Mickelsson's Ghosts (24 page)

“I'm sorry,” he said. He felt no emotion at all.

In the kitchen, Mickelsson made himself one last drink. He was wide awake now. Since he had no gin, he fixed Irish and water. He sniffed the water suspiciously, but all was well; no rabbit had fallen into the reservoir as yet, or if it had, it was not yet smellable. He must remember to do something about his water supply. He thought of placing a note to himself on his refrigerator, where he had paper and magnets, but feeling through his pockets he found no pencil, only his pipe, which he took out and held in his hand. It crossed his mind that he might call his daughter; but according to the clock on the oven it was quarter to four.

With the drink in one hand, his pipe in the other, Mickelsson wandered from room to room, still in his suitcoat, scowling thoughtfully, his step just noticeably unsteady. In the livingroom he paused a moment, thinking of putting a record on the stereo—an excellent set, the first thing he'd bought after he'd left his wife—but he decided against it. Though he was thinking nothing, merely sizing things up, trying to shake the vision of those two black-coated men, inseparable in his mind from the nightmare trucks, he did not want Beethoven or Mozart intruding. He moved on, touching things, in his mind the image of the two men whirling around to face his headlights. He saw the image as a photograph his son might take, black and white, grainy. Soon he found he could see it only as a photograph, not as it had been. He raised his glass, looking at the hand that held it—steady as a rock, he discovered to his surprise.

He concentrated, smoking now—puffing fiercely—on how he meant to change the house. He'd paint the bedrooms white, or maybe get wallpaper, fill the rooms with antiques, make farmerish chests of pine and cedar; he'd wallpaper the livingroom and put down hardwood floors all downstairs, or maybe spruce. The workroom, he'd decided long since, he'd make a diningroom: white plaster, dark, exposed beams. Assuming the I.R.S. didn't seize it, maybe attach his earnings as well. Assuming he could somehow pay his old bills and his wife's expenses, take care of his children …

Images of the party drifted into his mind and out again—Blickstein bowing, European-style, to old Meyerson, Jessica sliding her eyes away, sly. He found himself recalling a different party, months ago; an image of his hunchbacked, gray-bearded chairman, above his head the fake rough-cut beams of his kitchen. As always, he was flashing his crazy, twitching grin, his two knuckly hands reaching out toward Mickelsson as if to persuade him that he, Tillson, was the soul of reasonableness. It was the first and last party at Tillson's that Mickelsson had attended. “But Greek!” Tillson wailed, and let out his skinny, nervous laugh. “We're not Harvard, you know!” He switched his eyes to the others, all facing him, tentative antagonists, then looked back at Mickelsson, and his tic-ridden face came forward farther, even with the hump. He blinked rapidly and strained his smile wider, as if Mickelsson's dullness of comprehension might perhaps be overcome by sheer energy and good will. “What
use
is it?
That's
the question! Let us say just for the sake of argument that our students actually learn the stuff, which I'll tell you in all honesty
I
never did, not that I didn't pass the tests, you understand, just as I passed the courses where presumably you couldn't get by without Greek—and this was at Princeton, which was supposed to be ‘boss,' as the kids say, ha!—but believe me I wouldn't know an aorist tense if it ran up and bit me; in fact to tell you the truth I'm not sure I ever really got the
letters
straight, though believe me I was good enough at other things—logic, for instance, all the intricacies of math, linguistics—” He swung his eyes from Mickelsson to the others, laughing but not joking, then hurried on, almost stammering in his eagerness to retain the floor: “But say for the sake of argument they actually
master
the stuff. What good is it? If we've learned anything at all in the last fifty years of philosophy, it's that even in English practically nothing we say makes sense. So why Greek? Why not talk gibberish in the language we were born to? You trying to make them root-and-berry Heideggerians—‘dis-close,' ‘com-pre-hend'?” He laughed wildly, perhaps delighted by his rhetoric, and looked around again. “It'll kill us!” He pointed at Mickelsson's chest. “It'll kill our F.T.E., drive students away. And it won't do much for the society either. What's a philosopher for if it's not to help people, in his clumsy way—help society clean up its act? Your book, now,
Survival and Medical Ethics
—ha ha! Thought I didn't read it, didn't you!
Your
book—that's philosophy for our
time!
Pop-philosophy, you may say—ha ha! nonetheless—”

“But I do read Greek,” Mickelsson said, reserved.
Pop-philosophy, you little fucker?
Then he remembered that he himself had called it that.

