Mickelsson's Ghosts (52 page)

Five minutes later Jessica called back. “Hi. Listen, the name of the girl who died was Deborah Vliet, but the people who are suing are her parents. Her maiden name was Sprague.” When Mickelsson said nothing, she said, “Hello?”

“I'm here,” he said. “I guess you caught me off guard. Sprague's the name of my ghosts.” He half laughed.

“Ghosts?” she echoed; then, remembering: “Oh, that. Mickelsson, could you possibly divulge what this is about?”

“Tell you when I see you,” he said. “Have to make another phonecall now—at least I think I do. You wouldn't know where these Sprague people live?”

“I imagine with a little detective work—”

“Never mind, I can do it.”

“All right,” she said, less than satisfied. If she was still full of questions, she contained them. “I'll see you right after your class, OK? You'll be there?”

“Sure,” he said. “Good.” By the time he got to good-bye, she'd hung up.

His second call he made to his neighbor John Pearson. The phone rang and rang. Just as Mickelsson was about to give up, the old man answered. He'd been out in the yard; something about a ram who'd hanged himself trying to break through an American-wire fence. When Mickelsson was able to get around to his question, the old man said, “Shore I know where they live. Right up the road about a mile and a half from me. They're my next-door neighbors except for one place between, Dudaks'. Course I don't see much of 'em. Odd bunch. Wouldn't be suing the doc if they wasn't. Tell the truth, I'm surprised they ever heard about lawyers. But you know how it is. People on Aid know more about lawyers and gettin things for nothin than people like you and me do.”

“Sprague doesn't work, then?”

“Oh, he works accordin to his lights, I s'pose,” Pearson said. “He's old.”

When it was clear he didn't intend to elaborate, Mickelsson asked, “Do you know if they're any relation to the Spragues that lived at my place?”

The line hummed and clicked while Pearson considered the question from various angles, or so Mickelsson imagined. At last the old man said, “I s'pose they musta ben.”

For the first time all semester, Brenda Winburn was talkative that morning, an effect of her romance with Alan Blassenheim, no doubt. Perhaps his admiration gave her the necessary confidence, or perhaps his apparent liking for Mickelsson had seduced her, made her willing to play Mickelsson's game a little. “Did you see the article in Sunday's paper,” she asked, “about the brothers who'd never known each other and were brought to America to be part of a study of identical twins?”

With a nod Mickelsson encouraged her to continue.

Though her look was still distrustful, as if prepared for lack of interest, scorn, or ambush from Mickelsson, Brenda continued with considerable ease and poise, her hands flat on the desk-chair top, one over the other. Her blond hair was drawn back tightly and tied in a bun, giving her small, almost lobeless ears a stranded look. On another day it might have seemed bizarre, but today the aliveness of her face—the blush of love, one might as well call it—made it difficult to think of her as anything but pretty. “One was named Stohr and the other was named something like Yufe,” she said. “One was raised a Nazi, the other one Jewish. They never saw each other since soon after they were born, but when they met at the airport they were both wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and double-pocket blue shirts with epaulettes, they both had little moustaches, they both flipped through magazines from back to front and had a habit of keeping rubber bands around their wrists. … I forget what else, but the similarities were amazing.”

“It's an interesting phenomenon,” Mickelsson said. He added with a smile, lest he drive her back into her reserve, “I'm not sure I get your point.”

The class, taking its cue from him as always, waited politely. Even Nugent seemed to hold down his anger a little, keeping his face passive, his chin resting on his slightly loosened fist.

“Well, I was just thinking,” she said, “maybe when Aristotle was doing all that taxonomy he was aware, to some extent, that things were more set by Nature than his—you know—moral philosophy admitted. Maybe he just didn't make the connection, I guess that's possible. But maybe, setting down those different kinds of fishes and crustaceans or whatever—maybe he had an inkling that human beings have certain basic natures too, and that”—she glanced at Alan Blassenheim—“ideas … all that sort of thing … different kinds of actions … don't really count much. Maybe our ideas and philosophies and all …” She looked down at her hands, calculating whether or not she ought to say it, then looked up and said, “Maybe all that is just cosmetics, if you know what I mean. Sort of just … polite behavior, like when whales or wolves touch noses or chimpanzees groom each other.”

The class looked from her to Mickelsson. He resisted the temptation to take the idea from her and bend it to the purpose of the course. “I'm not sure I follow the argument,” he said.

