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By Root 262 0

stood in the way of any Jew. But now he was discovering that what didn’t count at W & K (which had certainly filled up with Jews since the day he had himself gone to work there) and what could even furnish him at times some eyebrow-raising sort of amusement, as it had when Jews, beginning in the seventies, had begun to move into his Fifth Avenue apartment building, or joined one of his clubs, did count heavily when it came to his family, or what was left of it! This marriage would turn Charlotte, his one remaining link with life, into a link with a world that wasn’t his—the psychiatrist parents he had so far escaped meeting, grandparents on the mother’s side whom Jon occasionally mentioned, possibly uncles, aunts, and cousins he hadn’t yet heard about. What might they be like? That contact with them would be unpleasant, that it would put a strain on his quiet good manners and composure, he was quite sure. Before long, they would cover Charlotte like ooze from the sea; they would absorb her and leave him out; never again would he be alone with her on his own ground; the pool-house kitchen and its hostile threshold were the microcosm of his future.

He tried the cellar door cover. It opened, which meant that he had forgotten to check it after Bogard and his men had finished raking. Perhaps now that Bogard had proved himself he should be allowed to lock the cellar from the inside and then leave through the house. Might as well give him the keys too; Schmidt couldn’t be sure of always being there to open the door. When he entered the cellar, his mood lightened. The place was impeccable; the effort he had put into arranging it had not been wasted. The dehumidifier humming beside the shelves on which he stored the reserve of cleaning supplies and canned goods did such a good job, drawing the moisture even from the crawl space, that as an experiment he had moved the paperbacks from Fifth Avenue to a new set of shelves he had the handyman build on the opposite wall. Their pages hadn’t curled, which was more than could be said for the books and magazines in the house; perhaps he could put in the cellar as well the art books and those of Mary’s accumulated hardcover volumes he didn’t need to have at hand. The temperature was about as low as it would get, and that was good news for the wine, also moved from the city, where he had been forced to keep it in a warehouse because the basement in the Fifth Avenue building was so stiflingly hot, to the cellar’s windowless continuation under the new part of the house. In the summer the coolness of that space was delicious, reminding him of the way movie theaters had felt during New York summers before window air conditioners had become customary in apartments. He sat down in the rocking chair near the workbench and shifted his weight. Not a squeak; it was a solid piece—his father’s, as was the oval woven-ribbon rug that the old man had had in his bathroom. The tools were in near-perfect order; the seniors among them, hammers, pliers that might have belonged to an old-time dentist, and little saws, also came from his father’s house on Grove Street. What a contrast between the cellar of that artisan’s federal Greenwich Village house and this! There had been no way to keep the damp out of it, or, for that matter, visiting rats, although Pasha the cat had worked hard.

He found the box of small cigars on the workbench, lit one, and threw the match into the wastebasket, a habit of which Mary had been unable to break him. Next time he came down, he would bring an ashtray, by way of remembrance and apology. And then the thought he had not allowed to form while he was touring the garden was complete, impossible to set aside for some later hour when he would have a drink in his hand and music in which he could lose himself on the turntable. Clearly, he would have to leave this house: the only trick was how to do it without Charlotte’s knowing it was because of Jon, or, if that realization could not be avoided, to do it in such a manner that she would take it as a good development for her father, a