by Louis Begley
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?
Let me out, he told the man. I can’t wait. I’ve got to go to the can this very minute.
That’s better. Now let’s try saying please.
Please.
The man stood up in the aisle. As Schmidt squeezed past him, the man caught him in a long embrace and kissed him near the ear. Yeah, I like you when you’re polite, just like my brother, he whispered.
In the chemical toilet Schmidt washed his hands and face. As he made his way back toward the front of the bus, he saw that the man’s eyes were closed. The driver was a big black, listening to a West Indian talk show on a radio stuck in his shirt pocket. The row immediately behind him was empty, and that’s where Schmidt sat down. The Warden was somewhere on the ground near his previous seat. He wasn’t going back there to search for a pocket book. When the bus stopped in Southampton, he dashed out, found his car in the jitney parking lot, and locked himself in. Only then did he look back. The man may have stayed aboard. He was nowhere in sight. Schmidt waited for his heart to stop pounding, started the motor, and pulled out of the parking lot onto the highway. Then, in the beam of his headlights, he saw the man energetically walking east on the side of the road, swinging his cane and nodding his head with great satisfaction.
V
ALL NEXT MORNING, Schmidt waited for Charlotte to call him. Surely she would want to tell him she was glad the first encounter with the Rikers had gone well. Would she say, I was proud of you, Dad, you looked so nice in that old suit? Then he would mention the conversation with Renata about a weekend visit when the Rikers might see the house. Schmidt had contempt for people who find it easy to say, left and right, come to dinner soon, you must visit us at the beach, let’s see a movie together, and then let the subject drop. He had invited Renata. That had created a piece of unfinished business to which he would attend promptly, for instance when he wrote or telephoned to thank her for the holiday lunch. His normal preference was for writing, typically on one of the postcards he collected for the day he might want to make a sly allusion to this or that event, but a telephone call appeared more friendly. It was his intention to be friendly toward that woman; he had been thinking about her. He assumed that Charlotte’s office was closed on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but she might have gone to work anyway, like young lawyers at W & K. He imagined her for a moment in her sweat suit and running shoes, carrying her papers, yogurt, and banana in the neat little backpack that seemed to accompany her everywhere. But, in any event, she and Jon would have slept later than usual. It wasn’t reasonable to expect that she would call before eleven. On the other hand, could she be waiting to hear from him, thinking he might want to say how pleasant the lunch had been? That would be a good thing to do, like stroking her hair or cheek, like his efforts to succeed with the Rikers. At a quarter past the hour, he dialed her direct line at the office. Six disconsolate rings, and he was switched to a recording: Rhinebeck Associates was closed; press 1 and dial the appropriate extension or the first four letters of the name of the person you are trying to reach and leave a voice mail message. No, he wouldn’t record a cheerful fatherly statement that Charlotte might or might not listen to before Monday. Instead, he tried her number at home. Jon’s voice, speaking very slowly, told him he could speak as long as he liked. What the hell; turning red in the face, Schmidt informed them that he had teleph
oned. They had gone out! A more pleasant explanation occurred to him. Charlotte and Jon were still asleep; that could be why the message had come on right away.
He found the senior Rikers’ number in the directory. It would have been the last straw if they had been unlisted. A voice he didn’t recognize, the secretary’s, he supposed—why would psychoanalysts have a nurse?—instructed him to state his name and telephone number. Dr. Myron Riker or Dr. Renata Riker would be in touch, as soon as they could. All right, he liked that formula. Albert Schmidt, calling to say what a wonderful time he had at Thanksgiving lunch. He would call again or write unless Dr. Riker or Dr. Riker called him first. It had been a dumb move destined to fail: In all of Manhattan, was there one shrink who answered the telephone? There had to be another number, real and unlisted, that rang elsewhere in the apartment.
Noon. A small, rapid rain had begun to fall. Why not break the rule against daytime drinking? Nobody would know or care. He poured himself a bourbon as big as the Ritz, added ice cubes, took the receiver off the kitchen phone, found a volume of Anaïs Nin he read on such occasions, and, glass and book in hand, went to bed.
VI
SCHMIDT’S FATHER had not shown much concern about his only son’s upbringing or education. Had anyone asked him the reason, it was a toss-up whether he would have answered that he was far too busy or that it seemed to him the boy was doing just fine. He did, however, as soon as Schmidt had learned to write, order him to keep a journal.
A man is responsible for what he does with his time, he said. Unless you get it down, it will be lost. Each day, make a record of what you did, and how long it took you.
Many years later, thinking about those words when his father was already dead, Schmidt came to the conclusion that, at least subconsciously, the old man must have meant something like time sheets, the attendance to which is a daily chore of every practicing lawyer who expects to be paid for his work. Thus, transposing, to take into account that you are a schoolboy, you enter: Meals, one hour and five minutes; cleansing of your person, seven minutes; attending school (transportation included), approximately eight hours, etc. Certainly, there was no diary or journal among the papers Schmidt and the executor of the estate reviewed. The record of the father’s deeds was in his firm’s ledger books and in the bills sent to clients. For professional services and advice rendered in connection with the arrest and mortgage sale in Panama City of The Iphigenia, and similar adventures.
As long as Schmidt had lived at home, until he went to college, the current volume of his diary, always a spiral school notebook with beige cardboard covers, his father having neglected to offer, even at the outset, a more enticing object, reposed in the bottom drawer of his dresser, in plain view, to the right of his underpants. The notebooks he had already filled were stacked on a shelf in the closet. He expected his diary to be read. In any case, there would have been no point in trying to hide it. His mother had a flair for uncovering evidence of sinful activity and regularly searched his possessions. She had no shame about it. Therefore, during those years, Schmidt’s daily entries were exercises in hypocrisy or style, the former written to appease his mother by the flaunting of pious sentiments and appeals to her vanity, the latter intended to enable him to answer yes when the old man asked, out of the blue, at dinner, whether the son’s records were up-to-date, consisting of laconic but precise and increasingly polished descriptions of what a model boy in Schmidt’s circumstances might be expected to accomplish or see during the particular day. Had he been obliged to lie, had a respectable number of pages not been scribbled on, his mother would have contradicted him. It would not have occurred to the father to inquire how she knew, or to Schmidt that he might protest against the spying.
