I Come as a Theif Read online

  I Come as a Thief

  Louis Auchincloss

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  …

  …

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part III

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he

  that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest

  he walk naked, and they see his shame.

  —Revelation, XVI, 15

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON

  Copyright © 1972 by Louis Auchincloss.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 0395139392

  For my good friend

  and faithful correspondent

  George T. Keating

  with deep gratitude

  for all his advice and encouragement

  in my work

  Part I

  1

  Lee Lowder had hoped, after Tony’s defeat in the State Senate election, that their life might be given back to them. After all, he had not been a regular politician and had accepted the nomination only because the Democrats had desperately needed a standard bearer to wage the hopeless if important fight in the Lowders’ traditionally Republican Manhattan district. And Tony had done better than anyone had dared to predict. He had dragged his much older and bitterly conservative opponent from the confident back rooms of right wing politics to the sound truck and the television debate; he had attracted statewide notice; he had rolled up the Democratic vote from its usual 25 percent to a figure so close to 50 that a recount had been necessary. Ex-Governor Horton had come to see Lee to assure her that there would now be a period of rest and reflection.

  “We have great ideas for Tony in the party, Lee, but I want to be sure he makes no false steps. He may be only forty-three, but that’s no chicken for a man who’s just lost his first race. We must use him carefully. The President owes us a Democrat on the Securities and Exchange Commission when Tom Surtees retires this spring. This may be a long shot, but I have a hunch I might swing it for Tony. So I’m going to suggest he use the interim to learn the ropes as Special Assistant to the Regional Director here in New York.”

  Lee had contemplated the sharp, pink eyes in that wide, white, doughy face. “And what would the Securities and Exchange Commission lead to?”

  “Anything at all. Attorney General of the state. Who knows? Perhaps Congress.”

  “But he would have a minute to catch up on his family?”

  “Oh, yes. These special assistant jobs…” Horton shrugged. “You know, they’re what you make them. Call it a two-month vacation if you like.”

  “But Tony makes so much of everything!”

  “Poor Lee. You hate politics, don’t you?”

  “Oh, no! I like it!”

  It had been true—at times. There had been excitement, exhilaration in the campaign. To see Tony’s earnest, square jaw, his small, inquisitive, smiling eyes, his curly gray hair on billboard after billboard, looming over words that demanded all kinds of wonderful but perfectly practical things, to hear his deep resonant voice on radio and television denouncing the slick, tricky slogans of the extreme right, to hear the roars with which he was greeted at rallies, well, it almost convinced one for the moment that something could—or even would—be done. And then had she not come of a family that had been just the opposite, that had never adventured beyond the strictly private life, that had sniggered over the egotistical motives which they had imputed to the smallest self-exposure, whether in amateur theatricals or running for public office? It was thrilling to feel your family trounced.

  “I suppose the trouble with all of us,” she mused, “is that we’re so sure that our sense of proportion is right. Too much or too little is always what other people are guilty of. That’s why I absolutely know that Mummie and Daddy are stickin-the-muds and Tony isn’t enough of one. But Lee Lowder? Oh, she’s perfect, of course! The way she divides her time between friends and children, between social life and home life, is just exactly right. How could it not be?”

  “How old are the children now, Lee?”

  “Isabel is fourteen and Eric twelve. Both still at home and at private day schools. Everything still perfect. Pre-hair and pre-pot. But I know what we’re on the threshold of. That’s why I need Tony more at home right now.”

  Well, Tony had taken the Governor’s offered job, and, as Horton had predicted, he had found it much less demanding than his law practice, but this had done Lee little good, for he seemed to have as many meetings as ever. What could you do with a man whose curiosity and interest were so easily and constantly re-aroused? Where was he now, at six o’clock, on a dull winter’s evening, while she sat with Eric in the living room, she with her bills, he with his homework, reluctant audience to Isabel’s heavy pounding of the “Marche Militaire” on the upright piano in the dining alcove? At the Turtle Bay Settlement House? At the Boys’ Club? At the Young Democratic Club? At Joan Conway’s? She frowned. At his mother’s? Oh, no, she was coming there (how could Lee forget?) for a drink—or, as Mrs. Lowder always put it, for “a spot of sherry.”

  “What are you studying?” she asked Eric, to help thrust off this chronic irritation. Eric looked up at her with his clear gaze of unexpressed impatience. He was thin, painfully thin, with a long, craggy, spotty face and an odd row of yellow bangs. If she could only transfer to him some of Isabel’s flesh! “Pope Paul the third and the Counter Reformation.”

  “Doesn’t your class feel that’s irrelevant?”

  “To what?”

  “Oh, to all that’s going on in the world today.”

  “If you were strapped to a steel chair, after having both legs broken on the wheel, and then lowered over a slow fire, you might not have found the Counter Reformation so irrelevant.”

  “My God, is that what you’re reading about?”

