Schmidt Steps Back (7 page)

Those were not his only sins: among the others, his being a Jew (but Schmidt was coming to regret that he had considered Jon’s being one of the Chosen a defect) and having been unfaithful to Charlotte and unscrupulous about her money weighed most heavily against him, along with the misconduct that led to his being booted out as a partner from W & K. Schmidt did not foresee a reconciliation with him. At last Charlotte appeared, beautiful and chic. She astonished him by proposing a truce, which Schmidt accepted. What else could he do? I will take you as you are, she said, and you take me as I am. We will see where that puts us. They shook hands on that, and she left to meet her husband. No embrace, just that handshake. He watched her walk toward the pyramid of the Louvre and remained in his chair for a long while. Then trying to put all his weight on the good leg, he made his way to rue St. Florentin. There were no taxis at the stand, and it didn’t look to him as though there would ever be any. If he was going to see Alice, he had better walk to the address on rue St. Honoré he had written down on the memo pad he kept in
his coat pocket. That is what he did, limping carefully until he reached the door of her building. He pressed the buzzer next to the brass plate that bore the initials of the Verplancks’ first names:
T. ET A
. Someone called out scratchily
Oui?
He gave his name, and the same voice bid him in English to take the elevator to the third floor.

The apartment—large, luxurious, and silent—looked out over gardens in the back of the building. Alice led him into the library, and once he was settled in a tapestry-covered armchair that he found surprisingly comfortable, she offered him coffee. Or did he prefer a drink? It was past noon, he told her, so he would dare to ask for a whiskey. She laughed, disappeared for a moment, and returned followed by an elderly woman, whom she introduced as Madame Laure, bearing a large tray with a decanter, Perrier, and ice and what looked like a glass of tomato juice for Alice. Once he had told her how sorry he was about Tim, and she had asked about his limp, he was at a loss about what to say next and felt that she might be too, in which case he should perhaps leave. At the same time, he didn’t think it was within the bounds of good manners to finish his drink and say good-bye less than thirty minutes after he had arrived. What’s more he didn’t want to leave: he was too content to find himself in this tranquil room in the company of a lovely and very elegant woman. A woman, it must be said, who intimidated him, although he felt certain that such was not her intention. If he wanted to stay, it was clear that he must get beyond the exchange of banalities, the sort of formulas that Emily Post probably recommended as appropriate for a conversation between a senior partner and the widow of one of his juniors, to whom he has come to pay his respects.

Alice, he blurted out finally, there is something that has
been troubling me very much about the way Tim went off the air: he didn’t let me know he was planning to retire or his reasons; he didn’t tell me anything. Then came the dreadful news that he was dead, but not a word from him between his retirement and that awful day. Something must have gone really wrong. We had worked together very closely from the time he came to the firm until a few years before you and he left for Paris.

He knew, of course, she answered, that you were unhappy when he started doing so much work with Lew.

Alice dear, I used to think of him as the son I would have liked to have. His working for Lew didn’t change that. I hope he didn’t think it did. That would be one heartbreak more.

Without any warning, she started to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks while she remained completely silent.

His gesture made awkward by the limp, he reached the sofa, sat down beside her, and spontaneously, without having formed an intention to do so, put his arm around her shoulders. Alice, he said, I am so terribly sorry, please stop, I’m sorry I asked those questions. I’ll leave right now if you like, if it will make it easier for you to regain your calm.

Still sobbing, she shook her head and hurried out of the room. Schmidt returned to his armchair and waited uneasily.

There was a tremor in her voice when she reappeared, but she was no longer crying. It’s such a long and sad story, she said. Are you sure you want to hear it?

He nodded.

She looked at her watch and said, In that case you must stay for lunch. Please excuse me again while I say a word to Madame Laure.

She came back, offered him another whiskey, and after a
moment of hesitation poured a much smaller one for herself. Lunch will be ready in a quarter of an hour: very simple, cold chicken and salad. I hope that’s all right. Then she added, Can what I tell you remain
entre nous
? You won’t feel that you need to discuss it with the firm?

