“Easy there,” his father says. “You don’t want to break it.”
“Why!” Mead yells. “Why didn’t you just accept the fucking scholarship? There isn’t another human being on the face of this earth who would turn his nose up at free money. Why you? Did you do it to make me feel indebted to you? Was that your way of getting back at me for not becoming an undertaker? Would it really have been such a goddamned terrible thing to do? Why? Tell me why you did it!”
His father sets down the dishtowel. “That’s what you think? That I refused the university’s offer of a scholarship to punish you?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know what to think, not anymore.”
Mead’s father pulls out a chair and sits down at the kitchen table as if he is suddenly very tired. As if the wind has been knocked out of his lungs. Mead feels horrible. Why did he just say that? Why is he tormenting the poor man? After all it isn’t his father who betrayed him; it’s Herman. He should apologize. Take it back. Beg his father for forgiveness. But he does none of these things. He just stands, frozen in place, waiting for a response.
“I suppose that I was upset,” his father says. “At first, when I first realized that you wouldn’t be following in my footsteps. It’s every father’s dream, of course, to have a son just like himself. But I knew better. You see, it was my father’s dream too. He wanted me to be a carpenter. My very first memory is of whacking my thumb with a hammer. I think I was three at the time.” He shakes his head, remembering. “I never got the hang of it. Never much enjoyed that kind of thing. Martin had an easier time of it. He was more like our father. Good with physical things like hammers and saws. They got along great. That is until Martin hit his teens, when he got it in his head to become a ballplayer.”
“What?” Mead says. “You mean Uncle Martin wanted to be a baseball player? Like Percy?”
His father laughs. “Ironic, no?”
“Don’t tell me: Henry Charles wouldn’t let him.”
“It never came to that. Martin wasn’t as good as Percy. But it was a bone of contention between them for quite a few years. And, I am ashamed to say, I took advantage of that fissure in their relationship. I ingratiated myself with my father the only way I knew how, by taking an active interest in the other half of his business.”
He stops talking and rises out of the chair. Picks up the discarded dishtowel and gestures for Mead to continue washing. Which Mead obediently does. Picks up another plate, soaps it, and hands it to his father, wondering where this is going, impatient for an answer to his question. But he keeps his mouth shut —for a change —because Mead hasn’t spoken with his father like this in years. No wait, make that ever.
As his father dries the plate, he continues to talk.
“I hated everything about it: the formaldehyde, the dead bodies, and all those sad people. I was throwing up every day. I must’ve lost ten pounds that first year. But I never let on to my old man how miserable I was because that was the only way I knew to get his nod of approval, by working alongside of him.” He places the plate on the cupboard shelf. Nods at the sink. Mead washes another dish and hands it to him. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I never wanted you to think you had to be a certain way to gain my approval. I guess that’s also why I turned down the scholarship. Because it was important for me to pay for your education myself. To prove to myself that I could be a better father to you than my old man was to me. That I could fully support my son no matter what vocation he chose.” He sets the dried plate in the cupboard and waits for the next one.
“I wish you would’ve told me all this three years ago.”
“I didn’t realize it was necessary.”
“It wasn’t,” Mead says and picks up another dish. “It just would’ve been nice to know.”
WHEN THE PHONE RINGS, Mead’s father answers it expecting Martin or Mead’s mother to be on the other end with an update on Jewel. But as it turns out, it’s neither of them. “I have to go out,” he says after hanging up. “Mrs. Schinkle just passed.”
“Now?” Mead says. “She couldn’t have waited until tomorrow?” But he is only kidding. Or at least half-kidding.
“I’d like you to stay here,” his father says as he pulls on his jacket. “I’d like someone to be here when Martin gets home. To stay with him overnight.”
“Sure thing, Dad,” Mead says.
His father starts out the front door, then turns back and says, “I still want us to sit down and talk, Teddy. I want to know everything.”
“Okay, Dad.”
His father looks at him a moment longer, then steps outside and closes the door.
