The Golden Calves Page 15

  “But didn’t they go in for human sacrifice?”

  “Oh, yes, yes.”

  The auditor coughed as if to indicate that they had gone far enough for him. “And what makes you think, Dr. Sweeters, that this serpent is worth so much more than the taxpayer paid for it in Zürich?”

  “Because it was a steal in Zürich! It was I who spotted it and knew what it really was.”

  “I see. But shouldn’t the vision serpent be represented as rampant? Didn’t I read that somewhere? This one seems to be totally relaxed. As if it had swallowed something and was digesting it.”

  “Perhaps a tax auditor.” Carol didn’t care if he angered him now. He had lost interest in the man and was once more rapt in contemplation of the snake. If sacrifice it called for, was this not the moment? He felt his skin tingling with a delicious, exhilarating sense and closed his eyes tightly. Maybe the serpentine god was there! Why not? Wasn’t it as likely as anything else in a world so ridiculous as to place its confidence in Claveracks and Addamses? Oh, the joy of it! The joy!

  “In this case, Mr. Ackerly,” he pronounced, “the appraiser was honest.”

  “You speak as if that were exceptional.”

  “It is. In the Museum of North America.” Ackerly smiled until he recognized that Carol was not smiling in return. “You sound almost serious, Dr. Sweeters.”

  “I have never been more serious, Mr. Ackerly. I speak advisedly to a Revenue Service department head. I fully realize that the ordinary auditor would have no interest in any tax return beyond the one he happened to be auditing. He might even close his ears to anything that would mean more work on his part. But you, on the contrary, may be interested to know how many times Uncle Sam has been cheated by donors of this institution.”

  Ackerly’s eyes narrowed; thé police dog had scented the cat. “I am very much interested, Dr. Sweeters.”

  “Let me tell you then about an appraiser called…”

  If Sidney Claverack and Mark Addams would not slit their own penises, it was fortunate there was a priest to do it for them.

  13

  ONE OF PETER HEWLETT’S private jokes was that the library in his apartment, which at first glance might have struck an untutored eye as the paneled retreat of a recognizable Park Avenue tycoon, complete with unread sets of classics, duck decoys and nineteenth-century English hunting prints, was actually the ideal from which such banal copies were made. The large carved swan on its own little round Sheraton table was the masterpiece of Elmer Crowell, the Michelangelo of sculpted waterfowl. The books, “armorial,” leather-bound in rich, restful-to-the-eyes pinks, greens and yellows, were arranged on the shelves so that every tenth volume faced outwards to display the gilded crest and coat of arms of its royal or noble owner. The paneling was of dark mahogany; the ceiling of white plaster carved with Tudor roses and drawbridges, and over the Jacobean mantelpiece hung a Ben Marshall painting of a master of foxhounds on foot, surrounded by his barking canines.

  But there were times when Peter wondered whether the joke might not be on him. If, in a household of females, he liked to think that he maintained a kind of control by his own quick temper, quickly appeased, and that he was obeyed, not so much that his womenfolk respected the brilliance of his intellect as that they deemed him at heart a sentimental old darling, he still could not escape little reminders that his wife and daughters, like those barking hounds, might at any moment turn on their master despite his long whip and rend his scarlet coat to shreds. What would his Crowell or even books bearing the arms of France quartered with Austria do for him in such an eventuality?

  And such an event seemed to loom on the morning when Augusta came into the room with a pad and pencil, like a secretary ready for dictation. Yet the moment she sat down, it was clear who would be dictating. Augusta never intruded on his sanctuary unless the matter was serious, and then she did not knock.

  “I’ve made a list of things for you to check on while I’m gone. There’s very little, really. The household pretty well runs itself.”

  He elected not to look surprised, if only to defeat her expectation. “I hope you have a good trip.”

  “Oh, I expect to have a fine trip. The Caribbean should be lovely in March.”

  “Is it a cruise?”

  “Yes. On the Excalibur. Three weeks. Nassau, Jamaica, Antigua.”

