I Come as a Theif

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I haven’t. I’ll go for a walk. I’ll go to the zoo. And tomorrow, I’ll let you know. Will that be time enough?”

  Max showed at least that he could still laugh. “Don’t be eaten by the lions,” he cried. “Don’t be a martyr to your own non-God.”

  7

  Tony walked in Central Park for an hour, but he found it unexpectedly difficult to bring his mind to any considered appraisal of Max’s proposition. It was like walking resolutely down a long corridor to a particular door and placing one’s hand firmly on the knob only to be distracted, before turning it, by some fool at the end of the corridor shouting one’s name or perhaps by some fool just shouting. At one point, by the boat pond, watching the elaborate model of a schooner making its precarious way across the water, he wondered in despair if it would be possible for him to do any thinking about Max’s plan at all. And it was sufficiently extraordinary that he could not even make out whether the procrastination of his mental processes was operating for or against the plan.

  Sitting on an empty bench, he tried putting the question to himself aloud: “Are you going to do what Max proposes?” Then he opened his lips to let the answer emerge, as if by some process of free association. None came. Was there no idea, no image in his mind? None but the banality that one crime must lead to another? “What rot,” he exclaimed aloud. Why should he have to assume the very proposition that he sought to rebut: that man was not free? Man was free. Free to commit one crime, or two, or three—or none.

  He decided that he might think better in company and went home. It was six o’clock, and Lee and both children were having their daily argument in the living room. Isabel greeted him with her usual passionate appeal.

  “Mummie’s been criticizing the young. She says we don’t get any joy out of life. That we’re discouraged before we’re even started. But she won’t see that’s only one side of the picture. We’re discouraged because we care. We care about people being shot and tortured and starved all over the world. I think we’re going to be known as the ‘moral generation.’”

  Tony stared at the girl as though she had just penetrated his secret. Then he laughed. “Why moral? It’s just a fashion, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Daddy! A fashion?”

  “Sure. Don’t you think our descendants may look back on our worrying about ghettos and racial prejudice the way we look back at Catholics worrying about Luther?”

  “No! Worrying about people’s religion was silly.”

  “You say that because you’ve never had any religion,” Eric put in.

  “Well, have you, Eric?” his father asked.

  “Perhaps not. But I see that churches may have the right idea. They go in for absolutes. Isabel’s full of sentimental goo.”

  “Oh, Eric, you and your absolutes. You’re nothing but a Nazi.”

  “Children!” Lee protested. “Your father hasn’t put in a long day at the office to come home to this.”

  Tony looked at her as he had just looked at Isabel. Did she see it too? But he was much too touchy. “No, it’s all right, I like it,” he said easily. “It’s funny to consider all the things we do perfectly freely, even thoughtlessly, that we could have been burned alive for a few hundred years ago. Think of all the peccadillos the Holy Office used to punish so hideously. Think of the tongues that were cut out for slandering public officials and the men who were jailed for unionizing. And when we come to sex…”

  “I believe,” Lee interrupted drily, “that in some benighted eras a man could even be put to death for making love to another man’s wife.”

  Tony turned to her, straight-faced. “Surely there couldn’t have been many who did anything as wicked as that.”

  “Oh, Daddy!” Isabel exclaimed scornfully. “You’re not with it at all. That happens all the time. Now we heard at school that Mary Burton’s father…”

  “Isabel!” Lee protested. “That’s enough. Now will you both please go to your rooms and finish your homework. You can come back and sit with Daddy while we’re having supper.”

  Tony went to the bar table to mix the cocktails. He was suddenly elated by the discovery that he could be two persons at once—two happy persons. All his life, it seemed, he had been afraid of not being the person whom his loved ones loved. He had shared the common human suspicion that if his mother, his wife, his friends could once peek behind the mask that he (and perhaps everyone else) wore, they would no longer love the person so revealed to them. And so, with total revelation, human love would disappear from the globe, except perhaps Tony Lowder’s, for it was his peculiarity to like people’s faults. But now it struck him that even if Lee would not have loved the Tony behind the mask, it did not have to matter so long as the mask remained. Two Tony Lowders could exist simultaneously and with equal reality: the Tony Lowder who was conventionally honest and whom Lee Lowder loved, and the Tony Lowder who was a crook and whom Lee Lowder might not have loved. He even began to feel the possibilities of continued exhilaration in the manipulation of these two Tonys.

