Mickelsson's Ghosts (69 page)

“Peter,” Tillson said, materializing at Mickelsson's elbow, leaning into the group in apparent distress, “I think something might be burning.”

“Good Christ, I forgot all about it,” Mickelsson said, and hurried to the kitchen. Orange light leaped like a movie on the far kitchen wall, projected through the glass oven door. It was not the pastitsio, luckily; only the oil that had dripped over onto the oven. In another minute, the whole thing would have been an inferno.

With the help of Brenda, Jessie, and the Blicksteins' friend—he let no one else see—he cut the pastitsio and set it out on three large plates on the table, then set out the spinach salad, rolls and butter, white asparagus, red wine, and ice-water. Jessie approached the table—she seemed to float—with a lighted taper. When the candles were lighted and Mickelsson could think of nothing more to be done, he dimmed the center-light—he had a brief memory of midnight communion in his childhood—and began herding the crowd into the newly finished diningroom. It had until now been closed off, and it was a startling departure from the rest of the house: white plaster walls, black exposed beams, carefully wedged-in frames and casements, handmade doors and windows of cherry, on the walls above the two old walnut sideboards, dark red tapestries from Mexico, and framed photographs by his son. One would have thought it had cost him a fortune, this room. It had not—though it had cost him more than he could afford. Two hundred dollars to the farmer with the sawmill, for wood. All the rest he'd gotten, at a bargain, from the basement of Owen's store and the local antique store—neither of which, so far, he'd paid.

As he threw open the doors, revealing the feast, the sparkling white cloth, dazzling water and wine glasses, glinting china and silver, tall, fluttering candles over hills of holly—another of Jessie's contributions—a great, breathy
Ah!
went up, almost religious. No one moved for a moment, their faces bright in the candlelight, caught off guard. Jessie stood beside him, her hand on his arm, smiling as if the whole thing were in her honor. Across from them Brenda Winburn stood bent slightly forward at the waist, her hand in Alan Blassenheim's, her face aglow, eyes reflecting the candleflames, her entire being momentarily transformed—her tan darker, blond hair more brilliant—to an at once Mediterranean and unearthly beauty. Kate Swisson bent her long neck, chin lifted, her red lips eagerly smiling, to sniff the food. “Isn't it sensational?” she asked, turning to the couple. Janet Cohen the ever-ready, the one who'd read his book before taking his course, hurried down the table, her eye on the red plush velvet chair.

Now they all began to move toward chairs. “Sit anywhere,” he said, kingly, “anywhere you like”—realizing as he spoke that it was a mistake; he should certainly have set out placecards. Jessie should have warned him. Yet they all made the best of it, laughing, choosing chairs, deflecting attention from his error by commenting on the crystal, the Christmas wreath centerpiece, the pastitsio. The graduate students, except for Janet, chose last.

Mabel Garret came in after everyone else, as if for some reason she'd been resisting—for it was not at the back of the crowd that she came but after the crowd, when it was no longer possible to stay in the livingroom—and after standing for a moment in her black dress, looking in at them, her frightened smile fluttering like a candle, her left hand groping unconsciously toward the doorframe, she quite suddenly widened her eyes, as if someone had touched her from behind, and opened her mouth for a cry that did not come. Mickelsson too was aware of something strange, an inexplicable cold wave, as if a door had been blown open in a nearby room. Tom Garret dropped the napkin he'd been in the act of picking up, jumped back, almost knocking his chair over, and tried to get to his wife, but he wasn't quick enough. There was a sound of rustling cloth, then a hollow thud, perhaps her head hitting, and she lay on the floor unconscious.

Mickelsson was the first to reach her after Garret. “Stay back,” he commanded, pushing away whoever or whatever pressed over him, “give her room!”

“Is there a hospital around here?” Garret asked gravely. Already he was lifting her in his arms.

“What happened?” Edie Bryant called. “I didn't see it!”

“I bet it's low blood pressure,” Ruth Tillson said.
“I
used to have that.”

