The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  ‘No chance. They’re out every night while they’re home. We’ll have a family lunch tomorrow, I’ll make sure of it. Hey, here’s an idea.’ She addressed Peter, as though Henry were absent. ‘Henry should take them downtown, show them around the Hirshhorn and the Phillips like he did when they were kids, and then take them to Wagshal’s, talk things over with some of that smoked brisket. He’d have so much to say about modern art. And they need to learn about it. Have to impress the girls somehow.’

  ‘I assumed you’d got them studying business admin so they wouldn’t be tainted by that sort of thing,’ Henry said.

  ‘Frankly, I want them to have jobs when they graduate. But it’d be helpful if they could tell the difference between a Picasso and a… oh, who’s the other one? Braque?’

  Pronounced like break.

  ‘If you can convince them to come along,’ Peter said, ‘you go for it, Henry. One mention of smoked brisket should do the trick.’

  He laughed that self-satisfied laugh Henry had become too accustomed to over the years, the one designed for the audience rather than himself; the one intended to convey confidence that actually hinted at insecurity. Peter patted Henry’s shoulder in a way he didn’t usually allow, except from people like Timothy Fogel.

  The sun fell below the canopy of tulip poplars on the property’s verge, the cold driving them indoors. Henry excused himself to get changed and felt the familiar flood of relief as he pulled the door to the guestroom in on himself. Less familiar was the sharp pang he felt at the absence of Martha, to whom he would have turned now to confide his feelings, to strip away propriety and say what he really thought about his sister.

  If he was honest, though, there had been something soothing in Christine’s company today, despite the irritation and scorn she provoked in him. He trusted her, the way he trusted anyone he knew inside and out, whose behaviour was predictable, unwavering. And yet she’d always been a powerful mirror, showing up the finest, most inescapable details. He couldn’t help resenting it, or finding it suffocating, when she told him how to conduct himself.

  Though Henry wanted to take his nephews out tomorrow, bridging the distance that had grown between them seemed impossible. They didn’t dislike him, as far as he was aware, but they’d achieved a stage closer to mutual indifference. Their passions now were rowing and wrestling, according to Christine. Beer, weed, girls and smoked brisket must have figured somewhere in that hierarchy, if his own experience was enough to work off. What could he offer them? Henry had been in their position. He’d played water polo and slept around the Boston University dorms. Tried so hard to show strength and mystique, chain-smoking cigarettes, wearing polo shirts with linen slacks, growing out a beard before he was ready for one, and displaying no real sense of humour beyond a cruel one.

  Henry remembered how he and Martha had gone to the galleries with the boys when they were younger. How she’d handled their boredom by calling out artists’ names, challenging her nephews to run around and find them (a prize for whoever got there first) while she and Henry locked arms, stood in front of Edward Hopper’s Ground Swell, taking it in. Then, when the kids returned, she’d broken off and chased them around the garden court, down the sculpture hall to the rotunda, while Henry stayed with the painting.

  This place, with its clean white carpet and its Chinoiserie, its proper arrangements—Henry felt like an alien here, too. But at the same time he was uncomfortably involved in it, pressed up to its perfumed bosom. He shouldn’t have come here. He might as well have stripped naked and put himself under their big microscope.

  Downstairs, Christine cleared her brother’s half-full cup of coffee and returned the untouched petit fours to their tin. She was worried about him—more so than usual. The psychiatrist clearly wasn’t helping. If anything, Henry was more morose than before. Which she found insulting. Everybody had to deal with tragedy, at some point, and those with enough moral fibre came through stronger than before.

  She didn’t like to think of her brother as a weak man, yet he’d behaved like one too often. One particular episode had stayed with her—being dragged along to some gaudy midtown bar to meet his friend Timothy, when she was in New York on a business trip many years ago. Her brother had behaved like a fool, simpering at every one of the man’s anecdotes and trying to play up Christine’s job, asking her about power dinners, haute cuisine, fine wine, and then acting disappointed when she didn’t glamorise it. All for this silly, shallow, vain man. He clung to the trappings of his career as if they meant something very deep, even though they were the antithesis of what he deserved.

