by John Gardner
Mickelsson’s Ghosts
John Gardner
To Liz
Contents
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
PART THREE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN GARDNER
PART ONE
1
Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances had forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—“the nice part of town,” everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts)—made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. He’d intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious. In any case, no such luck. He was strong; a weight-lifter, once (in his college days) a frequently written about football player, though no one any longer remembered that; but the ringed and cigarette-scarred table had proved too much for him. For days he’d had to walk with his right hand in his pocket, too sore to lift a pencil. At times like that Mickelsson wished his estranged wife—still living in style, back in Providence—dead. The rest of the time what he felt was not anger but a great, sodden depression.
He could see from one end of the apartment to the other—kitchen and diningroom at one end, livingroom at the other, sloping-roofed bedroom and entryway to one side—but he couldn’t see out. Though the apartment had windows at either end, they opened onto branches and lush green leaves of immense old maples, so close that, if he’d wanted, he could have poked through the screen to reach his arm out and pick a few clusters of winged pods. On windy nights the trees brushed the walls and roof above his head. Occasionally as he sat in just his undershorts and sandals, wiping sweat from his forehead, armpits, and back, slapping at flies, moths, Junebugs, or mosquitoes, his eyes would unfocus and drift up slowly from the print before him, and he would brood for a moment on the idea of renting a small, cheap place in the country, maybe getting himself a second-hand air-conditioner. He would sigh, take off his glasses, wipe sweat from his eyelids, and after a while return his attention to his book. Rarely did Mickelsson read anything he did not hate.
It would be pleasant, he thought, not to feel hemmed in by the so-called faculty ghetto: big, boxy houses of brick and wood, drably painted brown, green, yellow, or blue, about a fourth of them partly supported by shabby, tree-crowded apartments like his own—stained ceilings, lumpy cracked linoleum, threadbare rugs, furniture that looked as if, years ago, it had been left out in snow and rain. In the country, if he felt like walking late at night he could be fairly sure of meeting no one he knew, only deer, raccoons, porcupines, maybe owls; and if he felt like working he would not be always listening for an unwelcome too hearty knock. For an unpopular teacher, as he knew he was, Mickelsson got a surprising number of visits from students or young colleagues who just happened to be passing. Presumably it had to do with the fact that he was alone and could generally be counted on to be in—he rarely went to parties, no more than one or two a month—and also with the fact that, for a man of his circumstances, he had a well-stocked liquor cabinet. “We saw your light was on,” they would say, “so we said to ourselves …” smiling brightly, eagerly, as if afraid of spending a night out there alone, cold sober. Despite his irritation, he sympathized. “Come in, make yourselves at home,” he would say, so gloomy of eye it was somewhat surprising that they accepted, though they always did. They would sit chatting earnestly, emptily, for hours—sometimes of the heat, sometimes of politics, sometimes of trash they’d picked up at local auctions—taking refill after refill, helping themselves, drinking and laughing in his kitchen sometimes even after Mickelsson said his good-nights and went to bed.
He resented their coming up and guzzling his liquor, heavy as he was with financial responsibilities—hardly two nickels he could clink in his pocket; college expenses of his son and daughter, the heavy debts and expenses of his wife in Providence—and he resented even more his visitors’ invasion of the narrow space his life’s errors had left him, though it was true, he would admit, that he took some comfort from their proof that, contrary to what he’d always thought, misery was universal. All the same, with a house in the country he’d be spared such nuisances. He had work to do, all the more urgent for the fact that, of late, his creative juices had dried away to dust. And there would be obvious advantages to living some distance from where his hunchbacked, crazy-eyed department chairman was forever calling meetings, and every other night some fool was invited to read a paper on “Rationality1 and Rationality2” or “Whether,” and where Heidegger’s parlamblings on “Nothing” and “Not” and “the Nothing that Nothings” were the last supposedly respectable gasp of classical philosophy; where Ethics (Mickelsson’s specialty, more or less) was quickly and impatiently snorted away, superseded by the positivist fairytale of “value-free objectivity”; where, worst of all (to tell the bitter, banal truth; and what could be worse than that this, of all things, should be “worst of all”?), people whose names he’d forgotten or never known were forever inviting him—pressuring him to come—to cocktail parties, most of them in honor of people about to retire, of whom he’d never heard.
