Schmidt Delivered by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online Page B

tolerated a young lawyer coming into his office without a yellow pad and pencil. Why bother explaining a problem or giving instructions if in the next five minutes what he said would be forgotten or distorted? Or not taking notes during a meeting? Idle hands, idle hands.
    The menu was fish lasagna, followed by a green salad and raspberry mousse. She had a small portion of the lasagna ready on a dessert plate and handed it to him.
    Here, taste. But careful, it’s real hot.
    Carrie, that’s a great dish. If you made it you are a great cook. Where did you get the idea for this?
    It was, in fact, extraordinarily good, with a light taste of nutmeg. Nothing about the way he had seen her grill hamburgers or lamb chops on the kitchen stove—which was all he ever let her prepare, and at that only rarely, suspicious of what she might do to food and preferring the known and reliable quality of his own limited repertoire—had given him a hint that she might be a full-blown chef.
    Surprise, surprise! You want to try the mousse?
    He did. There was a separate portion of that waiting for him as well.
    Fantastic! Why haven’t you been whipping up these dishes for us every evening? How come you know how to make them?
    Mrs. Gorchuck. My mom.
    And she?
    Haven’t I told you, Schmidtie? Until she retired, she was a cook in an Italian restaurant off Atlantic Avenue. Boy, she can make anything.
    But why have you kept your light under a bushel?
    You dodo, I haven’t cooked for you because you’re always there in your apron cooking for me. Plus you do the dishes. It’s a good deal. Why should I mess with it?
    Well, that’s over. The new deal is I stick to washing dishes and you do the rest. We’ll never go to a restaurant again.
    I’ll stick to the deal I have. Schmidtie, you think she’ll like it? Maybe you should tell her the food was catered. If she knows a dumb Puerto Rican waitress cooked it she’ll think it can’t be good. Also she’ll think I’m like all over everything here. She’ll freak out.
    No, Carrie hadn’t learned manners watching old movies. Mrs. Gorchuck had taught them to her, as well as recipes and skills that Brillat-Savarin would have found worthy of note, on her days off from that restaurant located on a street corner somewhere in the mythic Hispanic and black slum, once full of Jews, that stretches to infinity past Brooklyn Heights, the only part of Carrie’s native borough Schmidt had visited, or late in the evenings, after the trip home on the graffiti-covered subway, dead tired though she was from the heat of the stove, her forearms covered by burns all the way to the elbows. Also true modesty and tact of a princess, precious matters of heart, more valuable than deportment, if indeed they could be taught. Or had these been the contribution Mr. Gorchuck, the retired board of education employee, whoseformer functions there were a mystery, had made to his only daughter’s remarkable upbringing? Schmidt had on occasion imagined, during higher flights of his idiosyncratic humor, that Mr. Gorchuck, descended from Muscovite princes and czarist generals, had been guilty of his own misalliance, so that in the veins delicately lining Carrie’s dusky skin the bluest blood of the steppes mixed with the cocktail of Puerto Rico. Less fanciful but appealing was the notion that Carrie might be a foster child, if not a foundling, whose native grace this pair had tenderly allowed to flower. Views as to the relative importance of nurture and genes were shifting anyway; the meaning of nurture was itself in question. Carrie’s case, it seemed to Schmidt, called out loud for scientific study. His personal research had not progressed far. Occasional suggestions, both veiled and explicit, that he should really meet the parents and that he would enjoy going to their house (that is how he put it, from persistent habit of speech, although he realized that home might be a walk-up apartment) or receiving them in his own house—the