Freddy Feinberg Doesn't Live Up to Expectations

Wind roared round the corner, shoving cold, clammy hands under my red coat. We’d rushed out of school so quickly I hadn’t had a chance to button up and now I was afraid to let go of Dad’s hand, ripped away by the current of people. Just in case, I kept my eyes on the street signs.

I lost count when I saw the man on the other side of Broadway. He was staring at a shop window, a tear in the human flow around him, his milk gray hair sailing side to side in the wind. As we were about to pass, his eyes, also grey, went big and round.

‘Burton. Burton Blake. Chess and Piano.’

Dad stopped. He’d been in a hurry to get me back to Grandpa’s, but he tugged me out of the people flow and into the absence created by the grey man’s stillness. Now everyone had to go around all of us and people were giving us looks but only I noticed.

‘Well, I’ll be damned. Freddy Feinberg.’

Dad’s voice was loud without being loud. People always listened when he spoke. Some of the people walking by gave him looks, but different ones now. Curious. The grey man held out his hand and when dad took it he looked at some point over dad’s head, as if he was watching a silent wrecking ball approach us all.

‘I have not lived up to other people’s expectations, Burton.’

Dad had his listening face on, which meant he liked this person. Or wanted something. It was usually that.

He took the man by his elbow and pulled us both through a door. Smells leapt at me like cats out of a wet sack--damp meat and vinegar and dill and sulfurous eggs and the kind of sweat that people cook up under winter coats and a hint of urine. I stumbled back and caught the back of my head on the steel door frame, breathing in the icy wind before the door screeched shut on us.

Then the worst was over and we sat at a table with metal tube legs and a napkin dispenser shaped like an English double-decker bus and paper cups with blue and white geometric designs with the word Hellas on them.

Dad ordered a Ruben sandwich that smelled of evil Brussel sprouts. My ham and cheese sandwich was delicious except there was too much ham and there were dark pointy seeds in the bread. I picked them out.

Stacked on my napkin they looked like a family of dead lice so I arranged them into hieroglyphs while I listened to Dad and Freddy Feinberg talk.

They were very different.

Dad was hands and laughter and big exclamations like ‘No! Really?’ that didn’t seem to go right with what Freddy Feinberg was saying, but I knew what he was doing: he was entertaining, because he hadn’t won that person over yet. He was always in full performance mode until that happened. That was a tricky moment. Then he had to think if he wanted to keep you or not.

Freddy-Feinberg-who-hadn’t-lived-up-to-other-people’s-expectations was almost not there. He spoke in short, crunchy sentences, like a child making Lego houses with only one hand and his teeth.

But each sentence was somehow…wonderful. They might seem flat and nothingish, like a puddle in an alleyway sprayed about by delivery trucks, but then you’d look again and under the oily-rainbow shimmer there was something moving deep below. Something special. I wanted to lean in, reach for it…

He didn’t melt at Dad’s finest efforts, but he told him more than I think he meant to.

He told us that after college he’d become Albert Einstein’s teaching assistant at Princeton. I knew Albert Einstein was something a little above and to the left of god, so I wanted to ask what it felt like. Someone who’d been smiled upon by Albert Einstein should glow, not be grey and dimmed and peeking under the corner of his rye bread like the cover of a magazine he wasn’t sure he was allowed to read.

It was a little frightening.

But my father wielded his magic as he demolished his Ruben and ordered another. He asked questions about Freddy Feinberg’s work though I guessed he didn't understand the answers any more than I did. And bit by bit, like a lamp moving towards you through a tunnel, Freddy Feinberg lit up. He never looked at us, just at things—the sandwich, prints of old New York on the wall, the ceiling with the wires hanging loose, his foot occasionally pressing down on a curling corner of the old grime-covered linoleum tiles. His voice was hushed but rounded, as if it was in a perpetual crouch behind a garden wall.

I didn’t understand what he was telling us but it seemed to be about the incompleteness of god, which I thought was an amazing thing to work on and very brave. Years later in high school I realized it was probably about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and I wish I’d known enough back then to ask him real questions. Though I don’t know if I would have dared even if I’d understood.

