The Altruists Read online

  Francine smiled. “None taken.”

  “Anyway, that’s not what I’m getting at.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I guess I mean to say I can’t imagine moving for anyone, period.”

  “You’re independent. I admire that in you. I’ll take credit for it, if you don’t mind. Good parenting.”

  “But you did that. You moved.”

  “It happens.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Lots of reasons.”

  “Like . . .”

  Francine drummed her fingers on the underside of the textbook. “Like when people say that marriage requires a certain fluidity, adaptability, compromise, they often mean on one party’s behalf.”

  “The woman’s.”

  “That is certainly the case most often.”

  “What does Dad think about it?”

  “What does he think about what?”

  “Moving us out here. Your sacrifice. Doesn’t he feel guilty or something?”

  Francine fluffed her hair. “Your father feels guilty about a lot of things. But not that. No, I don’t think he feels bad about that.”

  “What does he feel bad about?” Maggie asked.

  “Well,” she said. “I suppose it’s not easy to be as ambitious as he is. Was. Because when you’re that ambitious and things don’t work out as you envision them—that can be hard to stomach.”

  “What didn’t work out?” Maggie closed the textbook, more interested now in her father’s abnormal psychology.

  “He had this idea,” Francine said. “It was his life. And in a way, it became mine.” She sighed and shook her head. “When I was young, there was nothing more appealing to me than a man with an idea.”

  “What was the idea?”

  Outside Maggie’s bedroom window, a branched cardinal ruffled its feathers. Francine watched it take off with a flutter. “Well,” she said, clearing her throat. “What do you know about African waste management?”

  * * *

  —

  Before Arthur had his idea, he had ambition, and that was when he met Francine Klein. He was pushy and determined, qualities she found attractive, especially when he was pushy and determined on her behalf. In Arthur she saw a fiery and productive mind at work, the kind of mind she dreamed of possessing herself. Fierce. Uncompromising. Their attachment was heightened by a series of pregnancy scares—a broken condom, problems with the Pill; fate, that Jewish grandmother, was ever pushing for a baby—and by the summer of 1977 they were sharing a cramped one-bedroom in Kenmore Square. Before Boston University’s multimillion-dollar urban renewal project facilitated the closing of the Rathskeller and the opening of a Barnes & Noble, Kenmore had been the kind of blighted neighborhood missed only after it was gone, a punk assembly of greasy spoons and methadone clinics. It was a good place to be young and in love.

  Francine was earning her PhD, acquiring a vocabulary that she applied with great enthusiasm to her parents. She’d spent her childhood longing to be anywhere but Dayton, to belong to any family but hers. But now, six semesters into her degree, Francine nurtured the one remaining seed of sympathy she’d saved for her mother, whom she realized was merely a maladjusted histrionic with perhaps some mild dermatillomania who had lost the best years of her life managing her husband, a unipolar depressive with a whole host of oedipal issues that Francine couldn’t even broach. Naming things provided an unexpected relief. She decided that her mother, though still fundamentally unforgivable, had been a victim of her mind, and of the times in which she lived.

  With this newfound sympathy came another, more disturbing revelation. Maybe Mrs. Klein, who called biweekly to ask whether Francine was pregnant yet, was onto something. Maybe fate had a point. Maybe they were in cahoots, it didn’t matter: in December of 1980, at twenty-seven years old, Francine decided—realized?—that she wanted a child.

  Arthur wasn’t convinced. “I thought,” he said, “that you hated your mother. All mothers, in general.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You say that all the time. Yesterday, in the kitchen, you said, ‘The older I get, the less I think of my mother as the exception, but the rule.’”

  “What I meant was that I realized she suffered as much as other women of her generation, many of whom had undiagnosed issues brought on genetically or exacerbated by the systems that confined them, so when she acted out it was more a symptom than it was—”

  “And you said how that was both extremely irritating and a great relief, because it meant you were normal, but it also robbed you of the right to complain.”

