The Golden Calves Page 5

  “It’s something rather serious, I’m afraid,” she said at last. “Our friend is gravely ill.”

  Anita’s first reaction was how odd it was she should not be more surprised. Her lips formed the almost voiceless answer: “How ill?”

  “As ill as can be. It’s her heart, and nothing can be done about it. She may leave us any time. The only thing Dr. Craven is sure of is that it can’t be long.”

  Anita clutched for the railing of the box. “Why are you telling me this? And why now?” She opened her mouth as if to cry out, but she didn’t.

  Mrs. Kay scrutinized her. “Do you want to go home, dear, and weep? Or do you want to show the character of which both Daisy and I are sure you are capable? Oh, I know it’s hard for the young to face death. You don’t see it in your mirror every morning.”

  “But why here, of all places?” Anita repeated, anguished now. “Miss Speddon may be back any moment.”

  “Not until the curtain. She has arranged that with me. It was entirely her idea. She wants you to be prepared, but not to discuss it with her. Death, she believes, should be a private affair. When she comes back, she will press your hand, and that will be all. She is counting on you to be very brave. And to look after her things.”

  “And she will not count on me in vain,” Anita murmured. For just a second she allowed herself the indulgence of covering her face with her hands. Then she turned back to Mrs. Kay. “I’m all right now. Tell me more about it.”

  As Mrs. Kay, in her low, measured tones, proceeded to explain the exact state of Evelyn Speddon’s degenerating heart, Anita found her mind as much a jumble of jarring thoughts as there were noises from the chattering auditorium below. Something seemed to want to escape from that mind; it was as if she had to close every aperture, pressing down with imagined fingers on its roof to keep enclosed the notion that what went on there was only her own business, that that dark cavern hid an amorality only blameless if never translated into words or deeds. For otherwise what would become of a soul that felt a wicked thrill at the intrusion of action into an existence so stale? Was the curtain about to rise on a drama in her own life, as it was about to rise on the second act of Wagner’s music drama? And did poor Miss Speddon have to perish for Anita’s liberty, her distraction, her libidinous fantasies? Surely such an Anita had to be a monster, even if she kept the knowledge to herself!

  “Here they come now,” Mrs. Kay was saying, and Anita jumped up as her patroness, with a gravely inquiring look, stepped into the box and took her hand to give it a quick, tight squeeze before taking her seat. Anita, returning that squeeze, said nothing and looked nothing, but hurriedly took her own place in the second row. But she had noted for the first time the glaze of death on those long gray cheeks.

  The lights dimmed, and she listened to Mark, who was murmuring something facetious about the dragon soon to be felled by the hero. She shuddered in unutterable dismay at her mental picture of Mark, clad in a bearskin, approaching her poor patroness with the gleaming Nothung in his murderous hand.

  4

  MARK ADDAMS, contrary to what was generally believed by the staff of the museum, was by no means assured of the board’s vote for the directorship, and nobody was more aware of this than he. He had the backing of the powerful chairman, which might have been sufficient for any other position on the staff, but even docile trustees have a way of showing surprising independence when it comes to the selection of a chief executive officer, and Mark had to contend with what the second ranking board member, Peter Hewlett, termed his “academic nudity.” Mark had a B.A. from Bowdoin, where he had majored in history of art, but no master’s or doctor’s degree. After college he had gone into advertising and from there into a public relations firm, and it was as a rising young officer in charge of fund-raising for the Museum of North America that he had first come to the attention of Sidney Claverack.

  Working congenially together, the two had managed to double the institution’s endowment, and Claverack, delighted with the man he now chose to regard as his protégé, had contributed his own money to make possible Mark’s employment as “assistant director in charge of development” at a salary equal to what Mark’s firm had been paying him and actually in excess of that of the about-to-retire director, who was sixty-five and suffering from emphysema.

  “I’m going to put all my cards on the table,” Claverack had said to him. “I don’t mind telling you that you seem to be just what I’ve been looking for as director of this shop. I haven’t made it exactly a secret that I’m not too keen about the available candidates in the field. No matter how much they prate about their administrative abilities, they don’t strike me as being nearly on a par with men who’ve been out in the big hard world of business competition. And yet museums have become big business, and they’ve got to be run accordingly. Not that I minimize the artistic function. Perish the thought! I have no idea of throwing out the baby with the bath water. But what I really want—and what I hope I can persuade my board to accept—is a man who can sell a product as well as buy one. I know you can sell this institution. You’ve already proved that. Hell, what more does a museum need? Somebody who can tell you how many angels can stand on the head of a pin or how many choirboys Michelangelo buggered? Fella, you’re the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Not that I’m exactly a maiden.”

