About Schmidt

by Louis Begley

  I don’t think that’s it. Jon and the other young lawyers who worked with you weren’t afraid of you because you were so senior, but because they thought they weren’t as right as you, and you gave them the impression that you thought so too. The father figure who is right and has the last word—that’s very scary. Also, most of them, Jon included, didn’t think they were living up to your expectations. It’s as though you wanted them to succeed but then were quickly disappointed.

  Well, I’m gone, and that’s one thing less for them to worry about! Anyway, since you have discussed all these things with Jon—by the way, isn’t it odd that Charlotte has never talked to me about them?—you must know that my own practice had stopped growing. I was losing my value to the firm. That’s another argument against the theory of terror.

  Jon never saw it that way.

  That’s the nicest news I have heard in a long time. If only it were true. But, true or not, you have put me into such a cheerful mood that I must leave now, before you say anything that might spoil it!

  On the contrary, you must stay. We really should reach out to each other.

  “Reaching out” was not among expressions or activities Schmidt liked. He associated it with affirmative action, of which he disapproved, and justifications offered for hiring lawyers who didn’t make the W & K grade. Therefore, he stood up to deliver what he thought might be his closing remarks.

  Renata, he told her, you want to accomplish too much in one afternoon. Of course, I won’t be a witch or some other sort of sinister presence at my only daughter’s wedding or other family gatherings or at any other time! Have I acted today in a way that gives you any reason to think otherwise? I don’t think so. On the other hand, Charlotte and Jon can’t behave toward me like a pair of selfish brats. I am a lonely man, and I have suffered a dreadful loss—you can’t measure it because you didn’t know Mary. Those two have to treat me nicely—no more than that. They haven’t; I won’t go into details because they are petty. And they must make small, minimal allowances for the way I am. I know I am not all sweetness and light all the time, even though I really try to put up a-good front. That I am sometimes sarcastic can’t be news to either of them—or that my bark is worse than my bite.

  Come, Schmidtie, sit down on the couch next to me. There is plenty of room.

  How was he to disobey? The further rearrangement of her legs, which occurred as she turned toward the space he was to occupy, fascinated him, as did the grin that spread from ear to ear. When he sat down, she took his hand, not to shake it, but apparently because she meant to hold hands with him. Then, after a moment, she asked: What was your life with Mary really like?

  He took his hand away and felt himself blush.

  What kind of question is that, and why do you feel authorized to ask it? Has Charlotte been complaining about her home life?

  Oh no. She has always conveyed the picture of an idyll—out of a stylish play. Two elegant and polite people, serious about their work, refusing nothing she asked for if it was “educational,” very affectionate to her and friendly but distant with other people, and liking to be alone or with her.

  Then I really don’t understand your question. Charlotte seems to have given you an accurate if somewhat idealized account. We were a nice New York couple of our time.

  It comes across though that you were rather stiff, maybe constrained, don’t you think?

  No, I don’t. Busy, as you implied, and fond of our family life. We saw nothing wrong with the way we lived, and I don’t now. And now I’m really going. Thanks once again for an extraordinary Thanksgiving.

  Before he could stand up she took his hand again. Please don’t be angry. I need to know you better. I need to know how you see your life. It’s because I want to help you make things easier for yourself. You will be surprised how much easier that will make it for the children. That’s all.

  Am I to become a patient? I have never done this sort of thing, you know.

  She laughed.

  You couldn’t be my patient, one doesn’t do these things within the family. Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend therapy for you: you are the wrong age, and you seem pretty well accustomed to the way you are—except for the effects of your loss, which will recede. To be in therapy, one needs to want to change. You don’t, and why should you, if you can get over this rough patch?

  Schmidt’s mouth had become completely dry, as it always did whenever he felt himself pressed beyond the point where he could still control his irritation. There was a half-melted ice cube left in his glass. He tipped it into his mouth and chewed.

  And your help, he asked, what might it consist of?

  Companionship. Helping you to recognize certain kinds of trouble so you can stay out of the way When I know you better, I may be able occasionally to give you a nudge, point you in a better direction.

  Here she let go of his hand and gave him a poke in the ribs.

  Like this. Don’t worry about it.

  The hand returned, warmer and very caressing.

  I had a good life with Mary, Schmidt told Renata. I wish she were alive and could have outlived me. I don’t know anything better one can say. As I said, Charlotte described the way we were accurately. We were every close. For one thing, from the beginning, we were orphans: well meaning, bright, and clinging hard to each other.

  It was like this later as well? No great crises either after Charlotte was born?

  Important ones? There might have been one, over a stupid indiscretion that Mary stumbled upon, but she didn’t allow it to become anything. It left a hurt, but it was never looked at again or mentioned, even though it may have never quite healed. That’s all.

  A woman. And that’s all? No other women?

  No.

