Mickelsson's Ghosts (13 page)

“That's up to you, a course,” Lepatofsky said. “I can tell you right now you won't get a Jeep like this at a used-car lot, with a snowplow and everything. Not for seven hundred. If I was you I'd just keep that Chevy for a spare. The plow alone's worth seven hundred.”

He gave that same argument again and again, mostly in the very same words, as they drove around. They rode up a logging trail, up and down steep banks, once up and over a partly fallen stone wall. “It's built high,” Lepatofsky said. “You won't get hung up, that's
one
thing.” To Mickelsson's slight annoyance later, they didn't think to try it on the road. Lily reached up, from time to time, to reposition the troll-doll.

“OK,” Mickelsson said at last, his heart anxious but his expression grim, “I'll take it.”

Slowly, dreamily, not making a sound, the child clapped her hands.

The first time Mickelsson drove the Jeep, after it was his own, two tires blew out and he discovered that, though it was terrific at negotiating swamps and stone walls, it had a maximum road-speed of sixty miles an hour downhill. According to his careful, neat figures, it got nine miles to the gallon. (Fear leaped up in him. He would be ruined!) Nevertheless, he retired the Chevy to his own empty barn—not as empty as Lepatofsky's; there were dried-out, twenty-year-old bales of hay, coils of rope, lengths of pipe and scattered, rusted farm-machinery parts—and, partly for style's sake, partly to get the old vehicle in condition for the difficult haul when snowtime came, Mickelsson cleaned up the Jeep and made it his regular means of transportation back and forth from school. “Hey, wow!” students would say when he pulled into his parking slot, and sometimes they'd come over to look at it. Witlessly, shyly, the red-haired troll-doll, still swinging on its short, rusty chain, would grin. He must remember to take that doll back to Lepatofsky's daughter, he reminded himself now and again. But he kept forgetting.

The university was thirty-five miles—more than an hour's drive—from the house on the mountain. He liked that, the distance between his two worlds. He could clear out his head, driving to school in the beat-up Jeep. (He'd left the Peugeot in Providence with his wife.) It was late September, no sign yet that the leaves would soon be turning, but when he set out, mornings, the house and mountain would be surrounded by fog, so that he had to poke slowly, carefully down into the valley, across the iron bridge, and up to the highway heading north out of the mountains into New York State. Sitting high above ordinary drivers, fists closed tight on the steeringwheel, shoulders thrown back and chin thrown forward, like a king fallen on hard times, he could think at leisure about his classes and appointments, remind himself of letters he had to write (he was badly behind, the desk at his office deeply buried), and make mental lists of books he must pick up at the library. He'd thought from time to time of installing an FM radio in the Jeep, but so far he hadn't done so, and it seemed to him increasingly unlikely that he would. Wind in his hair, morning sunlight gleaming in the swirls of fog and on patches of glass-smooth river in the valley below and to the left of him—here and there, rising through the fog toward visibility, a barn with high silos, a village of white houses, a neon motel sign precariously craning to the level of the Interstate—he felt himself changing as if magically from whatever he was on the mountain to Mickelsson the teacher, the colleague, the committeeman.

Not that he was much of a colleague, he would admit. After a year at this place, he knew hardly any of the people he taught with—five or six in philosophy, one or two in English, Jessica in sociology, perhaps a half-dozen others, more faces than names; but he was closer to these people, sad to say, than to any of the people he'd taught with in California or, before that, Ohio, not to mention those he'd met during his Fulbright year in Germany, none of whose names he remembered. (He saw his former friends from California occasionally at philosophy conferences, where they struck him as odd dressers and prematurely aged, full of crackpot West Coast opinions—thought as an effective physical impulse or “charge,” and so on. His friends from Ohio, Hiram College, he never saw anywhere.) As for other people he and his ex-wife had known, Mickelsson had put them, through no fault of theirs, almost wholly out of mind. The thought of Providence, with its beautiful old trees and dark-brick buildings, its classy, troubled students, its long, drunken parties and gloomy flirtations, above all its oceanscape, at one time so dear to Mickelsson and his children—the thought of Providence filled him with such a feeling of waste and hopelessness that he preferred to consider the whole place swallowed by the Atlantic.