But the place in the country remained, for the moment, an idle dream. He had no time for house-hunting, and no energy. He labored on, struggling to read, think, and write—propping windows open, stirring the heavy, sticky air with a gray Monkey Ward’s electric fan, taking frequent showers and, when depression weighed on him, trying to sleep, sprawled naked, his legs and arms thrown wide, on top of his musty, Bounce-scented sheets. The table-lamp by which he worked, leaning on one fist—or stared at some wretched girlie mag, strangling the goose—was as warm as an oven and threw a dead yellow light aflicker with shadows of insects. (He rarely changed the flypapers—he disliked touching them—and he distrusted the chemistry of pest-strips.) The whole apartment reeked of old tobacco from Mickelsson’s pipe or, sometimes, cigarettes, and often in the morning it had, besides, a country barroom smell of beer or gin. Often, late at night, instead of working, he wrote long letters to his daughter and son, letters he would crumple and discard the next day, because they showed his drunkenness or—his children would think—imbalance.
Mickelsson, once the most orderly of men, a philosopher almost obsessively devoted to precision and neatness (despite his love of Nietzsche), distrustful if not downright disdainful of passion (his pencils always sharpened and formally lined up, from longest to shortest, even in his pocket), a man dispositionally the product of a long line of Lutheran ministers and one incongruous, inarticulately rebellious dairy farmer, Mickelsson’s father … Who would have thought that he, Peter Mickelsson, could come to this? Sweating, drinking, listening for visitors, sleeping off depressions or hangovers, he wasted so much time (more and more, these days) he began to feel almost constant guilt and panic. His stomach was so sour he was forced to eat Di-Gels like candy. “So this is what it’s like to be poor,” he would say to himself, cocking one eyebrow or staring, suddenly lost, at
the broken plastic soap-dish in his rusty shower stall. Moving with the crowd at the Binghamton July-fest, inching past tables of leatherwork, canned goods, dolls, ceramic ware, or moving in and out of booths displaying paintings and photographs, lacework, cabinetry, and tinwork (none of which Mickelsson could afford), he would find himself brought up short by some whiskey-reeking pan-handler in four-day-old whiskers, with bloodshot milky-blue eyes beginning to fall inward. Quickly, after the first, startled instant, Mickelsson would push his way past the man—merciless, shoving him away—thinking, with a tingle of alarm: “So this is what it leads to!”
Sometimes the feeling that his life was hopeless—and his misery to a large extent undeserved (like everyone else’s, he began to fear)—would drive him down to the maple- or oak-lined streets at night, to prowl like a murderer, looking in through strangers’ windows with mixed scorn and envy, avoiding those streets where he was likely to meet someone who knew him, from the university, someone who might pity him for living like a starveling graduate student or first-year instructor after all he’d been once, not long ago, a full professor in a prestigious university, with a house that would put all of these to shame; or someone who might want him to stop and chatter about campus politics or the general decline of student ability and educational standards; or some Gelehrter riding high on the crest of his career, who would be secretly amused to see Peter J. Mickelsson out walking, muttering to himself, late at night, Mickelsson who’d fooled them for a time, all right, but look at him now, furtively gesturing, lecturing the empty air! (Weren’t there rumors that he’d had some kind of breakdown, back at Brown?) No doubt they weren’t all of them as villainous as he imagined; one or two in his department seemed decent enough, and there was one professor of sociology, Jessica Stark, who was pleasant to talk to—an original mind and apparently good-hearted, and beautiful, to tell the truth—but on the whole, the less he had to do with these people the better. He knew what they said of him behind his back, knew the narrow margin that had gotten him his appointment and the fuss certain members of the department had made about whether or not he should arrive with tenure—he, who had outpublished the pack of them, one of the only two members of the department who could be said to have a national reputation.