  When he brought Lee her drink, she told him the big news of the day. “Governor Horton called. He said he’d tried your office, but you were out. He wanted you to know that he hadn’t forgotten you. He said if he couldn’t wangle the SEC, he might be able to get you an assistant secretaryship at the Treasury. Oh, Tony, would we move to Washington?”

  He felt a throb of pity as he made out the urgency in her eyes. Lee had filled out a bit with the years, and there was a hint, just a hint, of middle-aged dumpiness in her hips and shoulders, but her snubby, turned-up nose, her large brown watery eyes, her curly black hair, her desperate intensity, all contributed to preserve the sentimental image of the little girl that held his imagination in so tight a vise.

  “I didn’t know you loved Washington.”

  “Oh, darling, we need a change. We’ve been marking time ever since the election. We haven’t gone back to the old life, and we haven’t really started a new one. I want you to get on with your political career. I want you to get on with the job of becoming a great man.”

  “Since when did you become so ambitious?”

  “I’m not in the least ambitious—you know that. It’s just that I’ve finally seen what you must become. And that we’ve all got to help you become it.”

  “Or else?”

  “Or else?” She shrugged as if this were a matter of no conceivable importance. “Or else we miss the boat. I don’t know how much that matters, but, generally speaking, boats should not be missed.”

  “And when did you decide all this?”

  She looked at him keenly for a moment, as if she were about to say something for which she might be punished. “That night you went to Joan’s for dinner and didn’t come home.”

  “You never mentioned that.”

  “No, but I imagine my silence was thunderous.”

  “Would you like to hear what happened? Joan’s desperately ill, you know.”

  “I do know. And I don’t in the least want to hear what happened. If you tell me you only sat and held her hand all night, I’ll be disgusted. And if you tell me something else, I’ll be equally disgusted. Let us leave it that a gentleman has to do what a dying lady asks.”

  He tried to make out what she was feeling from the fixed half-smile in her eyes. He knew that smile, and he knew that it could mean different things. “Very well,” he agreed. “But what does that have to do with me and politics?”

  “I did a great deal of thinking that night. I began to see that I had made a mistake—the commonest mistake that women make—in trying to get hold of you. In trying to be part of you or own part of you. It’s so banal, so vulgar, that eternal clutching after a man, to avoid the bathos of loneliness. To avoid the basic human job of learning to live with oneself. Soul fleeing—that’s what we’re always doing. Running away from our own souls.” She seemed to be working herself up to an actual fit of temper with herself. “I realized at last that being jealous of Joan was batting my head against a wall. Th
at if it wasn’t Joan, it would be somebody else. Or something else. For what I began to see was that Joan wasn’t all sex. That she’s not unlike politics to you.”

  “Well, of course, she’s been a great contributor.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean that she’s part of a crowd. The crowd that plays such a large role in your consciousness. The crowd that logically, sensibly, may one day become your constituents. The crowd of which I, like Joan, can be a part. The only way one can become a part of somebody else is by becoming a part of the thing they’re part of.”

  Tony shook his head. “You’re angry with me.”

  She stepped up and threw her arms about him. “Darling, I’m not. Believe me, I’m not. I’m trying so hard to be good and sensible. And to be happy. That’s the point.”

  “You’re right. That is the point.”

  “And I’ve been thinking. I don’t want you to give that extra time to me and the children I used to ask for. That was being as bad as your mother. I was only thinking of myself. I want you to get on with your career. Full time. And I want to help you. All the way.”

