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By Root 271 0

alone and with him, that cluttered up the top of the double chest of drawers to the left of the bed are gone. They are on a shelf in the closet, easy to reach when he wants to look at them. That’s his form of modesty. The pain Mary suffered in this bed during the last weeks: Was it a form of retribution? Schmidt can’t think what grave sins she had committed to deserve it. The past is both distant and recent, and yet they all seem venial: small lies, short-lived fits of anger, perhaps pride. But it was a Miss Porter’s and Smith College alumna kind of pride, a quality girls used to be praised for. They were to have self-respect and remember who they were and how much they had to be grateful for. Mary certainly did. As for his own case, the scourge of Charlotte’s unnatural dislike, icy loneliness, the trap of Bryan and of the man, which condemns him to live in desire and without hope? If it is retribution meted out ahead of time, it must be for Corinne, confirming that there is symmetry in the Almighty’s arrangements. Of course, it was unthinkable that someone was actually bothering to balance separately billions of individual accounts. The job had become too big for the just gods who “of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.” The final solution was global: endless torment, distributed randomly, but with no one left out. It was enough to remember that all lives end badly.

One simplifies these things, especially for children. He remembers how, when Charlotte was eight, Mary and he played their LPs of Don Giovanni for her over and over and explained the plot before taking her to see it performed at the Metropolitan Opera. When they got home from the matinee, he asked her what she had liked the best. It’s when the statue comes to dinner and walks like this: ta ta ta ta, she told him, and kept on repeating, ta ta ta ta. He was delighted with her answer, and told her she had gotten it exactly right. First, Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore. Then he taunts the dead man by inviting his marble statue to dinner. Then, on top of it, he has the bad manners to forget the invitation he has issued, sits down to dinner, without waiting for his guest, and starts gorging himself. Here Schmidt gave his off-key rendition of Ah, che piatto saporito and Ah, che barbaro appetito! No wonder the man of stone walks into the banquet room angry ta ta ta ta and pulls the Seducer down into hell!

When retribution is so neatly personalized, Schmidt thinks he can understand it, perhaps even, à la rigueur, for a moment believe in the system. According to the librettist, and Tirso de Molina before him, Don Giovanni could have escaped. If he had not mocked Elvira, if he had obeyed the ghost of the Commendatore, if only he had repented! How is he, Schmidt, going to be saved? By letting go of Carrie? Sei pazzo! Not for all the tea in China! It should be possible, for a sum of money that he could afford, to buy off Bryan. And if the man reappears, he can have him arrested and put away for a good long time in a booby hatch, enough time so that, if he is let out again, it won’t matter. For instance, in Wingdale, if that place is still in business: he would call his old friend, the governor’s secretary, and ask him to speak to the right people. That fellow is obviously a dangerous public nuisance. But Bryan might not stay “bought.” He might pocket the money and laugh at him. When in the past he counseled clients against paying bribes and thought that arguments derived from moral principles or the likelihood of getting caught weren’t working, he usually concentrated on the ghastly inefficiency of such methods. You couldn’t be sure whether it was necessary to pay—the government official might do what the client wanted anyway, without the money—and if he took the money and did nothing, you had no recourse. He might now for once listen to the voice of his own wisdom. On the other hand, Wingdale has a chance of working.

But then he realizes that, even if effective, neither solution is acceptable. Carrie might find out what he has done: he can’t take