I Come as a Theif (7 page)

"You're very funny."

"I'm very grave."

Max leaned forward and covered his face. "Can't you ever be serious?"

"Don't despair, my friend. I haven't turned you down yet. But in a matter like this I insist on dotting every 'i' and crossing every 't'. What kind of a devil are you if you won't let a man discuss the soul you're trying to buy? If I am to become a bribed civil servant, Max Satanicus, I am going to become it with my eyes very wide open."

"But I know you when you take that tone," Max retorted wearily. "It always means you've decided against something."

"Do you know me? If you did, you'd know that your proposition intrigues me. It intrigues me immensely. If I'm ever to commit a crime, it strikes me that this might be the right one." Tony paced up and down the rug as he worked it out. "Look at each aspect of it. Where is the wrong? Where is the hurt? Start with the bribe money. Where does it come from? The public? No. The government? No. It comes from the Mafia. Whatever you and I did with it would be at least as socially valuable as what they would. So no loss there. And if Menzies, Lippard is saved from closing, is that not for the public benefit? Are not hundreds of innocent investors saved from possible insolvency? So far so good. But what about Lassatta, or whoever he represents? Wouldn't it be better if they lost their investment in Menzies? Not necessarily. Because this is probably a retirement account. The Mafiosi, like other prudent persons, save for rainy days and senility and terminal ailments. And if they lose their savings, don't they have to go back to robbing and killing for more?"

For the first time in their session Max seemed to be thinking of something besides his own panic. "You don't have to go so far as to make out that we're public benefactors!"

"Why not?" Tony exclaimed. "If everything comes out for the better? Now, let us consider the intangibles. Do we, by taking this bribe..."

"
I
take the bribe."

"Nonsense, Max. I'm the public officer. Do we, by taking this bribe, decrease respect for the United States Government? No, because nobody will know of it but a couple of crooks who have no respect for government anyway. And, as far as you and I are concerned, you will have been relieved of a cruel anxiety, and the temptation to do further wrong, while I shall have been placed in possession of means through which to become a better public servant."

"So what is lost?" If Tony had to be humored, Max's expression seemed to say, well let him be humored.

"'Nothing but honor,' as Jim Fisk put it. That, of course, is lost forever. And I won't try to delude you by quoting Falstaff. We should have indeed lost something when we have lost honor. But precisely what that amounts to is for
us
to decide. We should have made a choice, of our own free will, and for motives that we have thoroughly explored, to commit a criminal act. We should be in charge of our destiny."

"You mean you'd do this thing as some kind of an intellectual game?"

"If you want to put it that way."

Max shook his head and sighed. "You're only playing with me. You'll never go through with it."

"I haven't decided."

"Oh, but you have."

"I haven't. I'll go for a walk. I'll go to the zoo. And tomorrow, I'll let you know. Will that be time enough?"

Max showed at least that he could still laugh. "Don't be eaten by the lions," he cried. "Don't be a martyr to your own non-God."

Tony walked in Central Park for an hour, but he found it unexpectedly difficult to bring his mind to any considered appraisal of Max's proposition. It was like walking resolutely down a long corridor to a particular door and placing one's hand firmly on the knob only to be distracted, before turning it, by some fool at the end of the corridor shouting one's name or perhaps by some fool just shouting. At one point, by the boat pond, watching the elaborate model of a schooner making its precarious way across the water, he wondered in despair if it would be possible for him to do any thinking about Max's plan at all. And it was sufficiently extraordinary that he could not even make out whether the procrastination of his mental processes was operating for or against the plan.

Sitting on an empty bench, he tried putting the question to himself aloud: "Are you going to do what Max proposes?" Then he opened his lips to let the answer emerge, as if by some process of free association. None came. Was there no idea, no image in his mind? None but the banality that one crime must lead to another? "What rot," he exclaimed aloud. Why should he have to assume the very proposition that he sought to rebut: that man was not free? Man was free. Free to commit one crime, or two, or three—or none.

