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

Leslie, knowing her at once and, in a way, not knowing her at all. The room had been filled to the brim with noise—ooh’s and ah’s, exclamations and cries of laughter—but he had felt as if he and Leslie were standing in a great silence. Maria had dressed her as a fairy princess: silver crown, light blue dress nearly floor-length, large transparent wings that seemed lighter than air. Her hair, around the eye-mask, was brushed and shimmering, lighter than the wings, and her face had been subtly colored, so that she looked a little like a doll, or a Sumerian goddess. He stood motionless, baffled as by a psychic vision, and he was not himself until his daughter came to him, obscurely smiling, and, raising her star-tipped silver wand, lightly—impishly—touched him with it on the nose. He stood grinning, dazed. Then the boys came tumbling out from the second bedroom, Joe Vico behind them, Mickelsson’s colleague in philosophy; pirates, cowboys, a portly banker with a Godzilla mask, then Mark, his son, dressed as some formal, scientific-looking man, bald, with a long white beard and a kind of scarf draped flat over his shoulders. Though there couldn’t have been more than six boys in all, they roared like school letting out. Mickelsson, abruptly coming to himself, had joined in with the laughter and extravagant but not inaccurate praise. Then, before his heart was ready, the children were off trick-or-treating.

Everything he’d seen, smelled, touched that night was alive, unforgettable, transmuted by his vision of Leslie. Maria had made some kind of fish in aspic; other women, including Ellen, had brought other things. There was a black chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries; a large fruit salad that made a picture of a witch. He looked at everything with reawakened vision, the innocent eyes of a child. For all his love of talk—especially his own talk—Mickelsson, that evening, had been unable to follow the conversation and had taken no real part in it. In his mind he saw his daughter approaching strange doors: such beauty as the man in the doorway’s glow had never seen before, beauty that might reasonably turn him at once from a furniture salesman or professor of economics into a kidnapper or rapist. Little comfort that the party was led by Olympia Vico, sixteen, and guarded on all sides by sixteen-, fifteen-, and fourteen-year-olds. Everyone in the room where Mickelsson sat was talking of Maria’s genius with needle and thread. Mickelsson kept stroking the fern beside him as if he thought it were a dog, often nervously glancing at his watch, and at last he’d said casually, “I think I’ll just drive around and see how the kids are doing.” No one seemed to notice the oddity of the remark. No one seemed worried in the least about the children.

He drove up and down street after street and saw no trace of them. His heart began to pound. He seriously examined how a murderer might capture fifteen children all at once and leave no sign outside his door. Then at last he spotted them and at once pulled the car over to the curb and extinguished the lights. His son was bowing grandly, swinging down his top-hat to reveal the pink cloth bald dome, and the man and woman at the door were laughing. His son was obviously the star, the leader. His daughter was nearly at the back of the flock, just another child in dress-up. She was smiling and slapping the hand of the girl beside her as Mickelsson had seen black people do on TV.

When he returned to the party, one of the men from the Art Department was doing a sword-dance, and Maria Vico was flamboyantly playing the piano. Mickelsson thought her beautiful. Then he noticed that all the women in the room were beautiful. Let the demon of eternal recurrence come speak to him now!

He remembered other Halloweens, at Hiram, in California, the sad one in Heidelberg where they couldn’t find masks, no matter where they looked (only the children had taken it in stride). He remembered the Halloweens in graduate school, when they were poor; how they’d watched the glass dish of M&M’s beside the door, praying they wouldn’t give out. …

Suddenly he remembered, only for a moment, a rather different occasion.

He wasn’t certain how old he’d been. Nine, maybe. And he was no longer clear on exactly what had led up to it. He was in fourth grade. His teacher was Miss Minton. He hated her as he’d never hated anyone before or since. For some reason she’d sent him to the coatroom, or rather, led him there by the ear—a particularly grisly punishment because no one after second grade was ever sent to the coatroom. (He understood it now. Proper form would have been to send him to the principal, but Miss Minton was notoriously cruel, maybe crazy; the principal would not have supported her, or anyway not to her satisfaction.) He could remember vividly only one thing from his year with her: “Sssmart, aren’t you! Oh yess, you’re sssmart!” Her lips shook, a hairy, warty lump on the upper one. She was a stupid woman (so Mickelsson had believed), and no doubt, overgrown and stubborn as he was, and a smart-aleck besides, he had challenged her more than he knew. He remembered, though he couldn’t recall details, that he’d mocked her, made fun of her, mimicked her; and he knew that the wilder she became the more stubborn and despairingly reckless he grew. No one quite believed him about her or, so far as he knew, took his side. It was no trifling business. Once when he had had his desktop open and was munging around inside for a book, she, passing down the aisle, had slammed the desktop down on his forearms with all her angry might. When the school nurse came—Miss Minton couldn’t prevent it—the nurse found his left arm was broken. Mickelsson had believed absolutely at