About Schmidt - Louis Begley [36]
The problem’s beautiful complexity procured for Schmidt a moment of elation and hastened his progress toward the Harvard Club, a temple of gregariousness located but a few blocks from where the bus had deposited him. Memories of bulletins received in the past, touting the holiday menu, made him confident it was open, the membership apparently exempt from the scourge of false pride. He was no longer a member there, hadn’t been for years, but that was no reason why he shouldn’t, for old times’ sake, visit the men’s room, and perhaps even enjoy a short snooze in the library. The hall porter was new to Schmidt or had undergone a face-lift. He shook the man’s hand and walked on to the great hall. Where once the only sound had been that of dice rattled in leather cups or of a bell furiously summoning a waiter to bring another martini to a grim-faced player bent over the backgammon board, gamboling little girls in pastel tights and their doting relations were in full cry. Like a blind man without a cane, Schmidt made his way through the Howard Johnson merrymaking to the beery smell of the urinals, the soap, and the cheap black combs in jars of disinfectant, one of which he washed and dried and then passed through his hair. Ten thousand hungover men of Harvard had peered at themselves in this full-length mirror. It was not one that flattered: he looked worse than even the sour person wearing his own clothes he had glimpsed returning his own stare from a Fifth Avenue store window. The way his recent loss of weight had shrunk his cheeks, and the set of his lips, closed from habit over uneven, discolored, cigar smoker’s teeth, and promising nothing, seemed especially regrettable. He practiced lifting their corners. The two-hour bus ride had introduced a disorder in his dress. He opened his belt, unbuttoned the fly, shook his trousers and smoothed his shirttails, rebut-toned and rebelted himself, and centered his necktie. The tweed suit had been his father’s. It never wrinkled. His brogues gleamed.
There’s enough fancy stuff on me to lodge and feed a homeless family for a month, thought Schmidt. Let’s leave this place and get the show on the road to the Rikers’!
He had guessed wrong. The building on East 57th Street where they lived wasn’t some tawdry white-brick job bustling with tenants in sweat clothes. An old Irish fellow at the entrance pointed to the end of the dimly lit lobby, from where his twin, after a series of false starts, conveyed Schmidt to the top floor. Walk straight in, he said. In fact, the elevator door opened directly on the apartment’s rectangular foyer, which had white walls. On them, lit by ceiling spots, hung prints of cavernous buildings. Although the Irish twin, shifting from foot to foot, seemed determined not to leave until he had made sure that this was a guest, who would move on toward the noise of the party after blowing his nose, and not a respectable-looking burglar, Schmidt paused to examine the Rikers’ art. It could serve as an instant and neutral subject of conversation. If only he had had a drink; why hadn’t he ordered one at the club and signed on the chit a name of convenience—for instance Jack DeForrest’s?
He was interrupted by the clatter of the elevator grill being dragged shut at last and the deep voice of a woman.
Do you like these? They are Piranesi’s views of prisons. Some people find them hard to take.
They are fascinating. I am Albert Schmidt.
You had to be. Everyone else is here. And I am Renata, Jon’s mother.
She saw that he was going to look at his watch and added, You are perfectly on time. I asked the others to come early, so that you would see us all at once, as in a photograph.
She was a large, erect woman dressed in a maroon skirt and a black-and-beige, rough-textured garment, which Schmidt supposed—because her jewelry was silver stuff with blue stones—must be an Indian poncho, worn over a long-sleeved white shirt. Her graying black hair was caught in a bun at the back of the head. Schmidt