  Mark had prided himself on being nobody’s fool. He had suspected that behind the chairman’s pale, smiling face, behind the large, commanding nose, the sleek black hair and watery blue eyes, behind the whole vigorous, alert and well-tailored figure, there probably existed a spirit of ruthlessness and inexorable advantage-seeking. Sidney Claverack was one of those men who never had to raise their voice, though Mark was sure that he could if he had to. His charm, his wit and his innate reason ableness, his gentle, ineluctable, pulverizing reasonableness (“You do agree with me, old man, don’t you? I knew you would”) could be counted on to bring one around, while the heavier ordnance was left unused in his arsenal, though not to rust there, never to be allowed to rust there. For there just always might be somebody who simply would not be convinced that the present power structure was the right one, for the arts as well as for business, or who stubbornly refused to be persuaded that the man who could not give the public what it wanted—or what its public relations counsel told it to want—was a fool who had no place either as an agent or beneficiary of philanthropy. But Mark’s business had always been precisely to deal with such public fiduciaries as Sidney. He had to know what he was about.

  He also knew that Sidney was a new but increasingly familiar type of trustee in the world of the cultured institution. Instead of devoting his primary ambition to his own business, like the older generation of museum sponsors, and giving his not-for-profit wards simply the benefit of his disinterested wisdom and money, he had left the management of his law firm, in which he had early achieved the first position, to his younger partners and gone on to identify the Museum of North America with himself. It had not, it was true, been his first choice. The United States Senate had been his earlier and perhaps more appropriate goal, but he had lost the race to a Democratic opponent after the expenditure by his backers of so vast a campaign fund that he had not deemed it feasible to raise another. And then, resolutely, spiritedly, he had turned the prow of his battle cruiser to the harbor of the visual arts.

  Nor did Mark see anything wrong with this. Why should the arts not be entitled to the best from the world of entrepreneurs? Had not Sidney Claverack put together for his own account a distinguished collection of modern American paintings? Was it not his avowed intention to quadruple the endowment of the museum and bring its attendance to fourth in the city, conceding only the unchallengeable supremacy of the Met, the Modern and the Natural History? When Carol Sweeters had pointed out to Mark that in a recent show of Canadian art at the museum, Claverack had managed to slip in an undue number of canvases by a young painter whose works in his own collection might be expected to appreciate in value by t
he association, Mark had put it down to that curator’s well-known habit of denigrating his superiors.

  When the ailing director had retired, after Mark had been in office only a year, he was named acting head, pending the decision of the committee of trustees appointed to find a successor. Of course this had aroused considerable resentment in the museum: a clique of older curators were never going to regard Mark as anything other than an upstart and the sidekick of an officious chairman of the board. But Mark knew that time was on his side and that many of the younger staff members already regarded him as the Galahad on whom they could count to pull the institution out of its doldrums and safeguard their own futures and pensions.

  These latter were not content to let the museum remain a quiet, sleepy organization where the older curators, absorbed in the cultivation of their individual gardens, tended to resent the intrusion of the public and to regard a strike by guards and maintenance men as a bonanza that would turn the building into a silent haven for scholars. The juniors were eager to follow Mark’s lead and turn the museum into a kind of graduate school for all ages whose artifacts would offer instruction in the history and culture of a continent, whose shop would be filled with enticing aids to learning and whose great central gallery would be available to display any of the popular visiting “megashows” so heavily covered by the press. By day the halls would be filled with students; by night they would glitter with benefit parties. Attendance was the new god at whose shrine Mark worshiped, and why not? What would be the good of a museum in the middle of a desert?

  But if the younger staff members optimistically and naively believed that the search committee would automatically follow the guidance of its chairman, Mark, less sanguine, realized that their failure to do so (and who could tell if the fickle Claverack might not be persuaded to change his mind or even sponsor a new favorite?) would deprive him of his one chance to achieve the first position in a major museum. For what was an “academic nude” without Sidney Claverack, and where else was he going to find such a sponsor? If the board didn’t choose him, he could only go back to his old public relations firm—if indeed they still wanted him.

  And if indeed he wanted to go back. Mark had always dreamed of a career that would combine material prosperity with eminence in a cultural field. At college he had wanted first to be an actor, then an artist, then a writer; but always a shrewd assessor of his own abilities, he had early divined that he was not destined to achieve high rank as servant of any of those muses. Yet his faith that he had an unusual gift, if he could only find the muse to bring it out, had never wavered. In the State House in Augusta, the home town where his father ran a small pharmaceutical business, there was a portrait gallery where the primitive likenesses of early hirsute legislators were startlingly dominated by the painting of a lady in flowing white, holding a golden goblet in outstretched hands, her mouth an oval of utterance, presumably of some strong and noble song. It was the diva Lillian Nordica, a daughter of Maine, depicted in her greatest role, Isolde. Mark had vowed that he would stand out as much from his contemporaries as the Wagnerian soprano stood out from all those worthy senators and assemblymen.