He decided that he might think better in company and went home. It was six o'clock, and Lee and both children were having their daily argument in the living room. Isabel greeted him with her usual passionate appeal.

"Mummie's been criticizing the young. She says we don't get any joy out of life. That we're discouraged before we're even started. But she won't see that's only one side of the picture. We're discouraged because we
care.
We care about people being shot and tortured and starved all over the world. I think we're going to be known as the 'moral generation.'"

Tony stared at the girl as though she had just penetrated his secret. Then he laughed. "Why moral? It's just a fashion, isn't it?"

"Oh, Daddy! A fashion?"

"Sure. Don't you think our descendants may look back on our worrying about ghettos and racial prejudice the way we look back at Catholics worrying about Luther?"

"No! Worrying about people's religion was silly."

"You say that because you've never had any religion," Eric put in.

"Well, have
you,
Eric?" his father asked.

"Perhaps not. But I see that churches may have the right idea. They go in for absolutes. Isabel's full of sentimental goo."

"Oh, Eric, you and your absolutes. You're nothing but a Nazi."

"Children!" Lee protested. "Your father hasn't put in a long day at the office to come home to this."

Tony looked at her as he had just looked at Isabel. Did she see it too? But he was much too touchy. "No, it's all right, I like it," he said easily. "It's funny to consider all the things we do perfectly freely, even thoughtlessly, that we could have been burned alive for a few hundred years ago. Think of all the peccadillos the Holy Office used to punish so hideously. Think of the tongues that were cut out for slandering public officials and the men who were jailed for unionizing. And when we come to sex..."

"I believe," Lee interrupted drily, "that in some benighted eras a man could even be put to death for making love to another man's wife."

Tony turned to her, straight-faced. "Surely there couldn't have been many who did anything as wicked as that."

"Oh, Daddy!" Isabel exclaimed scornfully. "You're not with it at all. That happens all the time. Now we heard at school that Mary Burton's father..."

"Isabel!" Lee protested. "That's enough. Now will you both please go to your rooms and finish your homework. You can come back and sit with Daddy while we're having supper."

Tony went to the bar table to mix the cocktails. He was suddenly elated by the discovery that he could be two persons at once—two happy persons. All his life, it seemed, he had been afraid of not being the person whom his loved ones loved. He had shared the common human suspicion that if his mother, his wife, his friends could once peek behind the mask that he (and perhaps everyone else) wore, they would no longer love the person so revealed to them. And so, with total revelation, human love would disappear from the globe, except perhaps Tony Lowder's, for it was his peculiarity to like people's faults. But now it struck him that even if Lee would not have loved the Tony behind the mask, it did not have to matter so long as the mask remained. Two Tony Lowders could exist simultaneously and with equal reality: the Tony Lowder who was conventionally honest and whom Lee Lowder loved, and the Tony Lowder who was a crook and whom Lee Lowder might not have loved. He even began to feel the possibilities of continued exhilaration in the manipulation of these two Tonys.

When he brought Lee her drink, she told him the big news of the day. "Governor Horton called. He said he'd tried your office, but you were out. He wanted you to know that he hadn't forgotten you. He said if he couldn't wangle the SEC, he might be able to get you an assistant secretaryship at the Treasury. Oh, Tony, would we move to Washington?"

He felt a throb of pity as he made out the urgency in her eyes. Lee had filled out a bit with the years, and there was a hint, just a hint, of middle-aged dumpiness in her hips and shoulders, but her snubby, turned-up nose, her large brown watery eyes, her curly black hair, her desperate intensity, all contributed to preserve the sentimental image of the little girl that held his imagination in so tight a vise.

"I didn't know you loved Washington."

"Oh, darling, we need a change. We've been marking time ever since the election. We haven't gone back to the old life, and we haven't really started a new one. I want you to get on with your political career. I want you to get on with the job of becoming a great man."

"Since when did you become so ambitious?"

