The Golden Calves Read online

  “Art is elitist. Beauty is elitist!”

  “And the public be damned.”

  “The public be double-damned! I can remember a day when you weren’t so far from my persuasion. When an idealistic young woman was happy to lose herself in the study of an ancient civilization and think nothing of museum shops full of vulgar dolls and costume jewelry or of planning shows of everything but the artifacts in one’s own institution. But that was before we fell under the spell of Young Lochinvar.”

  She always had the hateful feeling that Carol could read her mind. For how else could he deduce her emotional concern with Mark from the latter’s occasionally dropping into her office, a courtesy he rendered to all the curators? Carol was a kind of fiend. Had she not felt his power over herself? She detested being alone with him, even in her own office with the door wide open.

  “I haven’t changed that much,” she said sullenly.

  “Only in that you have become the slave of fashion. I suppose you shouldn’t be too much censured for that. Fashion rules our world, from antinuclear protests to the size of bikinis. But beware! Fashion can be a merciless tyrant. It can become the storm of which I just warned you.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He raised a solemn finger as he paused for effect. “I am predicting, Anita Vogel, that within a century of Evelyn Speddon’s demise her collection will have been scattered over the auction markets of this nation from sea to shining sea!”

  “And why do you assume such a horrible thing?”

  “Because your dear lady has collected everything there is to collect. With the inevitable result that in each succeeding decade at least one tenth of her artifacts will be out of fashion. And things out of fashion are necessarily disposed of.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting the little matter of her will?”

  “I forget neither her will nor the firm that is drawing it. Is it not Claverack’s? But even if she puts in a hundred restrictive clauses, a judge in equity, interpreting the dead mind as it would have functioned had it existed at the moment of decision—i.e., as does his honor’s—will provide a key to open every lock. That is what the enlightened law professor of our day calls the nature of the judicial process.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Meaning you won’t. And anyway, you needn’t. You won’t live to see it all. As I say, it will take a hundred years.”

  “Oh, go away, please, Carol, go away. You just love to torture me.”

  Desperate, she covered her eyes with her hands. When she looked up, to her surprise and relief he was gone. It still lacked fifteen minutes to closing time, but she decided to go home, as she had at last learned to call Miss Speddon’s mansion on East 36th Street, lonely survivor of an era when Murray Hill had been fashionable. If Anita’s life at times struck her as a scuttling through dark alleys to blessed havens, this dwelling was certainly the greatest of the latter, far safer than the museum itself, for there were no acting directors, no Carol Sweeterses there, only the friendly ancient Irish maids, moving silently through dim, cool chambers to administer to the perfect comfort of a wonderful old lady surrounded by objects of incomparable beauty.

  Emerging from the taxi that she had extravagantly taken, Anita paused to gaze gratefully up at the welcoming façade whose heavily rusticated ground floor seemed almost too hefty for the support of the second and third stories of red limestone and the green mansard roof popping with bull’s-eye windows. Then, taking her key, she let herself into the front hall to greet the Assyrian warriors with a silently breathed assurance that she would do her best to protect them from a threatened power of even greater evil than their cruel profiles seemed to evoke.

  She found Miss Speddon alone in the parlor, sitting in her usual upright position in the middle of a high-backed divan before a silver tea service that might have meant, to one unfamiliar with her ways, that she was expecting a dozen guests.

  “Why how nice, dear, that you’re home early, just in time for a cup of tea. And to think I was just feeling the least bit sorry for myself at being all alone.”

  Miss Speddon was a tall, thin, bony woman who dressed in lively colors, often red, but she wore no make-up, scorning to compromise with time’s ravages, professing on the contrary to welcome them, in accordance with her stoutly maintained theory that each minute of life was as good, or should be, as any other. Her strong, oval, slightly equine face was framed by long hair of snowy white, parted in the middle of her scalp, and her unadorned neck and ears gave emphasis to the big-stoned rings that turned around on her long thin fingers.

  “I had a visitor this morning,” she observed after she had filled Anita’s cup. “None other than your young acting director.”

  “Oh? He didn’t tell me.”

  “Does he tell you everything?” Was Miss Speddon being arch?

  “Not at all. But associating me, as he does, so entirely with you, I should have thought he might mention it when he was in my office this afternoon.”

  “Does he come often to your office?”

  Anita wondered in dismay whether the whole world was going mad. “Dear Miss Speddon, what in the world are you driving at?”

  “Simply that he strikes me as having a more than casual interest in you.”

  “He certainly has a more than casual interest in you. And in your collection. As I suppose he should have. And certainly a more than casual interest in the fund with which he hopes to see it endowed.” “Dear me, how mercenary the world must seem to you! But that brings me exactly to the point I’ve been for some time wanting to make. That I may have been remiss in introducing you to that world. How many years have you been living with me, dear?”

  “Three years and three months.”

  “How precisely you know it!”

  “It shows that, contrary to the belief of many theologians, there can be time in heaven.”

  Miss Speddon’s little smile acknowledged the too florid compliment. “Dear child, how gracefully you put it. But in all that time how often have you entertained your friends here?”

