Mickelsson's Ghosts

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 “Rationality
₁
and Rationality
₂
” 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.