Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner Page A

he’d understood had slipped his mind. It was no grave matter; it would be weeks, in fact, before Mickelsson would remember that he’d forgotten.
    At the door, as he was leaving, the old lawyer pinched at his sleeve and cried out, “You’ve been here to Montrose before, Professor?”
    â€œYes,” Mickelsson said, nodding, poking tobacco into his pipe. “I looked at a couple of houses here.”
    â€œYou oughtta run up and see Lake Avenue before you leave,” the old man said. He interrupted himself, coughing, and took out a wadded gray handkerchief to press to his lips. When he’d finished he patted Mickelsson’s arm, old-womanish, his fingers like sticks. “Right up toward the courthouse and bear left by the bandstand. Can you see the bandstand? They use to hang people up there, in the old days.” He smiled, baring his teeth. “Lake Avenue, as I was saying—” He stepped out onto the concrete stoop so he could point the way.
    â€œI’ve seen Lake Avenue,” Mickelsson said, raising his voice. “You’re right, it’s a beautiful sight.”
    â€œPrettiest place you ever laid eyes on,” the old man said. Again he raised the handkerchief to his lips, but no cough came. “Just bear left at the bandstand. Go on, just walk up and have a look at it.”
    â€œI’ve seen it,” Mickelsson said, almost shouting now, stiffening.
    The old man stood with the handkerchief near his mouth, nodding and waiting, smiling as if pleased that the professor had at last been persuaded. Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, the lawyer’s eyes were all gray, swimming iris.
    In the end, with what seemed to Mickelsson himself an abrupt and rather crazy laugh—consciously giving himself up to absurdity and feeling, as he did so, suddenly light, as if someone had switched off gravity—Mickelsson turned, pushed his hands into his pockets, and set off for the bandstand, bore left when he came even with it, then stopped for a moment and stood looking, his hat pushed back. “Nice,” he said aloud, broadly gesturing with his pipe. He waved at the cupolas, the rose-trellised porches, whatever people might be peeking from behind their lace curtains and heavy drapes. “Beautiful!” He laughed somewhat sharply, then put his hands and pipe into his coatpockets, his expression growing thoughtful.
    It was true that the village of Montrose was beautiful—quite remarkable if you came to it from Binghamton, with its vast wrecked-car piles and cluttered freightyards, its four- or six- or eight-lane highways sectioning the town, looking at the scabby backs of poor people’s houses; its grim miles of black, decaying factories and failing warehouses, its trucker stops (Texaco, Shell, Sunoco; between them short-order restaurants, bars, and shoddy little rental stores) mighty Binghamton, blasted by the idiocy of Urban Removal, so that the city’s once-grand old downtown section was like a beautiful old lady with teeth knocked out … though at sunset, in all fairness, Binghamton too could be beautiful in its way, with its thousands of lights reflected in its two wide gentle rivers and sweeping grandly up misty, dark hills, here and there the gleaming golden onion domes, or the paired golden domes, of a Polish church, to the south the brick, glass, and aluminum towers of the State University. After Binghamton, the village of Montrose suggested another reality entirely (neither had it anything at all in common with cracked-voice, puffy-faced, sooty Susquehanna, sister city twenty miles east). Montrose was the mythic American past, westernmost settlement of the Connecticut Land Grant—large white houses set like gleaming palaces or grand old-fashioned inns on broad side-hill lawns or shrubbed, well-cared-for hill-crests, the tallest, darkest evergreens in the world rising along their driveways. Inside each house there were