Schmidt Delivered Read Online Free

whomever else he engaged. They would be like a covenant that runs with the land, a part of the social contract. Only Carrie’s feelings stood in the way. Class consciousness of Colony Club ladies? Schmidt thought it was rudimentary in comparison with Carrie’s. He read as a clear signal, for instance, her refusal to set foot in O’Henry’s or to shop in Bridgehampton: the poor child didn’t think that she was any kind of success in the eyes of her former coworkers and the army of locals who filled the tanks of her and Schmidt’s cars, mowed the lawn, vacuumedthe pool, fixed the plumbing, painted the shutters, or did any of the other vastly overpriced chores required for Schmidt’s general enjoyment of life. Far from it, she thought, not inaccurately, that she was considered by them a traitor to her class. The expression was his and not one, Schmidt realized, that either she or they would use, having recourse instead to some up-to-date synonym for “floozy.” Naturally: a Puerto Rican waitress from Brooklyn comes out to the Hamptons to pocket big tips and after a year gets tired of plates covered with scraps of red meat and uneaten fries and even of shacking up with Bryan or some other local stud. So she gets herself a better job—laying a rich old guy, someone it’s all right for the locals and the migrant lumpen proletariat to rob blind but not to fraternize with. That had surely been the initial analysis made by the Polish brigade. But the ladies got used to Carrie during Schmidt’s convalescence, and she got used to them. Whatever might be their a priori moral or social judgment of Carrie, he felt certain they couldn’t help seeing that she was a good egg and was treating him right. But so long as they lived in this place, with the folk memory of their history so fresh, how was he to get her to think of herself as the lady of the house and make her comfortable with any other staff he might hire?
    As soon as he had recovered from his accident, he had a five-foot wall of delicately colored weathered old bricks built to surround the pool. The flagstone deck was replaced by more old bricks, and red and pink climbing roses and rosebushes were planted inside the wall. A get-well present to himself. The roses prospered and were in full bloom. Bogard,the gardener, kept an eye out for hornet nests. So far they had been lucky: neither hornets nor bees had come to visit. Schmidt tested the temperature of the water with his hand. Perfect for him but on the cold side for Carrie. It was a beautiful but cool July. Reluctantly—in part because he had never been able to get out of his head the remark of a publisher friend of Mary’s that a morning of heating the pool costs as much as the best seat at the opera, in part because he liked the cold for himself and wouldn’t have cared if others, Carrie alone excepted, stayed out of the water, and also because he disliked the noise—Schmidt turned on the heater, took off his clothes in the changing cabin at the side of the pool house, dove in, and began doing laps. He had given up counting long ago. The effort to keep track distracted him from thoughts about anything else. Instead, he regulated himself according to the clock suspended on the brick wall. His intention was to swim fast every day for thirty minutes, unless it rained so hard that getting into the water seemed too absurd or he heard thunder nearby.
    It really was too bad he had only Gil and Elaine Blackman to turn to for company, and Gil sometimes seemed too chummy with Carrie for his comfort. In the old days, he had liked, had in fact been proud of, Mary’s milieu of publishers and writers. He certainly preferred it to the equally closed world of Wall Street lawyers, and he hardly knew anyone else in or near Bridgehampton other than the eternal Blackmans. Well before Carrie, Mary’s friends made him feel that, deprived of her prestige, on which account he was forgiven his mostly silent presence at their lunches