Chapter One
Schmidt's wife had not been
dead more than six months when his only child, Charlotte, told him she
had decided to get married. He was finishing breakfast at the kitchen
table. The "Metropolitan" section of the Times was in his
left hand; as on every Saturday, he had been poring over the mutual fund
quotation table to check the prices of two investments, one in small capitalization
companies and the other in international equities, both of which he had
bought on his own initiative, out of conviction, and had come to regard,
irrationally, because the rest of his money was managed with reasonable
success by a professional whom he left quite alone, also out of conviction,
as the weather vane of his financial standing. The small capitalization
fund was down, by ten cents. He thought that made it a loss of about fifty
cents for the week. The international stocks were down too. He put aside
the paper, looked at his daughter, so tall and, it seemed to him, painfully
desirable in her sweat-soaked running clothes, said I am very happy for
you, when will it be? and began to cry. He had not cried since the afternoon
when the specialist confirmed the advice he had previously given to him
over the telephone: Don't think of an operation, why mutilate Mary, it
won't give her even one good year, we'll keep her as comfortable as possible.
Meanwhile, you two try to have a good time. He held Mary's hand until
they were out in the street.
The morning sunlight was blinding. He put Mary into a taxi--ordinarily,
she would have walked home, but he saw that she was shaken, almost
disoriented--caught one himself, proceeded to the office, told his
secretary he didn't want to be disturbed, shut the door, called David
Kendall, the family doctor who was also their friend, heard that he and
the specialist had discussed the advice before it was given, and, lying
facedown on the couch, wept like a boy, the parade of his life with Mary
passing on the screen of his burning eyelids like some refurbished
newsreel. That day he had been mourning the end of his happiness. But
today it was the imminent collapse of a bearable existence he had thought
he might be able to sustain. He didn't need to ask Charlotte who the man
was: Jon Riker had been around for a long time before Mary began to die.
That very minute he was probably shaving, in Charlotte's bathroom.
In June, Dad. We want to talk to you about picking the day. Why are you
crying like this?
She sat down and stroked his hand.
From happiness. Or because you are so grown-up. I'll stop now.
Promise.
He blew his nose elaborately, using a piece of paper towel he tore off
the roll on the upright holder next to the sink. Of late, he was finding
himself reluctant to use the handkerchief he always carried in the pocket
of his trousers, saving it for some unspecified emergency when having a
clean handkerchief would save him from embarrassment. Then he kissed
Charlotte and went into the garden.
Jim Bogard, the new gardener he had hired at the beginning of the season,
and his crew had been at work all week. He noted once more with
satisfaction that dead leaves and broken branches had been raked, even
from the mulched flower beds around the house and the more inaccessible
spaces beneath the azalea and rhododendron bushes. The wilted yellow tops
of Mary's lilies had been cut so close to the ground that one could not
suspect the presence of the bulbs underneath; the Montauk daisies looked
like topiary porcupines; the hedges of honeysuckle that enclosed the
property on three sides, leaving it open only to the saltwater pond that
lay beyond a stretch of fields beginning to turn light green with winter
rye in this mild weather, had a prim and angular look. If his neighbor
Foster decided to subdivide, or a developer finally got to him, it would
not be difficult to plant out whatever monstrosities they might build: at
worst, they could put up two or three houses. Of course, the feeling of
open space and the view would be lost. This was subject of worry for him
each year, when the potatoes had been taken in and farmers had time to
turn their minds to money and taxes. He had been thinking of it during
his last visit to the tree nursery, and noted the great number of mature
bushes for sale and their prices, which weren't so high as he had
expected. Should he take the initiative and talk to Foster about his
plans? Mary had never wanted to tie up such a large part of her own money
in the Bridgehampton property, and she didn't want to use his money, but
Charlotte, really Charlotte and Jon--he would have to accustom himself to
that formulation--might see the problem differently. One never regretted
a purchase of land made to protect one's property.
He walked around the house and the garage, examining them closely. Here
and there, Bogard's chattering Ecuadoreans had missed an apple. He picked
up as many as he saw, threw them on the compost heap, and inspected, one
by one, the garage, the pool, which was under a new cover he didn't like,
and the pool house--really a strangely minuscule barn--they had been able
to convert into a cottage and finish just before the thunderbolt of Mary's
illness stuck. It had been her project: Schmidt preferred to have
Charlotte and her guests in the house, under the same roof as he--which
wasn't awkward since Mary required these young men to use the bedroom and
bathroom with the shower stall off the kitchen--so that to see Charlotte
at breakfast required no prearrangement. He could linger quite naturally
with his newspaper at the kitchen table or in the wicker rocking chair and
listen while she talked on the telephone or with the visiting friend,
absorbing the texture of the day she planned.
