I Come as a Theif (19 page)

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.

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.

"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.

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.