I Come as a Theif (4 page)

"Dream on. When Governor Horton sees how much you've been gambling, he won't touch you with a ten-foot pole. You'll seem too giddy.
At best
"

"At
best?
"

"Well, there's something else."

"Come on, let's have it."

"I've borrowed from some pretty unsavory characters."

"Damn it all, Max!"

But Tony's sudden anger seemed only to excite Max to a final pitch of exasperation. "Damn it all yourself, Tony! Don't talk to me that way. Who the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think made the world aware that such a person as Tony Lowder even existed?"

"I guess I know what I owe you, Max."

Max's tone, at this small concession, slid at once from a screech to a whine. "Oh, I don't want your gratitude, Tony. I did it just as much for me as for you. The point is: we're a team. You're the star, sure, but the star still needs a manager. You're my big gamble, in politics, in law. Hell, in life. You're the only real, honest-to-goodness, in-it-to-the-finish friend I've ever had. We've got to stand together. And now...!" Max's whine suddenly subsided, and some of his old enthusiasm seemed to be rekindled in his eyes. "We're almost there, you know. We would have been, except for this filthy recession. Herron's basically sound; so are the restaurants. With anything like half a chance we could clear a million. We're so
close,
Tony. So close I can smell it. It's bust or glory. We could be all set, and you with a political career that could take you anywhere. Anywhere at all!"

Tony wondered why he did not care more. There was something eerie about the moments, like this one, when his ambition shut off, like the motor of an airplane, leaving him precariously to glide. One might have emotions; one might have sympathies; one might even have love, but without ambition it sometimes seemed that these other things simply jostled one aimlessly hither and yon, like eddying air currents, until the prevailing yank of gravity brought one to the inevitable smash.

"You talk as if I wanted to go broke," he said.

"Sometimes I think you do. You know Joan Conway would give it to you."

"Oh, lay off Joan Conway."

"Well, don't you!"

Max with this gave a howl of laughter and ran around the board table when Tony grabbed at him. Tony caught him and twisted his arm behind his back.

"Take it back."

"Oh, come on, Tony. Can't you even screw for money like that?"

Tony gave his arm an extra twist until Max squawked in pain and then let go in disgust. For Max actually liked it. His blue eyes had the fixed look of an ungulate overpowered by a carnivorous foe.

"You're a filthy-minded bastard," Tony said flatly. "However, I'll try to raise the money."

"That's talking."

"Mind you, Joan's only the last resort."

"I'm glad you can still talk of last resorts. Mine are all used."

"You should have stopped at the next-to-last."

"If I live, I'll learn. But do it for your kids, Tony. Do it for Lee."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I haven't known you for fifteen years without learning that the way to get something out of you is to appeal to your neurotic unselfishness."

"Get out of here."

***

Walking across the park to his parents' apartment house, Tony considered his "neurotic unselfishness." He had always been a bit embarrassed by this habit of preoccupation with the plights of others. It had seemed to turn the story of his life from the hard, clear lines of the kind of neoclassic drama that he had loved at college to a rosy Victorian tragicomedy, blurred by sentiment. It had kept him from establishing a proper distance between himself and his parents. And yet at the same time he knew that he judged them coolly enough. As a boy he had always been glad to get away from them, to school, to camp, to the houses of friends. Unlike most overfilial youths who turn their self-imposed duty into a pleasure or at least into an addiction, he obeyed its dictates only when they were clear. He seemed to have been at once strangely dominated and strangely free.

The ancient yellow-faced crone with stringy white hair who opened the door of the apartment, the combination cook and cleaning woman (Tony never knew why she worked for the wages Dorothy paid her) grumbled that his mother was out.

"I know, Nellie. I came early to have a word with Dad."

"Well, you'll find him where you always find him. Gawking into that goon-box."

Tony paused in the doorway. It was not a room that told one much about its occupants. His parents had added nothing to Dorothy's inherited furniture but certain latter-day necessities: the color TV set before which George Lowder passed his days, the gleaming nickel wheelchair which bore him to and from it, the encyclopedia and reference books that Dorothy had received as dividends from her book club. The rest was a faded reminder of the contractor ancestor's brief grandeur: two imitation Louis XV
bergères
with needlepoint seats and a worn Aubusson carpet. The room itself had too few windows and too many doorless doorways, like a stage set adapted to multitudinous exits and entrances.

