The Golden Calves Page 18

  “Are you a cultivated man, Dr. Sweeters?”

  “Heaven forbid! I’m a Maya. I worship the god and his replica.”

  “You mean you worship that?” Julia’s eyes were fixed again on the emerald asp.

  “I worship the vision serpent/’

  As Mark escorted Julia down the corridor to the main entrance hall, he remarked with a touch of impatience, “Sweeters is basically a serious curator. He doesn’t always talk such tosh.”

  She clutched his arm. “Oh, Mark, watch out for that man! He hates you.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “It emanates from him. And did you note that he never looked you in the eye?”

  “Anyway, I’m not afraid of his serpent. It’s a fake.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s hard to be sure of these things. But his very able number two man calls it ‘Sweeters’s obsession.’ ”

  “Then why do you display it?”

  “Because nobody’s proved it’s a fake. And it’s a striking object and keeps Sweeters happy. We can always remove it if some hard evidence turns up.”

  That afternoon Mark went to the Chrysler Building for his weekly visit to Claverack. The chairman kept an office at the museum, but he exacted this regular pilgrimage as a kind of tribute. Mark, finding him at his most cordial, was at once alerted to danger.

  “Good news, my friend. I’ve had another letter from Laderer, the board chairman of the Institute of Pre-Columbian Studies in L.A. He’ll take both Sweeters and Vogel. I guess we can survive without them, don’t you agree?” Here he winked.

  “Sweeters is a very good man, sir. One of our best.”

  “No doubt. But how high would you rate him on loyalty?”

  “But that’s all over. I really don’t see what Sweeters can do to us now.”

  “I’m afraid you’re naïve, my boy. Anyway the die is cast. I’ve written to my friend on the coast to say that, while we have no wish to lose Dr. Sweeters, if this is a promotion, he has gone as far as he can go here.”

  “Is that so, sir? Couldn’t he become senior curator?”

  Claverack’s eyes glinted. “Not while I’m on this board.”

  “I believe the curatorial appointments are supposed to be within the discretion of the director.”

  “Are you challenging me, Mr. Addams?”

  “The issue has not yet arisen.”

  Mark waited while the chairman debated in wardly his next move. Would he erupt and try to shout his way into making his point? But no, there were other ways of getting rid of uppity directors. When Sidney spoke, he seemed almost relaxed.

  “As you say, the question is still moot. And it will never come up if Sweeters accepts this post, which it is obviously in his best interests to do. As it will be in Miss Vogel’s.’’

  “Why must you get rid of her as well?”

  “Because, man, she is standing between me and the whole development of the museum! She’s sitting there like a lugubrious cat, mewing ‘Speddon this’ and ‘Speddon that’ every time we stick a thumbtack in a bulletin board. She’s got to go, Addams. You must know that as well as I.”

  Mark felt suddenly sick in the pit of his stomach at the prospect of having to threaten Claverack with the appraisal file. He supposed he had never really believed that it could come to that. And maybe it still wouldn’t. “If you mean, sir, do I agree that we should dispose of Miss Vogel so that, when the public has forgotten about Miss Speddon and her will, we may go back to disregarding Miss Speddon’s plans, then, no, I do not agree. I believe we are morally bound to carry out the terms of the will that she destroyed, in view of the circumstances of its destruction.”

  “Morally bound! Since when did public institutions become morally bound by the craven scruples of naïve and replaceable directors?”

  “I can only tell you, sir, how I stand. I don’t suppose there is much point in our arguing about it. When the time comes that you propose to dismantle any of the Speddon projects that we undertook at the time the suit was settled, I shall make my position clear to the board. And right now I intend to advise Miss Vogel that I consider it her duty to her late patroness to remain at her post. I have little doubt of her agreement.”

