Life After Genius (2 page)

“That’s her right there,” the dry-eyed woman says to Mead and points to a black-and-white photograph of three young women. “The one in the middle.”

“Her who?” Mead asks.

“My mother-in-law. Delia. Of course, she was much younger back then. That picture must’ve been taken over fifty years ago.”

Mead leans in for a closer look. All three women are wearing gingham dresses trimmed in white eyelet collars as if they sense a barn dance in their near futures. And each one is holding a fruit pie in her left hand and a prize-ribbon in her right. The sun must have been bright that day because they’re all squinting into the camera.

“That was the year Delia won first place in the County Fair Bake-Off,” her daughter-in-law says. “She made the best cherry pies in the whole state of Illinois. Really. Delia was a genius in the kitchen.”

Genius. Mead flinches at the sound of the word, having never before associated it with pastry. A self-important word. It brings to mind an imaginary photograph, one not hanging on the Winslow’s wall. A black-and-white snapshot of Mead standing next to the twenty-five-year-old Delia, she holding her blue-ribbon pie, he a stack of textbooks. The two geniuses of Grove County.

“Did she win the blue ribbon again the following year?” Mead asks.

“Oh, no. Delia never entered the contest again. She’d had her moment in the sun and wanted to give other women a chance at theirs.”

Or she discovered that she didn’t like it. Being a genius. Didn’t like being separated from the rest of the herd. A target for not only praise but also jealousy. Mead wishes he had met the curly-haired woman with chipmunk cheeks when she was still alive. He feels as if he knows her, or at least understands the ambiguity she must have felt about her genius. He would have liked to have spoken with her. He might have learned a thing or two from Delia about how to handle living life as a genius. Pastry or otherwise.

Which is perhaps why it comes as such a shock when Mead turns the corner at the end of the hall and comes face-to-face with the present-day Delia: a seventy-five-year-old woman with thinning white hair, sunken cheeks, and skin that looks several sizes too large for its occupant. A man is sitting next to Delia’s bed. He stands when Mead and his father enter the room, introduces himself as Samuel, son of the deceased, and apologizes for the stench. “We did our best to clean up my mother before you arrived.”

“No need to apologize,” Mead’s father says. “This kind of thing happens all the time.” Pulling two pairs of latex gloves out of his back pocket, he hands one to Mead. “Put these on,” he says and dons the other pair himself. The gloves are lined with talcum powder and fit Mead like a second layer of skin, but pulling the right one on over his still-sore hand hurts like hell. Through this haze of pain, he watches as his father turns down the bedsheets —and almost gags.

Mead now wishes he had taken his father up on that offer to stay in the hearse. It’s not that Mead hasn’t seen a dead body before. He’s seen plenty of them. But those were the sanitized version of dead, already bathed and preserved. This is different. This is a little old lady in her soiled nightgown. Mead tries to take a breath and chokes. If he’d actually eaten anything in the past twenty-four hours, he’d be heaving it up all over the deceased right now. But lucky for Mead, he hasn’t had any appetite at all since his last conversation with Herman.

“Why don’t you open a window?” Mead’s father says to him as if it was hot in the room and a cool breeze might be welcome. Mr. Calm-Under-Pressure. Mr. Never-Let-Them-See-You-Sweat. Mead would like to tell his father that it isn’t necessary. That he is man enough to take it. But it is necessary and he isn’t man enough. And so Mead throws open the sash and sticks his head out into the backyard, startling the pet dog who isn’t sleeping by the fireplace but watering an azalea bush. A little dog that starts barking its head off when it sees Mead.
Yip, yip, yip, yip.
The damned thing is no bigger than a cat.
Yip, yip, yip, yip.
Reminds Mead of Dr. Kustrup, the chairman of the math department, a man who confuses quantity with quality when it comes to the use of his vocal chords.
Yip, yip, yip, yip.
Mead sticks his tongue out at the dog.
Yip, yip, yip, yip.
The smaller they are, the bigger they try to sound. Seems to go for both dogs and men.

By the time Mead pulls his head back inside, Delia has been transferred from her bed to the gurney and covered with the ubiquitous white sheet. Samuel apologizes again and offers Mead a glass of water. Mead turns it down because of the look on his father’s face. It isn’t a look of disapproval —Mead only gets those from his mother —but of embarrassment. Mead knows what his father is thinking: The family of the deceased has enough on their minds and shouldn’t have to deal with the undertaker’s weak-stomached son.

T
HE RIDE BACK INTO TOWN IS SILENT
. Mead stares out the window of the hearse at the passing houses but sees instead an auditorium full of mathematicians and visiting professors squirming in their seats. Glancing at their watches. Talking among themselves. Wondering where the key speaker is. Why the damned presentation has not yet gotten under way. Mead sees a man walking on the sidewalk but pictures instead Herman, pacing up and down the hall outside of the auditorium, watching his master plan crumble to pieces before his eyes. Mead sees Dean Falconia stride purposefully past Herman and into the auditorium, eyes to the floor, head shaking, trying to figure out what he is going to say to the scholars in the audience who made a special trip to Chicago just so they could witness —with their own eyes —the overwhelming statistical evidence that Mead has gathered that points to the veracity of the Riemann Hypothesis. Important men. He sees Herman walk up to the dean and ask where Mead is. Sees shock register on the young man’s face as it begins to dawn on Herman that there was a third possible scenario to his plan. One that he had not foreseen.

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.”

H
IS 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.

O
N 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 son —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.