Mickelsson's Ghosts (16 page)

“Hello,” the man said. “Is this the Mickelsson residence? I'm sorry to disturb you so late at night—”

“It is,” Mickelsson had said. The street beyond the man was absolutely still, no lights anywhere but the streetlamps.

“My name is Geoffrey Stewart,” the man said, and smiled apologetically. “Your wife, that is, Mrs. Mickelsson, suggested … I'm sorry to trouble you—”

Reluctantly, Mickelsson unlatched the chain. “Come in,” he said. For all his irritation, he'd opened the door wide, as if sensing—correctly, he would later understand—that the man would not enter if the invitation seemed half-hearted.

“I'm sorry to trouble you so late at night,” the man said again.

“No trouble. Come on in.”

The man obeyed and, not yet setting his suitcases down, looked up the long stairway, then into the livingroom. “Beautiful house.”

Then the name clicked. Mickelsson said, “Are you Geoffrey Stewart the poet—from Chicago?”

The man grinned, his head bent forward, as if the question might be harder than it sounded. “That's me.”

“Come in!” Mickelsson spoke somewhat more warmly now, gesturing in the direction of the livingroom. “Can I get you something to eat? Something to drink?”

“Noooo thanks,” Stewart said. He looked down at the cat. “You must be Horace,” he said. His eyebrows slid upward. “Hellooooo, Horace.”

Geoffrey Stewart, street poet, was said to be the author of things like “Hell no, we won't go,” and “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” It was also said that, to avoid income tax, and thus involvement with “the criminal government,” Stewart earned and owned almost nothing. (His two suitcases, Mickelsson would discover, contained not clothes but pamphlets.) Mickelsson said, “I'm pleased to meet you!”

“Same here,” Stewart said, and smiled. “I read your book.” Carefully, fussily, he aligned his suitcases with the entryway wall, where they wouldn't interfere with people's passage, then clasped his hands together in front of him and followed Mickelsson into the livingroom.

Two hours later, when Ellen came home, they were sitting almost knee to knee; they'd been talking about politics, religion, ethics, race, aesthetics. Stewart was serene, gestureless, his manner that of a pastor in his study.

“Geoffrey!” Ellen cried, running somewhat drunkenly to lean down and hug him as, awkwardly, he tried to rise from the couch and greet her. Their heads bumped and both of them laughed. “This is Geoffrey Stewart,” she said, turning with a dramatic sweep of her arm toward Mickelsson.

“I know,” he said.

“Geoffrey!” she cried, and hugged him again, then immediately burst into tears. Mickelsson had gone out to the kitchen to fix her a Scotch. It was morning now, ocean-clear sunlight falling over the overgrown garden behind the house.

They hadn't slept at all that night or the next day; or rather, only Ellen had slept, and that just for an hour or so. While Mickelsson was fixing pancakes for the children—then five and two—Stewart had played old hymns on Ellen's piano.

“They taste all crumbly,” the boy said—Mark—looking up mournfully, as if it were really no worse than he'd expected. His hair had at that time been yellow, like Ellen's.

“They're supposed to taste crumbly. They're made of all-natural, stone-ground wheat-flour,” Mickelsson said. “You're lucky they taste at all.”

Both children pouted, touching the pancakes with their fingers.

“Come on,” he pleaded, bending down to be level with them, pretending to look hungrily at the syrupy mush, “give it a try! Two-three
hup!”

Thoughtfully, experimentally, his daughter poked his nose with her syrupy finger, then laughed.

In the livingroom, where the piano was, Ellen was saying, slurring her words, “Geoffrey, doesn't it bother you that when people like you are living in poverty, people like us have Baldwin pianos?”

Stewart smiled. “The world's got to have pianos,” he said.

He'd stayed four days, the first stranger in years to make friends with grumpy old Horace, and an instant uncle to Leslie and Mark. Mornings and afternoons he talked at schools and at San Francisco State (Ellen's arrangements), burning money and flags, speaking of pacifism and “the message of Jesus.” He spoke—sternly, without gestures—of the Jews killed during World War II, the first real test of modern society's right to survive. Not that it was all brand new. The Germans had been mass-murdering Africans for years, killing every eldest son to keep the tribes in control, so that when Hitler arrived the machinery was pretty much in place. As for L.B.J. … And so on.

