Mickelsson's Ghosts (70 page)

“A child,” Garret said.

Back at the house they said nothing to the others—it was Garret's wish—of what Mabel thought she'd seen; but in the kitchen Mickelsson told Jessie what Garret had said.

She looked at him, sharp-eyed as a bird. “How did you feel?”

“Well, I was interested, I suppose,” he said. He leaned against the counter, swirling the liquid around and around in his martini glass.

“I should think so.” She moved her hand as if to touch him, then thought better of it. “And you didn't feel anything—at the time she was seeing those things?”

“Or thought she was.”

“Oh, stop it, Mickelsson.” As if to take back the snap of irritation, she did touch him, lightly resting her hand on his arm.

He looked down. “I felt something, yes. A coldness, and fast-moving shadows.”

She asked, “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” Her eyes met his, then skidded.

“I don't know,” he said before he'd stopped to think. “I mean, yes, but—”

She nodded. “It's all right. Stop worrying. Another time.”

“It's just—”

Alan Blassenheim came into the kitchen for ice. He nodded, smiling one-sidedly, apparently thinking well of himself. Behind him, the Swisson woman poked her head in at the door.

“I wonder,” Mickelsson said. Blassenheim glanced at him, seeing whether he was the one addressed. “I wonder what that man in the brown coat was there for. Eerie, somehow.” When Blassenheim seemed not to follow, Mickelsson said, “The man in the waiting room, I mean.”

“What man?” Blassenheim asked.

Mickelsson looked away as if guiltily.

Blassenheim rolled a look back at the Swisson woman; it was for her that he was getting the ice. “I guess I didn't notice,” he said. “I wasn't really paying much attention.”

Jessie met Mickelsson's eyes.

Then Edie Bryant was in the kitchen with them. “Git out! Git outl Everybody in the livinroom!” she called excitedly. “We're to have Freddy at the fiddle and Lady Kate will sing!”

“Thank you, Alan,” Kate Swisson said, letting her head fall limply sideways, taking the glass of ice from him. “Now if I can just find some juice or something.” To Mickelsson she explained, shyly smiling, flutteringly helpless, “It's my throat. It's like this all the
time,
these days. It just scares me to
death.”
She touched her white throat with three long fingers.

“I'll find you something,” Alan said. “I think there's some grapejuice.”

“Alan,” Brenda Winbum called from the livingroom, “are—you—coming?”

“I'm getting Miss Swisson some grapejuice,” he called.

Mickelsson and Jessie moved into the livingroom as Brenda said,
“Mrs.
Swisson.” Her eyes locked angrily on Mickelsson's for an instant. Then, guiltily, she smiled.

As soon as Brenda was out of earshot, Jessie said, “That young lady has a crush on you, Mickelsson.”

“Jessie, that's silly. Look how jealous she is of Alan.”

“That's at least partly for
your
benefit. She's a very proud young woman.” She smiled, sliding a covert look back at Brenda. It was true, he saw, that she valued herself, and for good reason. But then what of Jessie, smiling down fondly at the poor innocent like some serene, possibly dangerous Chinese goddess?

In the corner of the room, with their backs to all the others, Tillson and Garret were in earnest conversation, Tillson's hand on Garret's arm, Tillson nodding, shaking his head, nodding again, speechless with interest.

10

When he awakened the next morning he was aware at once that the room was filled with bright, eerie light, and it came to him that, even as he slept, he'd been aware for hours that it was snowing heavily, a cold blizzard snow, wind whistling around the corners of the house, softly banging the shutters, knocking for admission. When he got up, shivering, and went to pull up the white windowshade, he saw, through the swirling clouds of whiteness, that snow lay deep on the porch roof and down on the lawn below, the road, the slope toward the pond beyond that, half hidden among pines—great unbroken drifts five or six feet deep, maybe higher. Even with the Jeep there was no possibility of his getting to school within the next day or two, assuming school would run, and if the icy snow kept falling and the wind kept blowing, no likelihood of his getting to school all week. All the shadows over his life—Donnie Matthews' pregnancy the darkest of all—must sit tight, bide their time. He remembered “the blizzards in Wisconsin in his boyhood, how he and his cousins had dug tunnels through the drifts—labyrinths, large rooms, windows looking up at white light. Even his grandfather's mood would lighten on days like this. He remembered the cold white light in the old man's study in the manse, how the old man would stand, his shirt very white against the darkness of his suit, his white hands knotted behind his back, bent like a crow toward the window, almost smiling, his odd, bent nose aiming slyly to the left, teeth like a shark's, nostrils flared as if sniffing things his straightforward eyes refused to recognize. His white hair glowed. “God is merciful,” he would say, apropos of nothing, as if the thought were unutterably baffling.