  “Arthur! I didn’t say ‘the right to complain.’ I said, ‘the feeling that I’d overcome something as the daughter of a sufferer of mental illness.’”

  “That’s not how I remember it. In any case, this conversation can wait. I can’t engage. There’s no room in my brain for this right now.”

  She rolled over in bed and almost toppled out, crowded as she was by his ambition, which was beginning to colonize his attention, in her prescient thoughts, like a mistress. She wished he wasn’t so aloof. She wished he’d focus on what was in front of him—her, for instance. But that long view was what she envied, and was drawn to. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to see yourself as a potential agent of history, a Great Mind. When he was in good spirits, his ambition was exhilarating. It was like being wonderfully drunk. When he was unhappy, as he was now, he seemed arrogant and quixotic, giving Francine nausea and the spins.

  She attributed his sour mood to work stress. Until recently he’d been developing a pet project at the engineering firm, creating an inexpensive, fast-setting substance that he hoped would one day replace concrete. It involved a special paste that Arthur had concocted that reduced the amount of cement required to make the mixture. He’d been at it for the past year, consulting with material engineers around town, staying late at the office to run stress tests, and falling behind on his other assignments. But the result of this experiment, while cheap to produce, turned out to be weaker than concrete, and unable to support larger structures like bridges and ships’ hulls and shopping malls, even when reinforced with mesh and rebar. Arthur had been furious when his supervisor canceled the project. “It’s new,” he’d pleaded. “A novel substance. You’re not going to give it a chance?”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s novel,” his supervisor told him, “if it has no applicable use.”

  “We can find a use. Bear with me. I’ll come up with something.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. There’s no need for faster, cheaper concrete. There’s no demand for it. No one has a problem with concrete as it is. I let you see this through because you were enthusiastic, and because you promised it wouldn’t interfere with your work, which it clearly has.”

  “I was enthusiastic. Am enthusiastic. I think I’m onto something here.”

  “I’m going to ask you a question,” his supervisor said. “Answer honestly. Are you pursuing this because you think it could meet a real need? Or are you pursuing this to have something to pursue?”

  “I reject the premise.”

  “In other words: Are you doing this for anyone besides yourself?”

  “I’ll find a use for it.”

  “It’s too fragile, Arthur. It’ll never pass code. Not in this country.”

  He was in a men’s room stall when it happened, the mid-January issue of Time spread open on his lap. The idea! It electrified his whole body. If only he could make use of his experimental substance somewhere else—somewhere hot and dry, where it would set quickly; somewhere with few regulations; somewhere in dire need of development, where his contributions would go appreciated—if only that were possible, he’d be more than just an engineer. He’d be a humanitarian genius. He looked down at the bespectacled face of the newly minted Zimbabwean prime minister star
ing up at him from the magazine, smiling below his toothbrush moustache. He raised the magazine to his face and kissed it.

  He flushed and fled the men’s room. It was only four thirty but instead of returning to his desk, he went straight to the break room where he stored his cross-country skis. He carried them outside and strapped in. The snow in Boston had piled up, bleaching the city, disappearing cars. He sped through the unplowed streets, tripping wildly over the fresh powder, limbs flailing. When he reached the Kenmore Square apartment, he kicked off the encumbrances and left them at the door, clambered up three flights, and breathlessly told Francine his plan.

  “You’re going to do what?” She was sitting at the table, her books and papers sprawled out before her.

  He huffed, his cheeks pink from the cold. “I’m going to build sturdy, sanitary, low-cost outhouses all across the Zimbabwean countryside.”

  Francine blinked. “You’re serious?”

  “I’m serious. What do you think?”

  What did she think? She didn’t want him to go, is what she thought. But she didn’t want to be the kind of woman who kept her boyfriend from pursuing his dream. It was too early in their relationship to sow that kind of long-term resentment. And, she had to admit, there was something exciting about it, about him, standing there all bright-eyed and dusted with snow, charged with purpose. It was a better look on him than vague, unrealized ambition. If she permitted him this trip, she thought, cosigned on this adult rumspringa, he would realize what he had in her. In a few months he would return, sick with freedom, ready to start a family.

