The Golden Calves Page 14

  “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. Because the circumstances won’t happen again. When Mark denied those questions about the…” She turned her eyes to the East River, rolling and turbid, below her window. She seemed to be debating, but more as a matter of taste than of emotional concern, whether she should articulate exactly what it was that Mark had denied. “You see, the whole thing was suddenly … well, so public, so crass, so humiliating, that I simply couldn’t bear it. I wanted to blot it out, at any cost. But that’s over now. I think I’m on top of any feeling of shame.”

  “There isn’t anything to be ashamed of.”

  “Yes, I see that now. I can even see Mark’s point of view. I see that he couldn’t admit those things and have any sort of a museum career left. The suit had put him in a position where he had no alternative.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” Carol had to make an effort to keep the growl out of his tone. “It seems to me that a gentleman always has the alternative of telling the truth.”

  “But what he’d done was not important enough to merit the whole truth. A kiss? A couple of kisses? Was it really lying to deny anything quite so inconsequential? What would a kiss mean to you, Carol?”

  “It would mean a pleasure, anyway. Not a rung in the ladder of my ambition.”

  “You’ve always been hard on Mark.”

  “I can’t not be, Anita. The guy’s a prick and always will be.” As he studied her impassive countenance for a sign of the least reaction, he felt a tiny throb of hope that her troubles might have killed her last bit of feeling for the director. But had they killed everything else? Was it better to have her alive and himself jealous or both dead? In his need to push past this disturbing question he asked abruptly, “What did the doctor say today?”

  “He said that if I continued to improve at this rate, I’d be able to go home in another week.”

  “Home?”

  “Well, that’s it. I don’t really have one, do I? Not where I wouldn’t be alone, that is. He doesn’t want me to be alone. For a while, anyway.”

  “How about your mother?”

  “I could go there, I suppose. She came in to see me this morning and was very nice about every thing. But that seems like another world, Carol. She and I are basically strangers.”

  “How about Mrs. Pinchet?”

  “Oh, she doesn’t want me at all!” Anita showed more amusement than resentment at the idea. Indeed, it brought a faint touch of animation to her features. “She’s a total lady and offered to put me up at a hotel with a nurse companion. But I couldn’t accept anything from her. I know she thinks I blew her case.”

  “She hasn’t said so, I trust.”

  “She hasn’t had to. No, I really haven’t decided where I’ll go.”

  “I might be able to sublet Fred Farr’s apartment for you. We’re sending him to Yucatán for a month.”

  “But I have no money!”

  “What are you talking about? Where’s the Speddon trust?”

  “The Speddon trust is right where I left it. And where I intend to leave it.”

  “You don’t mean that you’ve renounced it!”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can, can I? But I don’t have to accept the income. I can simply let it pile up and one day maybe give it to charity. Don’t look so horrified, Carol. That money was given me in a kind of moral trust. In return for my taking care of her things. And look what a mess has been made of that!”

  “But that wasn’t your fault. It was Miss Speddon’s for changing her will. Or you could even say it was mine for not anticipating that Mrs. Pinchet would bring that crazy lawsuit. My idea had been to let the article in Art in Town do the job. The trouble with a lawsuit is that if it’s lost or even settled, the bad guys get a kind of vindication.”

  Anita shook her head. “But even if it wasn’t my fault, I’m no longer in a position to do the job the legacy was to pay me for.”

  “It wasn’t to pay you for doing anything. It was to pay you for what you’d done. For giving three years of your life to Miss Speddon. The obligation was all on her side. And she recognized it, dear old generous soul that she was!”

  “Anyway, I’m not going to touch the money.”

  “But, Anita—”

  “Please, Carol.”

  He gave it up. For the present, at least. There was no point upsetting her unduly. The trust would always be there for a later, more rational mood. And anyway there was something not altogether unattractive to him in her now complete dependency. An idea was taking rapid shape in his mind that filled him with an excitement so intense that he already dreaded the possibility of its extinction.

  “Let me ask you something.” He paused, taken aback by his own breathlessness. “You know my apartment. It’s large, like so many in the old buildings. Constructed before the measly meanness of today’s housing. It has three bedrooms. One I’ve converted into a little library, but it has a day bed and would do perfectly for a nurse companion. I want you to come there, Anita, when you’re released from here.”

  She seemed really moved. She reached over to touch his hand. “Oh, Carol, that’s sweet of you. But I couldn’t think of moving you out of your apartment.”

  “You wouldn’t have to. I’d stay. I’d stay and do all the marketing and see the deeming woman was kept up to scratch. I’d get in a cook, and we’d have gourmet meals. Oh, Anita, we’d have fun! And you can’t think me such a beast that I’d ever take advantage of the arrangement.”

  “No, no, I’m not such a silly fool. I know true kindness when I see it. But I can’t think how I could justify putting you to such trouble and expense.”

  “You don’t understand. You’re always thinking of what you owe people, never of what they owe you. If you come to my apartment, I’ll be the one who’s in your debt.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Because you’ll have given me the chance to make up for what I did to that cat.”

  For a moment she didn’t seem to grasp the reference; then she almost laughed.

