An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Page B

people.” The sooner the barbarians understand that the better. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.
    No spirit exists.
    I surprised myself with this realization and, disturbed, sat up in bed, switched the lamp on, and lit a cigarette.
    I don’t have time for philosophy. I could use a sister’s counsel.
    Summertime shudders quietly to its close. Four days pass, and not a sign of him. “I need some time alone,” he whispered. This is not true. “If you get bored, take a few pills.” Thanks for everything.
    The solitude was very much my own, with a freshness to it like that of the first sweet air of the day, the air you breathe through a half-open window at dawn.
    I want to hear your voice.
    But nobody comes and I am left to my own resources.

24.
    Because Joe was a notoriously hard person to buy gifts for, I asked him what he wanted for Christmas.
    Joe answered, “What do you mean? As compensation what for?” Joe demanded. Ignorant and lazy though he must have found us, he remained sweetness itself. “Come and sit here, dear,” said Joe persuasively, patting the sofa at his side. He is the embodiment of resilience, joie de vivre, and possibility. “In a recent survey a group of old people were asked if they had any regrets about their lives, and the majority of them said they regretted that they had been so virtuous.” Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it. The reasonable man, he insisted, achieves nothing. “You cannot train children to be good citizens of a state which you despise.”
    That, I think, is the right kind of attitude. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would warn, “One should not try to surpass one’s father in diligence; that makes one sick.”
    He was soon writing Eleanor again. For too many years he had closed his eyes to Eleanor’s activities, but now he would make it his business to take more than a casual interest. “I do hope you’re having a wonderful time, darling,” he wrote.
    A letter from Eleanor followed. She felt that Joe was surely being destroyed. “Come to Spain with me, end of September,” said Eleanor brisk and practical. “You know, Joe,” she said,
    “I don’t mind what you do, if you love me really. Women are not like men.” There is, I believe, something just the tiniest bit smug in that statement. “What about this father of yours?”
    The next day the bitch came. Her gaiety had returned. She behaved flawlessly. “Hello, sweetheart. You see I did as you asked me to,” she said. “As you know, I do my best to please you.” I doubted that. “All my life I’ve done everything to excess:” that was her motto, and her method. Certainly there was arrogance in this attitude. Maybe a chemical imbalance is the root to her bitchiness. For Eleanor, the racket and disorder, the weariness of constant travel, were bad enough, but the meals were the worst trial of all.
    Presently the lad stood in front of her, wildly excited. She said a few words to him in Yiddish.
    That is when he leans forward and kisses her. He was still a little spellbound by gaudiness. She is absurdly young, hardly twenty years older than he is, and seems all the time to be getting younger, or at least not older, so that he has the worrying sensation of steadily catching up on her. A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed cloudlike leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.
    Her eyes, however, saw nothing; they had suddenly been suffused with tears.
    But Joe said it didn’t matter and made her sit down by the fire. He has a distressing habit of saying quietly to those with whom he is familiar the most shocking things about himself and others, and, moreover, of selecting the most shocking times for saying them, not because they are