Hardly aware that he was doing it, Mickelsson moved Ruth out of the way with one arm, then helped Garret carry his wife into the livingroom, then into the kitchen, heading for the back door, the quickest route to where the cars were parked. Tillson had managed to get ahead of them to hold the door open. Jessie ran after them with an afghan. In the starlight her skin seemed stretched over her skull, elegant and alarming. “Wrap this around her, Pete. It's cold out.” She draped the afghan over Mickelsson's shoulder. “I'll call ahead and make sure the doctor's there.” He nodded.

“It's all right,” Garret was saying loudly, over and over, to his unconscious wife, to himself, to the friends around them. “You people stay here. We'll call from the hospital, let you know what we find out.” Then, to Mickelsson: “We'll take my car, it's behind the others. I'll give you the keys after we get her in.”

“I'll bring your coat,” Miss Orinsky told Garret, then ran back to the house.

“Alan, you come with us,” Mickelsson said quietly, catching Blassen-heim's eye. “Help Tom hold her while I drive.”

Blassenheim nodded, one startled jerk of the head, then hurried around them to open the back door of Garret's Plymouth. When they had her inside, her head on Garret's lap. Garret fished the keys from the overcoat Miss Orinsky had just given him and handed them to Mickelsson.

“Be careful!” Jessie said at the car window, bending down to look in. Her skin was waxy gray in the dim light draped from above the back door. For an instant her high-cheekboned, wide-mouthed face subsumed the world. On the dark lawn beyond her, snow was falling. The Blicksteins and Bryants stood half in, half out of the kitchen, their visages dramatic—Edie above all, drawn to her full height, solemn, gray and white, like a death god. The others were at the window to their left, pressing against the glass like children. Mickelsson got the engine started and realized only now that he wished Jessie were going to be there to help. As he backed out, she was already on her way into the house to phone the hospital.

“What do you think happened?” Mickelsson asked as they reached the dark, icy trees at the edge of town.

No answer came from the back seat, and he glanced into the rear-view mirror. Garret was looking straight ahead. If he'd heard Mickelsson's question, he showed no sign.

For half an hour Mickelsson and Alan Blassenheim sat leafing through magazines in the chilly, dimly lit waiting room at the end of the Emergency Room hallway, an enlarged section of the hallway itself, listening to night sounds inside and outside—faraway footsteps, the clicking of fluorescent lights, distant trucks, voices of strangers. Except for a dark-bearded, early-middle-aged man in a brown coat and brown trousers who kept flipping through magazines in a distraught, bewildered way, licking his thumb each time he turned a page, they were alone in the waiting room—practically alone in the hospital, for that matter: there was the stocky, sixty-year-old nurse who'd met them at the door, chattering and solicitous—“Poor little thing! Wait here, please”—and the blond young doctor who'd come ten minutes later—“Tom Mowry,” he said, holding out his hand. They saw no one else. “People complain that the hospital's not adequately staffed,” the doctor said. He pulled his coat off and hung it on a coatrack. “They don't know what we go through just to keep up what we've got. Three of the doctors here have pacemakers. If they had any brains they'd be retired.” Then, rubbing his hands together like a craps shooter, he went into the room where the nurse had put Mabel—conscious now, lying with her eyes closed, her husband seated beside her—nodded a quick, apologetic dismissal to Mickelsson and Alan, then closed the door behind him. They heard voices, and after a few minutes the nurse came out, went down the hall to a room at the far end, then returned to the room where the doctor and the Garrets were. Mickelsson called his house and talked with Gretchen Blickstein, then briefly with Jessie, telling them what little news there was, that Mabel was conscious and the doctor was examining her. Everything was fine at the house, Jessie said. The party was going ahead full-steam, the guests all still in the diningroom. Then Mickelsson sat in the waiting room again, fallen out of time, as he always felt in hospitals—half reading, occasionally glancing down the hall, the rest of the time half listening to voices in his mind, memories or dreams.

Once or twice when he looked up he saw that, in the darkest corner of the waiting room, the man in brown was looking at him, his mouth slightly open, in his eyes a puzzled, troubled look, as if he were thinking of asking Mickelsson some question. Then, changing his mind, the man would straighten his black, coarse hair with his fingers, and look at his knees.

