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

“You want to change the world and be remembered, my friend? You want women to admire you and old school chums to say ‘I knew him when’? Be Hitler! Be Joseph Stalin! You don’t need philosophy to be good—common sense and a little common luck will get you by. But take ordinary nastiness and push it to the limit, turn common misunderstanding into a great misunderstanding, a profound stupidity—that, my friend, they will write books about!”

Blassenheim’s smile had no pleasure in it, though if he knew the grounds on which Garret was teasing him, he didn’t show it. “I guess I understand what you mean, sort of,” he said—he was carefully not showing discomfiture at the hand on his shoulder, either, maybe even felt none, alas for him; a gentle soul to the sub-atomic core—“but isn’t it true that if you wrote a good enough philosophy book you could answer in advance anything a Hitler might say?”

“It’s already been written a million times,” Garret said. “Nobody reads it. Out of print.” He beamed. “Ninety-nine cents at Barnes and Noble.”

“You mean, like”—Blassenheim searched, then suggested—“the Bible, Spinoza, Kant?”

Jessica joined the group. Mickelsson felt her there before he saw her.

“That kind of thing,” Garret said. “Or Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, As the World Turns. People know pretty well what good is; they just don’t care that much. Maybe when they’re young they do—marching against the draft, throwing themselves down on logging roads to save the redwoods. … But it’s hard to keep up your interest, and these days especially, some reason. Churches can no longer do it for you—at one extreme too complex and sophisticated, full of self-doubts, and at the other extreme too dumb. And novels—when was the last time you read a novel that made you feel young again? But a Hitler, or even a Khomeini—that wakes people up, makes ’em virtuous!”

“Inexpensive virtue,” Mickelsson said.

“Listen, these days just a picture of a picture of a virtue, I’ll buy it.”

They all laughed. In Mickelsson’s head, their sounds began to echo, as from a vault.

“Peter,” Tillson said, materializing at Mickelsson’s elbow, leaning into the group in apparent distress, “I think something might be burning.”

“Good Christ, I forgot all about it,” Mickelsson said, and hurried to the kitchen. Orange light leaped like a movie on the far kitchen wall, projected through the glass oven door. It was not the pastitsio, luckily; only the oil that had dripped over onto the oven. In another minute, the whole thing would have been an inferno.

With the help of Brenda, Jessie, and the Blicksteins’ friend—he let no one else see—he cut the pastitsio and set it out on three large plates on the table, then set out the spinach salad, rolls and butter, white asparagus, red wine, and ice-water. Jessie approached the table—she seemed to float—with a lighted taper. When the candles were lighted and Mickelsson could think of nothing more to be done, he dimmed the center-light—he had a brief memory of midnight communion in his childhood—and began herding the crowd into the newly finished diningroom. It had until now been closed off, and it was a startling departure from the rest of the house: white plaster walls, black exposed beams, carefully wedged-in frames and casements, handmade doors and windows of cherry, on the walls above the two old walnut sideboards, dark red tapestries from Mexico, and framed photographs by his son. One would have thought it had cost him a fortune, this room. It had not—though it had cost him more than he could afford. Two hundred dollars to the farmer with the sawmill, for wood. All the rest he’d gotten, at a bargain, from the basement of Owen’s store and the local antique store—neither of which, so far, he’d paid.

As he threw open the doors, revealing the feast, the sparkling white cloth, dazzling water and wine glasses, glinting china and silver, tall, fluttering candles over hills of holly—another of Jessie’s contributions—a great, breathy Ah! went up, almost religious. No one moved for a moment, their faces bright in the candlelight, caught off guard. Jessie stood beside him, her hand on his arm, smiling as if the whole thing were in her honor. Across from them Brenda Winburn stood bent slightly forward at the waist, her hand in Alan Blassenheim’s, her face aglow, eyes reflecting the candleflames, her entire being momentarily transformed—her tan darker, blond hair more brilliant—to an at once Mediterranean and unearthly beauty. Kate Swisson bent her long neck, chin lifted, her red lips eagerly smiling, to sniff the food. “Isn’t it sensational?” she asked, turning to the couple. Janet Cohen the ever-ready, the one who’d read his book before taking his course, hurried down the table, her eye on the red plush velvet chair.

Now they all began to move toward chairs. “Sit anywhere,” he said, kingly, “anywhere you like”—realizing as he spoke that it was a mistake; he should certainly have set out placecards. Jessie should have warned him. Yet they all made the best of it, laughing, choosing chairs, deflecting attention from his error by commenting on the crystal, the Christmas wreath centerpiece, the pastitsio. The graduate students, except for Janet, chose last.

Mabel Garret came in after everyone else, as if for some reason she’d been resisting—for it was not at the back of the crowd that she came but after the crowd, when it was no longer possible to stay in the livingroom—and after standing for a moment in her black dress, looking in at them, her frightened smile fluttering like a candle, her left hand groping unconsciously toward the doorframe, she quite suddenly widened her eyes, as if someone had touched her from behind, and opened her mouth for a cry that did not come. Mickelsson too was aware of something strange, an inexplicable cold wave, as if a door had been blown open in a nearby room. Tom Garret dropped the napkin he’d been in the act of picking up, jumped back, almost knocking his chair over, and tried