  Eric shrugged, with a meager smile, and resumed his reading. Lee wondered if he might be the herald of a reaction in youth. He was such a solitary child, with such high marks and so few friends.

  “Isabel!” she called. “Must you pound so?”

  “Miss Downey says I should play it with feeling.”

  There were moments when Lee was almost appalled at how little she and Tony had to show for their lives. He had been earning forty thousand a year before he had taken the government job, but it had all gone in taxes, rent and tuition. Everything they had in the world was contained in this Lexington Avenue flat, with its living room, dining alcove, foyer, two master bedrooms and maid’s room (for Eric). And what a miscellany it was. Tony would never part with family things. Who else in the world would have kept the ugly amateur portrait of his contractor grandfather with muttonchop whiskers, the two atrocious Hudson River School landscapes, the horsehair sofa, the big black walnut breakfront with the sets of Cooper and Louisa May Alcott? Small wonder that her own father did not care to part with his few treasured “old New York” it
ems to such a son-in-law. And yet, in spite of everything, she loved it all. She even loved to walk down the dull brown characterless corridor from the elevator past the closed anonymous doors, anticipating the one that would open upon the crowded, glowing warmth of her own home.

  “Isabel, please! Or I’ll tell Miss Downey to give you nothing but Debussy.”

  Yet what did she have if one took away Tony? What could she show for the thirty-eight years of her life? Oh, Eric and Isabel, of course. That went without saying—or did it? But there was nothing, so to speak, “star-like” about herself as a mother or housewife, as a friend or daughter, or even as a dabbler in social work (all Tony’s causes). No, the everything about Lee Lowder had to be her love for Tony, as she faced again and again—probably too much. He represented the near total of her emotional capital.

  The front doorbell rang loudly. Had he lost his key? Oh, no, how could she forget again—Mrs. Lowder! Lee hurried out to admit her mother-in-law, dreading the moment as she opened the door when a scrim would descend over the apartment, over her whole life, like the scrim in Das Rhein-gold that shows the gods as old when Freia is taken by the giants. Instantly she would see her things as Mrs. Lowder saw them.

  “You look surprised, my dear. Weren’t you expecting me?”

  “Of course. Come in.”

  Isabel might have been hitting the keys with a kitchen pounder, but she was still not loud enough to muffle the sound of Eric urinating in the bathroom off the hall corridor.

  “Eric, I’ve told you a hundred times to close that door! One of these days I’m going to roast you over a slow fire.”

  “Lee, what a dreadful idea to put in the child’s mind! Don’t scare him!”

  “Eric’s mind is more full of horrors than Fox’s Book of Martyrs. My pigmy imagination could never hope to add to it.”

  In the living room Dorothy Lowder sat in the smallest, stiffest chair as if it were the only one that she could trust not to buckle. She gave the impression of being swathed and scarved, like a pre-World War I automobilist. Her eyes were big and blue, round and unhappy, anticipating the hurt which they elicited. But if her frizzed gray hair and round face suggested an Irish Clara Bow, kissed by time, her dumpy, mauve-draped figure evoked the contrast of a vamp, a Theda Bara who had succumbed to sweet cakes.

  “I wonder if Tony doesn’t have something on his mind. He seems so tired these days.”

  “I guess he worries about his father.”

  “Oh, I can’t think it’s just that.”

  But Lee was determined to keep the ball of reproach in Mr. Lowder’s court. “He hates to see his father’s memory going. And getting in to see Mr. Lowder so often, all the way across the park, isn’t the easiest thing in the world.”

  “Well, of course, he’s a wonderful son. Nobody knows that better than I. For all the help I get from Susan and Philip I can’t understand their attitude. In my day a family was a family. It was a case of mutual obligations…”

  And Mrs. Lowder was off on the Dalys. Eric and Isabel retreated to their rooms. They knew all about the fortune which Grandpa Daly had made and lost, except for the poor remnant on which Mrs. Lowder still lived. They knew about the five handsome Daly sons, the five pretty Daly daughters, the big white shingled house in Larchmont, the hospitality, the cheer, the warmth of it all. There were still moments when Lee could feel sorry for her mother-in-law, trapped in a dry old age with a smiling booby of a husband, but didn’t she have Tony? A good part of him, anyway?

  “My sister Vinnie still has all that,” Mrs. Lowder complained. “She has thirty-two descendants, and there’s never a day in the calendar that one of them doesn’t come in to see her. Perhaps my trouble was in giving up the Church. There’s something so dry and dead about Episcopalianism.”

  “But, Mrs. Lowder, you have three perfectly good children!”

  “And only one of them married. What good is Susan to me, I’d like to know? When old maids stayed at home with the old folks, at least they had that use. Susan’s so busy at Legal Aid, she can hardly get in to see us on weekends.”

  “Susan is a very useful woman.”

  “Not to those that bred her, she isn’t. And Philip, what does he care about his parents? What does he care about but that horrid young man he lives with? Ugh. I can hardly hold my head up when I think about it.”

