About Schmidt - Louis Begley [6]
The problem of the house was not new. Schmidt had perceived its unpleasant outline during the first meeting with Dick Murphy, the trusts and estates lawyer at Wood & King who had drafted Mary’s and his wills when they decided they ought to sign such instruments, amidst the requisite jokes about whether they were of sound and disposing minds. He had stared at it during each subsequent discussion of revisions and codicils occasioned by the rising tide of their fortunes, and changes in the tax law, and when he arranged for them to see Murphy before Mary’s exploratory operation, at a time when the doctors were still hopeful. It came to this: the house wasn’t his and it was too valuable by far. It had belonged to Mary’s maiden aunt Martha, her father’s sister, who had brought up Mary after her mother died of pneumonia in 1947.
Mary had just turned ten. Martha was the only relative, apart from some elderly distant cousins in Arizona, Mary’s father having been killed in knee-high water off Omaha Beach, in the first attempt to land. From the time Schmidt and Mary were married, they had spent their summer vacations with Martha; in due course, Martha became Charlotte’s godmother; it had taken all the powers of persuasion of Martha’s lawyer to keep her from leaving the house to a four-year-old Charlotte. In the event, the house and everything else Martha had went outright to Mary. Everything else consisted of a sum that was small even in 1969 dollars. Martha had been used to living very comfortably, spending her capital; the trust from which she also received income terminated on her death and was distributed to those distant cousins. But by the beginning of the seventies, Schmidt was earning enough to pay for the upkeep of the house. Thus Mary’s cash inheritance grew, and she had been able to put aside a good part of what she earned as an editor distinguished for her sure literary taste in an otherwise brutally commercial publishing house. The convention between her and Schmidt was that she paid for her own clothes and hairdresser, the few lunches or taxis for which she was not reimbursed, gifts (which were sometimes startlingly extravagant), and charities Schmidt didn’t want to support. He took care of the rest. Still, as Murphy said, she had only a little over a million dollars. Martha had brought her up to be old-fashioned about money, which to her meant investing in treasuries and only the highest-rated municipal bonds. On the other hand, given its location, the house was probably worth two million; if she was to leave it and the money to Charlotte, as she intended, the tax would be more than a million, and how was Charlotte to pay it unless she sold the house, which was the opposite of what Mary wanted? The only sensible plan, Murphy pointed out, was to leave the money to Charlotte and the house to Schmidt. In that case, he explained, there would be no tax on the house, as a bequest to a spouse. Later, there would presumably be enough in Schmidt’s estate, when he died and she inherited, to pay the tax. She would be coming into some leftover money as well, enough for the upkeep on a big house. Then Murphy—Schmidt could have strangled that Irish oaf—put to Mary the question he had already raised with Schmidt privately and Schmidt had asked him to stay clear of: Tax planning aside, why shouldn’t her husband own the house he had lived in each summer and on most weekends for more than a quarter of a century and in which he had invested a great deal of his own money? He recited the modern heating system and insulation, the endless roof repairs, and, most recently, the new larger pool and pool house. Couldn’t Charlotte and, in time, her husband and children, use the house the way she and Schmidt had used it while her aunt Martha