Schmidt Steps Back by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online Page A

see him.
    It had in fact been old Dexter Wood himself, the firm’s autocrat since the death of the firm’s other founder, who recruited Tim. As he reminded the assembled partners at more than one firm lunch, the young man was a paragon, and it had been a coup to bring him in with the discreet help of his old friend Justice John Harlan, with whom he had played tennis and practiced law in the years gone by and for whom Tim was clerking. Quite a vote of confidence in the firm, he would intone, from the justice and from Verplanck. No disagreement was expressed. Manifestly, Tim had it all, every quality required to make him, as the younger partners put it, the complete package. Handsome, imperially slim, arrayed in discreet made-to-order suits and shirts that did not shout their Savile Row and Jermyn Street provenance, he trailed an aura of old New York money. A star as an undergraduate at Yale, he had gone on to shine just as bright at Harvard Law School, and, quite naturally, the best clerkships had followed,first on the Second Circuit in New York and then with the Supreme Court justice thought to represent the best of what the Eastern Seaboard legal establishment had to offer.
    Schmidt was then a brand-new partner. The glad tidings that he had been taken into the firm had been given to him by Dexter Wood the day before Thanksgiving in 1967, a little less than a year before Tim’s arrival. The old man had walked into his room, closed the door behind him, and, as Schmidt scrambled to get up, motioned him to remain seated and continue what he was doing, which was stuffing his briefcase with the documents he planned to work on in Bridgehampton during the long holiday weekend. A memorandum he had drafted and planned to submit to Mr. Wood on Monday was among the papers he had already packed. Schmidt was worried about it. He had never before worked under the old man’s direct supervision or given advice on complex and, to him, unfamiliar antitrust issues, in this case the legality of the railroad tariff arrangements that Mr. Wood’s favorite client, the CEO and major shareholder of which happened to be Wood’s own brother-in-law, had worked out for the shipment of its product to buyers and warehouses scattered across the country. Schmidt had already delivered several preliminary memoranda on various aspects of the problem and had been interrogated by the old man in his office, the questions showing a careful scrutiny of Schmidt’s work. No criticism of the work had been offered, but no praise either. Did that mean that the old man was satisfied? The fact that he hadn’t required Schmidt to rewrite any of the memoranda and hadn’t brought in another associate with antitrust experience to work alongside him suggested as much. But it was also possible that Mr. Wood would lower the boom only after seeing that finallong memo reposing at the bottom of Schmidt’s briefcase. (A hypothesis between the two was that his research and conclusions had been found acceptable as far as they went, but, at the same time, mediocre and unimaginative. He hadn’t pushed his thinking far enough. He could do no better than journeyman work.)
    Worries and self-doubt had plagued Schmidt since he first went to work for W & K. The ability of the partners—if one excluded three or four handling trusts and estates who may have been all right when they started but by common consent had let themselves go—and of most associates too was, like the standards set for the work, so high that only a deluded dolt would have been free of Schmidt’s anxieties. This was his seventh year when, according to custom, he and other associates who had been hired with him would be either taken into the partnership or expected to leave. To be sure, not immediately or next month, a decent period of grace being allowed, but the policy of up or out was applied rigorously, so that with every week the situation of a passed-over associate who had not moved on went from