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

“Sprague doesn’t work, then?”

“Oh, he works accordin to his lights, I s’pose,” Pearson said. “He’s old.”

When it was clear he didn’t intend to elaborate, Mickelsson asked, “Do you know if they’re any relation to the Spragues that lived at my place?”

The line hummed and clicked while Pearson considered the question from various angles, or so Mickelsson imagined. At last the old man said, “I s’pose they musta ben.”

For the first time all semester, Brenda Winburn was talkative that morning, an effect of her romance with Alan Blassenheim, no doubt. Perhaps his admiration gave her the necessary confidence, or perhaps his apparent liking for Mickelsson had seduced her, made her willing to play Mickelsson’s game a little. “Did you see the article in Sunday’s paper,” she asked, “about the brothers who’d never known each other and were brought to America to be part of a study of identical twins?”

With a nod Mickelsson encouraged her to continue.

Though her look was still distrustful, as if prepared for lack of interest, scorn, or ambush from Mickelsson, Brenda continued with considerable ease and poise, her hands flat on the desk-chair top, one over the other. Her blond hair was drawn back tightly and tied in a bun, giving her small, almost lobeless ears a stranded look. On another day it might have seemed bizarre, but today the aliveness of her face—the blush of love, one might as well call it—made it difficult to think of her as anything but pretty. “One was named Stohr and the other was named something like Yufe,” she said. “One was raised a Nazi, the other one Jewish. They never saw each other since soon after they were born, but when they met at the airport they were both wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and double-pocket blue shirts with epaulettes, they both had little moustaches, they both flipped through magazines from back to front and had a habit of keeping rubber bands around their wrists. … I forget what else, but the similarities were amazing.”

“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” Mickelsson said. He added with a smile, lest he drive her back into her reserve, “I’m not sure I get your point.”

The class, taking its cue from him as always, waited politely. Even Nugent seemed to hold down his anger a little, keeping his face passive, his chin resting on his slightly loosened fist.

“Well, I was just thinking,” she said, “maybe when Aristotle was doing all that taxonomy he was aware, to some extent, that things were more set by Nature than his—you know—moral philosophy admitted. Maybe he just didn’t make the connection, I guess that’s possible. But maybe, setting down those different kinds of fishes and crustaceans or whatever—maybe he had an inkling that human beings have certain basic natures too, and that”—she glanced at Alan Blassenheim—“ideas … all that sort of thing … different kinds of actions … don’t really count much. Maybe our ideas and philosophies and all …” She looked down at her hands, calculating whether or not she ought to say it, then looked up and said, “Maybe all that is just cosmetics, if you know what I mean. Sort of just … polite behavior, like when whales or wolves touch noses or chimpanzees groom each other.”

The class looked from her to Mickelsson. He resisted the temptation to take the idea from her and bend it to the purpose of the course. “I’m not sure I follow the argument,” he said.

“It’s not an argument,” she said, suddenly smiling, and shrugged. “It’s just that, for example, this man Stohr, the one that was raised a Nazi, he was one of those Hitler Jugend, if that’s how you pronounce it, and when he was young he saw movies that said Jews were cockroaches and had to be gotten rid of, and then after the war when the Russians captured him and made him look at those pictures of the death camps and things, he felt confused and guilty, and he changed his mind to the same extent everybody else did in that situation—he didn’t really have any choice at all—but in all the important things, like what kind of glasses and shirts to wear—”

“Important things?” Mickelsson asked, raising his eyebrows.

She smiled, alarmed, and waved her left hand. “You know what I mean,” she said.

Nugent slid his eyes toward her, scornful, murderously impatient.

Blassenheim raised his hand.

“I’m not sure I do,” Mickelsson said, and decided to grant Blassenheim the floor.

“Nobody’s saying that killing people isn’t important,” Blassenheim said, and threw a look at Brenda to see if his defense was acceptable to her. “The question is why people do it, or don’t do it, whichever. We talk about people as doing what they do because they think of it as right, or at least, like, expedient. Like Plato’s principle that nobody chooses to do what he thinks will bring him pain. But she’s saying—Brenda’s saying—maybe that’s wrong. Maybe people choose ideas by style, they just sort of helplessly go with whatever’s in the stores that season—sort of a general ‘go with the group’ adaptation—but when they’re dealing with little, more specific styles, like when they choose their clothes, like their shoes and shirts and glasses, that’s more like straight genetic programming.” He sat back and waved his hand, just an interpreter, not committed. Predictably, the class was amused.

“You really think blue double-pocketed shirts with epaulettes are programmed in our genes?” Mickelsson asked.

“You know,” Blassenheim said, “maybe not that directly.” He waved again.

“Interesting,” Mickelsson said, smiling at Blassenheim as if playing chess with him. They’d moved a long way from Aristotle, but no matter. “And what does that do,” Mickelsson asked, “to our theory of the Good? Are moral judgments and aesthetic judgments of the same kind? Are the Nazi ideal of human nature and the liberal ideal just alternatives of taste?”

Though he addressed the question to Blassenheim, it was Brenda Winburn who answered. “It wouldn’t necessarily mean absolute values