The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  Christine’s face was drawn and gaunt when it appeared at the entrance, searching around for him, her overnight bag in one hand. She’d dressed expensively, as usual, but with no flair—a choice that seemed driven more by exasperation than excitement. The way—if he was brutal with himself—that Martha had. When she’d stopped caring.

  ‘Kid,’ she said, thrusting into him with a big, melodramatic hug as he got up to greet her. ‘God, I’ve been so worried about you.’

  ‘How was your day?’ he said, shrinking away from her and gesturing at her to sit down. Ridiculous to be this jumpy around his own sister.

  ‘My day? Fine. Hectic, obviously. I can’t stay long—I’ll have to go straight to Penn Station after this.’

  ‘I’m not sure why that has to be so urgent. Her neck will be broken whether you’re there tonight or tomorrow.’

  ‘Wow, you really are that cold.’ Christine asked a passing waiter for a Badoit. ‘I remember reading this piece about you in the New York Post, where one of your old assistants, I think her name was Sandy, called you a gender-flipped ice queen. I never would have thought that was an accurate description of my little brother before this year.’

  ‘The fact you read that in the Post says more about you than it does about me. We’re due for a proper conversation, Chris. Can’t recall the last time we had one. Remember how we used to get on, when we were at college? When I sneaked out of the dorms and came over to that tiny place you were renting in South End? You and your friends introduced me to Chivas and cigars, and we played poker and talked politics and listened to your Rolling Stones records because Mom and Dad never let us.’

  Christine shifted in her chair, scanning the exits, as if he could have somehow blocked them. ‘What’s brought this on?’

  ‘You don’t look back on it fondly?’

  ‘Sure. I loved how you were willing to do that. Leave your world for a while and see what I had to offer. It made me think you cared about me, that maybe your rejection of the family had been a teenage phase. Guess I was wrong.’

  Henry could have countered her here. He’d never rejected their family, or he didn’t think he had—unless perhaps he was being too lenient on himself. Perhaps he did still judge her now—for the predictable paths she’d chosen. The husband who allowed her to be tired and purposeless because he didn’t recognise or celebrate her ambitions, because he loved the convenience of what she provided, the easy silence and stability compensating for a lack of passion.

  Before Henry could get carried away with this line of thought, he had to cut himself off. He thought uncomfortably of Martha, of how Christine had disapproved of her, wondering for the first time how big a part envy had played in that disapproval, at least initially, and how much he himself had come to resemble Peter over the years.

  ‘I never rejected you,’ he said. ‘Not then and not now. That’s not what I’m talking about. It just frustrates me that you spend your time worrying about me, and everyone else. I’m fine, Mom’s as fine as she’ll ever be, whether you see her or not. Stop trying to fix us.’

  ‘You practically asked for my help. I thought I was doing the right thing.’

  ‘In desperation, yes, I did. I had nowhere else to turn after Martha died. And I appreciate that you were concerned for me. Truly. But you can’t get angry when I don’t want to take your advice.’

  Christine moved in her seat again, trying to get the slipped disc in a position where it wouldn’t become inflamed. She’d run out of painkillers today and there wasn’t enough time to visit a pharmacy. She’d have to endure a whole train trip in this state.

  Though she fought it, Henry’s mention of their time together in South End had roused nostalgia in her. Simpler times. When she hadn’t been tied down yet, bound by rules. Her little brother had been so cocky then, strange and handsome, so attractive to the girls—and, she had no doubt, a few of the boys—around his dorms. (Timothy Fogel, surely. Not that either of them had ever confessed to it, as far as she was aware.) A helpless boy, though, really, beneath that veneer of hard-won confidence. She’d tried to protect him, did some of what their mother couldn’t.