  “You had all my family here for my thirtieth birthday. A good dozen in all, counting all the halfs and steps.”

  “But friends, Anita. When have we had your friends?”

  Anita sighed at having to go into this again. For Miss Speddon was constantly offering her the chance for hospitality. It was simply that Miss Speddon forgot. “You’ve offered to ask my friends here again and again. Nobody could have been more profusely generous. It is I who have been the reluctant one.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid attention to your reluctance.”

  “Maybe I haven’t any friends.”

  “And maybe that is something I should have remedied,” the older woman insisted. “And given some dinner parties for young people. Well, it’s never too late to start. Let’s have a party and ask Mr. Addams.”

  Anita could hardly suppress a little groan. “Dear, dear Miss Speddon, won’t you ever realize that I’m perfectly happy the way things are? That I have adored being included in your life and taken in by your friends? That I want nothing else? Can’t we just go on as we have been?”

  But Miss Speddon could be inexorable where she spied a duty she might have shirked. “Certainly not. I must consider your best interests. I stand to some degree in loco parentis.”

  “Oh, altogether! I have no family now but you.”

  Miss Speddon frowned. “You must not say that or even think it. Remember your mother and father.”

  “But they’re not my mother and father! You know that. They adopted me only because they thought they couldn’t have children, and when they did, my sole use was gone. Oh, I’m not saying they haven’t been decent enough; they have, and so have my stepmother and both my stepfathers and all the halfs and steps, but they don’t any of them really care about me, and they were tickled pink when you took me over and all my problems. Why can’t I adopt somebody, too? I adopt you as my mother!” Then she thought of
Miss Speddon’s fortune and blushed very red. “Oh, of course, I don’t mean anything legal or having to do with rights or anything like that! I mean just here at home. Oh, Miss Speddon, what must you think of me!”

  “I think of you as a very dear young woman whom I regard as a kind of ward. I don’t in the least mind being entirely frank about legal matters. I shall not leave you any substantial part of my estate—’’

  “Oh, Miss Speddon, please!” Anita cried in agony. What kind of a mad day was she having?

  “Let me finish, dear. I was raised with very strict principles about inherited money. I believe it is incumbent upon me to leave the bulk of the Speddon money that my grandfather made to his descendants, except to the extent that I may deflect it to charity. Accordingly, I am leaving my collection and two thirds of my Speddon estate to the museum, and one-third to my nephew and niece. As the latter are very well off, this should satisfy them. But I also have the money that I call ‘my own,’ the much more modest estate that my mother left me. She had no other descendants, so with this I may provide for friends and servants, including you, my dear. It is no fortune that I’ll be leaving you, but it should keep you decently, and I shall request the museum to retain you to look after my things.”

  Anita burst into tears. “I don’t want to live after you!”

  “But you will, my dear, and I trust you’ll have a long and happy life. And as you choose to regard me as a mother, I think you should heed my advice. Which is this: do not rule out the idea of marriage. Keep an open mind. If the right man comes along—”

  Anita could bear it no longer. “If you mean Mark Addams, I think you should know he has no thoughts of me in that line. He has a long-standing affair with a lawyer in Mr. Claverack’s firm.”

  “A lawyer?” Miss Speddon’s lips were pursed to a small o of surprise and distaste.

  “I think you’ve actually met her.”

  “Oh, a woman. For a moment I thought you meant … We have to be ready for anything these days. But these liaisons must be expected of young men. They don’t last forever.”

  “But this one seems quite permanent. They’ll probably get married. And even if they don’t, I have no interest like that in Mark. Let us not talk about him, please. And I promise you that I’ll keep an open mind about marriage. There! Will that do? Now, why don’t you tell me what you and the acting director discussed? If it was not private, that is. For I’m sure he didn’t come here to tell you how much he admired me.”

  “No, that was just my inference. He came, at my suggestion, to discuss my will. I gave him a copy of it and asked him for his suggestions.”

  “Which, knowing Mark, I’m sure he had.”

  “Yes, and actually some rather interesting ones. He thinks I should leave more questions to the discretion of the museum than I have.”

  “What, for example?”

  “Well, whether a particular object should be kept or sold.”

  “Sold?”

  “Don’t look so horrified, dear. It’s not that they’d do it. But as he explained, we are confronted these days with the cleverest art forgeries. It would be absurd if a museum were obliged to continue to display a Healy or an Eastman Johnson after it was established it had been painted by some smart fraud in an attic in Brooklyn.”

  “If he were that smart, maybe he’s a better painter than Healy or Johnson.”

  But to Miss Speddon, as to all collectors, the art forger was the arch-heretic, worthy of being burned alive. “And then there is the question of new valuations. The museum should be free to move things about to give prominence to artifacts coming into or going out of fashion. Mr. Addams cited Mrs. Gardner’s museum in Boston as a case in point, where the administration can’t even rehang a picture. The dead hand, he said, has frozen the whole collection.”

  “Oh, Miss Speddon, I beg of you, don’t listen to him!”

  Anita had jumped to her feet. She was trembling so that even Miss Speddon’s old eyes could take it in.

