The Altruists Read online

  Meanwhile, UMSL was $8 million in the hole. The university had recently consolidated the College of Fine Arts, the Center for Media Studies, and their entrepreneurship MBA into the centralized Institute for Business Arts. Danforth was packed with international heirs and east-coasters; UMSL, a public institution, mostly served Missourians. But despite these differences the schools were only six miles apart, a fifteen-minute drive in Francine’s Spero, separated by the little towns of Wellston, Hillsdale, Beverly Hills, and Normandy.

  “What are we doing here?” Ethan asked as his father pulled the car into the parking lot of UMSL’s Dedbroke Performing Arts Center.

  “You’ll see.”

  Ethan stepped out of the car and followed his father inside. The center’s lobby was shabbily decorated with approximations of “abstract” and “modern” paintings on the walls. Pigeon shit Pollocked the glass windows. In the center of the lobby Ethan registered a cardboard standee, a two-dimensional woman in a lilac gown and slippers, her cardboard legs pressed together, arms arcing over her head.

  Her dimensions were uncanny. She stood around four and a half feet high, not life-sized but not any other recognizable scale either. She smiled blankly at Ethan. “What are we . . . ,” he began to ask again, but a silver-haired usher with plantar fasciitis appeared behind him and, limping, pushed them across the lobby, through the auditorium doors. “You’re late,” she scolded. “You almost missed it.”

  Ethan dropped into the scruffy fabric of an auditorium chair. More than half of the semi-tiered seats around him were empty.

  “Hey,” he said. “I need to ask you for a favor.”

  “Huh?” Arthur snorted, the spiked sound sticking Ethan in the ribs.

  “This is hard.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “What I wanted to ask you was . . .”

  Arthur raised an eyebrow.

  “Was . . .”

  The prospect of putting his desperation into words was crippling. He hated begging, hated telegraphing his needs, and it was never easy admitting failure to one’s father.

  “Have you—did you . . . Have you noticed anything weird about Maggie?” He bailed. “Does she look okay to you?”

  His father hushed him. “It’s starting.”

  All at once, the murmuring voices around them thinned to a whisper. The tentative squeaks of a tuning orchestra flared throughout the performance hall. Somewhere in the darkening room, Ethan heard the nasal whine of an oboe.

  * * *

  • • •

  Maggie woke at noon to church bells.

  Or, wait, no—it wasn’t the sound that woke her but the silence around it. The way the rusty chime rang unclouded through Chouteau Place. It was Saturday, the bells wouldn’t truly go berserk until tomorrow, but they still rang on the half hour, and their clean, defiant sound startled Maggie out of bed. Ridgewood had its churches, too, Irish and Italian and Gottscheer Catholic, but their bells were one factor in a larger system, an ethno-ambient collage of catcalls, Puerto Rican dembow riddims, and Chinese-delivery motorbikes. The resulting soundscape was so constant and so rich that Maggie had become suspicious of anything else. She’d forgotten the oppressive silence of Midwestern suburbs, and yes, she meant oppressive in that way—like the pyramids (potentially built by her ancestors) in Egypt, this kind of majesty came at a cost. This kind of peace meant unrest somewhere else. Someone had to pay for it. Someone somewhere had to suffer for this neighborhood to stay quiet enough that the wind in the trees was the sound of paper money, rustling.

  The house was quiet too. No sign of Ethan or her father. Maggie stomped downstairs, her feet thudding against the beige carpet-runner. A yellow legal pad on the kitchen table read OUT W/ ETHAN in Arthur’s negligent scrawl.

  Alone in the house, the whole day stretching out before her, Maggie set about redistributing her family’s wealth.

  She scoured the house for items of interest, things of value sentimental and objective. She made space in her duffel bag for her beloved stuffed elephant, Susan B., which Arthur had placed at the foot of her bed (sentimental), along with the tortoiseshell barrette (sentimental) that she’d worn daily for two years straight in preschool. She swiped a pair of gold cufflinks (objective) that she’d never seen her father wear. She nabbed cash from his sock drawer. She wrapped four crystal-stemmed wineglasses in a pillowcase from the linen closet and stashed those in her backpack—one pair for drinking, one pair to pawn.

