I Come as a Theif (8 page)

And then he smiled because it occurred to him that he was afraid. Would there never be an end to sentimentality? When would he learn it was not a question of courage or manliness or morality but simply of choice?

Before Lee or either of the children was awake he went into the living room and dialed Max's number.

Tony at fourteen had had a religious experience. At least for almost four years he believed it to have been one. It was never repeated, but its effect on him was nonetheless powerful. It followed what he always afterward considered his initiation in crime.

His young brother's passion in life was a dolls' house. Philip at twelve was a large fat boy with black greasy hair and a shrill, aggressive disposition. He refused to make the smallest compromise with a world that largely bored him. He liked the movies; he liked to exchange dirty stories with a small number of unattractive friends; he liked to play with and embellish the elaborate dolls' house that he maintained in his bedroom in the Riverside Drive apartment.

This dolls' house was a cause of constant mortification to his parents, particularly to his mother who knew too well with what glee the Dalys must have discussed the masculine deficiency which it represented. She banished it to Philip's room and refused to buy him dolls or furniture for it. But Philip, who derived a dusky delight in flinging in hostile faces the unorthodoxy of his pleasures, dragged visitors in to see his treasure and caused a mocking hilarity at family gatherings by loudly specifying the miniature ornaments that he needed as his Christmas or birthday due. Dorothy Lowder found, like many censors before her, that she had only exposed her shame to the spotlight. Tony decided that Philip should have one ally in the family.

He had to break down the natural distrust of the maverick for the regular fellow, of Mummie's cross for Mummie's darling. An older brother, unlatching the side of the dolls' house for a peek, must have seemed the most Trojan of horses. But Tony was persistent, and Philip, for all his snarling independence, needed a friend. When Tony promised to get him a French divan for the dolls' house parlor, Philip was interested.

"But how will you get it? They're very expensive."

"I might ask Grandpa Daly. He promised me five dollars for swimming that mile last summer. He never paid up."

"He never will!" Philip snorted in derision. Grandpa Daly, the family god, had clay feet to the younger generation. "Besides, he hates my dolls' house."

"Well, what he doesn't know won't hurt him."

But Tony got nowhere with Grandpa Daly, who gave him a lecture on the poverty of his own childhood in County Cork, and anyway he had discovered just the divan that he wanted for Philip, which was not to be had for money. It was a beautiful little green French sofa in the splendid dolls' house of Inez Feldman, only daughter of a rich Jewish banker who occupied a baroque mansion just north of the Lowders' apartment house. Inez was a fat, spoiled, opinionated brat with a snooty smile and pigtails, and she didn't give a hoot about any of her many things, but that didn't mean she would give them away. She liked Tony, but when he had asked her to make him a present of an old Howard Pyle book that she never looked at, she had turned him down flat, saying it had been a present from a favorite uncle. He knew her type. Things acquired a value in Inez's eyes simply by being coveted by others.

Tony was certain, however, that she would never miss the sofa. In the first place, he could rearrange the little room so its absence would hardly show. In the second, the dolls' house was only one of four of Inez's, and she was already bored with it. The question was purely of the chances of detection, for there was no comparison between Inez's and Philip's need. In Tony's mind theft was associated exclusively with money. Taking things came under the lesser head of "swiping," a form of misdemeanor about which grown-ups could be expected to carry on but which enjoyed much less opprobrium among his contemporaries. There were gradations, of course, even in swiping. One did not take another boy's watch, or his camera or (assuming this were possible) his bicycle. But a useless bit of dolls' furniture owned by a spoiled girl who did not even care about it ... well, only a prude would carp about that. Besides, he would not be taking it for himself.

The theft, or purloinment, or simple swiping, was accomplished as easily as Tony had foreseen, and Inez was quite unconscious of her loss. The epidsode filled him with elation. He might have been a prince of olden days who finds himself endowed with the power to heal by touch, or, more appropriately, a Robin Hood whose destiny is to redress, in his own particular fashion, the injustices of contemporary society. He had taken a trump from Inez's hand to provide a better balance in Philip's.

