I Come as a Theif Read online

  “Oh, I don’t say he doesn’t do it well, Lee. Of course, he does. Tony does everything well.”

  “I thought you were just suggesting that he has no talent for speculating.”

  “Well, that’s hardly a great art, is it?”

  “It had better be, I guess, if it’s what he’s doing!”

  “You take one up so fast on things, Lee. I simply meant that Tony may be too nice for politics.”

  “Too nice or too soft?”

  “Too nice, Lee. I shan’t have words put in my mouth. Politicians—successful ones, that is—have to be hard-boiled. Tony would always be worrying about some lame duck. That’s why I think he’ll do better in his profession. There his lame ducks can pay.”

  “I never heard anything so cynical,” Lee retorted. She was beginning to be uncomfortable at the prospect of really losing her temper. “Why can’t you admit, Mrs. Lowder, that the only reason you don’t want Tony in politics is that you don’t want him to go to Washington and leave you?”

  “Now, darling…” Tony was beginning, but his mother, quite as angry now as Lee, cut him off.

  “Well, is it so unnatural for a mother to lean on her own son?” Then, after a moment’s silence in which they all showed the shock of how far they had gone, Dorothy took a loftier tone. “Don’t worry, Lee, it’s not going to last forever. One of these days you and Tony will be perfectly free to go to Washington or anywhere else you please. And there may be a bit of money for you, too. Not much, I fear, but a bit.”

  “But Tony can’t wait, Mrs. Lowder. If he’s going to do anything, he’s got to do it now.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that he would have to wait for long.”

  “Oh, in these days people live forever.”

  Mrs. Lowder rose with the dignity of an old print of Sarah Siddons playing Queen Katharine at her trial. “Let us hope for some exceptions to that unfortunate rule. Perhaps, Tony, you won’t mind helping me to get a taxi.”

  When they had gone, Lee saw Isabel in the dining alcove. She had come back to practice and had heard it all.

  “If you’re ever fool enough to marry a man with a mother, Isabel Lowder,” Lee exclaimed fiercely, “never give her an exit line like that.”

  2

  What humiliated Lee about the complaint that she inwardly nursed against Tony was that it was the commonest complaint on the American domestic scene: that he did not belong to her as much as she wanted and had not, since their honeymoon. He had not, she was fairly sure, belonged to anyone else—he did not, for example, belong to Joan Conway or even to his mother—but that did not prevent her feeling a lack, over and above (or at least so she fancied) the lack that every human being who loves another human being is doomed to feel in the bottom of that other’s response.

  “I know it doesn’t do any good, because nobody ever listens to anyone else,” her own mother had retorted on the only occasion when Lee had confided in her about this. “But I must still tell you that you’re a perfect little idiot. Tony is doing very well as a husband and father, and he’s certainly a good son-in-law. Always so polite and interested. I never feel it’s perfunctory, though I suppose it must be.”

  “But it’s not perfunctory!” Lee protested. “It never is with Tony. That’s just what I mean. He’s devoted to you. Sometimes I think he’s devoted to everybody.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Well, I even think he’s devoted to me.”

  “Then what on earth are you complaining about?”

  “That he loves us all just the same amount.”

  “Really, Lee, you’re too ridiculous. Anyway, I can’t imagine why people think parents have any influence. You’ve always been wildly romantic, and I don’t think anyone ever accused your father or me of that. But you might do well to borrow a leaf out of our unromantic notebook: ‘Let well enough alone.’ If I kept picking away at your father the way you pick at Tony, I might find out that he was less amiable than I suppose. Human beings aren’t such great shakes, my dear. We all wear masks, for decency’s sake. This modern business of yanking them off can be very foolish.”

