Mickelsson's Ghosts (11 page)

Though it seemed they had nothing more to say, the old man went on standing there, looking at Mickelsson as if he, Mickelsson, were the visitor, and the reason for the visit had not yet come clear. Mickelsson waited, impatient to get back inside to his unpacking, resisting the temptation to ask some question or volunteer information about his life and work, as the old man was apparently hoping he'd do. He felt the awkwardness of the silence growing, and though he was nearly as tall as Pearson and a good deal heavier, he felt increasingly like a young man under suspicion, an intruder. Then, abruptly, not from embarrassment, it seemed to Mickelsson, but simply because he'd decided to do so—Pearson turned his head and looked over at the large, sharply gabled farmhouse. “Seen any sign of them ghosts yet?”

It did not seem intended as country humor, much less a cruel reference to Mickelsson's bouts with illness. Anyway, there was no way the man could know. Pearson's eyes, swinging back to judge Mickelsson's reaction, showed no sign of teasing—no sign of anything, not even much interest.

“There are supposed to be ghosts?” Mickelsson asked after an instant.

“That's what folks say. They never told you that?”

Mickelsson fished his pipe out of his coatpocket and turned to look at the house. Poking tobacco into the bowl, he said, “No, they didn't mention it.”

The old man nodded, eyebrows drawn outward, ends lifted. Though he did not say so, he seemed of the opinion Mickelsson himself was now privately entertaining, that they'd kept the matter secret for fear that if they let out the truth Mickelsson might not buy. Pearson said, his head tilted like a dangerous bird's, “Old brother and sister use to live here, years ago. Odd pair. I remember seeing them a time or two, when I was a boy.” He hung his right hand from the bib-strap of his overalls. “Sprague was their name. The brother and sister looked exactly alike, except the man wore a beard and the woman wore long dark dresses. Killed theirselves, or that's what folks say. Or one killed the other and then was hanged.”

“Anyone know why?” Mickelsson asked. He lit the pipe, for a moment sending out smoke-puffs one after another, like an engine. Pearson looked at the smoke with interest.

At last he said, “I suppose it's easy enough to speculate.” Though he did not go on to speculate, it was somehow clear what his own idea would be: strange goings-on behind those high, harsh windows—incest, most likely; at any rate something that had made them outcasts, no one to turn to in time of trouble. Mickelsson allowed his mind to toy for an instant with the queer idea that he could see someone standing at the upstairs south-east window. Secretly he knew from the beginning that it was only a reflection of the maple in the yard.

“Well, life has strange twists and turns,” he said.

Pearson glanced at him as if he thought it an odd thing to say. Then, with his tongue in the corner of his mouth, still keeping his opinions to himself, he looked over at the dog. “I guess we better get back,” he said. The dog threw a look at the woods, then up at his master. “Any time you need somethin,” Pearson said, “you just phone me, hay? Number's in the book. John Pearson. I got a pickup truck, might help you clear all this owt.” He flapped his right arm in the direction of the junk outside Mickelsson's back door—cardboard boxes and trash from the basement.

“I may take you up on that,” Mickelsson said.

Pearson turned away, the dog turning with him and trotting alongside him through the gray, knee-high weeds, moving like a dark leaf carried along on a stream. Only after they'd vanished into the woods did it occur to Mickelsson that he'd forgotten to ask who it was that was supposed to have seen the ghosts, and when, how often, how long ago. Not that it mattered. It was interesting, faintly—living in a house that was supposed to be haunted. Perhaps in fact some childish, irrational corner of his brain had hopes of seeing them. He imagined himself casually telling his colleagues at the university that he lived in a house where there were supposed to be ghosts, dropping it at Jessica Stark's dinnertable, for instance. But though he was interested in the whole idea of ghosts, in a distant, rather academic way—casually interested in psychic investigation and what prescience might possibly imply about the freedom-determinism issue—interested, that is, as a professional philosopher and occasional reader of paperback books
(My Passport Says Clairvoyant, An Experience of Phantoms, Physics and Psychic Research)
—the idea that he himself might ever meet a ghost was, alas, unthinkable.

