“Beautiful house,” Mickelsson said.
“We like it,” Blickstein said, warmly grateful.
Talk filtered down from the livingroom and, from somewhere to their left as they started up the stairs, kitchen sounds, blurry as sounds under water. As Mickelsson’s eyes came up level with the room he saw, indistinctly, gathered in small groups here and there, some seated, some standing, the usual crowd—the Rogerses; the Bryants, in English; Tom and Mabel Garret, in philosophy; one tall, young couple he’d never seen before, both blond and scrubbed and ill-at-ease; and over on the couch, just looking up at him from intense conversation, old Meyerson and his wife and—Mickelsson’s heart paused, thoughtful—Jessica Stark. They both smiled. Tillson, Chairman of Philosophy, was not present.
“You know everyone here, I take it,” Blickstein said; then, tipping his head in the direction of the young couple and raising his hand like a classy waiter offering a table, “Have you met the Swissons?” Mickelsson drew his eyes away from Jessica.
The new couple bowed formally, exactly together, shyly smiling. The woman had a long white neck and huge eyes. When she blinked it was something from Walt Disney. Mickelsson approached them, extending his hand. “Peter Mickelsson,” he said heartily. He spoke, he realized an instant too late, as if he meant to overawe them. Blickstein’s influence frequently did that, made him clumsy. As the young man reached out, slightly effeminate, for Mickelsson’s hand—giving him that covertly eager look, boringly predictable, Swede meeting Swede—Blickstein delicately poked his head in between them, saying, “Britt Swisson’s a composer—you may have heard of him—and Katie here’s a soprano. They’re the catch of the year, believe me!” He winked. Now the young woman took Mickelsson’s hand, squeezing his fingers much more firmly than her husband had done, her oversized eyes not meeting Mickelsson’s, gazing instead at his tie, as if perhaps there was a spill on it. Her skin had a waxen look.
“Glad to meet you,” Mickelsson said, somewhat lowering his voice. “I look forward to hearing your work.”
The young man smiled, glancing at his wife. He had dark vein-shadows in his forehead and on the backs of his hands. The flesh under his eyes looked bruised.
Blickstein asked, rapidly brushing his palms together, looking up at Mickelsson, “What are you drinking? We have pretty much everything, I think.”
He asked for a martini and, as Blickstein hurried away, delighted by the choice, moving as if weightlessly for all his bulk—ritually touching people’s elbows as he passed—Mickelsson returned his attention to the couple. He was aware that, behind him, people were beginning to talk again. Fred Rogers’ wife appeared with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. Mickelsson accepted one, a pastry shaped like a butterfly, with some kind of spicy meat on it.
The young woman’s name had already escaped him. “So you’re new with us,” he said. The Swissons bowed and smiled, two china figurines.
“We just arrived last week,” the woman ventured, as if speaking took great courage. Her voice was soft, like a young child’s. “We’ve been touring, you know.” Her eyes blinked shut, then opened wider.
“You haven’t found a house, then?” Mickelsson asked.
“Noooo,” she said, and smiled hopelessly, her head tipped sideways, like the head of one of those divinely meek saints in a fourteenth-century painting. Her husband, when he smiled, revealed bad teeth—yellow fissures and pits. It was a startling effect, as if a beautiful-woman mask were removed to show a skull. As they talked about housing in Binghamton, Edith Bryant edged in on them, a woman of over sixty, maybe close to seventy, red-headed and merrily wrinkled, bold-featured as a puppet. She was licking sauce or cheese from her fingers.
“You should just taste this, Peter! Hmm-huh! Dee-luscious!” Her voice was husky, intimate; her whole face twinkled. She cut her eyes up at Mickelsson coyly. “Ah we to understand that you really plan on livin out in those Endless Mountains?” She turned in a spasm of camaraderie to the Swissons, insisting on including as many as possible. “Don’t ya’ll just love that name—the Endless Mountains?” She insisted on the slightly self-mocking ya’ll as urgently as she insisted that they all have a wonderful time—a little-girlish grand old lady craning her powdery face toward the Swissons, eyes sparkling still more brightly, throat-cords straining. Fixing again on Mickelsson, she crooned, “I bet you just love it, Peter. The Endless Mountains! Isn’t that something from Poe or Hawthorne? Romantic gloom and all? I am most certain Zarathustra would approve!” (Edie Bryant was, she would tell you if you asked her, just a plain old gal from Atlanta. Here people were well-to-do. Her husband, who seemed much more classy, vaguely Bostonian, hailed from Pittsburgh. He had not worn, tonight, his Tyrolean jacket.)