  “Oh, Carol, that’s sweet of you. Maybe I’ll have to think it over. Maybe I really will.”

  She did, in the end, come to his apartment, and for three weeks they enjoyed something like the amiable relationship he had envisioned. Her recovery, however, was rapid, and by the time she was well enough to find a suitable sublet, she was also ready to take back her old job at the museum, which Harold Stein, touched by her collapse, had insisted she be offered as part of the settlement. Anita had hesitated about accepting, but Carol, divining that it would be a way of easing her conscience about the trust, had represented it as her duty.

  “Together we can keep an eye on Claverack,” he had assured her. “Of course, he loathes you and me and will lose no opportunity to get rid of us, but he won’t dare try anything for a while yet.”

  And so life on Central Park West had begun to repeat its old pattern, for all the world, Carol thought sullenly, as if nothing had happened to any of the principal performers. He seemed to have made no appreciable gain in the affections of the still listless Anita, and he cast a jealous and suspicious eye on her least dealings with Addams.

  He had solved the problem of his own relationship with the director by confining it to a strict formality. When they passed in the corridor he would not even nod, and at staff conferences he would address him as “Mr. Director” and restrict his comments to the business at hand. He had no problem with Mr. Claverack, as the latter, since the ugly publicity of the lawsuit, was rarely seen at the museum. He was electing to keep a low profile during the period when management was carrying out what Carol sneeringly described as its “token” compliance with the terms of the Speddon settlement.

  One morning, the hated director made an uninvited appearance in the doorway of Carol’s office. He looked more than ever like a clean young man on a Saturday Evening Post cover, and his small, hovering smile seemed a kind of anticipatory defense to some expected insult. When Carol simply stared ba
ck at him, without a greeting, Mark entered the room and closed the door firmly behind him.

  “I think we’ve got to talk, Sweeters.”

  “About museum business?”

  “And our own. To some extent it’s the same thing. I mean we’re in the same boat. Sidney Claverack’s boat.”

  “That, Mr. Director, is your boat, not mine.”

  “Well, it’s true that it’s about not to be your boat. Unless you and I do something about it. He aims to get rid of you and Vogel. He’s cooking up a scheme to have you both offered jobs in the Institute of Pre-Columbian Studies in L.A., where he has a pal on the board. Of course, I told him that Anita would feel duty-bound to stay here and guard Miss Speddon’s things. But he’s not listening to me these days.”

  “And what is all this to you, Addams?”

  Mark, without answering, sauntered across the room, his hands in his pockets. He paused before the glass case containing the vision serpent. “Incidentally, I’ve changed my mind about your snake. Keep him if you want.”

  Carol felt a constriction in his throat. ‘The gods of the Mayas have no need of favors from the likes of you.”

  But Mark, without betraying the least resentment, took a seat before Carol’s desk. “I know you’re always going to hate my guts, Sweeters, but it can still pay us to work together. Believe it or not, I’m on the Speddon side now. I want to see all those commitments carried out. Every one of them. If I told you I’d had a change of heart you’d laugh at me. So I won’t tell you that. I’ll just tell you I need your help, and you need mine. The appraisals of the pre-Columbian artifacts given the museum by clients of Claverack are in your locked file. I need them.”

  “Are you ordering me to open that file, Mr. Director?”

  “No. I’m simply asking you to. Look here, I won’t beat about the bush. I’ve been checking his clients’ appraisals in the other departments. They’re all made by the same appraiser, a stooge of Claverack’s dealer, and they’re all grossly inflated. That’s how he got his clients to give things to us. By getting them three times the tax deduction they were entitled to.”

  Carol watched the director carefully, his heart beating faster as he began to make out the latter’s plan.

  “I know that.”

  “And you never thought anything of it?” Mark’s astonishment was unfeigned.

  “What should I have thought? All I care about is adding to the collection. What’s it to me what a donor deducts? They’re all tax cheats, anyway.”

  “But don’t you see, if we put our evidence together, we’ll have something to hold over Claverack’s head?”

  “You mean you’d turn him in to the IRS?”

  “No, no, no! We’d drop a hint of it, that’s all. Just enough to make him think twice about getting rid of people who oppose him on Speddon. I don’t see Claverack risking a rap about defrauding Uncle Sam.”

  “Is that what it would be?”

  “Well, wouldn’t it?”

  “Ask my secretary for the key,” Carol said abruptly, “and do as you like.” He turned his attention to the memorandum on his desk and pretended to be absorbed in reading it until he heard the director leaving. Alone, he jumped from his chair and darted across the room to stand by the vision serpent.

  He must have stood ten minutes staring down at those coils of jade. He tried to keep from blinking. Then he breathed in deeply, as if to suck in some of the mystery that must have settled in the air over the noble asp. The idea that had flashed over the roof of his mind when Addams made his proposal now hardened into a concept of justice as high and straight and gothic as some ancient English court of law. For if the evidence gathered by Addams for purposes of blackmail (and was it anything else?) were delivered to the proper federal authorities, would it be only the wicked Claverack who bit the dust? No, it would be the wicked Addams as well! For what board of trustees would continue in office a director who had betrayed the chairman and brought his institution into public odium and disgrace? Talk about killing two birds with one stone! With one shining piece of glorious green jade!

