The Altruists

by Andrew Ridker

  Bex greeted Maggie at the entrance to the sanctuary—“Mwah, mwah, you’re gorgeous”—while Levi subjected Mikey to a vigorous handshake. The Goldins had come out in full force, the patriarchs exchanging kisses like made men, the women wrapped in mink. Maggie sat among the Kleins, who fidgeted in their tallitot and kept checking the score of the Jets game on their phones. Floating congregants, unaffiliated with either family, occupied random seats, murmuring prayers and davening at their own pace.

  Ezra was meant to share the occasion with another boy in his class, but that was before Levi bought the congregation a new Torah and the rabbis bumped the poor kid back a week. Ezra chanted from the scroll, speeding through his portion, cracking his voice on the ancient cantillations. Those melodies, meaningless to Maggie but warm and familiar, fell over her like a blanket and coaxed her to sleep. When she came to, the temple’s sisterhood was presenting Ezra with a sterling silver Kiddush cup, and there were three individually-wrapped Sunkist Fruit Gems on her lap. The sound of crinkling plastic rose throughout the sanctuary as hundreds of Fruit Gems flew through the air. Maggie chucked hers with a bit too much enthusiasm; a moment later she heard Ezra shout, “Ow! Fuck! My fucking eye!” Mikey scowled at Maggie. “Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered. “The whole point of a firing squad is that you don’t hold one person responsible.”

  As the service reached its end, the rabbi led the congregants in prayer. On Ezra he bestowed the priestly benediction before imploring the congregation to join him in blessing the United States Armed Forces as well as the IDF. Maggie kept her mouth shut in protest.

  All rose for the Kaddish, the hymn for the dead. Those in mourning were asked to remain on their feet after the prayer so that the congregation could identify those grieving around them. Maggie stood. She raised herself up on her toes but couldn’t spot her brother.

  That night, before the party, Maggie lingered beside Mikey in the lobby of the Teaneck Marriot. Maggie wore a blue fit-and-flare dress with a pashmina shawl around her shoulders that Mikey had given her in college.

  She’d gained back a few pounds in recent months. She was pleased with her new density. It felt good to be grounded again. She had been grieving her mother for ages, starving herself in a protest whose aims were unclear to her now, making herself ill in the process. It was time to get on with her life.

  Independent of these developments, Mikey had embarked on a ridiculous home-workout regimen recently popularized by the ultraconservative Speaker of the House. He looked dapper in the charcoal suit he’d chosen after Maggie explicitly forbade pinstripes, his pale blue shirt accented by a red power tie and cufflinks.

  “Come on,” she gestured, hastening toward the ballroom.

  Bex spared nothing when it came to her children. The orthodoxy of the morning had given way to the excess of a nightclub in Tel Aviv. Blue and red LEDs steeped the foyer in neon. A bar had been erected in the middle of the anteroom. A crystal pyramid of upside-down martini glasses shone in rows of saturated backlight.

  “This is the scene,” Maggie said, “where the underclass smashes through the gates and we all get what’s coming to us.”

  Two women on stilts in glitter-flecked suits directed them inside. Maggie saw a familiar silhouette by the bar, shoulders high and tense, leaning on the table that supported a bust of Ezra’s head carved in ice.

  “Ethan!” Maggie called. “My brother,” she told Mikey. “I’m going to say hi. You stay.”

  She skipped over and hugged him. His nose had recovered from the blow. It was only the faint smudges of darkness at the corners of his eyes that gestured to lingering damage. “You look good,” she said.

  “Thanks.” He downed half of the drink in his hand.

  “What’s that?”

  Ethan swirled his glass. “Club soda. Trying to kick some habits.”

  Maggie nodded. The glittering women made their way through the room on their stilts, posing for pictures with guests.

  “Hey,” she said. “Where were you this morning?”

  “I almost didn’t come. I don’t know how to talk to anyone here. I’m thirty-one years old. I’m jobless. I’m broke.”