  ‘I wish it weren’t like this,’ Henry continued, before she could defend herself. ‘Who’d have thought we’d turn out as these people? You’re not as happy as you could be…and, okay, neither am I, but I do think you’ve got more chance of doing something about it. What happened to that fierce Harvard graduate who didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought and wanted to stand up for the little guy? I miss her. I’m sorry your kids never got to meet her. I think they’d have liked her—she was pretty cool.’

  It was the most he’d said to her in years. Christine wasn’t impressed, though. He couldn’t haul up some long-since abandoned version of her and demand to know where that girl had gone. She couldn’t make herself that person again, whether she wanted to or not.

  ‘That’s not how it works, kid,’ she said. ‘You have to accept that Peter and I haven’t been on the same wild-goose chase as you and Martha. It’s different when you have kids. We had to grow up. And Martha’s idealism wasn’t genuine—you’re a fool if you think it was. She was even more selfish than you. Martha thought the world would fall into place around her, starting with you. And she was so disappointed when that didn’t happen. I think you liked the idea of Martha better than you liked the woman you actually married. You ignored her defects rather than being objective about them. I consciously weighed up Peter’s flaws and decided they were worth living with. Worth the sacrifice. Something tells me you didn’t.’

  Christine hoped this view wasn’t inaccurate or biased. Even if it was, he needed to hear it from someone. That was the only way her brother could regain a sense of himself—by consciously rejecting the person he would never see again, or at least acknowledging her flaws. Any other thoughts on the subject would surely destroy him.

  ‘Well, I appreciate the candour,’ Henry said.

  ‘Is it such a shock, really?’

  ‘She was going to divorce me, you know. I talked to Cathy about it.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ Christine muttered. ‘Of course Cathy would say that, to kick you while you’re down…you should have been the one divorcing her. She never knew how to make you happy.’

  ‘Yeah. It wasn’t that simple.’ An idea had occurred to him. He brightened up. ‘Chris, can you do me a favour? Give me Melanie Jacobs’ number. I need to get in touch with her.’

  ‘Oh.’ Christine felt herself smirk. ‘You’ve given that some thought, huh?’

  ‘We’ll see what happens.’

  She took out her phone and flicked the number to him in a text.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Now, listen—if you don’t hear from me, if I miss a holiday or two, it doesn’t mean I don’t care.’

  Christine almost understood what he was saying, but she was reluctant to fully allow herself that understanding. Whatever more she had to say would be wasted. ‘I have to get going,’ she said.

  Henry wasn’t going to call Melanie Jacobs for the reason Christine wanted him to call her. He had a favour to ask of her, the results of which could have been mutually beneficial—the idea had come to him right then. Whatever happened, he wasn’t going to ask her out. He wondered if it would be possible to maintain a platonic friendship with somebody like Melanie, if they could both avoid his sister’s meddling.

  Before Christine left he asked about the kids. She explained that Jake had come down with pneumonia and missed out on finals week. Somewhat despite himself, Henry expressed real concern for the kid and offered to come visit. When she told him it wasn’t necessary, that Jake was over the worst, he offered again, more insistently, not out of guilt, but because he thought, in a moment of delusion, that his being there might mean something to Jake.

  He walked her out onto Grand Army Plaza and stumbled against her, unexpectedly, as he went to give her a hug on the red-carpeted steps. He clung on hard—as if to his mother, in all her inadequacy—before putting he
r in a cab.

  ‘Tell Mom I love her,’ he said as he was closing the door. It could have been the way the light fell on the window, but he seemed to catch Christine crying as the cab pulled away from the sidewalk.

  Henry hadn’t given her the salad set, in the end. He went into the Palm Court to retrieve it from beneath the table, where her stemmed glass of Badoit remained, the lipstick smeared thick on its rim, waiting to be scrubbed off.

  Rather than taking a cab of his own, Henry decided he was going to walk home, all the way down Park Avenue like he and Martha had after the Oxford fundraiser. He hadn’t walked this far through Manhattan since the blackout in 2003. It had already occurred to him that he couldn’t last here, that he would be leaving New York soon. This was a chance to say goodbye to the city, to acknowledge both its significance and its imperfections. He’d always preferred taking cabs, shuttling from one exciting location to another, not simply because there was no time to walk but because there wasn’t much excitement to be found in the long, nondescript blocks that connected them.

