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By Root 340 0

that remained to be done. Schmidt’s clients were loyal and grateful, but they had been sending him less and less work and, red-faced, sometimes had bargained over fees. No one denied that his work was faultless, but, except in the most unusual and progressively rarer cases, were the higher quality, and the margin of added safety it brought, worth the price? Schmidt’s watchful partners were taking note. He was a proud man. If certain dealings with Jack DeForrest had not miscarried, if it hadn’t been for Mary, if shoring up his position at Wood & King had seemed a matter of life or death—it couldn’t have, given what Schmidt was learning about dying—he might have had another go at the Himalayas. But he also knew that the qualities that had made clients seek him out were going out of style, just like the transactions on which he had honed them: legal and textual analysis rigorously applied to each sentence another lawyer had written until all mistakes and ambiguities had been caught and corrected, eerie precision of draftsmanship capable of shrinking arcane provisions to one-third of what they would be in anyone else’s document and making them inescapably comprehensible, and total fidelity to the fuddy-duddy institutions he served. Schmidt had not had to cajole or threaten to win in negotiations: it had sufficed that he was always demonstrably and impeccably right. Thus, he had been moved, beyond anything he had ever experienced in his career, when, at a dinner at the “21” Club celebrating the completion of one of his transactions, the legal department of the insurance company that was his client presented him with a plaque showing a knight-at-arms, with his name at the top and underneath it the words “Dieu et mon droit.” A tribute, the general counsel explained, to the power of Schmidtie’s right reason and, he added laughing, his crushing rectitude.

No, he must not quarrel with Riker. His deepest need was to be at peace with his daughter, to maintain a state of wordless complicity with her, like those rare moments of surrender when the surf that rakes the Atlantic beach is transformed into tiny, glittering ripples, and one can float on one’s back, eyes open to the late-September sky. Instead he had been churlish with the boy, Charlotte surely thought he had, and on the day she had told him they would be married! It didn’t matter that the vulgar boy had provoked him. Coming from himself, ill temper was unforgettable, if not unforgivable. If he didn’t manage, for reasons that couldn’t be stated without aggravating the case, to return to treating Riker as he used to in the office, indeed at the breakfast and dinner table under his own roof during all those years when, after all, he was sleeping with Charlotte, if he behaved as though Mary and he hadn’t imagined and accepted the conventionally desirable result, he would force her to take Riker’s side against him, to behave, quite properly, as though the insult had been directed at her. This was the kind of misery that Mary could have cured, even as she could unravel desperately tangled kite strings and make things all right between him and Charlotte, now talking to one and now to the other, keeping their confidences, until at last, hours or many days later, one of them was coaxed into saying the obvious, necessary words that meant nothing but brought them back into sunlight.

And a quarrel with DeForrest and the management committee over the pension plan? He could imagine how Riker might explain the two sides of the argument to Charlotte. Charlotte didn’t doubt that he had more than enough money. How could it be otherwise? Money had not been a subject Mary and he discussed in Charlotte’s presence—they hardly ever talked about it even when they were alone. His mother’s squalid nagging about money had been the constant background noise while he lived with his parents; he didn’t want to be reminded of it in the life he had made for himself. To be sure, he had occasionally informed Charlotte that he wasn’t rich, in a tone, he realized, about as convincing as that of his ritual injunctions