Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

Little by little Mickelsson came to be so taken by his theory that he began actually to enjoy the music, even its overwrought performance. Tentatively, he smiled, nodding his approval. He knew well enough how Ellen’s theories, many of them published in Modern Drama and The Educational Theatre Journal, could make crap intellectually majestic; and he remembered how, when they’d gone to Cornell to decide whether or not Mark should go there, and had visited the conspicuously expensive art museum, Mark had said, looking around at the sculptures, paintings, drawings, and photographs, “Any freshman that comes here would know right away that it’s all stupid, but I bet you after four years of art education, he’s not sure anymore.” Mickelsson knew, in other words, how aesthetic theory can steal the wall from the aesthetic object. Nevertheless it seemed to him that his theory of the Swissons’ music was right, not just concept juggling, not just an exercise, on his part, of the age-old human inclination to make peace with even the most outlandish opinions of the tribe. True, it was possible that the stuffiness of the place had mellowed him: audience heat and the scarcity of oxygen made it harder and harder to keep from yawning. And no doubt he’d been influenced by pity for the Warren woman. It was always tempting to reason away the defects of an essentially benevolent community. Nevertheless he smiled and nodded now—even raised and lowered the toes of his shoes—with firm commitment. Jessica glanced at him, still reserved, even sulky, but tentatively pleased by the improvement in his attitude. He considered reaching for her hand. The same moment, he saw, close to the stage, right in front of Katie Swisson’s teal-colored shoes, his student Alan Blassenheim. The sight of Blassenheim warmed Mickelsson’s heart almost as a glimpse of his own son would have done. The young man’s dark, soft-looking hair, set off against the stagelights, had purple highlights and a rainbowed halo at the edges. Mickelsson was reminded of the half-despairing Jesus in the dust-obscured picture from the workroom floor. It was true, he reflected; Blassenheim was a classic case: the desperate good boy, eager to please, lifted up beyond the physical now, devoted to the Best, whatever in the world the Best should prove to be. His devotion alone witnessed to its existence. Perhaps it was the same with his son. Ah, the pity! With all one’s heart one longed to give young people the key to it all, but … He saw in his mind the blackened wooden cheesebox and its cargo of rust-pitted, hundred-year-old keys, keys once so precious that someone had actually buried them in a wall! He shivered, smiled, then stifled another yawn. Blassenheim had his head turned, apparently conscious that Mickelsson was behind him. Mickelsson bowed across the intervening rows with exaggerated sociability.

Automatically, when the song ended and the applause began—he couldn’t remember a single note of it—Mickelsson joined in.

“Cheer up,” Jessica said in his ear, possibly meaning to injure—her scent rushed to his heart—“it’s almost over.”

“I like it,” Mickelsson said. “They’re very good.”

She gave him a sidelong, utterly inscrutable look.

He smiled, clapping on, thinking about her anger and the scent of her perfume, distinct, yet too subtle to identify with any earthly flowers, landscape, weather. …

Kate Swisson bowed and bowed, left, right, center, smiling at the students in the front row. Alan Blassenheim, broad-shouldered, handsome as a latter-day Hercules or Apollo, clapped with his hands above his head, like a Greek dancer. At last the audience stopped applauding and settled back for more. Mickelsson glanced at his watch and thought, mistakenly, that it had stopped.

The clinking of the piano suggested one of those dread-filled moments in a horror film, or an awesome shot in a space-buster, star sparks plummeting toward the camera. With a wild look of either madness or terror, Kate Swisson wailed in Spreehstitnme,

“In the timelessness,

                     the spacelessness of heaven,

after 33,ooo performances of Handel’s Messiah,

            I cried out.

In utter desperation I forced my waythrough masses of bodiless spiritsthat surrounded the throne.

There was a clamor of voices,   all wanting to get out.      I was not alone!”

Mickelsson laughed. Very clever! Interesting! Not at all with the intention of sleeping, he closed his eyes and slept.

He dreamed he had a long, friendly conversation with his wife. The dream was in vivid color, and his wife wore a dress decorated exactly like a wedding cake, sugar-white, as blinding as snow on a sunny, cold day. Her hair was once more its original golden yellow. They were the best of friends, as close as two children together, and everything in the dream was filled with light, rich and surprising, like morning to a very young child. The village where they found themselves had brown streets, bright yellow and red flowers in windowboxes, and red brick houses like those in a young child’s picturebook. He heard her say clearly, with such sweetness his heart went light with joy, “This way, Mick.” She lifted off the ground, flying like a candied angel on a string. He too began to fly, but then, high above the lovely picturebook world, he suddenly realized that he’d lost the trick of it.

He jerked awake, reaching out to catch himself, and looked around, startled, crushed inward by the auditorium’s darkness, though the dream-voice was still in his ear. To his outer, merely fleshly ear, Kate Swisson sang, in her overly meticulous, phoney way:

“ ‘But there’s nothing here in my book,’ God said,‘nothing but miserable lives,of toil and tears and human suffering.Look here,there is an opening for a blackunemployed, unskilled, uneducated laborer,who will go from job to job,from booze to drugs,from woman to woman. …’ ”

There was a pause, a rising melodic phrase on the piano, and then:

“ ‘Halleluyah. I’ll take it!’         God smiled               and I was born again.”

With a tavern-piano glissando and three funky chords, the concert ended.

The people around Mickelsson clapped and clapped, some of them shouting “Bravo! Bravo!” or whistling. He