by John Gardner
“That’s the way,” Mickelsson said. “Make yourself at home.”
The cat pretended to sleep on.
Mickelsson washed dishes and straightened up the house. The icy snowfall and wind had let up now, only an occasional gust driving a puff of white down the mountainside. He really could make it into town without much trouble. A mile’s distance. An hour, an hour and a half at most. He thought of making lunch for Donnie. The Acme would be open, though few customers could be expected to come. He could make her something she’d never heard of, something wonderful but not unduly strange—bifteck au poivre, perhaps. He thought about how she would watch him, half admiring, half cross as he worked in her kitchen; but he continued straightening up the house, vacuuming, dusting, intending to set out but not yet doing it.
By noon the snowplow had still not opened up his road, which meant that there would be no mail today—no bills, nothing from the I.R.S., no angry letters from Ellen or her lawyers. He thought of the mail stuffed in the filing cabinet in his office at the school, another great burden of guilt he could dismiss, since there was nothing he could do: whatever lay there must lie on as it was until God and the county saw fit to clear the roads. Soon, it struck him, there would be a grim addition to the usual—the requests to send essays to stupid magazines, and so forth. Soon he would be getting appeals from the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Jessica Stark, and just after each of them an even-handed letter of information from Blickstein, views from the mountaintop, gentle presentations of the larger picture, palatable ruin.
At three in the afternoon, the phone still had no dialtone. If he was wrong not to call his daughter and (not that he could reach him) his son, he could take no blame for his failure today, could not even smart at their failure to call him. Though the sun moved steadily from southeast to southwest, time was suspended; he need not even think of Donnie. God be with her, he thought, since nobody else was convenient. If God was off fishing in the northeast corner of the universe, or in bed with a cold, could Mickelsson be blamed?
“Maybe,” Mickelsson said aloud.
Toward dusk the wind began to blow much harder and the drifted snow rose in clouds that blotted out the sun—swirling, slate-gray, blasting the sides of treetrunks with sharp needles. As night approached, anxiety stirred in him. It would not do to put off for too long his conversation with Donnie. He tried the radio, looking for a weather report. The whole band hissed and crackled with static, and all he could find was Christmas music, disco, and NPR’s All Things Considered. He left the needle on the NPR station, then forgot to listen. Classical music came on without his noticing—an all-Wagner program, stirring, full of rattlings and weighty whumpings.
Now that darkness had fallen, the last of his pleasure in the snowstorm fell away. His agitation about Donnie Matthews’ pregnancy—above all, his vexation at her daring to lay the whole freight of it on him and at his own fatuous acceptance of the burden—began to confuse itself with worry about his son, until now always so restrained and level-headed. Perhaps he was still that, but sorely provoked. What if there should be some slip-up? (He got up, heavy-legged, carrying a book—he couldn’t remember having picked up the book or sitting down with it—and began to move through the house, pondering what he should move on next.) What could one do—actually do, within the limits of sane and humane liberalism—to block or expose the monsters, idiots and enforcers of the nuclear power industry? Could any politician, ever, anywhere, be shaken out of the dim-witted reasonableness and willingness to please that had gotten him his job in the first place—the turtlebrained patience or stupidity that enabled him to sit for months and years hearing sworn delaying and obfuscating testimony from the soft-spoken, nattily dressed nuclear devils—the new breed of extermination-camp scientists, the new breed of spectacle-rims-and-tooth-gold bankers, dutiful Eichmanns of the investment community—while every day new plants went up, and new patents for solar, wind, and wave fell before the threats, trickery, and cash of the hell people? He could feel his face reddening with anger as he thought about it. Partly Wagner’s fault, probably, his heavy brasses still poleaxing the night. Mickelsson’s hands clenched, squeezing the book, and his breathing grew labored. R. M. Hare had been wrong about the Nazis. The fol-de-rol of the Aryan aesthetic ideal—Wagner’s—had been a ruse in support of a much more ancient and familiar human goal: unlimited pig-greed. Hitler was alive and well at Seabrook, and the rules had not changed. Survival of the fattest. What made one furious, of course, was not that these people were unfit to live. It was that only by becoming spiritually and morally one of them could one beat them. So it was that, by ever-quickening evolution, the species went from bad to worse. Good luck, my son! His anxiety scuttled back into musings more abstract and safe, not unrelated: thoughts of the tragically accidental human brain, so huge and self-absorbed that it was cut off from every vitality around it, even its loves, even the flesh and bone machine in which, complaining and scheming, it mushed from here to there and, dully, back.