  “Okay,” she said. “I think you should do it.”

  With her blessing, he wrote a proposal and applied for funding. She helped compose and mail the grants, missing her academic deadlines in service of his. But no sooner had the applications gone out than Arthur was swiftly and mercilessly turned down by nearly every organization he’d solicited: Save the Children, the Southern Africa Development Community, Samaritan’s Purse, Doctors Without Borders, Engineers With Passports. Months melted with the snow, and Arthur grew despondent. Francine had never seen him drink more than two beers in an evening, but here he was having three, four, five, six. He put on weight. This from a man who never indulged, who practically accounted for individual grains of rice, who imposed hunger on himself, who wasted nothing and wanted only to unleash himself on the world.

  She took some small, private relief at his rejection. It meant that he would stick around. Things would improve once he bounced back. He’d given it a shot, and it hadn’t worked out. Maybe now he’d put his ambition toward their relationship. Maybe now they’d make a family.

  In the fall, their lives resumed some semblance of normalcy. Francine studied hard, strategically scattering mentions of friends with new babies in conversation. Arthur returned to work, pretending not to hear her.

  Then, that spring, an unusual letter landed in his mailbox. The envelope was addressed to Arthur from an organization called the Humble Brothers in Christ. In their typewritten note, they described themselves as “a group devoted to eradicating poverty; to abolishing hunger; to utterly pulverizing treatable illnesses worldwide.” Arthur nearly wept with relief when, at the end of the letter, they stated their intention to fund his project.

  Francine was devastated. “Are you sure about this . . . church?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of it. I don’t want to put a damper on things, but I’m saying, it might be wise to keep from getting overexcited.”

  “I have to take whatever I can get,” he snapped.

  What the Humble Brothers lacked in name recognition they made up for in enthusiasm—and money. Their tax-exempt church’s newly minted publishing wing even printed up a hundred copies of Arthur’s detailed proposal, pocket-sized red hardcovers with his name embossed on the front. Arthur was so proud of them that, for the first time since meeting Francine, he cried.

  The bound proposals had an outsize effect on Arthur, who’d grown up in a home without books. As a boy he was a natural thinker with precocious critical faculties, but his parents weren’t readers. Arthur spent his Sundays in the Sharon Public Library, losing himself in the stacks. His was the typical syllabus of the preadolescent male—biographies of geniuses, novels about baseball—but his favorites were the swashbuckling, empire-defending adventures of Lieutenant Giles Everhard (VC, GCB) as documented in T. S. Worthington’s Everhard novels. The good lieutenant was a scoundrel, a rake, a hot-blooded antihero who sailed and slept his way around the world on behalf of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Drab, cold Sharon, Massachusetts, could not compete with the exotic islands depicted in Everhard in the West Indies, nor the American Southwest of Everhard and the Redskins. Arthur’s parents couldn’t have cared less. His mother, a severe woman with undiagnosed Tourette’s and an unrelated habit of reminding her son what a little shit he was, threw away whatever books he brought home. She didn’t see the value in them. His father, the only cash-strapped dentist in the world, was hardly any help, consumed as he was in self-loathing and the drinking problem that endeared him to the local Irish and made him a Barnum freak show among his fellow Jews. To have a book, now, with Arthur’s name on it—it was a rebuttal to them both. If only his father were still alive to see! He drove to Sharon and left a copy with his mother. She never called to follow up.

  “This is typical,” he fumed. “So typical that she would do this.”

  “Calm down,” said Francine.

  “The least she could do is lie to me! Tell me she gave it a once-over! I called her this morning, and guess what? No mention. You were right about mothers. They’re the worst. Can’t trust ’em. Period.”

  “That’s not what I said. Besides, you know how she is. You can’t rely on her for positive reinforcement. She’s never given it to you. You’re going to have to be proud of yourself. I’m proud of you.”

