Mickelsson's Ghosts (32 page)

What his reverend grandfather had had to say about Eden he couldn't remember, probably nothing good, but it seemed to him now that his grandmother had told him a hundred times the story of those two naked people and the serpent. She told it with spirit, as she told all her stories, but no moral conviction; it had not been—in contrast to the story of God's calling Samuel in his sleep, or Noah's flood—a story full of meaning for her. She told it exactly as she told stories of her childhood in unimaginable Stockholm, or told the stories she made up to explain the pictures in his Charlie McCarthy coloring book. She told him, with ice-bright, merry eyes, how the snake had talked and Eve had bitten the apple and the pair had been thrown out of the garden, so that afterward human beings had to be farmers and storekeepers. So far as he could tell, the moral of the story was that because the snake had spoken to Eve, all snakes in the world ever since had to crawl on their bellies, perhaps so they'd be far from people's ears.

Every Sunday, once he knew the story, Mickelsson—then five or six—would sit, hardly hearing his grandfather's drone, gazing up, rapt, at the picture. It had never occurred to him that this was not the real snake, the picture not as true as a photograph, nor had it ever occurred to him, so far as he knew, that the story might not be a literal report of facts. He studied the expressions of the man, the woman, and the snake in wonderment—especially the snake: sad-eyed, misunderstood, suffering perhaps a premonition of the trouble to come but as yet knowing nothing, as innocent as the apple on the tree. He tried to imagine what the snake might be saying—that part was never quite clear in his grandmother's account—but nothing would come to him, not even a guess. He could not help but think it had all been a peculiar misunderstanding, though nothing of much consequence, since it was obviously pleasant to be a farmer or storekeeper, though it was sad that people must now wear clothes. (One could not discuss with his grandmother the oddity of wearing clothes.) When he was eight, the church—which had originally not been Lutheran but something else, vaguely pagan—had held a fund drive and, to Mickelsson's sorrow (also his father's and uncle's), the sanctuary had been changed, the wood stripped down and stained almost black, as it was supposed to be, according to someone, and an organ installed—a huge whale-mouth full of teeth—where the picture had been. He'd realized now that it was a bad thing to be thrown out of Eden, though it was nobody's fault, so far as he could tell. After the reconstruction—or sanctification, as his grandfather had called it—his uncle had stopped going. It was interesting to him now that the son of a Lutheran minister should be able to rebel so whole-heartedly. But perhaps in the final analysis his father had been the greater rebel. He'd continued going, but, from all evidence, only for the hymns—he gloried in singing and grieved at his son's inability—and for Sunday entertainment, and to visit his friends.

All the world had been thrown out of Eden at about that time, he knew now, by hindsight. World War II was on. Many of the older farmboys he knew, and even some grown men, his uncle among them for a brief period, had gone away to be part of it, and some were reported to be missing in action or dead. Sweden was said to be conspiring with the enemy. Collaborating. There had been movies to that effect. He would sit cringing, hot with guilt and shame, and at night, each time with astonishment, he would wet his bed. For years, even after he knew they were unjust, he'd been unable to get those movies out of his mind. At times—sometimes publicly, when he was drunk—he had blamed them for his choice of profession.

He and his family, cousins, and friends would sit hunched around the radio, dark and glassy-eyed, listening to Lowell Thomas or Gabriel Heatter report the news: bombings, planes missing, London on fire. No one had known that it was necessary to explain to him that Sweden was not at the heart of it. He'd explained, ragingly, on the asphalt school playground (he had often, in those days, argued with his fists), that his uncle had joined up with the United States Navy; but when Donald Warner—a face and name he would never forget—had said, “Sure! As a spy!” Mickelsson—that is, Mickelsson the child—had felt his heart sink.

