About Schmidt (2 page)

It was understood that the house near the beach was the place they both liked, in all seasons and every kind of weather. When Mary worried that he would feel trapped in Bridgehampton, and disoriented without his long-established weekday habits, he reassured her: he had spent more than enough years behind a desk, and they weren’t really giving up New York. The two-hour bus ride to the city was itself a habit as comforting as any other; in time, they might look for a pied-à-terre, perhaps in one of the new condominium buildings people claimed weren’t all that shoddy, and become the owners of a dashing pad on a high floor, surrounded by the sky and humming with central air-conditioning and kitchen and laundry machines no one had ever used before. Of course, they both knew there wouldn’t be time for that. Mary’s strength had lasted, miraculously, until the essential furniture and objects had been transported to the country and accommodated in the house. Afterward, waiting for the end was enough to keep them busy.

Decidedly, there was nothing wrong with Jon Riker. Schmidt had invited him to dinner one night—along with a group of other associates and two investment officers of a Hartford insurance company they all serviced—without in
the least imagining that Charlotte would find him remarkably attractive. In fact he was surprised at her turning up, after Mary had warned her that the party would be business entertainment, one of those rank-has-its-obligations affairs older partners have to suffer through once in a while to make the hardworking young fry feel appreciated. But the next morning Charlotte said she was glad she had come. She thought Jon looked like Sam Waterston; that was her pronouncement, enough for Schmidt to get the picture. She had graduated from Harvard the previous year and was still living at home. The time to say what he really thought about Jon as his daughter’s prospective beau was then, or over the course of the next few weeks. But he never told them—either Charlotte or Mary. He gave them only his office point of view: an excellent young lawyer, almost certain to become a partner, except that he works much too hard. How will he find time to take Charlotte to the movies, never mind movies and dinner! Schmidt had behaved with decent consistency, of which he was rather proud, just as he would later, when he became Riker’s principal, probably indispensable, supporter for partnership. Luckily for Riker, that process took place, and was concluded favorably for him, before he began sleeping with Charlotte; anyway before the word had gotten around or Mary had opened Schmidt’s eyes, so that the firm did not need to face the dreaded question of whether the rule against nepotism was about to be breached.

But even if Charlotte had not just informed him that she and Jon had made their decision—now that he thought of it, couldn’t Riker have gone to the trouble of coming to Charlotte’s father to ask for her hand?—and it weren’t too ridiculously
late to speak to Charlotte with the utmost candor, there was still nothing he could say against Riker, or, more precisely, against the marriage, that wouldn’t seem to her, and perhaps even to him, once the words were out of his mouth, quirky, possessive, smacking of jealousy or envy. What could he say beyond admitting that, outside the office, he didn’t care all that much for the qualities that in time would make Riker such a useful, reliable partner in that beloved firm—which Schmidt was coming to realize he missed principally as a source of income and a porous barrier against self-doubt—and that they surely weren’t the qualities he had hoped to find in a son-in-law? According to an Arab proverb that one of his partners with oil-rich Middle Eastern clients had assured him was genuine, a son-in-law is like a pebble, only worse, because you can’t shake him out of your shoe. Schmidt knew that the Romans, on the contrary, had prized these intruders. If one really loved a woman, one loved her the way a man loved his sons and his sons-in-law. Since he regretted not having sons—at work, he had had a tendency to develop a strong affection for the best of the young men who worked with him, a feeling that was generally reciprocated until the associate he had singled out as his right hand and object of loyalty became a partner and no longer needed a father figure in the firm—he had hoped to have Roman feelings for the man who married Charlotte. But how was he to bestow them on Jon Riker?

The stuff he had written about Riker, with considerable eloquence, in the critiques that, according to office procedures, followed the completion of each important assignment, was true enough: with variations appropriate to the
occasion, it was like what he had told Charlotte and Mary and what became, in due course, the necessary mantra of slogans he repeated wearily at firm meetings when Jon came up for partnership. These slogans were not contradicted by Riker’s other attributes, which Schmidt liked less but hadn’t felt compelled to mention because they had little to do with the criteria according to which his partners judged candidates. For instance, the narrowness of that strong intelligence: What did his future son-in-law think about, apart from client matters and deadlines and the ebb and tide of bankruptcy litigation (Jon’s annoying specialty, the domain of loudmouth, overweight, and overdressed lawyers, thank God Jon didn’t look or sound like them), spectator sports, and the financial aspects of existence?

