About Schmidt - Louis Begley [88]
I don’t understand. Are you saying that the aggression consisted of telling me the truth or of telling me a lie? Did she make up what she told me?
Not entirely. She knows you turned on Jon because he is Jewish.
Suddenly Schmidt felt very tired. Sleep, he needed to sleep, if only for a few minutes.
He wanted to say, I didn’t exactly turn on him, and, I wasn’t unhappy only because he is a Jew, but what was the use of splitting hairs?
Renata, I am sorry that I didn’t respond more gracefully.
The first time we met I told you that you were under very great stress. It had to affect your behavior. But I can tell you do have strong anti-Semitic feelings. Perhaps you should examine them. Jews aren’t that bad. On the average they aren’t worse than other people.
They are different.
Don’t let that frighten you.
Before she got into the taxi he had hailed for her at the corner of the street, she gave him her cheek to kiss and said, Oh Schmidtie, I had hoped we would be such good friends. Is that still possible? Don’t answer now, when you are angry.
He returned to the club before going to the garage and went to the toilet. Face slightly flushed, otherwise recognizable. He washed with cold water and rinsed his mouth with Listerine. The cigars were waiting on the bench in the hall. Julio could be counted on; he was a real friend; Gil Blackman was another. Smart and cynical and he’d known Gil forever. He asked Julio to connect him with Gil’s office. An English voice, like Wendy Hiller’s in I Know Where I’m Going, informed him that Mr. and Mrs. Blackman were at their home in Long Island. Oh ho! Could she connect him there?
You’ve returned from paradise, you old rascal, called out the robust maestro. When am I going to see you?
I was hoping to come to your office right now. I’m in the city. But as you’re out there, I’ll drive back this afternoon.
Then have dinner with me. What a relief! The mummy’s here on a visit. Elaine and she will be able to eat together on trays in front of the TV A girls’ night in! Ha! Ha! Around seven-thirty at O’Henry’s? Yes, the earlier the better! I can’t wait to get away. Ciao!
The mummy was Elaine’s mother. According to Gil, she was still unreconciled to the misalliance between her own daughter, the lineal descendant of the world’s foremost manufacturers of work clothes, and an interloper whose grandfather had been born in Odessa. The insult had penetrated deep under the skin that surgery had made as impervious to the passage of time as the limestone facade of her mansion on Pacific Heights. Would her problem respond to treatment by Dr. Renata? Schmidt feared it might be too late.
The Saab on cruise control, resolutely in the far left lane of the expressway, snaking past slower traffic, Schmidt reviewed what had been demanded and offered. Purchase of Charlotte’s remainder in the house? One and a half million, he figured. That was a lot of cash, but he would manage it. He might, in fact, take Dr. Renata’s advice: sell the house and move into a place that wasn’t like a hemorrhage of hundred-dollar bills. If not right away, then sometime later. “Dust inbreathed was a house—the wall, the wainscot and the mouse.” He wouldn’t be selling the Schmidts’ ancestral homestead. Someone must have sold that long ago. This house was nothing except his life with Mary, which was over, and memories of Charlotte’s childhood, which was over too. Charlotte was going against Mary’s wishes, not he. There was no need for him to play the martyr. If he didn’t sell the house, those two would do it as soon as he died and the estate was settled.
Carrie winked at him. When he had left the house in the morning, she was still a shape under the covers like a very large cat. If she weren’t in her waitress clothes, she would have on the same pink flannel shirt with a red-and-blue flower pattern she wore last night, when she appeared in the bedroom so soundlessly that he kept on reading until he heard her speak: Who’s come here to play with Schmidtie? He looked up—a Halloween