When Susan, their older sister, who was always peering into Philip's dolls' house and making mean remarks about it, saw the divan, she recognized it at once as Inez's.

"You swiped it from her!" she accused Philip.

"I did not! Tony gave it to me."

Susan turned in surprise to Tony. Inez might well have given a present to her handsome brother, but why a doll's divan? "Inez has a funny way of showing her partiality."

"Not at all," Tony retorted. "I told her I wanted it for Philip."

As an answer it seemed to fit, but Tony knew that Susan would make a point of checking his story with Inez. For there was a grown-up quality in Susan. She could always be counted on to do the obvious thing and hence to catch people. Yet he had no sense of alarm, or even of apprehension. The game was becoming exciting.

"Well, I'll ask her next time to give you something for me," Susan said.

And she did this, the very next Sunday, when Inez and her father came to lunch. Inez looked blank.

"You remember, Inez," Tony said coolly. "The little divan from your dolls' house you gave me for Philip's? I asked you for it as a Valentine's Day present."

Inez looked so bewildered that Tony felt embarrassed for her obtuseness. Then her features seemed suddenly to jump in recognition.

"Oh, the little sofa, of course!" she cried. "Naturally, I gave it to you! It was for Philip, that's right. Do you like it, Philip? Does it fit your room? You must show it to me after lunch."

But after lunch Tony had to walk home with Inez, and when her father had gone upstairs for his nap, he had to kiss her many times in the conservatory. For years afterward ferns would be associated in his mind with wet, thick lips, with the scent of gum drops, with perspiration. He had learned about crime. Now he learned about punishment.

It was not necessary, however, to be caught. Only fools were caught. It was going to take more than Inez's giggles and squirms to make him give up this brave new weapon. A week later he took a miniature piano from the apartment of a friend whom neither Susan nor Philip knew and warned Philip not to show it off to guests. Then he took a book from the library of a friend's father for Susan (he told her it had been a present) and a china ashtray for his mother (he told her he had bought it with his saved allowance). At last he decided that it was time to do something for himself, and he took a yellow fountain pen from a department store counter. This last somehow struck him as a final commitment.

He now found himself in the habit of accumulating small objects at the rate of one a week: figurines, vases, beads, tiny toys, spoons—the world seemed replete with useless, decorative, unmissed chattels. He kept them in the back of his closet and in the bottom of the grandfather clock in the front hall that had never worked. Just why he was turning himself into such a magpie remained a mystery. At times he thought that he must like the feeling that he was doing things, rather than having things done to him. At others he felt that there might be an element of daring in these acts, a kind of challenge to the capricious deity that had made his family's life seem such a dreary one. But all he could be sure of was that he felt a bigger, braver being when his fingers surreptitiously closed around a coveted object.

There might have been a lesson taught by the fact that when detection came, it came after a gross risk quite unnecessarily and uncharacteristically taken. It was on the Lowders' annual summer visit to Grandpa Daly in the big white house in Larchmont. Tony hated this visit. He hated the airs of superiority of the Daly cousins and the bray of the big Irish gathering. He hated his mother's enthusiasm and his father's discomfort. But above all he hated Grandpa Daly.

Grandpa Daly was a small, wiry widower with thick long hair, still brown at eighty, that fell over his forehead in the manner of Will Rogers. But there was little benignity in the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped brown face under that tumbling lock or in the discourse that flowed so relentlessly from that gnarled throat. Tony had never known a human being to talk as much as Grandpa Daly. He seemed to be engaged in a kind of permanent, oral autobiography, a monument of words to the glory of Patrick Daly, varied only by individual paragraphs directed at particular members of his listening family to show them how best to derive profit from his example. Ordinarily, at least at Larchmont, the respectful silence of his descendants was broken only by appropriate laughs or exclamations of assent, but occasionally a querulous grandchild or bibulous son-in-law might attempt a longer interruption or even take the floor, in which event the ancestral voice would rise in pitch and by the exact number of decibels needed to dominate the rival sound, immediately dropping to its former level when the latter was quelled.