Lately, of course, he’d been publishing practically nothing—as they’d no doubt noticed—and if that damned apartment was not the whole reason, it was certainly part of it: airless, oppressive, so hot that even when it was balmy outside, as it sometimes was on summer nights in Binghamton, sweat washed down his flesh in rivers. One prayed for rainy nights, but then when the rain came gloom came with it, such sharp memories of playing Chinese checkers or chess with his children—rain washing down the leaded windows, ocean-wind groaning through the heavy old trees, his daughter’s soft blond hair lighted like hair in a sixteenth-century painting—he could no more work than fly. Often on rainy nights he would fix himself four or five large martinis in a row and go to bed (so much for saintly self-transcendence), where he would lie wide awake, staring at the ceiling or at the branches outside his window.
All this progressed.
Walking down the night or early-morning streets, most of them named for famous poets or composers, usually mispronounced (his own street was, locally, “Beeth-ohven”; but then, the State University of New York, his employer, was called “Sunny”), he would feel a great rage of frustration and general hatred of his complacent, well-off neighbors—though also he felt such terrible loneliness that sometimes he would find himself seeking out and moving slowly past the darkened apartments of unmarried female graduate students or middle-aged, unattached female colleagues. (Indeed, once or twice he even knocked at a door; once or twice he went in.) Sometimes he felt so misused and cheated, passing some large, dark, wide-gabled house, seeing a dim light burning in the bathroom, or the ghostly aura of a television set—two or three expensive bicycles on the porch—it was all he could do to keep from howling like a wolf, or snatching things up out of the gutter and throwing them through windows. What a joy it would be to hear those spotless, innocently staring panes go crash! He kept himself moving, allowed himself no pause, no thoughtful lingering—not that, really, the temptation was more than a brief, waking dream. He walked cocked forward, as if pitched against high wind, a largish, stout man in dark, tight trousers and a darker shirt, around his thick neck (if the night air was cool) an ascot tie, two fingers clamped tightly on the brim of his hat, holding it down firmly—not really to protect it from gusts, one might have thought, but as if, freed of the pressure of his hat, his head might explode—his steps quick and heavy, stamping out small lives, his short, stubby pipe or sometimes cigarette sending up smoke-clouds, flags of his own mortality, in quick, white puffs. His hair was unkempt and red, as his father’s had been and as his son’s was yet, his own now ominously graying in tight iron curls at the temples and neck. He walked faster and faster, his shadow stretching and shrinking under streetlamps, until he thought he might have a heart attack; and then at last the fit would pass.
He found his well-being, if one could call it that, increasingly dependent on these late-night walks. Not that even his walks were exactly carefree. Sometimes large dogs would come out at him; or the hulking silhouettes of teen-aged boys, gathered on some porch, would suddenly fall silent as he passed. He’d taken to carrying a heavy walking-stick he’d picked up at one of Binghamton’s innumerable antique stores. It was intended only for self-defense—or less than self-defense, mere symbolic protection—though it had also aesthetic and social functions useful to Mickelsson just now. It was an article from the age of well-made objects, the age when possessions were adornments of a life presumed-until-proven-otherwise to be noble and worthwhile. That presumption had, for Mickelsson, lost force, though it was, when one came right down to it, the whole basis of his ethical theory, every word he’d written through all those ruinous years. Lately he’d come to be increasingly cynical, increasingly impressed by accident: chance virtue, chance wickedness, at best the magpie gatherings of emotivism. He’d paid too little attention to deep-down meanness—the right wing shaking its Jesus-loving, eager-to-kill, fat fists over “the horror of abortion”—all those hundreds of thousands of poor dead babies—the left wing sweating with pious indignation over all those poor dead mothers. “Atheists! Antichrists!” one side screamed. “Motherfuckers! Assholes! Baptist