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By Root 294 0

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