About Schmidt - Louis Begley [67]
When the evening falls, he writes to Charlotte. His stay is almost over. Probably, there is no sensible way to mail a letter from the island at this point. He might as well do it at the Manaus airport, on his way home, if he is going to mail it at all.
There is a confession he owes her: The way those years when she was a child and then a big girl sped by, he has trouble constructing a narrative of what happened between him and her. Nothing very bad, of that he is sure. When she was little, and then at Brearley and at Harvard, she was always a model daughter, a source of such pride, and he cannot think of a time when he withheld his approval, any mean act of which he was guilty, or anything even halfway sensible she wanted that he did not try to make sure she would have. But what did they do together that had more substance than the time he put in watching over her at the beach, driving her to all those lessons, or sitting beside her at the movies? The rare visits to a museum in the city? A couple of performances of The Nutcracker? Taking her and her roommates out to dinner in Boston, when he visited her at college with Mary, or during the few trips he had made alone, as a lark, when Mary was away at a sales conference? Had he and Charlotte ever had a real talk, either when she was little or as grown-ups? Was there something he had taught her about life that was worth mentioning? Incorrigible, he adds he isn’t sure he knows such things. Perhaps that is why he has so little to say to her now, except how much he loves her and, of course, when they fight. Had Mary done better, and if so, how had she managed it? If she did, it was some quality she possessed and he, Schmidt, lacks. Would Mary have felt she had more in common with her daughter?
There is a violent downpour in the afternoon. No nature trip. He hasn’t uttered a word all day, except obrigado, to thank the servants. Having reread what he wrote, he tears it up and says, out loud, Even if this stuff is true it’s no excuse for the way she behaves. Good manners are the one thing she might have learned from me.
X
HE HAD SENT under the cover of envelopes, because the only address where he knew he could reach her was O’Henry’s, postcards of the restored opera house in Manaus, Indians spearfishing from canoes and lounging in their hammocks, and birds of the Amazon. Before leaving, he had deposited her Christmas present with the bartender: bright red leather gloves lined with wool. Therefore, her being so utterly business-like the evening of his return, Schmidt having rushed to the restaurant for dinner, really just in order to see her, as he acknowledged to himself—she greeted him and took his order without a word about the four-week absence, the gloves, or his having written—surprised Schmidt. He had expected connivance, a sign that would distinguish him, but there was nothing, not even one of her languid smiles. It would have been easy, so it seemed to him, to make a teasing remark about his strange tan; his one serious session in the sun made him turn the color of copper, with just a touch of verdigris. But as he chewed his way through the dinner, it seemed to him that she was paying