  Perhaps Lee would not have been so troubled if Tony, throughout their brief courtship and honeymoon, had not lived so incredibly up to her ideal. She had originally been quite humble about her ideals—accepting her mother’s conservative tradition—until he had seemed, by his dazzling conduct, to be saying: “No, it’s all right; your dreams were not presumptuous; a husband, a lover, can be all that.” It was really a pity to be capable of playing a role to such perfection if he could not maintain it. Or was it better to have one perfect memory than none at all?

  “He looks lucky to me,” her hostess had said at the cocktail party in the stuffy little garden behind the converted brownstone where Lee had first met him. “He looks like the kind of man who can always get a taxi on a rainy day.”

  Or a girl. Or a pretty girl. One who was twenty-three and thought that life was over because a short story had been rejected by The New Yorker. He had looked, at twenty-seven, much as he still did: tall, with those broad shoulders and a face that managed to be at once square and sensitive, and he moved with the awkward heaviness of some natural athletes, exuding, perhaps simply through his frequent deep laughs, an air of gaiety oddly inconsistent with an appearance that seemed more adapted to sobriety, even to puritanism. Lee had not known in the least what to make of him. His sympathy about the short story was extraordinary. He did not seem to be putting it on, which was quite as much as could have been expected of any bachelor lawyer who wanted a date, and a late one, for the evening. No, it was more as if the rejected short story had been his own disappointment. His attitude had cured her of literary ambition forever, but it had given her something else to cope with.

  Everyone had always been on his side from the beginning. Any hope that her father might be shocked by the fact that his family lived west of Central Park, that his maternal grandfather had been an Irish immigrant and his paternal one at least partly Jewish, that he had not gone to an acceptable preparatory school or an Ivy League college, was soon dispelled. “Nobody cares about that sort of thing any more,” Mr. Bogardus had snapped at her. “Tony’s a natural gentleman. Besides, he got a silver star in Korea.” Lee was to be denied the romance of rejection. Could it be that her parents were afraid she would get nobody?

  And then the honeymoon in Bermuda. If she had written about it as she saw it in her own mind, she could not have sold it to True Romance, let alone The New Yorker. It would have been deemed far too sentimental, too gooey. She had been frightened at moments, wondering if it was quite safe to take one’s foot off the earth and place it in a third-rate movie. Tony was so considerate, so masterful, so entertaining, so funny. Might she have been relieved to notice, when he studied the menu, ordered the wines, demonstrated his competence in such matters, that he was just the tiniest bit common? But he wasn’t.

  Only his own father, vacant, foolish, perpetually smiling Mr. Lowder, seemed to doubt him. “Tony’s a fine fellow,” he told her, “but he doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Maybe he’s too nice.”

  Was that it? Fifteen years later she still didn’t know. There was a privacy in Tony that never yielded to any assault, that never showed a dent. If he rarely displayed irritability and hardly ever bad temper, he was still ineluctable in his determinations. He seemed to be always busy: in his law practice, in his boys’ club and settlement house, with the myriad personal problems of his vast number of not very attractive friends. He never earned enough money, for he was a very free spender, and encouraged her to be the same. Yet they always seemed just to manage. He would leave the apartment at night to meet someone who telephoned without explaining why. “Ed’s in a jam. I’ve got to go,” was all that he would say. He took hold of her life, encouraged her to be an active citizen, to go on the Junior Committee of the Turtle Bay Settlement House. “You must make something of yourself,” he would emphasize.

  Why? For years she had not been able to make
out if he had a purpose. He had left a big downtown law firm to form a small midtown partnership which had done moderately well but not very much more than that. He had made a name for himself in boys’ welfare and recreation, but so had others. He was popular with many friends, but so were others. And then, suddenly, had come his nomination for the State Senate, and, for six months, everything at last had seemed to jell. Volunteers had flocked to his headquarters; money had filled the mail. Tony, like a squirrel long watching a high bird feeder, had finally leaped and landed securely at the first try. There had even been a wild columnist in The Village Voice who had entered his name in the list of future presidential aspirants. The whole thing had been a dazzling experience and had made her wonder if all that had mystified her in Tony was not simply that he was a public man.