  That tragedy became her shared burden. He would like Melanie Jacobs, she was certain. An intelligent, steady, reasonable woman. Better than sly, manipulative Martha Beaucanon—rest in peace—who had one foot out the door from the first day, negotiating everything in her own best interests. Poisoning her brother’s sense of himself. Insisting on her moral superiority over everyone, including Henry. The difference between Christine and her naive little brother was that he’d swallowed Martha’s pretensions in one easy gulp.

  They should have broken off their marriage long ago. It had produced nothing more than that big, empty penthouse full of beautiful, cold objects.

  EXPECTING sanctuary and relief, Henry found that New York spurned him as he returned in the late morning. The unseasonably fine Thanksgiving weather had given way to out-and-out chill. Low clouds pressed down on the spires of the buildings, cutting off their tips so they pointed to nothing.

  The dinner with Melanie Jacobs had gone as anticipated. She had interesting things to say about her research, the rewards of teaching, her charity work. She had solid convictions about education reform, which Henry at least didn’t disagree with. She was also involved with a program in Lebanon, recruiting artists to teach traumatised Syrian children in a refugee camp—something he wanted to ask her more about. He would have been content with her company, in fact, if it didn’t feel as though Christine had selected a blurry reproduction of Martha from his mental rejects pile, complete with two children from the former marriage. Arrangements, whether real or imagined, made Henry self-conscious. He could have forgiven Christine’s good intentions if they weren’t so near-sighted.

  Like Henry, she had seen their parents growing old together, sleeping in separate beds, sacrificing their freedom at the altar of duty. Their father’s long, fattened and wasted middle years would always haunt Henry, the crush of inevitability that must have stifled whatever dreams he’d had. A career as a pilot. Pan Am, exotic destinations.

  He’d learned of his father’s death out of the blue in 2002, during a trip to Paris Fashion Week. Having survived several cancer scares and a heart attack, his father had gone out for a wander one night and fallen into the neighbours’ swimming pool. Stranger and more unexpected than anything else the man had done in his lifetime, though just as inconclusive. The news came as an email from Christine, curiously matter-of-fact, telling him to get home quickly and help prepare for the funeral—no words of commiseration or sympathy. One final, unbelievable line: I know he would have been proud of you, kid.

  He would have been proud. If.

  Henry might have lost it completely if Martha hadn’t been there with him. The thought of how suddenly and inconsequentially a dull life could be cut short, the final draining of dark water revealing nothing new under the surface. He couldn’t have handled it alone, would have sunk into despair in an empty hotel room. But Martha understood, even if she said nothing, and he held himself secure against her, on the divan, with a glass of whisky each. Without thinking about it, he’d lain down and put his head in her lap. She’d stroked his thinning, greying hair. Reached down and loosened his tie.

  He wished others could have seen Martha as clearly as he did, in that context. Christine had orchestrated a private moment with Henry after Thanksgiving lunch. His nephews were dismissed from the table, while Peter wandered off to clean the kitchen, though he must have been listening. Once the
y were on their own at the spindly-legged dining table she’d inherited from their mother, Christine asked how he’d enjoyed seeing Melanie Jacobs—whether he was going to send her a note, arrange to meet with her in New York when she was in town for a conference next month.

  Though tempted to use this lapse of judgement against her, to give Christine a real piece of his mind, Henry held his temper and said he would think about it. Which prompted more demands, as if she were asking for a fight. Then came the kicker. The questions about Martha: how sure was he that she’d been entirely right for him; and how he could know, when he hadn’t been in a serious relationship with another woman his entire life? The coercive, pitying tone—he had to move on. It was what she would have wanted. Wasn’t this a chance for him to rediscover himself? Free of Martha’s influence, her pushiness, her expectations of him? Wasn’t it time for him to be his own man?

  Henry couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said to get himself out of that room. Something about how sorry he was for taking up her precious time off.

