I Come as a Theif Read online

  “How large?”

  “Well, say fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Tony Lowder! Tell me you’re joking.”

  “Now, hold on, Ma. I would agree to pay you ten percent on that for your lifetime. That’s twice what you’re getting on it now.”

  “But where would you get that kind of return?”

  “That’s my affair.”

  “And what would my security be?”

  “Me! Won’t you gamble on me, Ma?”

  “I’ll do no such thing. I won’t gamble on anything or anybody.” Dorothy Lowder clutched her fists to her breast as if she anticipated his forcing them open to release hidden gold. “What have I had all my wasted life but the smitch of property my poor old father managed to put together for me? And you’d take that! You’d plunder your mother and reduce her to the state of one of those miserable hags you see rooting in garbage pails for old newspapers!”

  Tony burst out laughing. “Don’t worry, Ma! Of course, I couldn’t take a penny after that. I was simply proposing the arrangement for your advantage. I can get my money in two or three other places.”

  Her half-open mouth and still pleading eyes suggested that she was torn between relief and the horrid suspicion that she might not have shown herself to best advantage. “I have to watch my money because of your father, of course,” she hastened to explain. “Where would he be now, I’d like to know, if I hadn’t kept together the little I have?”

  “He’d be nowhere at all,” Tony assured her. “You’re absolutely right. And if ever again I come to you with a proposition about money I want you to promise me you’ll kick my tail right out of here. Come on over to the desk, and I’ll put it in writing.”

  “Oh, Tony dearest, you do see my point? You’re not making fun of me?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Because I depend so on you. I couldn’t bear it if you thought I’d denied you anything unreasonably.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Do you know what your brother Philip had the gall to tell me when I told him he should honor his father and mother? That there ought to be a statute of limitations for that commandment.”

  Tony laughed again. “That sounds like Phil.”

  “You make a joke of everything, Tony. Sometimes I wonder if you take anything seriously. What about this money you need? You’re not in any real trouble, are you? I mean you haven’t done anything … well, wrong, have you?”

  “You mean do I need the money so I can put it back? Like my stealing those toys when I was twelve? No, Ma. Dad nipped my career in crime in the bud. I’m still pure as pure.”

  Dorothy got up now to put her arms around him, and he could feel her quickly beating heart. “Make us a drink, dearest,” she said. “You’ve given me such a scare.”

  ***

  When Tony had gone, Dorothy felt again the full bleakness in the room and shivered. All her experiences in the past hour had been peculiarly physical. Tony had seemed to be sitting before her in a very corporeal sense, big, heavier than usual, very still. She had noticed the darkness of his chin and upper lip. Had he needed a shave? Something appeared to have gone out of him, or maybe it had gone out of him only for her. Had it, unbelievably, been a part of her love for him? Not her affection, of course, not her mother instinct, nor her preoccupation with him, nor even her nervous need to kiss him, to touch him, but some part instead of that wonderful, all-embracing, eye-closing, velvet-soft, heart-uplifting, soul-redeeming, life-giving adoration on which she had simply built her life. Had any of that gone out—even for a moment—with the sudden suspicion that he might have committed a crime? Oh, no, never, what did she care about what peccadillos in the crazy male world of silly stocks and boring bonds her darling boy might have committed? It was this new thing, this lunatic scheme to rob her that had shaken her to the roots. As the idea came back on her in all its horror, she even regretted that she had not taken him up on his offer to put his promise in writing.

  “I think Tony looks tired,” she said to George.

  “Why shouldn’t he? He must be in a peck of trouble to need all that money.”

  Dorothy looked up in surprise and saw that her husband’s eyes had a malicious glint. “So you heard!”

  “You don’t treat your favorite son very well when he needs you, Dorothy.”

  “What do you think he’s done?”

  “Something crooked.”

  “George! The way you say that! You don’t even seem shocked. Your own son, a crook!”

  “My own son? What has that to do with it? Look whose grandson he is.”

