Schmidt Steps Back by Louis Begley

life. Then the great man’s lips parted. He was actually speaking, droning on about how the partners had voted—yes voted, unanimously in fact without discussion—to invite Schmidt into the partnership, and, if he accepted, they would expect great things from him. Was he disposed to accept? What a burst of affection inside Schmidt! Was there any task that Dexter, as Mr. Wood declared he was thenceforth to be called, could set that Schmidt would not be readyto accomplish? If only, for the moment, he would shut up and get out of his room! For there was only one thing that Schmidtie wanted now: to call Mary. Everything would be all right, the best private schools for Charlotte, a garage near the apartment so there’d be no more terrifying late-Sunday-night walks home after he’d unloaded the weekend gear and dropped off the car at the parking lot in East Harlem. A new station wagon to replace the ancient Buick hand-me-down from his father might be in the cards. They could afford more expert help at home, a real housekeeper. And perhaps Mary might even relent and agree to have another child.
    Out of the six only he and Jack DeForrest made it. To celebrate, Jack and Dorothy joined Schmidt and Mary at the ‘21’ Club. Martinis, shrimp cocktail, and filet mignon. After much discussion between Schmidt and DeForrest, they ordered a Pommard to go with the meat. Afterward they all went to Le Club, which was hard to get into but Jack knew someone whose name did the trick, and tried hard to go wild on the dance floor. When Schmidt and Mary got home and were in bed, she whispered, Lie back and be quiet. She took him in her mouth, and, when he came, she swallowed and swallowed and swallowed. He knew that she believed there was no better way to show that she loved him.
    Then 1968 veered into disaster. At the end of January, the Vietcong had launched the Tet Offensive. Walter Cronkite, apparently no longer able to countenance the carnage, said on TV that the war was at a stalemate and had to be settled by negotiation, advice that fell on deaf ears. Horrors were heaped on horrors at home. On April 4, Martin Luther King was murdered, and race riots, arson, and pillage followed in Harlem and cities across the land. Two months later, almost to theday, Bobby Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; he died the next day. After protests against the war in Vietnam and loss of public support had forced LBJ to forgo seeking reelection, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey at a convention that was a televised brawl both inside the hall and out, where protesters battled Chicago police. An incredible six hundred fifty demonstrators were arrested, and the city’s hospitals were swamped by the hundreds of others savagely beaten by the police. In New York a student sit-in at Columbia led to a series of bloody riots when President Grayson Kirk called in the police to evict the students from administration buildings. In the resulting hubbub, the class of ’68 was allowed to graduate from the college and the professional schools, including the law school, without regard to the days of classwork that had been lost. Only Harvard and Yale law school graduates were to be found among W & K partners, and in fact there were only a couple of Columbia graduates among the associates, the older partners taking considerable pride in the crimson and blue complexion of the firm. But it happened that in the fall of ’68 five Columbia graduates were to become associates, and Columbia students had been working at the firm during the summer. Columbia’s leniency in allowing students who hadn’t really completed the year’s work to graduate had now in the eyes of many devalued their degrees and academic honors. In fact the entire Columbia grading system was suspect. When the subject was discussed at W & K’s firm lunch, the head of the hiring committee repeated what he had read in the
Wall Street Journal:
the law school faculty had