I Come as a Theif Read Online Free PDF

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