I sat there in silence and felt sad for him without knowing why. It seemed right that we’d found him standing alone on the sidewalk staring at cold cuts and considering how he’d not lived up to expectations.

I wanted to ask about that, too, because he repeated it twice. Both times dropped into the few silences my father didn't immediately fill. Both times I waited for my father to pick up that sentence and unravel it, but he didn’t.

My mind tried - I dug around in Grimm's fairyland and pulled out this image of the evil “them” who’d set expectations so high that a man who basked in Albert Einstein’s smile and who knew that god was incomplete could somehow disappoint them. They were as ominous to me as the swamp that Snow White’s evil queen rowed through with her poison apple. They were clawing, leafless trees that ripped at your hair and clothes when you were already frightened and alone.

I hoped Freddy Feinberg would be better now that Dad had found him. That it was good luck that had made him stop by Ernie’s Deli just in time for us to find him. 

I believed utterly back then in what Dad always said—that brilliance just needed that defining stroke of luck to come along and sweep it into the pantheon of glory where it belonged by divine right. Dad’s hadn’t come yet, though we all knew it was close, especially now we were in New York. Very soon everyone would realize that he was just as good or better than Arthur Rubenstein with a touch of Horowitz. Someone was bound to recognize that, and then everything would be perfect.

So perhaps Dad was this sad man’s stroke of luck. Freddy Feinberg's fates had rolled the dice and turned him down 47th onto Broadway where Dad would rescue him so he could fill “Their” expectations just as Dad was filling himself with corned beef.

Freddy Feinberg paid for our lunch even though his sandwich sat whole but limp on his plate. I felt bad about that, but Dad didn’t seem to notice.

Then we all left together and turned in opposite directions. Without even goodbye and a smile or “see you later.” I tried to look over my shoulder, but in seconds Freddy Feinberg was lost. We were at 27th Street before I asked Dad: “How will he find you again?”

“Do you know I always beat him at chess?” Dad answered. “He was a genius at math but he could never beat me at chess. He didn’t have What It Takes.”

This is where the memory ends.

I don’t remember reaching Grandpa’s. If Mom was there waiting with the boys. I don’t know how long the six of us we stayed in that one-bedroom apartment that smelled of tuna and Lysol. I remember lots of things from the years after that, some of them pretty bad.

But that one memory of our months in New York is as vivid as my first memory of a roller coaster ride. I can walk through it. I can feel the pointy tips of my shaggy coat where the mud splashs dried. I can feel the tightness of my old gloves pressing between my fingers where I clutched my father’s hand too hard.

I also know there have to be things I’ve added over time because I couldn’t have known them then. About the Incompleteness of Dad. About being a lemming in his little cult, running blindly towards the cliffs to the tune of his piano. At least we all went over together. At least the price I paid wasn’t as high as some of the others.

But even though I didn’t see through the glitter-emerald curtains that hid True Dad, I was smart enough to remember Freddy Feinberg’s story with all my senses. Down to the twisted chrome leg of the chair I sat on so that it felt I might slide off if I didn’t curl my foot around it. I must have known even then there was some deep truth there—about the people who had expectations of Freddy Feinberg, about Dad who had expectations of everyone but himself. About walking away. About disappointment.

I gave Freddy Feinberg a better ending in my imagination.

Two blocks from where we walked away from him a woman was staring at a bookstore window. There’s a green-covered book there (I don’t know why it’s green) about the incompleteness of god. She leans in and reads the author’s name out loud.

‘Freddy Feinberg.’

And he stops and says: ‘Yes?’

She has no expectations for him to live up to. She likes incomplete things because they can go in infinitely many different directions.

She likes infinity, too, because it’s very strange. As real as a real number but magical in a way magic could never be.

I sent them to Vermont because I had a great aunt up there who lived in a glass house in a forest and spied on the beavers and stabbed trees to make maple syrup like a modern day witch and that seemed a good place for them.

I left them there and even when I was tempted, much later, to try and find out what happened to Freddy Feinberg, I never did. 

I know stories like his don’t end well, so I wrote my own.