Mickelsson had gone to listen to him every time he could, the first professed revolutionary he'd met who wasn't visibly crazy. Then, as suddenly as he'd arrived (they'd thought he was in the livingroom reading the paper), Stewart had vanished. F.B.I. men had come to the house to ask questions. “How long have you known Mr. Stewart, Professor?” “Do you know his present whereabouts?” “Have you ever been in Seattle?” They would not explain what the problem was. For the first time, Mickelsson had fully understood Ellen's helplessness and anger, her impatience with “so-called Reason.”

Though he still disliked the plays her friends did—plays her writings (and many other people's) gave what Mickelsson considered a kind of fraudulent legitimacy—plays which looked for inspiration to the French (whom, one and all, Mickelsson with whole-hearted bigotry believed and frequently declared to have been back-stabbers, fakes, and perverts at least back to Caesar's time)—Mickelsson was a great deal more sympathetic than formerly to her aims. Though aims and means were, in Mickelsson's opinion, inseparable, for the sake of domestic tranquillity he kept quiet, insofar as he was able, about Ellen's preferred means. That Ellen's friends were awakening audiences to the crimes of the age seemed to him unlikely. If anything, he thought, her Thespian warriors were playing the part of Stalin's “useful idiots,” not raising consciousness (as the slogan makers of a later decade would love to say, innocent of any suspicion that they were quoting Carl Jung) but stiffening the resistance of a decadent society, hurrying up the inevitable clash, plowing and fitting the ground for dragons' teeth. He might have thought it was his duty to protest, had not the Establishment seemed, by its violence and wonderful stupidity, so eager to deserve every pint of the bloodshed that was coming. The scent of war was everywhere, not just in the San Francisco area. And so he had sat at the desk in his upstairs study overlooking the street, writing papers, preparing classes, listening with the back of his mind for trouble in the children's bedrooms, and letting Nature take its course.

Ellen thrived on it. Sometimes, he would swear—though all talk of the occult was to him claptrap—she would get a kind of halo or glowing aura when she and her friends brought off (and escaped alive) a particularly offensive “production.” Sometimes none of them, Ellen and her friends, would sleep for days, plotting against audiences or reviewing their successes. Then, inevitably, the reverse swing of the pendulum would come, the crash, as they called it. She would lie in bed crying, clinging to him as, in his childhood, he or, later, his younger sister and cousins, non-swimmers, would cling to an inflated rubber tube at the swimming-hole. “Oh God,” she would wail. “Oh God, Mick, take care of me!” He would explain to her, holding her, what he thought was going on psychologically, how the psyche was never fooled by ethical simplifications: the more fiercely one lied, however noble the purpose, the more fiercely the genetically programmed sense of human decency struck back. He would stare up at the ceiling, stroking her hair, cradling her as he would a child, explaining, explaining. By the time he got it clear, so that she could not help but understand, she would be sleeping. Even if she'd fully understood what he told her—he believed even now that what he'd said was true—she forgot it all as soon as she was back with her friends, “those dumb sons of bitches,” as he too often described them. Her depressions, at first infrequent, then more and more common, became darker. Sometimes when he came home from a lecture or convention he would find that Ellen had been in bed for two days and nights, leaving the children to fend for themselves. “The kitchen,” he would tell her, quietly, sternly, “looks like a God damned municipal dump.” “But what am I supposed to do?” she would wail. “I'm so fucking
depressed.”
She saw an analyst twice a week, which made Mickelsson seethe. (Mostly the cost, he would now admit.) Everyone knew she saw an analyst twice a week. “Come the revolution,” Mickelsson said, “the first middle-class parasites to go will be the analysts.”