He assured her that his questions had been those of a grieving friend. It would not occur to him to talk about their conversation to the firm—from which he had in any event retired—unless she specifically authorized him to do so. Thereupon she apologized, saying that she couldn’t understand why she had made that request. Perhaps it was because she would be discussing for the first time certain things with someone who wasn’t already aware of them. His visit was more welcome than he could imagine. It had made her realize how badly she needed to tell that story from beginning to end to someone who would listen sympathetically, who had known Tim well before Paris. And so, while they drank their whiskeys, then over lunch and afterward, when they took coffee in the library, she talked nonstop. At first he thought that he was hearing about a prolonged marriage spat, some rather selfish and high-handed behavior on the part of Tim that she badly needed to get off her chest. But as he heard more, his heart sank. The story was unlike anything he could have imagined.

She was startled, she said, when Tim decided in 1981 to go to Dexter Wood and volunteer to take the place of Billy Higgs, the partner then in charge of the Paris office who was scheduled to return to New York only twelve months later. Putting himself forward like that wasn’t Tim’s style. What made it even stranger, he had turned Dexter down cold four years earlier when Dexter asked him to take over from Higgs’s predecessor, Sam Warren. He did that against her wishes. For many
reasons she had really wanted to move to Paris at that time. He knew that, and he knew very well why. She had thought that, if the children’s French heritage was to be meaningful to them, they should at some point spend a number of years in France, and the timing was ideal. Sophie was five and Tommy three; they were still in preschool, they could be moved to Paris and put into the French educational system without disrupting their schooling. Language wouldn’t be a problem. She had always spoken French to them. They understood perfectly and were on the verge of speaking really well. She had also told Tim that if he was concerned about their reading and writing in English, there were ways to make sure they could: tutors, perhaps a private bilingual school with instruction in both languages. She had another personal and urgent reason to be in France, of which Tim was also completely aware. Her mother had been very recently diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—you know Lou Gehrig’s disease—an illness for which there was no remedy or cure. The doctors thought it was an aggressive case. Some months earlier her father had at last retired from the diplomatic service, and he and her mother had decided to sell their apartment on rue du Bac and move to the house in Antibes that had come to them from her mother’s family, a place that her mother loved, having spent all summer vacations there until the war. Both her parents were convinced that the Antibes climate would be good for her. It had even occurred to Alice that she and Tim could buy the rue du Bac apartment. The location was just what she wanted, there was lots of room for the children, and you couldn’t ask for a better layout for entertaining. It had simply gotten to be too big for her parents.

Do you know anything about my family history? she asked abruptly.

Schmidt replied that he knew, of course, that her father had been the French ambassador in Washington. He had met both him and Alice’s mother at her wedding reception. But that was all.

I am a child of the victory in Europe, she said. My father was with the Free French during the entire war. He managed to get from Bordeaux to London just as Pétain was capitulating and afterward was one of those people who were parachuted into France for special missions and then taken back to London. My mother and he met in Normandy during one of those missions. She was in the Gaullist resistance. Strangely, that’s how she survived. She stopped wearing the yellow star and went underground. When my father entered Paris in August forty-four with the Division Leclerc, she was already there, and I was born twelve months later, three months after they got married. It could have been a shotgun wedding, but there was no one left on my mother’s side to go after my father. My entire family ended up in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and none of them survived. They were the kind of Jews who believed that the Germans would never do to them what they were doing to the others.

Seeing a look of puzzlement on Schmidt’s face, she added, Yes, my mother was Jewish. That did not put off my one hundred percent Aryan father, one of those brilliant French Protestants who come in first at every
concours
—those competitive examinations you have to take in order to go to the best schools and rise, as he did, to the top of the Quai d’Orsay. Anyway, they were older than most people when they had me,
and they didn’t try to have more children. My mother died in eighty-six, just short of her seventy-fifth birthday.

And your father?

For the first time that morning she laughed, making Schmidt decide that he loved the sound of her laughter. My father’s very much alive, still in perfect health at ninety, sharp as a tack, and living in Antibes with my mother’s best friend. Unmarried, of course—they’re quite modern.

