Life After Genius

by M. Ann Jacoby

  Mead’s father turns onto Main Street and drives past a row of mom-and-pop stores. A pharmacy. A grocer. A hardware store. A five-and-dime. Welcome to lovely downtown High Grove, a mere six hours and three decades away from Chicago. A hop, skip, and a jump into the past. The hearse then passes in front of the largest storefront in town, in front of a row of plate glass windows behind which are displayed a tall chest of drawers, a floor lamp, and a sofa. And hanging above these windows is a sign that reads: FEGLEY BROTHERS INC. FURNITURE. CARPETS. UNDER TAKERS. The hand-painted sign has hung there for a couple of generations. Mead’s father turns into the alley just beyond these windows and parks in the lot behind the store where Mead’s uncle Martin is waiting.

  Mead slides down in his seat. Shit. He had forgotten all about his uncle, something about which he is not at all proud. Another indication of just how messed up his life has become in the past twenty-four hours.

  “It’s all right, Teddy,” his father says, peering down at Mead from on high, “I told him you were home.” But this only makes Mead feel worse.

  He slides back up, peers out the window, and smiles at his uncle, but the man does not smile back. Instead, his uncle looks straight through him, as if Mead doesn’t even exist. He opens the back of the hearse and pulls out the gurney. Mead’s father and uncle lock heads to discuss the deceased —time of death, age, approximate weight —then roll Delia onto the freight elevator. After another short conversation, Mead’s father walks back to the hearse, peers in at his son, and says, “He’d like you to join him downstairs.”

  Shit. Mead would rather his uncle find another way to get back at him. Like screaming in his face and calling him an ungrateful, self-centered, egotistical spoiled brat. At least Mead could take that, knowing that he has it coming. But this, this is beyond the realm of getting back; this is pure cruelty. “I can’t, Dad. Sorry, but I just can’t.”

  His father walks back over to the elevator to relay the message. Uncle Martin stares at Mead with hate in his eyes, then the elevator door closes and he is gone. Only then does Mead get out of the hearse and follow his father through the rear entrance into the store, stepping abruptly back in time to his childhood.

  Ten thousand square feet of sofas and coffee tables and dining room suites, of bed frames and mattresses and dressers and rockers, of floor lamps and carpets and caskets, distributed over three floors. That’s Fegley Brothers. Unchanged from as far back as Mead can remember. When he started elementary school, fitted with his first pair of prescription glasses, Mead used to pretend the store was a castle and that he was the young prince who would one day inherit it. On the first floor, he would crouch behind bookcases and entertainment centers, pretending they were trees and that the forest was filled with bandits. He’d pop up from behind sofas brandishing a yardstick as if it were a sword and fight them off. On the second floor, he would jump from bed to bed, pretending that he was leaping over rivers filled with jaw-snapping alligators, then he would ascend to the third floor where the king kept all his riches, where closed caskets sat on raised platforms under klieg lights and looked to the young Teddy Fegley like treasure chests filled with gold. The only place he did not play was in the basement. The dungeon. The place where the king kept his prisoners chained to the walls and fed them only water and gruel. The place where the young Teddy Fegley’s imagination really soared. This was where he consigned the boy in first grade who tripped him in the hall, laughed, and said, “Can you see the floor, Theodore?” And the girl who gave him, on Valentine’s Day, a shoebox containing the corpse of a bird. “Is it dead, Ted?” she said, and then ran off to join her coterie of tittering friends. But the king had the last word and he sent to the dungeon all those who dared betray the trust of the young prince.

  Floorboards creak under Mead’s feet as he now crosses through the back office and peers out onto the showroom floor. Standing in the middle of the showroom, talking to a customer, is Lenny, a balding, middle-aged man of indistinct features. A fixture at Fegley Brothers as permanent as those klieg lights on the third floor. Mead realizes, with a bit of a shock, that he doesn’t know the man’s last name. He has always referred to him simply as Lenny. A man of many talents: salesperson, deliveryman, pallbearer, gravedigger. If something needs doing, Lenny is the guy who will get it done.

