Mickelsson's Ghosts (6 page)

“Can you afford it?” she asked. “I know things are cheaper down there—”

“No problem,” he said, and waved it away.

“With all your tax troubles, and all that money you pay your wife …” That was the least of what she'd wormed out of him, yawning behind her hand but leaning forward with interest, the night he'd stayed late after her party. They'd talked till nearly 6 a.m. He frowned now, suddenly startled by the notion that she was hinting at offering him money. At once he dismissed the idea and almost laughed.

She said, “People say there are rattlesnakes in Susquehanna.”

“I doubt it. It's possible, I suppose.”

“It doesn't bother you?” she asked. When she saw that he didn't intend to tell the truth, she let her smile flash again, not at full voltage. “Well, good luck,” she said. She looked down the corridor, then thoughtfully back at his face, only for a moment. Abruptly—untruthfully, he thought—she said, “I'm sorry I can't talk longer, Pete. Gotta run.” She reached back and closed her office door. She tried the knob, making sure the door had locked.

“Sure. I'm sorry if—”

“You'll remember to bring me that book?”

“Book?” he asked.

She grinned like a woman ten years younger. “I knew you wouldn't remember. Something by someone named Hare. We talked about it at Bryants'.”

“Oh, that!” He smiled, pretending to remember.

She shook her head, giving up on him, and, as Mickelsson stood flat-footed, she went past him, patting his arm. He turned heavily, watching her go, her free arm waving back to him without her turning. She walked quickly, in long, smooth strides. He thought again of what it might be like to be her lover—a thought that always depressed him. He was overweight, wrecked, no doubt half crazy, and Jessica's husband had been, everyone said, “just wonderful!” Whenever the man was mentioned Mickelsson would prick up his ears, secretly hoping to hear that the man had not been wonderful, that he was a dullard, and ugly as death. It never happened. He realized now how ridiculous he must have looked, intensely smiling, fake as a peddler of snake-oil, waving away her near-offer, if it was that.
No problem.
He thought of the long, intense conversation they'd had at Bryants', not a word of which he remembered. Old devil gin.

Mickelsson went back into his office and closed the door.

Almost nothing he'd written on the loan application was strictly true. Strange affair! No one who had known him two years ago, not even his wife, could have anticipated this radical change of character—or rather, loss of character. It was astonishing, in fact: conscious, utterly indefensible falsehood from Mickelsson the moralist, howler in the wilderness of his desiccate age, ranter against sloganers and simplifiers, both Communists and capitalists, liars and lob-wits of every persuasion—Professor Peter Mickelsson, indefatigable shamer of the shallow-minded, fulminator against the frivolous and false, who had written scornfully of both fundamentalist straight-world bigotry and the latest campus fad, homosexual uncloseting—et cetera, et cetera. Yet it was so: his application was (not to put too fine a point on it) a pack of lies. His enemies, if they heard, would whinny with glee. He had a demon in him, his friends would have to say; there was no other reasonable explanation.

But what was he to do? (He sat bent forward, his right hand making small gestures two inches under his chin. The banker went on skimming the papers in front of him, his glasses low. He breathed audibly, steadily, like a man who smoked too much or had trouble with his digestion, or like a large animal asleep.) Mickelsson would never have gotten the loan—it was surely a fact—if he'd mentioned his unpaid taxes and penalties, or the payments he'd doubtless have to make to his wife, if ever he could get her to meet him in court (meanwhile he was sending her monthly checks—odd amounts, now more, now less, as much as he could manage—a generous act, as any reasonable observer would admit)—not, in fact, that he fooled himself for a minute.

Perhaps he really was in the possession of some demon, that is, some daemonic idea. Though all his life he'd trumpeted rationality, circumspect behavior in the deepest, broadest sense, self-mastery, it could hardly be denied that, for all his care, his ship was foundering, had foundered. He was reeling yet from the surprise of his wife's demand that he get out. (“Just beat it, Professor. I'm not interested in debating it. You see that door? Just glide on through it.”) His career was on the skids. … Yet on the other hand, on the other hand … “The
Übermensch
is ‘dumb,' his ideas unrestricted by the language of the herd”—F. Nietzsche. “Great truths are felt before they are expressed,” says Teilhard de Chardin. “Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying,” says Camus. Or Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every man's life is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.” (But then again, of course: “Men will find reasons for the harm they intend to do anyway.”) It was not as if Mickelsson acted with his own approval.

