I Come as a Theif

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I’ll try to see it in that light,” she murmured and almost stumbled out of the house in her need to be alone. On the beach she fell on her knees and scooped up the sand desperately with both hands. She had a dismal notion that she had soiled, not her marriage (for what had that become?) but her ideal of it. She had made herself and Tony, by even discussing the matter, as sordid as her parents saw them. She got up to run—actually to run, so bad was the pain—when she saw a large man in a red sweater and white shorts walking swiftly down the beach toward her.

  It was Norry Conway.

  Later she was to remember with surprise how quickly she reasserted control of herself. Perhaps, after all, she was a woman made for crises. Norry did not even greet her. He sat down by her on the sand, hugging his knees and staring out to sea.

  “I’ve been debating all night whether I should come here, and I finally decided I had to. Tell me something, for God’s sake, Lee. What are our spouses to each other?”

  The small, almost affected laugh that she managed reminded her of her mother. “Some people might pretend to be surprised by such a question. But I think it’s entirely natural. Joan and Tony are simply the most tremendous friends.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but I know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean they’re lovers.”

  She was even able to face calmly his angry stare.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I do know. Because I should know it with everything in me if Tony was unfaithful.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Totally.”

  Norris was more than taken aback. He was actually embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  “You needn’t be. Joan and Tony have something to give each other, but it’s not their bodies. They have a kind of tense understanding which may be for their mutual benefit. I know it’s frustrating and infuriating for you. Oh, believe me, I know! But you and I should try to be big about it. It’s the only way. Marriage is not the total possession of another person. It can’t be, and it shouldn’t be.”

  As she took in the relaxation of his heavy, puffy face and sensed the easing of that large, threatening frame, she saw that she had succeeded. Norris might take her for a trusting idiot, a prosy ass, but he was over the crisis. In one morning she had lost and saved her marriage. For it was perfectly clear to her now as she laughed a bit giddily and looked over the green tossing ocean that she was going to accept what she had. Somehow, miraculously, Norris Conway had seemed to create her solution. She had come out of the isolation of her dreams and had performed an act, a solid act, here, on this sandy earth. She would be able to live again so long as Tony never tried to take her back to the unbelievable bliss of their honeymoon.

  Part III

  1

  Tony sat at the U.S. Attorney’s table in the District Courtroom at Foley Square. The dying sunlight of the early winter afternoon flickered against the high window through which he could see only a gray, cloudless sky. His glance circled the bare walls of the clean, austere chamber and dropped to the packed rows of quiet, listening spectators behind the rail. Mr. Lanigan, Menzies’ lawyer, was arguing an objection. The jurors made no effort to conceal their boredom at this legal interruption of the drama. Judge Fenton, whose long cerebral face seemed pulled into a kind of fixed attention, stared at Lanigan with empty eyes.

  “But I submit again, Your Honor, that it bears on the all vital question of the credibility of the witness Lowder. Lowder has already been indicted and convicted for the same crime of conspiracy to break a federal law with which the defendants Lassatta and Menzies stand here charged. Lowder had no trial, for he pleaded guilty. He has not been sentenced, or even incarcerated, pending the results of this proceeding. In other words, Uncle Sam, Lowder’s stern but potentially benevolent relative, is looking down to see how well he testifies here. And Lowder knows and I know, and Your Honor knows, and this jury knows—indeed this whole courtroom knows—that the length of Lowder’s sentence will depend on the exact degree of his cooperation with the federal prosecuting authorities!”

  “Mr. Lanigan,” the Judge interrupted, “you have made that argument a dozen times in this trial, and it has been repeatedly ruled on.”

  “It cannot be made too often, Your Honor!”

  “I say it can. You have ample exceptions for any appeal you may wish to make. Let us get on with the testimony.”

