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

and trimmer the house became, needless to say, the more absurd the legends of its haunting seemed—legends still obscure, since while everyone in Susquehanna claimed to know the place haunted, no one so far had been able to tell him any more than old Pearson about who might be haunting it or why. Some thought it was the Sprague ghosts who troubled the place; some thought it was the ghosts of the people who’d lived there before the Spragues. The U.P.S. man, when he came by with the fruit trees Mickelsson had ordered, claimed he’d heard an entirely different story, one no longer very clear in his head but given to him on the best authority—something about buried treasure, or perhaps a mysterious grave … a curse, possibly. … “Well, no matter,” Mickelsson had said, smiling, turning back to his work, which was, that day, the sanding of the downstairs floors. He must put the whole stupid haunting legend out of his mind.

He could not entirely drive from his consciousness the strangeness of what he was doing, fixing the place up when he had no one but himself to do it for; but he carefully kept himself from thinking too much about that. Even more studiously he kept himself from thinking about his son. Ellen had had a card from him, from Rochester, New York. She had the police out hunting him.

Mickelsson received a letter from his daughter—a long, chatty one that he read over and over until he knew it by heart, and between readings, kept on his pile of manuscripts on the table in his study. Though the letter was in English, only a few hints here and there of her increasing inclination to shift to French, it seemed to Mickelsson that she spoke to him already in a foreign tongue. The letter seemed all surfaces, as if the words were not windows into her thought but mirrors, maybe rapidly moving mirrors made of steel. Strain as he might, he couldn’t hear the sound of her voice in the writing—whether it was the letter’s fault or his own, he couldn’t tell. He would stand by the curtainless window of his study, holding the letter in his two hands, reading through it slowly, word by word, as if he were brain-damaged, and though a thousand thoughts pressed through his mind—dream-thoughts crowding like shadowy deer through a meadow at night—none would stand plain. She assured him that Mark was all right; he knew what he was doing if anyone did in this crazy, fichu world. Then she spoke of a young man named David as if Mickelsson should know him; spoke of her new doctor, a chiropractor and nutritionist, and of the theory of chiropractic: electrical circuits, stimulation of weak organs. He, Mickelsson, should take vitamins, she said, especially vitamin E, for the heart. She included a list of the supplements he needed, with dosages. “Well, Papa, bon soir,” she ended. “Baisers …”

At last, thoughtfully, he would fold the letter and put it back on its place on his study table, then move as if aimlessly, to the kitchen, to put on another pot of coffee. While the percolator snorted and rumbled, he would stand at the back door, his hands in his pockets, looking up at the colorful, thinning leaves, thinking calmly—coldly and indifferently, as if it had nothing to do with himself or his son—how queer it was that the soul in isolation, no matter what the stimulation of the world around, should shrivel up, like a plant perfectly healthy except for its signal leaf, and die. It was no queerer, of course, than the familiar fact that to a person in love the world, however drab, comes alive, full of music and soft voices.

It was by no means just poetry. As the book Nugent had pressed upon him made abundantly clear, with pages and pages of statistics and charts, one’s very life depended on the sometimes sped-up heartbeat one experienced when close to loved-ones (also, to some extent, one’s sped-up heartbeat in the presence of those who offend). If it was true that people occasionally died while making love, it was far more true that people died for lack of it. Reading through Nugent’s book, case after dreary case of cardiac fatality in the single, the unhappily married, and the divorced, Mickelsson had begun to feel like a man encountering his own obituary. At first it had seemed that Donnie Matthews, costly or not, would prove his salvation, but no such luck: the quite violent heartbeat rise during young people’s sexual coupling, and the moderate heartbeat rise during older people’s coupling, were both found to be beneficial. The sexual coupling of an older man and a younger woman, especially one not his marriage partner, was apparently only a little less deadly than cyanide. In the end, of course, the heart’s real, physical demand for love was not just a matter of sex: the heart—whatever the mind’s objections—demanded company, security, trust. By the time Mickelsson was two-thirds of the way through The Broken Heart, he found the chest-pains caused by his anxiety so great that he dared not read further. All he could do was glance hastily at the last few pages to make sure that at the last minute the author didn’t take it all back. Alas, he did not. Mickelsson resolved to eat less, drink less, smoke less. Even so, if Dr. James Lynch was right, Mickelsson was a walking dead man.

He was over that original anxiety now, for himself at least. He was resigned to the likelihood that he would die soon—even morbidly interested. It would solve a good deal. But with every passing day he grew increasingly uneasy about his missing son. It was not, of course, that he thought the boy might be lying hurt somewhere, or dead. His mind refused to entertain such thoughts (though one of Dr. Lynch’s statistics unnerved him: four out of five of those who die between the