  “So how does it work?” Mead asks his father.

  “How does what work?”

  “The store. How does it work?”

  “Well, customers come in, select a piece of furniture, and we deliver it to them the following day.”

  Mead gives his father a sidelong glance. “Thanks, Dad, for that illuminating description.”

  “I’m sorry,” he answers back. “Was that a serious question?”

  Mead gazes at a display of six walnut chairs seated around a matching dining room table but sees instead the dean, standing at the podium. He sees him tap a piece of chalk against the lectern until the auditorium quiets. He hears him apologize to the assembled mathematicians and then make up some excuse as to why today’s much-anticipated presentation has been called off. Mead sees the attendees rise from their seats and head for the exits. Some of them are angry, some are merely disappointed. One of them is utterly surprised. Then the auditorium is empty. Quiet enough to hear a pin drop as the end of one life gives birth to the next.

  “Yes,” Mead says. “Yes, it is a serious question.”

  HIS FATHER STARTS HIM OFF with the accounting books, with lists and lists of incoming and outgoing merchandise. With columns of numbers that need to be added and subtracted, multiplied and divided. After running through the basics, Mead’s father hands him a pile of balance sheets and asks if he wouldn’t mind looking them over and checking for errors. “After all,” his father says, “you’re the mathematician.”

  Mead is offended. Is this what his father thinks he was doing up there in college all this time? Adding and subtracting simple columns of numbers? Well, he couldn’t be more wrong. Mead spent most of his time thinking in the fourth dimension, a concept around which he doubts his father could even begin to wrap his mind. But then Mead catches himself with the realization that he is directing his anger at the wrong person —again —that his father has not a clue that his request is insulting, because all he knows is this store, that furniture out there, these columns of numbers in this ledger book. And they mean as much to him as the zeros of the zeta function mean to Mead.

  Meant.

  “Sure, Dad,” he says. “I’d love to.” And the thing is, it actually ends up being kind of fun. Playing with numbers. Like hanging out with old and trusted friends. Everything else in Mead’s head —all thoughts of the dean and Herman Weinstein and the presentation that never quite happened —empty out to make room for those numbers. And before Mead knows it, two hours have passed and he has found a dozen mistakes that add up to over two thousand dollars’ worth of outstanding moneys owed to Fegley Brothers Inc.

  “Well, would you look at that,” his father says, holding up the ledger book so Mead’s uncle can see it with his own two eyes, the man having just emerged from the basement where he spent the better part of the morning with Delia Winslow. His eyes are blurry and unfocused like a mole’s; his body ripe with a mixture of sweat and formaldehyde. “Look, Martin, at what Teddy did.”

  “That’s great,” Uncle Martin says. But he barely gives the ledger book a glance. Pushes past Mead into the bathroom behind the office to take a shower. Slams the door shut.

  ON HIS FATHER’S SUGGESTION, Mead heads over to the five-and-dime to pick up sandwiches at the lunch counter. As if saving the family business two thousand dollars on his first day on the job isn’t enough. As if fetching food might better salve his uncle’s still-open wounds.

  His first day on the job. That’s sort of what this is, isn’t it? The first day of the rest of Mead’s life and all that crap. Wow. This is not at all how Mead thought his life would turn out —and it most certainly isn’t what his mother had planned for her genius so
n —but it’s okay. There are a lot worse things in this world a person could be than a furniture salesperson slash undertaker. Like for example, a parasite. As defined on page 965 of the College Edition Dictionary: par•a•site (pár sı t), n. 1. Herman Weinstein. That’s what it says. Swear to god. Or at least it will in the next edition, because Mead intends to submit it.

  The counterman recognizes the sandwich order Mead places and says, “Hey, I know who you are. You’re Lynn Fegley’s son, Teddy.”

  Not in the mood for idle chitchat, Mead says, “Yes, and if you know that you probably also know how testy my uncle gets after an embalming.”

  “I sure do,” the counterman says. “Your order will be right up.”