He sighed and for a moment put his hand over his face.

He looked at the pink that showed through the banker's hair and remembered his father's annual trips to the bank in Wausau—twenty miles away, the nearest big town—for fertilizer and seed money. He remembered how his father would sit, oddly shrunken, by the loan-officer's desk, his straw hat on his knees, on his face white splotches that would later turn out to be skin cancer. Mickelsson, ten or twelve, would be sitting outside the railing, nothing to play with but the worn-smooth chair-arms and his plastic-rimmed glasses. The loan man in Wausau (by now long dead) had been almost an albino. He'd had a large, white jaw and a long, straight nose with prominent, flared pink nostrils. The pale lashes around his bulging eyes were like silk. Mickelsson, in his childhood, had frequently met the man in nightmares.

Well, so Mickelsson had been less than forthcoming, as politicians say. But the president, loan-officer, and sometime head-teller of the small Susquehanna bank, County National, asked no questions or anyway none that would make trouble; he and his committee apparently took Mickelsson's optimistic estimate of wages and “probable additional income” in gentlemanly stride. No doubt they were accustomed, in this depressed, backwoods area, to loan applications more poetic than factual. (Or was it, conceivably, that the man had read Mickelsson's articles for popular magazines—on the arms race, the ethical implications of test-tube babies, et cetera—and had never entertained the possibility that a man of such good sense might throw prudence to the wind?) No matter, no point worrying, for the moment. Look on the bright side: he'd taken the old Kierkegaardian leap. (Needless to say, he would not seriously appeal to the authority of that righteous, crackpot Dane.)

The banker glanced up, and Mickelsson instantly broke off his furtive gesturing. The banker was silver-haired, silver-moustached, a boyish, ruddy man with dimples in his cheeks. On his glass desktop he had a sign in loopy, girlish script, with a flower,
Thank You for Not Smoking.
He pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk for Mickelsson's signature. “Well, everything looks OK,” he said; and Mickelsson, taking his word for it, drew off his useless bifocals and hastily signed. He carefully dotted the i and crossed the
t.
Then they shook hands, both half rising from their chairs, reaching across the desk, grinning like conspirators. Mickelsson was half tempted to open a checking account, in token of his gratitude, but resisted. Bounced checks would stretch the poetry thin.

“Well, Professor,” the banker said, drawing his hand back across the desk and standing up the rest of the way, “welcome to Seskehenna.”

“Thank you,” Mickelsson said, also standing up, towering above the man, mentally noting the local pronunciation. He toyed with his hat, his smile locked firmly in place.

“Any time we can be of service,” the banker said, hanging his fingers from the top of his vest, “just drop by.”

“I will.” He backed toward the door, grinning and bowing.
“Gratitude is hatred in a mask.” F. Nietzsche. “Gratitude to a fellow mortal is excrement.” Luther.

“Anybody told you the history of that house?” the banker asked, smiling. When Mickelsson looked blank, pausing in his retreat, his eyebrows raised with exaggerated interest, the banker continued, “Lot of legends about that old house. I'm not up on 'em, myself—if there's two things on earth I can never remember it's history and jokes. But you should talk to the neighbors. You'll find it interesting, I'm sure.”

“I'll do that,” Mickelsson said. “Well, thanks for everything. It's been a pleasure to do business with you!” He smiled again, bowing one last time, and, after an instant's hesitation, put his hat on, setting it in place with both hands, then cocking it.

The banker smiled a touch too thoughtfully, as if Mickelsson, leaving, had gotten some small detail wrong, had perhaps started with the incorrect foot, or had failed to put his chair back exactly where he'd found it. One sensed, all the same, that the banker would do everything he could to make things easy. Small-town solidarity. Yes-siree-bob. They needed each other. Outside the unwashed glass front door with its black and silver lettering, around behind the pillar where his new friend the silver-haired banker couldn't see him, Mickelsson hunched his shoulders and lit a cigarette. He glanced once at the bench-loungers sizing him up from across the street—four men, two women; they might have been sitting there, observing events around the town's one traffic light, for years. Mickelsson sent them a stiff little salute. No one seemed to notice. Then he moved hurriedly, perhaps a little furtively, to the real-estate office next door.

