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

seductive look at Blickstein to make him stay. Blickstein waited, obediently smiling, furtively tucking in the front of his shirt. “Peter’s found himself a farm that overlooks the very Susquehanna!” She cast her eyes toward an imaginary mountainscape, her head drawn back grandly, her right hand—fingers aflutter—drawing in the mountains’ details. “Well, I for one approve! Ya’ll know that’s where Coleridge wanted to have his colony? And where Captain John Smith found those Indian folk that were the model for Rousseau’s ‘Noble Savage’? And to think!“—her attention was on Mickelsson again—“you live right there, on that river so romantically, so very poetically yearned after! Why just the idea makes me cry!”

“Wonderful place to live!” Blickstein said, shaking his head as if with envy. “Wonderful! Oh, excuse me.” The shirt and belt were where he wanted them now. He backed away, remembering some errand.

Edie flashed her smile, permitting him to leave, then, rearing back, fastened her jewel-bright eyes on Mrs. Swisson. “Listen, honey, why don’t ya’ll drive down sometime and see it all,” she challenged. “Might truly inspire you. So much beauty! And when the leaves get themselves into autumnal dress—my! It’s rather like Vermont, only broader.” Her head swung toward Mickelsson. “Peter agrees with me, don’t you?”

“I guess that’s a pretty good description,” he said. Though he forced a smile—he did in fact like her: the brazen energy of the woman, the tyrannical insistence that they be merry—he felt like someone listening from beyond the grave, come back for a visit, weighed down, faintly pained by the trivia of all he’s lost. Not that he blamed Edie. (It occurred to him now that he’d missed some party she’d invited him to. He could not have said by what subtle gesture she reminded him of it. She bore no grudge, she was letting him know; but she hadn’t forgotten.) Why was it important, he wondered, that they all have a wonderful time?

Again Edie touched the Swisson woman’s arm, though the woman had shown no sign yet of fleeing. Edie’s eyes enlarged with interest. Her tightly curled, orange-red hair glittered, metallic, each hair exactly the same color as every other. Her head trembled a little with palsy. “I b’lieve one might call it spiritual country—though to my mind it’s downright peculiar, what with the Mormons starting up there and all. Why, Peter, you’re dwelling on holy land! That’s where Joseph Smith had those divine visitations, where those fabulous tablets were given into his very hands.” She scrunched her face up to a self-scorning smile. “I know Peter knows all that stuff.”

“They’ve got a monument I drive past,” Mickelsson said. “Small, pretty shoddy. You’d hardly notice if it weren’t for the historical marker.”

“Mercy no!” Edie agreed, and now it was Britt Swisson’s arm she fondly reached for, widening and brightening her eyes again. “And there’s more. That’s not the whole of it by a long shot! Did ya’ll know there are oodles of Pennsylvania Dutch out there? Entire villages of witches of the most vicious order?”

“Is that true?” Britt Swisson asked, glancing up at Mickelsson and raising his glass.

“When you get to know Edith—” Mickelsson began.

“I swear to God,” she blurted, pretending indignation, reaching out as if to bat at him. “It’s forever in the paper!” She caught Fred Rogers eavesdropping on the conversation and quickly brought him in on it, frantically waving at him. “Wait just a minute. You help me out, Fred. Fred will tell you the God’s truth,” she explained to the Swissons. “Fred’s a historian, he knows everything.” She smiled, mocking both herself and Fred, but, all the same, bursting with pride, smug about being his friend.

“What’s the debate?” Rogers asked, smiling, leaning his silver head into the group, one shoulder forward. He had a face shaped for pathos, even when he smiled; a long sad-clown mask gently bearing up under the sorrow of things.

The Swissons glanced at each other, each timidly hoping the other might answer.

“It’s true, isn’t it,” Edie said, “there are Pennsylvania-Dutch witches in Susquehanna?”

“Witches, Klansmen, rattlesnakes …” Rogers waved his drink, indifferent and mournfully amused. To the Swisson woman he said, “I heard your recital the other night. What a sweet, sweet voice!”

Her face lit up, and her husband smiled, once again revealing the pitted, patched teeth, and slowly raised his glass, looking down. Edie Bryant leaned forward, fascinated. “Oh shoot!” she said, her false teeth clacking, “I missed it!”

Mickelsson backed off, looking critically at his nearly empty drink, then drifted as if aimlessly toward Phil Bryant and Tom Garret, who were discussing, as usual, university politics, or anyway so it appeared from their expressions. Maybe this time it was whales, or the horror of having to choose between Carter and Reagan. That was the main subject everywhere, these days. Even if the survival of the world depended on it, as some people claimed (Mickelsson had his doubts), it was a dreary business. Before he’d moved far enough to have fully committed himself to their conversation, he paused, drained his martini, ate the olives, and glanced around. Jessica Stark, still talking with the Meyersons, caught his fugitive glance in her direction, gave him a little wave, and smiled—one quick, brilliant flash—then returned her attention to the old people. She looked, as she always did at parties, expensively handsome—a burgundy dress cut low but made modest by a lacy white blouse, her deep brown, slightly graying hair swept up and pinned with an ivory comb. Though her complexion was dark—heavy tan over her freckles (Jessica had a mother in Florida, he remembered)—her cheeks were flushed, as if she’d been running. Her eyes, in the shade of her dark lashes, were pale tonight, a lucid, unearthly gray. She sat as if riding the couch sidesaddle, bent forward with interest, bringing her height down to the level of the old people. Her back was supplely curved in a way that made him think of pictures of beauties from the twenties, though the curve was less extreme, her knees