by Louis Begley
Schmidt kicked the last of the stray apples. His anger was like a bad taste in the mouth.
That final indignity was unmentionable. He could not have spoken of it to Mary: a word against the Jews, and she brought all the sins of Hitler on your head, but this marriage was not a matter of civil rights or equal opportunity or, God help him, the gas ovens. To the best of his recollection, no matter how deeply or how far back he looked, Schmidt was sure he had not once in his life stood in the way of any Jew. But now he was discovering that what didn’t count at W & K (which had certainly filled up with Jews since the day he had himself gone to work there) and what could even furnish him at times some eyebrow-raising sort of amusement, as it had when Jews, beginning in the seventies, had begun to move into his Fifth Avenue apartment building, or joined one of his clubs, did count heavily when it came to his family, or what was left of it! This marriage would turn Charlotte, his one remaining link with life, into a link with a world that wasn’t his—the psychiatrist parents he had so far escaped meeting, grandparents on the mother’s side whom Jon occasionally mentioned, possibly uncles, aunts, and cousins he hadn’t yet heard about. What might they be like? That contact with them would be unpleasant, that it would put a strain on his quiet good manners and composure, he was quite sure. Before long, they would cover Charlotte like ooze from the sea; they would absorb her and leave him out; never again would he be alone with her on his own ground; the pool-house kitchen and its hostile threshold were the microcosm of his future.
He tried the cellar door cover. It opened, which meant that he had forgotten to check it after Bogard and his men had finished raking. Perhaps now that Bogard had proved himself he should be allowed to lock the cellar from the inside and then leave through the house. Might as well give him the keys too; Schmidt couldn’t be sure of always being there to open the door. When he entered the cellar, his mood lightened. The place was impeccable; the effort he had put into arranging it had not been wasted. The dehumidifier humming beside the shelves on which he stored the reserve of cleaning supplies and canned goods did such a good job, drawing the moisture even from the crawl space, that as an experiment he had moved the paperbacks from Fifth Avenue to a new set of shelves he had the handyman build on the opposite wall. Their pages hadn’t curled, which was more than could be said for the books and magazines in the house; perhaps he could put in the cellar as well the art books and those of Mary’s accumulated hardcover volumes he didn’t need to have at hand. The temperature was about as low as it would get, and that was good news for the wine, also moved from the city, where he had been forced to keep it in a warehouse because the basement in the Fifth Avenue building was so stiflingly hot, to the cellar’s windowless continuation under the new part of the house. In the summer the coolness of that space was delicious, reminding him of the way movie theaters had felt during New York summers before window air conditioners had become customary in apartments. He sat down in the rocking chair near the workbench and shifted his weight. Not a squeak; it was a solid piece—his father’s, as was the oval woven-ribbon rug that the old man had had in his bathroom. The tools were in near-perfect order; the seniors among them, hammers, pliers that might have belonged to an old-time dentist, and little saws, also came from his father’s house on Grove Street. What a contrast between the cellar of that artisan’s federal Greenwich Village house and this! There had been no way to keep the damp out of it, or, for that matter, visiting rats, although Pasha the cat had worked hard.
He found the box of small cigars on the workbench, lit one, and threw the match into the wastebasket, a habit of which Mary had been unable to break him. Next time he came down, he would bring an ashtray, by way of remembrance and apology. And then the thought he had not allowed to form while he was touring the garden was complete, impossible to set aside for some later hour when he would have a drink in his hand and music in which he could lose himself on the turntable. Clearly, he would have to leave this house: the only trick was how to do it without Charlotte’s knowing it was because of Jon, or, if that realization could not be avoided, to do it in such a manner that she would take it as a good development for her father, a sign of returning optimism, something on the order of her own decision to found the next generation of the family, with him now willing to stand on his own feet in a new life. A preposterous idea, but it would not be the first time he had successfully put on an act for the benefit of his wife and daughter.
The problem of the house was not new. Schmidt had perceived its unpleasant outline during the first meeting with Dick Murphy, the trusts and estates lawyer at Wood & King who had drafted Mary’s and his wills when they decided they ought to sign such instruments, amidst the requisite jokes about whether they were of sound and disposing minds. He had stared at it during each subsequent discussion of revisions and codicils occasioned by the rising tide of their fortunes, and changes in the tax law, and when he arranged for them to see Murphy before Mary’s exploratory operation, at a time when the doctors were still hopeful. It came to this: the house wasn’t his and it was too valuable by far. It had belonged to Mary’s maiden aunt Martha, her father’s sister, who had brought up Mary after her mother died of pneumonia in 1947.
