I Come as a Theif Read online

  “Tony! You’re acting so strange.”

  “I’m feeling so strange. I’ve done a wicked, criminal thing, and I disgust myself.”

  Joan looked down at her diamond for a moment and then covered it over with her hand. “What kind of a criminal thing?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

  “Will there be consequences?”

  “There have been. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “No. I mean real consequences. Like the police or something.”

  “What does it matter?” He was suddenly impatient with her silly questions. “If I told you I were going to suffer some horrible, old-fashioned punishment, like being broken on the wheel, I wouldn’t care.”

  “Or like dying of cancer?” Joan had finally remembered herself.

  “That’s right. I envy you, Joan.”

  The fact that he did not care enough about convincing her to put the least conviction in his tone did the job better than any emphasis. “I believe you do,” she murmured in awe. “But then you’re very brave. That’s why I envy you. Why I’ve always envied you.”

  “Brave?” He snorted. “What’s bravery?”

  “Not being afraid of pain. Or dying.”

  “It depends what the pain is. I’m afraid of what’s inside me now. If I could run away from it, you’d see how brave I was.” He clenched his fists in a sudden spasm of misery. “I’d put on a skirt and fight my way into a lifeboat ahead of any number of women and children.”

  Joan abandoned her diamond and reached under the table to touch his hand. But when she felt the tremor of his clenched fist, she withdrew. “You poor darling, I believe you would. What has happened? Is it bad conscience?”

  “How do labels help?”

  “Maybe you could pray.”

  “Do you?”

  “Oh, yes. Constantly. When I’m not abusing God, I pray to him.”

  “You think this is a religious experience I’m having?”

  “Couldn’t it be?”

  “You and your chalice. It could be anything. Except I don’t feel repentant. I only feel damned. Can you be damned if there’s no God and no heaven? It’s a paradox, but I can believe it.”

  “Couldn’t you make some kind of restitution? They say you can’t buy back innocence, but I wonder if that’s true. If you’ve hurt somebody, you can pay damages. If you’ve embezzled, you can put the money back. There’s not much you can do about murder, but I suppose you haven’t gone that far.”

  “Where would I get the money?”

  “From me, of course. What do I need money for?”

  “You know I can’t touch your money.”

  “Is that sensible? If you’re damned and I’m dying?”

  “It isn’t sensible. But there’s very little that’s happening to me that makes any sense.” Again he shivered with impatience. “All I know is that I wish I were dead.”

  Joan almost smiled. It was the nearest thing to a smile anyway in their curious interchange. “It would be cozy if you went with me. I’d mind everything much less. But whatever it is, you’ll get over it. You’re so strong, lover. You’re the strongest man I’ve ever known. And I wish I’d married you. I think we’d have got on.”

  “You’d have hated being poor.”

  When he had said this, he did not want to go on with the conversation. Joan would never understand what had happened to him, and what good could it do him if she did? Tactfully, she turned to her other neighbor, and he was left to silence as the woman on his right had given him up as hopeless. He had a fierce urge to leave the dining room, to go down to the rocks and to run by the sea, run as hard as he could. He was just about to excuse himself when Joan rose, and the terrible meal was over.

  On the long drive home he answered Lee in abrupt monosyllables. Her questions about the party irritated him furiously. Never could he recall having been so unreasonably angry. But the pain was actually growing. He had to concentrate on the road to keep the car from swerving.

  “You seemed to have had plenty to say to Joan at lunch,” Lee observed tartly. “Is that why you’re all talked out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you don’t have to bite my head off.”

  “Lee, will you try to understand something? I think I’m starting a nervous crack-up. I have the most terrible sunk feeling. Like a migraine.”

  “You mean you have a headache?”

  “Much worse. Much!”

  “Oh, Tony, what is it?”

  The tense anxiety in her tone only infuriated him. “Oh, leave me be, will you? I’ll come out of it. Just leave me be.”

  “Well, it makes a girl feel just great to be told to shut up by a husband who’s been shooting his mouth off all day to another woman.”

  “Joan’s different. She’s dying.”

  “Is that the only way to your wounded heart? Rather a stiff price to pay, don’t you think? Do you mind if I wait until the children are a little older?”

  “What a handy thing jealousy is!” Tony almost shouted “It exempts you from the least chore of sympathy. All you have to do is imagine that I’m paying attention to another woman, and I can suffer the tortures of hell for all you care!”

  Lee was silent, and for some minutes he drove on without even glancing at her. Then he heard her stifled sobbing and knew that he had really hurt her. For Lee was no easy weeper. Always in the past her tears had been a terror to him, and few indeed had been the concessions that he would not allow to make them cease. But now everything was different. Her resentment seemed to him unreal, egocentric, not really concerned with him. He would not apologize or attempt to console her. Grimly he gripped the top of the wheel and stared down the middle of the road. When he stopped at their apartment house Lee got out, dry-eyed, without a word. As he drove about to look for a parking space, he knew that their breach was grave.

  4

  Tony had met both Joan and Lee in the winter of 1954. He always looked back on that year as the dividing point of his life, a period of brief but heady independence between his final resolution to give up fussing about his parents and siblings and his acquisition of new and more permanent subjects for emotional untidiness.

