Free Schmidt Steps Back by Louis Begley

did, to the top of the Quai d’Orsay. Anyway, they were older than most people when they had me,and they didn’t try to have more children. My mother died in eighty-six, just short of her seventy-fifth birthday.
    And your father?
    For the first time that morning she laughed, making Schmidt decide that he loved the sound of her laughter. My father’s very much alive, still in perfect health at ninety, sharp as a tack, and living in Antibes with my mother’s best friend. Unmarried, of course—they’re quite modern.
    Schmidt cursed himself for having allowed her to notice that hearing that her mother was Jewish had startled him. It was a tic; he had reacted like a goddamn windup toy set off by something that was connected to a time when such things did matter to lots of people, himself included, people who now knew better and no longer told jokes about Jews, blacks, or homosexuals. Surely she didn’t think he cared about it today. To apply today’s sensitivities and rules to how things were thirty years earlier was unfair. A political anachronism! So he interrupted her inanely: You know, Alice, that your background—so very distinguished—was not anything that I was concerned about or that the firm took into account. I don’t think anyone knew or had bothered to inquire. Look at Lew Brenner, he added. He was made a partner the year you and Tim got married, or perhaps the year before.
    Alice raised her eyebrows and sighed. Wonderful never-changing anti-Semitic America, she said softly. I remember it well. But never mind. To go back to Tim, he knew how I felt and he knew about my parents when he turned Dexter down. He just told me, as though that made everything all right, You can go to France anytime you want and as often as you want. But he wasn’t going to exile himself to a legal backwater. That didn’t matter to Sam Warren and whoever was the partnerin Paris before him because they were both lawyers without clients or any hope of ever having clients, in addition to being fundamentally lazy. Taking other partners’ clients to fancy dinners when they happened to pass through Paris and making themselves useful around the American Cathedral made them happy and from the firm’s point of view was probably the best use they could be put to.
    Schmidt nodded. Tim was right about both of them.
    I’m sure he was, and I’m also sure that he didn’t mean to hurt me. He just hoped I could understand that it wasn’t reasonable to ask him to do what I wished. The subtext was that my mother was going to die soon whatever I did, and he had to think about the long-term future, meaning his illustrious career. It was that simple. He didn’t have anything against France. His French was very good, and he had the kind of good manners the French love. But his clients, his practice, and the firm came first. There was another unmentioned obsession, the reason we went to France together only once, on our honeymoon: his family’s place on Mount Desert. He kept a big sloop at the yacht club in Bar Harbor, and his idea of heaven was to sail in those waters. So every August, or as much of every August as he could protect from clients and other partners, had to be spent in Maine. I’d go to Paris to see my parents just a few days at a time either alone or, if my parents were up to it, with the children. Naturally, I wanted my parents to know them. Otherwise, going to Paris didn’t matter to me all that much: I had lost touch with all but a few of my French friends long ago. Radcliffe had done that, and before that living in Bonn, when my father was ambassador there. So the question was, what had changed his mind, why did he suddenly decide in 1981 that he wanted to move to Paris asquickly as possible? You must admit that it was strange. From the point of view of the children, the timing was awful. Sophie was at Brearley and Tommy at St. Bernard’s. They were both happy and didn’t want to leave their schools or their friends. The one