  “You should try to understand that, Mrs. Lowder. Parents are learning to accept homosexuality today.”

  “Please don’t use that word!” Mrs. Lowder gesticulated violently, as if she were thrusting off some assaulting creature. “Can you imagine what they do to each other? Even to think of it is too repulsive.”

  “I know what they do. Would you like me to tell you?”

  “Never. My dear Lee, you’re sometimes appallingly modern.”

  “But you should love Philip and Susan. It’s so awful, this American habit of thinking people have no lives unless they marry and breed. As if we were hamsters.”

  “Lee! You sometimes go too far. How can you, a mother, think I would not love my own children?”

  “Oh, anybody can not love somebody else,” Lee retorted, weary of it. “Anyway, you have Tony.”

  “Oh, yes, we all have Tony.”

  And there he was, standing in the foyer, taking off his raincoat. What did he do to a room? Was it his build? His bigness? His large, square, generous face? Or was it the contagious friendliness of those intent, attentive gray eyes? Or the easy impassivity of his manner and the strange fearlessness that radiated from him? Or was she simply a romantic fool? Plenty of people, she knew, did not think Tony was in the least extraordinary. Indeed, her own father found him rather ordinary. And what for that matter had he really accomplished in his life but practice law with a very moderate success and lose a campaign for the State Senate? But this was heresy.

  “Darling!” She hurried out to the foyer to fling her arms around his neck.

  “Hey, what’s up? Did you hear I was dead or something? How are you, Ma?”

  Mrs. Lowder’s answer was lost in the noisy return of the children who did not scruple to throw in their grandmother’s face that the excuse of homework for their retirement had been a sham. Isabel, whose broad face seemed broader framed by straight blonde hair, demanded that her father settle an argument with Eric that had raged, except for school, since breakfast.

  “Eric says that welfare shouldn’t pay a mother for more than one illegitimate child!”

  “It just encourages them to have more,” Eric retorted. “And they don’t take proper care of them. Everyone knows that. They let them run around the streets and look for heroin and grow up to be criminals and mug us. Us, who pay for their welfare!”

  “I must say, I think it’s extraordinary what children discuss these days,” Dorothy Lowder interposed. “I really wonder what good it will do Isabel or Eric to know about such things at their ages. Still, I can’t help agreeing with Eric.”

  “But Grandma! It’s a woman’s natural function to have a baby.”

  “In a civilized world, Isabel, we must learn to control our natural functions.”

  “Oh, I’m for birth control, of course.”

  “That’s not what I was trying to say at all. I was trying to say…”

  “But birth control isn’t the point,” Isabel interrupted. “A civilized government should be responsible for every child born under it.”

  “The government can still be responsible,” Eric pointed out. “But not by paying the mother welfare. It should take the child away from her and bring it up properly.”

  “Take the child away from its own mother!”

  “Why not? If she’s obviously unfit? The way half of them are.”

  Lee could see that Tony, looking from one to the other, was debating, not how he should decide, but how he should phrase his decision. Isabel, of course, had to win—she knew that—but she could not altogether repress an impulse of sympathy for Eric. He was so serious, so industrious, so conscientious, and Isa
bel was such a … well, such a mess. Eric made her think of some hard-working settler in the wilderness who finds the small patch that he has staked out and cultivated threatened by indolent Indians.

  “Eric,” Tony said gravely. “Every child, however born, is a human being, with as much right to grow up as you have.”

  “I know that, Dad.”

  “Of course, you know it. It’s nothing to know it. You have to feel it.”

  “Why? Why do I have to?”

  “Because to the extent that you fail to feel it, you fail to be alive.”

  Eric put on his look of “So it’s going to be one of those evenings” and left the room. Isabel returned to her piano. Dorothy Lowder drew her round face into a longer shape, as if she were trying to remold it with thoughts of dignity and sadness.

  “I was just telling Lee how tired you look. Is it the new job?”

  “Oh, no, the job’s easy enough. All I do is check the financial houses to see their capital’s up to snuff. It’s my own capital that worries me. This market’s a ghastly headache.”

  “Tony! You don’t mean you’ve been speculating.”

  Tony looked as if this were the last thing he needed after a long day. “I’ve been trying to make some money, Ma. And it’s not easy in a recession.”

  “But you should have learned from your grandfather’s example. Speculation was always the ruin of the Dalys.”

  Tony winked at Lee. “I guess it’s my sad destiny to offer another proof of that.”

  “Why do you have to stay in government if it pays so badly?” his mother persisted. “Why can’t you go back to your law firm?”

  Lee intervened indignantly. “Because if Tony’s ever to get anywhere in politics it has to be now.”

  “Why does Tony have to ‘get anywhere’ in politics? Is politics the end of the world? Personally, I’ve never really seen Tony as a professional politician.”

  “Why, he’s a natural politician, Mrs. Lowder. Everyone who saw him in the campaign recognized that.”