About Schmidt - Louis Begley [84]
And it had to be a lie. He could not think of a single act in his career at Wood & King on which such an assertion could be based. Certainly not on his treatment of associates who had worked for him or of the other Jews in the firm, partners or associates, or on his role in recruiting lawyers. On the contrary, he had used his prestige as an alumnus who had been an officer of the Harvard Law Review to cajole a large number of its Jewish members into coming to work at the firm. Some of them were Semitic types straight out of a Nazi propaganda cartoon, including his favorite, the best associate he had ever worked with, who eventually left W & K for a professorship at Harvard. That one used to wear a yarmulke to the office! Then what could it be? Not anything he had said. He had never told jokes about Jews—in fact, he didn’t tell jokes of any kind, because the few times he had tried no one had laughed.
The stuff about clients was hogwash, too. Poor Charlotte should know better but probably didn’t; no one seemed to have a historical perspective. At the time when his relationships with insurance companies and other great American financial institutions that directed business to W & K were cemented, there were in their management all told maybe five Jews who made decisions about investments and hiring law firms, and certainly no Jews in yarmulkes, or blacks, or Puerto Ricans, or women, or, so far as he knew, homosexuals. These people were white male Protestants—usually with the same background as his own. He didn’t especially like them for that. Too many were tedious, slow-witted boors, but one took one’s clients as one found them, and said thank you!
And friends! They had had Jewish friends. Of course, they had met most of them through Mary. He had done his best with them, and it was they, along with everybody else out of Mary’s world, who dropped him when she died, not the other way around. The same was true of the homosexuals who used to come so regularly to lunch and dinner. Mary got to know them, because homosexuals work in publishing houses and write. But Dad, are you telling me that blacks and Puerto Ricans don’t write? No, Charlotte dear, of course they do. But in publishing they aren’t easy to find; it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And your mom hadn’t had the good fortune to publish Wright, Baldwin, or Morrison, who might not have wanted to be friends with Mr. and Mrs. Albert Schmidt even if she had! He used to think he had Jewish friends of his own too, at his firm. If Mr. Riker or whoever else was telling tales about him was to be believed, that had been an illusion. It follows that you’ve got it right, Charlotte: there is no one left who counts, no one except the unmentionable Gil Blackman!
Righteously indignant, Schmidt nevertheless continued the examination of his conscience. Do you like Jews, or blacks, or Puerto Ricans, or homosexuals? En bloc, no. Were you pleased to hear that Charlotte was going to marry that upstanding, bright, and very successful Jewish boy? No, I wasn’t. And was it because he is a Jew? Not exclusively. But you would have swallowed hard and cheered up pretty quickly if he had been a nerd with a name—unchanged and unanglicized—like Mr. Jonathan White? Most probably. And it wouldn’t have been quite such an adventure to visit Mr. White’s doctor parents in their Manhattan apartment at Thanksgiving? Not really. Thank you, Mr. Schmidt. One more question: Would you prefer it if Carrie weren’t a lower-class, Puerto Rican waitress? I love her skin and her kinky hair. I am afraid you haven’t answered the question. In her case, the devil take the rest.
His mood darkened.
Have you the right, Mr. Schmidt, to withhold your affection from your daughter’s fiancé because he is a Jew—yes, I know, you don’t need to repeat it, principally for that reason? Yes, every right. Who has the right to pry into my emotions? I don’t sit in judgment on the feelings of Dr. & Dr. Riker or those adorable grandparents. It’s enough for me if they behave