MEAD IS CLEANING THE LIVING ROOM when his uncle comes through the front door. He waits to see if his mother will come in behind him but she doesn’t. Mead pulls back the curtain and looks out just as she is driving away. A wave of anger rolls over him. Surely she knows that he is still here. Mead’s father must have told her. She could’ve at least poked her head inside and asked how he was doing. If he needed any help. But no, she’s still mad at him for coming home. If Mead wants to get her sympathy, he will first have to graduate from college.
He drops the curtain and glances at his uncle, who is hanging his jacket in the front closet. Not knowing what to say —or if he should say anything at all —Mead goes back to doing what he has been doing for the past four hours. Cleaning. He empties an ashtray into a lipstick-stained coffee cup then sets the ashtray back down on the table.
“That’s not where that goes,” his uncle says.
Mead looks up. “I’m just cleaning. You can put everything back where you want tomorrow.” But as soon as he starts for the kitchen, Martin steps over to the table, picks up the ashtray, and moves it six inches to the left. It irks Mead but he lets it go. After all, this is his uncle’s house and he can put his stuff wherever he damn well pleases.
After emptying the ashes into the garbage can, Mead soaps, rinses, and then sets the coffee cup in the drying rack. Martin comes into the kitchen and sits at the table. Mead thinks to ask his uncle how it went but he already knows the answer. Not well. Nothing like that ever goes well. And since Mead can think of no good reason to make his uncle relive the experience, he says nothing. Instead, he picks up the dishtowel and starts putting away the remaining dishes.
“That’s not where those go,” his uncle says. “You’re doing it all wrong. The cups go over there and the plates are supposed to go over there.” And he gets up and starts emptying out the cupboard, stacking the clean, dry dishes on the dirty, wet counter.
“Leave it be,” Mead says. “It’s late. We can move stuff around tomorrow.”
But Martin ignores him and keeps pulling dishes out of the cupboard, stacking them on the counter. “You’re getting everything all dirty again,” Mead says, growing more and more annoyed even though he knows he has no right to. “Stop, please.” But Martin keeps going. Even when he runs out of room. He stacks the dishes too high and then one of them falls into the sink of soapy water. “Uncle Martin,” Mead says. “Stop. You’re making a mess. I just cleaned all these dishes.” And he grabs his uncle’s wrist. Martin yanks it free and, when he does, the dish in his hand falls to the floor and shatters. “Goddamn it, Uncle Martin. I just finished cleaning this place up!”
The instant the words are out of his mouth, Mead regrets them. Shit. He waits for his uncle to get mad, to call Mead an ungrateful spoiled brat. Instead, he looks up and says, “It’s all wrong. The room they put her in, the walls are white. Pink. The walls should be pink; Jewel loves the color pink. And there are no curtains on the windows. It’s cold. It was a cold room. How is she supposed to get better in a cold, white room?”
“I don’t know,” Mead says, a cold sweat breaking out across the back of his neck. Shit. His uncle should have checked into the room next to his aunt. Why didn’t Mead’s mother make him? He thinks to call his father, to call for help. But he can’t. The man already has his hands full. And Mead sure as hell isn’t going to ca
ll his mother. Shit. He’s just going to have to deal with this on his own; something Mead feels woefully underqualified to do. But this isn’t some rich, spoiled kid at school he’s dealing with here. It’s his uncle. And so Mead takes a deep breath and lunges ahead. “It’s a hospital, Uncle Martin. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
His uncle loses interest in the dishes then and sits back down at the table. “I should’ve gone to one of his games.”
“Excuse me?”
Martin stares at his hands. “He sent me tickets, you know. Me and his mother. She never knew because I threw them out. I think that’s why he performed so poorly, because he didn’t have our support. It’s my fault he got released at the end of the year, my fault he came home, my fault he hit that tree.” Martin looks up. “Do you know where he should have been that day? In Arkansas for spring training. He could’ve been a professional ballplayer. He was that good. If only I had given him my support. It’s all my fault.”
