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

somehow quaint suggestion of the shy, brilliant fat boy he’d once been and, in some ways, was yet. An antique plush chair stood over by the bookshelf at Lawler’s back, a chair that looked much too rickety to sit in, but the only one available. Mickelsson drew it up to Lawler’s desk and warily sat down. The chair was not the only antique in the room, he saw now, as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness. Over by the window stood a tall grandfather’s clock with a great brass shield for a pendulum and ornate brass disks above the face, gauges of the progress of the moon, perhaps; Mickelsson had no idea. Above Lawler’s desk hung—or mournfully loomed—a large oil painting of a castle almost invisible in darkness and fog.

“How are things?” Mickelsson asked. He watched his colleague’s face closely, with interest, to see if, this once, he would look up.

“Mmm, yes,” Lawler said, and struck directly at his business, speaking in the fussy, at once timid and sober-minded fashion of a schoolboy certain of nothing in the world but his facts. Jessie had of course been exactly right about him: a lonely man cloaked and disguised in fat and abstraction. “I asked you to come by,” he said apologetically, “because I’m rather concerned about our mutual friend or, that is, student, Michael Nugent.”

“Oh?” Mickelsson said, and waited.

“Do you think he seems well?” Lawler asked. Startlingly, his eyes rose to stare straight into Mickelsson’s with what seemed to him—perhaps he was mistaken—dreadful grief.

“He seems to me quite intelligent,” Mickelsson said, hedging.

Lawler moved his hand in a minute gesture of impatience. “Yes, unquestionably. But I’ve been wondering, observing him—of course it’s only conjecture. …”

“Yes, I see,” Mickelsson said, and looked down. “Has Dean Blickstein talked to you, by any chance?”

“Nooo.” There was a hint of alarm in his voice, as if he’d guessed what was coming.

“He’s apparently going through a difficult time,” Mickelsson said. He felt, all at once, awash in guilt. Here was Lawler, of all people, the great, aloof intellectual, distressed about the welfare of one of his students, while Mickelsson, superficially more social, by far more conscious of the world around him, even conscious, some of the time, of the parallel between his students’ unhappiness and the unhappiness of his son, turned his back on his students as on everything else. He said, blushing, “According to Blickstein, Nugent’s father died recently. The boy was extremely depressed by it; in fact it seems he attempted suicide. And then apparently he was hit rather hard by the death of one of his teachers, Professor Warren.”

“Warren?” Lawler echoed vaguely. Again his voice was apologetic, as if the name were no doubt one he should know but, unfortunately, did not.

“It seems they were fairly close,” Mickelsson said. “I’m not sure how close. Apparently, Warren was homosexual, like Nugent.”

“Oh?” Lawler said. He seemed puzzled and a little dismayed by the revelation; he was perhaps not sufficiently of the world to have noticed Nugent’s tendency. “That’s a burden, I suppose, in our society.” His mind was elsewhere. After a moment he said, looking down at his book again, “It sounds as if there’s not much we can do. Is the boy getting counselling?”

“We could suggest it. I haven’t, myself.”

“Counselling might help, I suppose.” He didn’t sound hopeful. Perhaps he too had known his Rifkins. “Warren,” he said, still trying to place the name. “Was he in our department?”

“Chemistry,” Mickelsson said. “Nugent was in engineering before he came to us.”

“Ah! I see! Yes, I knew that. Chemistry, then. I see. And you think they were lovers?” Lawler’s face darkened in embarrassment.

“I wouldn’t say that, though of course I wouldn’t know. Just good friends, I think.”

“Good friends. Yes, I see.” He raised his right hand, unaware that he was doing it, to rub the space between his eyebrows, pushing up the bridge of his glasses, as if he had the start of a headache. “If there were only something one could do,” he said. He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Mickelsson.

“Yes,” Mickelsson said.

Slowly, thoughtfully, Lawler began to nod. “Well, thank you for coming,” he said. “I suppose all we can do is watch him, try to be whatever help we can.”

“We can do that much, yes.”

On the way back to his office, Mickelsson pressed his fist to his forehead, hardly knowing what he felt. Mainly he felt like a child returning from the principal’s office, found guilty and not properly punished. “Very well, very well,” he muttered angrily, but which of his failures he was confessing was not clear. One thing was certain. He ought to take Michael Nugent aside, have a heart-to-heart talk with him. Ought, he brooded. A stupid word, no force. A word for weaklings, Nietzsche would say. A word for survivors, something he apparently was not. No paradox, for Nietzsche. The species does not grow in perfection: the weak are forever prevailing over the strong.

Jessie arrived three hours later than she’d said, an annoyance not because he had anything planned but because it forced him to another painful recognition: she was one of those people who had a knack for making you worry. He’d pretended to read, glancing now and then at the clock beside the door, sometimes bending close to the window for a look at the weather—clear and frozen as a crystal—sometimes coming alert at the sound of a car, but then time after time the car went on past, another meaningless Not-Jessica, as Sartre would say. When she arrived, she came roaring up to the back door and beeped the horn twice (she drove something small and European-looking), and when he opened the back door and went out to her—no jacket over his T-shirt, hunching his shoulders against the bitter cold and rubbing his hands, whining but widely grinning, “Where were you, Goldfarb? I thought you were dead!”—she opened the car-door (the inside light went on) and called out, “Come on, Mickelsson, lend a