  Her eyes were pleading, sincerely pleading. Whatever her motive, she had certainly convinced herself. Had he reached the point where he expected her to convince him?

  “I will, Lee.”

  Later that night, after she had gone to sleep, he lay awake, trying to take in the fact of what he had decided to do. For how could he now tell that trusting girl that her new hopes for him, on which she was building a new life for her loving heart, were to end in his political failure and bankruptcy? As the hours went by and he lay stiller than he could ever remember lying on a sleepless night, he tried to fight the persistently encroaching idea that what was going to happen on the morrow was a birth, the birth, forty-three years delayed, of Anthony Lowder. For up until now, it more and more struck him, he had existed like something floating in space, subject entirely to the attraction or repulsion of other objects that happened to come within his sphere. Now something was happening within himself. A little muffled motor, deep in the recesses of his psyche, had started to revolve, to throb, to whir. Anthony Lowder was going to start his own motion in a black void, and it could hardly matter where that motion took him. Success or failure were less important than the fact that he was making his own decision—independently and unsentimentally. The only thing that created a small doubt was the idea, implanted by Max, that he might be going to commit the crime for the sake of committing it—to round out and perfect his own little squalid existentialist story.

  After three in the morning he fell asleep and dreamed that he had done what Max had proposed. It was a curious dream in that what he had done varied in no particular from what he and Max had discussed that afternoon. It seemed not so much a dream as a rehearsal. When he awoke, he was drenched in the sweat of relief that it was only a dream.

  “Perhaps it’s a warning,” he told his haggard reflection as he shaved. “Perhaps I had better give up the whole thing.”

  And then he smiled because it occurred to him that he was afraid. Would there never be an end to sentimentality? When would he learn it was not a question of courage or manliness or morality but simply of choice?

  Before Lee or either of the children was awake he went into the living room and dialed Max’s number.

  8

  Tony at fourteen had had a religious experience. At least for almost four years he believed it to have been one. It was never repeated, but its effect on him was nonetheless powerful. It followed what he always afterward considered his initiation in crime.

  His young brother’s passion in life was a dolls’ house. Philip at twelve was a large fat boy with black greasy hair and a shrill, aggressive disposition. He refused to make the smallest compromise with a world that largely bored him. He liked the movies; he liked to exchange dirty stories with a small number of unattractive friends; he liked to play with and embellish the elaborate dolls’ house that he maintained in his bedroom in the Riverside Drive apartment.

  This dolls’ house was a cause of constant mortification to his parents, particularly to his mother who knew too well with what glee the Dalys must have discussed the masculine deficiency which it represented. She banished it to Philip’s room and refused to buy him dolls or furniture for it. But Philip, who derived a dusky delight in flinging in hostile faces the unorthodoxy of his pleasures, dragged visitors in to see his treasure and caused a mocking hilarity at family gatherings by loudly specifying the miniature ornaments that he needed as his Christmas or birthday due. Dorothy Lowder found, like many censors before her, that she had only exposed her shame to the spotlight. Tony decided that Philip should have one ally in the family.

  He had to break down the natural distrust of the maverick for the regular fellow, of Mummie’s cross for Mummie’s darling. An older brother, unlatching the side of the dolls’ house for a peek, must have seemed the most Trojan of horses. But Tony was persistent, and Philip, for all his snarling independence, needed a friend. When Tony promised to get him a French divan for the dolls’ house parlor, Philip was interested.

  “But how will you get it? They’re very expensive.”

  “I might ask Grandpa Daly. He promised me five dollars for swimming that mile last summer. He never paid up.”

  “He never will!” Philip snorted in derision. Grandpa Daly, the family god, had clay feet to the younger generation. “Besides, he hates my dolls’ house.”

