The Altruists

  “You were going to what?” asked Maggie.

  “Save it? With what money?” said Ethan.

  “Well. With your mother’s money.”

  “Mom’s?” Ethan asked.

  “Yes. Come on. Don’t kid me.”

  “No, honestly,” said Ethan. “What money?”

  “Your mother’s money. The inheritance.”

  “But I’m broke,” said Ethan.

  “You’re what?”

  Maggie slapped her thigh. “I knew it!”

  “I spent it,” Ethan said. “I don’t have it.”

  In the silence that settled, Arthur heard, for the first time, the rain. It had been raining all along, since he started talking, probably, cold drops battering the windows of the house.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ethan shook his head. “What is there to say? I spent it. Real estate in New York—an apartment in Carroll Gardens. And I left the firm.”

  “Where are you working?”

  “I . . . don’t.”

  “You haven’t been working?” Now Arthur was doubly perplexed. The natural order of things was upset when a son retired before his father.

  “I quit.”

  “But . . .”

  “Not ‘but.’ ‘And.’”

  Arthur leaned forward. “And . . .”

  “And I’m in debt.”

  “Debt.” He stared at his son in disbelief, zeroing in on his swollen purple nose.

  “Yeah. A bit. The apartment is historic. Not cheap. I can go back to work, I mean I’ll have to, soon, I was kind of biding my time until—well, I don’t know what. Nothing, anymore. I was actually going to maybe ask you, if you had a minute . . . for a loan . . . although now . . .”

  Confusion brewed in Arthur’s heart. He was not accustomed to managing more than one feeling at a time. Tenderness boiled into shock. Rage. And relief, if only for the fact that his son now needed him at least as much as he needed Ethan.

  But mostly rage.

  “How could you spend it all? And quit work? What were you thinking? How do you live?”

  “I live.”

  “That city is expensive!” Arthur spat. “How did you—how did you eat?”

  Ethan hung his head. Arthur watched his son slump forward, bent over himself like a lowercase p for pathos. He turned to Maggie. “And you?”

  “Me what?”

  “Don’t tell me you spent your money.”

  “Mom’s money?”

  “Yes, the fucking money!”

  “Oh, no. No, no.”

  A thick vein throbbed on Arthur’s neck. “Good,” he said, wiping his forehead. “Fine. Good. . . . I don’t suppose you want to put it toward the old mortgage, do you?”

  “I’m renouncing it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah. Gonna give it all away.”

  Rage proliferated. Begat and sired more rage. He kept it bottled, eked out one careful word.

  “Why.”

  Maggie threw up her hands and let them fall with a patter on her lap. “It’s not doing us any good! Look at Ethan. He’s a mess.” She turned to him. “No offense. But you’re bleeding on the couch.” He dabbed at his nose. “And you, Dad! I don’t want to end up like this, trying to buy up a house that’s way too big in the first place. In this walled-in neighborhood. What do we need it for? Listen. Chouteau Place has nothing to do with the world.”

  “Maggie—”

  “Do you even like it here? You hate your job, I know that. Look. I don’t know what I’m going to do with Mom’s money but I know I can’t spend it on myself.”

  “Then spend it here!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t understand,” Arthur protested. “You. Could. Save. Our. Home. Jesus Christ, I wasn’t even going to ask! I was going to spare you the discomfort!”

  “This isn’t my home. I don’t live here anymore. Neither does Ethan.”

  Arthur’s stomach somersaulted and a wave of nausea rose and sank within him. In the late nineteenth century, his forebears fled tacitly sanctioned pogroms in Odessa and survived the arduous voyage to America with nothing. Arthur’s great-grandfather had pushed a cart full of stinking fish around the Lower East Side so that his son could open a small shoe store so that his son could practice dentistry so that his son could build things so that what? So that his son could plummet into debt? So that his daughter could give away her inheritance?

  “That’s it?” asked Arthur. “That’s where we are now? Ushering in our decline? Hm?”

  “You’re not going to renounce it,” Ethan told his sister.

  “Yes I am.”

