I Come as a Theif (3 page)

"Why?" she interrupted.

"Why a computer firm?"

"No. Why do you have to go into these things?"

"To make money, of course."

"Why do you need so much money? I thought you only wanted to add to your income a bit."

"All right, Lee. Let's talk about something else."

Gin always made her irritable, and she knew that she had to get hold of herself. "No, I'm interested," she said. "Really interested. Why do we have to be rich?"

"Please, Lee. Tell me about your day. Did you go to the Boys' Club?"

"No, I want to talk about why you want to be rich. Aren't I and the children enough for you?"

"Oh, Lee."

"I'm not being soppy. I want to know. You never tell me what you're really thinking. Please do. Just once." She saw that she was only antagonizing him, and she paused again to drain some of the emotion out of her tone. "I'd like to know the role of wealth in our future. Seriously. Maybe you're right. Maybe we
ought
to be wealthy."

Tony looked at her with contained exasperation. "Well, it's not fashionable in liberal circles to admit the importance of money in politics, but all the same, there it is. If you're a poor Republican, you can get your money from business. But it's not so simple for poor Democrats. The big ones have all been rich: Roosevelt, Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson, Harriman..."

"You mean they have to have money for campaigns?"

"They have to have it for the whole way of life. How do you live when you're out of office? How do you live—for that matter—when you're
in?
A man with half a million bucks behind him isn't so nervous about next November. And besides, people trust him more. In an affluent society—and, God, is it affluent!—the politician must have something, too. The English always understood this. Disraeli had to marry a rich widow before going into politics..."

"It's a pity you didn't think of that before you married me."

"There are other ways of making money, you know."

"Like Max."

"Well, Max is part of it, sure."

"And how are they doing, your things?"

"Not well at all!" he exclaimed with a cheerful laugh. "Which reminds me. I've got to make that call."

Alone, Lee drank another Martini and tried to consider her mortification more calmly. Max always prevailed over her, but then didn't plenty of others? And wasn't it perfectly possible that Max and these others were more concerned with the future success of Tony Lowder than Lee Lowder was? Even more unselfishly concerned? It was Max who had made Tony take the case of the communist professor which had got him such wide publicity and established his name in liberal circles. It was Max who had pushed his nomination for the State Senate. Max lived for Tony. And what about Joan Conway? Joan Conway was very ill, people said. She didn't look it, but there you were. People said she was, and rumors of serious illness, like rumors of marital discord, were usually true. Would she be glad if Joan died? No. On the whole, she thought she would be sorry. She liked Joan. She did not know that Joan was Tony's mistress. She only knew that Joan wanted to be. It was exceedingly curious that she did not care more about the exact nature of Joan's and Tony's relationship. She did not seem to be much bothered by so conventional a form of infidelity. Joan, after all, could not take from her, she was sure, that part of Tony that she held. No matter what things he did with Joan, he would make love just as often and just as well with his wife.

She saw Tony now crossing the room to her. It exasperated her that he was smiling, that he should assume so complacently that she would wait there patiently for him, that she would not rush out and take a cab home.

"Good news?" she asked coolly, knowing that his smile meant nothing in such matters.

"Well, we seem to need more money. We always seem to need more money."

"How will you get it?"

"I haven't a clue."

"Max, as your mother would put it, must have Daly blood."

"Why do you have it in so for Max tonight?"

"Because he's so ... weak. Because he's not..." As she reached about for a word, she was surprised to find one that struck her as peculiarly apt. "Because he's not straight!"

Tony glanced up. "What makes you say that?"

"Well, didn't you tell me that when he represented Grace Nitter in her divorce from Joe he was really representing Joe? Who was afraid she'd go to some shyster who would fleece him?"

"Yes. But I was never sure to what extent it was a conscious misrepresentation on Max's part."

"I believe at the time you suggested that he had betrayed his client."

"Perhaps I did. But mightn't Grace have been better off—from the point of view of her home and children—to have a little less in an amicable settlement than more in a filthy court battle?"