Then the decade had turned; they were now in Providence—after one year in Heidelberg, Germany—good for him and, sadly, good for her. San Francisco was dead. The Actors' Workshop had moved to New York and promptly failed; the mime troupe was mostly in jail, or so he'd been told. She had begun to put up posters—in her study, in the kitchen—about women's rights. He'd been largely in agreement with what the posters said, with one or two reservations, and they'd sometimes, like superior people, joked about it. He hadn't understood that the complaint was personal. He did the dishes, some of the cooking, some of the house-cleaning. She'd never wanted to be in on the handling of the money, or so he'd thought; he'd given her an allowance. “Like a
child,”
she said once. “But,
Jesus,”
he said, injured and astounded, “Jesus Christ!” Full of doubts, because Ellen was inexperienced and impetuous, he'd given her control of their finances. It was a burden he was glad to be rid of, of course, though he worried. And even now he had not fully understood that she considered him an absolute, unreconstructible male chauvinist pig. Then came—though they'd somehow missed it in San Francisco, or so he believed (now he sometimes wondered)—liberated sex. She'd gone to conventions on contemporary drama and had “slept with people”—both women and men—as she was careful to report. (It had been happening for some time when she finally brought it out, both of them drunk, sitting happily in front of the fireplace.) His world reeled; then he began to do the same at philosophy conferences. On principle, he thought.
Versuchen wir's!
(“It's a fact,” he would sometimes tell male friends, when he was as blurry of eye as an ocean creature, “the most sexually ravenous beasts in the world are woman philosophers.” He would leer crazily—so he saw himself—like his strangely innocent football friends, long ago, when they talked about “beaver.”) Unlike Ellen, he was unable to bring himself to report his sins, even drunk. When they had fights about Ellen's playing around—a phrase that, inexplicably, filled him with rage—it always seemed later that it was not her infidelity that brought on the fights, nor his guilt at his own unconfessed infidelity, but the gin they'd drunk. It had seemed not in the real world, as real human beings, that they attacked each other, but as brightly painted puppet-like creatures in an eerie projection, a dream-world where blows (they had often come to blows—Mickelsson holding back, doing damage enough, Ellen laying in on him with everything she had, pitifully girlish, though sometimes he came out with a puffy face) had no force, whatever their violence, and words, whatever their viciousness, would prove hard to remember later. In the morning they would be careful of each other, as of people who've been wounded and will never again be whole. He understood only now, he believed, what had really been going on. They'd both been idealists. They'd been brought up, both of them, in families where fidelity was assumed, the marriage bond inviolable; and when they'd left that pattern, following the fashion of their friends and time (Ellen smiling, Mickelsson looking dangerously intense), enjoying the usual excitement of the chase and the cheap thrill of liberation, they'd become like lost children. Decency striking back. They'd become anxious. Soiled. (She too had known it. He remembered how one morning, after he'd fallen asleep dead drunk on the livingroom carpet, he'd awakened to find that she'd laid out tulips in a circle all around him.) Mickelsson's greatest pleasure, toward the end of their marriage, had been lying in bed with her, holding her quietly in his arms as she slept. If dawn had never come, or the next night's party, the next philosophy or drama convention, they would doubtless have lasted forever, like their parents.

“Is she happier without you?” Jessica asked.

“On the whole,” he said, then quickly raised his hand, palm out. “No pun intended! Purest accident!”

She shook her head, excusing it. “As my aunt Rose used to say, ‘God spare us.' ” She tried to hide a yawn.

He put his hand back down onto Jessica's foot. “Anyway, yes, she's happier. I hope. Fine young buck to keep her company—another ‘theater person.' I pay them handsomely to stay out of my hair.”

She studied his eyes, suspicious. “How handsomely?”

“Thousand a month,” he said. “Most months.”

“That's crazy!”

He shrugged. “It's all I can afford.”

A tuck came to the corner of her mouth, making the dimple show, and after she'd thought for a moment, she said, “You're establishing a precedent, you know. When you get into court you'll be stuck with it.”

He made his face worried. “You think I should've hit her with a hammer?”

She shook her head slowly and looked up at where the wall met the ceiling. “I think you should try to be more serious about all this.”

He squeezed her foot, then playfully ran his fingertips halfway to her knee. “First thing tomorrow,” he said. It came to him, all at once, that the room had grown light. The birds were singing like crazy. “Gee-whillikins,” he said, looking at his wristwatch, “it's time for you to get up and jog!”