  “Half the people in this room are in debt,” Maggie said, “and a whole lot worse than you. They’ve learned how to live with it.”

  “To live despite it.”

  “To live with a big fat middle finger to it.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Maggie nodded. “Thanks for not asking me to bail you out, by the way.”

  Ethan laughed. “I wouldn’t dare.”

  A gaggle of tweens tumbled past, spilling bright red virgin cocktails in pursuit of a boy who’d swiped a pair of heels.

  “I’m heading back to school,” she said.

  “No kidding. For what?”

  “To be a teacher. Middle school, I was thinking. In some states you don’t need a master’s or anything.”

  “You’re leaving New York?”

  “I’ve had enough of this city. It’s too expensive.”

  Ethan cocked his head.

  “You pretty much have to be a petrogarch to live in Manhattan,” she continued, “and I don’t plan on sticking around to see Brooklyn fill up with skyscrapers.”

  “Where then?”

  “Vermont. That’s the plan, at least.”

  Ethan nodded. “I was thinking about school too.”

  “You were?”

  “Yeah—or, well, I already thought about it. And applied. And I’m going.”

  “Ethan! Wow! What’s the program?”

  “Pratt has a graduate degree in interior design. An MFA.”

  “Ah,” she said. “An MFA. That famously practical degree.”

  “Funny. Dad said basically the same thing.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

  “I’ll have to sell the apartment,” he said.

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’ll be a resident advisor. They let you live in the dorms if you keep an eye on the undergrads.”

  “You’re going to have to do more than keep an eye on them.”

  “I know.”

  “They’re gonna come to you with problems, you’re gonna have to—”

  “I know, Maggie. I know.”

  The gauzy lights harmonized into a rich lilac. A tuxedoed man passed the bar carrying a wood block on which three metal chimes were strapped. He tapped them gently with a mallet. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “if you’ll follow me now to the main hall.”

  “This isn’t the main hall?” Ethan asked.

  “Save me a seat,” said Maggie. “Two of them.”

  She found Mikey with a plate of Japanese food. “I ran into some guys from work,” he told her through a mouthful of sashimi. “Inhaling what appeared to be top-shelf cocaine in the men’s room. Small world, right?”

  “Too small. Come on, let’s find our table.”

  In the ballroom, Ezra’s name was projected onto the ceiling in italic script. Motivators in disco vests shimmied across a grid of faux wood laminate tiles. One side of the dance floor was bordered by a herd of white leather couches, and across the room a pair of strobe-lit bartenders dispensed drinks with choreographed skill. Above them, a violinist and a saxophonist flanked a DJ on an elevated platform. Ambient electronica pounded throughout the ballroom. Voices fizzed and sparkled above the bass.

  Maggie pushed through a crowd of people and found her brother seated at a long table. She introduced him to Mikey.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” Ethan said.

  “You too,” said Mikey. “Maggie’s told me loads.”

  The music swelled. “Hatikva” overdubbed with synths and snare rolls. A motivator had miked his headset and was barking at the guests. “Zaides and gentlemen, goys and girls,” he called. “Please
find your way to the dance floor. That’s right: it’s time to horah!”

  A circle of interlocking hands formed on the dance floor. Levi appeared behind his niece and nephew, yanked their chairs out, and pushed them onto the floor. They were swept into the spinning circle, torquing like a flywheel, orbiting Ezra at the center of the room. Dollar bills began to fall from the ceiling, flitting through the air like confetti, and it wasn’t until they began to accumulate on the dance floor that Maggie saw they had Ezra’s face on them. She soon lost sight of her brother and her date as the ring became recombinant, permitting everyone, parents and children and cousins and business partners. For a moment, before Ezra was hoisted in a chair above adoring friends and family, Maggie, then flanked by two commercial real estate moguls, felt herself begin to rise, a centrifugal wonder, her toes skirting the floor.