Every time an airplane went over at night, he was sure that in a moment he'd hear the piercing, downward-slanting whistle of a bomb, and when the plane droned on, its dark sound innocently diminishing to silence, he was astounded by God's mercy. It was otherwise with trains, moaning through the woods at the far end of the farm, carrying weary-faced young soldiers. Sometimes in town, standing on the platform of the gray brick depot—torn down thirty years ago now—he had looked in at them with something like that wonder with which he'd looked up at the picture of Eden in the church. They sat crowded like animals in a stockcar on its way to Chicago, but they smoked and grinned, sometimes waved through the gray, greasy window at him, peculiarly indifferent to the fact that when they got where they were going they would have to shoot people, or possibly die. Every Saturday afternoon he saw people die in movies—sometimes actual people, in
Time Marches On.
The chatter of guns seemed not real, more like dream-noise; only the drums were real—absolute Being—rank on rank of goose-stepping soldiers, with swastika flags hanging down from the buildings, so many thousand soldiers that there seemed no hope for mankind. He held his older cousin's hand, white-blond Erik, who was to die in Korea. Later he saw pictures in
Life
magazine of mound on mound of dead people—Jews, he was told, though the magazine did not make it clear. Still later, in college, he had lain beside a half-Jewish, half-Italian girl, one of the cheerleaders, on a blanket overlooking a quarry. Suddenly, looking into her brown eyes, feeling the softness of her skin, he'd felt horror stir in him, as if a black shadow—Sweden's evil ghost, or the ghost of Dr. Luther in his final madness—had fallen over them. Whenever he went to movies about World War II—dog-fights, people shouting happily, like Boy Scouts, grenades exploding, bridges falling in—he felt sick at his stomach, as if he were looking at his childhood through thick, wavy glass. People laughed in the ocean-bed darkness of the theater around him, or leaned forward, flickering light on their faces. At times a kind of vertigo would come over him, a weakness of arms and legs, and he would leave. Once, in college, lying on his bunk in the dark with his hands behind his head, he'd asked his roommate, “Does it ever seem to you that everything you look at, it's in a mirror?” “No,” his roommate had said, after thought. He hadn't expressed himself clearly, he'd decided. It was impossible that others should not have noticed. (He'd never heard of Plotinus, Porphyry, and the rest—thank God—though he ought to have suspected the whole thing from his grandfather's talk of Luther.) But then there were times, sometimes weeks on end, when even he himself forgot and swam comfortably, easily, through a world that seemed to him not insubstantial. After he'd married Ellen, that queer sense of things had more or less left him, and after his son had been born, the world had become for him positively secure. (By now he knew Nietzsche on consciousness: “a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable text.”) The feel of grass when he hunkered down, rolling a ball to Mark, had such quiddity, such authority, one might have imagined time had stopped, and the sacramental moment toward which everything tended had arrived. When Mark's clumsy hands came together around the ball and he laughed in proud amazement—Ellen standing over by the day-lilies, a book closed on her finger, her bespectacled face turning its smile to them—it was as if the whole world cried out, delighted, changed to music, lively as an animal—the dazzling white walls of the neighbors' houses, the green lace of leaves overhead, blue sky.

At four in the morning, feeling a change in the darkness beyond the windows, Mickelsson decided he'd better quit. There would be another day for painting—and another and another. Days also for writing his blockbuster book. He'd do well to sleep. He put the lid on the paint can, sealed it tight with his heel, then washed out the roller and brush in the upstairs bathroom sink. The bones of the hand that had gripped the paintbrush ached like rotten teeth.

It gave him a queer feeling, moving around alone at this hour in the big, empty house, the house he was painting, preparing for nothing, “just the one of you,” as the doc had said. He remembered distinctly, as if she were in the room with him, her girlish laugh. “Strange,” he said aloud, then said nothing more, made uneasy by the sound of his voice. He turned out the lights, then—unconsciously massaging his right hand as he walked—went back to the bathroom to wash up, prepare for bed. He got a sudden image of the fat man's tray of money, then of Donnie in the musty-smelling bed, on her knees, her face buried in the pillow, her two hands spreading her buttocks for his entrance from behind. Like a suddenly shrinking aura, his emotion shrank inward and went dark. He stared into the mirror, brushing his teeth. Foam around his mouth, bags under his eyes, the hair on his chest yellow-silver. He was old, debauched, repulsive. No one would ever again see Mickelsson the athlete, big-chested, small-bellied, powerful but not yet fat of shoulder, not yet grossly fat of neck. He looked away. He spat, rinsed his mouth, wiped his face on the towel, then draped it once more over the toilet tank; he'd taken down the towel rack in preparation for painting the walls. He took from the medicine cabinet the sickly violet plastic-and-rubber gum-stimulator, dreariest curse of middle age, leaned toward the mirror again, and dutifully bared his fangs.

