I Come as a Theif Read online

  “Oh, Tony, shut up!” She could not let him go on. She could not let him hypnotize her with clichés. She had not given up a literary career for that. But what literary career? She had had none, and she knew it. And he meant his clichés; he wasn’t afraid of them. That was the terrible thing about him. “I think I will have a third drink, after all,” she muttered.

  3

  Tony stood on the basketball court, twenty feet from the basket, holding the ball poised before him, studying the distance. A dozen boys of high-school age stood about, watching.

  “Say, Tony, I’ve got a buck says you can’t make two out of three.”

  “He did last week.”

  “Yeah? Some hot shot.”

  Tony threw the ball. It rose in a perfect arc and dropped through the basket without touching the ring.

  “Jesus.”

  “How’s that buck looking?”

  “He can’t do it again. Betcha.”

  One of them threw the ball back to Tony, and this time he tossed it without delay. A miss. He tried again. A miss. There was a pleased outburst of jeers.

  “That’s the Lowder style.”

  “A flash in the pan.”

  “Say, Tony, you lost that one like you lost the election.”

  “Say, Tony…”

  “Say, Tony, do you know why you lost the election? My old man told me.”

  Tony had noted that since November they felt personally superior to him. An election was like a prize fight. The loser lost his balls. “What did your old man tell you, hot rock?” he demanded.

  “He said you’re always shooting your mouth off about blacks, but you send your kids to private school.”

  Tony shrugged. “Education’s like anything else. The best costs the most. As long as I can pay, I’m buying the best.”

  “Jesus. How can you call yourself a liberal?”

  “I can call myself anything I want, can’t I?”

  “My old man says you’re a goddam wasp.”

  Tony flung up his hands in mock dismay. “My mother’s Irish, and my father’s part Jew. What are you trying to do? Kill me politically? I’m paying a genealogist to look for black blood.”

  There was a faint general snickering, and Tony’s politics were dropped.

  “Say, Tony. Is it true they’re going to close down this goddam settlement house?”

  “Say, Tony. Why don’t you rich trustees fork over?”

  “Rich?” Tony groaned. “I only come to committee meetings for the free lunch.”

  “Jesus. What a moocher.”

  “Say, Tony. Why don’t you get the dough out of Mrs. Conway?”

  “Yeah, Tony. They say that big broad’s loaded.”

  “Say, Tony. Is it true you bang her?”

  “Is she good, Tony?”

  “Funny guys, funny guys,” Tony muttered and hurried off the floor before Miss Hall, the director, who had appeared in the far doorway, should hear. Miss Hall had the handsome, sexless, marble looks of some professional old maids. Her extreme deference to trustees was never menial, simply formal.

  “Oh, Mr. Lowder, I thought you’d gone. Mr. Leonard is in the board room. He was anxious to catch you.”

  “He always is.”

  “Tell me, do you think our treasurer was unduly gloomy?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Will we have to give up the summer camp?”

  “Keep your fingers crossed.”

  “Oh, Mr. Lowder, if you could only talk Mrs. Conway into equaling her last year’s gift.”

  “That was supposed to be a one shot deal. We can’t expect her to support the house indefinitely.”

  “But you have such influence on her!”

  Tony glanced back at the boys. Happily, they were playing ball again. “Besides, she’s ill.”

  “Well, I suppose you know best.” Miss Hall’s true concern almost penetrated the brittle surface of her perfunctory affectations. “I wish all our trustees cared the way you do. It’s wonderful the way you find the time to come here and play with the boys.”

  Tony turned from her brusquely. He could never abide compliments. “I’m a lousy trustee,” he muttered. “A trustee should be able to give or get others to give.”

  “Oh, but you’re a working trustee.”

  “There’s nothing like money,” Tony retorted.