  Sorting things, reassigning them—it was the rare occasion when Maggie felt that she controlled her life. That she could shape her destiny. Her mother’s money, the inheritance, was completely out of her hands. Undeserved and unasked for. What was Maggie supposed to do, enjoy it? Live it up beneath the fiscal ghost lights of her mother’s life? Literally profit off the worst thing to ever happen to her? And who’s to say the money would have made life any better? It had practically ruined her brother!

  Maggie didn’t like moochers and leeches, the freeloader types from college whose parents underwrote their bad plays and bought studio time for their alt-folk acts. But she was also skeptical of anyone with a really good job. Anyone who made really good money at a really good job had blood on his hands. You didn’t make good money without exploiting someone. Somewhere in the corporate structure, someone was losing, and losing big. The poor. The environment. Maggie wanted no part of it. Which is why she had to steal, or redistribute, every now and then. It was a confusing set of principles she’d arrived at—but perhaps no more confusing and muddled than the actual economy, of which she could not make heads or tails.

  She continued to redistribute. The grand prize, the thing she had come for, was a Tiffany cocktail watch that had belonged to her mother. It was a square, diamond-studded piece on a black satin strap, roman numerals bordering the blank face in white gold. Super showy as far as Maggie was concerned, much more in Bex’s domain than her mother’s, but its value was sentimental too. In her rush to live monkishly, to possess as little as she could, Maggie had forgotten to bring a token of her mother with her to New York. And the token that she wanted was the watch.

  For a time, while Maggie was in high school and for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to her, her mother befriended, or was befriended by, the wife of the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. Maggie wasn’t sure how this had come about—she only knew that the manager’s daughter was a classmate of hers, and the worst kind of social demagogue—but all of a sudden Francine was being whisked away to the city’s most upscale restaurants: Tony’s Italian, Al’s steakhouse, Morton’s steakhouse, Fleming’s steakhouse.

  The manager’s wife and her friends were five to ten years older than Francine, platinum blonde, extremely white, politically conservative. Maggie suspected, and could only hope, that her mother got an anthropological kick out of dining with them—that Francine joined their clique in the name of science. Or else she liked the free steak, which was almost always comped, the manager’s wife dismissing Francine’s plastic with a look of Are you kidding me?

  Either way, these were not her mother’s people.

  Sometime in the course of this new friendship, which lasted for about ten months in the spring of 2006, the manager’s wife hosted a fund-raiser at the Chase Park Plaza hotel. The cause was ALS, the cost per plate was $300, and the players’ wives, many of them models, spent the cocktail hour working the room, mingling with donors and laughing gracefully with their mouths closed.

  Francine dragged Arthur along. He wore a brown suit.

  “What do you think it cost to host this here?” he asked. “Answer in research grants.”

  “Shh,” she said. “And besides. You have to spend it to make it.” When Arthur excused himself to the men’s room, she sneaked away and bought a $100 raffle ticket.

  After a speech from the manager’s wife and a harrowing short film on motor neuron disease, the shortstop’s wife, a Dutch
dancer whom the shortstop had allegedly fallen for on a post–World Series bender in Amsterdam, approached the podium and listed off some alphanumeric characters that matched the sequence on Francine’s ticket stub. It took a moment for her to realize what had happened.

  Maggie’s memory of that night was clear: Her mother coming through the kitchen door, face flushed joyful red, her sequined dress catching and releasing frenzied light. A glass case rested in her palm. She removed the top to show Maggie the watch.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “I guess,” said Maggie, then sixteen. “I mean, it’s a little . . . much. Right?”

  “Tell me about it,” Arthur groaned.

  But Francine wasn’t listening. She stared at the watch, the expensive-looking but altogether-unlike-her object.

  “Are you crying?” Maggie asked. Little crystal tears welled in her mother’s eyes.

