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

uncomfortable to excruciating. Until at last he left. Left, but to do what? What became of him? Presumably he had found a job at another law firm unless, if he had remained in good graces, W & K had steered him to a position with a client. The tacit assumption was that either way it had to be a step down from W & K. The prospect of being consigned to such a purgatory, and the attendant humiliation, terrified Schmidt. How would he explain it to Mary or, even more difficult, to Aunt Martha, who seemed to hold an irrationally high opinion of her favorite niece’s husband? Fortunately, he did not see his father often. But sooner or later, he would have to tell him too, and it would be wise to do sobefore W & K announced its new partners and he saw that his son was not among the elect. It was easy to imagine the pitying look: So this is my oh-so-fancy son who thought he was too good to come to work at my admiralty firm, the firm he could have inherited! His father wouldn’t allow himself to gloat, but he wouldn’t need to in order to make Schmidt squirm. Who knows? Perhaps he’d be forced to go back to his father with his tail between his legs and ask whether there might be a place for him at the firm he had as much as scorned. Schmidt was good at financings, and one-half of the work of an admiralty firm like his father’s was ship mortgages and charters. The other business—for instance, how to arrest in Singapore or Panama City the SS
Boolah Boolah
or some other hapless vessel whose owners owed money to a client, and to have her sold at auction—he could learn. The conversation with Mary wouldn’t be easy either, not because of anything she would say or do, but because regardless of her reaction he would have become the unsuccessful husband of a successful wife. It was not a role he had imagined. When they got married four years ago, she was an editorial assistant, at a great publishing house, to be sure, but still only a glorified secretary. But neither her pregnancy nor the arrival of Charlotte had slowed her progress. It took her only two years to become a full-fledged editor, and it seemed to Schmidt that everyone in the book business made a point of telling him that she was a powerhouse. He didn’t doubt it; besides she was carried forward by the cresting tide of women’s lib.
    And Schmidt’s own opinion of his own merit? When he allowed himself to think objectively about the partners’ perception of his work, he was obliged to admit that it must be favorable. But to go from there to the conclusion that he stoodhigher than the five other associates, three from Harvard and two from Yale, who joined W & K the same year as he, was hubris pure and simple. At most, he could bring himself to allow that one of them, his classmate at law school, wasn’t the sharpest tool in the firm’s shed, and that one of the two Yalies was a slimy sneak. But could one be sure that the partners were aware of the faults of character that had earned him the contempt of his classmates? Assuming they did, though, that still left Schmidt and three others in the running, and one couldn’t tell for how many openings they were competing. At firm dinners, Mr. Wood invariably babbled about how they always took in associates who had demonstrated that they deserved to be partners, those who were “breaking down the door.” But no one took that seriously. You had to be needed. Was Schmidt needed? Nothing was less certain. He might well be better at financings than any other associate of his seniority, but there were excellent prospects coming up through the ranks, and perhaps the firm would wait for one of them to be ready. To top it all, now that he had gotten stuck with old man Wood’s catastrophic antitrust assignment, all bets were off.
    No wonder the sight of the old man sitting in the visitor’s chair of his tiny office, wordless and with a wan smile on his thin lips, made Schmidt wonder whether he would faint for the first time in his