About Schmidt (3 page)

There were at least three reasons why Schmidt hadn’t wanted Mary to be backed into that 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 him.

He went up the cellar steps and entered the kitchen. Now Riker was at the table, a plate of unfinished poached eggs before him. Steel-rimmed, slightly tinted glasses on his nose, attaché case at his feet, he stopped correcting a thick draft.

Charlotte’s in the shower. Has she told you? She thought I should speak to you first, but I knew you would want it to be her. I hope you approve my making her an honest woman!

He stood up and held out his hand, which Schmidt shook. The long fingers that explored Charlotte were hairy between the first and second joints. Where does the ring go, on the
right or left hand? No doubt, Jon would wear a ring. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that this large, very handsome young man’s hairline wasn’t what it used to be. Probably he worried about it; a small pocket mirror might be lurking in one of the pockets of that attaché case.

Nicely put! Thanks for the old-fashioned sentiment. Congratulations!

You are the first to know, Al. I haven’t even told my parents.

Schmidt disliked being called Al, slightly preferring Albert, which was his given name and, therefore, couldn’t be helped. He wondered why Riker wasn’t handling him better. A tiff with Charlotte over breakfast, while the paternal heart was breaking in the cellar? Getting even, because of the bizarre flashback to the days when, as a young associate, he had been afraid of Schmidt? Second thoughts?

Then pick up the telephone. It’s past ten. And don’t use your credit card.

Thanks, Al. I’ll do it from the room. That way I’ll catch Charlotte before she comes downstairs and will get her to speak to them too.

Do that. Since when do you call me Al?

Just testing. I want to see how much a son-in-law can get away with. Don’t be such a sourpuss!

Schmidt took the breakfast dishes off the table, scraped the egg yolk from Riker’s plate, and rinsed them. He genuinely liked cleaning up after meals. From the start, in the early division of chores between him and Mary—it was important to her that Schmidt share equally in the housework and looking after Charlotte—he had asked that doing dishes
be included in his assignment. The activity soothed him, as did washing off the kitchen floor and counters and sweeping anyplace at all. They were simple, uncontroversial tasks, in which it was possible, provided there was enough time, to achieve, when one stood back squinting at the clean surfaces, a feeling of perfection, an illusion that order had been reestablished. He referred to them as his occupational therapy.

Of course, during the week there had never been much housework or looking after young Charlotte of the sort that weighed down many of their friends. They had had a cleaning woman from the time they got married, every weekday, since Mary was working at her first junior editorial job and brought manuscripts home, and he kept the usual New York lawyer’s late office hours. When Charlotte arrived so did a nurse, a grim but very gentle fat Texan lady once married to an air force warrant officer, who stayed with them until Charlotte went into the second grade at Brearley—the only southern nanny known to Schmidt who was certifiably white—and a succession of housekeepers, periodically upgraded to keep up with Schmidt’s income. Neither the housekeepers nor the nurse worked on weekends, and the housekeepers prepared dinner but didn’t serve it, Mary and Schmidt ate so late. The result was that Schmidt’s dishwashing was the principal domestic task performed during the week, Mary being in charge of putting away leftovers, mustard, and chutney when they ate curry. She did that well; Schmidt had always been a dismal failure at filing, and organizing little dishes covered with aluminum foil reminded him of that. Weekends were more complex. They went to the
country unless there was a party or a concert they really couldn’t miss. If Schmidt had to work in the office on Saturday or Sunday, which happened dismayingly often until he no longer felt he was a young partner and began to have papers brought out to him by messenger, Mary would take Charlotte alone, with the baby-sitter. There was a succession of those, as well: Hunter College students working for lodging and pocket money and later, when they decided Charlotte should learn French, au pairs. Corinne had been one of them.

If he was stuck working on a Saturday morning, he would try to catch an afternoon train and join them, and, when it was too late for that, he would go out sometimes early on Sunday to get in a set of tennis or a long walk on the beach, and help Mary with the drive to the city. While Martha was alive, work-sharing rules did not apply in her house. She thought Charlotte should be in women’s hands—her own, Mary’s, and the baby-sitter’s—unless the child was going to the beach or to her pony lesson, or to the afternoon movie show in East Hampton, each of which was a proper occasion for a father to appear. And there wasn’t any question of sticking one’s nose into the kitchen and doing the work of Martha’s cook and the cook’s assistant, each as adamantly Irish as their cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking employer.

Mary and Schmidt kept the cook until her retirement; it was unthinkable that she be let go. Would she return from Florida to look after Schmidt, now that he had been put out to pasture? The question had teased him. Afterward, they kept the house going as best they could, with the help of a squadron of Polish women who arrived once a week in battered Chevys, Diet Cokes in hand, hair in curlers, their outsize
rear ends and bosoms restrained by resort wear in which lime, shocking pink, and orange predominated—women who whizzed through the place and departed three hours later planting moist kisses on Mary, Charlotte, and even Schmidt.

It astonished him, how he had come to believe in the absolute necessity of Charlotte’s being taken to the country each weekend, and to feel uneasy himself, at loose ends, uncomfortable with city smells and the Sunday look of streets, if he happened not to go away. And yet, this was a habit acquired only upon marriage. Schmidt’s parents had not owned a place in the country. Unless one counted attendance at law school reunions and out-of-town Bar Association meetings as vacations, his parents took none. They didn’t agree with Schmidt’s father, and his mother didn’t like the expense. Saturdays and Sundays were spent in the city; Schmidt learned about grass and trees in Central Park and about swimming in a large reedy pond to which an establishment upstate called Camp Round Lake had a right-of-way. He had been a camper there from the age of eight, and later, until his second year at Harvard College, a counselor.