  “You have to understand,” she said in a fragile voice. “I never win anything.”

  Maggie had never heard her mother speak this way before. She’d never heard her talk in terms of victory and defeat—nor was Francine prone to admissions of self-doubt. Maggie had instinctively wanted to defend her, but how could she defend her to her? Francine never won? But she was perfect and good! What could it mean that a woman like her mother, beautiful and wise and cunning, never felt as though she won? And what did it say about Maggie, who worked tirelessly to emulate her?

  It tore her up, even now.

  But where was it? Not in Francine’s modest jewelry drawer, not under her parents’ bed, not among the scattered pens and spotted seashell paperweights on her work desk. Maggie stomped around the house, searching in vain. She thought to look in the last place she’d expect. But the house had lots of last places. Too large for a four-person family, much less a family of three, the house was comprised almost entirely of last places.

  She tried the basement, her first last place. But the watch was not among the slumping beanbag chairs, at the oxidized feet of the Ping-Pong table, or behind the rowing machine Arthur salvaged from the Dumpster outside her middle school. It was not in the unfinished laundry room, where a black burn stained the wall behind the washing machine. The watch was not in her second, third, or fourth last places either.

  Her fifth last place was the dining room. She was digging through a handsome chest of drawers, riffling through inherited silverware, when she opened her thumb on a monogrammed dinner knife and spun around in pain. There, hanging on the wall before her, was a message from her father.

  ELEVEN

  With Arthur in Zimbabwe, Francine devised a syllabus of indulgence. Free from his meticulous accounting, his obsessive bookkeeping, and his tightwad inquisitions (“I was just in the shower—there are two soaps. Did you buy more soap? Why do we have two soaps?”), she took a much-needed sabbatical from austerity. She saw movies. She bought a down jacket. She went to the Museum of Fine Arts and brought home a glossy Thomas Hart Benton print from the gift shop, which she framed and hung in the living room above the accent chair she’d also purchased in his absence. It wasn’t a radical program. But Arthur, whose genius lay in imposing his will on those closest to him, was deficient in the consumer psychology that gave life in America purpose. There weren’t many things he didn’t consider to be indulgences.

  Solitude was the one luxury for which Francine lacked the requisite emotional, and material, currency. She missed Arthur—she did—and there was also the matter of rent, which she couldn’t cover on her grad school stipend alone.

  She tried advertising the second bedroom, which she and Arthur had been using as a study, to the greater Kenmore area at large. For one interminable weekend her apartment swarmed with all manner of vexatious punks, marathoners, Irish Catholics, Sox fanatics, preppies, Fort Point artists, and Harvard Square grand masters. There was something wrong with each of them. Too outrageous, too intense, untrustworthy. A retired woman in her sixties asked where she could store her porcelain owl figurines. An admittedly handsome Southie boy suggested with non-rhotic confidence that he share Francine’s bed in an effort to save space. Just when she was resigned to paying rent herself and eating out of Goya cans all year, she met a candidate she deemed, in the flattering light of her desperation, a safe bet.

  The safe bet had a heartland smile, wide-set eyes, and guarantors. Marla Bloch was a psych student like Francine, though two years behind her in the program. They had Ohio in common. Marla hailed from Cincinnati, and was curiously unashamed of her home state. She openly admitted to her bafflement at New England winters, Bostonians’ poor manners, and graduate study in general. She vocalized the thoughts that Francine never dared to say, lest her veneer of East Coast sophistication crack. Things like “This reading is dense!” or “It’s so nice to meet another Ohioan!” or “It’s hard to spell ‘amygdala’!” She wasn’t wrong in her feelings—their readings were dense, Marla’s midwestern manners were appreciated, and that little almond of nuclei was truly an orthographic puzzler—but these were things Francine had learned not to admit aloud. Marla Bloch didn’t mind. She was a truth teller, a bluntly unselfconscious girl of a type Francine recognized, warmly, from home.

  Marla wrote a blank check for utilities and the two women shook on it.

