Schmidt Steps Back

by Louis Begley

  No wonder the sight of the old man sitting in the visitor’s chair of his tiny office, wordless and with a wan smile on his thin lips, made Schmidt wonder whether he would faint for the first time in his life. Then the great man’s lips parted. He was actually speaking, droning on about how the partners had voted—yes voted, unanimously in fact without discussion—to invite Schmidt into the partnership, and, if he accepted, they would expect great things from him. Was he disposed to accept? What a burst of affection inside Schmidt! Was there any task that Dexter, as Mr. Wood declared he was thenceforth to be called, could set that Schmidt would not be ready to accomplish? If only, for the moment, he would shut up and get out of his room! For there was only one thing that Schmidtie wanted now: to call Mary. Everything would be all right, the best private schools for Charlotte, a garage near the apartment so there’d be no more terrifying late-Sunday-night walks home after he’d unloaded the weekend gear and dropped off the car at the parking lot in East Harlem. A new station wagon to replace the ancient Buick hand-me-down from his father might be in the cards. They could afford more expert help at home, a real housekeeper. And perhaps Mary might even relent and agree to have another child.

  Out of the six only he and Jack DeForrest made it. To celebrate, Jack and Dorothy joined Schmidt and Mary at the ‘21’ Club. Martinis, shrimp cocktail, and filet mignon. After much discussion between Schmidt and DeForrest, they ordered a Pommard to go with the meat. Afterward they all went to Le Club, which was hard to get into but Jack knew someone whose name did the trick, and tried hard to go wild on the dance floor. When Schmidt and Mary got home and were in bed, she whispered, Lie back and be quiet. She took him in her mouth, and, when he came, she swallowed and swallowed and swallowed. He knew that she believed there was no better way to show that she loved him.

  Then 1968 veered into disaster. At the end of January, the Vietcong had launched the Tet Offensive. Walter Cronkite, apparently no longer able to countenance the carnage, said on TV that the war was at a stalemate and had to be settled by negotiation, advice that fell on deaf ears. Horrors were heaped on horrors at home. On April 4, Martin Luther King was murdered, and race riots, arson, and pillage followed in Harlem and cities across the land. Two months later, almost to the day, Bobby Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; he died the next day. After protests against the war in Vietnam and loss of public support had forced LBJ to forgo seeking reelection, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey at a convention that was a televised brawl both inside the hall and out, where protesters battled Chicago police. An incredible six hundred fifty demonstrators were arrested, and the city’s hospitals were swamped by the hundreds of others savagely beaten by the police. In New York a student sit-in at Columbia led to a series of bloody riots when President Grayson Kirk called in the police to evict the students from administration buildings. In the resulting hubbub, the class of ’68 was allowed to graduate from the college and the professional schools, including the law school, without regard to the days of classwork that had been lost. Only Harvard and Yale law school graduates were to be found among W & K partners, and in fact there were only a couple of Columbia graduates among the associates, the older partners taking considerable pride in the crimson and blue complexion of the firm. But it happened that in the fall of ’68 five Columbia graduates were to become associates, and Columbia students had been working at the firm during the summer. Columbia’s leniency in allowing students who hadn’t really completed the year’s work to graduate had now in the eyes of many devalued their degrees and academic honors. In fact the entire Columbia grading system was suspect. When the subject was discussed at W & K’s firm lunch, the head of the hiring committee repeated what he had read in the Wall Street Journal: the law school faculty had wanted one thing only, and that was to get the class of ’68 off their backs and out the door. “Anything goes” was the slogan for first-and second-year students too. If you showed up for the exam, you got a passing grade. If you actually wrote something in the exam book, they gave you an A. We’ll have to watch this carefully, announced Dexter Wood to the accompaniment of Hear! Hear! and some pounding on the table. The golden age of the university was over, and with it the sanctity of law school class ratings and elections to the law reviews; a global contagion was spreading, as those who had followed the May events in France through the periscope of the W & K Paris office were prompt to predict.

  An associate of Verplanck’s quality would have always been considered a feather in the firm’s cap. His arrival at a time like this, however, was particularly welcome, and the older partners greeted him with an unusual outpouring of affection. He was an example of the best that the familiar and beloved system of education and selection could produce. Thus quite naturally, without a word having been uttered by Mr. Wood or any of the other firm elders, a general understanding took hold: until the happy day when—provided he didn’t stumble—Tim would be taken in as a partner, he was to be put only on the most challenging projects and spared mind-numbing tasks such as updating surveys of state blue-sky laws or combing through files of a client in antitrust hot water or any work at all for members of the Racquet Club Patrol. That was how the partners doing trusts and estates work were known to W & K wags, an allusion to the midday hours they put in at that institution ingesting their daily preprandial martinis, and, unless the roof fell in and someone had remembered to tell them about it, their habit of returning to the office not more than two and a half hours before the 5:52 left Grand Central for Greenwich and New Canaan.

  A first-year partner like Schmidt should have had little hope that this paragon might be assigned to help him. But Schmidt’s own reputation and standing within the firm were high. The group of great insurance companies he serviced were then the firm’s crown jewels, and their private placements—heavily negotiated long-term loans with intricate restrictions on dividends, investments, and borrowings—were financial sonnets in the composition of which Schmidt excelled. Even before he became a partner, the fuddy-duddies who ran those clients’ legal affairs from offices in Boston, Hartford, Newark, or New York skyscrapers had frequently made a point of asking that Schmidt work on their new deals when they telephoned one of the two firm seniors, Mr. Jowett or Mr. Rhinelander, to say they were sending over some work. With his new status as a partner, Schmidt’s standing as these clients’ preferred lawyer became official, and when a series of proposals for very large and novel loans arrived that autumn and winter, he obtained a first call on Tim’s services.

