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

together, prim—somehow falsely prim, he thought, like a tomboy dressed up in silk stockings and diamonds—and she made no flapper’s pretense that she was less than, as they said on TV, full-figured. Above all what made her no twenties beauty was that rich darkness set off by her strange, gray eyes—a darkness of gold and browns and amber, lustrous as the sherry in the glass dangling forgotten in her dark right hand. When she laughed she tipped her head back, baring her throat, and a dimple appeared on one cheek, flickering like light. The famous David Meyerson sat far back in the couch, bleary-eyed, cackling, saying something in Yiddish—“bobbe-myseh”—flapping a hand at Jessica. A gleaming, gray plastic hearing aid protruded from one large, liver-spotted ear. His wife, beside him, smiled vaguely, timid as a mouse.

“Refill?” Blickstein asked, appearing beside Mickelsson and taking the glass from him before he could answer.

“Thank you,” Mickelsson said, then on second thought followed the dean toward the kitchen. Behind him he heard Tom Garret saying “Why not believe in dragons? If they really were a possible evolutionary move, hydrogen sacks, helm of terror, and all the rest—” He would be grinning with wide, innocent eyes and squirrel cheeks, his chin lifted as if willing to take a punch. “Oh, faddle, Tom!” Bryant said in his English-professor voice, sweet and deep as a bass viol, “give a little credit to human imagination!” If Mickelsson had known they were talking of dragons (Garret often did that, something of an embarrassment in a representative of the Philosophy Department), he’d have gone over and put in an opinion.

Blickstein’s wife, Gretchen, was at the stove, pink-faced and anxious, peeking under a pot-lid, holding in her right hand a glass of wine over ice. Perspiration glistened on her forehead. At the sink a tall, slim, auburn-haired girl in a black dress and white apron stood scrubbing pots and pans. She had the water on, plunging down through steam. She looked too old, somehow too classy to be a student, but he couldn’t think why else she’d be working for the Blicksteins.

“Oh, Peter,” Gretchen Blickstein said, smiling as if he’d caught her at something. “How wonderful to see you again!” She lowered the pot-lid, wiped her hands on her apron, and reached out to take his. “Let me look at you!” she said, and tipped her head, smiling fixedly. Her hand, like the rest of her, was plump and soft.

Blickstein, at the refrigerator, poured from a sparkling glass pitcher into Mickelsson’s martini glass. A thick-furred gray cat stood at his feet, looking up into the light from the open refrigerator door. “You know Agnes Warren?” Blickstein asked, inclining his head in the direction of the girl at the sink. “She’s helping us out tonight. Agnes, this is Peter Mickelsson. Philosophy.”

The girl turned her head, brown eyes flashing a look of what seemed hatred.

“How do you do?” Mickelsson said, taken aback.

“Fine, thank you,” she said softly, almost inaudibly, and returned her fierce attention to her work.

With the side of his foot, in a movement as soft as the cat’s fur, Blickstein pushed the cat away, then closed the refrigerator door.

“Now you boys go back out and mix,” Blickstein’s wife said. “Dinner will be ready any minute.” She smiled and waved her hand, shooing them.

He took the drink from Blickstein and, after one glance back at the auburn-haired girl, moved with him into the livingroom. “The young woman, the one that’s helping you,” Mickelsson said, then hesitated, hardly knowing what he meant to ask, “is she … a student?”

“It’s an interesting story,” Blickstein said. “Well, interesting is not quite the word. You don’t recognize the name? Warren?” He whispered it.

Mickelsson raised his eyebrows.

The dean smiled, or rather winced, giving his head a little shake. “Remind me to fill you in.” He broke away, hurrying over to Tom Garret and Phil Bryant to check their drinks, then pick up the empty hors d’oeuvres tray from the glass-topped coffeetable. Mickelsson paused to sip his martini and survey the room, then for some perverse reason went over to Mabel Garret, the hardest woman in all Binghamton to talk to. She stood at the bookshelves, head bowed, reading titles, her shoulders pulled inward inside her shawl—dull black as a Bible—as if she were cold. Darkness seemed to come out of her, though he knew it was only her habit of hiding where the light was most dim.

“Hello, Mabel,” he said.

“Hello.”

“How are the children?” She had ten of them, all adopted—blacks, “native Americans,” Vietnamese, children with handicaps. Her children were all he had ever gotten her to talk about, and then never more than a sentence or two. He wondered if she ever talked to the children themselves. He supposed she must—not that she would need to, necessarily. She emitted a kind of enfolding warmth, for all her remoteness and secrecy. A weird lady—as if some mist-covered bog had taken human shape.

“Fine,” he thought he heard her say. She glanced up, briefly smiling, giving him a definitely significant look, though God only knew what it signified. She often gave him significant looks, as though there were some secret bond between them, perhaps something from an earlier life. She believed in such things.

“And you’re fine?” he asked.

She studied him for an instant, then returned her attention to the books, not answering. Much of what Mabel Garret did was, by ordinary standards, rude. Suppressing a flicker of irritation, Mickelsson glanced across the room at her husband, still talking in his soft, upper-class South Carolina accent with Phil Bryant. Dean Blickstein stood listening, smiling down at Tom Garret eagerly, tensely, as if ready to grapple with him—all in fun, of course. He was tucking in his shirt again. Mickelsson sipped his drink, then turned his attention to reading the backs of books.

“You should go talk to Jessie,” Mabel Garret said.

When he looked at her, she was reading book titles as before. He wondered if conceivably he had only imagined that she’d spoken.