But if strictly speaking he was a colleague to nobody, he knew better, instinctively, than to admit that fact too openly to himself. Sometimes after telephone conversations with his wife, whether the tone she took was haughty or cajoling, he sensed how precarious his hold was on the world. He must find something to live for—his work, his students—otherwise sure as day he would wake up some morning strapped down hand and foot, full of guilt and dim, dreamlike memories of himself in garish dress, solemnly bent to impassioned, tearful conversation with a mouse in a trap or the shattered remains of a dog beside the road,
PHILOSOPHER CLAIMS DIRECT ENCOUNTER WITH BEING!
It was a harmless lunacy. He was inclined to believe he was at his best when “not himself.” Nevertheless, any hint that he was slipping could make his fingers tremble. And so—as he'd drunkenly told Jessica the night he'd stayed late—by stubborn acts of will Mickelsson shaved in the morning, read his journals, soberly prepared classes. Let those things slide, as already he'd let his writing slide (a book on the ethics of genetic manipulation, several articles, a paper for the March convention of the A.P.A.—all very current and important, but nothing his heart was in), and he'd be doomed, subtly and irrevocably called into the shadowy world he felt always not far off, as close and dark and ingeniously patterned as the woods on the mountain above him. Closer. As close as the walls of whatever stark, inhospitable room he happened to be standing or sitting in in the old, allegedly spirit-ridden house.

And so, soberly, knowing what he was doing, Mickelsson acted the role of teacher, committeeman, jovial colleague. (His right hand left the steeringwheel, gesturing, trying to make things plain to the windshield.) It was in fact a character he had always enjoyed and could enjoy even now, with certain reservations, so long as he knew he could take it off, like his suitcoat and the annoyingly narrow tag, “Ethicist,” when he left for home. Mickelsson had always been a friendly man, or so he believed, but he was not in a mood, at this stage of his life, for socializing. He was indeed in a period of redefinition, reassessment, or perhaps, to be accurate, mourning.

Mickelsson frowned and slowed down a little. A hitch-hiker, illegal on the Interstate, held out a thumb to him; a tramp-faced man in a long brown coat. Mickelsson slowed more, then changed his mind and sped up again. As the Jeep passed him, the hitch-hiker slowly, as if ominously, shook his head.

Period of mourning, Mickelsson thought, and nodded, lightly tapping the steeringwheel with the heel of his fist.

Jessica had been seated on the couch across the coffeetable from him, leaning toward him, lightly frowning, her eyes darker than usual in the dimness of the room. She'd turned out all the lights but the entryway light, the light in the kitchen (throwing its bluish fluorescent shaft over the far wall and the tall, evil-looking African drum), and the light on the fern-stand just behind his chair. The couch she sat on floated, sectioning off one quarter of the room. Beyond her he could make out wide French doors, a vase of silk flowers, a painting. It had not seemed to him that night that she'd turned off lights to make their talk more romantic, though now sometimes he wondered if he'd misjudged—missed a chance. Feeble as it was, the light behind him made her gold chain and eyes—slanted a little, like an ancient Persian's—gleam like whitecaps at twilight or coins found in childhood. He wondered if a woman as large as she was—perfectly proportioned, but goddess-size, nearly Mickelsson's size—had trouble buying clothes. He drank slowly and carefully, pacing himself, taking no risks.

“Why do you say you're a failure?” she'd asked. “What are you—fifty—forty-five?”

“I know it sounds like self-pity,” he said, “or too much gin.”

She dismissed it with a wave.

“Of course I've got very high standards,” he said. He opened his hands, then once more clasped them lightly between his knees, his feet square on the floor like a farmer's. Her long, slim legs, the grace of her left hand draped over the couch-arm, made him feel heavy, wide as a truck; yet he did not feel ugly tonight. In fact, no doubt because she watched him with interest, he felt handsome. The sportcoat he wore had just come from the cleaner's; the pale blue shirt was the first he'd bought since he'd left Ellen. He reached for his pipe, found it still half full of tobacco, and felt for his matches.

“Usually when people of our age say they're failures,” she said, “they're telling the truth. In your case, I don't believe it.”

“ ‘Our age,' ” he mocked.

She laughed. “I'll say this: you've got your act down pat.”

“I don't mean it as an act,” he said, then grinned. “Probably you're right.”

“What were you like?” she asked. “I mean, when you were younger.”

“You wouldn't have cared for me,” he said. Now he had his pipe lit. She waited.

He shook his head as if in admiration of the young man he'd been. “I was a name to conjure with, in my grad-school days,” he said. “I'd played a little football as an undergrad, which people still remembered—I may have mentioned that.” When he glanced at her, she nodded, and he saw that he'd mentioned it too often. “Well, now that I threw myself into it, I found I was pretty good at book-work too,” he said. “Did a dissertation—published later by Temple University—on Luther, Nietzsche, and the modern predicament. Got some pretty fair reviews.” He scowled, mock-petulant. “Nowhere important, to tell the truth.
Philosophy Today. ‘A
bold and original contribution to the Nietzsche reassessment'—that sort of thing. It really was, in fact.” He made his face modest but tucked his thumbs under his armpits. “I don't mean to brag.”