  As he mounted the long varnished stairway to the board room, he reflected how odd it still seemed to dread seeing Max. For years his life had been indissolubly bound up with that handsome baby face, those friendly sky-blue eyes, the shock of blond hair, the noisy ribald laugh. Max had been the spirit, the very soul of Lowder, Leonard, Bacon & Shea. And he had worked hard, too, for all his habit of reducing everything to jokes. That was what Lee could never see. Oh, perhaps it was true, as she never lost an opportunity of pointing out—women were relentless—that Max had used him and used his connection with the Conways, but had he not given it all back twice over? Who but Max had believed, from the beginning of their friendship as clerks in Hale & Cartwright, in what he had not scrupled to call Tony’s “star”?

  But now Max’s show seemed over. The big, gay backdrop of his sybaritism had split down the middle, and all the gray frenzy of his industry was scattered over a darkened stage. Max had lost his head before he had even lost his money. He jumped up from the board table as Tony came in.

  “This goddam recession!” he cried. “Nixon ought to be impeached. Herron’s down another twenty points, and Everett wants his margin.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten g’s. From each of us.”

  “I haven’t got it, Max. You know I haven’t got it.”

  “And that’s not all. We’re going to need twenty more for Alrae before the end of the month. And there’s the loan interest. Can’t you get fifty from somebody? From Joan? From your family? It would get us through. It would even put us over. Oh, Tony, don’t look at me that way. Don’t you see we could make it?”

  Tony looked dispassionately at the pleading, oddly blank eyes that his friend thrust up at him, and at the tiny beads of sweat on the high, ivory forehead. Max was almost ugly when he was worried. Tony was surprised at his own coldness. This was the same Max, after all, to whom, a few weeks back, he had been so devoted.

  “Max, is all this really worth it? Suppose we let it go?”

  “Let it go?”

  “Let the investment go. Take a bust. It doesn’t have to be the end of the world, does it?”

  “Doesn’t it?” Max’s voice was hoarse, and he looked about the room as if he suspected eavesdroppers. “We’re up to the hilt, you and I. The firm’s in it, too. We’d lose our office!”

  “And what does that amount to?”

  “The law library? The furniture? The lease?”

  “Oh, to hell with them.”

  “To hell with them?” Max’s eyes were brimmed now with actual tears of outrage. “To hell with bankruptcy? Do you think, Tony Lowder, for one solitary second, that you could be appointed to any government job if you and I went bust in a mess like this?”

  Tony turned away impatiently. “You exaggerate. There’s no disgrace in bankruptcy. Anybody can take a licking on this market.”

  “Dream on. When Governor Horton sees how much you’ve been gambling, he won’t touch you with a ten-foot pole. You’ll seem too giddy. At best”

  “At best?”

  “Well, there’s something else.”

  “Come on, let’s have it.”

  “I’ve borrowed from some pretty unsavory characters.”

  “Damn it all, Max!”

  But Tony’s sudden anger seemed only to excite Max to a final pitch of exasperation. “Damn it all yourself, Tony! Don’t talk to me that way. Who the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think made the world aware that such a person as Tony Lowder even existed?”

  “I guess I know what I owe you, Max.”

  Max’s tone, at this small concession, slid at once from a screech to
a whine. “Oh, I don’t want your gratitude, Tony. I did it just as much for me as for you. The point is: we’re a team. You’re the star, sure, but the star still needs a manager. You’re my big gamble, in politics, in law. Hell, in life. You’re the only real, honest-to-goodness, in-it-to-the-finish friend I’ve ever had. We’ve got to stand together. And now…!” Max’s whine suddenly subsided, and some of his old enthusiasm seemed to be rekindled in his eyes. “We’re almost there, you know. We would have been, except for this filthy recession. Herron’s basically sound; so are the restaurants. With anything like half a chance we could clear a million. We’re so close, Tony. So close I can smell it. It’s bust or glory. We could be all set, and you with a political career that could take you anywhere. Anywhere at all!”

  Tony wondered why he did not care more. There was something eerie about the moments, like this one, when his ambition shut off, like the motor of an airplane, leaving him precariously to glide. One might have emotions; one might have sympathies; one might even have love, but without ambition it sometimes seemed that these other things simply jostled one aimlessly hither and yon, like eddying air currents, until the prevailing yank of gravity brought one to the inevitable smash.