  Dorothy stared, incredulous. “Are you referring to my father?”

  “Who else? He had no moral backbone. Irishmen can withstand anything but temptation. Tony’s the same way. I’ve always known it. Oh, I grant he’s been a good boy, considerate and kind, the best thing your family ever produced, as a matter of fact. But he’s still unable to stand up to any real temptation. I don’t suppose he can help himself. It’s in his blood.”

  What struck Dorothy most about this unprecedented harangue was that it seemed to be delivered quite without temper. George might have been discussing Tony’s basal metabolism. He was emphatic—as if it were a point that he had made a thousand times over—but he was also bland. He sat there in his wheelchair, for all the world as if he were resting from a lifetime of successes, offering Olympian judgment on a son whom he seemed to regard so little his as to exempt him from all responsibility. Dorothy, searching frantically for a weapon to hurt him with, suddenly found it.

  “You say that about Tony? Tony, who’s the one child of yours who’s ever cared for you?”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t a good son.”

  And he continued to blink at her. When he stopped at last and closed his eyes for a little nap he might have been the carcass of her family life.

  4

  Joan Conway’s first reaction to the doctor’s announcement that there was a recurrence of the cancer in her uterus only six months after the operation that was supposed to have cut it all out was one of passionate anger. It was too cheaply ironical, too vulgarly banal that at thirty-nine, with her beauty and her husband’s fortune both still intact, she should face the prospect of imminent extinction. Oh, could she not see the complacent nodding, hear the complacent sighs. “Well, well, she thought she owned the world, didn’t she? What good will her diamonds and her Louis XIII interiors do her now? Her sables and her cars? Vanitas vanitatum!”

  He was young, Dr. Reid. Her old doctor had himself died of cancer. His successor was still embarrassed by death, though at least he knew enough to avoid the impertinence of sympathy. He spoke quietly as he seemed to study the card in his hand. Joan raged inwardly at the dimly lit room with its Metropolitan Museum reproductions of Cézanne and Van Gogh, and its ghastly green furniture. Yet the wretched room would survive her.

  “Will you operate again?”

  “Probably. There’ll have to be further tests.”

  “Is there any hope? No, skip that. I know the answer. There’s always hope. I remember what Doctor Audreys said when I asked him if he told patients the truth. ‘I don’t have to. They don’t want to know.’ Well, neither do I.”

  “I never meant to imply there was no hope, Mrs. Conway.”

  “And I shan’t ask you to. But promise me one thing, and I’ll get my husband to endow a hospital for you. Promise me, if it’s going to be long and painful—or even short and painful—that you’ll give me something to finish it off.”

  “Mrs. Conway!” He stood up now, and his eyes, for all he could do to control them, were sympathetic, damn them! “You mustn’t jump to such terrible conclusions. There are plenty of things we can still do. There’s radium. We’ll start treatments next week. I want you to come back to the hospital.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as you can.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “I have a room reserved for tomorrow.”

  “Tha
t’s much too soon. I’ll call you.” She jumped up as she saw that he was about to protest. “I think I’ve had enough for today, Doctor, don’t you? Forgive me.”

  She walked the ten blocks home up Park Avenue. Of course, it had to be a beautiful day, the sky a mocking blue. What else could she possibly expect from a world that, except for the old dead doting parents, had always viewed her with dislike and distrust? Oh hypocrite world that cared only for money and things and hated those who admitted to caring! Nature itself had been against her, for the womb that had denied her babies would now deny her life.

  The apartment was empty except for Len, the perfect butler, who always knew when to be silent. Norry, thank God, was away on one of the constant business trips that nourished his illusion that his executive talents explained his vice-presidency in Conway & Son. The maids had the morning off because of the dinner party that night. She told Len that she would see no one, speak to no one, and then roamed the living room and library in consoling solitude. Did death exist if one were alone? She touched the bronze Italian figures on the tables; she fingered the Cellini cups; she placed the palms of her hands against the faces of marble statues. The way to leave such things? The way to leave the great Luke ruby glowing, warm, soul-warming, in the blue safe of her bedroom above?