  During the cab ride home from Penn Station, Henry remembered the relief he’d once felt on returning to find everything as he’d left it, in equilibrium. But today the scales were knocked. The apartment no longer beckoned him in with the prospect of full cupboards and a home-cooked meal and a bottle of Napa cabernet, split between two. Martha would have gone around turning the lights on, sorting through the mail, kicking off whatever elegant pair of shoes he’d insisted she buy, sinking her bare feet into the carpet. And there would have been laughter, he was certain. The right amount.

  He had to treasure everything Martha had left behind. Henry took up his position in the Eames chair by the windows and launched into one of the books his wife hadn’t finished, her dog-eared folds still marking the pages. A history of the Borghese family and their role in the art world of Rome. Their patronage of a young Bernini. The Rape of Proserpina.

  A photograph of the sculpture caught his attention, stopped him. Henry tried to remember how the myth went. Proserpina, dragged down by Pluto to rule the underworld by his side. Classic sex and scandal, with a mother-in-law thrown into the mix for good measure, if he remembered correctly. The ending had something to do with pomegranate seeds. He wished he could ask Martha about it, or that she’d at least scrawled some explanatory notes in the margins in the messy hand that only he could decipher.

  She’d often mentioned Rome. He should have taken her there instead of Milan, where he and Fogel had always gone for work. And she should have pushed for it—rented a car, stolen him from his meetings for another of those sneaky getaways, so they could feel like teenagers skipping school. Sharing in a private, uninhibited moment.

  That had never happened, yet Henry’s consciousness insisted it should have. He could picture it so easily: Martha on the Ponte Sant’Angelo, shimmering in the haze beneath an imaginary sun, Hadrian’s mausoleum and its soaring statue of the archangel Michael off in the background, as if lifted from an engraving on the book’s dust jacket. Striding ahead with her hands in her jeans pockets while he pursued her with the camera. Leaning out over the Tiber as she waited for him to catch up, drinking in the scene, then turning to him and flashing some tooth like a model in a Valentino shoot.

  So real. Clear as the most indelible memory, but as impossible as any other fantasy.

  Away from that sun-drenched European image, rain descended on the Manhattan beyond his windows, drips falling into the parched soil of the flowerpots out on the terrace. Henry let the book drop between his legs, no longer thinking about Rome but the idea that Martha was there with him, returned from that imaginary vacation, reading her own book on the sofa beneath the lamp’s dull glow.

  Lost in himself, Henry didn’t hear the intercom ring through the growing storm. It was an hour later, if not more. As if the bell were interrupting a vivid dream, it too merged with the other noises. Then another, more aggressive ring shook him awake.

  In the near-darkness, Henry felt his way along the wall.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said into the speaker.

  ‘It’s me,’ came a crackling voice he didn’t recognise. ‘Maggie.’

  ‘You must have got the wrong address.’

  ‘Maggie, from the bar. Can I come up?’

  Henry pressed and released the talk button a couple of times, his finger shaking, before he spoke again. ‘Not today,’ he said. ‘Thank you, though.’

  ‘So…here’s the thing. And it’s not ideal. I was going to take you up on your offer. I need a place to crash.’

  What offer? Henry’s awareness stretched to the previous Friday, when he’d drunk too much and been helped into the elevator. Then it hit him, in a hot, prickly rush. He’d made that suggestion. No, that insistence. Much worse.

  ‘Hello? Are you there?’ The voice had gone small, sheepish. ‘Freezing my ass off out here.’

  Wordlessly, Henry pushed the button that unlocked the door.

  When Maggie appeared she was a sad sight, dressed in a soaking-wet plaid jacket that hung off her like a layer of loose skin. She was carrying a faded rucksack, which she slung to the floor as if she’d trudged into a ski lodge. A couple of canvases stuck out from beneath a bedsheet dappled with mould.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Henry said.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m broke. Got kicked out of my studio. Trust me, I’ve already tried everyone else I know.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you think I said.’ He appraised her coolly, trying to gather something from the way she held herself. Her shame expressed itself in defiance, chin thrust forwards and shoulders stiff, but a shake ran through her, as though she couldn’t quite keep herself in one piece. ‘You really have nowhere else to go?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Are you working at the bar tonight?’