  “Saying it is one thing.”

  Maggie fumed. “Why does everybody think I won’t?”

  “Maggie,” said Arthur, heaving, “you don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  “I think I do,” she said.

  And then it all made sense. The photographs. The no-kill. The ballet. The whole weekend, each piece in its place. The weird smell that hung over everything, she could locate it now. Name it. As her pulse quickened, Maggie was reminded of something that her father used to do when she was young. The Daddy Tax. What began as a harmless Halloween joke—hand over that Almond Joy, Maggie, I’m collecting my Daddy Tax—had grown, over the years, into a pathological perversity. Her father levied Daddy Taxes on everything she earned or won. When she house-sat for the neighbors’ kids, Arthur charged her a finder’s fee for putting them in touch. He skimmed 15 percent off her paycheck during the summer of her first real job, working the register at a children’s toy store, because, he’d said, she owed him gas money for driving her to work. He ate food off her plate when there was plenty for the taking on the table as a constant reminder of who’d put it there. And throughout her four years at Danforth, until Francine’s death, he’d reminded Maggie that as soon as she graduated she could start paying him back for the tuition. With interest. His exact words: “Put it on your bill.” As if parenthood was something to be paid back! As if children were an investment to be returned, doubled, in cash.

  “Hold on,” she said. “Is this why we’re here? It is, isn’t it? Mom’s money—that’s why. The whole trip. That’s what this was all about.”

  “Maggie. Maggie, hold on—”

  “Oh my god.”

  “Not the whole trip, Maggie. Not the whole thing—”

  “It wasn’t enough to imprison Mom in this house? In this city? It wasn’t enough to cheat on her? While she was on her deathbed? You have to try to take her money too?”

  “I did not imprison anyone.”

  “Do you even want us here? Do you even want a relationship with us?”

  “Is someone knocking?” Ethan asked.

  “No,” snapped Maggie. “It’s the rain.”

  “Someone’s knocking.”

  “It’s the rain . . . Dad?”

  Arthur stared into the empty space between his children’s faces. With a weary gasp, he said, “It’s both.”

  “Dad, what the hell is going on?”

  A knock echoed through the house. A screen door opened and closed with a pneumatic wheeze.

  “Dad?”

  A woman was standing under the arched molding.

  She was not Francine.

  Of course she wasn’t.

  But to the Alters looking upon her, the woman’s most distinguishing feature appeared to be the extent to which she was not Francine. Tall, straight haired, crow eyed. Boyish above the waist and muscular below. Not Francine at all. Something, someone, entirely different.

  “I am going to Boston,” she said, quivering. A German accent swam through her watery voice.

  Arthur ground his palm into his forehead. “What are you doing here?”

  “Who’s t
his?” asked Ethan. A drop of blood fell from his nose.

  The woman spoke again. “I am taking the fellowship in Boston. I still have time. I deserve to find someone who—oh, Arthur. We cannot live here. You know that. Us, together, in the house of your family? Arthur, I am not your wife. I do not know what I am to you. But I know that I cannot waste my time anymore. You have a duty to stay and sort yourself. There is much for you to sort.”

  “What is happening here?” asked Ethan.

  “You are sixty-five, Arthur,” she said. “What will happen when you are gone?”

  “I’m not going any—oh, Christ. Can you give me a minute here?”

  Maggie’s mouth hung open. She could not believe what she was seeing.

  The watch.

  The diamond-studded cocktail watch.

  Her mother’s watch. Wrapped tight around this woman’s wrist.

  “You. Have. To. Be. Kidding. Me.”

  “Okay,” said Arthur, standing. “Kids? Excuse us for a minute. This is not—we are not—she is not—”

  “Do you see?” said Ulrike. “With me it is just ‘not, not, not.’ You do not want me, Arthur. You want company. But I am more than company.” She began to weep.

  Maggie looked at the crying woman, then her father, then the woman.

  She marched into the dining room, shoulder-checking the German as she blew past. She lifted one of Arthur’s photographs off the nail from which it hung. Man Kneeling with Arm Around Boy. She brought the image crashing to the ground.

