Yes indeed, there was!
He decided to change his name to Schneider.
He encountered only one slight difficulty. It was simple to change his own surname and that of the baby, Hans. He had good friends in the mayor’s office, and his excuse that there was another horse-dealer of the same name in a near-by town was readily accepted. But the first son, Karl, presented a problem. The boy, now seven years old, had just been classified for future conscription by the Prussian military authorities, and the Sergeant neither had nor wanted friends in Prussian military circles. Moreover, any official move to change the boy’s name might easily invite the very inquiries into origins which he most dreaded. In the end he did nothing about Karl’s name. So it was that, although the sons of Franz and Maria were baptized in the name of Schirmer, they grew up with different surnames. Karl remained Karl Schirmer; Hans became Hans Schneider.
The Sergeant’s change of name never caused him a moment’s anxiety or inconvenience in his lifetime. The anxiety and inconvenience resulting from it descended, over a hundred years later, on the head of Mr. George L. Carey.
1
George Carey came from a Delaware family that looked like an illustration for an advertisement of an expensive make of car. His father was a prosperous doctor with snow-white hair. His mother came from an old Philadelphia family and was an important member of the garden club. His brothers were tall, solid, and handsome. His sisters were slim, strong, and vivacious. All had fine regular teeth, which showed when they smiled. The whole family, indeed, looked so happy, so secure, and so successful that it was difficult not to suspect that the truth about them might be different. But no, they actually were happy, secure, and successful. They were also exceedingly smug.
George was the youngest son and, although his shoulders were not so broad as those of his brothers nor his smile as self-satisfied, he was the most talented and intelligent member of the family. When the glories of their football-playing days had departed, his brothers had made their ways aimlessly into business. George’s plans for the future had been clear-cut from the moment he left high school. Despite his father’s hope for a successor in his practice, George had declined to pretend to an interest in medicine which he did not feel. What he wanted to go in for was law; and not the criminal, courtroom kind, but the kind that led in early middle age to the presidencies of railroads and steel corporations or to high political office. But while the war, which came just after he had been graduated from Princeton, had removed much of his solemnity and smugness and had had beneficial effects upon his sense of humour, it had done nothing to change his mind about his chosen profession. After four and a half years as a bomber pilot, he went to Harvard Law School. He graduated, cum laude, early in 1949. Then, having spent a useful year as secretary to a learned and famous judge, he joined Lavater, Powell and Sistrom.
The firm of Lavater, Powell and Sistrom of Philadelphia is one of the really important law offices of the eastern United States, and the long list of partners reads like a selection of promising candidates for a vacancy on the Supreme Court. No doubt its massive reputation still derives to some extent from memories of the vast utilities manipulations with which it was concerned in the twenties; but there have been few corporation cases of any magnitude during the last thirty years in which the firm has not held an important brief. It remains a virile, forward-looking concern, and to be invited to join it is a mark of approbation most flattering to a young lawyer.
Thus, as he arranged his belongings in one of Lavater’s comfortably furnished offices, George had reason to feel satisfied with the progress of his career. Admittedly, he was a little old for the somewhat junior position he occupied, but he was shrewd enough to realize that his four years in the Air Corps had not been wholly wasted from a professional point of view, and that the distinction of his war record had had quite as much to do with his presence at the Lavater firm as his work at law school or the warm recommendations of the learned judge. Now, if all went well (and why shouldn’t it?), he could look forward to rapid advancement, valuable contacts, and an expanding personal reputation. He felt that he had arrived.
The news that he was to do some work on the Schneider Johnson case came, then, as a disagreeable blow. It was also a surprise of another kind. The sort of business that Lavater, Powell and Sistrom normally handled was the sort that made reputations as surely as it made money. From what George remembered of the Schneider Johnson case, it was just the sort of slapstick affair that a corporation lawyer with a thought for his reputation would pay to stay clear of.