to stay up late, watching—the room was all dust and strangeness and confusion (he remembered the astonishing slick whiteness of the paint they were just then beginning to brush onto the doors, abnormally white because they worked by the light of bare bulbs); when he went in in the morning, the whole thing was finished and he could hardly believe his eyes—a huge, gleaming room where once there had been two small dingy rooms, the white paint and light blue wallpaper adazzle in the early-morning sunlight. Was it that, then, that had prompted him, these many years later, to transform the old Sprague place? He had his doubts about the power of psychological symbols; nonetheless, his memory of that surprising transformation was strong, and it was no doubt true that all the sophistication in the world could not rid the soul of its primal faith in magic. Even now, in his hopelessness and guilt, he could not deny that his knowledge of the house around him, restored by his hands to something like its former beauty, miraculously cleaned up like the world of Noah, gave a kind of security, however tentative; a place to stand. That was how his father had lived his whole life: rebuilding, letting the light in. He, not Nietzsche's Prussian officer—much less the artist, philosopher, or saint—was the Übermensch.