Poor Mark! He looked up as if startled from the book he had been staring at, not reading. He was standing exactly in the center of one of the empty bedrooms, reading (or not reading) on his feet, like old Lawler. Outside the windows it was now deep night, the storm still woefully howling. On the radio a huge-voiced soprano was ranting. Thesis-antithesis: he remembered one of his son’s gestures, how he would slide his hand lightly back and forth on the tabletop as he sat leaning forward, explaining in his soft, ever-reasonable voice the economics of death by radiation—for instance how eventually every stone of a nuclear power plant must become radioactive, too “hot” for human beings to handle, how the whole thing must be buried by machines that must then follow the plant into its grave, and how not one penny of the company’s operating costs was set aside for that inevitable eventuality, though the expense would run to the millions. As he set forth, calmly, lucidly, his vision of the future—a world cheated and defiled, poisoned forever by present man’s stupidity and greed—his fingertips moved smoothly back and forth, again and again, like easy-going skaters on a long, narrow pond in the country. Mickelsson’s grandfather, similarly calm, had had, by comparison, only trivial images of Satan’s majesty.
Mickelsson put down the book and went back downstairs. When he turned on the Christmas tree lights his funereal mood darkened more, but he let them burn on, as he let the big, warlike music of Wagner go on playing. It was an outrage that such a swine should write beautifully—not that Mickelsson claimed Kunst Wissenschaft. He’d tried to put out of mind Wagner’s crimes against humanity, that year he and Ellen had spent in Heidelberg. The Germans had long since forgiven Wagner, he saw; but then, more than a few of them, it seemed to Mickelsson, had forgiven Hitler. In the laundromat he and Ellen had to use there were large, carefully painted swastikas. “The kids, the kids!” the woman who ran the place had told them in English, indulgently batting the air. In his impeccable German, Mickelsson had said, “The kids paint very professionally.” In Austria, not far from the Eagle’s Nest, he’d been invited to the home of a baron who had a painting of the Führer over his fireplace, two lighted candles on the mantel. Not that he hadn’t met good people too, people who hated what Germany had done, even one woman who’d converted to Judaism so that when the soldiers came, herding Jews down the street, she would not be free to pretend it was not her business. Nonetheless, he distrusted every shopkeeper and bus-driver, the whole clean, dangerously law-abiding tribe. “Das ist verboten!” they would cry out as one man if some poor fool lit a cigarette where he shouldn’t. They would rise again, fountain up, shining with terrible brightness, to the first Martin Luther or Wagner or Hitler who cried out to them, a tribe as wickedly high-minded as ever. Bäumler’s Nietzsche—Hitler’s Nietzsche—was still, to a surprising extent, the Nietzsche Germans knew: the altered, Jew-hating, war-monger Nietzsche whose Also sprach Zarathustra Nazi soldiers toted in their backpacks. Even more easily than they’d stolen and perverted Christ (in Nietzsche’s view),
they’d stolen and perverted the Antichrist. Mickelsson hadn’t left a day too soon. His heart, when he came to the messy, disorderly streets of New York, had lifted like a yellow March kite.
In the kitchen he poured milk into a cereal bowl, then carried it into the livingroom to set down near the cat. As always, the cat ignored him, feigning indifference, though in the morning the bowl would be empty. “Hypocrite,” Mickelsson said, but not with malice. It was a common fault. He thought of reaching out with two fingers to pet the cat’s head, then thought better of it. For all the evidence of his warrior nature—the nicked ears, deformed belly and shortened tail—the animal seemed comfortable, serene; yet he could spring in a split second, Mickelsson knew—could explode in unholy outrage, hissing and slashing.
