I Come as a Theif (2 page)

"Eric says that welfare shouldn't pay a mother for more than one illegitimate child!"

"It just encourages them to have more," Eric retorted. "And they don't take proper care of them. Everyone knows that. They let them run around the streets and look for heroin and grow up to be criminals and mug us.
Us,
who pay for their welfare!"

"I must say, I think it's extraordinary what children discuss these days," Dorothy Lowder interposed. "I really wonder what good it will do Isabel or Eric to know about such things at their ages. Still, I can't help agreeing with Eric."

"But Grandma! It's a woman's natural function to have a baby."

"In a civilized world, Isabel, we must learn to control our natural functions."

"Oh, I'm for birth control, of course."

"That's not what I was trying to say at all. I was trying to say..."

"But birth control isn't the point," Isabel interrupted. "A civilized government should be responsible for every child born under it."

"The government can still be responsible," Eric pointed out. "But not by paying the mother welfare. It should take the child away from her and bring it up properly."

"Take the child away from its own mother!"

"Why not? If she's obviously unfit? The way half of them are."

Lee could see that Tony, looking from one to the other, was debating, not how he should decide, but how he should phrase his decision. Isabel, of course, had to win—she knew that—but she could not altogether repress an impulse of sympathy for Eric. He was so serious, so industrious, so conscientious, and Isabel was such a ... well, such a mess. Eric made her think of some hard-working settler in the wilderness who finds the small patch that he has staked out and cultivated threatened by indolent Indians.

"Eric," Tony said gravely. "Every child, however born, is a human being, with as much right to grow up as you have."

"I know that, Dad."

"Of course, you know it. It's nothing to know it. You have to feel it."

"Why? Why do I have to?"

"Because to the extent that you fail to feel it, you fail to be alive."

Eric put on his look of "So it's going to be one of
those
evenings" and left the room. Isabel returned to her piano. Dorothy Lowder drew her round face into a longer shape, as if she were trying to remold it with thoughts of dignity and sadness.

"I was just telling Lee how tired you look. Is it the new job?"

"Oh, no, the job's easy enough. All I do is check the financial houses to see their capital's up to snuff. It's my own capital that worries me. This market's a ghastly headache."

"Tony! You don't mean you've been speculating."

Tony looked as if this were the last thing he needed after a long day. "I've been trying to make some money, Ma. And it's not easy in a recession."

"But you should have learned from your grandfather's example. Speculation was always the ruin of the Dalys."

Tony winked at Lee. "I guess it's my sad destiny to offer another proof of that."

"Why do you have to stay in government if it pays so badly?" his mother persisted. "Why can't you go back to your law firm?"

Lee intervened indignantly. "Because if Tony's ever to get anywhere in politics it has to be now."

"Why does Tony have to 'get anywhere' in politics? Is politics the end of the world? Personally, I've never really seen Tony as a professional politician."

"Why, he's a natural politician, Mrs. Lowder. Everyone who saw him in the campaign recognized that."

"Oh, I don't say he doesn't do it well, Lee. Of course, he does. Tony does everything well."

"I thought you were just suggesting that he has no talent for speculating."

"Well, that's hardly a great art, is it?"

"It had better be, I guess, if it's what he's doing!"

"You take one up so fast on things, Lee. I simply meant that Tony may be too nice for politics."

"Too nice or too soft?"

"Too
nice,
Lee. I shan't have words put in my mouth. Politicians—successful ones, that is—have to be hard-boiled. Tony would always be worrying about some lame duck. That's why I think he'll do better in his profession. There his lame ducks can pay."

"I never heard anything so cynical," Lee retorted. She was beginning to be uncomfortable at the prospect of really losing her temper. "Why can't you admit, Mrs. Lowder, that the only reason you don't want Tony in politics is that you don't want him to go to Washington and leave you?"

"Now, darling..." Tony was beginning, but his mother, quite as angry now as Lee, cut him off.