The image rose up in his mind of Pearson's blurry, gray-blue eyes, his masklike, lurid face with its tuft of goat-beard. That he chose not to have much to do with people seemed evident. It was perhaps for that reason that one couldn't tell whether or not he was joking, could no more know for sure what he was thinking than one could guess the opinions of a tree. He was a warning, Mickelsson thought, staring blankly, unconsciously poking at the ashy tobacco in his pipe. Karl Jaspers again; the idea that solitude in Nature may mean a temporary replenishment of selfhood, but to remain solitary is to risk impoverishment—to risk vanishing like a cloud dispersed, or sink like old man Pearson into the woods. His gloom deepened. Having fled to this house, he could not imagine finding his way back.

Abruptly he cleared his throat, put his pipe in his pocket, dusted off his hands—he could not remember now what he'd been thinking—and started back toward the house.

Back in the room he'd chosen as his study he returned to the dusty but interesting business of unpacking his books and old papers. He came across the notecards for a piece he'd started some years ago, and then for some reason dropped, on Dada and modern political recklessness. The cards were yellow, the ink, from a ballpoint pen, blurred and fading. He'd written the notes when he was teaching in California. He remembered the sharp thrill of the discovery: that the Dadaists, as early as 1915—the final “apes of Zarathustra,” one of his notes proclaimed—were expressing exactly the same disgust and despair one found in the graffiti on university walls in 1965: “Stop everything!” Nineteen fifteen, when his father was eight years old, his grandfather still brooding by medieval reasoning on problems already a century defunct; 1915, when his father was perhaps already inclining, subtly, non-rationally, toward the unmeditated, neither theistic nor anti-theistic love of life—love of cows, pigs, chickens, horses, ducks, goats—that would shape his character and perhaps, for a time at least, Peter Mickelsson's own: a time when farming was sweet, no sound but the gentle creak of harness-leather, the occasional hiss of steam, and the horizons of consciousness were walnut groves, hedgerows and hills.

The movement known as Dada came into being in Zurich in 1915 and eventually exported its people, “art,” and outbursts to wherever an audience could be attacked. The name Dada is French babytalk for anything to do with horses, including horses' fecal matter, and like the movement, the name had no direct positive significance. Dada was in its outward form a nihilistic protest against everything. According to a Dada manifesto, its “position” was:

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

Another note:

Dadaist Arthur Craven, invited to lecture at the Exhibition of Independent Painters in New York in 1917, appeared drunk and proceeded to belch and swear at his audience. The address was concluded by police when Craven began to strip. (Cf. lecture from inside diving bell.)

He had intended to argue that Dada had won, more terribly than the Dadaists—lovers of suicide though they were—had dreamed they might. Another note:

No social emotion is more vital in America today than a sense of personal helplessness, uselessness, and impotence. Everyone more or less has the sense of existing in the shadow of vast uncontrollable structures, impervious to human desire or need. (To elaborate: computers, I.R.S., Pentagon, etc.)

Under the notecards he found, ironically, a sheaf of his grandfather's sermons: “The Responsibility of the Lilies of the Field,” “A Father's Harsh Love,” et cetera. He got a vivid image of the old man pacing in his study in the manse, his right hand making furtive little gestures that, strange to say, would expand only slightly, if at all, when he rose behind the pulpit on Sunday morning to attack his congregation. (He was a small man, doll-like. It was odd that he should have conceived large sons.)

Under the sermons, and under his own ream of notes on Martin Luther, then notes on Nietzsche, near the bottom of the cardboard box he was unpacking, he found a photograph he couldn't remember having seen before. It was a color snapshot of his wife, Ellen, lying on a sofa, in a black dress, their one-year-old son sitting beside her, smiling at the camera, dressed in red trousers and a striped blue and white shirt. Ellen's hair was straw-yellow, and she was thin, surprisingly pretty. He had not remembered for a long time how pretty she'd been in those days. He felt his throat constrict, as if the bright irretrievable past were a poison in the air. It was not grief he felt. That would come, perhaps, but it was not there yet. The pretty young woman and the equally pretty child might almost have been strangers—touching, interesting: the lines of the woman's face soft and intelligent, the child's smile serene. In a sense, of course, Mickelsson remembered a great deal that instant, remembered that the setting was an apartment they'd had at the time in California, and that when he—or someone—had taken the picture (it was in some respects more a deduction than a memory), an uncle, his father's brother, who had died just a few months later, had been visiting, seemingly hale and hearty. But what he felt, it seemed to him—felt like a physical sensation, a jolt—was that favorite old puzzler of philosophers, the perishability of time. Days, months, years, whatever their vitality, could be swallowed into nothingness. The endless, green Wisconsin summers of his childhood, the joyful, anxious years of graduate school (he remembered the print, the texture of the paper in the Kant he'd pored over in his library carrel), then twenty years of teaching—and more important, more shameful, the vast plain of time he'd had with Ellen—all that charged, sunlit span could shrink up and vanish leaving nothing but a few sharp-edged boulders, frozen images drained of emotion, or of all but the bloodless, child-faced spectre of emotion. … He pressed his thumb and first finger to his forehead, pushing hard, as if seeing if his flesh still had feeling—squatting among shambles, books and papers and the long-forgotten snapshot—straining to get his mind around the fact that such vitality could vanish from the earth. “So this is death,” he thought. Not that it was a useful, philosophical thought. He felt grief edging nearer, still unreal, mere potential, like some hazard ahead of him on a path through woods after dark.