It was noted by all, however, that if little knowledge of his relatives could have come in by his ears, enough must have entered through his wandering, shrewd little eyes, for he seemed entirely up to date with the collective and individual failings of his clan. He also seemed to have antennae that picked up the least failure of reverence, for he showed an overt hostility to Tony and directed some of his sharpest comments in the boy's direction. Tony's indifferent marks at school, Tony's preoccupying love of sports, Tony's espousal of the causes of delinquent servants, all came in for grandpaternal comminations. Even at fourteen Tony could sense insecurity in the tyrant who could not endure the smallest sign of independence in his court.

Sometimes at table, the sage of County Cork would pare his fingernails with a tiny scissors that could be pulled out of the interior of a mother-of-pearl pocket knife. This knife intrigued Tony. It was the symbol of his grandfather's immunity from the law that governed others. For anyone else to have pared his nails at table would have been unthinkable. Grandpa himself would have been the first to pounce on him. He was like Louis XIV, who had the lonely privilege of defecating in public. One morning when Tony passed the open doorway of his grandfather's empty bedroom, he spied the knife on the bureau, and, almost before he knew what he was doing, he had entered quickly and seized it. But as he returned to the doorway, he confronted his grandfather coming in. Never was he to forget the expression on that brown, cunning face. It was delight!

"What are you doing in my room, Tony Lowder? What have you got there in your hand? Open your hand at once, sir I At once, I tell you, or I'll call the police! By God, Tony Lowder, if you don't open your hand this second..."

Tony dropped the knife and fled.

All morning he waited for retribution. He speculated that his grandfather would select the high publicity of the noontime meal, and he was right. When all were at table, Daly produced his ivory knife and placed it solemnly on the table before him.

"It is my sorry duty, ladies and gentlemen, to have to tell you that our kinsman, Tony Lowder, is a thief!"

Tony's mother gave a cry of alarm; there were gasps of dismay, but Daly raised his arms in the air.

"I caught him red-handed this very morning! Leaving my room with this valuable instrument clutched in his grasping fist! Deny it if you can, Tony Lowder!"

Tony was silent.

"Of course, he can't," the old man continued. "Any more than I, alack the day, can deny he's my own flesh and blood. When I was a boy, in Ireland, my grandfather told me that he could remember the day when a lad was hanged in Galway for the theft of a silver pitcher. It's not my opinion that we have altogether gained from the leniency that has taken the place of the old values."

Daly discoursed throughout the meal on the nefariousness of Tony's crime. There were no interruptions except for Dorothy's occasional gentle sobbing. But Tony knew that this was a necessary demonstration put on for her father's benefit. He found that he fiercely welcomed the break between himself and the old man. There was an end of the hypocrisy of blood love or even blood civility. In the cleaner, airier world that was opening up around him, Patrick Daly, if still a god, was a superseded god. He could rule the Dalys, but he no longer ruled Tony Lowder. The latter was as free and lofty as a Roman citizen who allows a temple in his forum to be dedicated to Jehovah as a gesture of tolerance to an unreasonable little nation that his legions have subdued.

When the meal was over, and the Daly cousins had trooped out of the dining room without speaking to him, Tony went out to the lawn alone. He could not quite analyze his bursting emotion, but he wondered if it might not be happiness.

***

Later that afternoon his real retribution fell, in a totally unexpected way. His father took him up to his room, closed the door and asked him gravely if his grandfather's accusation was true.

"But I admitted it!" Tony exclaimed in surprise.

"You weren't just borrowing the knife, to use it for something?"

"Oh, no."

"You really meant to keep it?"

"Certainly."

"And never return it?"

"Never."

And then, to Tony's horror, George Lowder burst into tears. Never could the boy have imagined that this smiling, taciturn, indifferent parent could have crumpled so completely. It was appalling to discover that a man who had always been so incapable of heights should not be immune to depths.

"Please, Dad." He placed a timid hand on his father's shaking shoulder. "Please, Dad, I can't bear it."