  It took him a whole hour to get down to 8th Street, past a few recognisable bars and restaurants and a huge stretch of unknown territory. Thinking that he could do with a drink now, he decided to stop by the wine bar.

  As he approached, he noticed the windows were darkened. A note on the door thanked the neighbourhood for its business, explaining that the bar wouldn’t be reopening in the new year. The fate of so many businesses as they emerged, bruised, from their first slow summer. Its disappearance didn’t wound Henry as much as he feared it might. Those countless nights spent alone at the bar could be struck from the record.

  The jazz band in Washington Square Park had finished their set for the day, decanting their takings from the bull fiddle case into a cashbox. Henry spent a while calculating how much he owed them for twenty-something years of free entertainment. He had nothing other than a fifty in his billfold, so, after an uncomfortable moment standing in front of them, he dropped it into the cashbox and continued on his way.

  He found the apartment empty. Though this didn’t surprise him, he called out for Maggie as if she might have been there. He also checked her room again, to make sure it hadn’t been cleared out. Did she care enough about her belongings to return for them?

  Perhaps that was a better way to be. Henry had devoted so much time, so much money, so much thought, to filling his apartment with the right stuff. He had no idea what had driven him. A desire to provoke envy in Timothy Fogel and his other associates, yes, but had they envied him? Only enough to make him want more of it.

  Henry went over to his collection of Henri Giraud champagnes, their corks pointing out at him from the rack. He’d built it up over the years, each case from the new vintage purchased on release, each bottle identical to the others.

  He pulled the bottles from their shelf, three at a time, and took them out to the terrace. He admired the view, briefly. The majesty of Manhattan at night, the early twentieth-century city struggling under the weight of a twenty-first-century population, the new crop of skyscrapers rising up over Midtown, tall and slender as supermodels due to their limited footprints.

  He removed the gold clasps from a few of the bottles and then set about shaking them, hard, until the corks popped of their own accord. The champagne sprayed over the railing down to the street below. He opened all of them, allowing the crazy force of the compressed gas to do its job until they ran out of pressure, at which point he tipped the remainder off. Eight floors up, he heard some commotion from the sidewalk. This didn’t deter him. He needed to make this champagne rain.

  He dropped each spent bottle at his feet, not caring if it broke on the tiles of the terrace. Then he returned inside and closed the door on them.

  Henry found a few good, strong trash bags and collected together his hundreds of copies of Her and Look Closer, dropping each pile into each open bag with a satisfying thud. He paused at the final issue, the last August issue he’d produced, ten months after Martha’s death. Historically the slowest seller of the year, and therefore not the best choice in which to make a statement. He hadn’t touched this issue since it was released. He flicked it open to the editorial page. That slick photograph of him. The title: Why nobody cares.

  A little trepidatious, he began to read, his eyes darting and skipping:

  A reporter once made the observation that I ended up in this business by accident, and he wasn’t wrong…My wife saw more in humanity than…The truth is, I’ve encouraged that ignorance… An editor should be a leader, but that implies…This industry is a parody of itself, the elegance of last century gone…We’ve given precedence to vacuous, anodyne work…

  One or two of his most trusted colleagues had sent him emails of support after this editorial had been published—which he’d done without the knowledge or consent of the board of directors. Nobody had declared that support publicly. Timothy had never spoken of it.

  He’d regretted it, of course. He’d come close to begging for forgiveness, promising his bosses that nothing of the sort would happen again.

  Henry ripped the page from the spine and left it on the dining table. The remainder of the issue ended up with the others. He heaved the bag over to the door and put it out for the super to collect.

  HENRY found an oilskin coat down the end of his closet. He buttoned it up tight, so that it hid the baggy jeans and the nightshirt he was wearing underneath.

