Benefit, page 25
Here is what Lois wrote to me in the letter that was in the single brown manila envelope the doorman handed over: “Dear Ms. Graham, I’ve been thinking about our conversation, which I found very interesting, and I’ve decided that I do not want to relinquish these papers after all. It seems wrong to let family materials go to someone not related or connected. I don’t imagine I’m depriving you of anything valuable in any case, and I appreciate your understanding. Regards, Lois Ricard.” Her cursive was clear, traditional, a bit prim—the handwriting of a debutante rather than an artist. “P.S. I include a token of our afternoon together.”
Here is what I wrote for the Weatherfield Foundation in a statement I sent to Lexie with a cc to Heather, to be included if acceptable on the website: “The Weatherfield Foundation was established in 1911 with money from Florence Weatherfield in honor of her husband, Ennis Weatherfield, after his accidental death in 1908. The money was Ennis’s bequest from profits of Weatherfield Sugar, sold in 1887 to a larger competitor. Throughout its history, up to the present day, the sugar industry has benefited from slavery and indentured servitude and economic exploitation as well as colonization by the United States and other countries; it has also relied on various benefits of wars, tariff regimes, labor laws, and immigration policies in the United States. Florence’s stipulation for her founding gift mentions only that it be used for study at the University of Oxford or the Sorbonne, two places at which Ennis had pursued his interest in philosophy. In 1919, after the conclusion of the First World War, the foundation’s first board established the current criteria for fellowship support.”
“Great,” Lexie wrote to me. “You really got it all in.”
Yes. That was all I had. The benefit was five days away.
I didn’t remember to call the restaurant until almost ten, back in my cold room, where a Post-it on the door in Len’s capital letters said the bike wasn’t ready: “NEEDS NEW CHAIN. DON’T RIDE.” A harried voice at the other end of the phone didn’t know what I was talking about, a lunch check; someone else had probably paid. I hung up. I had in my bank account $679.54. Related or connected. Lois’s words. I looked around at the in-law apartment where I now lived. Above me, dangling in its plastic from the top of my door, hung the dress I now owned.
The token in Lois’s envelope was the sheet of sketches: the repeated anonymized figure that could be anyone but was in fact me, taken from a moment at which I was perfectly still yet drawn to imply an infinite range of past and future activity.
9
I SHOULD LEAVE, I THOUGHT WHEN I ARRIVED.
I didn’t. I watched the ballroom as it filled. People entered, couples, groups. They recognized and hailed one another. White-clothed tables were arranged in a wide ring, gilt chairs set around them and glassware, flowers clustered on top; above were a line of chandeliers and a layer of gold-rimmed mirrors marking each arch. A quartet of musicians at the front bent over music I couldn’t make out. The conversations were numerous enough now to flatten into a general low roar. I could hear someone nearby exclaiming that he had just been talking about some other person, and I could hear both laughing at the odds of this. A voice next to me got louder to affirm the importance of choosing trust over experience. If there’s a choice, this voice insisted. When it comes to hiring. I couldn’t hear anyone raising an objection. I held a glass of water I had barely drunk. I looked down. The carpet was plain hotel carpet, nylon in shades of brown, designed to conceal things. I should leave, I thought.
I didn’t. When an electronic gong sounded, calling everyone to the tables, I found the number 11 in one corner. Already around number 11 were a lawyer who worked “in tech” and his wife, a speech pathologist, and a taciturn professor of finance and his bored, stylish boyfriend. The lawyer had been a fellow, also the finance professor. When we exchanged the years and subjects of our degrees, the speech pathologist said “Literature” with an approving nod and told me eagerly how much her husband read, an hour a day—he even put it on his schedule; his assistant knew not to make an appointment during that time—and her husband told me that reading was the best career development there was, most people didn’t realize, and free. I missed my chance to agree vociferously enough. I missed my chance, when they explained that their son was in college and perhaps going to major in English, to ask what college, so they could tell me, modestly, a name of which they were no doubt very proud. I recognized too late that they wanted this. I answered their questions about schools I had attended. I missed my chance to agree that an English degree was particularly wonderful because you could do so much with it—and the tech lawyer should know; he hired people all the time. The Weatherfield was like that, too, prepared you for anything. I failed to offer an anecdote in response. “And so you teach now?” the speech pathologist asked. I should have left already.
