Mickelsson's Ghosts (47 page)

She nodded, smiling, resting her left hand on Mickelsson's back. “Isn't it?” she said. Mickelsson nodded and smiled.

“Well, I better get back to my place on line,” Tillson said, giving his head an extreme sideways jerk. “God bless you! Happy evening!” He fled.

“Poor Geoffrey!” Jessica said, and smiled.

It was true, as Freddy Rogers had observed at the Blicksteins', that Katie Swisson had a “sweet, sweet voice”—sweet, pure, elegant, and young. But Mickelsson found it unpleasant to watch her. She seemed unhealthily pale, as did her husband at the piano, but that was the least of it. She had a queer way of striking her notes with the tip of her nose and her eyebrows, and she sang bent forward at the waist, hands eagerly clasped, eyes overlarge and bright, as if to say, “Isn't this delightful? Isn't this
fun?”
She wore a narrow-strapped, low-necked teal dress that looked to Mickelsson remarkably like a slip, and on the bun at the back of her blond head she had pinned a dark red rose. Her husband's piano playing was if anything even more self-conscious than her singing. He leaned far back and occasionally shook his head as if to say, “Oh no! Oh no!” or nodded as if to say, “Oh yes! Oh
yes!”
then brought his blond head sweeping forward dramatically, as if to butt the piano, then at the last moment stopped, jerked his head up with an open-mouthed look of astonishment at what he'd nearly done, tossed a smile to his wife, who seemed to take wonderful pleasure in his antics, and leaned far back again as if to make the audience believe it was not
he
who made that curious tinkling in the treble.

“There's the answer to the energy shortage,” Mickelsson whispered. “We could strap some kind of machine to them, run the lights or something.”

Jessica raised one finger to her lips.

He closed his eyes, thinking if perhaps he only heard and did not see, all would be well. But alas, in his mind they bobbed and weaved as grotesquely as ever. When he opened his eyes again and glanced around, it seemed that in all the audience he alone was unenraptured. He leaned slightly toward Jessica and whispered, “Ah, I get it! It's Art!”

She pointedly did not hear him, sitting with her head lifted, smiling with appreciation. Christ but she was beautiful! Fake as hell, just now; but beautiful. He thought of speaking further but decided against it. She seemed actually to be enjoying it, though it was she herself who had warned him that it might be awful. Once or twice she nodded and almost laughed with delight. It was a fact, perhaps, that the whole thing was ridiculous, but he'd better not trust his judgment. Though he'd had only one glass of gin, it had been a good-sized glass, and on an empty stomach. He would give the audience the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, music had never been his language. Spiritual insensitivity, no doubt, like Faust's. Deaf to even the noblest arguments.
See, see, where Christ's bloom streams in the firmament!

He tried to listen to the words of the song, since some of them at least seemed to be English, and after a moment he discovered that it was something old-timey, not Shakespeare, but something vintage:

“Stay me with flagons,
Comfort me with apples,
for I am sick with love!”

Mickelsson threw a look at Jessica, saw that she was still all attention, then slouched down in his seat.

“With lu-uh-uh-uh-uh-uv!”
Kate Swisson sang. Her eyes had that glistening, lidless look embarrassingly common among Swedes.

All around him students, professors, and townspeople listened reverently, as they would listen to the solemn intonings of a Carter, Anderson, or Reagan on TV. Some of the people around him were smiling, little teary glints in their eyes. He sighed. “Don't make a scene,” he cautioned himself. “Culture is not for everyone.” He let his eyes drift again over the audience and suddenly came alert. The brown-eyed young woman he'd met in the kitchen at Blicksteins', widow of the murdered chemistry professor, was here at the concert with the dean and his wife, sitting between them like a daughter, the dean's arm on the top of the seatback behind her, just barely not touching her, nestled against her hair. The young woman sat with her forehead resting on her hand, the elbow on the seat-arm, so that her eyes were hidden, perhaps allowing her to sleep or, conceivably—he smiled at the thought—cry. Then it crept over him that she
was
crying. “Fool,” he told himself, clenching his fist. He thought of how he'd blindly trod on the Polish girl's feelings in his graduate medical ethics class.