  People even criticized her taste. Imagine doing rooms in early seventeenth century! But Louis XIV, Louis XV were so trite. She loved the austerity of the linen fold paneling and of the tall, gaunt, straight-backed chairs which brought out the rich, exploding colors of the paintings: Vouet, Champaigne, Latour and the glorious Rubens. Some of the furniture would bring little enough at auction when Norry’s next wife sold it, for Joan had pulled the divans apart to insert cushions and make them unexpectedly luxurious, but who cared? She had devised a home that would please at once the most confirmed aesthete and the most abandoned sybarite. It would never be appreciated, but what had been appreciated that she had ever touched?

  She felt exhausted, but she knew it was only because of what Dr. Reid had told her. Lying down full length on a sofa she switched on her dictaphone and continued the memoirs that had been her only effective distraction since the advent of illness.

  “Debutante year. 1949. The beginning and the end. The start of real life and the end of that life in reality. I was the last debutante of the western world. The last one, that is, to want to be a debutante, to believe in being a debutante. To believe that it was a great and thrilling and wonderful thing to be a debutante. Not that I ever admitted it, oh, no! I was not such a fool. I knew the fashion. I knew one had to play down the debut, question its worth, voice a preference for travel or work among the lowly. I knew one had to swear one went through it only to please one’s family. Yet the fiendish thing about philistines is that for all their crudeness and for all their insensitivity, they somehow manage to smell one out. They knew I wanted to be a debutante. That I believed in being a debutante. And they feared and hated me for it.”

  Joan’s eyes were wet at the picture of the lonely, angry girl that she had been. She wondered if there were anything in her life she would have done differently, given the chance. Would they have hated her less?

  “Except Mummie and Daddy. Poor darling dowdy old Mummie and Daddy. How ashamed I was of them and how much I miss them! If I have deserved this cancer, it was for treating them as I did. Oh, I was good enough to them after I married Norry, but everything was easy then. Before, in that long before, I suffered tortures over Mummie’s dumpy figure, her fussy clothes, her misplaced kindliness, her big lugubrious features, her fatiguing loquacity, her habit of inadvertently sitting with her knees apart so everyone could see her old white flabby thighs—and more. And Daddy’s horrible fatness, his silly laughter, his watery eyes, his bad breath. I saw how they bored the world. I even saw that they saw it themselves. They hung on to their poor little peg of social position and accumulated the income of Daddy’s scrap of a trust, all for the glory of their phoenix of a debutante daughter. They toddled about the fashionable watering places; they plucked elbows and murmured in ears; they suffered the crudest rebuffs, just to make themselves soft ashes from which I could rise. Ah, poor darlings, it is almost worth believing in extinction just to know that you can’t see me now.”

  She wondered if she cared if anyone should ever play the tape. Norry? Why should she care? Why should he? What was left but truth?

  “Why did everyone see through me? Did I allow mockery to slip into the service that my lips rendered? Was it that the pale, pasty beauty that I affected, set in a frame of long raven hair, was too reminiscent of the era of real debutantes? Why did even poor Norry, that last fruit of the Pittsburgh tree so long plucked by New York virgins, suspect me of mercenary motives? Why did I so nearly lose him to that little brown bundle of spite, Mamie Rivers, who was somehow able to veil her own passion for gold behind her own bright eyes? Oh, but they couldn’t resist me; Norry couldn’t resist me. Even knowing me they couldn’t resist me, and, damn them all, whatever happens, I’ve had the world—I’ve had the whole goddam glittering world. It’s not much, God knows, but it’s better to have had it than to have had nothing! Nothing, anyway, but cant and hypocrisy and the pretense of living for anyone but your own sole, solitary, bitchy, selfish self.”

  She switched off the machine as she saw Len in the doorway. “Blast you, Len, what do you want?”

  “Sorry, Ma’am. Will you speak to Mr. Lowder?”