“I suppose he would,” Mickelsson said carefully, not wishing to be drawn too far.
Blickstein arrived with his martini, with two immense olives, and Mickelsson took it from him, bowing.
Edie touched the Swisson woman’s arm with her fingertips and threw a bright, seductive look at Blickstein to make him stay. Blickstein waited, obediently smiling, furtively tucking in the front of his shirt. “Peter’s found himself a farm that overlooks the very Susquehanna!” She cast her eyes toward an imaginary mountainscape, her head drawn back grandly, her right hand—fingers aflutter—drawing in the mountains’ details. “Well, I for one approve! Ya’ll know that’s where Coleridge wanted to have his colony? And where Captain John Smith found those Indian folk that were the model for Rousseau’s ‘Noble Savage’? And to think!“—her attention was on Mickelsson again—“you live right there, on that river so romantically, so very poetically yearned after! Why just the idea makes me cry!”
“Wonderful place to live!” Blickstein said, shaking his head as if with envy. “Wonderful! Oh, excuse me.” The shirt and belt were where he wanted them now. He backed away, remembering some errand.
Edie flashed her smile, permitting him to leave, then, rearing back, fastened her jewel-bright eyes on Mrs. Swisson. “Listen, honey, why don’t ya’ll drive down sometime and see it all,” she challenged. “Might truly inspire you. So much beauty! And when the leaves get themselves into autumnal dress—my! It’s rather like Vermont, only broader.” Her head swung toward Mickelsson. “Peter agrees with me, don’t you?”
“I guess that’s a pretty good description,” he said. Though he forced a smile—he did in fact like her: the brazen energy of the woman, the tyrannical insistence that they be merry—he felt like someone listening from beyond the grave, come back for a visit, weighed down, faintly pained by the trivia of all he’s lost. Not that he blamed Edie. (It occurred to him now that he’d missed some party she’d invited him to. He could not have said by what subtle gesture she reminded him of it. She bore no grudge, she was letting him know; but she hadn’t forgotten.) Why was it important, he wondered, that they all have a wonderful time?
Again Edie touched the Swisson woman’s arm, though the woman had shown no sign yet of fleeing. Edie’s eyes enlarged with interest. Her tightly curled, orange-red hair glittered, metallic, each hair exactly the same color as every other. Her head trembled a little with palsy. “I b’lieve one might call it spiritual country—though to my mind it’s downright peculiar, what with the Mormons starting up there and all. Why, Peter, you’re dwelling on holy land! That’s where Joseph Smith had those divine visitations, where those fabulous tablets were given into his very hands.” She scrunched her face up to a self-scorning smile. “I know Peter knows all that stuff.”
“They’ve got a monument I drive past,” Mickelsson said. “Small, pretty shoddy. You’d hardly notice if it weren’t for the historical marker.”
“Mercy no!” Edie agreed, and now it was Britt Swisson’s arm she fondly reached for, widening and brightening her eyes again. “And there’s more. That’s not the whole of it by a long shot! Did ya’ll know there are oodles of Pennsylvania Dutch out there? Entire villages of witches of the most vicious order?”
“Is that true?” Britt Swisson a
sked, glancing up at Mickelsson and raising his glass.
“When you get to know Edith—” Mickelsson began.
“I swear to God,” she blurted, pretending indignation, reaching out as if to bat at him. “It’s forever in the paper!” She caught Fred Rogers eavesdropping on the conversation and quickly brought him in on it, frantically waving at him. “Wait just a minute. You help me out, Fred. Fred will tell you the God’s truth,” she explained to the Swissons. “Fred’s a historian, he knows everything.” She smiled, mocking both herself and Fred, but, all the same, bursting with pride, smug about being his friend.
“What’s the debate?” Rogers asked, smiling, leaning his silver head into the group, one shoulder forward. He had a face shaped for pathos, even when he smiled; a long sad-clown mask gently bearing up under the sorrow of things.
The Swissons glanced at each other, each timidly hoping the other might answer.
“It’s true, isn’t it,” Edie said, “there are Pennsylvania-Dutch witches in Susquehanna?”