He stoked the fire one last time: red flames and embers, whiteness behind them, the air astir with heat waves as if reality were dissolving before his eyes—he thought he saw Donnie Matthews’ pouting white face in the flames—and then, as he was uncomfortably turning away, he noticed near the woodstove, on the brick and stone foundation, a pair of fur-lined leather gloves. They were small, a woman’s, and looked familiar. When he raised them to his nose and caught the scent, his chest went light and he realized that they belonged to Jessie. Odd that she should have left them and not known it, cold as it had been when she went out to the car last night. Freudian mistake, perhaps. He felt the softness of the fingers, the leather warm in his hands, then smelled them again. Something eased into his mind, something he’d been looking for before, he had a feeling. He had seen, maybe thirty-five years ago, some horror picture about voodoo; a white glove on a table, moving by itself as an old, old man spoke incantations. In the night outside, a woman in a white dress, owner of the glove, came sleepwalking down a long, straight road, under an arch of trees. When the glove reached the edge of the table, the woman was at the door. At the time, Mickelsson—twelve or thirteen—hadn’t doubted that such summonings were possible. If the world was all a show, the flesh make-up and rags behind which vast energies played, why not?
He shuddered, then absently, dismissing the memory, folded the gloves and laid them on the flowerstand by the door, where he’d see them and remember to take them along with him to school when the roads were plowed. He switched off the radio without noticing he was doing it; then he wound the clocks, pausing for a long time after the last one, listening to the wind howl—banging on the livingroom door like a dozen angry fists—and looked down at the key in his hand, trying to remember what it opened. It reminded him a little of the key to some old-fashioned wind-up toy, something Leslie or Mark had played with, or something he himself had played with as a child in his grandfather’s study. He’d played there for hours, though his grandfather had been cranky as a goat, family stories suggested. “Grampa,” he had asked once—meaning nothing large by it (or so his mother believed), hoping to hear only of some particular event, as when one day he had dusted the furniture in the livingroom without being asked—“why does God love us?” “That,” his grandfather had said, looking furtive, cornered, “is a mystery.”
Mickelsson glanced at the Christmas tree. The cat, when Mickelsson looked over toward the stove, was gone.
“You all right?” someone asked.
“You know I’m not,” another voice answered acidly, as if with familiar anger.
“Needn’t snap,” the first voice said, the old man’s. He did not sound apprised of how deeply that feminine anger burned, how long its festering poison had been coaxed and tended.
When Mickelsson turned, slowly, as if to stir no breeze, they were standing there, perfectly still, the old woman’s face bloodless gray, her eyes full of lightning. She wore a flowerprint housedress with a faded pink robe over it, her dark, graying hair brushed straight down, to the backs of her knees. Mickelsson reached out toward the wall to steady himself—exactly as Mabel Garret had reached out, he remembered. The old woman’s carefully sealed-in fury was infecting him, it seemed. His stomach knotted tight, and a strangling feeling came into his throat and chest. The old man was in stockingfeet and workworn trousers, only a washed-out gray undershirt above, white bristly hair poking out like a hundred tentacles around the neck. Mickelsson knew him, then recognized him. It was the man in brown, from the hospital, but much older. His hair was parted in the middle and lifted at the sides, as if brushed. His beard was uneven. In his left hand he held a large silver pocket watch, which he’d apparently just wound and was now trying to read through his low-on-the-nose, thick-lensed glasses. His mouth was as lipless as an old razor cut. You could make out the white of his chin, like bread-dough, through the hair. At last he gave up on the watch and looked at Mickelsson. He seemed only a little surprised that he was there. For a moment it seemed that he would speak, but then the ghost worked his wrinkled, nearly toothless mouth—four or five long teeth in front, then nothing—as if trying to rid the inside of some taste. He turned his head, fumbled the watch into his pocket without looking at it, and moved toward the stairs. The old woman followed, clenching and unclenching her right fist, which had something in it, her eyes bright glints in the cavernous sockets, tiny glittering specks like wild-animal eyes lit up in the darkness of their lair. Mickelsson stood still as they moved past him, the two never glancing in his direction, watching the floor. In her spotted, trembling left hand the old woman clutched a fistful of the robe. With her right hand she dabbed at her mouth with what he saw now was a wadded-up hankie. When they were gone (he could hear them going slowly up the stairs) he remembered the clock-key in his hand, opened the glass door of the clock, and dropped the key inside.