  “Of course, 111 speak to Mr. Lowder.” She sat up and picked the gray telephone out of the linen-fold box. “If you’re telling me you’re not coming for dinner, Tony, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “It’s not that,” his voice replied. “Lee just phoned to say she has flu.”

  “But you’re coming?”

  “Unless that puts your table out.”

  “Kid on. Look, Tony, come early, will you? Tell Lee I’ve changed the hour to seven.”

  “Shell never believe that.”

  “Well, then tell her it’s business. God damn it, I’m a client, aren’t I? Just because you’ve gone into government doesn’t mean you can throw me over. I’ll see you at seven. Not a minute later.”

  Tony’s voice became stubborn. “You think just because you helped finance my campaign, you can order me around.”

  “Damn right I do.”

  “Well, think again.”

  She changed her tone to a mocking whine. “All right, Albert, it’s not the Queen. It’s Vicky, your loving wife. Now will you come? Please?”

  When he had rung off, Joan felt better. If there had been no afternoon to fill until dinner time she might have been almost content. There was something about Tony that always dispelled fear—probably the simple fact that he was immune to it. While she was with him, she shared some of his immunity. And she could sleep until six. She had a pill for that.

  ***

  At eight o’clock the big room, brightly lit, smelled agreeably of incense. Joan, in white, wearing her rubies, drinking a glass of undiluted gin, pretended for a while to listen to Tony’s political chatter.

  “I feel so content and secure,” she interrupted. “Do you ever feel content and secure? All of a sudden? As if you and I existed all alone and nobody else was really real?”

  “I feel that way sometimes after I’ve drunk as much as you have. What’s got into you tonight, Joan? Your guests will be here in a minute.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t worry. Do you ever worry?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Over what?”

  “Oh, over something that you haven’t had to worry about for many a year.”

  “Money, I suppose.”

  “How you say that! As if it were something trivial, faintly absurd. Even contemptible.”

  “It is. Believe me, Tony. It is. It’s worse. It’s a bore.”

  “Then why not get rid of it?”

  “It’s not mine. It’s Norry’s. Oh, I have a little, of course. Would you like it? Shall I give it to you?” Tony wa
s pushing the crystal ashtray on the table back and forth in a gesture of impatience. “But I mean it,” she protested. “It’s not just the gin. You’re my only real friend, and I love you. Why should you be worried when I have money? Why should I not share it with such a friend? How much do you need?” Tony, however, continued to brood. “Seriously, lover, how much?”

  “Perhaps I could accept a loan,” he muttered.

  “Certainly. Speak to Mr. Nash at the bank. I’ll tell him to do anything you say.”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m going to grab the moon. Forty thousand would be a Godsend. Forty thousand for three months.”

  The specificity of his need was like a cold rag rubbed suddenly into her face, and she was back in Dr. Reid’s office with the cheap reproductions of Van Gogh. She trembled all over. Tony watched her change of expression with surprise. Then he shrugged.

  “I see how it is,” he said, now sullen. “You want to help, but you hate me for needing it. You rich all belong to the same club. You’re better off sticking with each other.”

  “Do you know that I may be dying?”

  “Jesus, Joan!”

  “It’s come back.”

  “Joan!” He did not move or even take her hand, but she felt the shock of his sympathy and was instantly better. “How bad?”

  “That bad. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll be going back to the hospital for treatment. Maybe I’ll be all right. Maybe not. Oh, who cares? Just don’t talk about it.”

  “Look, Joan. I wasn’t serious about that loan. Lee and I made a bet last night. She said you were like all rich people. That you gave oodles of money to charity but hated giving it to friends. She said you were actually afraid of giving it to friends. As if their poverty might be catching.”

  “Lee said that?”

  “Yes, but she was wrong, and I win the bet. I tested you, and you immediately offered me the money. I was simply picking a quarrel to get out of it when you broke up my little game with this hideous news.”

  Len appeared in the doorway and nodded to Joan.