About Schmidt Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought out to him by messenger, Mary would take Charlotte alone, with the baby-sitter. There was a succession of those, as well: Hunter College students working for lodging and pocket money and later, when they decided Charlotte should learn French, au pairs. Corinne had been one of them.
    If he was stuck working on a Saturday morning, he would try to catch an afternoon train and join them, and, when it was too late for that, he would go out sometimes early on Sunday to get in a set of tennis or a long walk on the beach, and help Mary with the drive to the city. While Martha was alive, work-sharing rules did not apply in her house. She thought Charlotte should be in women’s hands—her own, Mary’s, and the baby-sitter’s—unless the child was going to the beach or to her pony lesson, or to the afternoon movie show in East Hampton, each of which was a proper occasion for a father to appear. And there wasn’t any question of sticking one’s nose into the kitchen and doing the work of Martha’s cook and the cook’s assistant, each as adamantly Irish as their cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking employer.
    Mary and Schmidt kept the cook until her retirement; it was unthinkable that she be let go. Would she return from Florida to look after Schmidt, now that he had been put out to pasture? The question had teased him. Afterward, they kept the house going as best they could, with the help of a squadron of Polish women who arrived once a week in battered Chevys, Diet Cokes in hand, hair in curlers, their outsizerear ends and bosoms restrained by resort wear in which lime, shocking pink, and orange predominated—women who whizzed through the place and departed three hours later planting moist kisses on Mary, Charlotte, and even Schmidt.
    It astonished him, how he had come to believe in the absolute necessity of Charlotte’s being taken to the country each weekend, and to feel uneasy himself, at loose ends, uncomfortable with city smells and the Sunday look of streets, if he happened not to go away. And yet, this was a habit acquired only upon marriage. Schmidt’s parents had not owned a place in the country. Unless one counted attendance at law school reunions and out-of-town Bar Association meetings as vacations, his parents took none. They didn’t agree with Schmidt’s father, and his mother didn’t like the expense. Saturdays and Sundays were spent in the city; Schmidt learned about grass and trees in Central Park and about swimming in a large reedy pond to which an establishment upstate called Camp Round Lake had a right-of-way. He had been a camper there from the age of eight, and later, until his second year at Harvard College, a counselor.
    The champagne flute snapped in his fingers as he was rubbing it under hot water to get Charlotte’s lipstick off. He scooped the broken glass from the drain with a paper towel and saw that it was rapidly turning dark red. The cut in the palm was clean but deep, apparently not the sort that could be taken care of by pressing a wad of paper toweling against it. He looked for the Band-Aids he thought he had last seen on the shelf above the sink. They weren’t there. Meanwhile, unmanageable fat blood drops kept reappearing on the floor, on the counter, and on the open cabinet door, faster than hecould wipe them with the sponge he held in his good hand. It was a ridiculous situation, fit for a sorcerer’s apprentice. He was beginning to feel shaky.
    Dad, what have you done to yourself? Sit down right away, make a fist, and hold it up high. I’ll bandage the cut.
    Just a broken Pottery Barn champagne glass. Four dollars and seventy-five cents. Don’t they crush glasses at Jewish weddings for good luck? I guess I’m getting in practice.
    He looked at Jon.
    You’ve got a long way to go, Al! It’s the groom who crushes the glass with his foot, not the disappointed father with his hand, and the bride and the groom first drink wine out of it. Remember, wine not blood. Jews aren’t