Mickelsson's Ghosts (41 page)

After the break, which was unusually quiet—not surprisingly; abortion was always a touchy subject, even for those who thought they knew what they thought—Pinky Stearns asked, frontally, the first question. “I notice you don't say anything of murder.”

Mickelsson sighed.

Ms. Morris was ready for it, of course. She sucked deep on her cigarette, lowering her eyelids (evilly, one might have said, but it was obviously nothing but the gesture of one threatened, attacked), and said, “To many people capital punishment is murder, or war is murder, just as, to other people, abortion is murder. But we traditionally make a distinction between killing by the society and killing by the individual.”
A stupid distinction,
Mickelsson thought. He thought of Heidegger, cloistered in his university, encircled by disciples, sending out his praise, however qualified, of the Third Reich. Why
not
prefer murder by a Raskolnikov? Not that anarchy was an answer either.
Stop everything!
No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians … Ms. Morris was saying: “In the case of abortion, of course, it can be argued that the thing killed is not even fully human.” She threw a look at Mickelsson that, in spite of himself, he found touching—the uncertain young girl looking out through the eyes of Portnoy's mother. Hesitantly, like an umpire under duress, he nodded, the curl of his lip no doubt showing his distaste. Stearns fumed but was too stupid, or maybe too angry, to spot the weaknesses in her response. He shook his puffy, filthy-bearded head, an impressive display of disgust and perhaps right feeling, but not an argument. In this much, anyway, Heidegger was right: judging philosophy by the standards of science is like judging the capacity for survival of a fish out of water.

Gail Edelman said softly, looking gently at Ms. Morris, perhaps to avoid looking at Mickelsson, “I suppose one might argue that the problem's partly one of sped-up modern time.” Her hands made a tent on the table in front of her. Her voice was an almost inaudible tinkle. “As Professor Mickelsson has often pointed out, morality is based on reality, including our knowledge that our conduct has future implications.” She smiled a weak, frightened little smile, perhaps intending to tell Ms. Morris in advance that eventually she meant to support her position. Gail's dark hair was cut short, her Irish-Jewish features perfect, china-doll-like, beautiful in the way a museum piece is beautiful. Her eyes—black irises, and whites that were faintly blue—were astonishing. It had occurred to him, the night of his drunken visit to her, that Helen of Troy might have had such eyes; they were as striking, in a different way, as Jessica's. The girl said, “The problem is, when social roles and social premises are changing with lightning swiftness, as we all know they are, these days—when one cannot tell what the acceptable and defensible norms are—one's wisest choice may be to argue one's own life-necessities, since …” She looked down, as if troubled by a mental conflict. “Of course the difficulty is that, in acting in a way that seems best for the self, leaving the welfare of the other to the other's self-defense, that is to say, the future, we may in fact be poisoning our
own
future self. …” She broke off, the outside ends of her eyebrows sinking, as if she were convinced that no one would understand her. No one ever did, no one ever had. She allowed the tent shaped by her two frail hands to collapse.

Mickelsson said, though not entirely sure what she was trying to say, “That's a good description of the problem, I think.” He swept the table with a glance, then focused on the hands of the Polish girl, knotted in front of her, on her notebook. Her tightly pinned hair seemed more frizzy than usual, the lawless ends catching the light, making a kind of halo. He said, “Sometimes, in practice, we're so hopelessly confused about the total situation we have no choice but to act on self-interest. Which is fine of course, as long as we fully understand what's in our interest.” He glanced at Janet Something, who, unobtrusively but not timidly, had her hand up. “Janet?”

“I'd like to know what
you
think,” she said. “I was watching your face—I guess we all were—” She glanced around, then back at him, the barest suggestion of a smile touching her lips. “I guess I think everything Rachel said was true”—she brushed the hair back from her eyes, quickly, stiffly, almost a karate chop—“but I felt something important might be missing.”

He waited, hoping to lure her on.

She seemed to consider waiting him out, then gave way. “I was thinking of that doctor in one of your articles,” she said, “the pro-abortion doctor who became the head of an abortion clinic which performed, if I remember, sixty thousand abortions without a single maternal death.”