"That was her decision, not Max's."

"Well, I can't dispute that."

Lee saw her opportunity, as usual, washing off into the gutters of his eternal reasonableness. If she allowed herself to become cross, he would simply retreat into beneficent silence. Never had there been a man more impregnable to female attack.

"I don't know what your moral code is," she observed grumpily. "Or even if you really have one. You're always finding excuses for people like Max. Even when you know he's shifty and opportunistic."

"I try to understand him."

"Do you? Or do you try to think of him as something he's not? Something better? What do you really believe in, Tony?" It seemed to her that this was turning into a very odd conversation indeed, but she hurried on recklessly to plunge in deeper. "Do you believe in God?"

Tony folded his hands patiently on the table. "No."

She was surprised, even a bit disappointed. She considered herself an agnostic, but there always lurked in the back of her mind the possibility of some ultimate purpose, even of a final and rather funny joke of discovering, after all, an old-fashioned heaven with angels and harps. What a sell for the old clowns who were waiting for Godot. "Then, of course, you don't believe in an after-life."

"That's right. I believe this is all we have."

"And there's no point? To anything?"

"I don't see that follows. There's a point to being happy."

She felt unaccountably depressed and wondered if she should have a third drink. There seemed to be something sad in Tony's not having any faith. It was all right for
her
not to have any. That was different. God and his angels did not depend on the likes of her.

"What makes you happy?" she asked.

"I don't think I'd better tell you. It sounds so bloody fatuous."

Now her words came out with a sudden sob. "Oh, Tony, for God's sake, tell me. Can't you see I'm having a fit?" Strangest of all was his not finding her reaction undue. He even laughed at her.

"Oh, let's put it that I like to make you happy," he said. "There! Does that satisfy you?"

"No. You only married me because you felt sorry for me at that cocktail party. Because I was so blue about having a short story rejected by
The New Yorker.
"

"I married you because I fell in love with you. Because you were the most adorable and cutest creature in the world. And still are. You look just the same, you know. The same curly black hair. The same bright brown eyes."

"Oh, Tony, shut up!" She could not let him go on. She could not let him hypnotize her with clichés. She had not given up a literary career for
that.
But what literary career? She had had none, and she knew it. And he meant his clichés; he wasn't afraid of them. That was the terrible thing about him. "I think I will have a third drink, after all," she muttered.

Tony stood on the basketball court, twenty feet from the basket, holding the ball poised before him, studying the distance. A dozen boys of high-school age stood about, watching.

"Say, Tony, I've got a buck says you can't make two out of three."

"He did last week."

"Yeah? Some hot shot."

Tony threw the ball. It rose in a perfect arc and dropped through the basket without touching the ring.

"Jesus."

"How's that buck looking?"

"He can't do it again. Betcha."

One of them threw the ball back to Tony, and this time he tossed it without delay. A miss. He tried again. A miss. There was a pleased outburst of jeers.

"That's the Lowder style."

"A flash in the pan."

"Say, Tony, you lost that one like you lost the election."

"Say, Tony..."

"Say, Tony, do you know why you lost the election? My old man told me."

Tony had noted that since November they felt personally superior to him. An election was like a prize fight. The loser lost his balls. "What did your old man tell you, hot rock?" he demanded.

"He said you're always shooting your mouth off about blacks, but you send your kids to private school."

Tony shrugged. "Education's like anything else. The best costs the most. As long as I can pay, I'm buying the best."

"Jesus. How can you call yourself a liberal?"

"I can call myself anything I want, can't I?"

"My old man says you're a goddam wasp."

Tony flung up his hands in mock dismay. "My mother's Irish, and my father's part Jew. What are you trying to do? Kill me politically? I'm paying a genealogist to look for black blood."

There was a faint general snickering, and Tony's politics were dropped.

"Say, Tony. Is it true they're going to close down this goddam settlement house?"

"Say, Tony. Why don't you rich trustees fork over?"

"Rich?" Tony groaned. "I only come to committee meetings for the free lunch."