  “Maggie,” Ethan said.

  “It doesn’t belong to you!” Maggie shouted, and smashed the second photograph. Man with Boy on Shoulders. Glass scattered at her feet.

  “Stop that!” Arthur called.

  “What?” said Ulrike.

  Man and Boy Standing Back-to-Back. Smash. Boy in Man’s Lap. Smash. The frames lay broken at Maggie’s feet.

  Ethan and Ulrike hurried over.

  “Are you insane?” Ulrike asked.

  “The watch! Give it!” Maggie shouted, and grabbed the woman’s wrist.

  “This is mine,” Ulrike pleaded, trying to wrest control of her hand. “It was a gift from your father!”

  “It wasn’t his to give!”

  “You cannot take back a gift!”

  Ethan looked around. “Where’s Dad?” he asked. But the object of his sentence, the object of his sister’s ire, was gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  He’s running against the foul weather, the rain blowing horizontal, each stinging drop a distinct irritation, a unique punishment. See him now, hurrying out the gates that describe Chouteau Place and on through splashing traffic, his mind blank, time smearing like the water on the windshields racing past. The neighborhood blurs. Main Campus is close ahead. He smashes past a student couple conjoined at the palm, splitting them in two, and scurries up the stairs of Greenleaf Hall. Temporary respite under a covered passage as he slides across the university seal imprinted on the stone walk—bad luck for those who tread on it, that’s what campus tour guides say—and back into the rain until he’s through the doors of the African Studies Library. One thing in mind.

  He turns over shelves, tosses books underfoot. Entire subjects, peoples, plagues, histories, and languages are chucked aside and trampled. Afrikaans. AIDS. Algeria. Where is it? He can’t find it. He will burst if he can’t find it.

  “Professor?”

  He turns, soaked through, growling under his breath, and sees a student librarian. Standing eagerly before him. Masking concern beneath a shaky smile. A kid whose nervousness belies the Gothic-lettered tattoo on his left bicep: LOREM IPSUM. A design major.

  “I thought it was you. I took your survey last year,” he says, “Social Change!”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah,” he continues, “really cool stuff. Applied engineering, ‘the social responsibility of building things,’ definitely interesting. A solid elective. Got me thinking, you know?”

  “Well,” says Arthur, “that’s the idea.” A shadow crawls across the stacks, swallowing a file of light. “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “I’m looking for a book and I can’t fucking find it.”

  “Oh! Right. Well, come on back to the checkout desk and I’ll see what I can do.”

  The kid guides him to the desk and slides over the counter. His right foot snags and brings a stapler down with it. “Shit. Argh.”

  “It’s a small book . . .”

  “Right right. Title?”

  Arthur huffs. “Toward a New System of Sanitation in the New Nation of Zimbabwe.”

  The kid clacks away at his keyboard. “Author?”

  “The author is . . . it’s—”

  “‘Arthur Alter . . .’ Hey . . . this is your book, Professor!”

  “Yes.”

  “Weird!”

  “Tell me where it is.”

  “I was only saying—”

  “Do it.”

  “Okay, okay, well, actually, hold on—it looks like it’s been flagged.” The kid looks up all innocent, all sorries.

  “Flagged?”

  “Like, reported missing.”

  “So, not flagged, but missing.”

  “Flagged as missing, yeah.”

  “Fuck.” He’s pacing. “Fuck.”

  “Hey, Professor?”

  Sweat drips from his brow. A fly buzzes circles around his ear.

  “Why do you need a copy of your own book?”

  “Excuse me.”

  “I mean, it’s a little weird. Right? I mean. Your own book.”

  Arthur bristles. Unthinking, he bends his knees. Spring-loads himself. “Listen to me. Listen. I need it. I need it now.”

  “Don’t you have other copies? Like at home?”

  “There was a fire. They burned.”

  “What fire?”

  “Just find the book.”

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” said the kid. “I don’t think I can help you out.”