  “I’ve made a great decision!” she exclaimed, as soon as the front door opened and he had returned, after taking his mother down. “I’ve decided that I really want you to be a politician. And not just to irritate your mother, either.”

  “You’re trying to get out of the scolding you know you deserve. Talk about wet hens! I had to sit in the lobby half an hour calming Mother down.”

  “Oh, she loved it. You know she loved it. So did I. I want to be taken out to dinner to celebrate my great decision.”

  “We’re bust.”

  “I have some cash.”

  At the Italian restaurant two blocks south, in a back booth, Lee sipped her drink and felt strangely elated. Was it happiness?

  “Will you excuse me to make a call to Max?”

  Her elation collapsed. “Oh, Tony, you’re always calling Max. I thought now you were out of the law you could leave your partners alone for a bit.”

  “But, darling, I’m in so many things with Max.”

  “What things?” She detested Max Leonard. She had always detested him. She was convinced that he had done Tony a disfavor in persuading him to leave Hale & Cartwright to set up on their own. Max had had no future in the bigger firm; Tony might have had. And Max was so relentlessly charming, so pallidly handsome, so busy-busy, so scheming. She thought he loved Tony more than he loved his snobby little wife. She thought he was in love with Tony. “I hate Max.”

  “You’ve never given Max his due. He’s been a very good friend. It was he, after all, who got me into politics.”

  “What things are you in with him?” she repeated.

  “Business things. I’ve told you, but you never listen. Max and I have gone into a joint capital venture. It’s backing a small restaurant chain in Jersey. And then there’s the stock in that new computer firm, Herron…”

  “Why?” she interrupted.

  “Why a computer firm?”

  “No. Why do you have to go into these things?”

  “To make money, of course.”

  “Why do you need so much money? I thought you only wanted to add to your income a bit.”

  “All right, Lee. Let’s talk about something else.”

  Gin always made her irritable, and she knew that she had to get hold of herself. “No, I’m interested,” she said. “Really interested. Why do we have to be rich?”

  “Please, Lee. Tell me about your day. Did you go to the Boys’ Club?”

  “No, I want to talk about why you want to be rich. Aren’t I and the children enough for you?”

  “Oh, Lee.”

  “I’m not being soppy. I want to know. You never tell me what you’re really thinking. Please do. Just once.” She saw that she was only antagonizing him, and she paused again to drain some of the emotion out of her tone. “I’d like to know the role of wealth in our future. Seriously. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we ought to be wealthy.”

  Tony looked at her with contained exasperation. “Well, it’s not fashionable in liberal circles to admit the importance of money in politics, but all the same, there it is. If you’re a poor Republican, you can get your money from business. But it’s not so simple for poor Democrats. The big ones have all been rich: Roosevelt, Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson, Harriman…”

  “You mean they have to have money for campaigns?”

  “They have to have it for the whole way of life. How do you live when you’re out of office? How do you live—for that matter—when you’re in? A man with half a million bucks behind him isn’t so nervous about next November. And besides, people trust him more. In an affluent society—and, God, is it affluent!—the politician must have something, too. The English always understood this. Disraeli had to marry a rich widow before going into politics…”

  “It’s a pity you didn’t think of that before you married me.”

  “There are other ways of making money, you know.”

  “Like Max.”

  “Well, Max is part of it, sure.”

  “And how are they doing, your things?”

  “Not well at all!” he exclaimed with a cheerful laugh. “Which reminds me. I’ve got to make that call.”