  Claverack sat back in his chair and squinted malevolently at Mark. The tips of his fingers touched and retouched each other. “Well, well, we seem to have grown too big for our director’s breeches, haven’t we? But maybe not too big to listen to a couple of cooling words of sound advice. Peter Hewlett has some degree of clout in our organization, but perhaps not quite as much as you suppose. And just remember one thing: that when it comes right down to the heart of any matter, trustees tend to side with trustees. Peter and I have understood each other since you were a raw college kid in a hick town up in Maine. And I can promise that you’re going to have to do a lot more than screw his daughter to break up an alliance like ours!”

  Mark at this could only quit the room without further comment.

  15

  JULIA sat with her back to her father in a large, bare studio room at the top of the Laidlaw Galleries, contemplating a portrait on an easel. It depicted a lady in a pink velvet dress, in the style of 1900, seated on a divan of gold damask against a dark background in which a vast Chinese vase, blue and white, glimmered. The lady was leaning forward, as if to show a polite interest in what the person—surely a man—standing where the observer was, happened to be saying. Did she quite comprehend him? Perhaps not. But she wanted to make a good impression; one felt she always wanted to make a good impression. She was very pretty, darkhaired, with a high narrow brow and a noble nose, well born, no doubt, and amiable, but of an intellect that could not match her grace. She existed to wear that dress, of such a warm and wonderful pink, a pink one wanted to rub and feel.

  “If you were going to buy Sargent, shouldn’t you have bought him years ago? In his big slump?”

  “Undoubtedly. But I thought he deserved that slump. I thought, like your mother, that he was slick. Now I’m beginning to rethink him. It’s too bad about his prices, but I’ve a hunch they’re going to go even higher.”

  When Peter studied a painting, he was as intent and still as a cat watching a fluttering bird. He seemed to be actually ingesting it; she could almost imagine the paints beginning to run. It had become a tradition with them that he would call her when he felt the moment of acquisition at hand. There had been times when one of her clients had threatened to interfere, but he had always grumbled, “What does she pay you? I’ll double it.” These moments in a gallery were the ones when she seemed most to share his collecting genius, when she became an integral part of the process in a way that her mother never had been nor even wished to be. Augusta was always ready with an opinion when asked, and a good one, too, but she was apt to offer it truculently, like an oracle awakened by an importunate truth seeker.

  Yet today Julia was unexpectedly conscious of something not unlike her mother’s independence. She did not really care for the portrait, except for the pink dress, and there was an element of deference in her father’s attitude to it that she found distasteful.

  “Do you suppose he tried to paint her just as he saw her?” she asked. ‘Is she simply mirrored? Or did he mean us to interpret her as I do?”

  “How is that?”

  Didn’t he know? “As a pretty numskull. Adorned by a gold bug of a husband. So that her portrait, like her dress, is simply another example of conspicuous consumption.”

  “Oh, Sargent saw that. It may be why he gave up ‘paughtraits,’ as he derisively called them. It’s because you can see he’s angry with himself for playing the silly society game that the picture has value. Is this what you really want?’ he seems to jeer at his poor sitter. ‘Very well, I’ll give you a feast!’ ’’

  “Until she vomits?’’

  “No, he stops short of that.”

  She let him go back to his absorption in the painting. If Drew Ames could see them now! But the golds and pinks of S
argent’s fantasy seemed to have survival power. The lady in pink struck her as a caricature of Mona Lisa. Her smile might have mocked the earnestness of a generation of radicals. “Shout your slogans and hurl your bombs, but men will still worship me. Aye, and women too!”

  “I’ve had some rather bad news from the museum.” He liked to interrupt his contemplations with extraneous topics. It gave him needed short recesses. “I don’t believe Mark knows it yet. Claverack came to see me yesterday. He’s under some kind of Treasury investigation about inflated art appraisals. I gather they’re claiming he got them for clients who gave paintings to the museum.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “At worst, they could bring a charge of conspiracy to defraud the government of taxes. I don’t know whether the museum staff is involved. Claverack was rather evasive on that point.”

  “Could he go to jail?”