  Mead gazes out the window to avoid further conversation. It’s a habit he picked up in junior high, after he got promoted from fifth grade to seventh, as a way to ignore the spitballs and rubber bands that flew past his head or pinged off his eyeglasses. A way to pretend that he did not hear his peers saying things like, “Do you still wet the bed, Ted?” He has found that people tend to leave him alone when he is gazing out a window, as if they are afraid to interrupt his train of thought, as if the young Theodore Mead Fegley might be on the brink of making some earth-shattering discovery. Or at least this is what Mead tells himself when he is studying alone in the library on yet another Saturday night.

  Someone is chaining a green Schwinn to a bicycle rack across the street from the five-and-dime, someone with a gray ponytail hanging halfway down his back, someone who closely resembles Mead’s math professor Dr. Alexander. What did the man do, ride his bicycle all the way down here from Chicago? He must be worried, that must be it. He came to High Grove to make sure Mead is all right. To find out why he left. Mead steps over to the plate glass window and raps it with his knuckle. “Hey,” he yells, but the professor doesn’t turn around. “Hey,” he yells again and raps harder, then opens the front door and steps out onto the sidewalk. “Hey! Dr. Alexander! It’s me! Mead!” Finally, the old man hears him and turns around. Only it isn’t Mead’s math professor, it’s a middle-aged lady in trousers and a work shirt. Mead drops his arm. But of course it isn’t Dr. Alexander. How silly of Mead to have thought that it might be. After all, the professor is probably just now finding out that Mead not only skipped the presentation but skipped out of town altogether.

  Disappointed, Mead steps back into the five-and-dime, letting the door swing closed behind him. He looks up and sees everyone seated at the lunch counter staring at him.

  “Friend of yours?” the counterman says.

  “No,” Mead says, embarrassed to have been caught making a public spectacle of himself. He snatches up the two brown paper bags on the counter and hands over the twenty-dollar bill his father gave him to pay for lunch. The counterman rings up the order and says, “Aren’t you supposed to be a genius of some kind?”

  “Ex-genius,” Mead says. “I converted back to Catholicism a month ago.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Keep the change,” Mead says and hurries out of the store before the counterman can ask any more questions.

  NOTHING SOOTHES THE SOUL of the savage beast like food. Whoever said that has obviously never met Martin Fegley. Not only does the man appear ungrateful that Mead got the sandwiches, he seems downright pissed off about it. Like the more Mead tries to please him, the angrier he is going to get. Uncle Martin unwraps his roast beef sandwich and peers between the slices of bread as if hoping to find a dead cockroach in there, something he can add to the growing list of demerits he is compiling against his sorry-assed nephew.

  “So how did it go?” Mead’s father asks Martin.

  “Not too bad,” he says, smelling like a mixture of Ivory soap and formaldehyde. He leans back in his chair and sets his feet up on the desk.

  Lenny has also joined them for lunch. He’s sitting in a chair next to the window that separates the back office from the showroom floor, so he can keep an eye out in case a customer should come in.

  “I got to her before rigor mortis had a chance to set in,” Martin says as he chews on his sandwich, “so I didn’t have to do too much massaging of the extremities. She was a little stiff around the knees and ankles, though, due to arthritis.” He takes another bite out of his sandwich, chews and swallows. “But I tell you, I’m always amazed how much blood comes out of these little old ladies. It’s as if they’ve been hoarding it, like cat food, for a rainy day.”

  “I helped, you know,” Mead says. “I didn’t just sit in the car. I helped transport the body to the hearse.”

  Martin takes another bite and washes it down with some soda. “The other thing about little old ladies is that few of them have any teeth left. If they come to me without dentures, then I’ve got to stuff their mouths full of cotton before stitching their lips shut. So they’ll look good, you know, at the funeral.”

  “All right, Martin,” Mead’s dad says. “That’s enough.”

  “Cotton. It’s an embalmer’s best friend. Yup. Nothing plugs up the ol’ anus better than a good wad of cotton.”