“All right, so you're one up on me, I readily concede it. Actually, I manage to stumble through the stuff myself. But we're talking practicalities—shrinking enrollments, pressure from the state. We're talking head-count, dollars and s-e-n-s-e. And the tyranny of the Christian theological tradition.” Suddenly an edge of pious anger was in his voice. “That's what it all comes down to, I'm sure you realize.”

Tom Garret said, standing in the wings of the conversation, “What about discipline? I always liked the argument ‘The study of Greek is good discipline for the mind'?”

“You're kidding!” Tillson said.

Garret shrugged, grinning, his glasses blanking out his eyes. “I never know until I see if people laugh.”

Old man Meyerson shook his head, too deaf to hear more than every fifteenth word. “Greek tought iss the foundation,” he said. He raised his long, crooked finger.

“Long before the Greeks there was algae,” Tillson said, “but nobody makes us start with algae.”

Mickelsson raised his martini and gazed down into it, looking for water separation. “Are you seriously proposing,” he asked, “that we stop encouraging our majors to take Greek—for fear we might lose a couple?”

“God save me from people with standards,” Tillson said. “Better dead than ill-read, right?” His eyes widened. “Listen, don't get me wrong! I have a personal fondness for Greek. Heck—”

“So long as I'm advising, I'll keep pushing Greek,” Mickelsson said. “Harder than before, since my view's in the minority.” He raised his glass to drink.

“I hope when it comes right down to it you'll ease up,” Tillson said, tipping his head, weakly smiling. “Some students, sure. But a lot of these kids—” He put his hand on Mickelsson's arm. “I realize you're bull-headed. I like that about you, up to a point.”

Rage moved up through Mickelsson, starting under the tips of Geoffrey Tillson's fingers. “I'll push. Count on it,” he said. Quickly he turned and left the kitchen.

Stupid,
Mickelsson whispered now, meaning himself, not Tillson. Dr. Rifkin would no doubt be interested in that rage. “What,” he would say, “does Greek have to do with the Great Cryptogram? Is it possible that God still speaks Greek?”

It was true that that night, more than a year ago now, he had begun to hate Tillson, or perhaps, more precisely, that night he'd found a hook for the hatred that had risen in him spontaneously, right from the beginning.

It was true that his anger made no sense. One could always tell one's students, “Learn Greek,” and the best of them would do it. Why should he be threatened by a timid little hunchback who controlled nothing, commanded no one, hardly even published? What could it mean, this animal fury that rose up at sight of the man? He thought of the Marxists in Jessica's department,
real
nuisances, simultaneously dolts and maniacs, programmed, it seemed, to fly into rages at the mention of certain words. “Feminist!” one of them had suddenly shouted at a party last year at the Bryants', bursting like a whale out of a serene, pale sea. “If she's a feminist, I'm Napoleon!” Everyone had looked at the man, or at the envelope of space around him, their eyes dulled, expressions patient. Only Mickelsson, the newcomer, had been surprised.

Was it true that in the plays of Shakespeare, Seneca rumbled down underneath, and beneath that Aeschylus? And beneath that the creature who once slept, restless and brooding, in the Giant Bed of Og? Maybe one of Garret's real-life dragons?

Craziness. From Greek, Latin. From Latin, French Spanish English and the rest. From the top vertebrae of some ancient beast, the grossly enlarged, holed bone that made the human head.

It had to do with the house. It had been, once long ago, something else, perhaps just a saltbox—the room he meant to make into a dining-room and the dark, ravaged attic above it. Should he make it what it was—tear off the whole immense addition, spacious rooms, spreading porches? By some act of not quite unthinkable magic bring back the world as it had once been?

Dream thoughts. Foolishness. Cunning evasion of present grief. How pleasant it would be to call Ellen on the phone, talk to her awhile as if nothing had changed.

He seated himself in a chair beside the acrid-smelling woodstove in the livingroom and stared at the Dutch door leading to the kitchen. All at once in his drunkenness, as it would seem to him later, all he could see was that large, neatly painted hex sign: tulips and oakleaves and birds not found in nature, around them a black band harshly unornamental. Was it meant to keep out evil, he wondered, or to lure it in?

