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

“I don’t think it’s Shakespeare. I wouldn’t know that kind of thing.”

“The Bryants make me gloomy,” he said, “especially Edie. She’s so interested.”

There was another hesitation. He imagined her closing her eyes. “She means well. It scares her that everyone’s not as happy as she is.”

“You think she’s happy?” He found it an interesting question, in fact. That Southerners’ habit of warmly remembering community and carrying the memory through life in their mouths.

Jessie sadly laughed. She was sounding farther and farther away. “As happy as she thinks she ought to be, then.” The line was silent, just a forlorn humming sound, as if all the way to Binghamton the phone-wires were bound in ice. Then Jessie asked: “Have you talked with your kids? Did they send Christmas cards?”

“Presents, in fact,” he said. His voice sank a notch deeper in its gloom. Again he mopped at his face. “A carving from Mark. I guess he did it himself—he’s never done that before, carvings, I mean. But it’s got the look. Very strange—interesting. Bunch of children praying.”

“That’s nice, Pete. I didn’t know Mark was religious.”

“He isn’t—though once when he was in school and they asked him to fill in some form, he put down, as religious preference, ‘Lutheran.’ ” He laughed. “That’s what I’d been, earlier, before I gave up on theism.”

“You never really gave it up, Pete,” she said. “That must be where he got it. What did Leslie send?”

“Embarrassment of riches. Dark plaid scarf, very nice one, more than she could afford. Also a wallet with a picture of her in it, one of those things where you put a quarter in the slot and then smile at the mirror. It’s not bad. She’s a wonderful-looking girl. She works, I guess I’ve told you. Cocktail waitress in one of those big motels—Ramada, I think. Poor kid works her heart out, both highschool and college, waitress several nights a week, and every play that gets produced for twenty miles around, she’s in it if she can fit in rehearsals. Takes after her mother that way. She’s got kidney trouble, as I think I told you; it’s not good for her, all that work. I hate it that after all that she spends money on me.”

“You know it would break her heart if she couldn’t send you something.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

Jessie asked, “What did you send them?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Junk.” It struck him that he’d sent nothing to Jessie. A fancy shirt had arrived from her; he’d opened it almost without noticing, feeling only a momentary flush of guilt; it was still on the chair in the livingroom.

“I’m sure it wasn’t junk,” she said. “What did you send?”

“It doesn’t matter much. Mark won’t get what I sent him anyway, not till he goes back to U.V.M., if he ever does. It was some things I’d made. Crude pegged boxes, some picture frames. Probably got there late besides.”

“My my, aren’t we pitiful,” she said. “By the way, I’ve been reading your books.”

“Oh?” Her words took a moment to sink in. “What do you think?”

“I can’t really judge such things,” she said.

“Take a flying guess.”

“Well … They’re interesting.”

“ ‘Interesting’?” he said, mock-horrified.

“You know what I mean. I’m not wild about philosophy, but they’re sort of fun.”

“That sounds like high praise,” he said.

“I guess it is.”

When at last the conversation ended and he hung up the receiver and turned from the phone, the ghosts were standing in the livingroom doorway behind him, watching him. It made him jump. The woman’s eyes were full of lightning, the man’s troubled, as if something of importance had slipped his mind. Mickelsson felt a surge of panic, then angrily flapped his arm at them, like a farmer shooing away geese. They remained where they were. It seemed not right, not possible. Surely it was his own wish—or anyway receptivity—that had conjured them. Out on the road in front of the house, a huge black horse went by, drawing a sleigh full of children. All Mickelsson could see over the snowplowed banks was the top of the horse’s head—there was a bright red plume on it—and the children’s bright hats. He heard harness bells, a sound out of his childhood.

At his feet, the cat complained for food.

“Parasite,” Mickelsson hissed. But he moved, glad of the cat’s foul-smelling solidity, toward the sink where he kept the catfood.

Afterwards, he went to the study to write the letters he’d told Jessie he’d written. He sealed them without reading them over, knowing that if he did reread them he’d never send them. Sentimentality; drunken rant. He drove them down to the box in front of the post office, so that he couldn’t retrieve them in the morning. Later, so drunk by now that he could hardly stand up, he phoned Levinson, in sociology; a good man, though he had no power in the department. They talked for two hours. Mickelsson couldn’t remember, afterward, a word of what they’d said. It was already full daylight when, placing his feet with care and clinging to the railing, he went upstairs.

He was not a well man. The ghosts he kept seeing, his sense that they were building up to something … He thought of the red coat, back from the laundry, hanging in his closet now. It was only a matter of time, no doubt. It floated through his mind that he could get up right now—he lay with all his clothes on—and drive into town with his murderer severity, his cold, dreadful, drunken frown, and get Blickstein out of bed, tell him in no uncertain terms how he felt, make use of the clout he was forever being told he had. Or he could make an appointment to talk to the president, as he’d said he’d done already.

Clout, he thought, and moved his head from side to side on the pillow, sweat on his forehead. His clout—he refused to shy from the word—was as fraudulent as that of