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

word moral. What’s the connection between the way Plato uses it in the Symposium or Aristotle uses it in the Ethics or Poetics and how we use it now, when we say ‘She hasn’t got any morals’? Or take ‘virtue.’ ”

Mickelsson raised his head, about to break in, but Nugent pressed forward, raising his voice a little. “They may work differently—Plato’s like a poet, or the person who writes a national anthem, and Aristotle’s more like a novelist, or a symphony composer—or anyhow that’s how it seems to me. …” He looked proud of himself. No harm. For him it was an original insight. “But all the same when they say ‘virtue,’ they seem to mean more or less the same thing. If Kierkegaard uses it at all it’s like somebody handed him the wrong test tube.” Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, Mickelsson thought. Is that shit still “in”? “Or what does a person mean by ‘virtue’ when he’s talking about the greatest good for the greatest number? I guess Aristotle wouldn’t say, any more than Jean-Paul Sartre, that people are necessarily born with virtues—if they were, Aristotle wouldn’t have had to write that instruction book for his son—but in Sartre, from what I can tell, it’s like virtue is something that just vanished out of the universe.” Sartre! Christ save us! Sartre! “That’s the reason Kierkegaard’s so strange: he tells you right out that he doesn’t know what virtue is, maybe it’s God’s whisper in Abraham’s ear, maybe it’s just insanity. I think he”—Nugent nodded toward Blassenheim—“might be right: maybe Aristotle really didn’t know what he was talking about, he was just saying how we do things in Athens or wherever. He even uses that word—‘we,’ like ‘the reason we believe’—as if he were speaking for all grown-ups. But if he did really know what he was talking about, it seems like it must be lost knowledge, like how to fuse brick. It’s like what Kafka says, there’s this machine that really used to work, but it doesn’t anymore—something fell off and nobody noticed, or the parts are worn out and nobody knows how to make new ones. It’s like words, language, ideas that used to make perfectly good sense—” He raised both hands, as if to guard himself from something invisible. “I realize it’s confusing, the way I’m saying it, but—” He abruptly looked down, then with a jerk, his face whitening, sat back in his chair. “That’s all.”

There was an embarrassed silence. For a moment Mickelsson couldn’t think how to break it. His stomach was in a knot. Some of the students were looking at him, waiting; some looked at the floor. He pushed from his mind the observation that too many chairs were empty. At last he nodded and said seriously, “Very good, Mr. Nugent.” He couldn’t seem to remember the boy’s first name. After another moment he nodded again and said, “Very interesting!” He glanced around the room. “Anyone like to comment?”

Miss Mariani raised her hand, looking troubled.

“Yes?”

“Are we supposed to have read the Poetics? According to the assignment sheet you passed out—”

“Mr. Nugent’s been reading ahead,” Mickelsson answered. “Reading and thinking. A practice I commend to you.”

Miss Winburn was again passing a note to Alan Blassenheim. Mickelsson gave her a look. To his surprise, she smiled brightly, her teeth large and perfect, startling against her tan.

Like someone who has just confessed some terrible crime, or avenged a murder, Nugent sat gravely still, with his eyes closed.

Mickelsson looked at the clock. “Well—” he said.

Sudden, loud rustling of papers and books, a raucous scraping of chairs. The students got to their feet—all but Nugent—and shuffled, beginning to talk now, toward the door. Then a strange thing happened. As the students filed out, Alan Blassenheim, passing behind Nugent, paused, looking down at him, then draped his hand for a moment over Nugent’s upper arm. Nugent opened his pale eyes, throwing a look of alarm up to Mickelsson, who merely gazed back at him, hardly knowing how to respond. Blassenheim, unaware of the effect he’d set off, moved on, loose-limbed, graceful as a dancer, toward the door, turning once, smiling at something another student said, saying something in return. His shoulders, in the dark athletic jacket, were immense.

Now Brenda Winburn, moving in a kind of side-step between the rows of desk-chairs, glided behind and past Nugent, her tanned, amazingly smooth face turned toward Mickelsson. For the second time today, as if she and Mickelsson had some secret, she smiled. She turned from him, swinging her smooth hair, and, just behind Blassenheim, disappeared into the noisy current of the hallway. At last, abruptly, as if someone had told him to, Nugent stood up, wiped his forehead, then his eyes, looking at the floor like someone stunned, mechanically gathered his papers and books, and left. Only now did Mickelsson come to himself and rise to leave.

“What was that curious phrase?” he asked himself, then remembered. Angels of Life; Angels of Death.

He’d meant to spend no more than a few minutes in his office, just drop off his mail as he always did, ritually transport it from his box to his desk, glancing at return addresses as he walked, on the slim chance that there might be something he’d take pleasure in opening—a letter from his daughter or son, perhaps—then get out of there quickly, before some student could catch him and pin him to his chair with questions, requests for favors, reasonable demands he couldn’t decently refuse. But almost as soon as he was inside the door, looking down miserably at his ex-wife’s handwriting (a demand that he send money, he knew without opening it), there stood Tillson, poking his silver-bearded head in, smiling his murderous, fake smile like the Keebler Cookie Elf gone insane.

“May I speak to you, Pete?” he asked, and grinned harder, his eyebrows jumping up and down as if he were clowning, which he was not. He wore an expensive but rumpled black suit, white shirt, a tie with