  Flattens his palms, thumbs out and hooked. Pleading. “It was just here weeks ago. You must know who last checked it out.”

  “I wish I knew,” says the kid, “but I don’t! It wasn’t checked out. It was either lost, or . . .”

  “Or . . .”

  “Stolen.”

  By now he knows it’s hopeless. By now he knows this is the end. Nothing good can come of this. This being Arthur. Nothing good has ever come of him.

  “I only wish,” the kid says, “that I could help—”

  But before he can finish, Arthur lunges.

  * * *

  —

  It must have looked strange to the students crossing campus on that April afternoon, sloshing to and from their libraries of choice, their protests, their treasury meetings, their improv shows, their study groups: a professor of mechanical engineering, tweed blazer draped across his shoulder, sitting on the rain-drunk grass outside the African Studies Library. There was something perverse about the sight of a grown man—a scholar—on the ground. Especially one in the exhausted but defiant pose of a child in the final act of a tantrum, on the slow path to acknowledging defeat. His legs were crossed. His head was in his hands. From a distance it might have even looked like he had fallen. But this, it was clear, to anyone who deigned to peer a little closer, was a man who had decided to sit down.

  A semicircle formed around him. Ethan, Maggie, LOREM IPSUM, and one thickset member of the Danforth Campus Police Department. Poised like a firing squad.

  After much pleading, and with a pledge to sponsor new uniforms for the officer’s squad, Ethan talked the cop out of detaining Arthur. The design major had emerged unscathed, miraculously free of bruises and scrapes and any other bodily proof of what had just transpired. A little j
ittery was all. A little shaken. Arthur muddled his way through apologies, first to the boy for their misunderstanding and then to the officer for the inconvenience of riding his Segway over from Main Campus. Above him hung the disapproving face of his late wife as performed by his only daughter.

  Ethan pulled his sister aside while Arthur wallowed on the lawn. “What do we do?” he said. “I mean, where does this leave us?”

  “You and me?”

  “Yeah. Us.”

  Maggie furrowed her brow, planted her hands on her hips, and scanned the grounds of the university that was the focal point of her family life—the university that wanted nothing more than recognition, on the national level, that it was a decent school. “We leave,” she said.

  “We leave.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about Dad?” Ethan’s crooked nose whistled.

  “He’ll be fine.”

  Their heads turned in tandem toward their father, still seated, the soggy soil saturating his jeans. Maggie shook her head.

  “He’ll pick himself up,” she said. “He has to, eventually.”

  PART III

  TWENTY

  University City was not immune to the temperaments of the institution for which it was named. May at Danforth was a month of making plans, of humblebrags, of anxious inbox checking. Graduating seniors disappeared into boozy reminiscences. Couples broke up or decided, with the morbid optimism of a doomsday cult, to give long-distance a shot. Every sidelong look, every fickle change in the weather, was understood to accommodate great meaning. It was a heavy-handed month. Metaphor flourished. There was no shortage of open weeping: from emotions, from pollen.

  For the nonwealthy children of this midwestern Ivy, the years of back-patting and positive reinforcement had come to a swift and salient end. Without the investment bank connections of their East Coast counterparts or the Silicon Valley hookups of the West, the majority of Danforth grads hunkered down and prepared to inherit the broken economy they’d spent four years hearing so much about. Where their parents once advised, “Shoot for the stars,” they now said, “Manage expectations.” When it came to the job search, passion was no longer a prerequisite. Health insurance was. Still, hopefulness prevailed with the promise of a new start. The intrigue of the nine-to-five. The magic of a paycheck: for the English major who’d lucked into an entry-level gig at the Poetry Foundation, the starting salary of $30,000 seemed like more money than would ever be possible to spend. Positions were applied for, letters of recommendation secured. Fulbright. AmeriCorps. Thirty students found work in the Danforth Office of Admissions, interviewing hopeful high school juniors and teaching phone etiquette to the work-study undergrads who rang up donors. The clinically depressed, a demographic that constituted 15 percent of the student body—and those were the diagnosed cases—began to feel the deadweight lifting.