Mickelsson's Ghosts (21 page)

“When you get to know Edith—” Mickelsson began.

“I swear to God,” she blurted, pretending indignation, reaching out as if to bat at him. “It's
forever
in the paper!” She caught Fred Rogers eavesdropping on the conversation and quickly brought him in on it, frantically waving at him. “Wait just a minute. You help me out, Fred.
Fred
will tell you the
God's truth,”
she explained to the Swissons. “Fred's a
historian,
he knows
everything.”
She smiled, mocking both herself and Fred, but, all the same, bursting with pride, smug about being his friend.

“What's the debate?” Rogers asked, smiling, leaning his silver head into the group, one shoulder forward. He had a face shaped for pathos, even when he smiled; a long sad-clown mask gently bearing up under the sorrow of things.

The Swissons glanced at each other, each timidly hoping the other might answer.

“It's true, isn't it,” Edie said, “there
are
Pennsylvania-Dutch witches in Susquehanna?”

“Witches, Klansmen, rattlesnakes …” Rogers waved his drink, indifferent and mournfully amused. To the Swisson woman he said, “I heard your recital the other night. What a sweet, sweet voice!”

Her face lit up, and her husband smiled, once again revealing the pitted, patched teeth, and slowly raised his glass, looking down. Edie Bryant leaned forward, fascinated. “Oh
shoot!”
she said, her false teeth clacking, “I
missed
it!”

Mickelsson backed off, looking critically at his nearly empty drink, then drifted as if aimlessly toward Phil Bryant and Tom Garret, who were discussing, as usual, university politics, or anyway so it appeared from their expressions. Maybe this time it was whales, or the horror of having to choose between Carter and Reagan. That was the main subject everywhere, these days. Even if the survival of the world depended on it, as some people claimed (Mickelsson had his doubts), it was a dreary business. Before he'd moved far enough to have fully committed himself to their conversation, he paused, drained his martini, ate the olives, and glanced around. Jessica Stark, still talking with the Meyersons, caught his fugitive glance in her direction, gave him a little wave, and smiled—one quick, brilliant flash—then returned her attention to the old people. She looked, as she always did at parties, expensively handsome—a burgundy dress cut low but made modest by a lacy white blouse, her deep brown, slightly graying hair swept up and pinned with an ivory comb. Though her complexion was dark—heavy tan over her freckles (Jessica had a mother in Florida, he remembered)—her cheeks were flushed, as if she'd been running. Her eyes, in the shade of her dark lashes, were pale tonight, a lucid, unearthly gray. She sat as if riding the couch sidesaddle, bent forward with interest, bringing her height down to the level of the old people. Her back was supplely curved in a way that made him think of pictures of beauties from the twenties, though the curve was less extreme, her knees together, prim—somehow falsely prim, he thought, like a tomboy dressed up in silk stockings and diamonds—and she made no flapper's pretense that she was less than, as they said on TV, full-figured. Above all what made her no twenties beauty was that rich darkness set off by her strange, gray eyes—a darkness of gold and browns and amber, lustrous as the sherry in the glass dangling forgotten in her dark right hand. When she laughed she tipped her head back, baring her throat, and a dimple appeared on one cheek, flickering like light. The famous David Meyerson sat far back in the couch, bleary-eyed, cackling, saying something in Yiddish—
“bobbe-myseh”
—flapping a hand at Jessica. A gleaming, gray plastic hearing aid protruded from one large, liver-spotted ear. His wife, beside him, smiled vaguely, timid as a mouse.

“Refill?” Blickstein asked, appearing beside Mickelsson and taking the glass from him before he could answer.

“Thank you,” Mickelsson said, then on second thought followed the dean toward the kitchen. Behind him he heard Tom Garret saying “Why
not
believe in dragons? If they really were a possible evolutionary move, hydrogen sacks, helm of terror, and all the rest—” He would be grinning with wide, innocent eyes and squirrel cheeks, his chin lifted as if willing to take a punch. “Oh, faddle, Tom!” Bryant said in his English-professor voice, sweet and deep as a bass viol, “give a little credit to human imagination!” If Mickelsson had known they were talking of dragons (Garret often did that, something of an embarrassment in a representative of the Philosophy Department), he'd have gone over and put in an opinion.