  “You’re going alone?”

  “Oh, no. Sadie May is going with me. And two friends of hers, also widows.”

  “‘Also’ like Sadie? Or ‘also’ like you?”

  “Like Sadie, of course.” Augusta did not acknowledge his sarcasm.

  “But I thought women lucky enough to have hung on to their consorts did not have to join up with deprived ones.”

  “They don’t act deprived. They’re less gloomy, anyway, than those with husbands in wheelchairs.”

  “Oh, come off it, Augusta. How many of my contemporaries are in wheelchairs?”

  “I was speaking metaphorically. Men don’t usually age as well as women.”

  “In what way am I aging less well than you? I speak of the mentality, of course. There’s no competing with that perfect skin and figure of yours.”

  Augusta took no more notice of his gallantry than she had of his sarcasm. “Of course there’s nothing wrong with your mind, Peter. There never has been, and I rather doubt there ever will be. But you’ve always had a streak of selfishness, and now it’s more than a streak. At the rate you’re going, if you don’t watch out, it may swallow you up.”

  Her voice had sharpened in tone. The issue was now joined. But he found that he was trembling with pain and anger.

  “We never object to a general state in the morals of our nearest and dearest. It is always to a particular blemish. How then have I been selfish to you, my dear?”

  “It’s not just to me. It’s to the girls and to our grandchildren. All you care about these days is your new gallery at the museum.”

  “Ah, the gallery, of course, the new gallery. You have it in for me because of my pictures. But what’s new about that? Haven’t you, basically, always? Even when you were helping me to choose them? You’ve always been jealous of my collection, Augusta. I suppose any wife would be.”

  “Don’t try to put me off with psychiatric bromides. You know perfectly well that what I mind is not your buying pictures but your giving them all away and depriving your family of their rightful inheritance.”

  “But Julia told me that if I gave them away in my lifetime you’d have no objection! She said your only worry would be if you found yourself saddled with a right of election against my will. Which you won’t be, because I’m leaving you your full intestate share.”

  “You mean my share of what’s left after the big plums have been plucked. Thank you very much. Julia thinks she knows you and me down to the last nut and bolt. It’s almost insulting of her, and certainly condescending. What’s more, it’s not true. I’m not such a fool as you and she suppose. The last thing that concerns me in all this is my duty. It’s yours I’m thinking of. Your duty to the children you brought into this world.”

  “You think it’s my duty to keep everything so that I may leave them everything? And give nothing away?”

  “No. I think it’s your duty to leave them their proper _share. And I think that if you and I sat down to discuss the matter calmly and rationally, you’d find that we’d probably agree as to what that share would be. After all, you’re not a communist or socialist. If you were, if you really and truly believed that you ought to give everything to the state, I wouldn’t so much mind. But you’re no such thing. You’re a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, and you know in your heart that you’re doing a wrong thing to your children. Well, don’t do it!”

  “Augusta, if I give you my word of honor that each of our daughters is going to be very well off—”

  “What good is your word of honor in a case like this? How can I possibly be sure of what you say unless I have all the facts and figures? And how do we kn
ow what “well off’ will be by the time you come to die? Suppose Julia, for example, wants to become a collector? Suppose she wants to support a museum, like you? Shouldn’t she have the same right to an inheritance that you did? What would your collection have been without your father’s fortune? And don’t give me that tommyrot about your having bought it all for a song, because you didn’t. You made some good bargains, surely. But you’ve also paid some tidy sums, sometimes too much. Remember all the money you sank into that Mexican muralist—”

  “Oh, Augusta, please!” His temples were throbbing, and he reached up to feel his sweat. My heart, he thought with sudden panic. He had to remember his heart. Resolving to keep calm, he confined his expression to a lugubrious stare. “And so you have decided to punish me by leaving me, is that it? You will sail away with Sadie May and enjoy yourself in the company of the fortunate widows? Perhaps you won’t come home at all. At least until you find yourself also translated to that happy state. I daresay it will be at no very distant date.’’

