by John Gardner
“Thank you for asking me tonight,” she said.
“My pleasure.”
“It’s a wonderful house—and a wonderful party. It’s always nice when there are students.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Beyond the partly closed study door, the grad students were belting out “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” It must be the historian Freddy Rogers that was playing the oddly mournful violin. He was missing; so was his wife. Mickelsson bent his knees, squatting down beside the woman. Her hair, he registered only now, was quite astonishingly beautiful, dark with red glints, like French-polished antique cherry.
“I’m afraid I was difficult the last time we met,” she said.
“My fault, don’t apologize. I wasn’t aware, at the time, of—” They both looked down.
After a moment she said, “Susquehanna seems like such a peaceful place.” She smiled, but tears had welled up in her eyes.
He could only study her, uncertain what she meant.
“I mean,” she said, blinking, then touching first one eye then the other with the knuckle of her right index finger, “he was working on something here, you know. Looking into something.”
Mickelsson nodded. “I’d heard that. Scientific project?”
“Oh no, I don’t think so,” she said, and glanced at Mickelsson timidly. “Something much more …” She searched for the word.
Gently, faintly ashamed of his prying, he asked, “You have no idea what?”
She shook her head, briefly smiled, touched her eyes again. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“Don’t be, for heaven’s sakes. Please!”
As if she’d been carefully watching it all, Gretchen Blickstein drifted over to them, sat down beside the young woman, and took an hors d’oeuvre. “Lovely party, Peter,” she said. She was built like a pigeon and had the same alert, unsentimental eyes.
“Thank you,” he said, and began to straighten up.
The young woman said, “I know what he was afraid of down here. I overheard him talking on the telephone one night—he stopped right away when I came in. I don’t know who he was talking to. He said something about a fat man.”
“You mentioned this to the police?” Mickelsson asked, no longer meeting her eyes.
“I did, and they went to talk with the fat man, I think. It seems nothing came of it. But I know—I know for certain—”
“Agnes, dear,” Gretchen Blickstein said, “don’t! Please don’t do this to yourself.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” She bowed her head, then put her hand over her eyes. Gretchen and Mickelsson exchanged looks; then Mickelsson straightened up.
Turning, Mickelsson said to Jessie, whom he found at his elbow, “Holding up all right, Jess?”
“Don’t I always?” she asked with a small laugh. Her eyes looked tired, and the high cheekbones seemed sharper, more Indian, than usual. She took an hors d’oeuvre. The Tillsons and Mabel Garret hovered just beyond Jessie, timidly eavesdropping, like people not sure they were really invited. Tillson must have followed Mickelsson from the kitchen. Still trying to make friends.
“You do bear up, I must admit,” he said. The grief in his voice startled him.
She gave him a look—angry?—then glanced at Agnes Warren. With the two smallest fingers of her right hand—in the others she held her hors d’oeuvre, and in her left hand her glass—she touched Mickelsson’s arm, drawing him away. “Have you seen any more of the Spragues?” she asked.
He floundered, then remembered. The old people. Still he hesitated, trying to think what made her bring it up. Small talk, because she’d overheard Blickstein’s dire predictions? Was she trying to make him look good in front of his department chairman? (Tillson was slinking off toward the Christmas tree to make some adjustment.)
“I haven’t been back,” Mickelsson said. “I suppose I should.”
“I feel I ought to have done something,” she said. “I hate it that he has to walk to town for groceries.”
“Except when he flies,” Mickelsson said.
“Oh, come off it, Pete.” She looked smaller, like someone who’s been scolded.
He touched her hand, trying to make out what was the matter. “You’re right, I should figure out a way to help him.”
“Perhaps he’ll be too proud to take it,” Ruth Tillson said eagerly, hoping it might be so.
Mickelsson looked at her, surprised to discover that she was stupid. “Perhaps,” he said, and, with a glance of farewell to Jessie, still baffled by what she might be up to, what the devil she was feeling, he moved toward the circle where Blassenheim was holding forth. The boy was taller and broader of shoulder than everyone around him, his hair and features more burnished and alive, as if he were a visitor from some younger, healthier planet.
“Hors d’oeuvres?” Mickelsson asked, edging between Brenda Winburn and Phil Bryant. Both of them reached to the plate. Brenda’s eyes were stormy, though she smiled as Mickelsson leaned near.
