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

And so, for these reasons and various others, when he looked back later almost the only image he retained was of the blurred silhouette of the lawyer’s torso and head against the window and, below, the doctor awkwardly twisted above her stack of gray papers, even her mouth twisted hard to one side (he could not see her eyes), signing her name, wherever there was an x, with her curled, long-fingered left hand.

He also remembered, sometime much later, one joke they’d neglected to let him in on. When Mickelsson was introduced to the secretary, when he’d first arrived, the woman smiled warmly and exclaimed, “So you’re buying the Sprague place! You must have steady nerves!”

“No,” he’d said, then realized that that must be their name for it (his mind went briefly to Sprague the philosopher), then realized there must be something more he was missing. “Steady nerves?” he echoed.

They were all laughing, Charley Snyder calling out, “Shame on you, Martha! You trying to make him change his mind?”

Mickelsson had meant to press her for what she’d meant, though he’d assumed he more or less knew. It was an odd-looking house, “Pennsylvania Gothic,” as Tim had said, laughing. Mickelsson laughed now with the others, trying to concentrate on the continuing introductions—the lawyer and Charley Snyder; Dr. Bauer he’d met before—and when the introductions were over, something else coming up immediately, the joke he wasn’t sure he’d understood had slipped his mind. It was no grave matter; it would be weeks, in fact, before Mickelsson would remember that he’d forgotten.

At the door, as he was leaving, the old lawyer pinched at his sleeve and cried out, “You’ve been here to Montrose before, Professor?”

“Yes,” Mickelsson said, nodding, poking tobacco into his pipe. “I looked at a couple of houses here.”

“You oughtta run up and see Lake Avenue before you leave,” the old man said. He interrupted himself, coughing, and took out a wadded gray handkerchief to press to his lips. When he’d finished he patted Mickelsson’s arm, old-womanish, his fingers like sticks. “Right up toward the courthouse and bear left by the bandstand. Can you see the bandstand? They use to hang people up there, in the old days.” He smiled, baring his teeth. “Lake Avenue, as I was saying—” He stepped out onto the concrete stoop so he could point the way.

“I’ve seen Lake Avenue,” Mickelsson said, raising his voice. “You’re right, it’s a beautiful sight.”

“Prettiest place you ever laid eyes on,” the old man said. Again he raised the handkerchief to his lips, but no cough came. “Just bear left at the bandstand. Go on, just walk up and have a look at it.”

“I’ve seen it,” Mickelsson said, almost shouting now, stiffening.

The old man stood with the handkerchief near his mouth, nodding and waiting, smiling as if pleased that the professor had at last been persuaded. Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, the lawyer’s eyes were all gray, swimming iris.

In the end, with what seemed to Mickelsson himself an abrupt and rather crazy laugh—consciously giving himself up to absurdity and feeling, as he did so, suddenly light, as if someone had switched off gravity—Mickelsson turned, pushed his hands into his pockets, and set off for the bandstand, bore left when he came even with it, then stopped for a moment and stood looking, his hat pushed back. “Nice,” he said aloud, broadly gesturing with his pipe. He waved at the cupolas, the rose-trellised porches, whatever people might be peeking from behind their lace curtains and heavy drapes. “Beautiful!” He laughed somewhat sharply, then put his hands and pipe into his coatpockets, his expression growing thoughtful.

It was true that the village of Montrose was beautiful—quite remarkable if you came to it from Binghamton, with its vast wrecked-car piles and cluttered freightyards, its four- or six- or eight-lane highways sectioning the town, looking at the scabby backs of poor people’s houses; its grim miles of black, decaying factories and failing warehouses, its trucker stops (Texaco, Shell, Sunoco; between them short-order restaurants, bars, and shoddy little rental stores) mighty Binghamton, blasted by the idiocy of Urban Removal, so that the city’s once-grand old downtown section was like a beautiful old lady with teeth knocked out … though at sunset, in all fairness, Binghamton too could be beautiful in its way, with its thousands of lights reflected in its two wide gentle rivers and sweeping grandly up misty, dark hills, here and there the gleaming golden onion domes, or the paired golden domes, of a Polish church, to the south the brick, glass, and aluminum towers of the State University. After Binghamton, the village of Montrose suggested another reality entirely (neither had it anything at all in common with cracked-voice, puffy-faced, sooty Susquehanna, sister city twenty miles east). Montrose was the mythic American past, westernmost settlement of the Connecticut Land Grant—large white houses set like gleaming palaces or grand old-fashioned inns on broad side-hill lawns or shrubbed, well-cared-for hill-crests, the tallest, darkest evergreens in the world rising along their driveways. Inside each house there were innumerable rooms, occasionally a small, discreet apartment, a side-door physician’s office. Sunlight, filtering down through the trees onto the high lawns and green-shuttered houses of Montrose, the rounded, fading red brick of Lake Avenue (Susquehanna’s brick streets were asphalt-patched, shabby and lumpy as the skin of a witch), gave an effect that, in a sentimental fifties movie, would call for a background of angels’ music. Indeed, music something like that might actually be heard there, in summertime at least, since at the far end of Lake Avenue stood the buildings and grounds of the Montrose Bible Conference.

It was true that Montrose was beautiful; but Mickelsson was unmoved. It was a village of old and dying rich people, superannuated doctors, lawyers, bankers, many of them retired to this place from Philadelphia. Nothing much had