Blickstein's wife, Gretchen, was at the stove, pink-faced and anxious, peeking under a pot-lid, holding in her right hand a glass of wine over ice. Perspiration glistened on her forehead. At the sink a tall, slim, auburn-haired girl in a black dress and white apron stood scrubbing pots and pans. She had the water on, plunging down through steam. She looked too old, somehow too classy to be a student, but he couldn't think why else she'd be working for the Blicksteins.

“Oh, Peter,” Gretchen Blickstein said, smiling as if he'd caught her at something. “How wonderful to see you again!” She lowered the pot-lid, wiped her hands on her apron, and reached out to take his. “Let me
look
at you!” she said, and tipped her head, smiling fixedly. Her hand, like the rest of her, was plump and soft.

Blickstein, at the refrigerator, poured from a sparkling glass pitcher into Mickelsson's martini glass. A thick-furred gray cat stood at his feet, looking up into the light from the open refrigerator door. “You know Agnes Warren?” Blickstein asked, inclining his head in the direction of the girl at the sink. “She's helping us out tonight. Agnes, this is Peter Mickelsson. Philosophy.”

The girl turned her head, brown eyes flashing a look of what seemed hatred.

“How do you do?” Mickelsson said, taken aback.

“Fine, thank you,” she said softly, almost inaudibly, and returned her fierce attention to her work.

With the side of his foot, in a movement as soft as the cat's fur, Blickstein pushed the cat away, then closed the refrigerator door.

“Now you boys go back out and mix,” Blickstein's wife said. “Dinner will be ready any minute.” She smiled and waved her hand, shooing them.

He took the drink from Blickstein and, after one glance back at the auburn-haired girl, moved with him into the livingroom. “The young woman, the one that's helping you,” Mickelsson said, then hesitated, hardly knowing what he meant to ask, “is she … a student?”

“It's an interesting story,” Blickstein said. “Well,
interesting
is not quite the word. You don't recognize the name?
Warren?”
He whispered it.

Mickelsson raised his eyebrows.

The dean smiled, or rather winced, giving his head a little shake. “Remind me to fill you in.” He broke away, hurrying over to Tom Garret and Phil Bryant to check their drinks, then pick up the empty hors d'oeuvres tray from the glass-topped coffeetable. Mickelsson paused to sip his martini and survey the room, then for some perverse reason went over to Mabel Garret, the hardest woman in all Binghamton to talk to. She stood at the bookshelves, head bowed, reading titles, her shoulders pulled inward inside her shawl—dull black as a Bible—as if she were cold. Darkness seemed to come out of her, though he knew it was only her habit of hiding where the light was most dim.

“Hello, Mabel,” he said.

“Hello.”

“How are the children?” She had ten of them, all adopted—blacks, “native Americans,” Vietnamese, children with handicaps. Her children were all he had ever gotten her to talk about, and then never more than a sentence or two. He wondered if she ever talked to the children themselves. He supposed she must—not that she would need to, necessarily. She emitted a kind of enfolding warmth, for all her remoteness and secrecy. A weird lady—as if some mist-covered bog had taken human shape.

“Fine,” he thought he heard her say. She glanced up, briefly smiling, giving him a definitely significant look, though God only knew what it signified. She often gave him significant looks, as though there were some secret bond between them, perhaps something from an earlier life. She believed in such things.

“And
you're
fine?” he asked.

She studied him for an instant, then returned her attention to the books, not answering. Much of what Mabel Garret did was, by ordinary standards, rude. Suppressing a flicker of irritation, Mickelsson glanced across the room at her husband, still talking in his soft, upper-class South Carolina accent with Phil Bryant. Dean Blickstein stood listening, smiling down at Tom Garret eagerly, tensely, as if ready to grapple with him—all in fun, of course. He was tucking in his shirt again. Mickelsson sipped his drink, then turned his attention to reading the backs of books.

“You should go talk to Jessie,” Mabel Garret said.

When he looked at her, she was reading book titles as before. He wondered if conceivably he had only imagined that she'd spoken. He raised the martini, thoughtfully sipping it, studying the side of Mabel's face.