“I’ll tell you the problem with that,” Garret was saying, wagging his finger at Blassenheim and grinning, then taking a step toward him, unconsciously invading his space. “It’s an admirable aim—know thyself, and so on—and in theory it’s the only way to figure out values: look inside yourself and figure out what you are, what’s possible and what isn’t, then think out the necessary ideals for human beings.” He was talking excitedly, a gesture for every phrase. Mostly he seemed to be arranging imaginary pots on imaginary shelves. Edie Bryant watched him with a fixed smile and widened eyes, pretending to think all he said was far, far beyond her.
Mickelsson shifted away a little. At times, especially when he held forth at parties, Garret allowed himself a surprisingly amateurish sloppiness, a Nietzchean “Let’s try it!” that could look a little like a parody of Mickelsson’s own method. It was silly that Mickelsson should permit himself annoyance, fond as he was of Garret. Yet he couldn’t easily miss the fact that what he felt, watching Tom flail in, was undoubtedly similar to what a man like Geoffrey Tillson must feel, given his cool certainties, when listening to Mickelsson himself. If there was a difference, it wouldn’t be evident at a glance to Tillson. That was what made Tillson so infuriating—that and the honor he somehow wrung out of the philosophy Establishment. Bookless as a jaybird, he’d nevertheless served on all the important A.P.A. committees. Somewhere on all the journal mastheads you’d find E. G. Tillson’s name. He was on all the right sides, the sides that had won the day. For all one said, he knew the demolishing opposition in advance, opposition arguments one would never get time to isolate and, with careful, steady tweezers, unpack. One could always buttress one’s ego with one’s books, of course. But as Mickelsson often said when drunk—but by God he meant it—the first principle of Establishment philosophy was, “Never, never look carefully at another man’s book!” Tillson, of course, had even less interest in Garret’s ideas than in Mickelsson’s. He moved off, smiling like a ninny, humming off tune, in the direction of the music.
None of the others, it seemed, had reservations about Garret’s wit. The singer, Kate Swisson, listened with her head slanted far over, as if fascinated, gazelle eyes wide, her long narrow fingers draped casually over Blassenheim’s arm, her soft lips puckered as if for a kiss. Hardly aware that his gloom was deepening, Mickelsson bulldozed the plate toward her, urging her to take an hors d’oeuvre. “Oh!” she said, smiling brightly, and, lifting her hand from Blassenheim’s arm, wide eyes unblinking, carefully took the nearest on the plate.
“The trouble is,” Garret said, twisting the cap onto an invisible pot, “trying to look deep inside ourselves is like trying to see the monster through the silt of Loch Ness.”
Phil Bryant, with a floor-grabbing lift of the head, cleft chin thrust forward, tried to toss in a remark—”Wolves, thine old inhabitants!”—but Garret’s rush buried it. “It looked very hopeful in the early days of psychoanalysis,” Garret said, “nice, neat system of ‘super-ego,’ ‘ego,’ ‘id,’ ‘conscious’
and ‘unconscious,’ and so forth and so on. ‘Extrovert,’ ‘introvert.’ But I’ll tell you what modern experiments seem to show.” He pointed to his head, then to his chest, and grinned. “No connection.” He held his hand toward Blassenheim, palm out, preventing anyone from breaking in. “I’ll tell you a typical experiment. We take Brenda here and we wire her up—cardiograph, encephalograph, rapid-eye-movement tapes, and so forth and so on—and we put her in a room; then we take Katie here and put her in another room and give her random electric shocks”—he leaned forward quickly and touched her, as if to relieve her anxiety—“nothing that hurts, just enough that she feels ’em, right?—and we tell Brenda to write down guesses of when the shocks are being administered. You know what we find?” He grinned, his chin pulled back. “What we find is that all of her guesses are wrong, but according to the cardiograph and so forth her body knew exactly when Katie was getting zapped! So you see? No connection! What’s happened is, we’ve evolved this massive super-ape brain—ape brain layered over snake brain layered over who-knows-what, each one foreign to the next, just foundation; no more real connection than there is between the bird’s egg and the nest. I exaggerate, right? OK, OK. Point is, simpler brains may possibly know a lot of things we can’t, things of certain kinds, the