  “Well, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  But Tony got nowhere with Grandpa Daly, who gave him a lecture on the poverty of his own childhood in County Cork, and anyway he had discovered just the divan that he wanted for Philip, which was not to be had for money. It was a beautiful little green French sofa in the splendid dolls’ house of Inez Feldman, only daughter of a rich Jewish banker who occupied a baroque mansion just north of the Lowders’ apartment house. Inez was a fat, spoiled, opinionated brat with a snooty smile and pigtails, and she didn’t give a hoot about any of her many things, but that didn’t mean she would give them away. She liked Tony, but when he had asked her to make him a present of an old Howard Pyle book that she never looked at, she had turned him down flat, saying it had been a present from a favorite uncle. He knew her type. Things acquired a value in Inez’s eyes simply by being coveted by others.

  Tony was certain, however, that she would never miss the sofa. In the first place, he could rearrange the little room so its absence would hardly show. In the second, the dolls’ house was only one of four of Inez’s, and she was already bored with it. The question was purely of the chances of detection, for there was no comparison between Inez’s and Philip’s need. In Tony’s mind theft was associated exclusively with money. Taking things came under the lesser head of “swiping,” a form of misdemeanor about which grown-ups could be expected to carry on but which enjoyed much less opprobrium among his contemporaries. There were gradations, of course, even in swiping. One did not take another boy’s watch, or his camera or (assuming this were possible) his bicycle. But a useless bit of dolls’ furniture owned by a spoiled girl who did not even care about it … well, only a prude would carp about that. Besides, he would not be taking it for himself.

  The theft, or purloinment, or simple swiping, was accomplished as easily as Tony had foreseen, and Inez was quite unconscious of her loss. The epidsode filled him with elation. He might have been a prince of olden days who finds himself endowed with the power to heal by touch, or, more appropriately, a Robin Hood whose destiny is to redress, in his own particular fashion, the injustices of contemporary society. He had taken a trump from Inez’s hand to provide a better balance in Philip’s.

  When Susan, their older sister, who was always peering into Philip’s dolls’ house and making mean remarks about it, saw the divan, she recognized it at once as Inez’s.

  “You swiped it from her!” she accused Philip.

  “I did not! Tony gave it to me.”

  Susan turned in surprise to Tony
. Inez might well have given a present to her handsome brother, but why a doll’s divan? “Inez has a funny way of showing her partiality.”

  “Not at all,” Tony retorted. “I told her I wanted it for Philip.”

  As an answer it seemed to fit, but Tony knew that Susan would make a point of checking his story with Inez. For there was a grown-up quality in Susan. She could always be counted on to do the obvious thing and hence to catch people. Yet he had no sense of alarm, or even of apprehension. The game was becoming exciting.

  “Well, I’ll ask her next time to give you something for me,” Susan said.

  And she did this, the very next Sunday, when Inez and her father came to lunch. Inez looked blank.

  “You remember, Inez,” Tony said coolly. “The little divan from your dolls’ house you gave me for Philip’s? I asked you for it as a Valentine’s Day present.”

  Inez looked so bewildered that Tony felt embarrassed for her obtuseness. Then her features seemed suddenly to jump in recognition.

  “Oh, the little sofa, of course!” she cried. “Naturally, I gave it to you! It was for Philip, that’s right. Do you like it, Philip? Does it fit your room? You must show it to me after lunch.”

  But after lunch Tony had to walk home with Inez, and when her father had gone upstairs for his nap, he had to kiss her many times in the conservatory. For years afterward ferns would be associated in his mind with wet, thick lips, with the scent of gum drops, with perspiration. He had learned about crime. Now he learned about punishment.

  It was not necessary, however, to be caught. Only fools were caught. It was going to take more than Inez’s giggles and squirms to make him give up this brave new weapon. A week later he took a miniature piano from the apartment of a friend whom neither Susan nor Philip knew and warned Philip not to show it off to guests. Then he took a book from the library of a friend’s father for Susan (he told her it had been a present) and a china ashtray for his mother (he told her he had bought it with his saved allowance). At last he decided that it was time to do something for himself, and he took a yellow fountain pen from a department store counter. This last somehow struck him as a final commitment.