The Golden Calves Read online

  He turned on the light by his bed and called Julia’s number.

  “Are you still up?”

  “Daddy, you know I’m a night owl. What’s up?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “You mean did I lure your director up here with lascivious intent? No, I’m alone, however shameful to admit.”

  “Julia, dear. You’ve got to marry him.”

  “Daddy! Are you drunk?”

  “I was never soberer. You’re both the right age. You both have the right tastes and temperaments. And you’re both divine human beings. To me, anyway. He’s fancy free, and I believe you are, too. Oh, darling, grab him, give me a son-in-law, and I’ll give you my whole damn collection!”

  “You are drunk. Go to bed.”

  “I’m in bed.”

  “Go to sleep, then.”

  “Just promise me you’ll think about it. That’s all I ask.”

  “Daddy, for God’s sake!”

  “Only think about it. Is that so much to ask?” “All right, I’ll think about it. Now good night!”

  “Bless you, my child. Bless you.”

  And without even seeking to justify his absurd sense of optimism, he switched off his light and fell almost at once into a black sleep.

  14

  MARK, in the first weeks of his affair with Julia, found the exuberance of his new happiness tempered with a peculiar recurring suspicion that it was somehow unreal. He would try to reason this away by reminding himself that it might have arisen simply from the contrast that his social difficulties with the staff of the museum offered to the bright merriment that Julia had brought to his extra-office life. He had never before had that boy’s sense of “School’s out!” in leaving his work. He had always been pleasantly excited by the daily routine, even in his public relations days; and indeed in his Chessie period there had been times when pleasure had seemed at least as arduous as toil. But Julia had a way of making everything seem fun. There was a lightness, even in her most serious moments, that put him in mind of the heroines of Shakespearean comedy, Viola and Rosalind and Imogen. She could be funny when she was indignant; her eyes seemed to laugh when she pulled herself up straight.

  When his mother, a still pretty, plump but very sober widow, trying to conceal her considerable zest for life behind the transparent veil of her New England propriety, and his obese and loquacious unmarried sister came down from Maine for a weekend in the wicked city, Julia, as their guide, had been generous enough to help them enjoy the sights of Manhattan without so much as a hint that they reconsider their complacent conviction that home had to be the better place.

  On the last day of their visit, when he and Julia had called at the hotel to say goodbye, his mother took advantage of his sister’s trip to the desk to pay the bill, to ask: “I suppose you two are keeping house together?” This was accompanied by a shrewd glance and a nod to indicate that even in Augusta they kept abreast of the sexual revolution.

  “Mark hasn’t moved in with me, if that’s what you mean, Mrs. Addams. Nor I with him. But I shan’t deny we are lovers. Does that seem very wrong to you?”

  “Well, of course, it wasn’t done in my day. Leastwise, not so anyone knew it. But I reckon there’s no great harm in it, if it’s generally tolerated. Does your ma approve?”

  Julia appeared to reflect. “I don’t really know if Mother knows. She rarely talks about personal things. But I suppose Daddy must have told her. And he certainly approves.”

  “He doesn’t think you and Mark ought to get hitched?”

  Julia’s laugh was clear and spontaneous. “As a matter of fact he does. You know, Mrs. Addams, a girl has a double role to play these days. In the past, when a young man came from Down East to the big city, the sleek, sophisticated woman he took up with was supposed to get the hayseeds out of his hair and polish up his manners for the dear little girl next door he would soon go home to marry. But now she has to be both.”

  “So you think you’re polishing up my manners, Julia?”

  “Well, haven’t I? Mrs. Addams, I appeal to you!”

  Mark’s mother, thoroughly amused now, glanced from one to the other. “Hang on to this girl, Mark.”

  This was as near as he and Julia had come to a serious discussion of marriage. He didn’t introduce the topic again, but he was glad it had come up. It distilled a small golden glow to the hours they were apart. He did, however, refer again to the supposed role of the city girl.

  “So you think you’ve smoothed my rough corners? The folks back home wouldn’t know me now?”

  “Did they ever? Who knows what abysses lurk behind those smiling green eyes?”

  Was she entirely joking? How much had her father told her about the lawsuit? They had talked around the subject, but Mark had been less than candid. He had promised her that the Mark Addams of that episode was no more, and she had seemed to accept this, but then she was deep. And was it true? Wasn’t he Johnny-on-the-make again? If he, the kid from the country, the penniless director of a small museum, should wed the rich and socially prominent daughter of a principal trustee, would anyone in the world of cultural institutions believe for a minute that he had been motivated by love alone? Couldn’t he just hear Carol Sweeters chuckling, as he leaned over Anita’s desk to show her the announcement of the engagement in the New York Times, “I see your friend Mark’s got his ass in a tub of butter.”

  He had his first inkling that some of the sense of unreality that made up in part both the delight and the bewilderment of the affair might be caused by something in her past, with which she had not fully come to grips, at a cocktail party she took him to. There had been a number of these; she introduced him easily into the circle of her friends and clients, and seemed to know at once, despite his good party manners, just who bored him and who didn’t. Nor did she embarrass him by too promptly giving in to his occasional impatience. If the bore happened to be a lady who was about to redecorate an apartment, she would tell him firmly that she expected him to “work.” At this particular party he found himself talking to one Ellen Lanier.