  That was a lie. He let Renata go on playing with his hand. There had been the other world, where Mary never set foot, a world that consisted mostly of business trips. Schmidt arranging to avoid a meal with an associate or a client, or arranging to have the dinner end early Then you could find him at the bar of his hotel, checking the place out, to make sure that the associate wasn’t there too, in some corner or on a bar stool, hidden from view by an obese fellow drinker. Some evenings nothing happened. More often, he would manage to find a woman drinking alone. Women of all sorts: high-class bar girls, sluttish telephone operators, secret drunks, too chummy with the bartender, who might turn out to be anybody—an unmarried hairdresser, a librarian, the wife of a doctor. First an inane conversation, and then sex in his room that he would think about for months, while in bed with Mary. They brought a kind of excitement to sex that had been absent except during the time with Corinne. Why? He had never asked her for things that he did at once with those other women. But then, why hadn’t she offered?

  No, he continued, and there certainly weren’t any crises about money or about Charlotte’s upbringing or about our jobs. No midlife crises! We both liked our work and knew we were good at it. Of course, Mary had less tranquillity in her job. Power struggles in publishing houses are ferocious, and editors need to feel they have power. If they don’t, they feel they can’t publish their authors right.

  And Mary?

  What do you mean?

  Did she have other men? Were you jealous? She must have been, after that indiscretion.

  I’m not sure she was jealous. She probably thought she had taught me a lesson that would last me for life—and, in fact, in a rather good way, it did. I never gave her any reason to be jealous again.

  That was true enough. Nothing ever happened after the encounters with those women. No presents, no letters, no phone calls. No diminution in Schmidt’s ardor. Absolutely nothing to be jealous about.

  But Mary? Did she have adventures?

  Schmidt laughed. She had loosened her grip on his hand. He took advantage of it to stroke her forearm. He wondered if he dared to extend the motion a little higher, where he might encounter her breast.

  Adventures in the other direction? I have always supposed that all
sorts of things go on at the Frankfurt book fair and those booksellers’ conventions that editors go to, or when a beautiful editor goes on a couple of weeks’ book tour with an author. But Mary? She was so very fastidious—as well as serious. I don’t think I could have imagined her participating in that sort of saturnalia! Or making up her mind quickly enough! I was always quite sure that after dinner she was really reading manuscripts in her hotel room, or catching up on sleep, or writing one of those marvelous letters to Charlotte.

  That was another lie, though one a gentleman could not have avoided. He had, in fact, hoped that Mary was discreetly promiscuous in Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and Detroit, or wherever else the book trade chose to transact business and seek pleasure. Might not that make her, miraculously, into a good lay? Like his attempt to get her to touch herself? Except that she was so squeamish, quite beyond fastidiousness. It had been difficult for Schmidt to imagine her getting into just any bed with a man because he gave off the right sexual signals. There would not have been enough time for ceremony. But perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps she was like that with him, whereas other men could open her at once.

  She patted approvingly the hand that was working over her elbow and grinned again.

  It’s all so intricate, she said. For instance, one has to take into account the excitement of being with a stranger. Also, there are sadistic fantasies that people who are married are often reluctant to act out with each other. Don’t you think so?

  I am sure you are right. Do you know that these are things I normally don’t discuss, except possibly with one friend, a man I have known most of my life? Why are we talking about them?

  I think it’s because I have gotten you started and you find that an intimate conversation with an analyst can be pleasant. I doubt you have many occasions to talk freely—except for that friend. We haven’t gotten very far, because you haven’t been frank, but I should tell you that you interest me very much.

  How curious! I think I am the most conventional of men.

  That may be interesting in itself. Is Jon right that you and Charlotte have no family?

  Essentially. Mary became an orphan when she was a little girl. The aunt who brought her up is dead. My own father died when I was in my early forties, and my mother much earlier. They each had cousins and maybe an uncle or two, but they disliked them. There were no contacts with them. I doubt any of them came to my father’s funeral. On the other hand, in a great big pink villa in West Palm Beach I have a stepmother who is perfectly alive and claims to be hardly older than me!

  Jon has never mentioned her—or Charlotte either.

  There is no reason they should. Charlotte doesn’t remember her grandfather, and my dealings with Bonnie—that’s my stepmother’s name—have been sporadic. After my father died, I collected his clothes, which he left to me along with an odd assortment of objects. Perhaps they were things she particularly disliked, perhaps there was another reason for the choice. I haven’t tried to think about it. We have written letters to each other—usually at Christmastime.

  Schmidt paused and took away his hand. Renata dear, you might give me a tiny bit more whiskey. Actually, I don’t mind talking about that story. It’s so distant.

  You pour it. I feel very languorous.