  * * *

  • • •

  The party got Maggie thinking. About money. She would never be able to spend as freely as her uncle’s family did. But she didn’t love the idea of her mother’s inheritance sitting in a cold bank vault, either, doing absolutely no good for anyone. Then again, it wasn’t really sitting there, was it? It was being traded, withdrawn from, speculated on, and invested with by boys like Mikey’s coke-addled colleagues, traveling at breakneck speed through the sketchy passageways of global commerce.

  She hated the idea of “fictitious capital,” insofar as she understood it. The “fictitious” part needled her. Were the people in charge just making this stuff up? As they went along? (“Economics,” she recalled a senile Danforth professor lecturing her class, “is a fiction. Narrative interpretation. Exegesis.”) It was disquieting. The longer her mother’s wealth occupied the realm of the imaginary, the longer someone savvier than she could profit from it. As long as she was going to keep the money—and she was, for the time being, going to keep it, until she officially renounced it—she thought it should exist in real life. The material sphere. Not that she was turning into one of those lunatic, paleocon, back-to-the-gold-standard syndicated-radio head cases. But for the first time in her life, she understood the limits of her understanding.

  In October her application with the Vermont Agency of Education was approved. She was to begin her coursework in the spring. Following the decision, she liquidated the trust and bought a ten-acre lot outside Woodstock, Vermont, on a hilltop called Harmony Ridge. The property boasted a three-bed, two-bath, two-story home; a furnished barn; a rustic outhouse; and five fenced acres of pasture with a run-in shed for a horse.

  Before moving north, she put aside a year’s worth of living expenses to sustain her while she worked toward her teaching license, and donated the remaining funds in the trust to Danforth’s Student Health Services. She gave the money in her mother’s name, under the strict terms that it be used to supplement the organization’s anemic mental health funding. She knew that Student Health was overburdened. And if the university wasn’t going to channel its endowment toward something worthwhile, the responsibility would have to fall to private donors like Maggie. “Use this grant in whatever way you like, per the conditions above,” she’d written in the letter accompanying the donation. She felt like a person of influence, using per like that. “But if you’re having trouble coming up with something, I’d recommend bringing on additional qualified, permanent staff.” There were plenty of kids, she figured, whose survival might depend on whether they had access to a woman like her mother.

  Managing an estate as large as the one she’d purchased, especially when she’d soon be in class all day, proved difficult. Maggie hired a local Birkenstocked vagrant named Bo to look after the property. But Bo didn’t have a cell phone, or a landline—he believed the government was listening in on him—so Maggie could get in touch with him only when he was at the house.

  She never thought she’d be anyone’s boss. Now that she was, she wanted to be the kind of employer who was put off by perfect attendance and unquestioning obedience. She wanted to take it easy, to rule not with an iron fist but a laissez-faire high five. This proved difficult in practice. Bo was unreliable, and there was so much work! What with the taxes, the fallen trees, and the termite infestations. Boiler trouble, water pressure malfunctions. A lot could go wrong on that much land. In late November, a sugar maple on the property was struck by lightning. It toppled, crushing a ground-level pipeline that joined the main house with the septic system. Maggie got a call the following day. “It’s kind of a disaster,” Bo said, sounding entirely unconcerned. “Fecal matter everywhere. Bubbling up in the grass . . . Want me to call in a professional? Take a look?”

  “Hmm.” Maggie thought about it for a moment. She ran a hand through her curls. “No,” she said. “I think I know a guy who can fix it.”

  * * *

  —

  Arthur arrived at Harmony Ridge on a blustery December night, snow sifting down from a single gray cloud, powdering his daughter’s estate. He inched along, the yellow headlights of Francine’s Spero illuminating a few feet of road ahead of him. He maneuvered the car up the winding drive, guided by the low stone fence on either side of him, until the stones disappeared and the path became indistinguishable from the field, the land dressed in uncanny white, leaving Arthur with little guidance but the glow from inside the gigantic house ahead, arched and shining through Palladian windows, and the winged light of the fixtures mounted on the house’s stone facade. He approached it, slowed, and cut the engine.