“Witches, Klansmen, rattlesnakes …” Rogers waved his drink, indifferent and mournfully amused. To the Swisson woman he said, “I heard your recital the other night. What a sweet, sweet voice!”
Her face lit up, and her husband smiled, once again revealing the pitted, patched teeth, and slowly raised his glass, looking down. Edie Bryant leaned forward, fascinated. “Oh shoot!” she said, her false teeth clacking, “I missed it!”
Mickelsson backed off, looking critically at his nearly empty drink, then drifted as if aimlessly toward Phil Bryant and Tom Garret, who were discussing, as usual, university politics, or anyway so it appeared from their expressions. Maybe this time it was whales, or the horror of having to choose between Carter and Reagan. That was the main subject everywhere, these days. Even if the survival of the world depended on it, as some people claimed (Mickelsson had his doubts), it was a dreary business. Before he’d moved far enough to have fully committed himself to their conversation, he paused, drained his martini, ate the olives, and glanced around. Jessica Stark, still talking with the Meyersons, caught his fugitive glance in her direction, gave him a little wave, and smiled—one quick, brilliant flash—then returned her attention to the old people. She looked, as she always did at parties, expensively handsome—a burgundy dress cut low but made modest by a lacy white blouse, her deep brown, slightly graying hair swept up and pinned with an ivory comb. Though her complexion was dark—heavy tan over her freckles (Jessica had a mother in Florida, he remembered)—her cheeks were flushed, as if she’d been running. Her eyes, in the shade of her dark lashes, were pale tonight, a lucid, unearthly gray. She sat as if riding the couch sidesaddle, bent forward with interest, bringing her height down to the level of the old people. Her back was supplely curved in a way that made him think of pictures of beauties from the twenties, though the curve was less extreme, her knees together, prim—somehow falsely prim, he thought, like a tomboy dressed up in silk stockings and diamonds—and she made no flapper’s pretense that she was less than, as they said on TV, full-figured. Above all what made her no twenties beauty was that rich darkness set off by her strange, gray eyes—a darkness of gold and browns and amber, lustrous as the sherry in the glass dangling forgotten in her dark right hand. When she laughed she tipped her head back, baring her throat, and a dimple appeared on one cheek, flickering like light. The famous David Meyerson sat far back in the couch, bleary-eyed, cackling, saying something in Yiddish—“bobbe-myseh”—flapping a hand at Jessica. A gleaming, gray plastic hearing aid protruded from one large, liver-spotted ear. His wife, beside him, smiled vaguely, timid as a mouse.
“Refill?” Blickstein asked, appearing beside Mickelsson and taking the glass from him before he could answer.
“Thank you,” Mickelsson said, then on second thought followed the dean toward the kitchen. Behind him he heard Tom Garret saying “Why not believe in dragons? If they really were a possible evolutionary move, hydrogen sacks, helm of terror, and all the rest—” He would be grinning with wide, innocent eyes and squirrel cheeks, his chin lifted as if willing to take a punch. “Oh, faddle, Tom!” Bryant said in his English-professor voice, sweet and deep as a bass viol, “give a little credit to human imagination!” If Mickelsson had known they were talking of dragons (Garret often did that, something of an embarrassment in a representative of the Philosophy Department), he’d have gone over and put in an opinion.
Blickstein’s wife, Gretchen, was at the stove, pink-faced and anxious, peeking under a pot-lid, holding in her right hand a glass of wine over ice. Perspiration glistened on her forehead. At the sink a tall, slim, auburn-haired girl in a black dress and white apron stood scrubbing pots and pans. She had the water on, plunging down through steam. She looked too old, somehow too classy to be a student, but he couldn’t think why else she’d be working for the Blicksteins.
“Oh, Peter,” Gretchen Blickstein said, smiling as if he’d caught her at something. “How wonderful to see you again!” She lowered the pot-lid, wiped her hands on her apron, and reached out to take his. “Let me look at you!” she said, and tipped her head, smiling fixedly. Her hand, like the rest of her, was plump and soft.
Blickstein, at the refrigerator, poured from a sparkling glass pitcher into Mickelsson’s martini glass. A thick-furred gray cat stood at his feet, looking up into the light from the open refrigerator door. “You know Agnes Warren?” Blickstein asked, inclining his head in the direction of the girl at the sink. “She’s helping us out tonight. Agnes, this is Peter Mickelsson. Philosophy.”