  “You talk as if I wanted to go broke,” he said.

  “Sometimes I think you do. You know Joan Conway would give it to you.”

  “Oh, lay off Joan Conway.”

  “Well, don’t you!”

  Max with this gave a howl of laughter and ran around the board table when Tony grabbed at him. Tony caught him and twisted his arm behind his back.

  “Take it back.”

  “Oh, come on, Tony. Can’t you even screw for money like that?”

  Tony gave his arm an extra twist until Max squawked in pain and then let go in disgust. For Max actually liked it. His blue eyes had the fixed look of an ungulate overpowered by a carnivorous foe.

  “You’re a filthy-minded bastard,” Tony said flatly. “However, I’ll try to raise the money.”

  “That’s talking.”

  “Mind you, Joan’s only the last resort.”

  “I’m glad you can still talk of last resorts. Mine are all used.”

  “You should have stopped at the next-to-last.”

  “If I live, I’ll learn. But do it for your kids, Tony. Do it for Lee.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I haven’t known you for fifteen years without learning that the way to get something out of you is to appeal to your neurotic unselfishness.”

  “Get out of here.”

  ***

  Walking across the park to his parents’ apartment house, Tony considered his “neurotic unselfishness.” He had always been a bit embarrassed by this habit of preoccupation with the plights of others. It had seemed to turn the story of his life from the hard, clear lines of the kind of neoclassic drama that he had loved at college to a rosy Victorian tragicomedy, blurred by sentiment. It had kept him from establishing a proper distance between himself and his parents. And yet at the same time he knew that he judged them coolly enough. As a boy he had always been glad to get away from them, to school, to camp, to the houses of friends. Unlike most overfilial youths who turn their self-imposed duty into a pleasure or at least into an addiction, he obeyed its dictates only when they were clear. He seemed to have been at once strangely dominated and strangely free.

  The ancient yellow-faced crone with stringy white hair who opened the door of the apartment, the combination cook and cleaning woman (Tony never knew why she worked for the wages Dorothy paid her) grumbled that his mother was out.

  “I know, Nellie. I came early to have a word with Dad.”

  “Well, you’ll find him where you always find him. Gawking into that goon-box.”

  Tony paused in the doorway. It was not a room that told one much about its occupants. His parents had added nothing to Dorothy’s inherited furniture but certain latter-day necessities: the color TV set before which George Lowder passed his days, the gleaming nickel wheelchair which bore him to and from it, the encyclopedia and reference books that Dorothy had received as dividends from her book club. The rest was a faded reminder of the contractor ancestor’s brief grandeur: two imitation Louis XV bergères with needlepoint seats and a worn Aubusson carpet. The room itself had too few windows and too many doorless doorways, like a stage set adapted to multitudinous exits and entrances.

  George Lowder sat in his corner watching a baseball game. He was a poorly preserved seventy-eight. He had a bad heart, weak lungs and worse hearing, and he only rose from his wheelchair to take the few tottering turns about the room that his doctor required of him each morning and afternoon. Yet he managed to appear serene. His oblong face and near-bald scalp had acquired, in the torpid days of his terminal, interminable illness, a look of distinction quite inconsistent with the small facts of his biography. George appeared wise and benign, although in the days when he had still been able to get about he had struck people as possessing only the cheerfulness of the foolish and idle. If he had been painted fittingly in a conversation piece of the Lowder family, he would have been represented as a cipher. But by some miracle the cipher, at the end of its seventh decade, seemed to be filling out.

  Filling with what? Tony wondered. Perhaps with a new independence of Dorothy. George had never apologized for earning no money, for producing nothing by way of substitute, for letting his wife bear the burden of bringing up the children and planning the household, but now he sometimes seemed on the verge of blaming her for reproaching him in these matters. He seemed to be implying, in the bland way in which he monopolized the television, or interrupted her talks with callers, or even contradicted her—oh, those high, gay, stubbornly repeated contradictions and that ineradicable smile—that if he was making a late stand, it was better late than never. Perhaps he believed that it would be a benefit to his children to glimpse the man he might have been had she not smashed him.

