Read Online Schmidt Steps Back by Louis Begley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Louis Begley
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the part of Tim that she badly needed to get off her chest. But as he heard more, his heart sank. The story was unlike anything he could have imagined.
She was startled, she said, when Tim decided in 1981 to go to Dexter Wood and volunteer to take the place of Billy Higgs, the partner then in charge of the Paris office who was scheduled to return to New York only twelve months later. Putting himself forward like that wasn’t Tim’s style. What made it even stranger, he had turned Dexter down cold four years earlier when Dexter asked him to take over from Higgs’s predecessor, Sam Warren. He did that against her wishes. For manyreasons she had really wanted to move to Paris at that time. He knew that, and he knew very well why. She had thought that, if the children’s French heritage was to be meaningful to them, they should at some point spend a number of years in France, and the timing was ideal. Sophie was five and Tommy three; they were still in preschool, they could be moved to Paris and put into the French educational system without disrupting their schooling. Language wouldn’t be a problem. She had always spoken French to them. They understood perfectly and were on the verge of speaking really well. She had also told Tim that if he was concerned about their reading and writing in English, there were ways to make sure they could: tutors, perhaps a private bilingual school with instruction in both languages. She had another personal and urgent reason to be in France, of which Tim was also completely aware. Her mother had been very recently diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—you know Lou Gehrig’s disease—an illness for which there was no remedy or cure. The doctors thought it was an aggressive case. Some months earlier her father had at last retired from the diplomatic service, and he and her mother had decided to sell their apartment on rue du Bac and move to the house in Antibes that had come to them from her mother’s family, a place that her mother loved, having spent all summer vacations there until the war. Both her parents were convinced that the Antibes climate would be good for her. It had even occurred to Alice that she and Tim could buy the rue du Bac apartment. The location was just what she wanted, there was lots of room for the children, and you couldn’t ask for a better layout for entertaining. It had simply gotten to be too big for her parents.
Do you know anything about my family history? she asked abruptly.
Schmidt replied that he knew, of course, that her father had been the French ambassador in Washington. He had met both him and Alice’s mother at her wedding reception. But that was all.
I am a child of the victory in Europe, she said. My father was with the Free French during the entire war. He managed to get from Bordeaux to London just as Pétain was capitulating and afterward was one of those people who were parachuted into France for special missions and then taken back to London. My mother and he met in Normandy during one of those missions. She was in the Gaullist resistance. Strangely, that’s how she survived. She stopped wearing the yellow star and went underground. When my father entered Paris in August forty-four with the Division Leclerc, she was already there, and I was born twelve months later, three months after they got married. It could have been a shotgun wedding, but there was no one left on my mother’s side to go after my father. My entire family ended up in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and none of them survived. They were the kind of Jews who believed that the Germans would never do to them what they were doing to the others.
Seeing a look of puzzlement on Schmidt’s face, she added, Yes, my mother was Jewish. That did not put off my one hundred percent Aryan father, one of those brilliant French Protestants who come in first at every
concours
—those competitive examinations you have to take in order to go to the best schools and rise, as he
She was startled, she said, when Tim decided in 1981 to go to Dexter Wood and volunteer to take the place of Billy Higgs, the partner then in charge of the Paris office who was scheduled to return to New York only twelve months later. Putting himself forward like that wasn’t Tim’s style. What made it even stranger, he had turned Dexter down cold four years earlier when Dexter asked him to take over from Higgs’s predecessor, Sam Warren. He did that against her wishes. For manyreasons she had really wanted to move to Paris at that time. He knew that, and he knew very well why. She had thought that, if the children’s French heritage was to be meaningful to them, they should at some point spend a number of years in France, and the timing was ideal. Sophie was five and Tommy three; they were still in preschool, they could be moved to Paris and put into the French educational system without disrupting their schooling. Language wouldn’t be a problem. She had always spoken French to them. They understood perfectly and were on the verge of speaking really well. She had also told Tim that if he was concerned about their reading and writing in English, there were ways to make sure they could: tutors, perhaps a private bilingual school with instruction in both languages. She had another personal and urgent reason to be in France, of which Tim was also completely aware. Her mother had been very recently diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—you know Lou Gehrig’s disease—an illness for which there was no remedy or cure. The doctors thought it was an aggressive case. Some months earlier her father had at last retired from the diplomatic service, and he and her mother had decided to sell their apartment on rue du Bac and move to the house in Antibes that had come to them from her mother’s family, a place that her mother loved, having spent all summer vacations there until the war. Both her parents were convinced that the Antibes climate would be good for her. It had even occurred to Alice that she and Tim could buy the rue du Bac apartment. The location was just what she wanted, there was lots of room for the children, and you couldn’t ask for a better layout for entertaining. It had simply gotten to be too big for her parents.
Do you know anything about my family history? she asked abruptly.
Schmidt replied that he knew, of course, that her father had been the French ambassador in Washington. He had met both him and Alice’s mother at her wedding reception. But that was all.
I am a child of the victory in Europe, she said. My father was with the Free French during the entire war. He managed to get from Bordeaux to London just as Pétain was capitulating and afterward was one of those people who were parachuted into France for special missions and then taken back to London. My mother and he met in Normandy during one of those missions. She was in the Gaullist resistance. Strangely, that’s how she survived. She stopped wearing the yellow star and went underground. When my father entered Paris in August forty-four with the Division Leclerc, she was already there, and I was born twelve months later, three months after they got married. It could have been a shotgun wedding, but there was no one left on my mother’s side to go after my father. My entire family ended up in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and none of them survived. They were the kind of Jews who believed that the Germans would never do to them what they were doing to the others.
Seeing a look of puzzlement on Schmidt’s face, she added, Yes, my mother was Jewish. That did not put off my one hundred percent Aryan father, one of those brilliant French Protestants who come in first at every
concours
—those competitive examinations you have to take in order to go to the best schools and rise, as he
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