Even now Mickelsson could not quite help thinking of Donnie Matthews. It crossed his mind that this would be the time to go to her, bundle himself up like an Eskimo and laboriously struggle into town. No one else would be there. He could spend the whole day with her, work out calmly what they meant to do. More than the whole day. Several days, perhaps. They would make love, talk, make love, talk. … It was an at once appealing and sickening thought—the struggle into town perhaps the most appealing part of it. He remembered going out with his father and uncle for firewood in the winter, riding on the perfectly silent bobsled behind the shaggy brown Belgians, no sound but the whuff of wind and the creak of harness-leather, the collar bobbing slowly like an old man wagging his head from side to side, listening to music, the crupper now slack, now tight as a muscle cramp. He would explain to her his feelings, how it was not just a foetus but a child, his child and hers—not that he believed that it was knowably his; but no matter. A child. A living, suffering being.

Something silver, the top of a garbage can, perhaps, moved solemnly across the snow, hardly touching it, leaving no track that he could see. He thought of all he ought to do at the university, fight for his department's rights, protect Jessica, among other things—though the threat against her was not yet definite. Strange to say, he felt none of the anger at Blickstein he'd felt last night. Blickstein was, as surely as Mickelsson, an idealist at heart. But he had his job. It was as if years had passed since last night's conversation. He put on his glasses, slippers, and robe, and went downstairs.

The kitchen phone had no dialtone—predictably, he realized, and felt pleased. Here as upstairs, the snowlight was astonishing. Outside the kitchen door, where the woodpile should be, there was a mountain of sugary brightness. It was incredible that just a few hours ago there had been cars outside that door, and that they'd driven home on the road in front, now invisible, markless. Had Tom Garret gotten back to his wife at the hospital? Not likely. But no way to find out—no phone, no means of transport; he owned neither skis nor snowshoes. So he need not think about it. Even to get wood for the stove, he found, he couldn't get out through the back door but had to go out the front door, which opened onto the porch, and lug through deep snow around the side of the house to the woodpile and carry back fire-logs the same way he'd gone out. When he'd carried in four armloads, his boots, his gloves, all the openings in his clothing, were filled with snow.

From the few live embers among the ashes in the bottom of the stove he got a fire going. As soon as it began to warm the room, the cat appeared. The cat stood in the doorway between the study and the livingroom, his large flat head low, tail back, as if stalking, carefully keeping his distance from the Christmas tree, then suddenly, without a sound, ran to the rug between the stove and the couch, looked around suspiciously, then settled himself. Instantly he looked as if he'd been sleeping there for hours.

“That's the way,” Mickelsson said. “Make yourself at home.”

The cat pretended to sleep on.

Mickelsson washed dishes and straightened up the house. The icy snowfall and wind had let up now, only an occasional gust driving a puff of white down the mountainside. He really could make it into town without much trouble. A mile's distance. An hour, an hour and a half at most. He thought of making lunch for Donnie. The Acme would be open, though few customers could be expected to come. He could make her something she'd never heard of, something wonderful but not unduly strange—bifteck au poivre, perhaps. He thought about how she would watch him, half admiring, half cross as he worked in her kitchen; but he continued straightening up the house, vacuuming, dusting, intending to set out but not yet doing it.

By noon the snowplow had still not opened up his road, which meant that there would be no mail today—no bills, nothing from the I.R.S., no angry letters from Ellen or her lawyers. He thought of the mail stuffed in the filing cabinet in his office at the school, another great burden of guilt he could dismiss, since there was nothing he could do: whatever lay there must lie on as it was until God and the county saw fit to clear the roads. Soon, it struck him, there would be a grim addition to the usual—the requests to send essays to stupid magazines, and so forth. Soon he would be getting appeals from the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Jessica Stark, and just after each of them an even-handed letter of information from Blickstein, views from the mountaintop, gentle presentations of the larger picture, palatable ruin.