George Lowder sat in his corner watching a baseball game. He was a poorly preserved seventy-eight. He had a bad heart, weak lungs and worse hearing, and he only rose from his wheelchair to take the few tottering turns about the room that his doctor required of him each morning and afternoon. Yet he managed to appear serene. His oblong face and near-bald scalp had acquired, in the torpid days of his terminal, interminable illness, a look of distinction quite inconsistent with the small facts of his biography. George appeared wise and benign, although in the days when he had still been able to get about he had struck people as possessing only the cheerfulness of the foolish and idle. If he had been painted fittingly in a conversation piece of the Lowder family, he would have been represented as a cipher. But by some miracle the cipher, at the end of its seventh decade, seemed to be filling out.

Filling with what? Tony wondered. Perhaps with a new independence of Dorothy. George had never apologized for earning no money, for producing nothing by way of substitute, for letting his wife bear the burden of bringing up the children and planning the household, but now he sometimes seemed on the verge of blaming her for reproaching him in these matters. He seemed to be implying, in the bland way in which he monopolized the television, or interrupted her talks with callers, or even contradicted her—oh, those high, gay, stubbornly repeated contradictions and that ineradicable smile—that if he was making a late stand, it was better late than never. Perhaps he believed that it would be a benefit to his children to glimpse the man he might have been had she not smashed him.

Tony shook his father's soft bony hand and leaned down to kiss his cheek. George's initial response, as always, was charming.

"Ah, Tony, my dear boy, how delightful to see you. But you're early. Your mother's not home yet."

"You must listen to me on Channel Thirteen tomorrow night," Tony told him. "I'm going to be on a panel discussing insiders and the stock market. What'll you give me not to stare right into the camera and say: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, I want you to know that my Dad, who's watching us right now, was one of the sharpest customers' men on Wall Street. Dad, this is the public. Public, this is Dad.' And then we could cut in your voice saying: 'The Public be damned.'"

"You wouldn't do that, Tony?" George asked in alarm. "That wouldn't be the thing at all, you know."

"Well, you'll never be sure I won't unless you watch. Tomorrow night at nine."

"Oh, that's bad luck. That's the time I watch the Ethna Pollock hour."

"Do you mean to tell me, Dad, that you wouldn't skip Ethna one night to hear
me?
"

"Well, the trouble is you don't get all the jokes in her program unless you keep up."

"I want you to hear me, Dad. I need your criticism."

"Very well, Tony, if you put it that way. Only you'll have to tell your mother to remind me. My memory's getting fearfully bad. I should forget my own head if it wasn't screwed on."

George's eyes kept reverting to the screen. It was not only that he didn't want to hear Tony in the future; he didn't want to hear him then.

"Look, Dad. I know it must be sad to grow old and feel that all your faculties aren't what they used to be. And I suppose you must have moments of feeling that you haven't accomplished all the things in life you wanted to. But the point is that all that any of us have, old or young, is
now.
It's just as important for you to be happy at seventy-eight as it is for Eric to be happy at twelve. I'd like to be closer to you. I'd like to understand you better." He paused. "I love you, Dad."

"Well, Tony, it's very nice of you to say that. You've always been a good boy. And a good son. Your mother's forever making a great point of that."

"You don't see it. I want to be a good son to
you.
"

"You are, Tony. You are. And now if you don't mind, I should like to go back to my baseball game. Can't watch and talk, you know."

Dorothy Lowder came hurrying into the living room. "Tony, darling, if I'd known you were coming this early, I'd have been home. How much of you have I missed?"

She took him over to the sofa by the fireplace where they always talked, leaving George to his game. She never lowered her voice when she talked about her husband, depending on his deafness.

"Doctor Foster tells me he shouldn't be left alone even for a few minutes," she complained. "He says the next attack may come any time. I'll have to get a day nurse or be chained to this apartment. Oh, Tony, how am I going to pay for it all?"

"Dip into capital."

"But I'm dipping."

"Dip more. Submerge yourself."