I hadn’t. But I was saved from the question about teaching by another gong, which began the evening’s program, and I watched Heather, in her green dress, go to a small podium near the musicians, and wait for the room to settle into quiet, and tell everyone to please start eating, not to wait, because no one should have to listen on an empty stomach. The first course was in front of us, a composed salad, dark leaves and shaved pale cheese and roasted red peppers on a white plate. Around me people obediently took up their forks. In the fitting room of Bergdorf’s Heather had been worried about the green dress; it was translucent—though she liked that effect, I pointed out. I reminded her that beneath the filmy surface layers was an opaque nylon column, so that anyone who thought they were looking through to some hidden and forbidden nakedness would not actually see anything but more material. “I do think I feel better in this one,” Heather had said. She looked beautiful, of course, at the podium. I could see the glint of her bracelet as she welcomed everyone and reflected with awe and gratitude on the fact of a hundred years. She had so many people to thank, she said, so many people who had given generously of their time and talents to make this evening possible. She listed names. She started a round of applause that caught on only clumsily as people put down their utensils to join in. Heather kept going; she introduced without further ado the chairman of the board, who wanted to say a few things to mark the occasion. Then the chairman was the only one standing apart from those black-clad servers at the room’s edges who were waiting with water pitchers or bottles of wine. I didn’t think I could leave.
I couldn’t. I said no, no wine to a boy who looked barely old enough to drink. I could see the place at a prominent table that the chairman had just left, and near his empty chair I could see Greta, tall even when sitting, with her golden hair piled up on her head; she was wearing something in dark red with a wide neck. The chairman had settled in at the podium. He was a man used to speaking to large crowds, with the easy habit of scanning for eye contact and finding confirmation wherever his glance happened to land. He explained that he had been doing nonprofit work for many years now, letting his audience read through this offhand summation the substance and length of his philanthropic power, and in that time he had learned one important thing, above all, which was this: A successful organization must always change while never changing. It was about enduring principles, he said, but adapted to new and evolving times. In the coming months, we would hear a lot more about how the foundation would accomplish just this endurance and adaptation. I didn’t see Judith at the table. Greta had written me an email the week before saying she probably would go to the gala after all; she hated those things, but she had a MISSION now—she thought the foundation should start an initiative regarding fellowships for low-income students—“I mean, I’ve been gathering information for your program, and I’m just more and more convinced that we could be doing so much MORE,” she wrote. “Don’t you think so? I told Heather to put me at a table with someone who could make a difference. Then I can charm them. I want to use my powers for good!!” She added a semicolon winking face and a colon smiling face between these sentences. I wrote back that I thought her plan made sense. “YOU must do the same,” Greta responded. I didn’t write back to that. The chairman of the board was wrapping up. The servers moved in again, silently. I couldn’t leave now.
I didn’t. I nodded at the server’s quizzical expression over my untouched salad plate, and he took it away. Heather introduced the reading of excerpts from those with essays in the commemorative booklet. The room settled into a different listening expectancy over main courses of steak or salmon or pasta. The teenaged waiter came around with a fistful of jagged knives. A slump-shouldered man shuffled to the podium and unfolded a page and spoke hoarsely about studying chemistry in Oxford just after the war; then another stepped in to detail with platitudinous satisfaction his odyssey from small-town farm boy to Parisian intellectual; then a squat woman who had been a fellow in the eighties read through a few easygoing anecdotes about sexism—a tutor who asked if her husband would allow her to travel—that everyone could scorn with gentle laughter and shaking of heads. Justin was last. He had texted me two days earlier to ask which part of the essay he should read, or mostly to argue with my suggestions, to have the satisfaction of scorning them: “No, too boring”; “No, wouldn’t work”; then “None of it really works.” I said the essay was very good, and Justin wrote back, “Sure, but will they hate it at the benefit?” I wrote back that he shouldn’t worry, he just had to read. “Yeah, that makes no sense,” Justin wrote. Listening now, I could tell that the essay was not suited for public performance but that the result was the same as if it had been. He was there to close out the program on a note of artistry and, vaguely, what people might take as progress. His selection was better than the others, anyway, if that was progress. Waiters moved in to remove disheveled plates and smeared silverware. It was that time in a long meal when everyone sighs with satisfaction or disgust at being confronted with the aftereffects of their own consumption. I could leave soon, maybe.
I didn’t. To my left was a white-haired woman wearing a brooch of bubbly jewels. “Such a nice evening,” she said to me. She took a long and appreciative sip of her wine. Her husband had been a fellow. He passed away last year. But he had loved his experience, talked about it often, always contributed as much as he could, and she tried to keep up with the foundation, in his honor. He studied history, at least that was the subject on the degree, but honestly—she laughed—it seemed in those days the fellowship was mostly about having a good time. “Meeting people,” she added, as if that was the same thing. I nodded. He was like that, she said, he had a gift for friendship; and the friends he met at Oxford he kept in touch with his whole life. Friends from around the world. “It was such a good chance, he always said, to broaden one’s horizons. To leave America, of course, and also to leave the American worldview. This was the real value, to him.” Someone came to collect our butter dish, with its smashed rose of fat. Someone came to collect the salt and pepper. “I imagine you feel the same,” the brooched woman continued. “Tell me your name again?” I gave it. She nodded. “Oh! You were thanked, earlier. You were part of the benefit.” I said no, not really. Then I said yes, kind of. I leaned back so that a server could remove my plate. The servers did not care to pause anymore to ask if a guest at a table in the back corner was finished with an uneaten main course. They wanted to hurry things along. We should all leave.