Once the upstairs bedrooms in the pool house, with their Town &
Country bathrooms, and the red-tiled kitchen next to the changing
rooms had been completed, the mornings became awkward for Schmidt. In
theory, Jon Riker still occupied these new quarters alone, or with guests
he and Charlotte had invited, but Charlotte would make breakfast there,
and something inside Schmidt recoiled from the idea of simply walking in
and sitting down with them. Mary had done it quite naturally and laughed
at his formality. But he detested surprising others as much as being
surprised himself. In his opinion, the whole point of giving the young
people a separate house was to ensure their privacy. He was not to go
there unless he had been invited; but since it was very rare that an
invitation was issued, he would try to get around his own polite rules by
telephoning to ask whether they would like him to bring the paper.
Sometimes he got the paper early, before there was any sign of activity in
the downstairs of the pool house. Jon was asleep, and, one could suppose,
Charlotte as well--in Jon's bed. Then that pretext was unavailable, and
he would watch miserably as Charlotte took the copy of the
Times he had bought for them from the kitchen table, carried
it across the lawn, and disappeared behind the forbidding door of the
other house.
Schmidt couldn't deny that the pool house turned out to be a blessing
during Mary's illness. It had let Charlotte and Jon continue a relatively
carefree sort of life alongside theirs, without calling attention to the
disparity, and without unduly tiring Mary or forcing Jon to come
face-to-face with the indignities, at first small, and then so shattering,
of Mary's struggle. By then Charlotte had told them she was moving from
her studio on West 10th Street into Riker's Lincoln Center apartment, and
the fiction that she slept in her room in the big house while he spent the
night in a lonely bed, perhaps working on documents he had brought from
the office, had to be abandoned. There was nothing to be done: to suggest
that she no longer bring him to the country would have been a useless
provocation, one that would have surely made her decide to stay in the
city. As soon as Mary died, though--in fact, the evening of the day they
all came down from the city for the funeral--Charlotte moved Jon to the
main house, into her sunny room with its bow windows and the blue Chinese
rug Schmidt had bought for her at an estate auction in Amagansett, a room
so particularly comfortable because it was in the more solid part of the
house that had been added at the turn of the century. And that's how they
had continued to live: his daughter and her lover separated from him by
the stair landing and the upstairs hall between their room and the one
where he slept, which he had shared with Mary. Schmidt did not protest;
so far as he was concerned, the house was now much more his daughter's
than his. Charlotte's plan, she had told him, was to continue to use the
pool house for younger guests--her and Jon's friends--so that Schmidt's
light sleep would not be disturbed by the pulse of alternative rock or the
thud of bedroom or bathroom doors being shut without the care he had
instilled in his wife and daughter. That was considerate, and Schmidt
welcomed the restoration to the weekends of the morning ritual he liked.
How was he to avoid, though, the sense that in these arrangements he was
the tiers incommode?
Altogether, the house looked good. Mary and he moved to the country soon
after he had negotiated an early retirement. Schmidt had found it
indecent, yes more indecent than unbearable, to go to the office day in
and day out, ostensibly affable from habit and collected the moment he set
foot in that place, as though all were not in ruins, actually attend to
work, and at times allow himself to becomes so caught up in a client's
problem that he forgot Mary and, in any case, for long hours did not think
about her, while she, virtually alone, was stretched on the rack. He put
the Fifth Avenue apartment on the market. That it was much too large for
them had become evident once they stopped entertaining; the wind that blew
from Central Park down the side street was so strong that already in the
winter of Mary's first operation the doorman needed to put his arm around
her to keep her from being blown over while she took the few steps to a
taxi; besides, with the abrupt diminution of the income Schmidt received
from the firm, the expense of keeping and running that large place had
become uncomfortably noticeable.
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-á-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 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 porous barrier against self-doubt--and that 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
hear 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.
Excerpted from About Schmidt © Copyright 2012 by Louis Begley. Reprinted with permission by Fawcett Columbine . All rights reserved.
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