Jon’s talk about finances was sort of a mantra too, one that Jon repeated and Schmidt despised. After his clerkship, should Jon have taken a job with a firm that paid associates more than Wood & King did? How should he evaluate the loss of income resulting from his choice, if there had been one, against the possibly lower probability of partnership at some other more lucrative place—but had he “made partner” there, what a bonanza! Now that he was a Wood & King partner, was his generation’s share of income sufficient (here the pocket calculator might come out of the neatly organized attaché case, Charlotte’s lavish offering), or was too much going to older types (like Schmidt, but that was left unsaid), who had not had the decency to get out when their productivity declined? Should he buy an apartment or continue to rent, was it to be a condo or a co-op, how much would it cost him to be married if Charlotte stopped working, what price
tag to put on each child? The evidence of Jon’s having read a book since the first volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, Mary’s Christmas present, was lacking. On long airplane trips, of which Jon took many, Schmidt had noticed that Jon did his “homework”—an honorable enough occupation—caught up on advance sheets, read news magazines, or stared into the middle distance. There was no pocket book tucked into Jon’s litigation bag or in the pocket of his belted raincoat that looked like a Burberry. Such had been Schmidt’s personal observations during the early years of their working together, when they often sat side by side in the plane, Schmidt struggling, once his own “homework” was done, to stay awake over some contraband belles lettres. Discreet interrogation of Jon had revealed only one subsequent change in his traveling habits: as the proud owner of a laptop computer, he could also use the time to write memos to files and work on his checkbook. What was this young man if not a nerd, or in the slang of Schmidt’s own generation, apparently coming back into use, a wonk, a wonk with pectorals? His Charlotte, his brave, wondrous Charlotte, intended to forsake all others and cleave to a wonk, a turkey, a Jew!

Schmidt kicked the last of the stray apples. His anger was like a bad taste in the mouth.

That final indignity was unmentionable. He could not have spoken of it to Mary: a word against the Jews, and she brought all the sins of Hitler on your head, but this marriage was not a matter of civil rights or equal opportunity or, God help him, the gas ovens. To the best of his recollection, no matter how deeply or how far back he looked, Schmidt was sure he had not once in his life stood in the way of any Jew.
But now he was discovering that what didn’t count at W & K (which had certainly filled up with Jews since the day he had himself gone to work there) and what could even furnish him at times some eyebrow-raising sort of amusement, as it had when Jews, beginning in the seventies, had begun to move into his Fifth Avenue apartment building, or joined one of his clubs, did count heavily when it came to his family, or what was left of it! This marriage would turn Charlotte, his one remaining link with life, into a link with a world that wasn’t his—the psychiatrist parents he had so far escaped meeting, grandparents on the mother’s side whom Jon occasionally mentioned, possibly uncles, aunts, and cousins he hadn’t yet heard about. What might they be like? That contact with them would be unpleasant, that it would put a strain on his quiet good manners and composure, he was quite sure. Before long, they would cover Charlotte like ooze from the sea; they would absorb her and leave him out; never again would he be alone with her on his own ground; the pool-house kitchen and its hostile threshold were the microcosm of his future.

He tried the cellar door cover. It opened, which meant that he had forgotten to check it after Bogard and his men had finished raking. Perhaps now that Bogard had proved himself he should be allowed to lock the cellar from the inside and then leave through the house. Might as well give him the keys too; Schmidt couldn’t be sure of always being there to open the door. When he entered the cellar, his mood lightened. The place was impeccable; the effort he had put into arranging it had not been wasted. The dehumidifier humming beside the shelves on which he stored the reserve of cleaning supplies and canned goods did such a good job, drawing the moisture
even from the crawl space, that as an experiment he had moved the paperbacks from Fifth Avenue to a new set of shelves he had the handyman build on the opposite wall. Their pages hadn’t curled, which was more than could be said for the books and magazines in the house; perhaps he could put in the cellar as well the art books and those of Mary’s accumulated hardcover volumes he didn’t need to have at hand. The temperature was about as low as it would get, and that was good news for the wine, also moved from the city, where he had been forced to keep it in a warehouse because the basement in the Fifth Avenue building was so stiflingly hot, to the cellar’s windowless continuation under the new part of the house. In the summer the coolness of that space was delicious, reminding him of the way movie theaters had felt during New York summers before window air conditioners had become customary in apartments. He sat down in the rocking chair near the workbench and shifted his weight. Not a squeak; it was a solid piece—his father’s, as was the oval woven-ribbon rug that the old man had had in his bathroom. The tools were in near-perfect order; the seniors among them, hammers, pliers that might have belonged to an old-time dentist, and little saws, also came from his father’s house on Grove Street. What a contrast between the cellar of that artisan’s federal Greenwich Village house and this! There had been no way to keep the damp out of it, or, for that matter, visiting rats, although Pasha the cat had worked hard.