The salesman was a young man of thirty or so, named Tim Booker, a grinning country boy with a face shaped like an apple, thinning brown hair, big farmboy muscles. Wherever the sun had touched him he was coppery brown. He dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket, yellow T-shirt (
FISHER STOVES
, it said), blue jeans, scuffed brown leather boots. From the moment he'd met him Mickelsson had been hard put not to like him. He seemed obviously honest, blessed with the heartiness and dependable gentleness Mickelsson had associated since childhood with dairy farmers—people like his father, whose survival, not to mention their peace of mind, depended on a gift for dealing patiently with big stupid animals inclined to push fences down, hide in the woods at calving time, grow moody around strangers, occasionally butt or kick. He'd of course been predisposed to like the young man. Tim had been his first real introduction to the character of the people who'd be his neighbors if he managed to get the Bauer place. From the outset the signs had been promising. Even Tim's accent was a pleasure, or anyway interesting, a sort of key to the place—a set of clues, if Mickelsson could figure them out, to the ungraspable phantom meaning he'd felt up at the house. The secret of wholeness, perhaps, if he was lucky. His cracked-up life's second chance.

Though he'd seen the world—had been a paramedic in Vietnam, he said—Tim had, in purer form than any of the others Mickelsson had talked to, what Mickelsson was coming to recognize as the standard old-time voice of Susquehanna: the flat, sweet yokel sound of rural New York State, richly shaped r's designed to make up for all the lost r's of New England (“car” was
cah-urr,
by some magic compressed to one syllable), and overlaid on that, the Scots' short
ow
sound and bitten-off t's, the accent that distinguished the northern tier of Pennsylvania, as in (Tim slapping the pockets of his jeans) “If I can find my dahrn keys I'll drive you
owt.”

After Mickelsson's experience with the real-estate people of Binghamton, Tim's directness was like ozone. “She'll come down,” he'd said, ritching back happily on his chair. “She needs to get moved owt of it, and you're the best chance she's gaht.” He laughed, lifting his dimpled chin. “I'd say a fair price for both of you'd be fifty thowsand dahllers.”

Mickelsson leaned forward, startled. Her asking price was seventy. “You think so?”

“Well,” Tim said, smiling more widely, throwing his arms out, “it can't hurt to ask.” Grinning head tipped, arms reaching wide, he was a startling, happy-child parody of the crucifixion.

As they'd driven up to the farmstead that first time, Tim had talked about his life and pleasures as if no one could help but find them interesting—as indeed Peter Mickelsson did, listening to Tim with a touch of envy, wondering with momentary morbid excitement whether he too ought to have a motorcycle. (He'd had one long ago, in his farmboy and college days; an Indian.) Tim had a blond Harley-Davidson, he said; a hog, fully equipped; more lights than a 747. He didn't ride it much, mostly just pahlished it. Mickelsson grinned and nodded, sucking at his recalcitrant pipe. Though Tim had never had much to do with boats—he couldn't swim, he said—he'd just bought a hardly used trimaran. All these lakes hereabouts, just laying there, it seemed sort of un-American not to pollute them. He lightly hit the steeringwheel as he laughed, head tossed sideways. He also owned a camper in which he'd taken trips to places as far away as Arizona, camping his way across the country with his wife and child. Whether the child was a boy or girl Mickelsson never learned. Tim spoke of him or her as “the kid.”

“What do you teach up at the cahllege?” Tim asked. He spoke with his head thrown forward and laid over on the side, like a motorcycle rider glancing back.

“Philosophy,” Mickelsson said.

He looked impressed. “Philahsaphy! That's something I never got into too much. Plato's cave and like that?”

“Something like that,” Mickelsson said, and gave a nod.

Tim laughed, swung his head, and hit the steeringwheel again. He was looking down into the valley to the left of them now, driving without a glance at the road but driving well. “I took an English course down at Lehigh Cahllege where we read some philahsaphy. It was hard going, but it was interesting. Aristahtle?”