Mary had just turned ten. Martha was the only relative, apart from some elderly distant cousins in Arizona, Mary’s father having been killed in knee-high water off Omaha Beach, in the first attempt to land. From the time Schmidt and Mary were married, they had spent their summer vacations with Martha; in due course, Martha became Charlotte’s godmother; it had taken all the powers of persuasion of Martha’s lawyer to keep her from leaving the house to a four-year-old Charlotte. In the event, the house and everything else Martha had went outright to Mary. Everything else consisted of a sum that was small even in 1969 dollars. Martha had been used to living very comfortably, spending her capital; the trust from which she also received income terminated on her death and was distributed to those distant cousins. But by the beginning of the seventies, Schmidt was earning enough to pay for the upkeep of the house. Thus Mary’s cash inheritance grew, and she had been able to put aside a good part of what she earned as an editor distinguished for her sure literary taste in an otherwise brutally commercial publishing house. The convention between her and Schmidt was that she paid for her own clothes and hairdresser, the few lunches or taxis for which she was not reimbursed, gifts (which were sometimes startlingly extravagant), and charities Schmidt didn’t want to support. He took care of the rest. Still, as Murphy said, she had only a little over a million dollars. Martha had brought her up to be old-fashioned about money, which to her meant investing in treasuries and only the highest-rated municipal bonds. On the other hand, given its location, the house was probably worth two million; if she was to leave it and the money to Charlotte, as she intended, the tax would be more than a million, and how was Charlotte to pay it unless she sold the house, which was the opposite of what Mary wanted? The only sensible plan, Murphy pointed out, was to leave the money to Charlotte and the house to Schmidt. In that case, he explained, there would be no tax on the house, as a bequest to a spouse. Later, there would presumably be enough in Schmidt’s estate, when he died and she inherited, to pay the tax. She would be coming into some leftover money as well, enough for the upkeep on a big house. Then Murphy—Schmidt could have strangled that Irish oaf—put to Mary the question he had already raised with Schmidt privately and Schmidt had asked him to stay clear of: Tax planning aside, why shouldn’t her husband own the house he had lived in each summer and on most weekends for more than a quarter of a century and in which he had invested a great deal of his own money? He recited the modern heating system and insulation, the endless roof repairs, and, most recently, the new larger pool and pool house. Couldn’t Charlotte and, in time, her husband and children, use the house the way she and Schmidt had used it while her aunt Martha was alive, and inherit only on Schmidt’s death?
There were at least three reasons why Schmidt hadn’t wanted Mary to be backed into tha
t corner. She wasn’t well, the question was so obvious there was no need to ask it, and he was sure he knew the unpleasant answer. She had never told it to him, and it wasn’t for Murphy’s ears, but he knew that before she died, she intended to settle an old score. As for the taxes, they didn’t worry her. She could have no doubt that Schmidt would pay them himself before he saw Charlotte sell the house. Therefore, it made him squirm, first to hear Mary carry on about the solemn promise she had made to Martha, and how Charlotte could get a mortgage to pay the taxes, and then Murphy’s solution, never mentioned to Schmidt previously, and inspired, it seemed to him, by the two vodka martinis Murphy had drunk over lunch at the Racquet Club. How neat! Mary would leave Schmidt a life estate in the house! That did it! The word given to the aunt wouldn’t be broken, since, as a matter of law, Charlotte was the heir. Because Schmidt had the house for life, it would escape taxation when Mary died, and, when Schmidt died, the tax would fall on his estate.
Except that I don’t fancy playing the dowager on my daughter’s property, and he wouldn’t have minded pointing out to Murphy that if he had kept his mouth shut, Mary might have left the house to her husband after all, was the rejoinder Schmidt would have liked to make, but what was the use? Apparently, he was to continue to be a slave to a house that would never be his own.
Thus, when Mary turned her eyes on him—there were tears in their corners, and he couldn’t help thinking of her contact lenses and how lucky it was that she still cared about her looks—and smiled, saying, Mr. Murphy is right, don’t you think so? he smiled back and said, Yes, that’s just fine.
That was that, but he saw the way to undo it. For Charlotte’s wedding present, he would surrender his life estate and pay the gift tax on the entire value of the house. He was sure that was how the tax law still worked. The market was down, but not for properties of this quality. It would have to be a big payment. He would call Murphy and go over the figures, but, whatever they were, his heart told him he could and would do it. There was another aspect of the situation to be considered. If he moved fast enough, and bought another place for himself, there was tax he could save some money on, the tax on the gain on the sale of the Fifth Avenue apartment. He had bought it the year of his and Mary’s marriage, with the money he had inherited from his mother. It was large and elegant, so that, even after he became a partner, there was no need for them to move. But the price that had made him gasp at the time turned out, in hindsight, to have been nothing at all, less than one-fiftieth of the sum for which he had been able to sell the place. He had literally rubbed his hands together with glee watching the value of that place go up, realizing that it was his real nest egg. Yes, in terms of what his investment adviser liked to call preserving family wealth, the result wouldn’t be all that bad—he would use up the gift tax exclusion and pay about seven hundred thousand in gift tax, save some of the million dollars in tax on the gain on the apartment, and hand the property over to Charlotte at a time when gift and estate taxes were high but not so high as one might fear they would become in the future.