kinds of things Brenda here knows with her body. But once you’ve evolved the super-ape brain, well, except on rare occasions, what it does is it locks the body out. Good-bye, Eden!” With two fingers Garret showed the turning of a key in a lock. Lightly, merrily, he threw the key away. “Any way you look at it it comes out the same: you just can’t get to the bottom of things. Matter, for instance.” He leaned forward, grinning, to block interruption. “We’re made of matter, right?” He grinned more widely, delighted by the strangeness of the universe. “Hey, listen, down to a certain point we are, but then we get to what’s known as the sub-atomic particles, which in fact aren’t particles or waves or numbers or anything else we can sensibly think of; they’re just some kind of craziness, maybe Biblical demons.” He laughed. “Neutrinos, for instance, neither matter nor energy. I can’t even understand ’em when I find ’em in a book! Or quarks—we’re told there are three quarks to a proton, and one quark is thirty times as massive as a proton. Help! How am I supposed to know that part of myself? Can’t do it, that’s all! Yet it could be there’s something very powerful down there—Tillich’s ‘ground of being,’ maybe. God Himself! We know there are some pretty wacky things in the world, ‘More than your philosophy dreams of, Horatio,’ ”—he winked at the English professor, Bryant, and sprinted on—“the shroud of Turin, which could be, according to one theory, the kind of picture that’s left by an atomic explosion, like the shadows burned into the concrete in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or there are, apparently, people who can move objects without touching them, even set walls on fire—or out-of-the-body experiences, ‘Oobs,’ as they call ’em, the kind of thing they’ve been documenting like crazy out at Stanford. And psychics, good old psychics, like the woman at Bank of America in San Francisco who writes down the addresses of people who’ve passed bad checks. It’s all there inside us, in some sense it is us—that’s the theory—and maybe the Hindus are right that if we do the right yoga we can see it, grab right hold of it; but from a Western point of view it’s as separate from us as the planet we stand on, we’ve just got to ride it, hopefully enjoy the ride.” He turned, briefly glowing, a phenomenon himself, pleased with his oration, and looked at Mickelsson’s scowling face, then Phil Bryant’s absent-mindedly interested smile.
“I must say,” Bryant said, “you don’t seem to offer much hope for an eager young philosopher!” He laughed. So did Blassenheim, but with a gloomy look in Mickelsson’s direction.
“In my view,” Garret said, “philosophy’s like any other human activity—just a craft.” He raised his open hand as if setting a bird free. “For the kind of people who naturally take to it, it’s a joy to work at, just like pottery, or leathercraft, target-practice—whatever. But the old idea that philosophers are doing something huge and wonderful, well, it just ain’t so, or anyway not anymore. There’s a great pleasure to be gotten out of getting a few ideas right—just as there’s pleasure in getting your garden to grow, or in painting a picture of it. But it’s no big deal. You want to be a big deal—” He turned to Blassenheim, grinning, threw his head back and reached up to put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You want to change the world and be remembered, my friend? You want women to admire you and old school chums to say ‘I knew him when’? Be Hitler! Be Joseph Stalin! You don’t need philosophy to be good—common sense and a little common luck will get you by. But take ordinary nastiness and push it to the limit, turn common misunderstanding into a great misunderstanding, a profound stupidity—that, my friend, they will write books about!”
Blassenheim’s smile had no pleasure in it, though if he knew the grounds on which Garret was teasing him, he didn’t show it. “I guess I understand what you mean, sort of,” he said—he was carefully not showing discomfiture at the hand on his shoulder, either, maybe even felt none, alas for him; a gentle soul to the sub-atomic core—“but isn’t it true that if you wrote a good enough philosophy book you could answer in advance anything a Hitler might say?”
“It’s already been written a million times,” Garret said. “Nobody reads it. Out of print.” He beamed. “Ninety-nine cents at Barnes and Noble.”
“You mean, like”—Blassenheim searched, then suggested—“the Bible, Spinoza, Kant?”
Jessica joined the group. Mickelsson felt her there before he saw her.