  Mr. Lanigan suffered from the kind of bumpy, ill-shaped stoutness that puts to rout the stiffest, most determined clothes. No belt could hold his shirt down, no garter his socks up; no pin could fasten the edges of his collar. Yet he seemed to live in a kind of nervous frenzy, refusing to accept this fact. He was constantly pressing down his tumbling, greasy hair and pushing back the glasses that slipped over his snubby nose. Such frenzy, however, was not altogether against him as an advocate. It somehow intensified the sincerity of his large, unhappy eyes. Jack Eldon, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, had told Tony that Lanigan was not a regular criminal lawyer. It was probably why he was so nasty.

  “I wish to recall the Special Assistant to the Regional Director,” Lanigan said, turning toward Tony.

  Tony resumed the seat that he had already occupied for long days of questioning. He knew now that he could go on as long as need be, answering the same kinds of questions in the same kind of monotone, indifferent to Lanigan’s efforts to anger him, until the exhausted jury should accept the simple fact that he was speaking the truth.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Lowder, I should no longer refer to you as the Special Assistant to the Regional Director?”

  “It’s hardly accurate. I resigned the position months ago.”

  “Resigned?”

  “Yes, Mr. Lanigan, resigned. I would have been fired if I hadn’t, of course, but it is technically still correct to say that I resigned.”

  “Does it pain you to be addressed by that title?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “But you would rather I call you simply by your name?”

  “Call me Butch, if you want.”

  “Ah, but I don’t want. I don’t want to at all. Would you tell me, Mr. Lowder, just how long you had occupied the position of Special Assistant to the Regional Director when you decided to accept this alleged bribe from the defendants?”

  “Between one and two months. Nearer two, I think.”

  “You mean as Hamlet said of his mother’s remarriage: ‘Nay, not so much, not two’?” Mr. Lanigan smiled at the jury to apologize for his erudition and to assure them that he knew they recognized his quotation. “And prior to your taking this position as Special Assistant, had you ever occupied a federal office?”

  “Never.”

  “Nor a state one?”

  “No.”

  “Or city?”

  “No, I’d never previously occupied any government position.”

  “And yet, less than eight short weeks after taking your first oath of public office, you were looking about to see how best to line your pockets? Or had you, indeed, taken the post in the expectation of just such extra emoluments?”

  “Your Honor,” Jack Eldon protested, rising, “I submit that Mr. Lanigan is harassing the witness. He has established over and over again that Mr. Lowder accepted a bribe. Nor did he have to, for Mr. Lowder pleaded guilty to the charge. What is to be gained by rubbing it in?”

  “I agree with you, Mr. Eldon,” the Judge replied. “I was about to intervene myself. I should have done so earlier had it not been perfectly evident that Mr. Lowder was not in the least bothered by these pin pricks. I must insist, Mr. Lanigan, that you have already covered this ground, unless you can persuade me that you have a new point to make.”

  When the Court, shortly after this, adjourned for ten minutes, Jack Eldon surprised Tony by walking after him to the corridor and offering him a cigarette. They had come to know each other very well during the trial and in its preparation, but never before had Jack shown
the least interest in a personal relationship. Indeed, his polite formality had suggested that he held Tony in the greatest contempt, as a traitor, not only to the legal profession, but to the greater world of “gentlemen.” Eldon, a tense, pale, rather beautiful man in his early thirties, with glittering eyes and tumbling, curly black hair, was a graduate of Groton and Harvard. He had taken a leave of absence from the great Wall Street firm of which he was a junior partner to act as Assistant U.S. Attorney out of a sheer sense of public duty. He was in many ways an anachronism, and by Tony’s lights, a bit of a Parsifal, but he was attractive and brilliant. He had handled the trial with the skill of an old prosecutor. It had been a triumph of brains over experience.

  “Has anyone discovered your new telephone number yet?” he asked Tony.

  “No, my evenings are blissfully silent. No crank calls. No calls of any sort.”

  “You’re still sure you wouldn’t care to go into protective custody? We’d prefer it, you know.”

  “No, I like my empty apartment. I’m grateful to be out on bail. I don’t really think anybody’s going to take a shot at me, and if they do … well, think of the problems that would solve.”

