I Come as a Theif

by Louis Auchincloss

  Max shrugged. “She still may.”

  “Oh, I know. But it gives me a chance.”

  Max laughed nastily. “Come on, Bogardus. Admit it. It gives you a chance. To deprive Tony of his big moment. Because you hate his guts!”

  Bogardus rose and nodded his head toward the door. “I guess our interview is over, Mr. Leonard.”

  8

  Central Park had come to be for Tony a symbol of release from his tensions. He walked there in the early morning when he couldn’t sleep and again in the late afternoon, before coming home. It was early spring and damp, and the city that formed the concrete oblong frame to this blessed patch of green might have been all the sins of the universe pressed about a single soul. But here, in the middle of that frame, strolling in the Mall, sitting on a bench by a lake, he could breathe.

  Each day of the week that he had decided to give Max to make up his mind had been tenser than the one before. The state of euphoria into which he and Lee had entered, the burst of their first enthusiasm, had not lasted. He was still convinced that he had to do what he was going to do, but Lee had become the prey of inevitable doubts. Her nervousness was now pitiable. They had agreed not to discuss the matter, but as no other topic was possible, their evenings had been full of wretched silences. Lee would stare at the children with eyes of painful doubt and apprehension, so that even Isabel had begun to ask her what was wrong. Tony yearned to have it all over. He was afraid of giving in to Lee’s implied appeal. He was afraid of going back to the old state.

  On Thursday morning, walking in the Mall, just as he was beginning to convince himself that he was not bound to Max by his own unilateral decision to wait a full week, he became conscious of a man on a bench who was looking at him. He was a young man, in a light suit with a pink tie, and very thick blond hair. He got up now and walked beside Tony.

  “Keep walking,” he muttered. “Lassatta sent me.”

  Tony stopped immediately and faced him. “I don’t care to keep walking,” he said coldly. “If you have something to tell me, tell me.”

  The man’s eyes moved from side to side.

  “Your pal Leonard’s gone to the police. He’s blabbed his story and asked for protection. They got him hid away already.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know. Lassatta knows. It happened last night. The word to you is keep cool. Deny everything. They can’t prove anything through Leonard. The meetings, the money, they were all part of a political deal.”

  “Why were they secret then?”

  “You couldn’t afford to be connected with Lassatta. It fits like a glove.”

  Tony frowned. It did fit. For what could the government prove about Menzies, Lippard? To do nothing was what he had been bribed to do, and nothing was exactly what he had done. It was Max’s word against his, and he knew which would be the better witness.

  “I see,” he said. “It fits.”

  “I can tell Lassatta you’ll go along?”

  Tony shook his head. “You can tell Lassatta I shall do precisely as I think best.”

  The man’s face quickly lost all expression. “Better be careful, pal.”

  “I shall be careful.”

  “You could get hurt. Very hurt.”

  “So could others.”

  “You got two kids. Just remember that.”

  Tony felt the tips of his fingers tingle. He had a vision of his hands moving, independently of himself, like two flying things, two bats, and fixing themselves murderously around this little man’s pudgy neck. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply to push away the image. It would be such ecstasy to kill.

  “Scram,” he muttered.

  “Just remember what I say, pal. Just remember those kids. Nobody’s asking you to do anything but save your goddam neck.”

  “You can tell Lassatta you have delivered your message,” Tony said and, turning abruptly, he walked away. He wondered, almost without interest, if the man would shoot.

  He decided to go back to the apartment. Lee would be startled, thinking he had gone downtown. He paused before his front door to look at his watch. Eight-thirty. The children would have left for school. From inside he could hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner. He rang the bell, and it stopped. Lee opened the door and stared in astonishment.

  “Did you forget your key?” she asked. “What are you home for?” When he did not answer, she took in what must have been his ghastly pallor for she cried out: “Oh, Tony, something’s wrong!”

  “Perhaps. I’m not exactly sure.” He came in quickly and closed the door. “Max has gone to the police. Or the U.S. Attorney. He’s told everything.”

  Lee’s eyes closed. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Why?”

  “He’s scared to death. He wants to be protected.”

  “From whom?”

  “From the bad guys.”

  “And you? How does it leave you?”

  “Presumably I’ll be arrested.”

  “Oh, Tony, how sordid!” She gave a little groan. “And the other way would have been so fine.”

  They sat in the living room, and he told her of his talk in the park, everything but the threat to the children. She followed him intently, with great, worried eyes.

  “But this puts an entirely different complexion on things!” she exclaimed.

  “I don’t see why.”

  “That man in the park is perfectly right. You must deny everything. You can’t let that sniveling little Max get away with this. Now you’ll have to admit I was right about him. Let’s leave him with his horrid little lie smeared all over his nasty face.”

  “Lie?”

  “Well, it will be a lie, the way he’ll tell it. Because nobody will ever give you the credit of having meant to confess. You’ll appear not only guilty but stupid. Oh, darling, I can’t stand it! We’ll have the rest of our lives to be good in, but don’t let Max smear you with this. It’s your duty to fight it. Your duty to Eric and Isabel.”

