Authors: Louis Begley
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, some 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?
On one of those Thursdays? I don’t know. I’ll suggest to Charlotte that she and Jon invite you to the country. You should see the house while I still live in it. I am going to tell you something that must be a secret between us, because I haven’t told Charlotte yet: I am going to give my life estate in the house to her as a wedding gift. That way she and Jon will have it to themselves.
Schmidtie, let’s talk before you tell her that.
Perhaps we will, but my mind is quite made up. Never more made up than now.
A gale from the west was blowing through 57th Street. He walked leaning into it, fists in the pockets of his trousers. Third Avenue was dead. Taxis streaming toward the bridge had all lit their “Off Duty” signs. On Lexington Avenue, he found one and told the driver to go to 41st Street. A dirty-looking bus was waiting. He sat down next to a window, took
The Warden
out of his pocket, found his place, and began to read. Mr. Harding certainly knew how to make himself liked and how to live under the same roof with his family. Why are some people born with that gift and others not? He must ask Dr. Renata the next time they meet. And that serene celibacy! Then the bus started, and the driver turned off the overhead lights in the aisle. The reading light was too dim to continue. Schmidt turned it off, put the book in his lap, called the attendant and paid the fare so she wouldn’t bother him later, and fell asleep.
He awakened unpleasantly, with a bad taste in his mouth. Something stank; it was the stench that woke him. He opened his eyes and saw that sitting next to him was a man as tall as he but much heavier, dressed in a threadbare tweed suit of the same shade as Schmidt’s, soiled and too tight for his frame. Under it he wore a rough sweater that looked like army surplus, a grimy flannel shirt, and a salmon-pink tie, the knot of which was black with dirt. The man was slumbering with his mouth open. Down the side of his cleft chin ran a rivulet of saliva. That was, Schmidt supposed, because the mouth was toothless, like the mouths of the aged Kurds one had been seeing in newspaper photographs, although this
man did not seem old, not much older than he. It was a good English or German face, except for that dreadful mouth, with eyes set deep under strong brows, a cocky nose, tiny well-formed ears, and a tough skull, the kind that, on a rough flight over the Pacific, when the captain walks through the cabin, would put the passengers at ease. The man’s cane rested between his legs. He shifted in his seat and broke wind. It was expelled in ample bursts, followed by a liquid rumbling in the stomach. If one could judge by the delicate smile that floated briefly on the man’s face, rather like a baby’s, after it has been burped, he felt relief. The cloacal odor was unbearable, but different from the stench that had interrupted Schmidt’s sleep and continued to nauseate him. Was the man hiding a piece of carrion in his pocket, had he a suppurating wound on his feet or somewhere under his clothes? It seemed impossible that an accumulation of dirt and sweat alone accounted for such fetor. And why, with the bus almost empty, had the man moved over to sit next to him, instead of spreading out over two seats?
It was clear to Schmidt that he had to get away. How to do it was less clear. The man’s thick legs occupied the entire space in front of him, and Schmidt did not think he could step over them. He would have to shake the man and ask him to move over. That’s what he did. The man broke wind again, and inquired, Your bowels acting up or your bladder?
It seemed to Schmidt that he winked as he said these words.
Neither. Please get up for a moment. I’d just like to get by you.
Hoity-toity, aren’t you? Isn’t that something: he would
just like to get by me! What’s the matter, doesn’t he like sitting with me?
He shook with laughter, and spread himself more comfortably in the seat, putting his gloved hands—the gloves were of knitted cotton thread, of a sort Schmidt hadn’t seen in years, that Charlotte had worn with her riding clothes—on the handle of his cane. He gave Schmidt another wink; this time there was no doubt about it.
Sir, I don’t know you and I don’t want to talk to you. I just want to leave this seat. Will you please get your legs out of the way!
The man pursed his mouth. He he he!
The way he laughed, or perhaps it was his mouth, reminded Schmidt queerly of the first judge before whom he had ever appeared, on a routine unopposed motion to ask for permission to amend an answer to a complaint. The judge denied it. He he he. And then he said, Haven’t you heard me, young fellow? Sit down! That had been an absurd ruling, and it took considerable labor to overturn it, but what was he to do now? Remain in the stench for another hour, with this mad hobo sneering at him? Ring for the attendant, an adolescent girl sitting next to the driver, and try to get the driver to mediate?