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 ri
ght 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?”
“I’ll ask her,” Garret said, smiling. “Off-hand, it sounds great.”
“Nothing fancy,” Mickelsson said, waving his pipe. “Just a few friends.”
As they rejoined the group at the auditorium door, Edie Bryant was saying, smiling, her wattles shaking like fringe, “Well, Jessie, there they are, two people sharing a talent. I’ll grant them that. Now, Phil and I, we’re as diffrunt as night and day. Outside the sanctuary of the bedroom, all is war.” She winked at Jessica, wicked. Bryant smiled, raising his jaw a little to put on more dignity. Tom Garret, arms folded over his chest again, looked down at the carpet, grinning to himself.
“Phil,” Mickelsson said, “and Jessica, I wanted to ask you this too.” He took her elbow. “I’m having a little party on December twelfth; that’s a Friday. If you’re free that night and you’d like to come—”
Jessica smiled as if wonderfully surprised and pleased but drew her arm away.
For reasons Mickelsson didn’t fully think out, the second half of the concert annoyed him much less than the first. He could have found reasons enough, of course. There was the distraction of Jessica’s emphatic coolness beside him, as if he’d somehow insulted her—whether by leaving her for a smoke outside, or by showing too little respect for Art, or by some other mistake, heaven knew. In any event, the discomfort she caused him made the music seem comparatively unworrisome. He glanced at her occasionally, showing his puzzlement, wordlessly asking for explanation; and though she didn’t see fit to explain to him, she did at least partly relent, patting his hand, then returning her own hand to her lap and resting it with the other.
And part of his increased appreciation, no doubt, had to do with the effect of the music on the Blicksteins’ young friend. She listened with such a rapt expression—head lifted, one diamond ear-ring shooting off needle-sharp arcs of colored light—that it occurred to him to wonder if perhaps the young woman was herself a musician, hearing things inaudible to the common ear. He made a greater effort to feel what the others were feeling. He began to nod, furtively tap his toes inside his shoes, raise his eyebrows in appreciative surprise, smile when those around him smiled.
Once he turned his attention to it, the whole idea of using “serious” modern musical devices (“tone rows,” “clusters,” whatever musicologists would call all this) for comic purposes seemed to Mickelsson rather interesting. Mickelsson knew nothing about the details of music. For all his Lutheran heritage and his father’s special love of singing, he himself had never been musical, as a child; in fact he couldn’t carry a tune. Not that he hadn’t made efforts to inform himself; part of his game was writing articles in aesthetics. He’d read an occasional book—a life of Mahler, another of Berlioz, the memoirs of Shostakovich. But he would hardly have ventured an opinion on Mahler, Berlioz, or Shostakovich in the company of musicians.
Yet for all that, as he listened to the Swissons’ music he began to develop a theory.
The devices Britt Swisson used in his compositions were mainly of the kind an ordinary, uneducated listener (like Mickelsson) would describe as “noise”; discord, scrambled rhythms, an occasional little passage of what might have been jazz, another that might have been the slightly “off” thumpings and poopings of a German town band—passages leading nowhere, ripped from their context, not so much “music” properly speaking as fragments of sound, glittering objects from civilization’s music dump. Surely these devices had entered the vocabulary of contemporary music in the first place (he reasoned) because they gave expression to feelings left unsatisfied in the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic tradition descended from, say, Bach and the eighteenth century. (It was true that in philosophical circles the emotion/expression theory of art had been taking quite a beating lately; but Mickelsson’s money, despite the current fashion, was on Collingwood and his gang.) And surely those unsatisfied feelings—the loss, alarm, paranoia, and vulgar passion in modern music—were none other than the emotions the Enlightenment repressed: the universal or at least very common human sense of vulnerability, encircling chaos, cosmic indifference. Discord and noise, in other words—bits of musical chaos partially ordered by the composer but allowed to stand as chaos, uncancelled or reformed—Being in the rift—were the musician’s expression of the godless, all-but-universal modern world-sense: the rage and alarm of an accidental consciousness stripped of its comforting illusions. It was fitting, it struck him now, that Kate Swisson should have said to him, all righteous sobriety, “Britt and I don’t believe in ghosts” but also it was the usual modern bullshit, for what was the meaning, intentional or otherwise, of Swisson’s comic use of devices invented out of fear and anger if it was not mockery of the devices by misapplication, to demonstrate, by mimicking them, how childish they were in their existential wail—to reveal them, without mercy (but also with no hard feelings), as theatrical rant and hand-wringing? Once all pretensions to tragic grandeur were dashed, once the very scream of “the ungodded sky” was shown for what it was, a self-regarding Waa, what could be expected but—what else was possible than—a return to good humor, classical sociability in place of the Romantic yawp? In other words, “Ideals,” as one used to say—value assertions with rounded edges—rushing up into the world as from a wellspring? (To say “We don’t believe in ghosts” was an act of truly shocking vulgarity. Who was ever quicker to talk about ghosts than the civilized, the effete genteel, the English? Only the opposite assertion, “We do believe in ghosts”—except if it were said by a madwoman—could be more vulgar.)