  “My duty to give perjured testimony?”

  “Oh, don’t use legal terms on me. We’re beyond that. Think of the effect on Eric. You and I agreed that the only way to get him through this thing was to convince him you’d redeemed yourself by going to the authorities and coming clean. We thought he might even come to admire you for it. But this way! Oh, no, Tony. It won’t do.”

  Tony rose and walked to the fireplace. “Do you really propose, Lee, that I get up in court and brand Max as a liar? That I ally myself with men like Lassatta and Menzies?”

  “If it’ll work, yes. Oh, Tony, listen to me.” She followed him about the room now, making her appeal in clipped, tense syllables. “I know you think I’m a cynic, but I’m not. It’s a maneuver, that’s all. To gain time till you can find a better ground to take a stand on. You keep Max from destroying you and your family. Which is what he’s after, believe me. You haven’t got the moral right to destroy your capacity to do good. To make yourself contemptible to your own children!”

  “You listen to me now, Lee. Believe me, love, I know what I’m doing. And I know what the risks are. I think I’m almost glad it’s too late for me to confess. There’s something so boy scout and cheap movie about striding up to an officer and saying: ‘Take me. I did it. With my little hatchet!’ It’s a cleaner, sounder business to be caught. Caught red-handed. Then there’s no nonsense about being a pompous ass. Everything is simplified. I did wrong. I got caught. I went to jail. Try to forgive me, if I prefer it this way.”

  Lee covered her face and sobbed violently. “I might. If you had mentioned me and the children once in that prosy sermon. Just once! But there’s no room for us in your masturbatory romance.”

  Everything seemed to go out inside Tony at this. His heart was as cold as a sunless, unpeopled world, a vision of dark and icy night. “Help me, Lee, can’t you?” he begged. “I don’t know if I can get through this without you.”

  “Oh, yes, you can!” she cried furiously. “You can perform to a grandstand of Tony
Lowders.” As she looked up at him, her eyes narrowed. “That man in the park? Did he threaten you?”

  “They always do.”

  “But he did?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the children, what about them? Did he threaten them?”

  Tony hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Oh, Tony!”

  “But it’s only bluff you know. They never take it out on children. Anyway, you’ll have police protection.”

  Lee’s drawn face seemed to show that she was divided between incredulity and renewed outrage. “You mean,” she half-whispered, “you’ll actually risk the lives of your children—never mind about mine—I know you don’t care about that—but you’ll actually risk the lives of Eric and Isabel, rather than let Max down?”

  “Rather than lie. Rather than save Lassatta and Menzies. Rather than play their vicious game. It’s got to stop somewhere, Lee.”

  “But why do my children have to pay for it?” Lee was approaching hysteria. “My poor innocent babes? Damn you, Tony Lowder, must we all perish to swell your ego?”

  “Please, Lee.” But her violence was helping him. He thought he saw his way through now. That icy darkness would not have to last. “You and the children will be all right.”

  “You’re a monster!” Her face seemed to crumple up, and she turned away. “I’m a fool to plead with you. Nothing makes a dent on you.”

  “I can do what I’m doing and still love you.”

  “Go to hell, will you? Will you please go to hell!”

  “I’ve already been there,” he said, and caught her hands as she jumped up and started pounding his chest.

  9

  Lee sometimes felt that she—or the incidence of marriage—had interrupted the central progress of Tony’s development. It was not that she was under any illusion that she had dominated him. But she wondered if the husband of her middle years had not lost some of the incisiveness of action of the younger man to whom she had engaged herself. It was as if marriage had been a kind of roadblock which had split up the oncoming force of Tony Lowder, so that part of it had had to go around, part to slip over the top, part even to seep or tunnel under. The force had all got past, one way or another, but it had shown up on the other side in plural form. Tony’s activities were now smaller versions of what she fancied had been previously a central drive, some philanthropic, some sentimental, some perhaps purely selfish. The different Tonys to whom she thus found herself married: the Tony who cared about the neighborhood poor, the Tony who fussed over his relatives, the Tony who went into speculative and unsuccessful ventures with Max Leonard, the Tony who spent hours talking with Joan Conway, were all different in their attitudes to Lee.

  “If I had been a strong woman like Joan, you’d never have married me,” she told him once, in their early years.

  “Joan’s not as strong as she looks.”

  “I’ll buy that. What I meant was that if I’d looked as strong as Joan, you’d never have married me.”

  “I can’t imagine your looking as strong as Joan.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But whatever you’d looked like, darling, you’d have surely been. And it might have been terrible to he as strong as Joan looks. Anyway, you wouldn’t have been Lee Bogardus, so how could I have married you?”

  “Are you glad you did?”

  “Silly.”

  “What have I really ever done for you?”

  “You mean that Joan couldn’t have done?”

  “Exactly!” she cried again.

  He paused, trying for her sake to be serious. “You’ve turned me back into a feeling person.”

  “Back?”

  “Well, I’d been one as a boy. At least I think so.”

  “And you stopped being one?”

  “Oh for years.”