“Bernard Nathanson,” he said, and nodded. For the first time he realized that, all this time, watching him, inscrutably smiling, she'd been an ally. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, as you say in your article—I guess probably everybody's read it—Nathanson helped get the liberal 1970 New York State Abortion Statute passed, and then suddenly he quit the abortion clinic.” She shrugged. “That's all I meant to say.” She shrugged again.

“I don't see,” Ms. Morris began, then looked at Mickelsson, betrayed.

Mickelsson looked down at her notecards to avoid her face. “Nathanson's problem,” he said, “as he explained in an article for the
New England Journal of Medicine,
was that the foetuses he and his associates vacuum-cleaned out were alive: living human beings, capable of feeling pain, struggling against death—every bit as alive as newborn babies. Sixty thousand of them. He never stopped believing in abortion, at least in certain situations. He just stopped performing them.”

“But you agree,” Ms. Morris said, her head very still, her dark eyes burning into him, “that an adult female human being is a more meaningful and socially valuable person than a foetus.” No hardshell Baptist was ever surer of his ground. Her troubled eyes insisted on the irony of it all: that it was Mickelsson's own position on the inequality of persons that underlay her argument. “I mean,” she said, inclining her head toward him,
“isn't
a grown woman of more value than an unborn
thing?”

He hung fire. “Sometimes,” he said at last.

She paled. The ex-highschool teacher, C. J. Wolters, looked at Mickelsson, not sure what to write in his notebook.

“I'll tell you a funny story,” Mickelsson said suddenly. He let his eyes rest on the tall, thin Polish girl's hands. “Last spring as I was trimming the hedges around my house”—it was a lie; in fact it was something he'd read in a newspaper—“I disturbed a bird's nest—a robin's nest. An egg fell out on the ground, and when I picked it up it felt heavy. For some reason—I'm not sure why—I cracked it, then opened it up, and behold, what I found inside was a tiny, living bird. I was a little upset. I'm a farmboy, I have experience in these things, and I knew there was no way in the world I could keep that little robin alive—eyedroppers and all that, if they did anything at all they'd just prolong the misery. I didn't want to leave the baby bird to be eaten by snakes or to be found by my neighbor's cat or dog; and though I myself felt pity for the thing—the way it opened its bill to me, blindly hoping behind those sealed-shut eyes—I knew the mother bird would never accept it, now that it had my smell on it. So I put it down gently on the ground and put the heel of my shoe on it and crushed it.”

Ms. Morris stared.

“As I say,” he said, “a funny story.” He opened his hands and raised his eyebrows, apologetic. “It was only a bird.” He smiled, then glanced at the Polish girl, then quickly down. She looked gray. So that was it, he thought. He'd walked into it but good, this time.

“So you're against abortion,” Pinky Stearns said sharply, triumphantly aiming his cigar at Mickelsson.

“I didn't say that, in the first place,” Mickelsson said, equally sharp, perhaps hoping to throw the guilt onto poor Stearns. “I happen to be pro-abortion, within limits. And in the second place, what
I
think has nothing to
do
with it. We're talking about ethics, not personal opinions.”

“No one's mentioned the question of ensoulment,” the mousey brownhaired girl next to Gail said abruptly, but no one, not even Mickelsson—though he heard her—noticed.

C. J. Wolters said, holding his hand up, palm out, to keep Mickelsson from answering too fast, “What I'd like to know is, what should we think about abortion, and why?”

No one seemed aware of the misery of the Polish girl.

Ms. Morris said, “That's what my whole report deals with.”

A mousey blond girl, whose name he did not know, seated next to the mousey brown-haired girl—the blond girl had never before spoken in class—said, bored-looking, speaking in a comically flat Midwestern accent, “All Professor Mickelsson's saying is that if abortion's too casual it's dehumanizing. A society where people can kill people ‘on demand,' so they don't have to go through the embarrassment of explaining why, is a crappy society.” Was her glance at him hostile?

“I suppose that's it,” Mickelsson said.

The tall Polish girl took a slow, deep breath, and still none of them seemed to notice.

“Anyway,” he said, “that's it once we've added in the individual agony, fear, guilt, anger, and helplessness, the things that make abortion a philosophical issue in the first place.”