The table was dazzlingly bright, like a field of ice and snow: crystal glasses, cut-glass candlesticks, gleaming china and silverware, pure white linen napkins and tablecloth. He thought of the communion table of his childhood. Steam poured up from the serving dishes or formed droplets on their shiny lids.

Mickelsson discovered, not exactly to his surprise, that Jessica had been placed beside him. He would be conscious all through dinner of not brushing against her arm. Jessica handled the seating arrangement well, he'd have to grant. She smiled like an old friend from Boy Scout camp, delighted to be placed where she was, and made small talk, once or twice touching his forearm as she parried some bullying Mickelssonian joke. As quickly as possible—as if to take the pressure off him, sensing the confusion he felt in her presence—she turned her attention to Phil Bryant, seated to her left, asking him with just the right shade of interest about his year abroad. One could feel the charge she carried, some intense native energy; but at the moment she had it closed in, securely capped. He was conscious of how large they were, Jessica and he, in comparison to the others, except for Bryant. It made him ask, when she turned to him again, if she'd ever done anything in athletics. “Only Rugby,” she said, giving him a smile and a slow wink, as if she'd read his mind. Then she turned back to Bryant.
(Fucking little tease,
he thought.) Once the side of Mickelsson's knee touched hers, and they both drew back quickly, Jessica giving him a glance, then smiling.

The Swisson woman—he managed to catch her name now, Katie—was to Mickelsson's right. She held her fork daintily, as if fearfully, like an astonished bird invited to dine with tomcats. She looked up with exaggerated interest, head tipped meekly sideways, whenever anyone spoke her name, asking for her plate, passing asparagus, pouring wine into her glass. To make her feel less a spectator, Mickelsson inquired, “You have children, Ms. Swisson?”

She shook her head, chewing, trying to swallow quickly.

He told her about his son at U.V.M., excellent photographer—perhaps she'd heard of him? (it was impossible, in fact)—and his daughter Leslie, taking classes at Brown, though a highschool senior, planning to enter McGill next year to study French. He glanced at Jessica. If he was behaving like a fool she hadn't noticed. She was deep in conversation with Phil Bryant and Gretchen Blickstein. Yet the back of her head struck him as alert and too still, as if she were eavesdropping on his talk.

“French! How interesting!” Kate Swisson said, looking up at him, wide-eyed.

Mickelsson shook his head. “You know what it means,” he said, mock-morose. “She'll go off to Paris and fall in love with some miserable Frog and that's the last I'll see of her.”

She laughed, large eyes grown larger. It struck him that, though he'd meant it as a joke, he'd spoken with some vehemence, as if in fact he were furious with his daughter, not to mention the French. He wondered if it were so—that he was angry at his daughter, that is. It was true that she never phoned, kept losing his number. Like her mother, she was congenitally disorganized. He could phone her, but the chance that Ellen might answer put him off. He realized that the table had fallen silent and said, to cover himself, “It's surprising how close you can feel to a daughter, and how little you really know her.”

“Peter! You, a man, expectin to understand
women?”
Edie Bryant cried out, across from him, brandishing her fork. Her eyes sparkled like the cut-glass candlesticks. “Perhaps shortly after the Second Coming!”

“Why, Edie,” her husband said, to Jessica's left, his voice even more than usually melodious (he was fond of quoting Shakespeare, and his fifty-year-old Yale songs could make a turnip cry), “you
surprise
me!” He paused just an instant, then added, “Again!”

They all laughed, even Mickelsson, as if it were a wonderful piece of wit. He wondered, inwardly tumbling toward darkness, if it were possible that they all laughed, as he did, from politeness hiding disgust. It didn't seem so, he thought, furtively glancing around the table—though certainly it had to be politeness with old Meyerson, who never heard anything anymore, not even the town's many churchbells, against which he'd once lodged complaints. He sat next to Gretchen Blickstein at the foot of the table, wheezily laughing with his eyes shut. His wife, beside him, watching him like a hawk, suddenly dabbed at the corner of his mouth with her napkin. He pulled angrily away and said something in German.

“Don't worry,” Jessica said,
sotto voce,
speaking past food, “she'll hate it at McGill. Believe me! She's like you.” She touched the corner of her mouth with her napkin.

“Like me?” Jessica and his daughter had never met.