  All right. Here it goes. You see, my father disinherited me, leaving absolutely everything to Bonnie, including furniture that had been in our family for a long time. Bonnie isn’t someone I would have talked to Jon about. I doubt I even talked about her to Charlotte. She belongs to the world that existed when I was in law school, and when I started out as a young lawyer. I left it behind when I married Mary.

  It must be sad to be disinherited!

  It was and it wasn’t. And this is a proper subject for us to discuss—family background, property, ghosts in the closet. It had to do with the quality of my childhood. My mother was a hypochondriac who had the misfortune of being in fact in bad health, so that the gaps between her migraines and backaches were filled by stays in the hospital, where one organ was removed after another: gallbladder, a part of a kidney, thyroid gland, you name it, and finally the usual female stuff. Even stronger than hypochondria was her sense of thrift. We lived in the Village and had Irish maids who did everything for the house. I can assure you that even when she was recovering from what turned out to be her last operation my mother wouldn’t let the maid do the shopping, because she was afraid she would buy the more expensive grade of eggs or butter or potatoes, and that would have broken her heart. Then she would count the eggs to make sure that the maid didn’t help herself to more than two a day! There wasn’t any justification for this at all. My father was the head of a small and very successful admiralty law firm. In his case that really meant the sole owner, his partners were that in name only, really they were employees. Those were the days when the practice of admiralty law in New York was profitable. Thus we lived in a beautiful house on a nice street but in Dickensian penury. I went to a Jesuit school on Park Avenue that cost next to nothing, but gave one a pretty rigorous education. My father had lunch at the Downtown Association and dinner at whatever restaurant his shipowner clients favored. That was also the era of flamboyant shipowners: many Greeks, most of them related to one another, Norwegians, and even one Czech lady who made a fortune buying broken-down cargoes and then chartering them into the Korean War trade. Of course, my mother didn’t control my father’s bank account, so he was well dressed in the Wall Street lawyer style—well enough to cut a decent figure at the table of those magnates. My father and mother didn’t go on vacations. My father thought that would have a demoralizing effect on the office. I was just beginning college when my mother died. Father took this event rather sentimentally, although they had fought all the time—over money. For instance, he collected Dutch pewter. Every piece he bought was a nail driven into her flesh. Anyway, I thought he would continue to live his perfectly regular life, except buying more frequently and more important pieces, when into the picture stepped Bonnie the Bimbo! She was the widow of one of his minor Greek shipowners, some sort of cousin by marriage of the Kulukundis clan—although she was perfectly American herself, from Nashville, with that unforgettable and unbearable accent—and he had done a will and maybe a trust for the husband. It’s always a good deal to do a client’s will in addition to the work for his business. Few things attach him to you more solidly than when he remembers that you will handle his estate. The husband died suddenly, my father became the executor or trustee, and one thing led to another. What a life he had with her! I used to think of my mother turning over in her grave like a chicken on a spit as the tap of the Schmidt fortune was opened to pay for gutting the house and redecorating at least twice, a butler imported from Hong Kong, a box at the opera, and on and on. Also my father gave up Brooks Brothers for the most expensive tailor in New York. That’s where this number I am wearing came from. Luckily, until the last couple of years, when he put on some weight, we were the same size. And then he died, leaving, as aforesaid, to Bonnie everything he still had—which was a lot, as he kept on earning good money and had never spent it before. At the time, it felt like a kick in the rear end that I didn’t need, but I got over it, and I must say I think Bonnie gave my father the happiest years of his life! Besides, I think he thought I had rejected him.

  How?

  His firm was one of those law practices that at the time the founder’s son could inherit. Without quite saying it, my father rather assumed I would. When it turned out that I was a good student and got clerkships, first on the court of appeals and then on the Supreme Court, and later firms like Wood & King courted me, he couldn’t, of course, tell me don’t go there, come to work for me. That would have been ridiculous, and he knew it. I believe, though, he expected me to stay just long enough to get some solid experience at a big firm and then join him. But when that time came, I made no move, and he was too proud to ask. So nothing happened, except that, after I was made a partner, Dexter King told me about running into my father, som
e years earlier, at the Downtown Association, and how my father asked whether I was doing well. He is on the right track, Dexter replied, and I don’t see what can derail him. Well, in law firm code language that means your boy will become a partner as soon as his turn comes, and normally that makes the boy’s father offer to buy you a whiskey sour. Only my father instead turned his back on Dexter and walked off, very much to Dexter’s amazement.

  My dear Schmidtie, what a story! I want to hear more. Will you stay with us for some early cold turkey?

  Actually, I want to kiss you.

  I know, but it’s a bad idea. We might not stop there. Besides, the others will be coming home soon.

  You are right. It’s just the way I suddenly felt. Like in the song, “New fancies are strange fancies….” Thanks for the cold turkey. I think it would be better if I tried to catch my bus. And what do we do next, Doctor?

  We become the best of friends. When will I see you? Will you come to the city to have lunch with me?