“It's not an argument,” she said, suddenly smiling, and shrugged. “It's just that, for example, this man Stohr, the one that was raised a Nazi, he was one of those Hitler
Jugend,
if that's how you pronounce it, and when he was young he saw movies that said Jews were cockroaches and had to be gotten rid of, and then after the war when the Russians captured him and made him look at those pictures of the death camps and things, he felt confused and guilty, and he changed his mind to the same extent everybody else did in that situation—he didn't really have any choice at all—but in all the important things, like what kind of glasses and shirts to wear—”

“Important things?” Mickelsson asked, raising his eyebrows.

She smiled, alarmed, and waved her left hand. “You know what I mean,” she said.

Nugent slid his eyes toward her, scornful, murderously impatient.

Blassenheim raised his hand.

“I'm not sure I do,” Mickelsson said, and decided to grant Blassenheim the floor.

“Nobody's saying that killing people isn't important,” Blassenheim said, and threw a look at Brenda to see if his defense was acceptable to her. “The question is why people do it, or don't do it, whichever. We talk about people as doing what they do because they think of it as right, or at least, like, expedient. Like Plato's principle that nobody chooses to do what he thinks will bring him pain. But she's saying—Brenda's saying—maybe that's wrong. Maybe people choose ideas by style, they just sort of helplessly go with whatever's in the stores that season—sort of a general ‘go with the group' adaptation—but when they're dealing with
little,
more
specific
styles, like when they choose their clothes, like their shoes and shirts and glasses, that's more like straight genetic programming.” He sat back and waved his hand, just an interpreter, not committed. Predictably, the class was amused.

“You really think blue double-pocketed shirts with epaulettes are programmed in our genes?” Mickelsson asked.

“You know,” Blassenheim said, “maybe not that directly.” He waved again.

“Interesting,” Mickelsson said, smiling at Blassenheim as if playing chess with him. They'd moved a long way from Aristotle, but no matter. “And what does that do,” Mickelsson asked, “to our theory of the Good? Are moral judgments and aesthetic judgments of the same kind? Are the Nazi ideal of human nature and the liberal ideal just alternatives of taste?”

Though he addressed the question to Blassenheim, it was Brenda Winburn who answered. “It wouldn't necessarily mean absolute values are wrong,” she said. “God might have rules a snake can never figure out.” She leaned forward like a daughter pleading—as if Mickelsson and Reason were stern authorities who could be gotten around by bright eyes and a timid smile. As was no doubt the case. “If some genius figures out and tells us about a divine idea but it's against human nature—how people really are, I mean, with all their programmed individual differences—it can't last, he won't be accepted.”

“Ah!” Mickelsson said, and raised a finger as if shooting the ceiling, “then in effect the ‘moral absolutes' ”—playfully, he put on a German accent—“can exist, if at all, only in the actual behavior of human beinks!”

“Not necessarily,” she said at once, narrowing her eyes. “Only the moral absolutes we're capable of achieving. Maybe that's why people are so restless and weird.”

Mickelsson smiled, his eyebrows lifted, as if unable to believe he'd been beaten fair and square. “Well done!” he said, grinning; and taking careful aim with his index finger, he shot Brenda Winburn in the nose.

Nugent had his hand over his mouth. Mickelsson gathered his books, realizing that he'd been caught, and, seeing that they were out of time, gave a nod, dismissing the class.

As the students were filing out he said to Blassenheim, who stood dawdling, waiting for Brenda to get her pen capped and tucked into the proper compartment of her purse, “It's not fair, you know, you two ganging up on me like that.”

“We didn't really plan it,” the boy said. He stood with his head drawn back a little, smiling uncertainly, as if with part of his mind he would like it to be thought that they
had
planned it.

“Like termites, these students,” Mickelsson said, speaking past the pipe and waving both hands, wiggling the fingers. “They keep coming and coming, and then one day you look around and—no castle!”

Alan and Brenda laughed pleasantly, as if from a great distance, then drifted toward the door, where Michael Nugent stepped aside for them. Mickelsson saw with a sinking heart that Nugent was waiting to ask some question.

“It's interesting the way you handle class,” Nugent said, walking beside Mickelsson as he hurried back to his office. Nugent's long legs moved oddly, yet with a curious grace, like the legs of a giraffe at the zoo. One hand was pressed hard to his chest as if to stanch blood. “I guess I don't understand it, exactly, but it's interesting.” He threw his head forward for a look up at Mickelsson's face. “I mean, you don't really say what's true, really, though you say it in your books.”