We didn’t. The brooched woman had more to ask. “And were you a fellow?” What year? she wanted to know. I tried to remember escaping the American worldview. I drank sometimes with a Brazilian student in my master’s course who spoke four languages and had spent most of his adulthood in Europe but liked to make sweeping statements about U.S. citizens. The difference between American and European culture, he explained in one tutorial after we read a Hemingway story about the First World War, was that Americans are still Puritans who believe they can live in the world without being of it and Europeans know this is a silly fiction, “perhaps also a dangerous fiction.” No one said anything to this; it felt like the kind of thing that couldn’t be defended or refuted in a scholarly setting. The widow next to me continued: Did I know Mark Harriman? She thought he was my year. I looked surprised. Mark was thinking of running for Congress, the woman explained, “in our district.” She still said our. Her husband had been part of the local Democratic committee. He had met Mark once, her husband had, before his death. “He was quite impressed with the young man,” she said. “He loved young people, you know. My husband. Is he here?” “Mark?” I asked. She nodded. I scanned the room. I found Mark standing near Heather’s table, talking with the chairman of the board. That man I recognized now. He was the one Mark and I had had dinner with back at Oxford. That was how long ago? I pointed Mark out to the brooched woman. She nodded appreciatively. I added, “But I think we should—” I gestured. Most of the tables were empty. I meant leave.
I got up. The widow was eyeing Mark. “Come along, we’ll say hello,” she said. The Brazilian student, I remembered, told me once that the problem with Americans is that they don’t know how to mourn. “Or is it grieve?” he asked me. “I never know.” I told him either worked. I told him they can be different really only in the … transitive? Was that right? It grieves me. The Brazilian student nodded; he understood basic grammar. The brooched woman folded her napkin and explained that her husband had been very interested in politics; it was a passion for him. But that wasn’t what he did; he was in business. At the end of his life, he taught business. Along with his nonprofit work. “And what do you do?” she asked me.
When I left I found Caroline.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said to the widow of the fellow who liked young people and politics and broadened horizons. The string quartet had swung into livelier music and waiters had moved several tables back to allow for dancing in the middle of the room, though no one was dancing yet, and at the back two long, narrow tables offered rows of dessert plates and white coffee cups, and I walked toward the nearest door and from the hallway stepped into a carpeted space beyond the elevator and when I opened the metal door with its thick handle and stepped into the stairwell there was a woman, below, smoking. She turned around. I said, “Oh!”
“Laura,” Caroline said. “I thought you were here. Justin said so. Hey.”
We exchanged exclamations. Yes, it was good to see each other; yes, it had been a long time.
“And you caught me like this.” Caroline gestured with the cigarette in her hand. “It’s awful, I know. I’m quitting at the New Year. I quit every New Year. This time, though.”
“I don’t mind.”
She brightened. “You smoke?”
“No,” I said. “No, not really.”
“Not really.” Caroline laughed as if we both knew this was a lie. “Come on down. Close the door anyway. I don’t want to set something off. No one in there needs to know how awful I am.”
“Can we get back in?” The door had already shut behind me.
Caroline shrugged. “I’m pretty sure.”
I made my way down a flight of stairs to where she stood smoking. It was cooler here, and smelled vaguely earthen, beneath the cigarette smoke. Damp stone and cold metal—the combination was welcome after the hot, soft room of food and people.
“You’re enjoying the benefit?” Caroline asked.
She was wearing a plain gray wool dress and heels. It looked like the kind of uniform a successful person wore every day to an office somewhere; there was a measure of power in wearing something this basic to an evening event. No jewelry except for small, thick gold hoop earrings. I could see a lot of makeup around her eyes. But this was the kind of makeup you were supposed to notice. “Am I enjoying—not really,” I said.
Caroline laughed. “Yeah, that’s not why you come to these things.” Why do you come to these things. She added, “You okay?”
I was leaning against the concrete wall. “I’m okay. Tired. I’ll sit down.” I found the edge of a stair. “Do you mind?”
“Be my guest.”
“Just for a second.” I pushed my palms down on the step. Somewhere a door slammed. I asked, “How about you? You’re … enjoying all this?”
“Oh, it’s fine. About what I expected. Steak or chicken, red or white, speeches.” She flicked her wrist. “The work I do, I’ve been to a lot of dinners.”
“I forgot where you work.”
“I work in development.” She didn’t seem to mind answering questions. Around the ends of the cigarette I could see her red-painted nails. She held a small silver portable ashtray. She was prepared.
“That was your degree,” I said. “I mean at Oxford. Development.”
