"Simply having you as a twin brother, always outshining him, destroyed something inside him. Next to you he feels like nobody”
"But Marta,” Sandy pleaded with her to understand. “When you wanted a custom-made dress, you went to a professional dressmaker, right? Because you knew you don’t have the skills to design a dress yourself. And when I wanted to start trading stock options, I hired Bill Clapton to give me a crash course in options trading, because I knew I needed an expert to guide me until I got the hang of it.”
“Okay, and therefore?”
“We understand that we don’t know everything, and we hire professionals to do for us what they’re best at.”
“Yes, and?”
“So why doesn’t Shalom understand that?” Sandy pounded so hard on the heavy desk that he had to stop and rub his hand. “Shalom never had a good grasp of business. So as a professional businessman, I helped him. I took the rather shabby property Dad left us, put up an office and commercial building there, and with a lot of hard work and help from my connections, I found amazing long-term tenants. I maintained the building for years, and I even made some upgrades…”
“I know,” said Marta. “And it’s all rented out at full capacity.”
“Right. You remember when that fashion chain, Darlow, went out of business? Before they’d moved out of their shop, and before I advertised the vacancy, I already had four agents calling me about renting the place. There isn’t a square foot of free space in the building. Shalom could come anytime and get the fruits of all that labor, effortlessly, and instead, he leaves them hanging on the tree.”
Fifty percent of the company’s profits, tucked away in interest-bearing bank accounts, had blossomed into enormous sums. Many millions of pounds sterling were sleeping peacefully in those accounts — to say nothing of half the value of the property itself, a value hard to estimate.
“But when I went to Olga for a dress, and you went to Bill for options advice, we paid them,” Marta said quietly. “The difference here is that Shalom feels he’s receiving your largesse for free. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s groveling. He’d rather have nothing than feel that way.”
“It’s not free at all,” said Sandy. “All these years I’ve been taking management fees from the company, which is standard practice in the real estate business. As far as he’s concerned, I could just as well be a stranger hired to manage the company.”
“But you’re not a stranger, Sandy,” Marta said. “You’re his brother. His so-successful brother, the one who always did better than him at almost everything.”
“And if I did better than him at a lot of things, is that a crime?”
“Of course it isn’t a crime. And I’m not saying you did anything wrong.” Once again, Marta found herself repeating the same speech they both knew by heart. “You never did anything but help him, and you tried very hard to do it in a respectful way and not to let it come across as patronizing. But simply having you as a twin brother, always outshining him, destroyed something inside him. Next to you he feels like nobody.”