“That kind of thing,” Garret said. “Or Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, As the World Turns. People know pretty well what good is; they just don’t care that much. Maybe when they’re young they do—marching against the draft, throwing themselves down on logging roads to save the redwoods. … But it’s hard to keep up your interest, and these days especially, some reason. Churches can no longer do it for you—at one extreme too complex and sophisticated, full of self-doubts, and at the other extreme too dumb. And novels—when was the last time you read a novel that made you feel young again? But a Hitler, or even a Khomeini—that wakes people up, makes ’em virtuous!”
“Inexpensive virtue,” Mickelsson said.
“Listen, these days just a picture of a picture of a virtue, I’ll buy it.”
They all laughed. In Mickelsson’s head, their sounds began to echo, as from a vault.
“Peter,” Tillson said, materializing at Mickelsson’s elbow, leaning into the group in apparent distress, “I think something might be burning.”
“Good Christ, I forgot all about it,” Mickelsson said, and hurried to the kitchen. Orange light leaped like a movie on the far kitchen wall, projected through the glass oven door. It was not the pastitsio, luckily; only the oil that had dripped over onto the oven. In another minute, the whole thing would have been an inferno.
With the help of Brenda, Jessie, and the Blicksteins’ friend—he let no one else see—he cut the pastitsio and set it out on three large plates on the table, then set out the spinach salad, rolls and butter, white asparagus, red wine, and ice-water. Jessie approached the table—she seemed to float—with a lighted taper. When the candles were lighted and Mickelsson could think of nothing more to be done, he dimmed the center-light—he had a brief memory of midnight communion in his childhood—and began herding the crowd into the newly finished diningroom. It had until now been closed off, and it was a startling departure from the rest of the house: white plaster walls, black exposed beams, carefully wedged-in frames and casements, handmade doors and windows of cherry, on the walls above the two old walnut sideboards, dark red tapestries from Mexico, and framed photographs by his son. One would have thought it had cost him a fortune, this room. It had not—though it had cost him more than he could afford. Two hundred dollars to the farmer with the sawmill, for wood. All the rest he’d gotten, at a bargain, from the basement of Owen’s store and the local antique store—neither of w
hich, so far, he’d paid.
As he threw open the doors, revealing the feast, the sparkling white cloth, dazzling water and wine glasses, glinting china and silver, tall, fluttering candles over hills of holly—another of Jessie’s contributions—a great, breathy Ah! went up, almost religious. No one moved for a moment, their faces bright in the candlelight, caught off guard. Jessie stood beside him, her hand on his arm, smiling as if the whole thing were in her honor. Across from them Brenda Winburn stood bent slightly forward at the waist, her hand in Alan Blassenheim’s, her face aglow, eyes reflecting the candleflames, her entire being momentarily transformed—her tan darker, blond hair more brilliant—to an at once Mediterranean and unearthly beauty. Kate Swisson bent her long neck, chin lifted, her red lips eagerly smiling, to sniff the food. “Isn’t it sensational?” she asked, turning to the couple. Janet Cohen the ever-ready, the one who’d read his book before taking his course, hurried down the table, her eye on the red plush velvet chair.
Now they all began to move toward chairs. “Sit anywhere,” he said, kingly, “anywhere you like”—realizing as he spoke that it was a mistake; he should certainly have set out placecards. Jessie should have warned him. Yet they all made the best of it, laughing, choosing chairs, deflecting attention from his error by commenting on the crystal, the Christmas wreath centerpiece, the pastitsio. The graduate students, except for Janet, chose last.
Mabel Garret came in after everyone else, as if for some reason she’d been resisting—for it was not at the back of the crowd that she came but after the crowd, when it was no longer possible to stay in the livingroom—and after standing for a moment in her black dress, looking in at them, her frightened smile fluttering like a candle, her left hand groping unconsciously toward the doorframe, she quite suddenly widened her eyes, as if someone had touched her from behind, and opened her mouth for a cry that did not come. Mickelsson too was aware of something strange, an inexplicable cold wave, as if a door had been blown open in a nearby room. Tom Garret dropped the napkin he’d been in the act of picking up, jumped back, almost knocking his chair over, and tried to get to his wife, but he wasn’t quick enough. There was a sound of rustling cloth, then a hollow thud, perhaps her head hitting, and she lay on the floor unconscious.