He awakened at seven-thirty with a strong sense that something was wrong. At first it seemed to him that the house was on fire, but when he put on his trousers, stiff muscles complaining, and hurried from room to room, he couldn't get even a whiff of smoke, though something else reached his nostrils, the baffling scent he'd encountered once or twice before, of bread baking, or cookies. It was weird: the smell was strong and all around him, like the smell of baking in his grandmother's house, in his childhood; much too strong to be explained by the trickery of mountain wind bringing smells in from the kitchens of his neighbors. He'd look into it, see if one of the chemists at school could account for it. At the moment he had other things to think about. His sense of something wrong was more intense than before, and now it seemed to him that the wellspring of trouble was under his feet, in the cellar. Only after he'd turned the wooden latch and cautiously opened the cellar door did he realize what it was that he'd expected, the dim memory of a nightmare perhaps: he'd thought the cellar would be hip-deep in rattlesnakes. As he moved tread by tread down the cellar stairs, the center of evil seemed to shift to another part of the house. He stood for several minutes, with the fingertips of his right hand spread on the damp stone wall as if waiting for an earth tremor, then moved to the doorway opening to the cellar chute. The padlock was broken. It was here, then, that his visitors had come in; that was why the kitchen door, which had been open when he'd come in that night, had not been broken. All this time, ever since the break-in, the house had, unbeknownst to him, stood open. He would nail the thing shut, but not till he was rid of this sixth-sense certainty that something was amiss. He went back upstairs.

In the middle of the livingroom he stopped walking and looked around in alarm. If it was not fire or snakes in the cellar, it was a violent outpouring of electricity, some fallen power line, something wrong in the TV. … He closed his eyes.

No …

He had thought all this time that it was a force outside himself, invisible, crackling, so powerful it bent him almost double and made all his joints cry out with pain. If he'd believed in spirits he'd have said it was the angry native spirit of this place—the earth god, still smarting over the digging of the cellar or the reservoir higher on the mountain; or the waterfall god, across the road, annoyed by the frequent intrusion of tourists (through the livingroom window Mickelsson could see that there was a car out there now, its smooth dark top gleaming in the sunlight, the driver and his family no doubt out there littering, breaking branches from saplings, lining each other up for pictures against the falls)—but he did not, of course, believe in spirits. The malevolent Shockwaves he felt all around him in the house must come from within.

No wonder. He, Mickelsson, had fled from the world's complexity to what he'd hoped might be Eden, and he'd found the place polluted, decaying—filled to the tongue-roots with low, slimy secrets: gossips, pompous asses, crudely cunning whores, con-men, idiots, mysterious intruders. He'd taken risks, like the merchant in the parable, who sold all his goods, or like the man who found the treasure on another man's land, and what he'd gotten for his trouble was neither paradise here nor freedom from his troubles in …

“Shit!” he whispered, and bolted to the window. The car he'd thought belonged to tourists was gone. Dark green, utterly without ornament. No doubt the Pennsylvania contingent of the I.R.S. “Shit!” he whispered more bitterly than before, and hit the wall with the side of his fist, so hard that his hand went numb.

As if it might help, he showered, shaved, trimmed the hair in his nostrils, cleaned his nails, then dressed as if for an English picnic, white sportcoat, blue slacks, blue ascot, white shoes, took the silver-headed cane and went out to the Jeep, ground the starter till it caught, then drove down, square in the middle of the road, to the Susquehanna bank. He hadn't hit them yet with one of his Binghamton checks. With luck … At the drive-in window he wrote a check for seventy-five dollars, drawn to “cash,” and handed it to the woman. She gave him the money without a moment's hesitation, and wished him good-day. He drove back onto Main Street and parked in front of Reddon's Drugs, for all to see.

He knocked and knocked. Finally she called out, “Who is it?”