"Well, is it so unnatural for a mother to lean on her own son?" Then, after a moment's silence in which they all showed the shock of how far they had gone, Dorothy took a loftier tone. "Don't worry, Lee, it's not going to last forever. One of these days you and Tony will be perfectly free to go to Washington or anywhere else you please. And there may be a bit of money for you, too. Not much, I fear, but a bit."

"But Tony can't wait, Mrs. Lowder. If he's going to do anything, he's got to do it now."

"I wasn't suggesting that he would have to wait for long."

"Oh, in these days people live forever."

Mrs. Lowder rose with the dignity of an old print of Sarah Siddons playing Queen Katharine at her trial. "Let us hope for some exceptions to that unfortunate rule. Perhaps, Tony, you won't mind helping me to get a taxi."

When they had gone, Lee saw Isabel in the dining alcove. She had come back to practice and had heard it all.

"If you're ever fool enough to marry a man with a mother, Isabel Lowder," Lee exclaimed fiercely, "never give her an exit line like that."

What humiliated Lee about the complaint that she inwardly nursed against Tony was that it was the commonest complaint on the American domestic scene: that he did not belong to her as much as she wanted and had not, since their honeymoon. He had not, she was fairly sure, belonged to anyone else—he did not, for example, belong to Joan Conway or even to his mother—but that did not prevent her feeling a lack, over and above (or at least so she fancied) the lack that every human being who loves another human being is doomed to feel in the bottom of that other's response.

"I know it doesn't do any good, because nobody ever listens to anyone else," her own mother had retorted on the only occasion when Lee had confided in her about this. "But I must still tell you that you're a perfect little idiot. Tony is doing very well as a husband and father, and he's certainly a good son-in-law. Always so polite and interested. I never feel it's perfunctory, though I suppose it must be."

"But it's not perfunctory!" Lee protested. "It never is with Tony. That's just what I mean. He's devoted to you. Sometimes I think he's devoted to everybody."

"Thanks."

"Well, I even think he's devoted to me."

"Then what on earth are you complaining about?"

"That he loves us all just the same amount."

"Really, Lee, you're too ridiculous. Anyway, I can't imagine why people think parents have any influence. You've always been wildly romantic, and I don't think anyone ever accused your father or me of that. But you might do well to borrow a leaf out of our unromantic notebook: 'Let well enough alone.' If I kept picking away at your father the way you pick at Tony, I might find out that he was less amiable than I suppose. Human beings aren't such great shakes, my dear. We all wear masks, for decency's sake. This modern business of yanking them off can be very foolish."

Perhaps Lee would not have been so troubled if Tony, throughout their brief courtship and honeymoon, had not lived so incredibly up to her ideal. She had originally been quite humble about her ideals—accepting her mother's conservative tradition—until he had seemed, by his dazzling conduct, to be saying: "No, it's all right; your dreams were not presumptuous; a husband, a lover,
can
be all that." It was really a pity to be capable of playing a role to such perfection if he could not maintain it. Or was it better to have one perfect memory than none at all?

"He looks lucky to me," her hostess had said at the cocktail party in the stuffy little garden behind the converted brownstone where Lee had first met him. "He looks like the kind of man who can always get a taxi on a rainy day."

Or a girl. Or a pretty girl. One who was twenty-three and thought that life was over because a short story had been rejected by
The New Yorker.
He had looked, at twenty-seven, much as he still did: tall, with those broad shoulders and a face that managed to be at once square and sensitive, and he moved with the awkward heaviness of some natural athletes, exuding, perhaps simply through his frequent deep laughs, an air of gaiety oddly inconsistent with an appearance that seemed more adapted to sobriety, even to puritanism. Lee had not known in the least what to make of him. His sympathy about the short story was extraordinary. He did not seem to be putting it on, which was quite as much as could have been expected of any bachelor lawyer who wanted a date, and a late one, for the evening. No, it was more as if the rejected short story had been his own disappointment. His attitude had cured her of literary ambition forever, but it had given her something else to cope with.