He’s thinking about Henry Charles. That’s what it is. He’s thinking about how his own father didn’t support him as a young man. He’s beating himself up because he didn’t do better by his son than his father did by him.
“Percy had a job interview, Uncle Martin. That’s why he was up in Chicago. He’d decided to become a sportswriter. It wasn’t your fault. He was okay with how things had turned out. He was moving on. It wasn’t your fault, it just happened.”
Martin continues to stare at Mead.
“Hayley Sammons told me. Yesterday. She’s the only one he told.”
Martin pushes back his chair and stands up as if he is mad. As if he is going to hit someone or something again. But he doesn’t, instead he walks out of the kitchen. He walks over to the staircase, turns around, and beckons with his hand for Mead to follow.
“I’ll come up later,” Mead says. “After I finish with the dishes.”
“Forget about the goddamned dishes, Teddy, this is more important. Come. Now.” And he proceeds up the stairs.
Reluctantly Mead takes off the kitchen gloves and follows his uncle, stands at the base of the staircase and looks up. Martin waves again then disappears down the hall. This can only come to no good, but Mead ascends the stairs anyway. At the top, he finds his uncle standing in front of Percy’s closed bedroom door. “Come on,” he says, opens it, and disappears inside.
Shit. Now Mead is sure this is a bad idea. Nonetheless he follows his uncle.
Percy’s room looks pretty much like the rest of the house. Untouched, it appears, since the day he left for that job interview in Chicago. His clothes are lying about on the floor and draped over furniture. Posters of baseball players are taped to the walls. The bed is unmade. It is a typical teenage boy’s room. It appears as if he has just stepped out and will be coming back any minute. How many times have his aunt and uncle come into this room and had that exact thought?
Martin waves Mead over to the dresser against which a baseball bat is leaning. A mitt hangs from one of the drawer pulls. Martin picks up a framed picture that is sitting on top of the dresser. It contains a photograph of three rows of men dressed in baseball uniforms. “That’s him, right there,” Martin says and points. “See?”
Mead takes the photograph and gives it a closer look. In the back row, all the way off to one side, is his cousin, squinting more than smiling into the camera, his left shoulder cut off by the picture frame, but he’s there, all right: a member of the team.
“Every time I look at this picture,” Uncle Martin says, “I wonder who that boy is. I mean I know he’s my son. I know he grew up in this house. I know I clothed and fed and educated him, but I don’t know who he is because I never took the time to get to know him; I was too busy seeing who I wanted him to be and not who he really was.”
Mead doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.
“You know where I was today?” his uncle asks.
“In St. Louis. Picking up supplies.”
“I went to Busch Stadium. I sat in the bleachers all the way up near the top and watched them play.” He taps the photograph. “When Percy didn’t get re-signed, I thought it was God’s way of making things right, of telling my son it was time to come home and fulfill his family obligations. I thought Fate was on my side. I thought He wanted what I wanted.” Martin shakes his head. “I come in here five, six times a day to look at this picture, to look at that face, to look at the son I never knew.”
“So stop,” Mead says.
Martin looks over at him. “Excuse me?”
“Stop. I mean, what’s the point? It seems to me that you’re just torturing yourself for no good reason at all. Coming in here, looking at this photo, thinking about all the things you could’ve done differently. But it didn’t happen that way. Things happened the way they happened. So what’s the point? It’s not going to bring him back, Uncle Martin. Nothing is going to bring him back so you might as well think about all the good times you two had together instead because, either way, he isn’t coming back. I hate to be so blunt about it, Uncle Martin, but he just isn’t.”
His uncle looks dumbstruck, as if Mead just slapped him across the face. In a moment he is going to come around, though. In a moment he is going to pick up the bat leaning against Percy’s bureau and bring it down over Mead’s head. Blood splattering everywhere. Another death in the family. And in two months Martin will be staring at a photograph of his dearly departed nephew, regretting that he made the wrong decision yet again.