“Well?” he imagined Dr. Rifkin saying.
“I don’t know,” Mickelsson said. “I’m not the only one, you know.”
“Come on now,” Rifkin said, and made a face as if he’d bitten into a lemon.
Mickelsson hovered, consciously refusing to come down firmly on either side. He thought of calling Jessie, then groaned, thinking of the face he’d seen in the flames. He must get money for Donnie. Had his mind’s chaos progressed to such a point that he’d be willing to take a loan from Jessie? Acid and darkness rose in him and he thought nothing, slowly chewing a Di-Gel, then another.
Half an hour later, as he was drifting toward sleep, he heard the snowplow roar by. Along with the engine noise there was a soft swishing sound, almost the sound of a heavy old boat cutting water. It faded away down the road toward silence.
“Got to think,” he whispered, knowing he intended to do nothing of the kind.
He had seen the ghosts. Was he afraid? He wasn’t sure.
The sudden stillness of the house startled him, in fact for an instant terrified him, until he made out that it was only that the wind had fallen off, and the waterfall in the glen below was frozen.
That night he dreamed that he saw the old man up on the roof of the house, fixing the chimney. Something was wrong. The old woman came out onto the lawn below, walking stiffly, something behind her back. He woke up sweating.
As he was feeding the cat, two mornings later, the phone rang.
“Pete? Finney here. Thought I’d just touch base, see if you-me, still blood-brothers.”
“Hello, Finney.”
“Not bad, Pete. Nothin to complain about, anyway nothin terminal, except that it’s God damn Monday. Listen, two items. First is, it looks like the squeeze play’s working. She’s makin the right noises, any day now she’ll be singin like a camel. Keep the pressure on, OK? No talkee, no cashee!”
“Actually—” Mickelsson began. He felt a queasiness in his stomach and knew Finney had swung around in his chair.
“Her lawyers have agreed to a meeting in court,” Finney said, and grimly laughed. “They don’t like it, natch, but thanks to a little pressure from the court itself, which is thanks in turn to a little clever manipulation by yours truly (no applause, please! Thank you!)—I’ll spare you the details (thanks, Shirley; Jesus; all right, tell the fucker I’ll get back to him right away
). … Let me tell you, Pete, the whole God damn world’s comin apart at the seams, you aware of that? Begin’s gone crazy and Sadat’s still tryin to learn to imitate his fart; piss-ant politicians out there shaking the ash can—‘You don’t go long with me I’ll blow up the world.’ Not that I care. Be glad it’s not me up there. I’d put my fingers in my ears and push the button with my cock. Actually, don’t be glad it’s not me. I been thinking of running for office, maybe. State legislature. No crap! Man needs to broaden his avenues of income, get more screws on more people, these troubled times. All that filthy corruption, it makes me sick that I’m not in on it. But OK, OK, we’re still down here in the pigshit dealing with the piss quotient, right? You there, Pete?”
“I’m here.”
“I was afraid you’d gone to sleep. Listen, try to groan a little when I talk to you, OK?” Finney laughed. “I keep getting the feeling there’s nobody out there, I mean nobody in the whole fucking city of Providence, whole universe even. Isn’t that weird? Finney at his lawyerdesk oinkin away, putting his feet up, puttin ’em down again, looking at the ‘out’ box, looking at the ‘in’ box, sweating and scheming, squinting his little eyes, and nobody out there—I mean nobody, nowhere, nothin. Little stirrings of dust.”
“Finney, you should see my psychiatrist, Rifkin. He lives right near you. He’s a good man.”
“You tellin me I should see a psychiatrist! Believe me, no room in the schedule, I gotta keep runnin, cover my ass. OK. Thanks, Shirley. OK, where was I? Oh. Got it. OK, so all we’re waiting for now is a court date, which is up to the court, you know; nothing I can do about it. So stay loose and stay in touch. That all clear, Pete?”