  Alone, Lee drank another Martini and tried to consider her mortification more calmly. Max always prevailed over her, but then didn’t plenty of others? And wasn’t it perfectly possible that Max and these others were more concerned with the future success of Tony Lowder than Lee Lowder was? Even more unselfishly concerned? It was Max who had made Tony take the case of the communist professor which had got him such wide publicity and established his name in liberal circles. It was Max who had pushed his nomination for the State Senate. Max lived for Tony. And what about Joan Conway? Joan Conway was very ill, people said. She didn’t look it, but there you were. People said she was, and rumors of serious illness, like rumors of marital discord, were usually true. Would she be glad if Joan died? No. On the whole, she thought she would be sorry. She liked Joan. She did not know that Joan was Tony’s mistress. She only knew that Joan wanted to be. It was exceedingly curious that she did not care more about the exact nature of Joan’s and Tony’s relationship. She did not seem to be much bothered by so conventional a form of infidelity. Joan, after all, could not take from her, she was sure, that part of Tony that she held. No matter what things he did with Joan, he would make love just as often and just as well with his wife.

  She saw Tony now crossing the room to her. It exasperated her that he was smiling, that he should assume so complacently that she would wait there patiently for him, that she would not rush out and take a cab home.

  “Good news?” she asked coolly, knowing that his smile meant nothing in such matters.

  “Well, we seem to need more money. We always seem to need more money.”

  “How will you get it?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Max, as your mother would put it, must have Daly blood.”

  “Why do you have it in so for Max tonight?”

  “Because he’s so … weak. Because he’s not…” As she reached about for a word, she was surprised to find one that struck her as peculiarly apt. “Because he’s not straight!”

  Tony glanced up. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, didn’t you tell me that when he represented Grace Nitter in her divorce from Joe he was really representing Joe? Who was afraid she’d go to some shyster who would fleece him?”

  “Yes. But I was never sure to what extent it was a conscious misrepresentation on Max’s part.”

  “I believe at the time you suggested that he had betrayed his client.”

  “Perhaps I did. But mightn’t Grace have been better off—from the point of view of her home and children—to have a little less in an amicable settlement than more in a filthy court battle?”

  “That was her decision, not Max’s.”

  “Well, I can’t dispute that.”

  Lee saw her opportunity, as usual, washing off into the gutters of his eternal reasonableness. If she allowed herself to become cross, he would simply retreat into beneficent silence. Never had there been a man more impregnable to female attack.

  “I don’t know what your moral code is,” she observed grumpily. “Or ev
en if you really have one. You’re always finding excuses for people like Max. Even when you know he’s shifty and opportunistic.”

  “I try to understand him.”

  “Do you? Or do you try to think of him as something he’s not? Something better? What do you really believe in, Tony?” It seemed to her that this was turning into a very odd conversation indeed, but she hurried on recklessly to plunge in deeper. “Do you believe in God?”

  Tony folded his hands patiently on the table. “No.”

  She was surprised, even a bit disappointed. She considered herself an agnostic, but there always lurked in the back of her mind the possibility of some ultimate purpose, even of a final and rather funny joke of discovering, after all, an old-fashioned heaven with angels and harps. What a sell for the old clowns who were waiting for Godot. “Then, of course, you don’t believe in an after-life.”

  “That’s right. I believe this is all we have.”

  “And there’s no point? To anything?”

  “I don’t see that follows. There’s a point to being happy.”

  She felt unaccountably depressed and wondered if she should have a third drink. There seemed to be something sad in Tony’s not having any faith. It was all right for her not to have any. That was different. God and his angels did not depend on the likes of her.

  “What makes you happy?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I’d better tell you. It sounds so bloody fatuous.”

  Now her words came out with a sudden sob. “Oh, Tony, for God’s sake, tell me. Can’t you see I’m having a fit?” Strangest of all was his not finding her reaction undue. He even laughed at her.

  “Oh, let’s put it that I like to make you happy,” he said. “There! Does that satisfy you?”

  “No. You only married me because you felt sorry for me at that cocktail party. Because I was so blue about having a short story rejected by The New Yorker.”

  “I married you because I fell in love with you. Because you were the most adorable and cutest creature in the world. And still are. You look just the same, you know. The same curly black hair. The same bright brown eyes.”