  The garden was a wreck. The deck chairs had blown over in the last storm, and the barbecue was fastened away beneath canvas, gathering cobwebs. The weeds were stiff with frost. The bird box Martha had tried to build, which had been overtaken by hornets in the summer, had now fallen off its post.

  Her shears and trowel were in the shed above the elevator shaft. Henry armed himself against the cold with padded gloves. They must have contained traces of Martha’s sweat and mildew, because they reeked. He got on his gouty knees and began turning up the earth. He had no plan, no idea how weeds should be removed or if he was pulling up real, dormant plants instead.

  The cold set in. His nose began to drip, his skin dry and itching, but the repetitive action kept him going. He breathed freely, enjoying the sound of rush-hour traffic eight floors below. The first clanks as the machine stuttered into a new day.

  From more than a mile away, the orange vest of a worker on the Freedom Tower caught his eye. As in the Andreas Gursky photographs Henry used to see at high-profile auctions, the figure appeared in miniature against the elongated blue glass pyramid on which he toiled. The same building in which Fogel would be attending meetings with the Condé Nast editors.

  Henry felt a strange unity with the worker, despite their distance. They were sharing in this brutal cold, if not much else.

  He uprooted the whole garden, until nothing remained but beds of overturned soil, the chairs now folded and stacked, the table moved to a corner where it wasn’t in the way. Henry could have created a scene in his mind: him and Martha here in their bathrobes on a Sunday morning, for no reason other than routine, actively avoiding any mention of last night’s fight, or preparing for another. Did they have any dinners scheduled this week? Travel? Feeling relieved when their commitments turned out not to be compatible.

  Good thing they didn’t have children. Henry had always known that he would have been too wrapped up in personal pursuits to give a child the love it needed. Or, worse, he would have overcompensated by giving them the wrong sort of love—pushing them to be what they weren’t.

  Maybe he did want a family, but not the kind he came from, or the kind Christine thought he should have. His true desire was to reach out and touch a single person from among the crowd. Where had that come from? Not Martha, as he might have assumed. He’d always believed that his best resolutions came from her.

  But she hadn’t given him a good resolution. Her death had poisoned him, forced him into the belief that he was helping someone, when in truth he was destroying them.

  Downstairs, Henry
stopped dead as he noticed Maggie’s rucksack in the reception area. She came through from the laundry. The sound of the washing machine followed. They stood in front of each other for a tense moment, Henry trying desperately to think of something, anything, he could say in this situation that wouldn’t make her think worse of him than she already did.

  ‘You’re leaving,’ he said. ‘That’s cool. I would too. Where are you going?’

  ‘I’d rather not tell you.’

  ‘What, you think I’m going to follow you there?’

  He regretted saying that at once. Her response was to stare at him. Well?

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You don’t owe me any answers. But can I at least give you a bit of context?’

  ‘If that helps you, sure, but don’t think you’re doing it for me.’

  ‘You…you remind me of my wife. When we met, when she was younger. Which isn’t an excuse, I know. I’ve been confused, though. When you’re on your own for so long…you can get lost in your own maze, sometimes. I’m sorry, I really am.’

  ‘You can’t use me as a prop in your stupid fantasy and then expect to be forgiven. I’ve been treated like an object before, Henry. You haven’t. You don’t know what it’s like.’

  Though he understood her meaning, Henry had been a prop in various fantasies. His parents had tried to mould him into their fantasy child, Kurt into his fantasy minion, Timothy into his fantasy best buddy—the one who enabled his self-destructive behaviour and didn’t question it. And no, he didn’t like being there. He tried to see it from her point of view: her face the screen onto which a seedy old man had projected his desires.

  ‘I’m not sure what else to say, except that…you know…you’re more than that. And I know this wasn’t how either of us had hoped things would work out, but…it’s been good for me. Having you around.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it would have been easy to keep you cut out.’