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

as a judicial bench. He had windows at his back, and all around the rest of the room—the desk took up a third of it—he had high wooden filing cabinets and dully gleaming law books. Mickelsson and the others sat across from him, in forced respect—all but the secretary, who moved back and forth from the outer office to this one, running errands for the lawyer. It was a cunning arrangement: except for the windows, the room was quite dark, and against the sunlight, hazed by cigarette smoke, the lawyer’s head was blurry and defeatured, symbolic of the godly power of his position—counsellor, arbiter, guardian of das Recht. In all fairness, he wore his mantle lightly, chatting casually, pausing for a coughing fit or to search his enfeebled memory for a name, or a date, or where the sam hill he’d put his ink-pen. Besides being forgetful and half blind, Mr. Cook was very nearly stone deaf.

The talk ebbed and flowed like pure Being; Mickelsson refrained from wading in. He liked these people, liked their comfortable ease with one another, but he was by no means one of them, not yet anyway, and in general, he thought, he wanted no more to do with them than need be. He was moving to the country to get off by himself; one could be amused from a distance—one could feel a sort of neighborly rapport, so to speak—without being sworn into the gang. And so he smiled stiffly, playing with his Western gentleman’s hat, rather pleased with himself despite his uneasiness about the lies, the money, allowing his mind to drift to thoughts of how he would fix up the house, someday paint the barns—nodding when by accident he met someone’s eyes. “That’s right,” he would say occasionally, throwing out his look of intense, crazed interest, eyebrows raised, grin eager, hardly aware what he was concurring in.

They were clearly in no hurry, and at times, briefly, their prelapsarian time-sense stirred his irritation. When the fat young woman showed the pictures of her children to Dr. Bauer, who had delivered them (the doctor tilted her large frame forward, nodding under her hat, exclaiming “My! Oh my!”), he felt such a twinge of impatience he had to stop himself and think the feeling out. It came to him at last that his earlier assessment had been entirely wrong. Say what he would about membership in the gang, he was in fact feeling snubbed—and was being snubbed, just a little. If he were seven, he thought, he would have burst into tears. Not surprising, of course. In this new life he’d invested so heavily in—risking, in fact, financial and maybe psychological catastrophe—they, with their smalltown, narrow minds, were keeping their distance as they’d do with some smiling fat banker from New Jersey. Absurd that he should mind. He knew about small towns. Ah, ah, what a ridiculous creature was the whimpering, snivelling human psyche! (He realized with a start that he was whispering, just perceptibly moving his right hand. He checked himself and glanced around the room. No one had noticed.) Given the slightest encouragement, he knew (unbeknownst to him, his right hand was moving again), the secretary would happily have shown him her snapshots. She’d have shown them to a nut-tree if the tree showed interest. She didn’t show her pictures to Charley Snyder either, or the lead-faced, trembling, coughing, wheezing old lawyer; but her smiles and chatter made them part of the conversation. They laughed, tossed her a word now and then like a puppy-treat, but mostly talked with one another. The child of someone they knew had wandered into a cave somewhere and had come across something radioactive. “That sucker came out glowing like a candle,” the lawyer cried in his thin piping voice. Charley Snyder shook his head, sympathetic, but asked with interest, “Uranium, was it?” “Refuse is what it was,” the lawyer yelled, “refuse brought down here from Canada or New Jersey!” Then he doubled over, covering his mouth with his already clenched fist, for a coughing fit. As soon as it was over he pulled again at his cigarette, hollowing his cheeks.

The conversation of the lawyer and Charley Snyder rippled into the conversation of the secretary and the doctor. As if unaware what it was that had altered the tone of their talk, the two women wondered what the world was coming to, briefly troubled about the future of the secretary’s children. “So many strangers coming in with their different ideas,” the secretary said as if Mickelsson weren’t there. “Lot more Mormons these days, not that I gaht anything against the Mormons.”

“Course not,” Dr. Bauer said.

“And all those people from New York City and so on, buying up the land so’s an ordinary person can’t afford it anymore—buying it and not even moving to it.”

“Buying it for retirement, they say,” Dr. Bauer said, and briefly closed her eyes.

For all his deafness, the lawyer somehow caught the secretary’s last remark and said to Snyder, as if it were he who’d made it, “Buying it to make the whole state of Pennsylvania their God damn garbage dump.”

Mickelsson, listening with only half his mind, remembered “Punk” Atcheson, the grinning, freckle-faced, red-headed boy who’d first made friends with him when—timid, knowing no one—he’d transferred to the big highschool in Wausau. One day Mickelsson had been the weird outsider, the next it was as if he’d lived in Wausau all his life. Punk had been on the football team and a star in the highschool chorus, which Mickelsson had quickly joined. They’d become, as they say, inseparable. Again and again they’d gone into laughing fits—Mickelsson could no longer remember the reason—and had been thrown out of classes. That was what he wanted now, of course: a Punk Atcheson to let him through the door.

Almost the instant he figured out his feelings, Mickelsson began to feel nothing at all, or nothing but the boredom and weariness he felt at faculty meetings. It was of course