About Schmidt Read Online Free Page A

single sixty-year-old codger with no dependents, but was the average American accustomed to living as Schmidt lived? Had he worked as hard?
    Moreover, his unsympathetic fellow citizen might not know that Wood & King had so organized its affairs that payments to retired partners stopped when they reached the age of seventy. That was five years after the normal retirement age. Therefore, the deal Schmidt had negotiated was generous in its own way. The pension was reduced, because he was leaving the firm early, but it was to continue until the same magic age. The reason for the generosity was no secret: it was to compensate him for gracefully leaving when he might have remained for another five years, like his contemporaries drawing a top share of the firm’s income. They didn’t mention that consideration in their talk, neither Jack DeForrest,the presiding partner, nor he, but he imagined that Jack had already been spoken to by many young partners—Jon Riker probably leading the charge!—anxious to warn DeForrest that if he stayed during those final years, Schmidt would be coasting. They wouldn’t have suggested he was a shirker; to allude to the effect on him of Mary’s illness and the declining role in the generation of revenues for the firm of the sort of financial work he handled would have been more than enough. Well, Schmidt had wanted to put down the burdens of his profession. It wouldn’t be necessary to push him out the door; that was one less worry for Jack.
    Schmidt recalled that when, as a very young partner, he had voted in favor of the W & K retirement plan, this quaint—so he thought—notion of stopping pension payments after five years had made him laugh. Jack DeForrest, his law school classmate and then his closest friend, was sitting next to him at firm lunch. He had whispered to Jack, This is neat! The vestry of St. James really believes that a man’s life is three score and ten! It so happened that Messrs. Wood and King, both present at the table, and both past the canonical age, were members of that august New York institution. Because they were the founding partners, the retirement plan treated them differently from everybody else—with exquisite courtesy that Schmidt, ever filial, had applauded. As for himself, how was he, then in his thirty-sixth year, to imagine that one day the fabulous frontier of his seventieth birthday would not seem distant at all, and he would be obliged to contemplate the financial disadvantages of living on beyond it? All he knew then was that he had, so far, managed everything very well; there was no reason why he wouldn’t continue to be both lucky and happy.
    As he rocked on in his chair the course he must follow seemed both clear and inevitable. Damn the taxes and the loss of income. He would give the house to Charlotte and move out. Living under the same roof with Jon Riker married to Charlotte during vacations, all summer weekends, and however many other weekends in the year they would want to use it might have been contemplated if it were on his own terrain, in a house that was really his, where he made the rules. But never in a fake commune, where he felt the obligation to consult those two about calling the plumber, repainting the house blue, or ripping out a hedge! He wasn’t going to try to save the capital gains tax on the apartment. Instead of sinking two million dollars into a house like Martha’s, he would buy a shack in Sag Harbor, among Mary’s former publishing colleagues, give up shaving and visits to the barber, putter around in L. L. Bean togs, and get his summer meals at book party buffets if the invitations to them didn’t dry up! Then if Riker someday decided he could at last afford to procreate, he, Schmidt, would still be able to offer his grandchildren an occasional treat. The great adventure of trying to live out his sunset years was yawning before him.
    He went up the cellar steps and entered the kitchen. Now Riker was at the table, a