Little by little Mickelsson came to be so taken by his theory that he began actually to enjoy the music, even its overwrought performance. Tentatively, he smiled, nodding his approval. He knew well enough how Ellen’s theories, many of them published in Modern Drama and The Educational Theatre Journal, could make crap intellectually majestic; and he remembered how, when they’d gone to Cornell to decide whether or not Mark should go there, and had visited the conspicuously expensive art museum, Mark had said, looking around at the sculptures, paintings, drawings, and photographs, “Any freshman that comes here would know right away that it’s all stupid, but I bet you after four years of art education, he’s not sure anymore.” Mickelsson knew, in other words, how aesthetic theory can steal the wall from the aesthetic object. Nevertheless it seemed to him that his theory of the Swissons’ music was right, not just concept juggling, not just an exercise, on his part, of the age-old human inclination to make peace with even the most outlandish opinions of the tribe. True, it was possible that the stuffiness of the place had mellowed him: audience heat and the scarcity of oxygen made it harder and harder to keep from yawning. And no doubt he’d been influenced by pity for the Warren woman. It was always tempting to reason away the defects of an essentially benevolent community. Nevertheless he smiled and nodded now—even raised and lowered the toes of his shoes—with firm commitment. Jessica glanced at him, still reserved, even sulky, but tentatively pleased by the improvement in his attitude. He considered reaching for her hand. The same moment, he saw, close to the stage, right in front of Katie Swisson’s teal-colored shoes, his student Alan Blassenheim. The sight of Blassenheim warmed Mickelsson’s heart almost as a glimpse of his own son would have done. The young man’s dark, soft-looking hair, set off against the stagelights, had purple highlights and a rainbowed halo at the edges. Mickelsson was reminded of the half-despairing Jesus in the dust-obscured picture from the workroom floor. It was true, he reflected; Blassenheim was a classic case: the desperate good boy, eager to please, lifted up beyond the physical now, devoted to the Best, whatever in the world the Best should prove to be. His devotion alone witnessed to its existence. Perhaps it was the same with his son. Ah, the pity! With all one’s heart one longed to give young people
the key to it all, but … He saw in his mind the blackened wooden cheesebox and its cargo of rust-pitted, hundred-year-old keys, keys once so precious that someone had actually buried them in a wall! He shivered, smiled, then stifled another yawn. Blassenheim had his head turned, apparently conscious that Mickelsson was behind him. Mickelsson bowed across the intervening rows with exaggerated sociability.
Automatically, when the song ended and the applause began—he couldn’t remember a single note of it—Mickelsson joined in.
“Cheer up,” Jessica said in his ear, possibly meaning to injure—her scent rushed to his heart—“it’s almost over.”
“I like it,” Mickelsson said. “They’re very good.”
She gave him a sidelong, utterly inscrutable look.
He smiled, clapping on, thinking about her anger and the scent of her perfume, distinct, yet too subtle to identify with any earthly flowers, landscape, weather. …
Kate Swisson bowed and bowed, left, right, center, smiling at the students in the front row. Alan Blassenheim, broad-shouldered, handsome as a latter-day Hercules or Apollo, clapped with his hands above his head, like a Greek dancer. At last the audience stopped applauding and settled back for more. Mickelsson glanced at his watch and thought, mistakenly, that it had stopped.
The clinking of the piano suggested one of those dread-filled moments in a horror film, or an awesome shot in a space-buster, star sparks plummeting toward the camera. With a wild look of either madness or terror, Kate Swisson wailed in Spreehstitnme,
“In the timelessness,