  She was a type he had learned to, recognize in Julia’s world: the plain, stout, plain-spoken woman with such utter confidence in her social position as to feel no need of feminine charm or even, for that matter, of aught but the slimmest good manners. He was not surprised, therefore, after she had invitingly patted the empty seat on the sofa beside her, to be asked to hand over the keys to his private life.

  “I’m talking to you as one of Julia’s oldest friends. I think she’s been hiding you from me. Why should she do that?”

  “Maybe she thinks someone will steal me.”

  “In that case hadn’t she better marry you? Is that in the cards? You’re both of age, surely.”

  He glanced across the room to her equally stout spouse, who was holding a dark drink that certainly interested him more than the chattering women around him, and wondered if he, too, would recommend marriage.

  “I guess you’d better ask Julia about that.”

  “I have, but she won’t tell me. All I really want to know is whether you’ll be good to her.”

  “What makes you think I wouldn’t?”

  “It’s nothing about you personally. It’s just that I know how terribly hurt she can be. Oh, she doesn’t show it, I know. No one could be a cooler cooky, more seemingly self-reliant. But that’s a mask. I know because I saw my brother, Drew Ames, hurt her eight years ago. That was when she put on the mask”.

  “What did he do?”

  “He was odious about her father. It was what made her break off their engagement. Drew was kind of a red in those days. You wouldn’t know it now. He checked his hammer and sickle after he made his first big deal in Pappy’s investment firm. Actually I think he took up socialism just to get Pappus goat. But the old man was too smart for that. He knew he’d only have to wait for Drew to come round.”

  “And was Julia a left-winger back then?’’

  “Julia never had any politica
l opinions that I could make out. But she certainly cared about Drew and his. He was handsome then. Now he’s like Joe.” She looked across the room at her husband with what struck Mark as a complacent bleakness. “Drew’s trouble was that he had a cruel streak. He still has, I guess, though his wife is too insensitive to feel it. He was always expounding his socialist views in a way to make everyone else feel idle and useless. And he couldn’t leave off the subject of Mr. Hewlett.”

  Mark felt a faint weariness stealing over him, the sure sign of impending disillusionment. He twitched his shoulders to shake it off. Why did people have to find psychological maladjustment in every happy relationship?

  “Well, I suppose Peter Hewlett has his vulnerable points.”

  “Yes, and Drew was merciless about them. He considered Mr. Hewlett the epitome of capitalist hypocrisy because he posed as an art lover. What did he accomplish, Drew used to ask, but enrich crooked dealers by buying their stuff to give away for tax deductions? And he’d say that sort of thing to Mr. Hewlett himself! With a kind of sneering laugh to make it seem like a bad joke.”

  “Well, no wonder Julia dropped him. Who wouldn’t have?”

  “But Drew wasn’t being entirely malicious. He had a theory that the bond between father and daughter was much too strong and he had to do something to break it.”

  “He certainly went about it in a strange way.”

  “Well, that’s it. But it doesn’t mean he didn’t have a point. Julia’s always had a thing about her father. There’s no question in my mind that she’d have married my brother if he’d left her old man alone. And when she finally turned on Drew, it was with a vengeance! I think she even became a decorator because it was the thing he most despised. Drew used to say decorators were faggots who painted the claws and capped the tusks of the capitalist dragon.”

  “You make your brother sound charming. I wonder that Julia could have been so taken with him.”

  “Well, he was really quite sexy, if I say so myself. All the girls thought so. Julia wasn’t so far gone on her old man as to be totally immune.”

  Mark at this debated getting up to walk away. But he found he couldn’t. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I don’t want you to make the same mistake my brother did. Because I think Julia’s happiness may depend on you. You seem to be the first guy she’s really cared about since Drew. The fact that she won’t talk to me about you seems revealing. And if you will take her, so to speak, with her father, you’ll find that things may work themselves out.”

  “What makes you so sure that I can put up with what your brother couldn’t?”

  “Two things. One, that you already get on so wonderfully with Mr. Hewlett. That Julia did tell me. And second, all the things she can bring you.”

  “What, that she couldn’t have brought your brother?”.

  “I’ll be frank. Money and social position.”

  “So that’s what you think of me.” He glanced darkly about the room. “I suppose everyone here thinks the same.”

  “They don’t think any the less of you, if that’s what you’re afraid of. People in this town believe in getting ahead.”

  He got up, already almost breathless at what he had decided to say to her. ‘Thank you for your candor, Mrs. Lanier. I think my feeling for Julia may be just strong enough to survive it.”

  He found Julia in the next room. As soon as she saw his expression, she divined there was trouble. He could not help admiring the ease with which she at once stood up and made her fluent excuses to the man she had been talking to, who happened to be their host. In the crowded elevator they could not talk; he had to wait for the lobby.

  “Let’s go to the park.”

