I Come as a Theif Read Free Page A

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