  He had stared so long at the vision serpent that his own vision blurred. He rubbed his eyes impatiently and resumed his gaze. The jet black orbs of the sculpted creature and its strange little beard, like a bib, reassured him. The Mayas had not been a sentimental people. Their emotions had been absolutes, their colors bright and fixed. The east was red for the rising sun; the west, black for the unknown, the uncovered. Hate was always hate.

  It had been agreed that he and Anita would celebrate the completion of her first month back on the job with dinner at an Italian restaurant. Its walls were covered with blown-up photographs of old drawings of famous Italian gardens. Water seemed to cascade over their little round corner table; strange monsters of carved stone or marble forming pilasters and cornices grinned at them with a weird friendliness.

  “Oh, but Carol, that’s wonderful!” she exclaimed when he told her about keeping the vision serpent. “It’s really big of Mark, even you must admit.”

  “He still behaved like an utter shit to you.”

  “But what does that matter if he means what he told you about the Speddon things?” There was more animation and color in her face than he had seen at any time since her hospitalization. The serpent had not only uncoiled itself; it was ready to strike.

  “Do you really think you can trust him? Him and Claverack?”

  “Well, Claverack certainly not. But Mark, yes, I think I really can. He seems to have completely changed his attitude. Why keep on with old grudges? Can’t you let bygones be bygones?”

  “So Young Lochinvar is come out of the west again!”

  “Oh, Carol, you’re not going to start all that again?”

  “Why the shit not?”

  And this was to have been the dinner when, had things gone just right, he had contemplated proposing marriage! Of making a fool of himself for the second time! Well, at least he had been spared that. As he sat moodily staring across the table, he remembered with a wince of mortification that he had referred mockingly on that other occasion to Darcy’s haughty proposal to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. It had to be some kind of a judgment against him for such folly that his situation should now repeat the great Jane’s contrived plot. For Darcy, though spurned by Elizabeth, gains her by saving her sister from social disgrace. Had he been actually inspired by some memory of that sentimental tale to turn his apartment into a nursing home for this penniless and ungrateful creature? Had he been hoping to dazzle her with his generosity and detachment? Really, had a man ever made a more egregious ass of himself?

  Thoroughly angry now, he resolved grimly to turn the blade in his own wound.

  “And to think I was actually thinking of asking you to marry me!”

  Her eyes were full of dismay. “Oh, Carol, my dear, dear friend, don’t talk that way, please. I’m not ready for anything like that yet. Really not.”

  He looked at her with baleful suspicion. “And not from Lochinvar either?”

  “Not from anybody, silly.”

  He sighed and picked up his napkin. He supposed it would have to do.

  He was to wonder afterwards if he would really have had the guts to go through with it if a Mr. Ackerly of the Internal Revenue Service had not called on him the Monday following for a personal inspection of the vision serpent. For after Carol had gone to Zürich to inspect that sculpture in the auction gallery, he had written to the banker who headed the Friends of the Mayan Collection at the museum to suggest that he buy it for them. The banker had done so, and it was his tax return that was now being audited. His appraiser, however, had been an honest one, obtained by Carol and not by Claverack.

  What had thrilled Carol—thrilled even as it chilled him—had been the discovery, at the beginning of the interview, that Mr. Ackerly was not the regular auditor on the case but the head of the department, who had come in the stead of his inferior because, as an amateur collector of Mayan artifacts, he had taken a
personal interest in the serpent. The gods of the rivers and meadows of Yucatán had conspired against Carol’s rival!

  “While I was reviewing the matter, Dr. Sweeters, I thought I’d take the opportunity of going to the museum and inspecting the asp myself. I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting your institution.”

  “Well, now, as they say, that you know the way…”

  “I’ll come again, of course. So this is it?” Ackerly stared for several silent moments at the spiraling jade. “What is that coming out of its mouth?”

  Carol repressed a smile. The man was indeed an amateur. “That is the head of the person having the hallucination that he is becoming the god represented by the serpent. The Mayas believed in an animate universe, peopled by large numbers of deities. It was important, to be favored by these, for mortals to be in constant touch with them. That is why a noble, or even a monarch, in such a ritual would be costumed as a god, in this case a serpentine one. And by drugs or bloodletting, he would reach a state where he hallucinated that he was that god. The artist’s job was to commemorate the ritual to instruct posterity how these necessary things were accomplished.”

  “The serpent god would then do something for the tribe?”

  “Presumably.”

  “Was the visionary then sacrificed?”

  “No, no. That fate was reserved for captives. Though undoubtedly some of the bloodletters died as a result of their too-drastic cutting. But it was a happy death. Happier, at any rate, than what probably awaits you and me.”

  “You sound as if you envied the Mayas, Dr. Sweeters.”

  “They lived closer to reality than we. They knew things that we don’t know. They gave names and shapes to unknown objects; they called them stars and moons and jaguars and monkeys and snakes and people. They brought the universe into their temples and learned to cope with time and death. They were clear and ruthless where we are confused and sentimental.”