"But is it fair to you and Philip and Susan? After all, it was
my
father's money. He would never have wanted it all spent on George."

"Grandpa Daly didn't anticipate the high cost of medicine today. You have to be damn near a millionaire to afford a decently comfortable death."

"How can you make so light of these terrible things?"

"What should I do? Weep? Cheer up, Ma. You'll get through."

"No one cares the way you do, Tony. No one comes in so faithfully."

"I thought Susan came in regularly."

"Exactly! Regularly. I feel myself being checked off. And as for Philip, of course, he only comes when he wants money."

"Like me."

"Like you, darling? What on earth are you talking about? You never ask me for anything."

"I've been waiting." Tony watched her carefully, as suspicion began to creep into her eyes, suspicion rapidly followed by fear. "I have a proposition to put to you. Supposing you were to advance me a sum—a very large sum—against my ultimate share of your estate?"

"How large?"

"Well, say fifty thousand dollars."

"Tony Lowder! Tell me you're joking."

"Now, hold on, Ma. I would agree to pay you ten percent on that for your lifetime. That's twice what you're getting on it now."

"But where would
you
get that kind of return?"

"That's my affair."

"And what would my security be?"

"Me! Won't you gamble on me, Ma?"

"I'll do no such thing. I won't gamble on anything or anybody." Dorothy Lowder clutched her fists to her breast as if she anticipated his forcing them open to release hidden gold. "What have I had all my wasted life but the smitch of property my poor old father managed to put together for me? And you'd take that! You'd plunder your mother and reduce her to the state of one of those miserable hags you see rooting in garbage pails for old newspapers!"

Tony burst out laughing. "Don't worry, Ma! Of course, I couldn't take a penny after that. I was simply proposing the arrangement for your advantage. I can get my money in two or three other places."

Her half-open mouth and still pleading eyes suggested that she was torn between relief and the horrid suspicion that she might not have shown herself to best advantage. "I have to watch my money because of your father, of course," she hastened to explain. "Where would he be now, I'd like to know, if I hadn't kept together the little I have?"

"He'd be nowhere at all," Tony assured her. "You're absolutely right. And if ever again I come to you with a proposition about money I want you to promise me you'll kick my tail right out of here. Come on over to the desk, and I'll put it in writing."

"Oh, Tony dearest, you do see my point? You're not making fun of me?"

"Not a bit."

"Because I depend so on you. I couldn't bear it if you thought I'd denied you anything unreasonably."

"Forget it."

"Do you know what your brother Philip had the gall to tell me when I told him he should honor his father and mother? That there ought to be a statute of limitations for that commandment."

Tony laughed again. "That sounds like Phil."

"You make a joke of everything, Tony. Sometimes I wonder if you take anything seriously. What about this money you need? You're not in any real trouble, are you? I mean you haven't done anything ... well, wrong, have you?"

"You mean do I need the money so I can put it back? Like my stealing those toys when I was twelve? No, Ma. Dad nipped my career in crime in the bud. I'm still pure as pure."

Dorothy got up now to put her arms around him, and he could feel her quickly beating heart. "Make us a drink, dearest," she said. "You've given me such a scare."

***

When Tony had gone, Dorothy felt again the full bleakness in the room and shivered. All her experiences in the past hour had been peculiarly physical. Tony had seemed to be sitting before her in a very corporeal sense, big, heavier than usual, very still. She had noticed the darkness of his chin and upper lip. Had he needed a shave? Something appeared to have gone out of him, or maybe it had gone out of him only for her. Had it, unbelievably, been a part of her love for him? Not her affection, of course, not her mother instinct, nor her preoccupation with him, nor even her nervous need to kiss him, to touch him, but some part instead of that wonderful, all-embracing, eye-closing, velvet-soft, heart-uplifting, soul-redeeming, life-giving adoration on which she had simply built her life. Had any of
that
gone out—even for a moment—with the sudden suspicion that he might have committed a crime? Oh, no, never, what did she care about what peccadillos in the crazy male world of silly stocks and boring bonds her darling boy might have committed? It was this new thing, this lunatic scheme to rob her that had shaken her to the roots. As the idea came back on her in all its horror, she even regretted that she had not taken him up on his offer to put his promise in writing.