Life After Genius (42 page)

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

M
EAD’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 answer 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?”

Mead stares at his bandaged mitt as if seeing it for the first time, as if it belongs to somebody else. “Oh, this. I punched somebody for screwing with me but it seems that I punched the wrong guy.”

Dr. Kustrup studies Mead, trying to decide whether or not he should take him seriously. Mead is probably the last person on earth Dr. Kustrup would imagine hitting anyone. And he is right. But apparently they are both poor judges of character.

The professor gathers up his lecture papers, placing them in a spanking new leather briefcase gold-stamped with his initials. It doesn’t really go with the rest of his elbow-patched, tweed-jacket ensemble, looking more like something a CEO would carry into a boardroom. “Is it your birthday today?” Mead asks.

“No, why do you ask?”

Mead nods at the briefcase.

“Oh, this. Isn’t it a beauty? Genuine cowhide. Imported from France.” Dr. Kustrup clasps the briefcase shut and lifts it off the desk, then says, “I’ll be introducing you at the presentation on Friday, Mr. Fegley. Are you excited?”

“I haven’t thrown up this much since I was four.”

Dr. Kustrup laughs. “I’m glad we’ve patched up our differences, Mr. Fegley. For both our sakes. Don’t worry, you’ll do a great job. I’ll see you on Friday.”

Mead waits until the professor has left, then follows him down the hall and around the corner to the men’s room, like a bloodhound following the scent of an escaped convict. Mead hesitates for a moment outside the door, his heart racing with anticipation, then pushes it open and steps inside.

No one is standing at the sinks or at the urinals. Mead steps over to one of the sinks, pulls open the faucet, and lets the water run full blast as he peeks under the doors of the four stalls. A pair of men’s brown oxfords is visible in the stall on the end, trouser cuffs bunched down over them, and a spanking new leather briefcase sits next to them. One pair of shoes, not two. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Dr. Kustrup is in there alone. Herman would have heard Mead walk in. He could be crouching on the toilet.

It’s a gift from Herman. The briefcase. There is no doubt in Mead’s mind. A little something the guy picked up the last time he was in Paris, a bribe for his mentor. It’s all beginning to make sense to Mead why Dr. Kustrup picked Herman. The professor is probably in there right now thanking him. How many other gifts has Herman given Dr. Kustrup? Does he slip a couple hundred dollars to the professor every quarter, buying himself a spot on the honor roll the way he bought his way out of that speeding ticket?

Mead shuts off the tap and steps into the stall next to Dr. Kustrup. The predator waiting for his prey. Or is it the other way around? It’s eerily quiet in here. Too quiet. The professor unrolls some toilet paper from the dispenser and falls silent again.

Mead stares at his bandaged hand. The hand Shirley held on to while she slept, the hand he used to defend her honor. He flexes his fingers and pain shoots up his arm.

Mead cannot believe how stupid he was to have given Herman the benefit of the doubt. To have thought even for a second that Weinstein was the innocent victim in that little bathroom duet. Herman is not a victim; he’s just as culpable as Dr. Kustrup. A user of people. But why go after Shirley? What could she possibly have that Herman wants?

The professor flushes and exits the stall. Mead peers through the crack in his door as Dr. Kustrup washes his hands, then combs his fingers through his thinning hair, adjusts his belt, and leaves, taking his spanking new briefcase with him. As if he doesn’t have a care in the world. Mead sits tight, his heart thumping loudly, and waits. He’s got Herman right where he wants him. Trapped in a bathroom stall, unable to come out. Mead is not sure what he’s going to say, how confronting Herman about his alleged consensual activities with Dr. Kustrup and his alleged abuse of Cynthia —neither of which Mead has any proof —is going to make the situation with Shirley any better. An apology, that’s what Mead wants. An apology and an explanation as to why Herman would tell Shirley that Mead had bragged about sleeping with her. Why he propositioned her as if she were the campus slut. And a retraction. He wants a retraction too, because an apology to Mead won’t do much good if Herman doesn’t tell Shirley that he made it up, that he was just kidding around, that his warped sense of humor and Mead’s behavior have nothing in common.

A minute goes by, then two. He’s good, that Herman, so silent Mead could swear he isn’t even in there. A real pro. But Mead knows that the best hunter is a patient hunter and so he sits tight and waits. And waits. Leans down to peer under the divider. No feet. So he waits some more and then gets an idea and stands up on the toilet seat to peer over into the next stall, sure he will find Herman perching on the edge of the toilet bowl like an urchin on the edge of a fountain, water spurting forth from his stone penis. Only the stall is empty. Shit. And Mead was so sure he was right.