  He was twenty-seven. He had the Korean War behind him and a silver star for bravery as a rocket ship skipper in the Inchon landings. He had almost forgotten the religious flutterings of adolescence. He had learned to leave his prickly relatives to their chosen injustices and to live for Tony Lowder.

  He found his lawyer’s duties in Hale & Cartwright congenial to his post-combat nature. He loved being able to throw all his force into a given case, without having to fret unduly over the equities. He had been allowed to cut his legal teeth on a cluster of small law suits, the kind that big firms have to take on as accommodations: divorces of relatives of partners, claims by discharged domestics, nuisance suits amounting to petty blackmail. The clients were pleased by his vigorous representation, and Tony received good raises. It struck him that the typical customer of Hale & Cartwright wanted his lawyer to be a bulldog that licked his hand and snarled at everyone else.

  Tony did not kid himself, when he defended a rich woman, notoriously forgetful, against the claim of a small milliners’ shop which she swore she had never patronized, or contested the suit for alimony of a penniless wife against a husband who was currently bankrupt but the heir to future millions, that he was serving any great cause or promoting any public good. But people had to have lawyers, didn’t they? And Tony Lowder had to make a living.

  Max Leonard was the self-appointed politician among the clerks of Hale & Cartwright, the man who studied the backgrounds and habits of the partners to try to determine what sort of associate they were most likely to promote, the man who was always gossiping with other associates about their chances, the man who considered every possible way of “making the grade” but the obvious one of hard work. Yet he had a charm to cover his buzzing activity and an ingenuity to conceal his basic superficiality. Tony
saw through Max, but he found him pleasant, largely because Max so much admired him. The latter was already probing the possibilities of their setting up on their own, and Tony suspected that Max, if on the light side for Hale & Cartwright, might still be the perfect front man for a smaller organization.

  It was at the Leonards’ apartment that he first met Joan. Elaine Leonard, whose blonde prettiness already augured a ‹ plump figure and who was already expressing public doubts that she and Max were the perfect young American couple they had seemed at their wedding, was torn between her jealousy of Max’s constant fussing over his handsome friend and her own pleasure at having Tony around.

  “Who is that stunning girl in the corner?” Tony asked her. “She lookeds like the heroine of a Joan Crawford film. You know the type: cool, possessed, ambitious.”

  Elaine did not need to turn around. “It’s Joan Lane, not Joan Crawford. But at the end of the movie you’ll find she’s just the same. She won’t, like a Crawford heroine, have given up everything for love.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “You want to meet her? Don’t get too thick. Max has other plans for you. He wants you to marry an heiress.”

  “Must we do everything Max says?”

  “You’ll find it’s easier. It saves you from being manipulated with hidden wires.”

  “Why didn’t he make a rich marriage?”

  “He should have. But never fear. He’ll live again in you. Perhaps he and I both will.”

  “What kind of talk is that?”

  Elaine’s eyes rested on him, mocking, irked, even rather desperately hopeful. “Does it embarrass you, Tony, to have made a hit with both the Leonards?”

  But Tony had grown too accustomed to Elaine to be embarrassed by her. “Do me a favor, will you? Introduce me to Joan.”

  When he had taken the other man’s place in the corner with the tall, pale girl with the long black hair, he felt at first that she might not have noticed the substitution. She had been talking about decorating, which was evidently her trade, and she continued to discuss a sample of new material which Elaine had pinned to the curtain behind them.

  “But then I suppose the room’s such a medley it doesn’t matter,” she concluded.

  “You don’t like the room?” Tony asked.

  “I didn’t say that, Mr. Lowder. But actually I don’t. However, it’s not important. This is the way all our friends live till the second baby. Then they move to the suburbs and life becomes serious. The first apartment is for making love and storing wedding presents.”

  He had been right, after all, about the Joan Crawford movie. “And will you start the same way?”

  “Oh, I want to start much better. Or stay where I am. Are you ambitious, Mr. Lowder?”

  “Tony.”

  “Are you ambitious, Tony?”

  “I’ve never been able to decide.”

  “Then you’re not.”

  “Should I be?”

  Joan shook her head, as if the question were not worth answering. Her gravity was becoming to her long face and dark, defensive eyes. “Max is always talking about you. Now Max is ambitious. Maybe he thinks he has enough ambition for both of you.”

  Tony thought already that he was going to like her. “You haven’t told me what your ambition is.”

  “I didn’t say I had one.”

  “You said you wanted to start better than the Leonards. Or is ambition only concerned with ends? It’s not as apt to be concerned with means.”

  He saw by the automatic quality of her smile that although she recognized humor, she did not much relish it. Smiling with her was probably a matter of manners. “My ambition is concerned with things. Beautiful things. I want to travel and see them. I want to own them. Some of them, anyway.”

  “You mean, like paintings, sculptures?”

  “Yes. And furniture. Porcelains. Jewels. I’m very serious about jewelry.”

  Tony noted that she wore none but a small sapphire ring. “So you must marry a rich man.”

  “I guess that’s about it. I must marry a rich man. Or remain an old maid with my dreams.”

