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

get in from Susquehanna, and an hour to get home again, and at least an hour for those meetings where nothing ever happens.” Though Tillson was showing alarm, he pressed on coolly, “You know I’ve set aside Thursdays and Fridays for my own research and writing. You set up those meetings knowing I can’t come to them—not even wanting me to come to them, I suspect, since my opinions would surely be opposed to your own—” He checked Tillson’s eyes and took pleasure in the look of amazement there. “And then you come in and use my ‘valuable time,’ as you call it, complaining about my failure to attend.”

Tillson’s smile became crazier than ever. “What?” he said, straightening a little. His eyebrows stopped jittering, frozen in circumflex.

“I’m not interested in offending you,” Mickelsson said. He felt his indifference increasing by leaps and bounds. “All I’m saying is”—he pointed at the calendar on the office wall—“you’ve scheduled the meetings for a time when I can’t come. That’s your mistake, not mine. And now, if that’s all the business we have between us …”

Tillson raised his finger again, then changed his mind, leaned his head to one side, and slowly lowered his hand. “Mickelsson,” he said, as if threatening, “you’re a strange man. Stranger than you think!” He suddenly stopped smiling. “All right,” he said, and abruptly stood up, fists clenched. His eyes glittered brighter than ever. “I appreciate your frankness.”

Mickelsson rose.

At the door, Tillson said, “We shouldn’t be”—he paused, hunting for the word, looking wildly dishonest as he did so—“enemies. I’ll admit, now that we’ve talked about it, I may have been a little in the wrong.”

Mickelsson nodded curtly, feeling redness in his face.

“We all have to try to get along, you know,” Tillson said. “None of us is perfect.”

“No doubt that’s true.”

Tillson thought about it, decided against comment—one hand went up furtively to the corner of one eye—and after a moment’s further hesitation, he nodded sharply and left. Mickelsson’s arms and legs began to shake. He bent over the vast mess of mail.

Only the back of his mind was aware that someone stood just outside his door looking in. “What was all that about?” Jessica Stark’s voice asked.

“Oh, hello,” he said. Guilt crawled over him. How fitting that she of all people should catch him at such a moment—Mickelsson the Viking, the Prussian Junker, reducing poor humpbacked Geoffrey Tillson to tears. Well, better Jessica than Edie Bryant.

Jessica was looking down the corridor after Tillson. Now she turned to look in at Mickelsson again. “Mind if I come in?”

“Do,” he said, a little querulous. He picked up the first piece of paper that came to hand and, scowling hard, pretended to read. Proudly, the Department of Music Presents … He put it down again.

She closed the door behind her and stood half leaning against it, her left hand on the doorknob. “Is something wrong?” she asked. She wore, today, a beige turtleneck, dark brown skirt, skin-tight soft leather boots.

“No,” he said, “nothing wrong,” and reached for his pipe. It occurred to him that if he were dying of lung or throat cancer none of this would matter. His father had died of cancer. Pancreas. People had come in great crowds to the hospital; the windows and tables, even the floor at one end of the room, were jammed with flowerpots.

Mickelsson said, “I had a fight with Tillson, as I imagine you saw.” He smiled sourly, then put a match to the tobacco in his pipe. “Poor bastard, he doesn’t deserve me.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. He registered an interesting complexity in her tone. By an act of will she supported him as if instinctively, but clearly she had private reservations. He wondered if perhaps it was a trick she’d learned with her late husband.

“Well, anyway …” he began, then shifted: “So how have you been?”

She said, “You’re trembling.”

“You think. I’m trembling, you should see Tillson!” He laughed, faking pleasure, and lowered the pipe.

Her eyes narrowed and one side of her mouth went up, not quite in a smile. “You like fighting with him, don’t you.” She came a step nearer.

“It’s always good to keep in shape,” he said.

“I think it’s a little like a fifth-grader picking on a third-grader.”

He stood stupidly gazing at her forehead. Her dark hair glowed; her scent brought a wave of unhappiness. He could think of no witty response.

She turned from him, irritably glancing at the papers on his desk. Something caught her attention. “Look,” she said, “the Swissons are giving a concert.” Then, after a pause: “You want to go?”

He looked down at the paper. Proudly, the Department of Music Presents … “I could,” he said, suddenly thinking of Donnie Matthews. “Do you?”

“Sure,” she said with a shrug, “why not?” She seemed to be working something out in her mind.

“I’ll pick you up, then,” he said, lifting his chin and sweeping one arm out like a Congressman performing.

At once he got an image of Jessica seated in her mink coat in his old, beat-up Jeep, but before he could take back his offer, she said, looking in horror at his desk-clock, checking it against her wristwatch, “Jesusl Gotta run!”

After she was gone, Mickelsson stared for a time at the mail on his desk, his mind a blank. When he came to again, he thought: She’s right; I should apologize to Tillson. He took out his checkbook and hastily wrote a check to his ex-wife, addressed and stamped the envelope, and sealed the check inside. Dear God, let it clear, he thought. The letter from Ellen he dropped in the wastebasket unopened.

Then he saw the letter from Finney. He reached for it at once.

The photograph was startling. Young people of college age, some perhaps only highschool students, lay everywhere in attitudes of passive resistance; a few sat foetus-like, hands over their heads. In the foreground two angry-looking members of a SWAT squad were lifting a young woman by the hands and feet. They were helmeted, white billy