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

He frowned, then calmed his heart and let it go. He thought of Luther sitting bolt upright in bed, his room full of devils, filling the place with their terrible stench. Emissaries of the Pope, who was in turn an emissary. No doubt the learned doctor had been crazy all his life. But it was the Renaissance; no one had noticed. He remembered Luther’s remark on the Nuremberg citizen Herr Osiander, who claimed not to believe in poltergeists: “Osiander always has to be different.”

“Idealism,” Mickelsson said. “That’s the great demon.”

“We mustn’t be sore losers,” Jessie said, and glanced at the people at the table nearest them, a middle-aged man with curly sideburns and a choleric look, beside him a thin young woman with a slash of white in her carefully puffed hair.

“Well, anyway,” he said, trying to put the evening back on track, if it ever had been, “we’ve got my affairs back in order.” He thought of Donnie, raving, crying out for all to hear, “It’s just a foetus!”

“That is good,” she said, her eyes searching his face again, and again her hand came over his. With her free hand she signalled for the waiter.

Only when they parted, back in the gray-lit university parking lot, did Jessie come close to admitting that she knew something was wrong. She studied his eyes, then in quick decision rose on her tiptoes, her hands on the back of his neck, and kissed him. “Don’t worry,” she said, and smiled, searching his face. “It will all be all right. Give it time!” She kissed him again, lingeringly, then abruptly turned away, since there was nothing more she could do. Her coat flared out and she crossed with long strides into the circle of light from a goose-necked lamppost, then out into shadow again, to her car. How clean and fine her beauty was, he thought with a foundering heart. He registered, suddenly squinting into the darkness, that the night they’d made love he’d seen stretch-marks on Jessica’s abdomen. He must pay more attention, he told himself. Break down these stinking prison walls.

For all that, he did not mend his ways. At home, he let his mail pile up as before; at his office, he stuffed it unsorted, unread, into his file cabinet, where Jessie would not see it. Rifkin would have been interested in that; not that Mickelsson needed a psychiatrist for help with the interpretation. The infant idealist in Mickelsson was holding out; it was nothing more than that. He wanted to be back with his wife and children, all of them ten years younger; wanted his father to come striding back from the grave, and his mother young and pretty again; wanted his promise as a philosopher to be all it had once been, or greater. He’d had, all his life, a dream about what life ought to be, and now, though all evidence was against the dream, he refused to renounce it. If not that life, he was saying in effect, then no life. He thought again of that ghastly phrase of Nietzsche’s, “This is your eternal life.”

To avoid thinking he worked on Luther—if what he was doing could be called work. One by one he brought Luther’s books from the university library and piled them on the floor by his desk, along with his grandfather’s old tablets. His simultaneous hatred and admiration grew day by day. He began to know the doctor’s stylistic tics as he knew his own—indeed, he began to see, to his horror, more and more similarities between his own personality and Luther’s. Sometimes, brooding as he worked on the house or as he walked the streets of Susquehanna, doing errands, he felt as if the old fiend were right at his shoulder, listening in; and once, in a drizzling winter rain, just as he was coming out of the hardware store, he actually thought he saw old Dr. Martinus in the flesh. It was one of those curious mental tricks one dismisses as soon as one sees one’s mistake, but for the second or two of its duration it struck terror into his heart. There he was, huge and slovenly, as in the contemporary descriptions and the one famous painting. He was dressed in black, as he’d been in life, his back turned to Mickelsson, the coarse hands folded behind his prodigious ass, and instead of coat and hat he wore a hooded sweater, exactly what one might expect of a former monk. Mickelsson froze in his tracks, knowing already that it wasn’t really Luther, yet staring on, stupefied, some dim, ancient part of his mind unconvinced. Then the enormous creature turned, as if aware of someone behind him, and Mickelsson saw that it was the fat man from Donnie’s apartment building. Mickelsson gave a quick, jerky bow, touching his hatbrim, and hurried down the street toward his car.

He couldn’t get the horror out of his bloodstream. A queer thought took possession of him: the unpleasant idea that once, before he’d stood religion on its head, that gross, foul-mouthed swine had from time to time heard confession—young girls who’d had venial thoughts, middle-aged lechers whose escapades had surely made young Martin lick his lips. There was a good deal to be said—as no doubt no one knew better than Luther—for his having gotten rid of that ugly institution; but then a queerer thought came: how comforting it would be, for a man in Mickelsson’s position, to be able to pour out his soul to a red-faced lout of a priest whose lips were sealed!

He was building, today, the door- and window-frames for the new diningroom, beautiful cherry boards he’d gotten for a song from a farmer on the lower road, who had a home sawmill. As he worked, measuring, sawing, fitting—handling the tools with a skill and confidence he’d never known he possessed—he played with the idea of confession. “I’m in love