Alan Blassenheim sat bent forward, a
Sports Illustrated
open in his lap, clearly a magazine of no interest to him, though apparently the others were even worse. Each time he turned a page he did it with an irritable slap, then grabbed the edge of the next page as if to turn that too, but on second thought went on reading. Whenever Mickelsson shifted in his chair, however slightly, Alan would look up to make sure all was well.

Mickelsson's eyes began to ache—the only lights were the lamp in the corner by Blassenheim and the dim light, a circular fluorescent, overhead—and he gave up for a while, dropping the tattered
Newsweek
back on the table and lowering his eyelids. He heard—or perhaps only saw, peripherally—the man in brown stir in his chair. Mickelsson glanced over at him and saw him rising, as if with slight difficulty, like a man in light shock, soundlessly moving his lips. The man wandered down the hallway, his steps almost silent—probably looking for a men's room. Near the end of the hallway he opened a door and went in.

Mickelsson once more closed his eyes. He could hear faint, faraway machine sounds—pumps, furnace vents, refrigerators perhaps. Now and then Blassenheim turned a page. Otherwise, silence. He thought of Blickstein smiling with interest as he predicted Jessie's advancing doom, and at the thought he felt a muscle in his face jerk. He heard someone groan, not far away, then realized that, in a kind of doze, he himself had made the sound. He glanced at Blassenheim, and their eyes met. They nodded like strangers on a train; then Blassenheim went back to his reading.

He decided to get up and walk. There seemed no one anywhere, though it stood to reason that on the floors above this one, the first floor, there would be sleeping patients in room after room. Looking in through a windowed door near the end of the hallway he saw the brown-coated man from the waiting room, seated at a glossy table, poring over a book. He had more books piled at his elbow. Mickelsson frowned, wondering what queer drama he was getting a glimpse of. He would no doubt never know. He found the men's room and went in. When he came out again, the man in brown was at the waiting-room end of the hallway, looking out at snow, or looking at his reflection in the glass of the door.

Finally the door of the room where Mabel lay came swooshing open and Dr. Mowry and Tom Garret came out. While Tom came over, the doctor smiled distantly and went to another room farther down the hallway, near where the man in brown had been. Blassenheim dropped his magazine on the table and stood up.

“Everything's OK,” Garret said and smiled. “They're keeping her overnight, just to watch her.”

“I take it you'll stay with her?” Mickelsson asked. “I'm sure we can find somebody to look after your kids.”

“No need,” Garret said, and raised his hand. “I'll run home and see to things, then come get her in the morning. She's asleep now—she'll sleep right through. He gave her a sedative.”

“I'd be happy to babysit,” Blassenheim said. He stretched his chin, self-conscious.

“Really no need,” Garret said. He picked up his suitcoat from the chair-arm where he'd dropped it, then got his overcoat from the rack. Blassenheim went around behind to help him on with them.

“So did they figure out what it was?” Mickelsson asked.

“Yes and no,” Garret said. He took a step toward the door, then paused. “Is this the way we came in?”

Mickelsson nodded, and the three of them moved together toward the door. The man in brown continued to gaze out, a book under his arm. He did not turn as they drew near. “And what was it?” Mickelsson asked.

“Well, it seems she ‘saw' something,” Garret said, and gave them an evasive grin. Mickelsson held the door. They went out into the cold.

“What d'ya mean?” Blassenheim asked.

Garret threw out his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Believe me, if I knew what I meant I'd tell you. She doesn't know herself—I mean, she
does
know, but …”

Mickelsson stopped walking. “What?” he said.

Now Garret and Blassenheim stopped too. Garret's face was still smiling, frozen. “I really don't want to talk about it,” he said. When they went on waiting, not accepting it, he reached out and touched Mickelsson's arm. “She saw a funeral, all right?” He shook his head. “She walked in that room where all of us were standing and instead of seeing us she saw these two people holding a funeral all by themselves.” He laughed.

Mickelsson and Blassenheim waited.

Garret looked down, raising his fist to his lips. After a minute he said, “She took some Darvon earlier tonight—malrotated colon. The doctor thinks it may have been the combination of Darvon and alcohol. That could explain the fainting, too.”

“I see,” Mickelsson said. As he opened the car-door for Garret, he asked, “What kind of funeral, did she say? Who had died?”