"I'm not in the least ambitious—you know that. It's just that I've finally seen what you must become. And that we've all got to help you become it."

"Or else?"

"Or else?" She shrugged as if this were a matter of no conceivable importance. "Or else we miss the boat. I don't know how much that matters, but, generally speaking, boats should not be missed."

"And when did you decide all this?"

She looked at him keenly for a moment, as if she were about to say something for which she might be punished. "That night you went to Joan's for dinner and didn't come home."

"You never mentioned that."

"No, but I imagine my silence was thunderous."

"Would you like to hear what happened? Joan's desperately ill, you know."

"I
do
know. And I don't in the least want to hear what happened. If you tell me you only sat and held her hand all night, I'll be disgusted. And if you tell me something else, I'll be equally disgusted. Let us leave it that a gentleman has to do what a dying lady asks."

He tried to make out what she was feeling from the fixed half-smile in her eyes. He knew that smile, and he knew that it could mean different things. "Very well," he agreed. "But what does that have to do with me and politics?"

"I did a great deal of thinking that night. I began to see that I had made a mistake—the commonest mistake that women make—in trying to get hold of you. In trying to be part of you or own part of you. It's so banal, so vulgar, that eternal clutching after a man, to avoid the bathos of loneliness. To avoid the basic human job of learning to live with oneself. Soul fleeing—that's what we're always doing. Running away from our own souls." She seemed to be working herself up to an actual fit of temper with herself. "I realized at last that being jealous of Joan was batting my head against a wall. That if it wasn't Joan, it would be somebody else. Or something else. For what I began to see was that Joan wasn't all sex. That she's not unlike politics to you."

"Well, of course, she's been a great contributor."

"Oh, I don't mean that. I mean that she's part of a crowd. The crowd that plays such a large role in your consciousness. The crowd that logically, sensibly, may one day become your constituents. The crowd of which I, like Joan, can be a part. The only way one can become a part of somebody else is by becoming a part of the thing they're part of."

Tony shook his head. "You're angry with me."

She stepped up and threw her arms about him. "Darling, I'm not. Believe me, I'm not. I'm trying so hard to be good and sensible. And to be happy. That's the point."

"You're right. That
is
the point."

"And I've been thinking. I don't want you to give that extra time to me and the children I used to ask for. That was being as bad as
your
mother. I was only thinking of myself. I want you to get on with your career. Full time. And I want to help you. All the way."

Her eyes were pleading, sincerely pleading. Whatever her motive, she had certainly convinced herself. Had he reached the point where he expected her to convince
him?

"I will, Lee."

Later that night, after she had gone to sleep, he lay awake, trying to take in the fact of what he had decided to do. For how could he now tell that trusting girl that her new hopes for him, on which she was building a new life for her loving heart, were to end in his political failure and bankruptcy? As the hours went by and he lay stiller than he could ever remember lying on a sleepless night, he tried to fight the persistently encroaching idea that what was going to happen on the morrow was a birth, the birth, forty-three years delayed, of Anthony Lowder. For up until now, it more and more struck him, he had existed like something floating in space, subject entirely to the attraction or repulsion of other objects that happened to come within his sphere. Now something was happening within himself. A little muffled motor, deep in the recesses of his psyche, had started to revolve, to throb, to whir. Anthony Lowder was going to start his own motion in a black void, and it could hardly matter where that motion took him. Success or failure were less important than the fact that he was making his own decision—independently and unsentimentally. The only thing that created a small doubt was the idea, implanted by Max, that he might be going to commit the crime for the sake of committing it—to round out and perfect his own little squalid existentialist story.

After three in the morning he fell asleep and dreamed that he had done what Max had proposed. It was a curious dream in that what he had done varied in no particular from what he and Max had discussed that afternoon. It seemed not so much a dream as a rehearsal. When he awoke, he was drenched in the sweat of relief that it was only a dream.

"Perhaps it's a warning," he told his haggard reflection as he shaved. "Perhaps I had better give up the whole thing."