  But Eldon did not want to think of them. He turned away, embarrassed, from Tony’s easy smile. “I wish you’d stay more in that apartment. These weekend bicycle rides of yours are very tempting to Mafiosi. Last Sunday we followed you all the way to Coney Island. My poor agent was exhausted.”

  “So that’s who he was. I thought as much. I’m sorry, but I can’t give up my rides. Think how soon I won’t be able to go anywhere!” Tony now realized that he liked to be talking again. He inhaled the cigarette deeply and became almost lyrical. “You ought to try bicycling, Jack. All through Central Park, very fast, very green, with its mountain range of towers. And Prospect, with its jungles of plants. Even Queens, with its desert wastes. And along the Sound, with those huge bridges. It’s the only way to take in New York—for better or worse. In the automobile you’re an invader. On foot, you’re a victim. But on a bicycle … well, you’re with the city, of the city. I live again, if it is living. I’m even happy.”

  Eldon looked at him with undisguised curiosity. “What do you hear from your family?”

  “Nothing. I don’t even know where they are. My father-in-law has hidden them away in the country.”

  “Well, of course, I know that.”

  Tony paused to give this proper consideration. It seemed so odd that this young man should know where his family was and that he should not. “Is it a safe place?”

  Eldon shrugged. “I guess so. But we don’t really think they’re in any danger. I believe there’s no case on record of the Mafia taking it out on a wife and children.”

  “Well, I guess it’s natural for my father-in-law to be nervous.”

  “Yes, but they could still call you.”

  “You don’t get it, Jack.” Tony was surprised that, knowing so much, Eldon did not know all. “Lee has left me.”

  People were returning to the courtroom already. Jack, suddenly flushing, clapped him on the shoulder. “Would you like to come for dinner tonight? Just Judith and me?”

  Tony was too surprised to speak for a moment. “Well, sure, I guess. If you think it looks all right.”

  “I think it looks just fine. Seven?”

  When the Court adjourned for the day, Tony walked home. He did it every day, though it took him more than an hour, for it gave him exercise on the weekdays and helped him to sleep. Besides, there was nothing else to do. He could not read, and he found that movies acted on his nerves. There was nobody whom he could bear to see, except Joan, and her visitors were now restricted to a few minutes. He felt guilty about his mother, who was desolate over his refusal to spend his evenings with her, but her heavy sympathy and commiseration were intolerable. He needed to be alone to get to know the new Tony Lowder who was going to be his principal if not his only companion in the long aftermath.

  It was difficult to be sure just what was happening to the inner Tony because the process of becoming a public criminal had such a stunning, doping effect on the imagination. It filled his mind to the exclusion of everything else. When he awoke in the morning, his first thought was: “Here’s another day for Tony Lowder, convicted crook.” Everything that happened to him: the rudeness of Lanigan, the jibes of the columnists who were as moral as nineteenth-century parsons, even his abandonment by Lee and her chilling silence seemed orderly and predictable parts of a perfectly understandable punishment. He was alone because he had taken himself out of his world. But he was not in agony, perhaps because he was still numb.

  It was plain that one day the numbness was going to cease, and then he would presumably feel the full pain of losing his family. But it was also quite possible that he would get them back. He understood perfectly that the great danger of his situation was self-pity. He had ruined forever his career as a lawyer and politician. That was obvious enough. But he did not have to have ruined his private career. The difference was that whereas before there had been a noisy grandstand of friends and family to applaud success, or the appearance of it, or even to boo in a friendly way at failure, now there were only tiers of empty seats. What he had to do—if he was to avoid the bathos of despair—was to adapt himself to the changeover from a life where the thermometer of his actions had been provided by others to a life where it was provided by himself alone. But the point was—and he kept making it again and again as he trudged the blocks—that the business of living might still be amusing enough, even transacted with oneself. There were people whose favorite game was solitaire.

  “Tony, old boy, how are you? Sorry for the trouble you’re in. I always knew Max was a goddam sneak!”