Jessica rolled her eyes.

He said, smiling again, still mock-modest, “I showed in great detail how Nietzsche—and Nietzsche's deep-down hatred of Martin Luther—lies behind every contemporary philosophical leaf and flower. Nietzsche
is
contemporary thought, in a way. He's the trunk whose branches are Freud, Sartre, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger—whatever still thrives on that maddening sap.” He cocked one eye as if surprised and displeased by the pun, then waved it away with the backs of three fingers.

“So the book was good, in fact.”

“Not bad,” he admitted.

But the book had not been linguistic, he explained with a sigh, which had been sufficient reason, in those days, for dismissing an argument unread. His present chairman believed even now that analytic philosophy was philosophy enough, much to Mickelsson's disgust. He pursed his lips, rubbed his palms together, and decided to tell her of his first run-in with Tillson, at some party soon after Mickelsson had arrived here. Tillson had said—eyes bugging, mad smile twitching, his index finger six inches from Mickelsson's chin—”Do you realize that, of the jobs announced in this year's
Proceedings,
only twenty per cent are
not
in analytic? And do you realize how many of that twenty per cent are not in
ethics?
I do not say,
believe
me, that ethics is an insignificant concern! Heavens no!” He leaned closer. “But statistically speaking it is not exactly the central fascination of our time!” He'd jerked forward, laughing, spitting out cracker crumbs and tiny bits of cheese, his head returning to its rightful place, level with the hump on his back. “He must've been drunk,” Mickelsson had later said to friends. “No, no,” they'd said, “that's just his way. You'll get used to old Tillson!” “I hope not,” Mickelsson had answered sternly—his deportment (he would have to admit, looking back) self-righteous, bordering on ridiculous. Well, so be it.

“Tillson's probably a better man than you think,” Jessica said, and looked down at her sherry glass. “I can't judge how good or bad he is as a philosopher. But his students like him.”

“He's got me there,” Mickelsson said, and gave her his crazed grin.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked. “Does it please you that some of your students dislike you?” He could say this for her: she did not come at you crooked, like a wolf, but straight, like a striking Alsatian.

He leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers together over his paunch. “Students are a necessary evil,” he said.

“Really? Is that what you think?” Though her expression was noncommittal, her eyes nailed him where he sat.

“No,” he said. He brazened it out with a smile, but if there was someone invisibly keeping score, he thought glumly, Mickelsson had lost another point.

It had been something that the work of a young philosopher should be noticed at all, and his book had in fact received praise from philosophers of the kind whose respect he most valued. (His wife had put it succinctly, not meaning to hurt: “Old men.”) And it would not be quite right to say that from there his work had gone downhill. He'd written two textbooks which had remained in print for several years and a short, quite brilliant book (in Mickelsson's opinion) which looked at medical ethics from a more or less Darwinian point of view. He'd known, of course, that in taking that long-abandoned tack, scorned by Nietzsche and dead in ethical theory at least since 1903—G. E. Moore's demolition of naturalism (Jessica suppressed a yawn)—he had been asking for it. That had always been part of the game, for Mickelsson. He had not guessed how “controversial“—that is, how deeply hated in some quarters—his book would be. (He found himself glaring at Jessica as he said this; she smiled blandly back. Was it possible that she wasn't listening? He leaned closer, glaring harder.) Nor had he guessed the depths to which his critics would be willing to sink. He could show her reviews. (“Please don't!” she said, raising her hands as if to fend him off. So she was listening. To some extent. He hurried on.) He should have expected it, their shrill, mindless wrath. He himself had dislocated Nietzsche's great, dark secret, how in his rage at those who had “stolen Christianity“—those holiness perverters who had reached their obscene peak in Martin Luther—Nietzsche had purposely couched his in fact liberal Christian philosophy in language designed to make burgher Christians squeal. What Nietzsche had done to Christians, Mickelsson had done to the surds of Academia, and he'd reaped the same harvest: scorn and indignation. He could tell himself that his friendlier reviewers were right about him: if he was occasionally careless, at times drawn too far by his love of rhetoric and inclination to shock, he was nonetheless a better philosopher—bolder and more original—than a vast majority of the nit-picking dullards one encountered in the so-called discipline these days. Though his enemies were intent upon injury and insult, he could defend himself with his old football-field combativeness. Yet there was no denying that the attacks had surprised and wounded him.