"Jesus. What a moocher."

"Say, Tony. Why don't you get the dough out of Mrs. Conway?"

"Yeah, Tony. They say that big broad's loaded."

"Say, Tony. Is it true you bang her?"

"Is she good, Tony?"

"Funny guys, funny guys," Tony muttered and hurried off the floor before Miss Hall, the director, who had appeared in the far doorway, should hear. Miss Hall had the handsome, sexless, marble looks of some professional old maids. Her extreme deference to trustees was never menial, simply formal.

"Oh, Mr. Lowder, I thought you'd gone. Mr. Leonard is in the board room. He was anxious to catch you."

"He always is."

"Tell me, do you think our treasurer was unduly gloomy?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Will we have to give up the summer camp?"

"Keep your fingers crossed."

"Oh, Mr. Lowder, if you could only talk Mrs. Conway into equaling her last year's gift."

"That was supposed to be a one shot deal. We can't expect her to support the house indefinitely."

"But you have such influence on her!"

Tony glanced back at the boys. Happily, they were playing ball again. "Besides, she's ill."

"Well, I suppose you know best." Miss Hall's true concern almost penetrated the brittle surface of her perfunctory affectations. "I wish all our trustees cared the way you do. It's wonderful the way you find the time to come here and play with the boys."

Tony turned from her brusquely. He could never abide compliments. "I'm a lousy trustee," he muttered. "A trustee should be able to give or get others to give."

"Oh, but you're a working trustee."

"There's nothing like money," Tony retorted.

As he mounted the long varnished stairway to the board room, he reflected how odd it still seemed to dread seeing Max. For years his life had been indissolubly bound up with that handsome baby face, those friendly sky-blue eyes, the shock of blond hair, the noisy ribald laugh. Max had been the spirit, the very soul of Lowder, Leonard, Bacon & Shea. And he had worked hard, too, for all his habit of reducing everything to jokes. That was what Lee could never see. Oh, perhaps it was true, as she never lost an opportunity of pointing out—women were relentless—that Max had used him and used his connection with the Conways, but had he not given it all back twice over? Who but Max had believed, from the beginning of their friendship as clerks in Hale & Cartwright, in what he had not scrupled to call Tony's "star"?

But now Max's show seemed over. The big, gay backdrop of his sybaritism had split down the middle, and all the gray frenzy of his industry was scattered over a darkened stage. Max had lost his head before he had even lost his money. He jumped up from the board table as Tony came in.

"This goddam recession!" he cried. "Nixon ought to be impeached. Herron's down another twenty points, and Everett wants his margin."

"How much?"

"Ten g's. From each of us."

"I haven't got it, Max. You know I haven't got it."

"And that's not all. We're going to need twenty more for Alrae before the end of the month. And there's the loan interest. Can't you get fifty from somebody? From Joan? From your family? It would get us through. It would even put us over. Oh, Tony, don't look at me that way. Don't you see we could make it?"

Tony looked dispassionately at the pleading, oddly blank eyes that his friend thrust up at him, and at the tiny beads of sweat on the high, ivory forehead. Max was almost ugly when he was worried. Tony was surprised at his own coldness. This was the same Max, after all, to whom, a few weeks back, he had been so devoted.

"Max, is all this really worth it? Suppose we let it go?"

"Let it
go?
"

"Let the investment go. Take a bust. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, does it?"

"Doesn't it?" Max's voice was hoarse, and he looked about the room as if he suspected eavesdroppers. "We're up to the hilt, you and I. The firm's in it, too. We'd lose our office!"

"And what does that amount to?"

"The law library? The furniture? The lease?"

"Oh, to hell with them."

"To hell with them?" Max's eyes were brimmed now with actual tears of outrage. "To hell with bankruptcy? Do you think, Tony Lowder, for one solitary second, that you could be appointed to any government job if you and I went bust in a mess like this?"

Tony turned away impatiently. "You exaggerate. There's no disgrace in bankruptcy. Anybody can take a licking on this market."