Soon after his mother died, Schmidt got rid of those notebooks of humiliation. They filled several big shopping bags that he placed in a neighbor’s trash can on the sidewalk of Grove Street. Along with them, he threw out a smaller bag into which he had stuffed photographs of himself as child and adolescent, framed ones that she had kept in her bedroom and others taken from her albums and boxes of odds and ends; letters he had written to her from camp; and the birthday and Christmas poems over the composition of which he had labored, each dedicated “To my darling mother with love,” and copied, before presentation, with a calligrapher’s pen, on sheets of cream-colored paper that was supposed to look like parchment.
In the second semester of his freshman year, at the insistence of Gil Blackman, who was taking, by special dispensation, a course on symbolist poets normally closed to undergraduates, Schmidt read Baudelaire’s Mon coeur mis à nu and a volume of excerpts from Kafka’s diaries and returned to writing in his own diary with something like gratitude to his father for the habit he had been forced to acquire. Schmidt was intelligent enough to know he would never write anything like those texts, but they showed him that a journal could be a way of trying out certain thoughts, perhaps even getting at his own truth. With years, the need to confess became less strong. He worked at his diary sporadically, in the main to set the record straight—not quite the record his father had had in mind—or at least to give his side of the story.
Alone in the house after Mary died, he found that keeping a diary was also a pleasant pastime that cost nothing, a more dignified way of breaking the oppressive silence that surrounded him than talking to himself. He became quite diligent. And, to the extent that any of us understand the forces by which we are buffeted, what he wrote down at that time was far from inaccurate.
Sunday, 12/1/91
When I woke up from my nap yesterday, it was already dark. I took a bath. Then, very wide awake, I went down to the kitchen, and made a cup of tea. That’s when I saw that the telephone was still off the hook. Had she called, had anyone called? I hung up. Suddenly, it rang. Charlotte, of course, her voice like a little girl’s, the voice she uses with me when she wants to be especially nice. She says all the things I might have expected about the lunch and avoids being triumphant about the Riker apartment, the good taste, how cultivated they are, etc. I ask about issuing the invitation for a weekend in the country. She holds a quick consultation, hand over the receiver, with Jon and tells me that’s perfect. I should invite them. Please avoid the weekend before Christmas: she and Jon have things they must do in the city. That makes Charlotte think of Christmas itself. Of course, they will have to spend it with the Rikers, it’s very important to the family. I contain myself and don’t say how droll that they should care, and so forth, or that, in the order of importance given to that holiday, my Christmas might rank ahead of theirs. On the contrary, the noises I make are noncommittal but pleasant. Instantly, Charlotte says that Jon wants to speak to me. All right.
Schmidtie, will you spend Christmas with us? We have it in Washington, with the grandparents, except that I haven’t been since I met Charlotte. They really want you.
I tell him the truth: it’s more than I can do. (Not the whole truth, because I don’t add: even if I wanted to.) I can’t imagine traveling to celebrate Christmas without Mary, not to a large family gathering, not this year. And I ask him not to worry about me, I won’t lock myself in my room to brood. Possibly, I will go abroad—to someplace without Christmas. This idea just popped into my head. It has merit, if I can think of where to go.
Charlotte again. They have picked a date—the first Saturday in June. A June wedding. Will that be all right? Once again, I weep. She notices right away. I say she mustn’t pay attention, I can’t help being sentimental. It will be a beautiful, romantic wedding with the garden at its very best. A sea of fresh bloom. Probably it’s not a moment too early to reserve the caterer and everything else that goes with it.
This is just as good a moment as any to speak about the house. My heart is in the right place, no trace of resentment, so why not get it over with? She hears me out, without interrupting, and says, Why is this necessary? I mean it’s a very generous present, but from my point of view it won’t change anything for the better, why can’
t we remain just as we are?
She is a smart girl. I say the house is too big for me (not true, I like big houses) and it depresses me (true enough, but what house wouldn’t?).
Another whispered, muffled conference between Charlotte and Jon. She says they will call back.
I make another cup of tea. This time, I put rum in it.
The next conversation begins with Jon. He wants to know the financial implications. I tell him they are simple: Charlotte will own the house and almost everything that’s in it now, but once I move out they will have to pay the taxes and upkeep. He wonders if they can afford it—especially as they plan to buy an apartment in the city. I say that’s a fair question, and they should think it through and tell me. Just in case he doesn’t understand the gift and estate tax aspects and, therefore, doesn’t realize how generous this wedding present will be, I explain them to him. He too is smart. By the time you have finished, he asks me, won’t we all be worse off? We don’t need a country house of our own. Forget about the life estate, it’s just a technicality. We’ll come and go just as we do now. In time we’ll help with the expenses.
I tell him they are both terrific. He must let me know about their cash flow. And I say to myself I must really try to figure out how necessary it is for me to go through with this.
That’s done. Of course, I won’t put on them a burden that’s too heavy, but I wonder whether my plan, although born from self-destructive and spiteful feelings, is not, in fact, the best for all of us. With me as the resident janitor/owner/father/censor—or in whatever other order one lists those roles—will they, will I, have a good time? Mary would have made it all right: she and I would have had our life to lead so that I could let Charlotte and Jon lead theirs without it being such an effort for everybody. Which is the real sacrifice, to leave or to stay?