  It was a friend, a fellow lawyer, walking in the opposite direction at Eighteenth Street. Tony nodded, returned the hearty grip and walked on. There were those who avoided him, and those who, like this fellow, covered their embarrassment in heartiness. Nobody, of course, reviled him. Nobody stopped to tell him that he had kicked another hole in the collapsing wall of public confidence. But all reactions were becoming the same to him. The reactors were on one side of the fence; he on the other. It would take a lot more getting used to, but he was getting used to it.

  “Is that you, Tony? Tony Lowder! Don’t run off. I just want to tell you that you’re doing a fabulous job of testifying against those goons…”

  “They only did what I did,” Tony muttered, and hurried on. This time the man was someone he did not know. His picture, of course, had been in all the papers and on television.

  “Aren’t you Tony Lowder?”

  He nodded and passed on. Sometimes it was like that, three in two blocks. More often his evening journey was in peace. On foot or on bicycle he was able to continue the inner dialogue without interruption, to continue arranging and rearranging, like a puzzle of colored cubes, the few small pieces of his future. It sometimes seemed to him that the person with whom he discussed their arrangement was a being just other than himself, a slightly larger Tony Lowder who supervised the plight of the smaller one, the bigger Tony being presumably a figure into whom the smaller might be expected ultimately to grow. In much the same way, at Joan’s Sunday lunch party, he had felt alone with respect to the other guests, but not with respect to this presence in himself. Was it grace?

  “Was it God?”

  He stopped and looked about. Nobody had spoken to him. His wince had not been at the comment of some passer-by, some possible witness to a chance exclamation uttered aloud by mistake. No, that wince had been one of simple shame at the idea that he should have called on God. To such a low rank had the deity been reduced in his subconscious.

  He found himself thinking of Joan Conway and her old nurse, Annie, whom she had always kept with her. Annie had been hidden away behind the scenes, a smiling, illiterate, crooning old Irish woman, eternally knitting in Joan’s boudoir where she could be available for her mistress’ hugs, like an old rag doll. Annie, he supposed,
had been Joan’s God. Well, she had done as much for Joan as such a god could do. It was a pity she had not survived to see Joan through.

  ***

  He was startled by the empty parlor into which the maid showed him. He had known that Jack Eldon was rich, but he had supposed that his riches would have expressed themselves more sternly, more traditionally, in Chippendale and porcelains of China trade and sporting prints. Instead, he found himself in a very feminine interior, made up at obvious expense and all at once by a fashionable decorator whose commission must have covered every last book and picture. If the husband was allowed to bring his pipe and newspaper into such a room, he might deem himself fortunate. The colors were loud but not strident, the abstracts gay and not grim; the table decorations were Arp-like sculptures converted to ashtrays. Beneath Tony’s feet spread a huge rug representing a backgammon board. Through the open door to a seemingly all-glass dining room he was surprised to see a table set for some dozen people. The last thing that he had expected was a party! But when Judith Eldon came in, a little blonde slip of a thing in scanty, gauzelike pink, not more than twenty-one years old, he understood. She obviously belonged to the world of continuous fete.

  “Well, I’ve certainly heard a lot about you,” she began. “It’s high time Jack brought you home. I understand you bicycle around the city, careless of risk. And that you threatened Jack you wouldn’t be as good a witness if they put you in protective custody. Is that true?”

  “More or less.” Tony liked her yellow eyes. They were large and cool and frank. “I induced your husband to see it my way.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “I don’t think about it.”

  “Because you don’t care. I see that. And, of course then, nothing will happen to you.”

  “It takes caring?”

  “It takes caring. About a drink, for example.” She moved over to the bar table. “You’re not beyond that?”

  “Oh, no.”

  She poured him his whiskey as he had asked for it, straight, and continued in her intimate vein. “Jack says your wife has left you. How mean of her. Doesn’t she believe in what you’re doing? Believe in your helping Jack? With all your wonderful testimony?”