He suspected that only one of them understood for sure what he was saying. Perhaps “one” not including himself.
All truths are for me soaked in blood.

In the parking lot he found he had congratulated himself too early on escaping the campus without having to deal with Michael Nugent. As he was getting out his keys, preparing to heave himself up into the Jeep, a voice called out, “He was investigating some kind of fraud.”

Mickelsson turned to see who it was that had spoken, not imagining it was himself who'd been addressed. Thirty feet away, in the middle of the asphalt between rows of cars, looking at him or maybe past him, he saw a gangly, rather tall, very white-skinned young man wearing white slacks, blue jacket, a broad-brimmed hat canted over one eye. Perched on the top of a dark van nearby, maybe twenty feet beyond the young man in the hat, he saw a graceful, broadly smiling Negro boy. It was only because he recognized the Negro that he recognized Nugent, then an instant later recognized that the words were meant for himself.

“What?” he called.

“I don't know if it had to do with chemistry or not,” the young man called, “but I know he was investigating some kind of fraud.”

Mickelsson looked down, gathering his wits, wondering why it was here, on the high parking lot overlooking the campus, dark blue waves of mountains in the distance, that Nugent and his friend had chosen to waylay him. It seemed strange, to say the least, that Nugent should wait for him here, in this isolated place, and then shout his information from thirty feet away. After he'd mused a moment, Mickelsson put the keys back in his pocket and walked over to Nugent—since apparently Nugent did not wish to come to him. The black boy went on smiling, his elbows on his knees, then tipped his head up to look at the sky. Towering black clouds were moving in, drawing together, tumbling. Occasionally one of them would brighten with buried lightning, then go dark again. There was as yet no sound of thunder. The trees above the parking lot were perfectly still. In a moment the smallest branches would begin to move, and after another moment it would begin to rain. Mickelsson's shadow fell over Nugent.

“You mean Professor Warren?” Mickelsson asked.

Nugent blinked rapidly, then nodded.

“How do you know?” Mickelsson asked.

“I talked to some people,” Nugent said. It was clear that no amount of prodding would make him more specific.

After a while Mickelsson asked, “Something to do with the university, you think? What was his interest in this fraud?”

Nugent shrugged as if it hardly mattered to him, but his eyes showed interest. They stared straight into Mickelsson's. Disconcerting.

“That's all you know? He was investigating some fraud?”

“I guess that's right.”

Now he did hear thunder, a low, long-drawn-out roll that made him think of his grandfather, in those final years, listening as if God's voice were in the sound.

“You think it was just intellectual curiosity?” he asked.

Nugent seemed to ponder the question, then finally said, “He was a clown, in a way. The sort of person who liked to go on—you know—intellectual benders. I remember he told me he was a member of an ashram in Boston for a while, after he'd abandoned conventional religion—he was at Harvard then. Later, when he was teaching at Riverside, in California, he got into Rolfing and the Alexander method—I forgot what all. I don't mean he was stupid, or just a joker, or anything like that. When I say he was a ‘clown' all I mean is—” He stopped smiling and rolled his eyes heavenward, grotesquely, as if saying what he wanted to say, getting it just right, took total concentration and God's help. “You know how it is in the circus. The acrobat does something, and the clown tries to imitate it, but the clown's not human, like the acrobat, he's just this creature with straw in his head. That's why clowns are at the same time funny and sad: they imitate exactly what human beings do, and if the
Nicomachean Ethics
were right, they really would become human. But no matter what they do they remain just clowns.”

Mickelsson smiled crossly and, still with his head down, looked at the boy up-from-under, reserved. The black boy on the van was still looking up into the darkness of the clouds, watching them with fascination, as if their movement were writing. “I guess I don't really follow,” Mickelsson said.

Nugent gave a quick, eager nod, as if that were completely understandable, exactly as it should be. “I just mean that you have to
believe
things, to be human—you know? You have to feel that things are
true.
A clown is someone who'd give his soul to believe, if he had one, but he never can, he just goes through the motions, harder and harder, to no avail. We laugh at him because we recognize that, in a limited way, that's how we are too. That's what I was trying to say in class, about Kafka and the lost language and everything.”