  “I’m not a rich man.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “Even if I became a successful lawyer, I shouldn’t be rich enough to buy the things you want. For I imagine they’re great things. Rembrandts and such.”

  “I suppose they are.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Her smile was suddenly charming, because they were not being funny. “As friends,” she replied. “A little-explored but not unsatisfactory relationship.”

  After some twenty minutes of this kind of talk, she agreed to have dinner with him. At the restaurant they had further drinks and then, almost without other preliminaries, they exchanged life stories. Only after they had finished dinner did their congeniality strike them as rare.

  “Of course, I was prepared for you,” she confessed as she took a sip of brandy. “I was intrigued by what Max told me about you. I put you together as a person with whom one could be honest, but I had no idea how honest. It’s extraordinary. I’ve never admitted to anyone the things I’ve admitted tonight. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Because I’m the unshockable man.”

  “I can see why I need the unshockable man. But what on earth have you to get out of me?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  She gave him a level look. “I suppose you think you can sleep with me.”

  “Is it so impossible?”

  “Definitely.”

  “We can leave that to the future. If I ever suggest it, it will be because you want it.”

  Joan closed her lips tightly. She seemed for a moment to have lost her breath. “I want it now, don’t you know that? But if you think I do all the things I want to do, you don’t begin to know me.”

  “I’m beginning to know you. And now, if you’ve finished that brandy, I’ll take you home. I have to be in court at nine tomorrow.”

  And so their strange friendship began. They went out together every two weeks, and on alternate dates Tony even allowed her to pay. Never once did he make a pass at her. She had told him all he needed to know, and he would recognize the moment—if it came. If it did not, well, New York was full of girls.

  She told him about Norris Conway, whom Tony had also met at the Leonards’. He was handsome in a way that was blond and beefy, agreeable in a way that tried too hard not to condescend, conscientious in a way that feared to be brutal. Norris was determined to win every medal in life on his own, or at least to look as if he had. He was probably better off being rich, for without the modern compulsion of the wealthy not to seem proud, he might have been very arrogant indeed. He had the heir’s fear of being “done,” and to be married for his money would have been to be done in the worst way of all.

  “My trouble is that everyone’s on to me,” Joan protested to Tony. “God knows why, for I never talk. I guess I must smell of it.”

  “You look deep, that’s your trouble. And you are deep. People think deep people have hidden motives. And they do.”

  “I could have brought Norry around months ago if I had even half a million of my own. Why the very rich think the merely rich won’t marry them for their money, I can’t imagine. Norry’s smitten, all right, and I’d make him a splendid wife. But he’s got his ears back like a scared horse.”

  “Maybe I can help.”

  “How?”

  “A little jealousy might do the trick.”

  “But he doesn’t know anything about you and me.”

  “Now.”

  Joan said nothing more that night, but he perfectly understood that she had not liked the suggestion.

  He also understood that she did not like the conviviality that had sprung up between him and her parents. Joan was fiercely protective about the old people and did not want her friends to sneer at them. On the other hand, she seemed to fear some possible exposure of herself in Tony’s obvious admirati
on of her mother. Mrs. Lane was Joan’s slave, but flattered by a young man, who could tell what disloyalty she might not be capable of?

  Mr. Lane was a cheerful nonentity, both to the world and to his family—a coughing, stuttering, stertorous, red-faced old man, a neat, clean bundle of aimless hospitality, not unlike Tony’s own father. Mrs. Lane had the more vivid personality. She was round and dumpy, but her dyed black hair and bangs, her many false jewels and tassels, her long, thin nose, her large blinking eyes and hoarse voice, had a dowdy distinction, like that of a retired English actress trying to impress the boarding house with memories of her Imogene or Portia. And, indeed, as Tony discovered, there was some basis for the comparison, for Mrs. Lane as a girl had shown a flair for the stage and had studied in Paris and even been praised by the great Bernhardt, before her father, a professor of religion, had hurried her back from the prospect of a life of sin to the safer arms of Jacob Lane.

  “You must recite something to me,” Tony urged her one evening at the Lanes’ tiny apartment, as jammed and eclectic as a Third Avenue antique shop. “What is the great scene from Phèdre? The one all the French school children have to learn?”

  “Now, Tony,” Joan protested, “if you start Mother on Phèdre, we’ll be here all night.”

  “Well, let’s be here all night. How about it, Mrs. Lane?”

  “I don’t know if I still remember any of it,” Joan’s mother murmured deprecatingly, glancing at the husband who never failed her.

  “Come, Jenny, give Tony a few verses. You know you can.”

  As Mrs. Lane looked down at the plush seat of the sofa and fingered an upholstered button, it was evident that she was going to recite and that her mere intention to do so had instantly increased her status in that small chamber. Even Joan was now respectfully silent. Mrs. Lane’s long slumbering muse might have been a kind of Aladdin’s lamp which, when rubbed, had still the power to subdue her family to an admiring vigil. Then she began to speak, and her voice was sharp, almost rasping, but very tense and very articulate. The French words seemed to emanate from another woman altogether:

  “Ah, cruelle, tu m’as trop entendue!