He found the box of small cigars on the workbench, lit one, and threw the match into the wastebasket, a habit of which Mary had been unable to break him. Next time he came down, he would bring an ashtray, by way of remembrance
and apology. And then the thought he had not allowed to form while he was touring the garden was complete, impossible to set aside for some later hour when he would have a drink in his hand and music in which he could lose himself on the turntable. Clearly, he would have to leave this house: the only trick was how to do it without Charlotte’s knowing it was because of Jon, or, if that realization could not be avoided, to do it in such a manner that she would take it as a good development for her father, a sign of returning optimism, something on the order of her own decision to found the next generation of the family, with him now willing to stand on his own feet in a new life. A preposterous idea, but it would not be the first time he had successfully put on an act for the benefit of his wife and daughter.

The problem of the house was not new. Schmidt had perceived its unpleasant outline during the first meeting with Dick Murphy, the trusts and estates lawyer at Wood & King who had drafted Mary’s and his wills when they decided they ought to sign such instruments, amidst the requisite jokes about whether they were of sound and disposing minds. He had stared at it during each subsequent discussion of revisions and codicils occasioned by the rising tide of their fortunes, and changes in the tax law, and when he arranged for them to see Murphy before Mary’s exploratory operation, at a time when the doctors were still hopeful. It came to this: the house wasn’t his and it was too valuable by far. It had belonged to Mary’s maiden aunt Martha, her father’s sister, who had brought up Mary after her mother died of pneumonia in 1947.

Mary had just turned ten. Martha was the only relative,
apart from some elderly distant cousins in Arizona, Mary’s father having been killed in knee-high water off Omaha Beach, in the first attempt to land. From the time Schmidt and Mary were married, they had spent their summer vacations with Martha; in due course, Martha became Charlotte’s godmother; it had taken all the powers of persuasion of Martha’s lawyer to keep her from leaving the house to a four-year-old Charlotte. In the event, the house and everything else Martha had went outright to Mary. Everything else consisted of a sum that was small even in 1969 dollars. Martha had been used to living very comfortably, spending her capital; the trust from which she also received income terminated on her death and was distributed to those distant cousins. But by the beginning of the seventies, Schmidt was earning enough to pay for the upkeep of the house. Thus Mary’s cash inheritance grew, and she had been able to put aside a good part of what she earned as an editor distinguished for her sure literary taste in an otherwise brutally commercial publishing house. The convention between her and Schmidt was that she paid for her own clothes and hairdresser, the few lunches or taxis for which she was not reimbursed, gifts (which were sometimes startlingly extravagant), and charities Schmidt didn’t want to support. He took care of the rest. Still, as Murphy said, she had only a little over a million dollars. Martha had brought her up to be old-fashioned about money, which to her meant investing in treasuries and only the highest-rated municipal bonds. On the other hand, given its location, the house was probably worth two million; if she was to leave it and the money to Charlotte, as she intended, the tax would be more than a million, and how was Charlotte
to pay it unless she sold the house, which was the opposite of what Mary wanted? The only sensible plan, Murphy pointed out, was to leave the money to Charlotte and the house to Schmidt. In that case, he explained, there would be no tax on the house, as a bequest to a spouse. Later, there would presumably be enough in Schmidt’s estate, when he died and she inherited, to pay the tax. She would be coming into some leftover money as well, enough for the upkeep on a big house. Then Murphy—Schmidt could have strangled that Irish oaf—put to Mary the question he had already raised with Schmidt privately and Schmidt had asked him to stay clear of: Tax planning aside, why shouldn’t her husband own the house he had lived in each summer and on most weekends for more than a quarter of a century and in which he had invested a great deal of his own money? He recited the modern heating system and insulation, the endless roof repairs, and, most recently, the new larger pool and pool house. Couldn’t Charlotte and, in time, her husband and children, use the house the way she and Schmidt had used it while her aunt Martha was alive, and inherit only on Schmidt’s death?