Schmidt cursed himself for having allowed her to notice that hearing that her mother was Jewish had startled him. It was a tic; he had reacted like a goddamn windup toy set off by something that was connected to a time when such things did matter to lots of people, himself included, people who now knew better and no longer told jokes about Jews, blacks, or homosexuals. Surely she didn’t think he cared about it today. To apply today’s sensitivities and rules to how things were thirty years earlier was unfair. A political anachronism! So he interrupted her inanely: You know, Alice, that your background—so very distinguished—was not anything that I was concerned about or that the firm took into account. I don’t think anyone knew or had bothered to inquire. Look at Lew Brenner, he added. He was made a partner the year you and Tim got married, or perhaps the year before.

Alice raised her eyebrows and sighed. Wonderful never-changing anti-Semitic America, she said softly. I remember it well. But never mind. To go back to Tim, he knew how I felt and he knew about my parents when he turned Dexter down. He just told me, as though that made everything all right, You can go to France anytime you want and as often as you want. But he wasn’t going to exile himself to a legal backwater. That didn’t matter to Sam Warren and whoever was the partner
in Paris before him because they were both lawyers without clients or any hope of ever having clients, in addition to being fundamentally lazy. Taking other partners’ clients to fancy dinners when they happened to pass through Paris and making themselves useful around the American Cathedral made them happy and from the firm’s point of view was probably the best use they could be put to.

Schmidt nodded. Tim was right about both of them.

I’m sure he was, and I’m also sure that he didn’t mean to hurt me. He just hoped I could understand that it wasn’t reasonable to ask him to do what I wished. The subtext was that my mother was going to die soon whatever I did, and he had to think about the long-term future, meaning his illustrious career. It was that simple. He didn’t have anything against France. His French was very good, and he had the kind of good manners the French love. But his clients, his practice, and the firm came first. There was another unmentioned obsession, the reason we went to France together only once, on our honeymoon: his family’s place on Mount Desert. He kept a big sloop at the yacht club in Bar Harbor, and his idea of heaven was to sail in those waters. So every August, or as much of every August as he could protect from clients and other partners, had to be spent in Maine. I’d go to Paris to see my parents just a few days at a time either alone or, if my parents were up to it, with the children. Naturally, I wanted my parents to know them. Otherwise, going to Paris didn’t matter to me all that much: I had lost touch with all but a few of my French friends long ago. Radcliffe had done that, and before that living in Bonn, when my father was ambassador there. So the question was, what had changed his mind, why did he suddenly decide in 1981 that he wanted to move to Paris as
quickly as possible? You must admit that it was strange. From the point of view of the children, the timing was awful. Sophie was at Brearley and Tommy at St. Bernard’s. They were both happy and didn’t want to leave their schools or their friends. The one big thing that had changed was that in 1981 Mitterrand became the president of France, with a Socialist majority in the National Assembly and the Socialist agenda of nationalizations and tax changes. In short order many rich French bourgeois decided they would play at being
émigrés
and leave Paris for New York and London—like aristocrats running away from the French Revolution. Suddenly we were meeting many interesting French people in New York. Some were old friends of my parents, who naturally looked us up, some were people my father specifically sent to Tim when he was asked whether he could recommend a lawyer in New York, some were friends of friends. That’s how Bruno Chardon, a partner in a very fancy French private bank, came into our lives. He was about Tim’s age, very handsome, very elegant, and very well connected. He was like another Tim, but with black hair and dark eyes, and the kind of Mediterranean skin that’s slightly sallow. Tim and he got along right away. It turned out that Bruno was also a passionate sailor, so that fall Tim had his boat brought down to New York. He berthed her at City Island, and the two of them would go out most weekends, with the children if it wasn’t too cold and the kids didn’t have birthday parties or other things they wanted to do in the city. Occasionally, I came along too. When the weather was suitable, and Tim could get away, they’d make a weekend of it. I didn’t complain because I realized that was the first time I saw Tim with a real friend. Certainly, it was the first time I had seen him be intimate with someone other
than me and the children. Bruno had broken through a wall. You probably don’t know that Tim and his only sister didn’t speak to each other; she didn’t even come to our wedding. As for those troglodytic parents, they’re Ice Age cold. The deal about Maine was that we stayed out of one another’s way: the sister went in July, so we went in August. The parents made no difference. Even if they showed up, they were like inanimate objects. You’re a better judge of how Tim was with other lawyers at the firm. To me it seemed that he was always jovial and enthusiastic about people he worked with well—such as you and Lew Brenner—but the relationships stopped right there.