That night—after he'd finished his weight-lifting, push-ups, and exercises, the athlete's regimen he'd followed for years, cowardly plea against mortality—lying heavily on his back under the covers, alone in the darkness of the big, quiet house, staring up at where the ceiling would be if he could see it (still wearing his glasses, as if imagining he might turn on the light again and return to the book on the bedside table), Mickelsson at last felt the sorrow, or rather self-pity, that he'd known would come. Tears welled up, and he reached up under his glasses to wipe them away with two fingers. He remembered his father and mother dressed up for church, young and handsome, with lively eyes. Now his father was dead, his mother an old woman, pale, wrinkled, bent like a foetus, hardly a visible trace of what she'd been in her prime. (Not that she wasn't happy, he reminded himself. Too bad the gift was one she'd been unable to pass on.) He remembered fishing on a lake somewhere with Ellen and the children—California or Nevada; they'd travelled a good deal, in those days—mountains above them like huge chunks of coal, throwing a long shadow. Then he remembered Ellen at some party, holding forth, glittering, everyone watching. Her neckline plunged; no one could fail to notice. Yet her face was what they watched.

The empty old house became more solid and stiff around him, more still. Though he couldn't see the ceiling, he knew exactly where it was, heavy to his imagination as a slab of stone. His eyes were now overflowing, though the tears seemed to him, or to the part of his mind standing back, observing, not warranted. He heard a train passing, far below him, a sound that recalled to him his earliest childhood. (A railroad had cut through his father's woods, a mile from the house. He would lie awake listening, in the middle of the night, when his mother and father were away visiting, or attending a meeting of the Grange. His grandmother would be down in the kitchen, reading her Bible. The house was of stone. Branches of fir trees scraped softly against the walls.) After the train passed—it took a long time—the silence seemed deeper than before. He could be afraid, he thought, if he let himself; could give way to fear as he'd done as a boy, walking down the pitchdark country road under a roof of creaking oak-beams, walking faster and faster, then running. But though the thought teased at his mind it did not reach him, quite. He watched it like a stranger, an alien spirit, curious and grieved but not tempted. One grew up, alas; came to see things plainly, with detachment. One gained things, one lost things; eventually one died. That was Nature's process. He thought of the formerly grand hotels in the Adirondacks, where he sometimes went to write, summers—he was probably the last of his kind to do that, haul his truckload of books to a decaying mountain “camp,” an immense old log lodge held up, in its age, by its great stone fireplaces; where he would settle in, pondering now the printed page, now the vastness of trees, lakes, mountains, sometimes going on long Nature-walks like some nineteenth-century Christian optimist—finding, among other things, once-grand hotels that had sunk back into brute, unconscious life, giving way to sumac, pines, and beeches until hardly a sign remained of where those hotels had stood. One learned to accept. That was the real death, Mickelsson thought, closing his eyes, irritably reaching up again to brush away tears. (It was not the mountain camps or the vanishing of time that brought tears to his eyes now. It was the thought of his daughter standing on the third-floor sun-dappled balcony of his Adirondack hide-out, her long skirt moving a little in the breeze, her torso bent forward as she whistled down to the young German shepherd, who yipped and pranced, unable to find his way up to her.) Well, never mind. For the moment, anyway, he was on his own. He must manage.