  Whereas Arthur considered even the North End to be a tourist trap, Marla, upon move-in, taped a list to the fridge, an actual list, of the top ten things she wanted to do and see in the city while she earned her degree. Francine snickered when she saw it.

  “Oh my god, I’m sorry,” she said, catching herself. “I don’t know why I did that.”

  “You laughed.” Marla looked confused.

  “No, no, I’m sorry,” Francine said. “It looks like a great list. Let’s pick something to do.”

  “Why did you laugh, though?”

  “I didn’t mean to, I promise. I’m thinking what my boyfriend would say.”

  “What would he say?”

  Francine suppressed a swell of cynicism. “Nothing. He would’ve thought it was a great idea. Come on. Let’s go to the Old State House. I’ve actually never been.”

  With earnest, chipper Marla at her side, Francine discovered Boston. Her new roommate walked unembarrassed with a map out in front of her, pausing to stop locals for directions. Unlike Arthur she had no reservations about entry fees at historic churches, museums, and other landmarks. And whenever she leaned too close to a painting or stepped inside a church mid-Mass, she was quick to laugh at herself in a manner that suggested only mock embarrassment. Francine suspected that beneath it lay an abundance of artless self-esteem.

  Marla was a talker. But she didn’t talk, as Francine’s mother did, as though she wanted to murder the silence before it got her first. She talked to pass the time. Nothing revelatory, whatever crossed her mind. And what crossed her mind more than anything, Francine discovered, was sex. She claimed to be “hung up” on a high school boyfriend from “a million years ago.” She talked about how much “fun” they used to have “in bed,” harping on the “bigness” of his “thing” and the feelings it provoked in her. Marla’s combination of frankness and puerility confounded Francine at every turn. In Francine’s undergrad years at Wellesley, sex had been political. Gynocentric. And Arthur was more interested in doing it, efficiently, than discussing it. But then here was bushy-tailed Marla Bloch, whose limited vocabulary of euphemisms did not prevent her from expounding on the subject day in, day out.

  Francine would have liked to forget about sex completely in her boyfriend’s absence. To devote herself to scholarship and celibacy. But Marla wanted to talk. Wanted to “chat” about “boys.” More than once, after sharing a bottle of cold duck, Francine went to bed thinking that she’d have to watch herself around this girl.

  Meanwhile, Arthur left her piece by piece.

  She began to forget. She lost his mouth first, so that when she tried to picture him, the lower half of
his face appeared smudged out by a pencil eraser. His eyes turned brown in her remembering, not hazel, which was what they were—canny, high-strung hazel. It was not until she forgot the particulars of his nose, rounding his into the mere idea of a nose, a stock nose, that she realized his ears—round or pointed? Lobes attached or free-hanging?—had slipped quietly from her mind days earlier.

  And yet. In Arthur’s absence, her mental image of him cloudy, a dim facsimile, Francine grew increasingly fond of him. Longed for him. She liked the man in her mind, the blurred approximation. He was even better than she remembered.

  * * *

  • • •

  After finals, Marla threw a party. She was the only graduate student in Francine’s program guileless enough to do it. “I want it to be wild,” she said, “like they were at Ohio State.” She flirted with a few themes before settling on the one that tickled her the most, and brought Francine along to xerox the invitations.

  You Are Cordially Invited

  To Marla Bloch’s First Annual

  Freudian “Slip” Party

  Lingerie/Underwear Only

  No Shirt, No Shoes, No Pants, No Problem

  Friends & Lovers Welcome

  “Marla, this is ridiculous,” Francine said. “No one is going to come to a—a lingerie party.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.”

  “You don’t think the concept is a little . . . immature? I’m twenty-nine years old. David? From our subsection? Is forty.”

  “You’re wrong. We’re giving people exactly what they want.”

  “I think he has kids.”

  Marla tweaked one of Francine’s curls. “Fran,” she whispered meaningfully. “Sweet, innocent Fran. Listen to me. We’re girls. And we’re giving other girls, and boys, permission to see each other. Each other’s bodies. Trust me. It’ll be a blast.”