At three in the afternoon, the phone still had no dialtone. If he was wrong not to call his daughter and (not that he could reach him) his son, he could take no blame for his failure today, could not even smart at their failure to call him. Though the sun moved steadily from southeast to southwest, time was suspended; he need not even think of Donnie. God be with her, he thought, since nobody else was convenient. If God was off fishing in the northeast corner of the universe, or in bed with a cold, could Mickelsson be blamed?

“Maybe,” Mickelsson said aloud.

Toward dusk the wind began to blow much harder and the drifted snow rose in clouds that blotted out the sun—swirling, slate-gray, blasting the sides of treetrunks with sharp needles. As night approached, anxiety stirred in him. It would not do to put off for too long his conversation with Donnie. He tried the radio, looking for a weather report. The whole band hissed and crackled with static, and all he could find was Christmas music, disco, and NPR's
All Things Considered.
He left the needle on the NPR station, then forgot to listen. Classical music came on without his noticing—an all-Wagner program, stirring, full of rattlings and weighty whumpings.

Now that darkness had fallen, the last of his pleasure in the snowstorm fell away. His agitation about Donnie Matthews' pregnancy—above all, his vexation at her daring to lay the whole freight of it on him and at his own fatuous acceptance of the burden—began to confuse itself with worry about his son, until now always so restrained and level-headed. Perhaps he was still that, but sorely provoked. What if there should be some slip-up? (He got up, heavy-legged, carrying a book—he couldn't remember having picked up the book or sitting down with it—and began to move through the house, pondering what he should move on next.) What could one do—actually
do,
within the limits of sane and humane liberalism—to block or expose the monsters, idiots and enforcers of the nuclear power industry? Could any politician, ever, anywhere, be shaken out of the dim-witted reasonableness and willingness to please that had gotten him his job in the first place—the turtlebrained patience or stupidity that enabled him to sit for months and years hearing sworn delaying and obfuscating testimony from the soft-spoken, nattily dressed nuclear devils—the new breed of extermination-camp scientists, the new breed of spectacle-rims-and-tooth-gold bankers, dutiful Eichmanns of the investment community—while every day new plants went up, and new patents for solar, wind, and wave fell before the threats, trickery, and cash of the hell people? He could feel his face reddening with anger as he thought about it. Partly Wagner's fault, probably, his heavy brasses still poleaxing the night. Mickelsson's hands clenched, squeezing the book, and his breathing grew labored. R. M. Hare had been wrong about the Nazis. The fol-de-rol of the Aryan aesthetic ideal—Wagner's—had been a ruse in support of a much more ancient and familiar human goal: unlimited pig-greed. Hitler was alive and well at Seabrook, and the rules had not changed. Survival of the fattest. What made one furious, of course, was not that these people were unfit to live. It was that only by becoming spiritually and morally one of them could one beat them. So it was that, by ever-quickening evolution, the species went from bad to worse. Good luck, my son! His anxiety scuttled back into musings more abstract and safe, not unrelated: thoughts of the tragically accidental human brain, so huge and self-absorbed that it was cut off from every vitality around it, even its loves, even the flesh and bone machine in which, complaining and scheming, it mushed from here to there and, dully, back.

Poor Mark! He looked up as if startled from the book he had been staring at, not reading. He was standing exactly in the center of one of the empty bedrooms, reading (or not reading) on his feet, like old Lawler. Outside the windows it was now deep night, the storm still woefully howling. On the radio a huge-voiced soprano was ranting. Thesis-antithesis: he remembered one of his son's gestures, how he would slide his hand lightly back and forth on the tabletop as he sat leaning forward, explaining in his soft, ever-reasonable voice the economics of death by radiation—for instance how eventually every stone of a nuclear power plant must become radioactive, too “hot” for human beings to handle, how the whole thing must be buried by machines that must then follow the plant into its grave, and how not one penny of the company's operating costs was set aside for that inevitable eventuality, though the expense would run to the millions. As he set forth, calmly, lucidly, his vision of the future—a world cheated and defiled, poisoned forever by present man's stupidity and greed—his fingertips moved smoothly back and forth, again and again, like easy-going skaters on a long, narrow pond in the country. Mickelsson's grandfather, similarly calm, had had, by comparison, only trivial images of Satan's majesty.