  He sat inside the sagging station wagon, the trunk heavy with duffel bags and bubble-wrapped breakables. He could feel the heat slowly filtering out of the car, and the cold creeping in. He had overestimated himself again. He’d been on the road for almost nineteen hours and was delirious with exhaustion. A crumpled paper bag was pinned between the windshield and the dash, speckled with greasy liver spots from the French fries he’d picked up in Columbus, the only food he’d eaten on the road. He’d impressed himself at the time, the fries a pleasant reminder of how little he needed to subsist on, but now his stomach roiled with a savage hunger.

  It was easier to leave St. Louis than he’d expected. Anxiety belonged to the future, not the past, and he didn’t see the point in wasting time with regrets. To dwell on all that he’d abandoned there—not only the house but those insidious, immaterial, American ideals: his dream of status and security, the pride of homeownership, the expectation of professional advancement—would surely bring on a heart attack of the type that killed his father. Still, it was hard to look upon the isolated, rustic chateau before him and know that it belonged to his daughter, while he could claim nothing in this world but the contents of the Spero. He reminded himself that it was not an unheard-of arrangement, the aging father sent to live with the adult child. But how many of those fathers had minds as sharp as his? And how many were expected to work for their room and board? He steeled himself and stepped out into the cold.

  Maggie answered the door in black leggings and hiking socks, an oversize sweater draped over her torso. “Dad,” she said, leaning forward for a hug. “I almost thought you wouldn’t make it.”

  “I-90 is a deathtrap in this weather.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Come inside.”

  He followed her into the house.

  The living room was high-ceilinged, the stone walls framed by beams of varnished timber mottled with knots. “Some of this was Ethan’s idea,” Maggie said, nodding up at the iron ring chandelier. She led Arthur through the abutting dining room. “I’ll give you the grand tour tomorrow. As you’ll see, the main problem is the septic system, which is ancient. But there’s plenty more for you to do once that’s fixed. Falling trees are going to be the least of our problems, especially now that it’s winter. How do you feel about horses, by the way? I’m toying with the idea.”

  He was queasy with excess. The house was too big, his status too compromised, the arrangement too bizarre. He hadn’t expected the place to be this grand. He hadn’t expe
cted Maggie to be so readily at home there.

  “It’s a bit . . . enormous, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It’s just a farmhouse.”

  “It’s a ski lodge, is what it is.”

  Maggie smiled. “You’ll sleep in the barn.”

  “Like an animal.”

  “Hardly. It’s furnished and heated. I left out towels, the bed has sheets, et cetera. It’ll be more private that way. I’ll let you get settled.”

  They looped back to the foyer. Arthur glanced down at the trail of brown water his squeaking sneakers had left behind.

  “Maggie,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  He looked her in the eyes then, for the first time, it seemed, since she was an infant, flailing and defenseless. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  “Whatever it is, don’t worry about it,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  He nodded and walked out into the snow.

  He trudged to the car and popped the trunk, hoisting a heavy duffel bag over his right shoulder. It would take multiple trips to get all his things out, three to four at least—unless he pushed himself, took up a heavier load. Leaning over, he grabbed a second bag and threw it over his left shoulder. His knees almost buckled, but they held. His thighs shook under the weight. He saw the barn across the field and set off toward it. Step after step he walked slowly, deliberately, hauling his load through the dark. Flakes alighted on his scalp.

  The barn was designed in the same style of the main house, all smooth knotted wood, one great room like an overturned ship’s hull. The straps on the duffel bags dug burns into his shoulders. He followed a row of dim Edison bulbs to the far end of the cavernous space, where a large bed with a wrought-iron headboard was flush with the wall.