  It was only a block away, and they walked there in silence. In the mild fall weather, amid the stalking, cooing pigeons, they found an empty bench, and he told her what Mrs. Lanier had said.

  “I was afraid of something like this the moment she came in. With friends like Ellen, as they say…” He was relieved to see that she was not going to minimize it. “Of course, Daddy and I have always been close. Unusually close perhaps. But I really don’t see why that has to bother people. I began to understand very early how much he needed love. He’s a lonely man, you know, with almost no intimate friends. He had a hateful father who completely dominated his pathetic, broken mother and sister. He led an exquisite bachelor’s existence, complete with rare books and bibelots, until he married Mother—rather to everyone’s surprise, I gather—in his middle thirties. She was devoted and high-minded, and he was happy for a while with her and us three girls. But then something happened. Mother became more and more remote, retreating into herself. I think she was disappointed that she had not been able to make more of him, that he did not have all the potentiality she had originally expected. Mother is a tremendous idealist, and I’m afraid she finds Daddy at times … well, trivial.”

  He could see that she was trying hard to be fair. The last word had caused her a tremor of discomfort.

  “But then they had the collection together.”

  “Tor a while. But Mother seemed to lose her interest in it. She used to say she cared about pictures and not collections. I think she actually found collections somehow … common.” Again that tremor. “Which is why I, to some extent, took her place in helping him. Which, I hasten to add, she never in the least resented. I think it was even a relief. I think she saw that, having had no illusions about Daddy, I could be kinder and more tolerant. Oh, tolerant’s not the word. For Daddy is in some ways a great man. Doris and Inez could never appreciate him except as a lovable old bear of a pa, but he and I … well, we have always understood each other. We each know what the other is thinking without being told. And when a sympathy like that exists between two people, why do the others immediately want to break it up?” Up to this point she had been almost apologetic. Now there was a hint of defiance in her tone. “I sometimes think that marriage is the only intimacy permitted in our society. And look what a mess people make of that!”

  “This is all very interesting, my dear, but you do^t have to beam those beautiful angry eyes on me. I don’t in the least object to your wonderful relationship with your father. I only wish I had one like it with my own. But you haven’t even touched on the thing your friend said that upset me.”

  “You mean about the money and social position?”

  “Damn right I mean that.”

  “I thought that was simply too vulgar to comment on. You’ve probably discovered that people in what is called ‘society’ are the most vulgar of all.” ‘It doesn’t bother you that your friends think I’m after your money?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Would it even bother you if I were?”

  Her look was one of faint surprise. “I guess I don’t know. I never thought of it. I suppose nobody’s ever entirely sure what they love someone for. I don’t imagine I’d like it if you were only after my money. But that’s not possible. That wouldn’t be my lovely Mark. I don’t think it pays to turn over every pebble on the floor of a generous heart. The heart’s the thing. And you’ve got a big one.” She was smiling now; she was begging him not to go on with it. But he was grimly determined to go on with it. ‘That seems to me just a little too pat. Mrs. Lanier tells me that everyone considers me a gold digger, but that they like gold diggers. Everyone is not always wrong. And isn’t the real reason they don’t mind my motives that they scent I’m giving value for what I get? That Julia Hewlett needs a husband who will fit in with her father and his collection? And don’t I do that to a T?”

  She stared down at the pavement. He had really done it now, brute that he was. But when she looked up, it was with a beseeching and not a reproachful expression. “Oh, lover, do you have to spoil everything? Can’t you just accept happiness? Don’t let that ridiculous Ellen or the memory of her horrid brother come between us, for heaven’s sake! Supposing we have money and pictures and museums and love and everything in the whole wide wor
ld. Can’t we enjoy them? How can you expect people not to envy us?”

  Ah, now he knew he’d have loved her without a penny, and in the very ruins of his bombed-out museum! He took her in his arms and hugged her. “It’s getting cold. Where shall we go for dinner?”

  “Anywhere that we won’t run into the Laniers.”

  Their affair now entered an intenser phase. Mark found there was no further need to talk of marriage; it seemed almost bound to come. They soon learned that they needed to see each other during the day as well as at night. When she was working on the lobby of a Central Park West apartment house, she would appear at odd moments in his office for a cup of coffee, and he would take her to inspect any new display or renovation. On one such occasion he got Carol Sweeters to take them to see the vision serpent in its new glass case in the Mayan gallery. Julia gazed long and intently at those jade coils before addressing the hovering, smirking curator: “Was it worshiped?”

  “Do you mean the sculpture or what it represented?”

  “Weren’t they the same?”

  Carol’s smiled ceased. “I see what you mean. The man who hallucinated that he was a vision serpent had to become one. And the artist reproducing the process may have undergone something of the same transformation. The Mayas certainly felt that their gods were in daily touch with them.”

  “So that getting in physical contact with one was not impossible. Like us consuming the host. Eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ.”

  “Just so.” Carol’s smile reappeared, but it was now different, the one he offered his equals. “It might also be called the artistic process.’’

  “Because the artist is uniquely privileged to reach behind the veil to reproduce the gods?”

  “And other men can only worship his products. Cultivated men, that is. For cultivated men today there are no other gods to worship.”