  Mead knows what’s going on here: His uncle is trying to gross him out. And as much as he hates to admit it, the man is succeeding. In spades. Mead throws down his sandwich and storms out of the office. Pulls open the back door and steps out into the parking lot, fuming. He considers walking back to the house —after all, it’s only seven blocks away —but decides against it because the only thing waiting for him back there is the six-legged creature. Then he considers his other options and realizes that he has none. Not a one. Because of Herman.

  The back door opens and Lenny steps out. “I thought I might join you for a breath of fresh air,” he says. “You mind?”

  Mead doesn’t answer, instead he sits down on the parking lot bench. Why there’s a bench in the rear parking lot, he has no idea. Perhaps it is here for this very reason: to blow off steam whenever Uncle Martin starts acting like an ass. How many times has Mead’s dad come out here to do the exact same thing? Not that he ever needs to blow off steam. Not Mead’s father. Everything just rolls right off that man’s back. It’s some set of parents Mead got. On the one hand, there’s his father with his calm, cool reserve; and on the other, there’s his mother with her high academic expectations. Shit. Between the two of them, Mead has no wiggle room to be human at all.

  “So what’re you doing?” Lenny says.

  “Trying to stay out of my uncle’s way.”

  Lenny sits down on the bench next to Mead. “No, I mean what’re you doing here in High Grove? Ain’t you supposed to graduate next week?”

  “Birds are supposed to fly south for the winter,” Mead says, “and flowers are supposed to bloom in the spring. Days are supposed to be long in summer and corn is supposed to be harvested in the fall. But I am neither a bird nor a flower nor a day of the week nor an ear of corn.”

  Lenny smiles, the kind of smile someone wears when he hasn’t understood a word of what has just been said but thinks he should have. And he won’t ask Mead to repeat it because he’s afraid it will make him look stupid. It’s another habit Mead picked up in school —talking in metaphor —to deflect questions he did not wish to answer, like whether or not he had a date for the senior prom.

  “You’re right,” Lenny says. “It ain’t none of my business.” And hands Mead the sandwich he left half-eaten inside.

  Mead takes a bite out of it and chews angrily. “Does Uncle Martin always talk like that at lunch or was this a special performance for my benefit?”

  “He has his good days and his bad.”

  “Please tell me this is one of his bad days.”

  Lenny stands up. “Time heals all wounds.”

  “Where’d you read that, in a fortune cookie?”

  Lenny smiles, then heads back into the store.

  Now why did Mead have to go and say that? After all, he isn’t mad at Lenny. Shit, Mead is acting more and more like the insensitive, self-centered prick his uncle thinks he is. And he isn’
t. Really, he isn’t.

  SAMUEL WINSLOW IS STANDING on the sidewalk in front of Fegley Brothers holding a navy blue dress up to the plate glass window and knocking on the door, which has been locked since the close of business half an hour ago. Mead’s father crosses the showroom to let him in and Samuel hands over the dress, saying that he’d like his mother to wear it at her funeral. The two men then head up to the third floor to select a casket. Lenny is busy pushing a broom around the showroom floor and Uncle Martin has already gone home, so for the first time all day Mead is alone.

  He sits down in his father’s chair and leans back. If he were still up in Chicago, Mead would just be getting back to his dorm room, the biggest day of his life behind him. And lying there, on the other bed, would be Forsbeck, his roommate. Sound asleep at six o’clock in the evening. Getting a little shut-eye before heading out to spend the evening with a dozen or so of his best friends. Mead glances at the phone on his father’s desk and thinks about calling his room at the dorm. About waking up Forsbeck to ask if the swelling under his eye —where Mead punched him —has gone down. Or maybe he will call Dr. Alexander instead. He could tell the professor how he thought he saw him on Main Street in High Grove with his bicycle. How Mead momentarily forgot that the professor was still limping around with one leg in a cast. He’d like to ask the professor if he is disappointed in Mead for skipping out on the presentation. Or angry. Or worse.