“I think I better go back downstairs,” Mead says, “and finish the dishes.” But as he goes to set the picture on the dresser, something falls partway out of it. At first Mead thinks it’s the photograph, that it has slipped through the frame. But then he looks more closely and sees that it is a fifty-dollar bill, folded in half and tucked behind the picture. Shit. Percy never spent it. He kept it all these years. Half the prize money. He saved it the way one saves a birthday card: not for the cash value but for sentimental reasons. And suddenly it hits Mead how stupid he is. How he wasted all those years feeling jealous of his cousin when the whole time he was the one thing Percy wanted more than anything else in the world: the closest thing he would ever have to a brother.
“I’m so sorry, Uncle Martin,” Mead says. “I don’t know what else to say except that I’m so very, very sorry.” And then he leaves. He’s halfway down the hall when his uncle sticks his head out the door and says, “Hey. Mead.”
He stops and turns around.
“That’s what you like to be called now, isn’t it? Mead?”
“Yes,” he says.
“So, Mead, how would you like some help with those dishes?”
14
REAL VERSUS IMAGINARY
Chicago
Nine Days Before Graduation
MEAD’S HAND SWELLS UP OVERNIGHT and in the morning it looks more like a catcher’s mitt than a human appendage. Forsbeck’s face has fared better, partly because his girlfriend made him apply an Icy Hot pack to it right away and partly because his face is a lot more solid than Mead’s hand.
“You oughta get that hand checked out,” the girlfriend says to Mead. She spent the night sleeping in Forsbeck’s bed. Not having sex, mind you, just sleeping.
“Yeah,” Forsbeck says. “And it’s your right hand too. I feel bad.”
“Why?” Mead says. “I punched you, remember?”
“Yeah, but I still feel bad.”
“I didn’t make it up, Forsbeck. There really was a girl in my bed.”
“Whatever you say, Fegley,” he says and exchanges a look with the girlfriend.
It takes twice as long as usual to shower and dress, what with one hand not working at all. Then Mead heads over to the student infirmary. The nurse takes one look at his mitt and orders a university van to transfer him to the city hospital, where X-rays confirm that his hand is not broken, just bruised. “What did you do,” the technician asks, “punch some guy in the face?”
Mead does not dignify her question with an answ
er and instead says, “How long am I going to have to wear this Ace bandage?”
She gives him a non-answer along the lines of “however long it hurts” and a prescription for pain relievers that Mead fills at the hospital pharmacy. Taking orders from his body instead of the instructions, Mead swallows two in the bus on the way back to campus and two more before heading into Epps Hall. As if they were aspirin. Despite it being a beautiful spring day, the building is stifling hot, its radiators not yet turned off. Mead roams the first floor, peering into one classroom after another, making his way from the front of the building to the back. At the far end is the auditorium —the room where Mead is to give his presentation, the largest classroom on campus with a blackboard that extends all the way to the ceiling of the sixteen-foot-high wall, the Madison Square Garden of academia —Mead removes the now well-worn copy of Dynamical Systems from his back pocket and rereads his notes in the margins. This is what his presentation should be about, not the statistical study of zeta zeros that the dean has been advertising. It’s good, that study, very convincing, but this is great. Or could be great, if Mead had more time. But he doesn’t. The presentation is only two days away now and the dean is counting on him. His final grade is counting on it too.
He rolls up the periodical and tucks it back into his pocket, then presses his nose against the small window in the auditorium door and scans the faces of the students seated inside. They look confused, which can mean only one thing: Dr. Kustrup is lecturing. Mead keeps scanning. Row by row. Seat by seat. But before he can get through all the faces, class is dismissed and the students start flooding past him into the hall, faster than he can check out all their faces.
“Mr. Fegley,” Dr. Kustrup says. “What an unexpected surprise. To what do I owe this great honor?”
“I’m looking for Herman. Have you seen him?”
“Why, yes, I have. His father’s in town visiting. We had breakfast together this morning, the three of us.” Then he notices Mead’s bandage. “If I may ask, Mr. Fegley, what happened to your hand?”
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