Where the proposed transaction departed from a pleasant capitalistic model was in its effect on his income: he had planned to pay the gains tax and add what was left from the sale of the apartment to his capital. And he hadn’t intended to buy for himself a house that cost as much as the astonishing price the apartment had commanded, which was what he would have to do if all of the capital gains tax was to be saved. In fact, he had had no thought of buying any house; his plan, to the extent such a thing existed, had been to live right where he was, in a place he had become used to thinking of as his home, to which he was attached, and which also happened to offer him, not to put too fine a point on it, the birthright—or is it the dream?—of every American retiree: a house that’s all paid for. He went back to his calculations. In order to carry out his new plan in full, he would have to take almost three million dollars of his cash and invest it in Charlotte’s taxes and the purchase of a new house he didn’t want and, in theory, didn’t need. That money, placed in municipal bonds, could be expected to produce an income of one hundred fifty thousand per year, tax free. Now it would no longer be forthcoming. He would still have the payments from his firm—one hundred eighty thousand dollars per year—and the income from the balance of his savings, perhaps another one hundred fifty thousand tax free if he invested that money in municipals as well. It occurred to Schmidt that, to the average American, this would seem a pretty good deal for a single sixty-year-old codger with no dependents, but was the average American accustomed to living as Schmidt lived? Had he worked as hard?
Moreover, his unsympathetic fellow citizen might not know that Wood & King had so organized its affairs that payments to retired partners stopped when they reached the age of seventy. That was five years after the normal retirement age. Therefore, the deal Schmidt had negotiated was generous in its own way. The pension was reduced, because he was leaving the firm early, but it was to continue until the same magic age. The reason for the generosity was no secret: it was to compensate him for gracefully leaving when he might have remained for another five years, like his contemporaries drawing a top share of the firm’s income. They didn’t mention that consideration in their talk, neither Jack DeForrest, the presiding partner, nor he, but he imagined that Jack had already been spoken to by many young partners—Jon Riker probably leading the charge!—anxious to warn DeForrest that if he stayed during those final years, Schmidt would be coasting. They wouldn’t have suggested he was a shirker; to allude to the effect on him of Mary’s illness and the declining role in the generation of revenues for the firm of the sort of financial work he handled would have been more than enough. Well, Schmidt had wanted to put down the burdens of his profession. It wouldn’t be necessary to push him out the door; that was one less worry for Jack.
Schmidt recalled that when, as a very young partner, he had voted in favor of the W & K retirement plan, this quaint—so he thought—notion of stopping pension payments after five years had made him laugh. Jack DeForrest, his law school classmate and then his closest friend, was sitting next to him at firm lunch. He had whispered to Jack, This is neat! The vestry of St. James really believes that a man’s life is three score and ten! It so happened that Messrs. Wood and King, both present at the table, and both past the canonical age, were members of that august New York institution. Because they were the founding partners, the retirement plan treated them differently from everybody else—with exquisite courtesy that Schmidt, ever filial, had applauded. As for himself, how was he, then in his thirty-sixth year, to imagine that one day the fabulous frontier of his seventieth birthday would not seem distant at all, and he would be obliged to contemplate the financial disadvantages of living on beyond it? All he knew then was that he had, so far, managed everything very well; there was no reason why he wouldn’t continue to be both lucky and happy.
As he rocked on in his chair the course he must follow seemed both clear and inevitable. Damn the taxes and the loss of income. He would give the house to Charlotte and move out. Living under the same roof with Jon Riker married to Charlotte during vacations, all summer weekends, and however many other weekends in the year they would want to use it might have been contemplated if it were on his own terrain, in a house that was really his, where he made the rules. But never in a fake commune, where he felt the obligation to consult those two about calling the plumber, repainting the house blue, or ripping out a hedge! He wasn’t going to try to save the capital gains tax on the apartment. Instead of sinking two million dollars into a house like Martha’s, he would buy a shack in Sag Harbor, among Mary’s former publishing colleagues, give up shaving and visits to the barber, putter around in L. L. Bean togs, and get his summer meals at book party buffets if the invitations to them didn’t dry up! Then if Riker someday decided he could at last afford to procreate, he, Schmidt, would still be able to offer his grandchildren an occasional treat. The great adventure of trying to live out his sunset years was yawning before h
im.
