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

he’d met someone who made all his doubts seem shameful. One typical winter San Francisco night, half fog, half rain—foghorn moans coming in off the Bay, deep electronic animal sighs—a knock had come at the door, timid but persistent, around three in the morning, and Mickelsson, in pajamas and bathrobe, had at last irritably gone down to see who it was, the old cat Horace at his heels. Ellen was out, not yet back from one of her parties. He’d opened the door a few inches, with the chain attached, and, looking out, he’d seen a middle-aged bum with two old bulging suitcases. He was bald, spectacled, with heavy-lidded Oriental eyes, dressed in a ragged shapeless brown three-piece suit twenty years out of fashion. Where the watchfob chain should be he had a ratty piece of twine. The man was nearly bald, around his ears tufts of steelwool hair. He wore thick glasses; the whites of his eyes were yellow.

“Hello,” the man said. “Is this the Mickelsson residence? I’m sorry to disturb you so late at night—”

“It is,” Mickelsson had said. The street beyond the man was absolutely still, no lights anywhere but the streetlamps.

“My name is Geoffrey Stewart,” the man said, and smiled apologetically. “Your wife, that is, Mrs. Mickelsson, suggested … I’m sorry to trouble you—”

Reluctantly, Mickelsson unlatched the chain. “Come in,” he said. For all his irritation, he’d opened the door wide, as if sensing—correctly, he would later understand—that the man would not enter if the invitation seemed half-hearted.

“I’m sorry to trouble you so late at night,” the man said again.

“No trouble. Come on in.”

The man obeyed and, not yet setting his suitcases down, looked up the long stairway, then into the livingroom. “Beautiful house.”

Then the name clicked. Mickelsson said, “Are you Geoffrey Stewart the poet—from Chicago?”

The man grinned, his head bent forward, as if the question might be harder than it sounded. “That’s me.”

“Come in!” Mickelsson spoke somewhat more warmly now, gesturing in the direction of the livingroom. “Can I get you something to eat? Something to drink?”

“Noooo thanks,” Stewart said. He looked down at the cat. “You must be Horace,” he said. His eyebrows slid upward. “Hellooooo, Horace.”

Geoffrey Stewart, street poet, was said to be the author of things like “Hell no, we won’t go,” and “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” It was also said that, to avoid income tax, and thus involvement with “the criminal government,” Stewart earned and owned almost nothing. (His two suitcases, Mickelsson would discover, contained not clothes but pamphlets.) Mickelsson said, “I’m pleased to meet you!”

“Same here,” Stewart said, and smiled. “I read your book.” Carefully, fussily, he aligned his suitcases with the entryway wall, where they wouldn’t interfere with people’s passage, then clasped his hands together in front of him and followed Mickelsson into the livingroom.

Two hours later, when Ellen came home, they were sitting almost knee to knee; they’d been talking about politics, religion, ethics, race, aesthetics. Stewart was serene, gestureless, his manner that of a pastor in his study.

“Geoffrey!” Ellen cried, running somewhat drunkenly to lean down and hug him as, awkwardly, he tried to rise from the couch and greet her. Their heads bumped and both of them laughed. “This is Geoffrey Stewart,” she said, turning with a dramatic sweep of her arm toward Mickelsson.

“I know,” he said.

“Geoffrey!” she cried, and hugged him again, then immediately burst into tears. Mickelsson had gone out to the kitchen to fix her a Scotch. It was morning now, ocean-clear sunlight falling over the overgrown garden behind the house.

They hadn’t slept at all that night or the next day; or rather, only Ellen had slept, and that just for an hour or so. While Mickelsson was fixing pancakes for the children—then five and two—Stewart had played old hymns on Ellen’s piano.

“They taste all crumbly,” the boy said—Mark—looking up mournfully, as if it were really no worse than he’d expected. His hair had at that time been yellow, like Ellen’s.

“They’re supposed to taste crumbly. They’re made of all-natural, stone-ground wheat-flour,” Mickelsson said. “You’re lucky they taste at all.”

Both children pouted, touching the pancakes with their fingers.

“Come on,” he pleaded, bending down to be level with them, pretending to look hungrily at the syrupy mush, “give it a try! Two-three hup!”

Thoughtfully, experimentally, his daughter poked his nose with her syrupy finger, then laughed.

In the livingroom, where the piano was, Ellen was saying, slurring her words, “Geoffrey, doesn’t it bother you that when people like you are living in poverty, people like us have Baldwin pianos?”

Stewart smiled. “The world’s got to have pianos,” he said.

He’d stayed four days, the first stranger in years to make friends with grumpy old Horace, and an instant uncle to Leslie and Mark. Mornings and afternoons he talked at schools and at San Francisco State (Ellen’s arrangements), burning money and flags, speaking of pacifism and “the message of Jesus.” He spoke—sternly, without gestures—of the Jews killed during World War II, the first real test of modern society’s right to survive. Not that it was all brand new. The Germans had been mass-murdering Africans for years, killing every eldest son to keep the tribes in control, so that when Hitler arrived the machinery was pretty much in place. As for L.B.J. … And so on.

Mickelsson had gone to listen to him every time he could, the first professed revolutionary he’d met who wasn’t visibly crazy. Then, as suddenly as he’d arrived (they’d thought he was in the livingroom reading the paper), Stewart had vanished. F.B.I. men had come to the house to ask questions. “How long have you known Mr. Stewart, Professor?” “Do you know his present whereabouts?” “Have you ever been in Seattle?” They would not explain what the problem was. For the first time, Mickelsson had fully understood Ellen’s helplessness and anger, her impatience with “so-called Reason.”

Though he still disliked the plays her friends did—plays her writings (and many other people’s) gave what Mickelsson considered a kind of fraudulent legitimacy—plays which looked