  Tony shook his father’s soft bony hand and leaned down to kiss his cheek. George’s initial response, as always, was charming.

  “Ah, Tony, my dear boy, how delightful to see you. But you’re early. Your mother’s not home yet.”

  “You must listen to me on Channel Thirteen tomorrow night,” Tony told him. “I’m going to be on a panel discussing insiders and the stock market. What’ll you give me not to stare right into the camera and say: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I want you to know that my Dad, who’s watching us right now, was one of the sharpest customers’ men on Wall Street. Dad, this is the public. Public, this is Dad.’ And then we could cut in your voice saying: ‘The Public be damned.’”

  “You wouldn’t do that, Tony?” George asked in alarm. “That wouldn’t be the thing at all, you know.”

  “Well, you’ll never be sure I won’t unless you watch. Tomorrow night at nine.”

  “Oh, that’s bad luck. That’s the time I watch the Ethna Pollock hour.”

  “Do you mean to tell me, Dad, that you wouldn’t skip Ethna one night to hear me?”

  “Well, the trouble is you don’t get all the jokes in her program unless you keep up.”

  “I want you to hear me, Dad. I need your criticism.”

  “Very well, Tony, if you put it that way. Only you’ll have to tell your mother to remind me. My memory’s getting fearfully bad. I should forget my own head if it wasn’t screwed on.”

  George’s eyes kept reverting to the screen. It was not only that he didn’t want to hear Tony in the future; he didn’t want to hear him then.

  “Look, Dad. I know it must be sad to grow old and feel that all your faculties aren’t what they used to be. And I suppose you must have moments of feeling that you haven’t accomplished all the things in life you wanted to. But the point is that all that any of us have, old or young, is now. It’s just as important for you to be happy at seventy-eight as it is for Eric to be happy at twelve. I’d like to be closer to you. I’d like to understand you better.” He paused. “I love you, Dad.”

/>   “Well, Tony, it’s very nice of you to say that. You’ve always been a good boy. And a good son. Your mother’s forever making a great point of that.”

  “You don’t see it. I want to be a good son to you.”

  “You are, Tony. You are. And now if you don’t mind, I should like to go back to my baseball game. Can’t watch and talk, you know.”

  Dorothy Lowder came hurrying into the living room. “Tony, darling, if I’d known you were coming this early, I’d have been home. How much of you have I missed?”

  She took him over to the sofa by the fireplace where they always talked, leaving George to his game. She never lowered her voice when she talked about her husband, depending on his deafness.

  “Doctor Foster tells me he shouldn’t be left alone even for a few minutes,” she complained. “He says the next attack may come any time. I’ll have to get a day nurse or be chained to this apartment. Oh, Tony, how am I going to pay for it all?”

  “Dip into capital.”

  “But I’m dipping.”

  “Dip more. Submerge yourself.”

  “But is it fair to you and Philip and Susan? After all, it was my father’s money. He would never have wanted it all spent on George.”

  “Grandpa Daly didn’t anticipate the high cost of medicine today. You have to be damn near a millionaire to afford a decently comfortable death.”

  “How can you make so light of these terrible things?”

  “What should I do? Weep? Cheer up, Ma. You’ll get through.”

  “No one cares the way you do, Tony. No one comes in so faithfully.”

  “I thought Susan came in regularly.”

  “Exactly! Regularly. I feel myself being checked off. And as for Philip, of course, he only comes when he wants money.”

  “Like me.”

  “Like you, darling? What on earth are you talking about? You never ask me for anything.”

  “I’ve been waiting.” Tony watched her carefully, as suspicion began to creep into her eyes, suspicion rapidly followed by fear. “I have a proposition to put to you. Supposing you were to advance me a sum—a very large sum—against my ultimate share of your estate?”