He listened, for some reason, as if he'd let some sound pass unregistered. But there was nothing, inside or out. Unsteadily, he rose and made his way to the hex to study it. One eye on each of the two birds looked out at him, vaguely hypnotic. When he squinted he discovered that the design made a blurry, disturbing face. He thought about that. Was it simply his drunkenness, or was it possible that the face was meant to be there, perhaps had some occult use? He squinted again. It did seem to have a hypnotic quality. Was that possible? He'd read something somewhere about the cobra's gaze, some disorienting effect on the balance of the brain's two lobes. He had no faith or particular interest in witchcraft, but by all accounts something went on in these mountains, presumably something one could identify with physical causes, once one figured out the tricks. Was the shadowy face intended to, in some way, give special powers to occupants of the house? Or on the other hand to harm them? He thought of the gray cast to Dr. Bauer's skin.

It made sense, he thought, feeling a stir of excitement. The dark reputation of the Sprague place was solid; everyone around seemed to have heard of it. And no theme in folklore was older than the notion of the deadly sign or magic writing, bearer of some curse. Perhaps the whole secret of the Sprague place was right here on this door!

He was no doubt thinking foolishly, melodramatically, but he groped his way to the kitchen, where in increasing excitement, as if rising to some formidable challenge, he sharpened a butcher knife. The image he'd seen through half-closed eyes was fixed in his head, reminding him of something, nothing he could put his finger on, but unpleasant. He tested the blade against the palp of his thumb, then returned to the livingroom and decisively, scrape by scrape, cut away the hex sign, leaving a halo of ragged wood. When he was finished, he carefully cleaned off the knife, using soap and water, as if even the wood and paint shavings might be dangerous, put the shavings in the garbage, then put the knife back in its drawer, neatly aligning it with the other knives, all good cutlery, sharp. These too, for some reason now obscure, he'd bought almost immediately after leaving his wife. He found that his glass of whiskey had disappeared, no doubt set down someplace. He was in no condition (turning slowly around, looking in all directions) to think out where he'd left it. He fixed himself another, definitely the last. The image of the face was still clear in his mind, still proffering its challenge. Now it reminded him of Tillson.

He stood wide awake, still looking around, grave, firmly planted. He was aware of the emptiness of the house, and its foreignness. He found himself moving again from room to room, bare dry walls, bare dry floors, most of the house devoid of furniture, stark. His shadow moved beside him, head lowered, large back round. Because the light fixtures had offended him—cheap, machine-etched fleurs-de-lis, a fake antique wooden-wheel chandelier, machine-painted globes hung from phoney brass—he'd removed the fixtures, leaving bare bulbs. Every stipple and crack in the ceilings called attention to itself. His footsteps, however carefully he walked, resounded. When he leaned close to one of the curtainless windows, cupping his hands against the light of the room, looking out, he saw nothing, just the dark, low curve of mountains. There was no evidence that anyone was alive but himself.

In the workroom, prospective diningroom, he absent-mindedly made an incision with his thumbnail, then pulled off a small swatch of wallpaper. Once he'd pulled it from the wall, the wallpaper divided magically into separate layers, dusty-backed, light, as if they'd never been glued. He held in his hand nine separate dry pieces, all queer to the touch as dead moth-wings. He drew them nearer, to look at them more closely. The first one was gray with a faded pink flower design, more like stitches than like paint, the whole thing so carefully made to look like cloth that it struck him now for the first time that in the old days, maybe the eighteenth century, it must indeed have been cloth, not paper, that people put on walls. He was vividly aware all at once of not just the age of the house but the
time
it contained: generations of people who had made lives in it, had periodically pored over samples of wallpaper, debating, arguing, finally choosing; and then new people coming in, as he had done now, people who had perhaps laughed scornfully at the wallpaper they found there, or had touched it wistfully, regretting its age and dinginess, knowing they would never find anything as nice. The next piece of wallpaper was light brown and dark brown, again made to look like cloth, and the next was what had probably once been wine-red, with an intricate stripe and flower pattern. All three of these oldest pieces had been, almost certainly, paper for a livingroom. It was perhaps at this point that the room had begun to change functions: the next two pieces might be either livingroom or bedroom (one green, one blue), and the next two seemed patterns one might pick for a diningroom. The most recent, no longer at all like cloth—a bright pattern of chickens, corncobs, and yellow dots, then another of teapots and salt-shakers—could only be paper for a kitchen.