Schmidt Steps Back

by Louis Begley

  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. H
e 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.

  It hurt his feelings, Schmidt realized, to tell her she was right. He added, I had always hoped it was more.

  You were taken in by that joviality—and those unbeatable good manners. It was the same with the law clerks he had served with in New York and D.C. and all those Yale and St. Paul’s classmates. Lots of good cheer. Lots of laughter. Beyond that? Nothing. Boreal cold, like his father and mother. With Bruno he became a real person, and I was grateful for that. Bruno was also wonderful with the children and me. Completely attentive and always truly interested in what we thought, what we were doing, ready to take part in anything that was proposed. He had come to New York to reconnoiter—that was the way he put it—and told both of us that there were tremendous opportunities in advising French flight capital. People who had succeeded in getting parts of their fortunes out of France, or had great sums of money hidden outside France, all that money that was “in the shadows,” needed to be invested, and the most attractive place to invest was the U.S. That created a great need not only for a banker like him but also, he claimed, for an American lawyer like Tim, provided he was based in Paris. He had to be in Paris to deal with people who were there and who wouldn’t do business by telephone and to get to understand local conditions and constraints. In effect he was saying to Tim, Move to your Paris office, and I will open for you every important door in France and also in Switzerland, where most of the money is parked. I believe Bruno, Tim told me. This is an opportunity that neither the firm nor I can miss. By the way, he was quite right about what Bruno could accomplish. He introduced Tim to some amazing clients.

  Schmidt nodded. He hadn’t known about the source of Tim’s European business, but both the quantity and the quality had been impressive and had been regularly commented on at firm lunches.

  You know how Tim was, Alice continued. Once he decided to do something he couldn’t be stopped. He got the firm to call Billy Higgs back early. As soon as he had Dexter’s word that the office was his, he went to Paris to organize our move. Bruno showed him this apartment, which had belonged to an aunt of his who had died some months before. His two nieces wanted to sell, and Tim bought it from them without asking me to come over to look at it first. It’s comfortable enough, and it worked for our purposes, but I dislike the neighborhood. My parents’ apartment had already been sold, but I’m not sure that Tim would have seriously considered it even if it had been available. It hadn’t been recommended by Bruno! I did put down my foot when it came to the schools. Bruno had the idea that the children should go to private schools, Sophie to one near the Trocadéro run by nuns and Tommy to the Jesuits, way over on the Left Bank. There Tim agreed with me: Catholic schools weren’t for us, and besides they were too far away. So we sent them instead to a public school near here, and that worked out fine.

  Schmidt had opened his mouth to put in a word for the advantages of a Jesuit education, having been sent to one of their schools on Manhattan’s Upper East Side by his father, who had swallowed his anti-Catholic bile to take advantage of a first-rate education offered at a bargain-basement price, but managed to hold his tongue.

  We settled into a routine. Tim worked long hours, staying at the office even later than in New York. The business that came in was often more than the office could handle. I was making sure the children were adjusting to the French system and did their homework, and I tried to run a Parisian household. My parents had a small but very pretty house—a pavillon de chasse—near Chantilly, just north of Paris, that they turned over to us. When the weather was agreeable, we’d drive out there on Saturday afternoon and stay until Sunday evening. There are wonderful walks to go on in the forest, which the French government keeps very clean, removing dead trees and fallen branches, clearing paths. Everyone liked it, including Bruno, who came with us regularly. It turned out that he liked to shoot, as did Tim, so during the season he and Tim would kill birds together. When the children had colds, or there were birthday parties, I stayed with them in Paris, and Tim and Bruno went to Chantilly alone. It all continued this way very serenely until the disastrous summer of 1985.

  She began to cry again. They had long since left the table and returned to the library, and once again Schmidt hobbled over to the sofa and, putting his arm around her shoulders, tried to comfort her.

  Thank you, she said, perhaps you don’t know what happened.

  He shook his head.

  Sophie went to camp that summer. Camp Horned Owl, in Maine, one of those girls’ camps that have been going strong for one hundred years. It was the third time, and she really looked forward to it. Her two best friends from Brearley were going as well. My mother was in very bad shape, so it was clear that I would have to skip Bar Harbor. But Tim said he would take Sophie to Horned Owl in July so that she’d be there when the camp started, return to Paris and work until August, and then make another trip to Bar Harbor with Bruno and get in his sailing. She would stay with them after camp, and they would bring her back to Paris. I was going to Antibes as soon as school let out at the beginning of July, with Tommy and our au pair. I wanted t
o be with my father, take turns with him talking to my mother, reading to her, changing CDs—she was listening to music a great deal—and watch the occasional TV program with her. It was more than a full-time job, because she hardly slept at night and wanted company. The physical side was taken care of by the nurses. She was by then completely paralyzed but able to breathe, chew food, and swallow, and she still spoke, but more and more feebly. It was very hard to understand her. We were waiting for the end, when she would need a tracheotomy or a breathing machine to get enough oxygen. She had decided—all three of us had decided—that we would not expose her to that torment; she said that she would stop eating and drinking, and turn her head to the wall, except that of course she couldn’t turn at all, was incapable of any movement. Schmidtie, you cannot imagine how hard it is to die, how hard it is to kill even a very sick, very feeble, paralyzed old lady. Or do you know? Did you have to go through that with your parents?

  No, Schmidt replied. My father died suddenly of apoplexy, and my mother in the hospital after a huge operation. There was almost nothing left in her belly when they got through.

  I’m sorry, said Alice. No, I’m not, anyway not for your father. It’s so much easier when they go quickly. I was reading Emma to my mother, one of her favorite novels, when the phone rang. It was three in the morning. Tim said, I’m at the camp, Sophie is sick, she has a high fever and seizures, I’m driving her to the hospital in Portland. I think you should come over. The au pair was a good girl, but I couldn’t leave Tommy and her with my father. All three of us took the morning plane from Nice and I was at the hospital late that evening. Sophie never recognized me. She died after two terrible days. It was meningitis caused by a staphylococcus infection. Three other girls got sick, and one of them didn’t make it either. The camp director had been slow to react; she called the parents instead of ambulances. You can imagine the anger and the recriminations, but I don’t think you can imagine the horror of seeing the little face of a twelve-year-old contorted in pain and empty. Completely empty, somehow turned inward.