Everyone had always been on his side from the beginning. Any hope that her father might be shocked by the fact that his family lived west of Central Park, that his maternal grandfather had been an Irish immigrant and his paternal one at least partly Jewish, that he had not gone to an acceptable preparatory school or an Ivy League college, was soon dispelled. "Nobody cares about that sort of thing any more," Mr. Bogardus had snapped at her. "Tony's a natural gentleman. Besides, he got a silver star in Korea." Lee was to be denied the romance of rejection. Could it be that her parents were afraid she would get nobody?

And then the honeymoon in Bermuda. If she had written about it as she saw it in her own mind, she could not have sold it to
True Romance,
let alone
The New Yorker.
It would have been deemed far too sentimental, too gooey. She had been frightened at moments, wondering if it was quite safe to take one's foot off the earth and place it in a third-rate movie. Tony was so considerate, so masterful, so entertaining, so funny. Might she have been relieved to notice, when he studied the menu, ordered the wines, demonstrated his competence in such matters, that he was just the tiniest bit common? But he wasn't.

Only his own father, vacant, foolish, perpetually smiling Mr. Lowder, seemed to doubt him. "Tony's a fine fellow," he told her, "but he doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. Maybe he's too nice."

Was that it? Fifteen years later she still didn't know. There was a privacy in Tony that never yielded to any assault, that never showed a dent. If he rarely displayed irritability and hardly ever bad temper, he was still ineluctable in his determinations. He seemed to be always busy: in his law practice, in his boys' club and settlement house, with the myriad personal problems of his vast number of not very attractive friends. He never earned enough money, for he was a very free spender, and encouraged her to be the same. Yet they always seemed just to manage. He would leave the apartment at night to meet someone who telephoned without explaining why. "Ed's in a jam. I've got to go," was all that he would say. He took hold of her life, encouraged her to be an active citizen, to go on the Junior Committee of the Turtle Bay Settlement House. "You must make something of yourself," he would emphasize.

Why? For years she had not been able to make out if he had a purpose. He had left a big downtown law firm to form a small midtown partnership which had done moderately well but not very much more than that. He had made a name for himself in boys' welfare and recreation, but so had others. He was popular with many friends, but so were others. And then, suddenly, had come his nomination for the State Senate, and, for six months, everything at last had seemed to jell. Volunteers had flocked to his headquarters; money had filled the mail. Tony, like a squirrel long watching a high bird feeder, had finally leaped and landed securely at the first try. There had even been a wild columnist in
The Village Voice
who had entered his name in the list of future presidential aspirants. The whole thing had been a dazzling experience and had made her wonder if all that had mystified her in Tony was not simply that he was a public man.

"I've made a great decision!" she exclaimed, as soon as the front door opened and he had returned, after taking his mother down. "I've decided that I really want you to be a politician. And not just to irritate your mother, either."

"You're trying to get out of the scolding you know you deserve. Talk about wet hens! I had to sit in the lobby half an hour calming Mother down."

"Oh, she loved it. You know she loved it. So did I. I want to be taken out to dinner to celebrate my great decision."

"We're bust."

"I have some cash."

At the Italian restaurant two blocks south, in a back booth, Lee sipped her drink and felt strangely elated. Was it happiness?

"Will you excuse me to make a call to Max?"

Her elation collapsed. "Oh, Tony, you're
always
calling Max. I thought now you were out of the law you could leave your partners alone for a bit."

"But, darling, I'm in so many things with Max."

"What things?" She detested Max Leonard. She had always detested him. She was convinced that he had done Tony a disfavor in persuading him to leave Hale & Cartwright to set up on their own. Max had had no future in the bigger firm; Tony might have had. And Max was so relentlessly charming, so pallidly handsome, so busy-busy, so scheming. She thought he loved Tony more than he loved his snobby little wife. She thought he was in love with Tony. "I hate Max."

"You've never given Max his due. He's been a very good friend. It was he, after all, who got me into politics."

"What things are you in with him?" she repeated.

"Business things. I've told you, but you never listen. Max and I have gone into a joint capital venture. It's backing a small restaurant chain in Jersey. And then there's the stock in that new computer firm, Herron..."