  They realized from the outset that they suited each other. It wasn’t only a matter of Tim’s brains or superb legal training, which enabled him to see through problems clearly and rapidly. He was also possessed of common sense, without which an associate as bright as Tim might allow himself to be sidetracked by problems with little practical impact on the client’s objectives just because he found them fascinating to explore. And he wrote well, an essential quality so far as Schmidt was concerned, guaranteeing the precision without which those same objectives could not be attained with a sufficient degree of certainty. It was also a matter of having fun, enjoying drafting as an art. Oh, Schmidt had never doubted that his own preoccupation with the aesthetic aspect was something that some at the firm laughed at behind his back, but Tim and he had the same understanding that their commitment to it was not only justifiable but essential. They made an exacting but seemingly pedestrian task—seeing to it that the claws of restrictions on dividends, borrowings, and investments bit down hard and prevented the borrower from diverting cash from the sacrosanct goal of paying the insurance company’s interest and principal when due—become something akin to a medieval artisan’s carving Passion scenes into ivory. Thus Schmidt had looked on benevolently even when he thought Tim was, well, overdoing it just a little bit, with his mania for number 2 Eagle pencils, which he sharpened just so himself rather than deposit them into his out-basket as everyone else did to be sharpened in the mailroom and returned a few hours la
ter, or the special onionskin paper he required for pasting revised language into drafts of documents. Or his peculiar little aphorisms. For instance, when reviewing the signature copy of a document in which he detected language that had been crossed out in the course of revising a prior draft: Never allow pentimenti to show in your finished work. Or apropos of a heavily marked-up draft, Haven’t we too much impasto here? Or after a conference with an inexperienced negotiator: This samurai isn’t ready to wield the long sword. All that stuff was amusing and displayed nicely Tim’s wide culture, but at times Schmidt feared that his protégé came across as something of a fop.

  None of this detracted from his fondness for his young colleague or the gratitude he felt for his work, and when Tim became a partner in 1974, a year ahead of his classmates, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, including Tim’s and Schmidt’s, that he owed the promotion to his own merit but the timing of it to Schmidt. That knowledge did nothing to diminish Schmidt’s dismay when Tim began, as he put it himself, to worship strange gods. In fact, in order to make sure that Schmidt got the point, he said, Ha! Ha! Ha! Adore not any strange god. The Lord his name is Jealous, He is a jealous God. Right Schmidtie? Ha! Ha! Ha! The point was that Tim had decided to move on. When in the last year of the Carter presidency the prime rate hit a stunning 21.5 percent, only fools would have borrowed long term at that rate from insurance companies, and only fools would have made cheaper money available long term to industrial borrowers. Schmidt’s insurance clients were stodgy but not stupid: they switched to making short-or medium-term loans to banks and raked in interest at rates they had never imagined could be obtained. Industrial companies were starved for cash, but it would not be long before Mike Milken and his merry band at Drexel Burnham rode to the rescue and invented junk bonds. Schmidt’s private placement practice never recovered from the blow, and eventually it withered. For the moment, however, there was only a slowdown sufficient to enable Tim (or was it foresight; would he have strayed even if there had been as much work to keep him busy as in the past?) to find a strange god in the person of Lew Brenner. Schmidt’s junior by a couple of years, Brenner found that his practice—oil and gas deals in North Africa and the Middle East—was booming. Very quickly it became evident, to Schmidt’s contained chagrin, that Tim was as valuable doing international transactions as he had been doing private placements in their heyday, that he got along just fine with Lew, and that Lew knew a good thing when it came his way. In fact, Schmidt had come to believe that bringing Tim into his orbit was part of one of Lew’s carefully laid plans. That man didn’t just happen to do this or that, which was Schmidt’s way. All of this hurt, and hurt badly, even though he had to admit to himself that Tim was always cheerfully ready to help in emergencies and with particularly irksome problems, so that when a couple of years later Dexter Wood announced that Tim would take over the Paris office—a move backed by Lew Brenner—Schmidt shrugged and let several days pass before congratulating him or telling Mary. It was a natural-enough decision. Tim was reported to speak near-perfect French; except for occasional involvements in Schmidt’s financings, which the old man described at firm lunch as part of Tim’s being a good sport, all his work was international, and he had some potentially interesting business opportunities in Paris; Alice was French but having gone to Radcliffe would be completely at ease in the role of the wife of the head of W & K’s Paris office; and, most important, considering the big effort of client development and public relations that would be required, Tim really wanted to take on the task.

  The invitation to call on Alice when he passed through Paris was never far from Schmidt’s consciousness as he traveled on his inspection tour of Life Centers in Central and Eastern Europe and certain of the new republics that had detached themselves from the Soviet Union. His last stop was Prague. On the way to dinner with his Czech colleagues he stumbled in one of the cobbled streets of Malá Strana and twisted his ankle so badly that both he and the emergency room doctor thought it was broken. X-rays showed that there was no fracture, only a bad sprain, and once the ankle had been taped he was able to go on to Paris. But not before the director of the Czech office had presented him with a carved walking stick to lean on as he hobbled around. It was thus that he found himself on a sunny April morning sitting in one of the green metal chairs near the bassin in the Tuileries, watching children and some elderly aficionados sail their boats. He was waiting for his only daughter, Charlotte. Parents and grandparents! His dealings with Charlotte and her husband had been odious: he was prepared for an unpleasant interview. She was in Paris, with her lawyer husband, Jon Riker, who had worked for Schmidt as an associate. Another case of a favorite guilty of betrayal: that was what Schmidt thought but didn’t dare to say aloud. Tim had followed a strange god. Jon had dared to become Charlotte’s live-in boyfriend and then her husband.

  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.