  “Well, of course, he maintains the whole thing’s absurd. And I believe these matters are usually settled with fines. But, yes, a jail sentence is always a possibility.”

  “That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would be terrible for the museum,” he reproached her, frowning. “I know you’ve never liked Sidney, but even you wouldn’t want that. The question is whether the board should call for his resignation pending the outcome of the investigation. I had rather hoped he might offer it, but he didn’t.”

  “I’ll bet he didn’t. You’d have to take his place, wouldn’t you?”

  “I imagine so. It should be only temporary. Though something tells me that even if Sidney comes out of this a free man, he won’t be clean enough to make the board want him back.”

  “So it will be permanent!” She clapped her hands. “Oh, Daddy, that would be such fun. Mark would love it, and I’d love it, too.”

  He fixed her now with a long gaze. Even the portrait for the moment seemed forgotten. “If I agree to do this, dearest child, will you agree to do something for me? And for yourself? And for Mark?”

  “I know. You want me to marry him. Oh, Daddy, you can be so impossible.”

  Exasperated, she jumped up to walk to the window. Where was the old wizard now? Who was this Peter Hewlett who slavered over a fashionable portrait and wanted a son-in-law who would speak honeyed words to him and build his gallery? She had a sudden image of the boat that she wanted now recklessly to rock; not a boat, really, a canoe, gliding down a forest stream over still water, she in the middle, her eyes following the bank dreamily, Mark paddling with careful adroit strokes, Peter in the bow, hunched over and peering intently ahead.

  “Why is that such an impossible request?” he asked.

  “You haven’t always been so anxious to marry me off.”

  “Well, I certainly didn’t want to marry you off to Drew.”

  She stayed at the window, her back to him and the portrait. She recalled with chagrin what she had said to Mark on the park bench about his not accepting happiness. Who was not accepting it now? Why wasn’t she welcoming with open arms the wonderful life that seemed to be unfolding before her, a life that was even more neatly and shiningly arranged than the best parlor she had ever decorated, with the museum, enriched by Speddon and rid of Claverack, now under the tandem team of her father and Mark, both loving her and beloved of her? What more could she ask of the gods to make her happy?

  Everything! Her life seemed suddenly as wrong as a room that was too perfect. It was artificial, unlived in; it needed inconsistencies, even a clash of colors, perhaps a few odd pictures. Wasn’t Mark to have made the difference? And hadn’t he done his best to make it? Come now, Julia, she thought to herself, be fair. You know your father’s too much of an egoist to match the picture you drew of him for Mark. And you’ve always known it.

  “What are you doing over there, Julia? Aren’t you going to help me decide about Mrs. Clyde?”

  “No, I’ve had my fill of Mrs. Clyde. I don’t think I’d have liked Mrs. Clyde.”

  “But, darling, you’re not meant to like her. You’re meant only to like her portrait.”

  He had actually said it! For what had she been doing for years but trying to like the portrait she had made of him? She had been so obsessed with the idea of bringing order back into her life, after the fiasco of her engagement to Drew, that she had not even minded the banal theory of parental domination with which her friends tried to explain her silly fiction of the sage old priest and the devoted Vestal. Joint worshipers at the altar of art, wasn’t that how she had put it? Hadn’t it allowed her to have her cake and eat it? To combine the uncluttered life of the dedicated virgin with a rare affair that could be ended without recrimination? Because her supposed preoccupation would be understood by the man who, like as not, was only too willing to have it that way?

  But Mark was too good for that. She had thought she could marry Mark and share him with her father. But it had never been a part of her fantasy that her father should like Mark more than he liked her. That made her ridiculous.

  “You know what Mother will say if you buy that picture?”

  “That I’ve lost my taste?”

  “That you never had any.”

  “I don’t think I have to be entirely dependent on your mother’s sometimes rather narrow puritanical ideals.”

  Still, she knew she had killed the purchase. Augusta’s eye might have been almost too pure, her nose for sham too keen, but her veto would be final to a husband who had never openly admitted his festering suspicion that her taste was finer than his own.