Mickelsson remembered his intent to put Nugent on to Nietzsche. “Maybe I don't actually
know
what I do in class,” he said, and smiled.

Nugent waited, floating along beside him with his arms lifted a little—he carried no books today—his face, at the end of his long, white neck, like the face of an alarmed sunflower. It crossed Mickelsson's mind that Nugent's worsted jacket was exactly like his own.

“There's a philosopher I've been meaning to recommend to you,” Mickelsson said, squinting at the boy. “Friedrich Nietzsche. Your remark about the way I teach our class made me think of it. Like many intellectuals, he had a profound distrust of the uses of intellect, or, as he'd prefer to say, ‘consciousness.' ”

Directly ahead of them as they walked down the sidewalk toward the library building, one of Mickelsson's colleagues, Lawler, the Aquinas man, came tentatively barging, walking straight down the middle of the sidewalk, his nose in a book. Edward Lawler was the soul of oddity: though he was apparently not religious, he was a specialist in medieval philosophy. He was short, five-two at most, and unhealthily fat, balding. The little hair he still had was gray. Like Tillson, their chairman, Lawler never wore anything but black—black suits even shabbier than Tillson's. (Sometimes, driving past his house, one would see him on his porch steps wearing his bathrobe, reading a book.) His shirts, on the best of days, had only two buttons left, though it was said that for special occasions he could dress like a prince. Weddings of his most beloved students, funerals …

“Hello, Edward,” Mickelsson said.

Lawler walked on, not looking up.
“V'yanna,”
he said. God only knew what language it was. Lawler was a master of languages. There was hardly a known one he couldn't work out, given time. When they'd walked a few steps further, Mickelsson looked back. Lawler had stopped, belatedly understanding that someone had addressed him, and stood bowing formally, oddly military, still buried in his book.
“Guten Tag!
Hi, there!” Then—still without really seeing them, it seemed—he waddled on. Mickelsson smiled.

“Lawler,” he explained to Nugent. “Brilliant man—philosophy. You must work with him sometime.”

“I'm taking his course,” Nugent said. “You signed me up for it.”

“Ah!” Mickelsson said.

They walked on.

Thinking about Lawler, Mickelsson had completely forgotten now what they'd been talking about. For all he knew, they might by accident be walking toward the market together—except that he noticed that they were heading toward the library building, which fact brought back reality, dimly.

“I'm afraid I forgot what we were saying,” Mickelsson said.

Nugent smiled palely and nodded. “We were talking about Nietzsche—and our class.”

“Ah yes.” He pursed his lips, walking more slowly for a moment. Nugent adjusted his pace. “There was something that bothered you,” Mickelsson said, not remembering, playing the odds.

“Well, they were talking about ‘moral absolutes,' that's all,” Nugent said, “the idea that they're built into Nature, and so on. Which is a long way from talking about values as human assertions. I guess I thought that girl—what's-her-name, the swimmer—was sort of
on
to it, how human beings can see only what they're constructed to see, and maybe it's entirely wrong, maybe green is really yellow, in God's eyes, but since there's no way human beings can know it, it doesn't matter. If our actions aren't
informed,
they're not really actions. I was surprised how you handled it, that's all.”

“Yes, right,” Mickelsson said. “Yes, I remember now. I was saying I may not
know
what I do when I teach. It's obvious that teaching should be thoroughly rational—” He glanced at Nugent to see that he was listening, not brooding on miseries of his own. “But Nietzsche's not convinced—in certain moods, at least—that we're at our best at our most rational.” He raised his hand, blocking objection. “Let me explain. Think about bodily functions. Imagine what it would be like if we had to be aware of the breakdown of fats”—he glanced again at Nugent, asserting his professorial authority—“that is, imagine how it would be if digestion was something
we
had to do. Consciousness, Nietzsche would say, has nothing much to do with what's most efficient in the working of the body. The question, he'd say, is why consciousness is needed at all. Nietzsche acknowledges the phenomenon of consciousness and supposes it developed—‘fortunately'—only late in the evolution of the human species. In other words, he thinks we're often better off without it—playing it by ear, as they say. That's not the
whole
story. It doesn't account for his idea of the ‘true hero'—the poet, philosopher, or saint.”