Kate Swisson sang, smiling frantically,

“The voice of my beloved!
Behold he cometh, leaping upon the mountains,
skipping upon the hills. …
”

Idiotically, the piano made jumping noises in the bass, and all around Mickelsson, people laughed. He craned his neck, making sure it was not that something had happened on the stage, but no, it was the music; all was normal, if any of this hoity-toity foolishness was normal—the Swisson twins grinning happily, both of them swaying like Muppets on TV. He thought, abruptly smiling, of what Donnie Matthews would think of all this, or Tim. “Faggots!” she would say, and that would be that. But at once he backed off. They were not his people either. As soon as the diningroom was finished, he thought, he must have a party. That would be a good time, as long as the party weren't too close to Christmas. He wasn't quite up yet to full-fledged Christmas feeling.

Perhaps his son would show up, stay for a while with Mickelsson, talking about the nukes, straightening out old problems. It was surely not unthinkable. What rage he must have felt when they'd smashed his camera, what absolute bafflement, given the trust in life Mickelsson had done his best to instill in him. They would talk, perhaps shout, as when Mickelsson had tried to make him not afraid of horses. He saw the horse rearing, his son flying off, terrified and helplessly enraged. Mark had been seven or eight then. It was at one of those riding stables, snowy mountains in the distance. “For Christ's sake, it's only an
animal,”
Mickelsson had yelled, trying to drive his son to courage by pure fury. “I hate animals,” Mark had yelled back, crying, looking wild-eyed, crawling away on all fours from his father as if he, Mickelsson, were an animal, the most dangerous and stupid of them all. Mickelsson cringed, remembering it. But Mark had indeed overcome his fear—had become a fine rider, secretly proud of himself.

Perhaps it was possible. It would make sense, all things considered. Mark would appear from nowhere, like a deer from the woods or the first midwinter robin. He would be bearded, duffle-bagged, loaded down with books and pamphlets. And what if the boy were to meet Donnie? He felt a blush stinging his face.

He must definitely have a party, show off the house. He began to work out in his mind what date the Friday two weeks before Christmas would fall on. Election Day was next week, the fourth. …

Without warning, the Swissons' song stopped, and everyone began to clap. Jessica, beside him, clapped with what surely must be genuine pleasure. Britt Swisson rose from the piano to bow—he seemed almost to be laughing—and the clapping grew louder. From here and there throughout the auditorium came whistles and shouts of “Bravo!” It was, by God, an
event,
Mickelsson thought. The Blicksteins' young woman was leaning far forward, clapping violently. Perfectly together, like two grinning dolls, the Swissons bowed and bowed. Then at last the clapping diminished and died, and Britt Swisson went back to the piano. He and his wife watched each other, nodding to an inaudible beat, nodding like two children about to leap into the flip of a jumprope; then suddenly, exactly together, they started singing and playing. Mickelsson lowered himself in his seat a little and sullenly closed his eyes.
“I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse,”
Kate Swisson sang, her blue eyes round as saucers.

“Who would've believed from meeting them,” Phil Bryant said when intermission came, “that the Swissons would turn out to be comics!”

Mickelsson, for civility's sake, said nothing. He thought again of old Pearson's idea of the Mormon God, alien and terrible, watching the activities of humanity with the detachment of a spider.

“They must've had the
most
fun working up their act!” Edie cried, bending toward Mickelsson and Jessica to make herself heard.

Jessica called back, laughing, “You make them sound like a vaudeville team!”

“But what else?” Edie cried, tossing her curls and merrily batting the air; then, turning to draw in Mabel Garret, “They're a team, Mabel, aren't they? Nobody doubts they're
artistes,
of course!”

Mabel said nothing, smiling rather oddly at Mickelsson, her brown eyes hooded, as if she'd heard some terrible rumor about him and had not yet definitely made up her mind.

“Well I
approve,”
Edie said, dictatorial. “Whatever says that serious art can't be playful? Why, isn't all art play?” She turned suddenly to Mickelsson. “What do
you think,
Peter?
You
know all about aesthetics!”

“Yes,” he said, slightly bowing, like a count, intentionally off register.