  ‘In a few hours.’

  ‘So you have time to tell me what the hell happened. Because I’m lost.’

  Maggie shifted uneasily on her feet in the entrance hall, making Henry uncomfortable. He ushered her through to the living room and invited her to take one of the Barcelona sofas. Pausing to think about the impact this would have on his precious leather, he went to the bathroom and returned with a towel, which he tossed at her. He wasn’t sure what people did in these situations, the etiquette, if there were any, escaping him. He simply figured it would help if they were both sitting down. Except he couldn’t join her—he felt a need to stand, to pace the room.

  ‘I got kicked out of my studio. Couldn’t make this month’s rent. My account’s overdrawn. This was my last resort.’

  ‘Isn’t there anyone else you can stay with?’ Henry said. ‘Like Beth, maybe?’

  ‘No, no—and listen, she can’t know about this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  No answer, which didn’t bother Henry. He hadn’t asked out of curiosity so much as impatience.

  ‘I see,’ he said after a long pause. ‘It’s easier to ask for help from somebody my age because apparently I have the resources and I wouldn’t expect much in return. I’d thought this was where your parents were supposed to step in and take control. Presumably they’re the ones who hooked you up with this gallery show in the first place, bankrolled your lifestyle here, enabled you to spend your spare money in hipster bars and get wasted on molly or polly or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘Why would you assume that?’

  ‘Because I know you. I’ve made the mistake of hiring you as an intern, and I’ve watched you fail to surpass my expectations, and you’ve presumably ended up scraping together tips at a bar when your parents gave up on financing your non-starting dreams. You’re bad with money because you’re accustomed to it, complacent. I’ve seen your problems many times over.’

  ‘Wow, okay. That’s both brutal and inaccurate. I haven’t seen my parents in two years—we’re not talking. And, by the way, at what age did you start being good with money? When you bought this apartment?’ She huffed out a reproachful little laugh that reminded Henry of the way the
magazine’s accountant used to react when he put through a request for more entertainment spending. ‘I don’t know anyone who could even dream of owning a place like this.’

  ‘I became good with money when I had to make a struggling publication profitable on no revenue, in the eighties. And because I was able to do that, I got a job where they paid me enough to afford this apartment.’

  Whether or not this was objectively true didn’t matter to Henry. He had a point to prove.

  ‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that the world isn’t one big conspiracy against you. Nobody cares that much. You just chose the wrong field at the wrong time. I wouldn’t have considered trying to make do as an artist, or a bartender, in New York because I wouldn’t have made that kind of work profitable. Hardly anyone does, and you know it. They find better things to do with themselves.’

  This put her out. She had pulled herself up on the sofa to sit cross-legged, scuffed sneakers dirtying the leather. She cast her gaze down at them and picked absently at one of the rat-tail laces. Henry imagined her bursting into tears, though predictably this didn’t happen.

  ‘Come on, it’s not that bad,’ Henry tried. ‘What do you drink? Bourbon?’

  ‘No, thanks. This wasn’t a good idea. I should get going.’

  ‘Where to? You already made it pretty obvious you’ve got nowhere else.’ Henry checked himself. ‘I mean, go if you want. I’m certainly not stopping you.’

  She didn’t move from the sofa. Henry went to the bar cart and poured two big slugs of George T. Stagg. The last person he’d fixed a drink for in this apartment was Martha. She would have occupied the same sofa, accepted the same tumbler with the same unexpressed gratitude. Were there traces of her lipstick on the rim, somewhere?

  ‘Of course I don’t want to go,’ Maggie muttered, curled up, avoiding him. ‘I won’t stay for long. A few days.’

  ‘And then where will you go? Presuming I agree to let you stay at all. No,’ he interrupted her as she was about to answer, ‘you’ve already said you don’t have anyone else. I can’t in good conscience let you go out there and get yourself trapped in some roach-infested hostel in Chinatown. I’d rather put you on a bus home.’