  “Are you sure it was a good thing to go back? Maybe you had it made.”

  “I wasn’t living.”

  Well, it was all very well to have this kind of talk in the first two years of marriage when one did not basically believe that anything could go wrong with love. She and Tony could risk any questions and almost any speculations. But when she had been married five years and caught him for the first time in a premeditated lie, her whole life seemed to fall apart.

  She had taken Isabel and Eric to Narragansett to spend July with her parents in their big, old, weatherbeaten shingle cottage on the beach. Tony was to come for weekends. She hated leaving him, but she wanted to get the children out of town, and they were both anxious to save the summer rental. She made a point of calling Tony every day in the late afternoon. One night, however, when he had told her that he would be working late and she was feeling particularly lonesome, she called his office at nine o’clock. Another lawyer answered the telephone and told her that Tony had left at six. Taking in her concern, he obligingly looked about the mail desk and discovered a note from Tony directing that a printer’s proof be delivered to the doorman at 771 Park Avenue and held for Mr. Lowder. Lee knew the number to be that of the Conways’ apartment house. She was too proud to call there, but she called her own apartment every hour without an answer until four in the morning, when she fell asleep, exhausted and sobbing.

  At nine-fifteen she telephoned Tony at his office and asked him why he had not answered.

  “I must have slept through your rings,” he explained casually. “Or else you were calling a wrong number.”

  “Or else you weren’t there!”

  There was a pause. “Where would I have been?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Sweetie, your tone!”

  “Never mind my tone. You spent the night at Joan Conway’s!”

  “How do you deduce that?”

  “Well, can you deny it?”

  “Would you believe me if I did?”

  “Oh, Tony, at least say you weren’t!” she almost shouted.

  “Why? You’re going to believe what you want, anyway.”

  “Then don’t bother to come up this weekend!”

  “Very well.”

  “Or any weekend!”

  “Have a nice summer.”

  She slammed down the receiver and again burst into tears. Was it really possible that a marriage could end in two minutes? Were they now what was called “separated”?

  She hurried to her mother’s bedroom and found Selena, as usual at that hour, seated at the big, all-mirror dressing table, covered with aids to beauty, brushing her golden hair and rubbing cold cream into her lineless cheeks. Selena knew that people marveled at the finished product, and she delighted at their marveling. No matter that the product was artificial. What otherwise would there have been to admire?

  “I’ve just discovered that Tony spent last night with Joan Conway!”

  Selena was working on the circles under her eyes, and she did not speak for a minute. “Was Mr. Conway there?”

  “How could he have been? We saw him last night, don’t you remember? At the Talbots’, for cocktails? He’s on that cruise.”

  “Oh, yes. And she wasn’t at the Talbots’, was she?”

  “No. She wasn’t.”

  Selena now reached for a tissue and started to remove some of the cream. “Well, that’s what you get for leaving him.”

  “Leaving him! You mean it’s unreasonable to trust a husband from Monday to Friday?”

  “In your case, I guess it must be.”

  “Oh, Mummie! You sound as if this were something of no importance!”

  “It’s exactly what you make of it, dear heart.” Selena made the most extraordinary contortion to reach a spot below a nostril. “Some men are like cows that have to be regularly milked. Personally, I find it distasteful, but I suppose it’s not their fault. A loving and faithful wife is thrown away on them.” Selena’s approving eyes seemed to congratulate her image for not trying to appeal to the coarser sex.

  “You think I should put up with this?”

  “Well, I don’t say you shouldn’t give him hell. I
think you should. It was indiscreet of him, to say the least, to get caught. Supposing Mr. Conway finds out? He struck me as a rather violent man.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t care,” Lee said sullenly.

  “How did you catch Tony?”

  “I didn’t really. I mean I haven’t any proof.”

  “Then I wouldn’t go looking for any.”

  Lee now went to her father’s study. He was reading the newspaper and smiled in the particularly amiable way that he had when he most hated to be interrupted. As she told her tale, however, she was surprised at how quickly he, too, accepted the situation. Indeed, the lecture that he proceeded to deliver might have been prepared in advance for just this occasion.

  “There’s something you and I never went into, Lee, at the time you were married, and that is the difference in Tony’s background and yours. I knew you’d flare right up, like all of your generation, if I so much as mentioned it, so I kept my mouth shut. Oh, I’m no fool. Besides, these differences don’t matter so much any more, and I was and am very fond of Tony. But you have to understand that to a man of Tony’s origins a woman like Mrs. Norris Conway is going to appear a very different creature than she appears to you. You have been brought up to take wealth and social position in your stride, and you assume that Tony is going to do the same. You couldn’t be more wrong. To Tony she is a kind of queen, or golden goddess. To enjoy the favors of a woman like that is not simply a matter of sex. It’s the fulfillment of an ambition—a sort of scaling the Matterhorn, if you want to put it that way…”

  Lee was too astonished even to laugh. That her father, who never showed the smallest interest in society or its doings, who hardly ever went out, except to a few neighbors’ houses, should attribute such force to the powers of snobbishness seemed to indicate that she had never understood him.