  “Oh, Peter, don’t be an ass!” Augusta actually stamped her foot, a rare gesture with her. “You’re just trying to make a tragedy out of your own pettiness. In a melodrama everything gets a pretty costume, doesn’t it? Even plain, ordinary, common-or-garden selfishness gets dressed up. Well, I won’t put up with it. You can take off that costume and see yourself as your family sees you. And to give you time to do that, I’m going off on my cruise. For I can be selfish, too!”

  Peter, in the days after she had sailed, found himself in a sorry state of depression. If he could have condemned her attitude as arbitrary and unreasonable, he might have been able to continue to dramatize his resentment, blowing it up to a stature that would almost have made up for his desertion and isolation. But so long as an occasional ray of light as to the horrid possibility of her judgment being correct stabbed into the darkness of his wounded self-esteem, he was helpless against the mood.

  “And why do I care so much?” he asked himself aloud, squinting bleakly at his own foolish image in the shaving mirror. “The woman has simply no conception of what it means to be married to one of the great collectors of our time!”

  And then he looked around with a nervous twitch to be sure the bathroom door was closed and that Annie the chambermaid wasn’t making his bed. If anyone were to hear his raving!

  His only comfort was his daily visit to the museum, where he would spend an hour with Mark Addams going over the plans for the Hewlett gallery. He had rapidly become devoted to this cheerful, compliant young man, whom he had previously considered too much Claverack’s protégé to be anyone else’s. But since the lawsuit Sidney had begun to express doubts about his former favorite, and this had immediately predisposed Peter in favor of Addams. For Peter had never quite trusted the chairman. Sidney was undeniably useful, generous, perhaps even indispensable to the institution, but Peter still kept a wary eye on him. Perhaps it was simply that he felt that Sidney handled Peter Hewlett too well.

  One morning, as he was about to leave Mark’s office, it occurred to him that the usually high-spirited director had seemed a bit tired and disconsolate, and he recalled not only the trouble that a critical chairman might be giving him, but something he had heard from the elegant, elderly Miss Tillinghast, curator of silver, with whom he often paused to exchange daily gossip, about a breakup between Addams and his lawyer girl friend. Perhaps the young man was worried and temporarily at loose ends. He turned back from the door.

  “I’m a cruise widower for the next two weeks, Mark. If by any chance you’re free this evening and looking for a good meal, I think I can do pretty well for you at the Patroons Club. You can always ‘go on’ if you have what is known as a ‘late date.’ ”

  “Why, I’d love that, sir! And don’t worry about late dates. The way I feel right now, I’m through with the sex for good.”

  “For good’s a long time.”

  “Well, for a long time, then.”

  In the huge, high-ceilinged, almost empty dining room, under the School-of-Tiepolo fresco, with the bad, dark portraits of deceased club presidents looking down at them, Mark and Peter dined lengthily and well. They had had two cocktails apiece at the bar; they had drunk a bottle of white wine and were now drinking one of red; and they had become very pleasantly congenial. Augusta in her distant vessel, descending with a swarm of widows on the crammed marts of Caribbean villages, seemed comfortably remote.

  Mark was already calling him Peter, and they were actually discussing the former’s relationship with the lawyer lady. The younger man was being as frank as if Peter had been a college crony.

  “The trouble with Chessie and me was that we were rivals as well as lovers. She’s full of sex antagonism. Of course that can sometimes be sexy—Theseus overcoming the Amazon. It can make screwing a livelier business, if it’s not carried too far.”

  Peter felt his throat constrict. This invitation into the scene of the younger man’s sporty bedroom was almost too much. He thought of Augusta’s passive response to his own fumbling lovemaking in the years before even that had ceased.