  Arthur covered his face with his hands. “It’s not enough.”

  * * *

  • • •

  More letters followed, details hashed out. It was settled: Arthur was going to Zimbabwe.

  There was a lot of hope for the country then. It was newly independent, the breadbasket of Africa, a chief exporter of wheat, corn, and tobacco, all thanks to a charismatic militant named Robert Gabriel Mugabe. In March of 1982, Arthur Gabriel Alter flew from Boston to London, London to Salisbury, which would soon be renamed Harare, landing in the capital city of the country in which he would bring his idea to fruition.

  Arthur had upgraded his flight in London for a nominal fee. Before takeoff, Air Zimbabwe provided him, a Club Class passenger, with hot hand towels and complimentary champagne. Once airborne, Arthur enjoyed a ten-hour open bar and a dinner of smoked fish and cornmeal cake, a service that would suffer drastic cuts in the coming months. Across the aisle sat an English-born Zimbabwean, a portly Kipling with a permanent tan. The man had a coarse moustache and a stumped foot. A pink scar extended from the base of his neck to where his shirt was buttoned halfway down his chest. He caught Arthur staring and said, “The war.” A couplet occurred to Arthur, something from a poem he’d memorized as a boy in school: Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, / What is Africa to me?

  In the baggage claim at Salisbury (soon Harare International) Airport, a slender man in a boxy suit and tinted shades displayed a slab of cardboard bearing the name ALTER. Arthur followed the man to a white Mercedes-Benz.

  Back in Boston he’d arranged to stay a couple of days at the home of the family of a Zimbabwean colleague, Louis Moyo. On Arthur’s last day at the firm, Louis took him out to lunch. When the bill came he passed Arthur a fist of hundred-dollar bills. “Did I loan you money?” Arthur asked. “No, no,” his colleague said. “This is for my parents. Give it to them for me, please. American dollars go much further than you think. And also, because I will forget”—and here he pulled a Playboy from his briefcase, a creamy-skinned redhead on the cover, topless and leaning over a bot
tle of spilled red nail polish, her nipples airbrushed into oblivion. “As a token of my thanks,” Louis said. He added, “Out in the bush? You might need it.”

  What is Africa to me: / Copper sun or scarlet sea.

  The Moyos lived in an expansive yellow-brick home in Salisbury with a lawn as manicured as any in the tony suburbs of Boston. They were waiting up for him when he arrived.

  Louis Moyo Sr. was a jowly, amiable man quick to cut himself down with a playful aside. He made a point to say things like, “You must be exhausted,” in kind acknowledgment of Arthur’s state. His wife, Promise Moyo, was more assertive, plying Arthur with tea and cakes. A fiercely independent woman, before meeting her husband she built and operated a clothing manufacturing plant. Louis Sr., who, by his own admission, possessed government connections but no particular skills, had arranged a contract for his wife’s factory to provide the Zimbabwe National Army with their uniforms. “The world is who you know,” he told Arthur, one hand around Promise’s waist.

  That first night, after leaving him to the guest room, Louis Sr. knocked on Arthur’s door. “I would like to wish you good night,” he said. “But first, I must ask—did our son give you anything for me?”

  Arthur had forgotten about the money. “He did,” he said. “One minute.” He crouched before his bag with his back to Mr. Moyo. After quietly peeling three Benjamins from the wad—he hadn’t forgotten Louis’s remark about the value of American dollars—he turned around and passed the rest of the money to his colleague’s father. Mr. Moyo’s face relaxed into a smile as he wished his guest a good night’s sleep.

  Arthur spent two relaxing weeks with the Moyo family. Mr. and Mrs. Moyo had both been educated abroad—Louis Sr. in Rochester, New York, and Promise in Toronto—and were curious about the state of American politics. Arthur fielded their questions about Reagan. How could the US elect a Hollywood actor to the office of president? Arthur explained that the average American voter was basically a pampered child with an insatiable appetite for entertainment.