She smiled as if it were exactly what she'd hoped he would say, and as she turned back to the Garrets, then quickly to her husband, realizing just an instant too late how difficult it would be to play off doom-faced Mabel, Mickelsson backed off a step, getting out his pipe, and edged into the chattering, smiling crowd, toward the double doors. When Jessica glanced at him, as if surprised at his abandoning her to the Bryants, Mickelsson smiled and held up his pipe as explanation. She made a face, then turned back to Edith.

In the commons outside, it was still snowing, large flakes falling softly, thickly, so that the tower of the Ad Building was a barely visible wedge against the night. Large and noisy as the crowd was, both inside the building and here, spilling out past the doors behind him, there was no one about on the commons. Under the long lines of goose-necked lamps the falling snow bloomed brighter, the whole scene forming some pattern he recognized. It came to him at last: ballet; London; his daughter Leslie in the seat beside him, holding his hand, leaning forward with an expression of intense concentration, taking in the dance just as, once, in Paris or Rome—some old, high-ceilinged, inexpensive hotel—she'd sat up suddenly in the darkness, bending forward intently, as Mickelsson and Ellen abruptly broke off their love-making.

He gripped his pipe between his teeth and raised a match to it. As he did so, it came to him that something was standing just behind him in the darkness, almost at his elbow, though most of the others stayed close to the building, out of the cold. When he turned, he saw Tom Garret smiling at him sociably.

“Oh, hello, Tom,” Mickelsson said. “I didn't know you smoked.”

“I don't,” Garret said, and grinned, holding up both hands to show that they were empty. “Can't afford it; too many mouths to feed. Just came out for the air. Enjoying the concert?” From his cherub, squirrel-cheeked grin it was clear that he, like Jessica and the others, was having a dandy time.

Mickelsson blew out smoke and half turned away. “I guess I must not be in the mood,” he said.

“That'll happen,” Garret said lightly, as if Mickelsson's remark were not evasion but familiar truth. “Sometimes the waters just aren't flowing.”

For some reason the observation stirred Mickelsson's feelings. He was reminded of old John Pearson, marching up and down the mountain with his dowsing rod; and he remembered Pearson's saying, “Seems like the land's gaht a spell on it.” Mickelsson cleared his throat and said, “I see the Blicksteins have their friend with them.”

Garret nodded. “Yeah. I guess they take her everywhere.”

Mickelsson moved closer to him. “Why is that, do you know?”

“You didn't hear?” Garret asked. He brushed snowflakes from his nose.

“I know her husband was murdered. That's about all I know.”

Garret looked out into the empty commons. He stood with his arms folded on his banty chest, stomach thrown forward, and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “That's about all anybody knows,” he said. “Awful thing.” His tone was oddly light, conversational, though it was clear enough that he took the matter seriously. “They'd only been married a month or so, very happy, and so forth and so on.”

“I'm sorry. What was the connection with the Blicksteins?”

“The husband worked part-time in Blickstein's office, some kind of administrative assistant or something—rest of the time in the Chem Department. I guess the Blicksteins got friendly with 'em.”

“And nobody has any idea who killed him?”

“Apparently not, or if they do they're still keeping it under their hat.” He leaned his head way over, looking at Mickelsson. Garret's hair and shoulders were white with snowflakes. “Worst part of it is, it was apparently someone the Warrens knew. I forget the details. The girl was away at the time, visiting her parents or something. Mabel can tell you the parts I've forgotten. Husband was alone in the apartment, let in the murderer, apparently had a chat with him, and so forth and so on. You'd think the police could solve a thing like that.” He shook his head.

“Awful,” Mickelsson said. “Let
him
in, did you say?”

“Him, her, them …”

He thought of asking if it were true that the man was homosexual, then decided against it. Anyway, Nugent wouldn't have been mistaken about that.

In the lobby behind them the lights flicked on and off. Mickelsson put the palm of his right hand over the pipebowl, the palp of his left thumb over the hole in the stem. “I meant to ask you,” he said as they went in together, following the crowd, “I'm having a little party December twelfth, Friday. Do you think you and Mabel could make it?”