  “Our real trouble began during the trial. It gave Chessie too much of an advantage over me. There I was, cutting a sad and sorry figure, and there she was, the blazing righteous advocate. And afterwards, it was as if Shylock was expected to make love to a victorious Portia, though maybe the old boy would have liked that. But not this cat. I knew I wasn’t going to make the grade, but like an ass I tried anyway. And Chessie’s reaction was horrendous. She couldn’t imagine, at least in her psyche, that she wasn’t being spurned, even humiliated. It drove her right up the wall.”

  “But surely you could explain that.” Peter feared that his eyes might be bulging as he mentally recreated the scene. “Even if at the moment she was too excited, wouldn’t she feel differently in the morning?”

  “But there wasn’t any morning; that’s just the point. She kicked me right out of her apartment. She said all was over between us.”

  “And that was that? That was final?”

  “Not quite. Unfortunately. There were two other occasions when we got together again. You can imagine what happened. I was so anxious not to have a repeat of those tantrums that I funked it each time. You can’t make love with a pistol to your head. At least I can’t. And the last time it happened I got sore myself. If she preferred indulging a nasty temper over trying to work things out rationally, she could do so, and to hell with her!”

  Peter noted the sudden thin line of Mark’s lips, which made him now look his age, in his thirties, not his twenties. The boy wonder had ceased to be a boy.

  “But you implied that she couldn’t help it. That her sense of rejection was not a thing she could control.”

  “Oh, that may be true enough. She’s probably suffering from not having been loved sufficiently by her parents. Or by her adored brother. He killed himself. I suppose there’s no harsher rejection than suicide. Yes, I can see it. She fortifies herself against being unloved and hence unlovable by taking up women’s causes and becoming a fighting trial lawyer. But then I come along to slip through the fortifications and take the citadel by surprise. And once she’s exposed herself, once she’s betrayed her secret weakness, I spit on her, so to speak. ‘Ah, so that’s what you’ve been hiding,’ she imagines me crowing. ‘Your essential unlovableness!’”

  “But, Mark, if you can see all that so clearly, surely you and she can talk it out? Not in the bedroom, perhaps, but, say, at the lunch table?”

  “It’s possible. But the truth is, it makes sex too clinical for me. I know people prate about understanding and sympathy and couples going together to shrinks, and I don’t say it never works. But sex has always come easily to me—until Chessie, at least—and I don’t propose to waste my life with someone who makes heavy weather of it. Let Chessie find her own storm partner. Let them enjoy the rumpus they make of a simple thing. As for myself, I’m through with tense Vogels and erupting Nortons. Give me a girl who can love a good roll in
the hay and laugh off a punk one. I sometimes wonder if the old puritanism we thought we’d kicked out of morals hasn’t gone underground and come back to plague us in the sexual act.”

  “People have to be serious about something. I’ve made my god out of art. I suppose the less fortunate may have to make theirs out of screwing.”

  “Is it a sin to want to enjoy a little peace and quiet with a woman?”

  Peter could not help reflecting that he had not perhaps been just to Augusta. She had always been so patiently uncritical of performances on his part that must have been pallid versions of what this finely knit fellow, for all his modesty, was capable of. Suppose he, Peter, had married a Chessie instead of an Augusta! “Good heavens, no!” he answered Mark’s question. “There must be plenty of young women glad to offer you that.”

  “Well, let’s drink to it.” Mark raised his glass of red wine. ‘It’s really swell of you to let me rattle on like this. I could never talk to my father about these things.”

  His father! The term cast a chill. But what other relationship indeed was possible? You old fool, Peter Hewlett, he snarled to himself; take what’s offered you and be grateful! “If we’re going to drink toasts, I think we’d better have some champagne.” And he raised a hand to beckon a waiter.

  When the Moët-Chandon was uncorked, Peter changed the subject to one that seemed to offer more common ground. “At any rate, you have your work at the museum. That must be your solace until Miss—or Ms.—Right comes along.”

  Mark seemed immediately disposed to be equally confidential in this field. “Well, that’s the great thing, of course. Though it’s sometimes a bit difficult to match the term ‘solace’ with the kind of isolation that’s imposed on me there.”