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

pipe, he saw and remembered another quality in his daughter: her innate love of justice. It shone in her like a sunlit fountain. She talked of Mark. “I’m not really psyched for all that, myself,” she said, and clearly she was not; but it was also clear that she looked up to her brother with almost worshipful admiration, as she’d always done, and could talk about nukes almost as smoothly as he could, though with fewer facts and figures. “I guess the thing is,” she said, “somebody has to get the word out, you know? Make the poor silly sheep sit up and notice. I mean the government people who are supposed to watch over the nukes are all nuke people themselves.” She smiled at her coffee, as if apologizing for getting carried away. “Well, Mark’s not crazy or anything,” she said. “He’ll be all right, you’ll see. It’s not even that he’s angry, not really. But he’s like you. …”

He waited, hoping she’d explain; off-hand, he was aware of no such virtue in himself. At last he said, looking down, “I wish I were like Mark.”

“Oh, you are, you are, Dad!” She seemed to imply that she, to her sorrow, was not.

“Well,” he said.

She nodded, then suddenly smiled, closing doors. “Have you got a car or something? Can I drive you to the airport?”

“I’ve got the Jeep back at the courthouse.”

“I’ll get the check,” she said, and reached for it.

“Leslie,” he said, so seriously that she hesitated. He put his hand down on hers. After a moment he said, “You mustn’t hold too high an opinion of me. It’s not a good idea. All human beings have faults … make mistakes. Sometimes even people who …”

She waited, smiling falsely, alerted.

“You may hear things about me,” he said, after another pause. “Pretty bad things, possibly.”

“I won’t believe them,” she said.

“They may be true,” he said gently. “All I mean is, honey …” He met her eyes for an instant, then was forced to look down. “You must believe in goodness, not particular people. Believe in goodness with all your heart and soul, but as for people, even good people—”

After a while she asked, “What is it you’ve done, Dad?”

He glanced at her, then frowned briefly and shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing we need to talk about. We’d better go.” Once again, because he was about to leave her, his eyes filled with tears.

At the courthouse, when she stopped the car and got out with him to walk him to the Jeep, she asked, “You’re all right, then?”

“Don’t worry about me, kid,” he said, and put his arm around her.

“Relly!” she said, and smiled.

When he thought back to it later, their actual parting was a blur to him. He remembered only that afterward, when she’d left him, swinging out into the street and vrooming the engine, his heart had stopped. That night, carefully driving home through snow—a black bear-rug in the Jeep seat beside him, Leslie’s impulsive gift to him—he suddenly remembered her voice as she said, “We understand if you don’t write. I mean, you have things to work out with yourself, OK? I mean relly, don’t even think about it!” He thought of Jessie, carefully not holding him responsible. It was not what he wanted. He wanted vows made and kept—dungeons and instruments of torture for those who failed. When they’d parted, he and Leslie, just before she’d gotten into her car and driven off, she had kissed him and smiled, had brushed hair from the side of her face and said, “Don’t drive if you get sleepy, OK, Dad? Promise?”

He’d wanted tears, sobs, rage at the world’s betrayal.

“I promise.”

She looked at her watch. “Wow! Gotta run!” She’d turned from him, then stopped. “Listen, wait here,” she said, and ran to her car, drew out the bear-rug and ran back to him. She held it up to him. It was heavy, bigger than she was. “Take it,” she said, “it suits you. Present from your dear devoted daughter who forgives you for everything, whatever, in advance.” When he reached out toward it, she changed her mind, spun away, and took it to the Jeep, where she opened the door on the passenger side and threw the rug in. Then she ran back to him, smiling, her eyes filled with tears. Again she brushed his cheek with her lips; then she was gone.

As he drove home, his thought turned to Donnie Matthews. He’d been a fool, insisting that she not get an abortion—and a fool in his class, arguing against abortion on demand. How many women in the world, in fact, would ask for an abortion they didn’t desperately need—because of parents who would be ashamed and hateful, or some husband who’d be impossible if he didn’t get a boy—would call the girl he got Johnnie or Frank, make her wretched? How long had he been like this, blind, insensitive as a stone, casually murderous, even actual murder not beneath him? Perhaps the fact that he could feel shame at what he’d become was a sign that there was hope. Perhaps. Not much hope, he thought. He could not tell whether his tears were for Mark or Leslie or Donnie Matthews or the buried child-angel in himself or, simply, the world.

Snow fell, mile after mile, sweeping into the headlights. He watched his reflection, the glow of his pipe, in the windshield. At last, to the left and right of him, he began to feel the mountains rising; broad, dark, endless waves.

It was by accident that he stopped that night at the university. First he missed his turn-off down from Route 88, so that he had no real choice but to drive through Binghamton, and then, when he entered the city, his mind was elsewhere—as it had been all this way—and he drove automatically to the school like an old horse heading for the barn. He caught himself only when he was about to turn onto Campus Drive and, looking at