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

clubs hanging from their belts. At the center of it all, the only protester standing upright, was Mickelsson’s son. Though the picture was black and white, Mickelsson saw the boy’s hair as flame red, flying out wildly in all directions under the top-hat. In one hand stretched out toward the photographer’s camera, the boy held the remains of his Rolleiflex. His expression was solemn, the eyes just dark shadows, the mouth a straight line of resignation, as if the violence done to his camera had nothing to do with the police or, indeed, with anything terrestrial. The standing figure seemed ritually still and formal, clothed in the apparel of a by-gone age. It was as if he were not really there, a trick, of light.

When he phoned the university, Mickelsson could learn nothing. Mark hadn’t visited the dorm in a week; no one could say whether or not he’d been going to his classes. Somehow Mickelsson had known Mark would have vanished. He phoned Ellen. She wept. “You must be very proud,” she said. “Ellen,” he said, “try to be reasonable!” “For God’s sake,” she said, “why don’t you die or something?” After that she cried for a long time and couldn’t answer when he spoke. Then The Comedian came on.

“Is that you, Professor?”

“Hello, Willard.”

He remembered the first time he’d seen the boy, out in the hallway of some grubby theater during the first intermission, lighting the cigarette in Ellen’s cigarette holder, Ellen puffing furiously, sucking her cheeks in, bending her head to him—he was a good nine inches shorter than she was and as skinny as she was fat. Both of them were dressed in black and white and both of them wore dyed black hair. Neither of them had noticed Mickelsson standing by the ticket-table, drinking coffee from a paper cup, getting ready to say hello. He hadn’t been expected, had intended to surprise and please her. It was an evening of plays—Three Radical Plays for Women—that Ellen had produced, and apparently Ellen and her friend agreed with Mickelsson that the evening was going badly. When Ellen, looking up past her smoke, had seen Mickelsson, she’d frozen, eyes caught in an evil wince. Slowly—ratlike, as it seemed to Mickelsson—the boy had turned to see what was wrong. That instant told everything. There was some fish he’d read about in his childhood: the male impregnated the female then docilely let her eat him. The boy touched Ellen’s waist as he looked at Mickelsson. She apparently hadn’t yet told him that she hated to be touched. All women, according to Ellen, hated to be touched, and all men were touchers. Women, she said, were lunar.

Willard said now, his voice crackling with emotion-held-in-check, “I should think you’d know by now that El doesn’t appreciate these phone-calls.”

“Good dog,” Mickelsson said. He was thinking of German shepherd watchdogs, but the joke was admittedly obscure.

There was a pause; then the boy said, “If you have things to say to El, I’d be grateful if you’d relay them through me.”

“I’ll bet you would,” Mickelsson said.

“In future, if you don’t mind—”

“I do mind, actually.”

“I’m not too interested, actually, in what you do and do not mind.”

One could imagine him thrusting his beard forward, eyes hooded. He would be standing bent-backed with the intensity of his emotion, maybe rising in slow, precarious rhythm onto the balls of his feet, then down again onto his heels. He wore pointy black, shoes, black suspenders.

“Occasionally it’s necessary for a man and his ex-wife to discuss the welfare of their children,” Mickelsson said. “You wouldn’t understand that, given your proclivity to fucking barren mares. Don’t be needlessly offended! I’m impressed by your Jesuitical devotion to your, so to speak, sex object—”

The phone went dead.

Mickelsson hung up, then looked at the newspaper photo of his son again, then folded it carefully and put it away in his billfold.

His graduate class in medical ethics had eight students. It met in a windowless room on the library’s fourth floor, around a dark, polished table. If he was lucky he did not have to sit next to or across from Gail Edelman, a bright young woman with whom, unfortunately, he had once spent the night. Generally, though the class was supposed to be a seminar, Mickelsson lectured, or rather, read from old notes. He would arrange the ashtray, pipe tobacco, pipe knife, matches, and notecards in front of him, hardly looking up as late-comers entered, and would skim through his notes, organizing his thoughts—he was never completely unprepared, in fact, but no one could doubt that for the most part he was winging it, not so easy with graduate students as with freshmen but possible as long as he alone held the floor—and when everyone was settled and the talk had died down, he would look up and say, formally—the formal tone indispensable to his ruse—”Good afternoon.” “Good afternoon,” they would respond, not quite words, more like a collective Mmmm’n. In just two weeks now their reports would begin, and he’d be off the hook, temporarily at least. If he had fifteen students, the maximum for the course, he’d be off the hook for good; but God sends only what He sends. In the brief moment when he looked up at them he got their placement, Gail Edelman in the far corner, where she often sat, these days, C. J. Wolters, his forty-year-old ex-highschool teacher across from him, fat Pinky Stearns profusely sweating to his immediate left, Janet Something to his right (it was hard to learn names when one never took attendance, never called on a student, never gave spot quizzes). … Of his eight students, only two, Stearns and Wolters, were male. In the old days, when Mickelsson had first begun teaching, nearly all graduate students in philosophy were men.

He lit his pipe, cool and reserved as an officer of the Gestapo, carefully squared his deck of notecards, and began.

“We observed last week that before we can talk seriously about ethics as they