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

depressed him. He was overweight, wrecked, no doubt half crazy, and Jessica’s husband had been, everyone said, “just wonderful!” Whenever the man was mentioned Mickelsson would prick up his ears, secretly hoping to hear that the man had not been wonderful, that he was a dullard, and ugly as death. It never happened. He realized now how ridiculous he must have looked, intensely smiling, fake as a peddler of snake-oil, waving away her near-offer, if it was that. No problem. He thought of the long, intense conversation they’d had at Bryants’, not a word of which he remembered. Old devil gin.

Mickelsson went back into his office and closed the door.

Almost nothing he’d written on the loan application was strictly true. Strange affair! No one who had known him two years ago, not even his wife, could have anticipated this radical change of character—or rather, loss of character. It was astonishing, in fact: conscious, utterly indefensible falsehood from Mickelsson the moralist, howler in the wilderness of his desiccate age, ranter against sloganers and simplifiers, both Communists and capitalists, liars and lob-wits of every persuasion—Professor Peter Mickelsson, indefatigable shamer of the shallow-minded, fulminator against the frivolous and false, who had written scornfully of both fundamentalist straight-world bigotry and the latest campus fad, homosexual uncloseting—et cetera, et cetera. Yet it was so: his application was (not to put too fine a point on it) a pack of lies. His enemies, if they heard, would whinny with glee. He had a demon in him, his friends would have to say; there was no other reasonable explanation.

But what was he to do? (He sat bent forward, his right hand making small gestures two inches under his chin. The banker went on skimming the papers in front of him, his glasses low. He breathed audibly, steadily, like a man who smoked too much or had trouble with his digestion, or like a large animal asleep.) Mickelsson would never have gotten the loan—it was surely a fact—if he’d mentioned his unpaid taxes and penalties, or the payments he’d doubtless have to make to his wife, if ever he could get her to meet him in court (meanwhile he was sending her monthly checks—odd amounts, now more, now less, as much as he could manage—a generous act, as any reasonable observer would admit)—not, in fact, that he fooled himself for a minute.

Perhaps he really was in the possession of some demon, that is, some daemonic idea. Though all his life he’d trumpeted rationality, circumspect behavior in the deepest, broadest sense, self-mastery, it could hardly be denied that, for all his care, his ship was foundering, had foundered. He was reeling yet from the surprise of his wife’s demand that he get out. (“Just beat it, Professor. I’m not interested in debating it. You see that door? Just glide on through it.”) His career was on the skids. … Yet on the other hand, on the other hand … “The Übermensch is ‘dumb,’ his ideas unrestricted by the language of the herd”—F. Nietzsche. “Great truths are felt before they are expressed,” says Teilhard de Chardin. “Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying,” says Camus. Or Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every man’s life is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.” (But then again, of course: “Men will find reasons for the harm they intend to do anyway.”) It was not as if Mickelsson acted with his own approval.

He sighed and for a moment put his hand over his face.

He looked at the pink that showed through the banker’s hair and remembered his father’s annual trips to the bank in Wausau—twenty miles away, the nearest big town—for fertilizer and seed money. He remembered how his father would sit, oddly shrunken, by the loan-officer’s desk, his straw hat on his knees, on his face white splotches that would later turn out to be skin cancer. Mickelsson, ten or twelve, would be sitting outside the railing, nothing to play with but the worn-smooth chair-arms and his plastic-rimmed glasses. The loan man in Wausau (by now long dead) had been almost an albino. He’d had a large, white jaw and a long, straight nose with prominent, flared pink nostrils. The pale lashes around his bulging eyes were like silk. Mickelsson, in his childhood, had frequently met the man in nightmares.

Well, so Mickelsson had been less than forthcoming, as politicians say. But the president, loan-officer, and sometime head-teller of the small Susquehanna bank, County National, asked no questions or anyway none that would make trouble; he and his committee apparently took Mickelsson’s optimistic estimate of wages and “probable additional income” in gentlemanly stride. No doubt they were accustomed, in this depressed, backwoods area, to loan applications more poetic than factual. (Or was it, conceivably, that the man had read Mickelsson’s articles for popular magazines—on the arms race, the ethical implications of test-tube babies, et cetera—and had never entertained the possibility that a man of such good sense might throw prudence to the wind?) No matter, no point worrying, for the moment. Look on the bright side: he’d taken the old Kierkegaardian leap. (Needless to say, he would not seriously appeal to the authority of that righteous, crackpot Dane.)

The banker glanced up, and Mickelsson instantly broke off his furtive gesturing. The banker was silver-haired, silver-moustached, a boyish, ruddy man with dimples in his cheeks. On his glass desktop he had a sign in loopy, girlish script, with a flower, Thank You for Not Smoking. He pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk for Mickelsson’s signature. “Well, everything looks OK,” he said; and Mickelsson, taking his word for it, drew off his useless bifocals and hastily signed. He carefully dotted the i and crossed the t. Then they shook hands, both half rising from their chairs, reaching across the desk, grinning like conspirators. Mickelsson was half tempted to open a checking account, in token of