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

in the house, the doctor had walked with him again from room to room, most of them as bare as the insides of empty wooden boxes—she’d used only a little of the house—the doctor taking long, light strides, pointing out once more what wonderful views he had from every window, not another house in sight. He imagined her sweeping through the hospital corridors, coming like sunlight into her patients’ rooms, chattering with them of their children while she clamped on the blood-pressure cuff or took a pulse, exclaiming “My! Oh my!” as she’d done with the big-breasted woman in the lawyer’s office. No wonder she was liked. Such pleasure in life! It was a great mystery, these powerful, inhumanly vital spirits. In her presence he felt weak.

As they travelled through the rooms she mentioned trivial faults and problems that had slipped her mind when he’d come to look at the house the first time, with Tim. The bedrooms upstairs had no heat except what came up through the registers, it would be best to leave the doors open to pick up what came up the stairs; the livingroom floor was buckled from the moisture of the spring under the house; in the kitchen and one bedroom at the back of the house small fires—defective space-heaters, from the looks—had left smoke damage, a sort of mouldy rottenness. That reminded her that the wiring in the room he would use as his study (as he’d decided at once; it looked out on roses and a birdbath) was a farmer’s cobble, in the long run probably not safe. She shook her head sadly and laughed. Mickelsson nodded, troubled but at the same time amused by her belated concern.

When the keys were in his pocket and he was ready to leave, she had stood for a moment at the hexigrammed door that opened from the kitchen onto the livingroom, a long room grubbily panelled, carpeted in drab mustard yellow, like the lobby of a seedy motel (he would change that with wallpaper and a hardwood floor), and she’d gazed, expressionless, at some point beyond the far wall of the room, presumably trying to think what more she ought to warn him of. She was faintly smiling.

“Well, thanks very much,” he’d said. “Good luck to you in Florida.”

She hadn’t seemed to hear, so he’d cleared his throat and said again, soberly, “Well, thank you very much.”

She’d started, then turned to him, smiling more brightly, reaching out like a man to shake his hand. “Thank you,” she said. “Good luck with the house!”

“Thank you,” he’d said yet again, and then, awkwardly, turning toward the door, “Well, be seeing you.”

“Why, maybe so,” the doctor said, and laughed.

He felt himself blushing, his right hand fumbling with the keys in his pocket. Accidentally, he’d given his words peculiar emphasis.

That was all. Mickelsson had walked out to the car, backed carefully down the steep driveway onto the high-crowned hardtop road, and nosed down the mountain, presumably never to see her again. It was odd that he should feel so embarrassed about that trifling slip, that stupidly emphatic “be seeing you.” It was not so much that the phrase was childish, more appropriate to one of his freshmen or sophomores than to á philosophy professor on the dark side of fifty. It had more to do with the suggestion it carried of indifference to her life, his own as well. Indifference to the obvious truth of things. Ordinarily not even that ought to have bothered him. One saw every day, no doubt, people one would never again lay eyes on, and one said “be seeing you” and thought nothing about it. Yet the emotion had risen in him strongly, causing him to blush. It was as if he’d let slip some truth that were better left unmentioned, as if he were warning her that he would see her, under circumstances not quite so pleasant. Absurd, of course. But there was no doubt of it, it seemed to him; that was what he’d seemed to say. Not surprising. Mickelsson wasn’t himself these days, pursued everywhere he went by the image of his wife, back in Providence with the young man she’d learned to prefer to him. “A cheerful person, watm-hearted,” she’d said—as if she too were that and her new love therefore suited her. No doubt the most primitive part of his brain still insisted it wouldn’t last. Privately, Mickelsson called the young man The Comedian. He had a quick, nervous laugh. Willard was his name. He was forever mugging, making jokes, throwing out curious, clowning gestures. In all fairness, no doubt, it was just the young man’s self-consciousness in Mickelsson’s presence. Confronted by his enemy, he put on any shape he could think of except of course his own.

“You’re a fine one to be talking about weird behavior,” Mickelsson’s wife had said.

“He hasn’t got the brains to go crazy,” Mickelsson had snapped. Then he’d turned on his heel, fleeing the conversation. In these battles of wit, he never won. His wife stood too firmly planted, firing too skillfully, too calmly. As for his son, twenty, and his daughter, seventeen, he hadn’t spoken to either of them in weeks. It was a difficult period, “a period of redefinition,” as Jessica Stark had said, her tone apologetic; she was as annoyed by rhetoric as he was.

“Where was I?” he asked himself aloud; then he remembered. No, the doctor had shown no sign that she was even aware of the stories that her house had ghosts.

He’d first learned that the house was haunted (or anyway that some people thought it to be haunted) from his neighbor from higher on the mountain, beyond the woods. “Seen any sign of them ghosts yet?” the old man asked.

Mickelsson threw a sharp look at him, interested and wary. The man was tall and old—just how old, Mickelsson couldn’t guess. He was a farmer, had been one, on that same high rocky piece of land, all his life. His