The girl turned her head, brown eyes flashing a look of what seemed hatred.
“How do you do?” Mickelsson said, taken aback.
“Fine, thank you,” she said softly, almost inaudibly, and returned her fierce attention to her work.
With the side of his foot, in a movement as soft as the cat’s fur, Blickstein pushed the cat away, then closed the refrigerator door.
“Now you boys go back out and mix,” Blickstein’s wife said. “Dinner will be ready any minute.” She smiled and waved her hand, shooing them.
He took the drink from Blickstein and, after one glance back at the auburn-haired girl, moved with him into the livingroom. “The young woman, the one that’s helping you,” Mickelsson said, then hesitated, hardly knowing what he meant to ask, “is she … a student?”
“It’s an interesting story,” Blickstein said. “Well, interesting is not quite the word. You don’t recognize the name? Warren?” He whispered it.
Mickelsson raised his eyebrows.
The dean smiled, or rather winced, giving his head a little shake. “Remind me to fill you in.” He broke away, hurrying over to Tom Garret and Phil Bryant to check their drinks, then pick up the empty hors d’oeuvres tray from the glass-topped coffeetable. Mickelsson paused to sip his martini and survey the room, then for some perverse reason went over to Mabel Garret, the hardest woman in all Binghamton to talk to. She stood at the bookshelves, head bowed, reading titles, her shoulders pulled inward inside her shawl—dull black as a Bible—as if she were cold. Darkness seemed to come out of her, though he knew it was only her habit of hiding where the light was most dim.
“Hello, Mabel,” he said.
“Hello.”
“How are the children?” She had ten of them, all adopted—blacks, “native Americans,” Vietnamese, children with handicaps. Her children were all he had ever gotten her to talk about, and then never more than a sentence or two. He wondered if she ever talked to the children themselves. He supposed she must—not that she would need to, necessarily. She emitted a kind of enfolding warmth, for all her remoteness and secrecy. A weird lady—as if some mist-covered bog had taken human shape.
“Fine,” he thought he heard her say. She glanced up, briefly smiling, giving him a definitely significant look, though God only knew what it signified. She often gave him significant looks, as though there were some secret bond between them, perhaps something from an earlier life. She believed in
such things.
“And you’re fine?” he asked.
She studied him for an instant, then returned her attention to the books, not answering. Much of what Mabel Garret did was, by ordinary standards, rude. Suppressing a flicker of irritation, Mickelsson glanced across the room at her husband, still talking in his soft, upper-class South Carolina accent with Phil Bryant. Dean Blickstein stood listening, smiling down at Tom Garret eagerly, tensely, as if ready to grapple with him—all in fun, of course. He was tucking in his shirt again. Mickelsson sipped his drink, then turned his attention to reading the backs of books.
“You should go talk to Jessie,” Mabel Garret said.
When he looked at her, she was reading book titles as before. He wondered if conceivably he had only imagined that she’d spoken. He raised the martini, thoughtfully sipping it, studying the side of Mabel’s face.
The table was dazzlingly bright, like a field of ice and snow: crystal glasses, cut-glass candlesticks, gleaming china and silverware, pure white linen napkins and tablecloth. He thought of the communion table of his childhood. Steam poured up from the serving dishes or formed droplets on their shiny lids.
Mickelsson discovered, not exactly to his surprise, that Jessica had been placed beside him. He would be conscious all through dinner of not brushing against her arm. Jessica handled the seating arrangement well, he’d have to grant. She smiled like an old friend from Boy Scout camp, delighted to be placed where she was, and made small talk, once or twice touching his forearm as she parried some bullying Mickelssonian joke. As quickly as possible—as if to take the pressure off him, sensing the confusion he felt in her presence—she turned her attention to Phil Bryant, seated to her left, asking him with just the right shade of interest about his year abroad. One could feel the charge she carried, some intense native energy; but at the moment she had it closed in, securely capped. He was conscious of how large they were, Jessica and he, in comparison to the others, except for Bryant. It made him ask, when she turned to him again, if she’d ever done anything in athletics. “Only Rugby,” she said, giving him a smile and a slow wink, as if she’d read his mind. Then she turned back to Bryant. (Fucking little tease, he thought.) Once the side of Mickelsson’s knee touched hers, and they both drew back quickly, Jessica giving him a glance, then smiling.