  “I’m afraid, my dear, that you’re overwrought. Perhaps our talk today has been a bit too personal for you. Why don’t you go upstairs and have a nice hot bath, and then we’ll have an early supper and listen to my new recording of the Mahler Fifth?”

  2

  ANITA’S sense of having been as much a stranger in the family nest as an oversized cuckoo fledgling hatched from an egg covertly deposited by a slovenly mother in the home of neat, orderly bluebirds was more justified by the facts than are many such feelings of alienation. Her adoptive father was a bright, energetic advertising mein; her mother, a competent fashion designer. They had been married for three years without issue and had decided to adopt a baby girl just before Sam Vogel was sent overseas in the war. But when he returned they proceeded to have two babies of their own, to divorce and remarry, and, amid all the proliferation of offspring of different matches, and of homes in Manhattan, East Orange and Rye, the thin, darkhaired, introspective and rather gangling oldest child had always been conscious of an air of faint surprise whenever she turned up.

  It was not that they weren’t nice to her. They were. But there was a resounding normalcy about them all, a blare of loud laughter, a constant whirring of balls being thrown and caught, from which she tended to shrink to an all-too-easily forgotten isolation. She had performed her function, after all. The fact of her adoption, as so often happens, had rendered the adopters not only fertile but fecund. She had been a device that, had she not been human, would have been disposed of. And then, too, the advertising father and designing mother had only moderately prospered; they had done well enough by normal standards, but their broods were large, and the private education deemed mandatory in the metropolitan area took more than all the income there was. Oh, true, Anita was paid for as well; she was by no means Cinderella with the wicked sisters, but she would never have presumed to ask for the extra tuition for a master of art history degree on top of her bachelor’s from Hunter. For that she had paid with a hard-won partial scholarship, her wages as a night waitress and an occasional check from her mother; and when, with the aid of a professor who had taken a particular interest in her work, she had secured a job at the Museum of North America, there seemed to be a feeling among all the Vogels, understandably enough, that she should be henceforth pretty much on her own. She would of course continue to go to her father’s in East Orange on Thanksgiving and to her mother’s in Rye for Christmas, and there would always be occasional summer weekends, and much would be made of her on each arrival—for half an hour. It was all right; Anita neither expected nor really wanted anything more. She liked her room on top of a brownstone only two blocks from where she worked. The museum had soon become her family and her life.

  She worked for three years in the pre-Columbian department, which embraced the vast field from the early Mayas to the Esquimaux and whose overall head was Carol Sweeters. She did not at first work directly for him, as she was assigned to a subdepartment of East Coast Indians in which he took little interest, but when he was putting together a major show of the museum’s Yucatán artifacts, and the assistant in charge suddenly left for a job in another museum, he selected Anita, quite arbitrarily as she then thought, to take the defector’s place. But she soon discovered he had been watching her more closely than she had supposed.

  “I note that you have been faithful over a few things, Miss Vogel,” he told her in his sneering tone. “I shall now make you lord over many.”

  “But may I go back to my Seminóles when we’ve done the show?”

  “If you still wish it then. You have been working with savages. The Mayas, you will find, had a civilization in some ways as high as our own. Not that that’s saying much.”

  “Because they studied the stars and devised a calendar?”

  “And because they built beautiful temples and adorned them with beautiful objects. I miss my guess, Miss Vogel, if you do not lose your heart to the Mayas.”

  Anita dutifully took home several books on the Mayas and re
ad them at night. She became fascinated by their concept of an agrarian society that kept warfare to a minimum. Indeed, they had appeared to regard it only as a defensive measure against invading tribes. When left to themselves, it seemed, they enjoyed a tranquil existence under clear blue skies, worshiping their strange gods on the high steps of their wonderful temples. There was, it was true, some suggestion in the books of human sacrifice, but Anita eagerly pursued the evidence that this aspect of their ritual may have been exaggerated or misunderstood by earlier historians. She had all her life suffered from a violent horror of all forms of bloodshed, with terrible nightmares about people being tortured or burned alive or devoured by tawny beasts. Indeed, she had often been afraid to go to bed at all, a state of affairs that had done little to contribute to her popularity in those early homes of dreamless sleepers.

  Carol Sweeters was then in his late thirties, unmarried, and, despite his ugliness, had a reputation of success with the ladies at the museum. Anita was never sure how much she really liked him, but she could not help being intrigued by all that he took for granted, including his bland assumption that she could ask for nothing better than to share his bed.

  “What are you holding out for?” he demanded one night in a cafeteria—he was notoriously stingy on dates—when she for the second time firmly declined to go back to his apartment. “A proposal of marriage? Don’t you think I could do better?”

  “Much. And so could I.”

  “Oh, I see your game. You think you’re the shy, intense type that’s going to catch the millionaire sated with silly society beauties. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Or that girl in Rebecca with Max de Winter. Except you’re not apt to find Rochester or de Winter in the Indian department of a second-class museum on Central Park West. Or do you dream of a passing trustee? ‘And what is your name, my pretty little assistant curator?’ Dream on, poor girl!”

  “Well, if I do catch one, I’ll promise to make him raise your salary. So you can afford to take the underlings you plan to seduce to better places for dinner.”