shit-heads!” the other screamed back. A noble debate. He did not doubt that human beings had the equipment to make relatively unbestial choices, but he doubted more and more that they would ever get around to it or that, in the final analysis, it mattered. If Life had become for him less the grand thing he’d once supposed it, the so-called Life of the Mind—of which he’d once written so glowingly—now fared even worse with him, seemed to him, in fact, a joke. Mind. God help us! The country was gearing up to make its stupendous intellectual choice between Reagan and Carter, or possibly Ted Kennedy. The newspapers had long since moved their tear-jerker stories of starving Cambodians back to page 22, making room for new horrors. Mainly Iran and the hostages. (Every gas station had its picture of Uncle Sam looking stern, however futilely, and its emptily ferocious legend “Let my people go!”) Carter became thinner of voice every day, Reagan—in his dyed hair and make-up—more jokey. In such a world Mickelsson’s walking-stick, with its smooth, dark, glowing wood, silver-tipped, and its heavy silver handle in the shape of the head of a lioness, was comforting, a steadying force; or so he would tell himself, holding the cane to the light, admiring it one more time, up in his kitchen, or swinging it jauntily, firmly grasping the head as he walked dark streets, his broad hat cocked.
One night, passing down a narrow, shabby, poorly lit street where he’d seldom walked before—dull houses, each with its enclosed or open or long-ago-screened-in, full-width porch, its light over the door (turned off by this hour), its one large or two small windows, its rusty porch-glider, fridge, potted plants—Mickelsson suddenly froze in his tracks, the hair on the back of his neck
rising. Right in front of him on the sidewalk, barring his path, stood a large, pitchdark chunk of shadow—a dog, he realized after an instant: a black Doberman, or perhaps a Great Dane. It simply stood there, head level with Mickelsson’s waist, not growling but firmly blocking passage. Seconds fell away. Mickelsson could see no one to call to, no movement anywhere, though from somewhere not far off came the tinny noise of a TV.
Now the dog did begin to growl: a low, uncertain rumble. Carefully, making no sudden movements, Mickelsson shifted the cane to both hands and raised it like a bat. And then, an instant before he knew he would do it, quick as a snake, he brought down the cane with all his might, aiming for the animal’s head. To his surprise—then horror—the dog did not leap back with the predictable lightning quickness of its kind, nor did it, as Mickelsson had expected, lunge forward to bite him. It simply went down the way cows had gone down at slaughtering time, when his father hit them between the horns with the eight-pound maul. Perhaps the dog was old, half blind, half deaf. In any case, down it went, almost without a sound—no snarl, just the crack of the canehead striking home, then the huff of escaping breath as the body struck the sidewalk. Mickelsson stared, the TV’s rootless harmonics suddenly loud in his ears. It was too dark to see well, but he sensed, if he did not see, the death tremor. He turned left and right, looking around in alarm at the nearby porches and windows. Miraculously, no one seemed to have witnessed the thing. He moved the tip of the cane toward the animal, thinking of poking it to make sure it was dead, but then resisted the impulse. He raised the cane, thinking of hurling it away into the shrubbery, but again changed his mind, imagining the dog leaping up at him as soon as he was weaponless. He looked around one last time—still no one—then tucked the cane under his arm and fled.
Back in his apartment, with the door bolted, Mickelsson cleaned the head of the cane under the kitchen faucet with great care, though he could see no sign of hair or blood, then poured himself a drink and sat down with it at the kitchen table, swallowed half of the drink at once, and after that sat with his glasses off, his forehead on his fists, eyes narrowed, almost shut, trying to think what he should do. He would call the police if he were the ethicist he’d all his life claimed to be and thought himself; but that thought had hardly entered his mind before he pushed it away forever. Back in Providence, where he’d been well-to-do and respected, he’d have gone to the police at once; but in Providence he wouldn’t have killed the dog.
