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

felt his throat constrict, as if the bright irretrievable past were a poison in the air. It was not grief he felt. That would come, perhaps, but it was not there yet. The pretty young woman and the equally pretty child might almost have been strangers—touching, interesting: the lines of the woman’s face soft and intelligent, the child’s smile serene. In a sense, of course, Mickelsson remembered a great deal that instant, remembered that the setting was an apartment they’d had at the time in California, and that when he—or someone—had taken the picture (it was in some respects more a deduction than a memory), an uncle, his father’s brother, who had died just a few months later, had been visiting, seemingly hale and hearty. But what he felt, it seemed to him—felt like a physical sensation, a jolt—was that favorite old puzzler of philosophers, the perishability of time. Days, months, years, whatever their vitality, could be swallowed into nothingness. The endless, green Wisconsin summers of his childhood, the joyful, anxious years of graduate school (he remembered the print, the texture of the paper in the Kant he’d pored over in his library carrel), then twenty years of teaching—and more important, more shameful, the vast plain of time he’d had with Ellen—all that charged, sunlit span could shrink up and vanish leaving nothing but a few sharp-edged boulders, frozen images drained of emotion, or of all but the bloodless, child-faced spectre of emotion. … He pressed his thumb and first finger to his forehead, pushing hard, as if seeing if his flesh still had feeling—squatting among shambles, books and papers and the long-forgotten snapshot—straining to get his mind around the fact that such vitality could vanish from the earth. “So this is death,” he thought. Not that it was a useful, philosophical thought. He felt grief edging nearer, still unreal, mere potential, like some hazard ahead of him on a path through woods after dark.

That night—after he’d finished his weight-lifting, push-ups, and exercises, the athlete’s regimen he’d followed for years, cowardly plea against mortality—lying heavily on his back under the covers, alone in the darkness of the big, quiet house, staring up at where the ceiling would be if he could see it (still wearing his glasses, as if imagining he might turn on the light again and return to the book on the bedside table), Mickelsson at last felt the sorrow, or rather self-pity, that he’d known would come. Tears welled up, and he reached up under his glasses to wipe them away with two fingers. He remembered his father and mother dressed up for church, young and handsome, with lively eyes. Now his father was dead, his mother an old woman, pale, wrinkled, bent like a foetus, hardly a visible trace of what she’d been in her prime. (Not that she wasn’t happy, he reminded himself. Too bad the gift was one she’d been unable to pass on.) He remembered fishing on a lake somewhere with Ellen and the children—California or Nevada; they’d travelled a good deal, in those days—mountains above them like huge chunks of coal, throwing a long shadow. Then he remembered Ellen at some party, holding forth, glittering, everyone watching. Her neckline plunged; no one could fail to notice. Yet her face was what they watched.

The empty old house became more solid and stiff around him, more still. Though he couldn’t see the ceiling, he knew exactly where it was, heavy to his imagination as a slab of stone. His eyes were now overflowing, though the tears seemed to him, or to the part of his mind standing back, observing, not warranted. He heard a train passing, far below him, a sound that recalled to him his earliest childhood. (A railroad had cut through his father’s woods, a mile from the house. He would lie awake listening, in the middle of the night, when his mother and father were away visiting, or attending a meeting of the Grange. His grandmother would be down in the kitchen, reading her Bible. The house was of stone. Branches of fir trees scraped softly against the walls.) After the train passed—it took a long time—the silence seemed deeper than before. He could be afraid, he thought, if he let himself; could give way to fear as he’d done as a boy, walking down the pitchdark country road under a roof of creaking oak-beams, walking faster and faster, then running. But though the thought teased at his mind it did not reach him, quite. He watched it like a stranger, an alien spirit, curious and grieved but not tempted. One grew up, alas; came to see things plainly, with detachment. One gained things, one lost things; eventually one died. That was Nature’s process. He thought of the formerly grand hotels in the Adirondacks, where he sometimes went to write, summers—he was probably the last of his kind to do that, haul his truckload of books to a decaying mountain “camp,” an immense old log lodge held up, in its age, by its great stone fireplaces; where he would settle in, pondering now the printed page, now the vastness of trees, lakes, mountains, sometimes going on long Nature-walks like some nineteenth-century Christian optimist—finding, among other things, once-grand hotels that had sunk back into brute, unconscious life, giving way to sumac, pines, and beeches until hardly a sign remained of where those hotels had stood. One learned to accept. That was the real death, Mickelsson thought, closing his eyes, irritably reaching up again to brush away tears. (It was not the mountain camps or the vanishing of time that brought tears to his eyes now. It was the thought of his daughter standing on the third-floor sun-dappled balcony of his Adirondack hide-out, her long skirt moving a little in the breeze, her torso bent forward as she whistled down to the young German shepherd, who yipped and pranced, unable to find his way up to her.) Well, never mind. For the moment,