  “I’ve got to get back to the office,” she muttered, ashamed of herself now. At the door she turned to smile ruefully at his adamantly presented back. He seemed to be appealing to the lady in pink to repudiate his daughter and her outrageous allegation. “If you insist on the mauve decade, why not try Boldini? Or Helleu? At least they were frankly fashionable.”

  Mark was away in Washington for a conference of museum directors, and she was alone that night. She took a sleeping pill to escape her mental agitation, and when she awakened at four in the morning it was with the total recall of a very vivid dream about Drew. She saw again his sullen brown eyes, his high-rising shiny black hair, and she ut tered a groan at the return of her sensation of emotional captivity and frustration. For she had struggled so desperately to burrow behind the barrier of that critical stare, that rejecting disapproval of all her likes and dislikes, only to find herself in the prison camp of his nihilism. Oh, how she had yearned, pined, prayed, for some scrap of illusion, some rag of romanticism! But no. He had been consistently, remorselessly dry. She had had no conception that his politics were only the expression of his passionate resentment of his harsh, near fascist father and would be utterly transformed with maturity into a simpler form of social aggression. She had let him tear her past to shreds. He had turned a bleak light on her father, on her sisters, on her friends; he had fixed them in the same exposed circle in which he made his own family perform their silly dance.

  “You know much better than I do, Julia, how many people and dollars it costs society to keep up your father’s style of living. And what does he give in return? He buys pictures to donate them to a museum to lower his income and death taxes. If he didn’t do this, others would. He is a perfectly useless person.”

  In her dream, however, it was not the memory of what he had said of her father’s collecting that had most upset her. It was the much sharper memory of her father’s reaction to Drew and Drew’s comment on that.

  “You’re making Daddy furious,” she had protested. “Can’t you ever shut up?”

  “Not as furious as all that,” the future investment banker had sneered. “He can always take a certain amount of criticism from a brawny young man.”

  And that, she knew in the anemic light of early morning, was what had released her from Drew at last. Not because she had not known about her father, but because he had. She had always been aware that Peter overtipped good-looking bellboys, that the new chauffeur was invari
ably handsome, that there were many more male nudes than female among his paintings and drawings and that he was beamingly charming to his daughters’ more attractive beaux. She had even been amused by an anecdote he loved to tell of an eminent Victorian scholar, whose middle-aged maiden daughters, accompanying him on summer trips to Venice, had described his partiality for gondoliers as “Papa’s little weakness.” For she had always been sure that her papa’s little weakness had never gone to such lengths. It had been a tamed, harmless thing, perhaps even contributing to his flair for art, and observed by only one person, in whose keeping it was perfectly safe.

  But to have it perceived by Drew had been simply unbearable! She got up and tried to obliterate the memory with black coffee.

  She spent a useless day at her office, too tired and upset to concentrate with much purpose on the new curtains for her Aunt Flora’s dining room or the carpet for the lobby of 1116 Park Avenue. Quitting the office early, she went to her family’s apartment, resolved to make up for her unkindness by pretending to her father that she had changed her mind about the Sargent.

  After all, it was not his fault that she had made him the hero of her inward monodrama. It was no responsibility of his that she had woven the fantasy of the beautiful father-daughter relationship to shield her from anything in life that she had not deliberately picked out for herself, turning it this way and that to be sure it was just right for Julia Hewlett. It behooved her then, now that she had selected Mark, to be fair.

  She was told that Mr. Claverack was with her father in his study. The latter had left word, however, that if she called, she was to join them there. Both men had been smoking, and the atmosphere was heavy. Passing her father to open a window, she noted with surprise how haggard he looked.

  “Let me tell you at once, my dear, that Sidney has brought me some very bad news. I told you about the trouble over the appraisals. It now appears it was Mark who tipped off Uncle Sam.”

  She stared at the sallow-faced chairman as she took her seat. “Why would Mark do a thing like that? Out of good citizenship?”