  And in his first two years at the museum it had begun to look as if he might achieve his goal. It had even seemed appropriate to him that the happiness he felt in the evolution of his professional life should have been complemented by a corresponding development in his private one. It was again through Sidney Claverack that blessings seemed to flow, for he met Chessie Norton, an associate in the latter’s law firm, at a cocktail party given in the chairman’s Park Avenue apartment. It was true that this tall redhead had not at first struck him as a blessing—rather the reverse, in fact.

  “I guess I don’t believe much in museums,” she had retorted in a snooty drawl when he had inquired if she was familiar with his and their host’s institution. “I find myself pitying the poor pictures on the walls. Think of all the crap they must have to hear about themselves!”

  “That is, I grant, a sobering thought. But how else are we to educate the public?”

  “How do you imagine you’re doing that?”

  “By teaching it to appreciate beautiful things.”

  “Oh, bushwa. Can you really believe that? The only way to appreciate a beautiful painting is to learn how to paint. I don’t say you have to paint well. Only enough to see what it’s all about.”

  “Would you say that of all the arts? Sculpture? Music? Writing?”

  “I would.”

  He reflected that she seemed horribly sure of herself. “And what about the people already educated? Doesn’t a museum offer them something?”

  “Well, it offers them more, certainly. But aren’t we reaching the point where reproductions will do the trick just as well?”

  “Never!”

  “I’ll bet I could fool you on a lot of stuff in your own shop. Didn’t Boldini’s father paint half the Rembrandts at the Met?”

  “If he did, he was a greater painter than Rembrandt.”

  The redhead seemed somewhat appeased by this. “Well, at least you’re not an authenticity buff. As if it mattered who painted what!”

  After this they chatted more easily. She showed no inclination to talk to anyone else at the party, even though some of her law associates were present, and Mark tried to interpret this as an interest in himself rather than a general indifference. Perhaps it was because of the intent way she had of attending to each question he put, a habit that, after all, she might simply have acquired in court. Still, there was something about her that belied her apparently assumed detachment, that suggested it was more armor than soul. The topic of museums led to that of curators and then to problems of administration and at last to the law and her own life. When he asked her to dine with him, she accepted as casually as if they had been fellow clerks leaving the office for lunch. As she seemed to care just as little where they went, he guided her to the nearest restaurant, a rather shabby Italian one on Third Avenue.

  At their table she seemed to relax and drank a considerable amount of Chianti. At first she had reminded him of a Modigliani model, long and lank, with long red hair, small, rather staring eyes and a twisted slot of a mouth over an oval chin, which, when lifted, enhanced her sometime air of hypercriticism. But as she became animated and enthusiastic, if a trifle too brisk, energy seemed to ripple through her, sending ardor into her long pale cheeks and flashes into her cold green eyes. There were moments when she could be almost beautiful.

  A discussion of the turbulence of the nineteen sixties led him to inquire whether her interest in law had exempted her from the radical activities of that time.

  “Quite the contrary,” she replied, with a slight quickening of interest. “You might even say I was ‘all out.’ I’m afraid it’s a dreary and typical tale.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “Would you really?” She studied him for a moment and then nodded, as if to indicate he had passed muster. “My poor parents! But then I suppose it was the same thing for many of their generation. There they were, in their nice little Queen Anne house in Darien, with two cars and a country club and just what everyone wanted in the way of family, a boy and a girl, almost the same age. Dad—you guessed it—was a vice-president of America Bank, and Mother had her garden club. Bruce was at Yale, and I at Vassar, and all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

  “Until pot and sex and war.”

  She gravely assented. “Until all of those things. Except with Bruce, pot led to cocaine. He pro tested, he marched, he smashed windows—as I did—as we all did—until we became disillusioned with disillusionment. Bruce held a news conference in New Haven and announced that he was going to kill himself.”

  “Which of course he didn’t.”

  “Which of course he did.” A spark in Chessie’s eyes seemed to reprove him for daring to question the dark integrity of the Nortons. “He shot himself in our cellar in Darien. Dad could never understand or cope with it. He t
urned away, refused to talk about it. Mother was worse and yet better. In time I came to think her quite wonderful. ‘Bruce has made his choice,’ she told me. There is a kind of relief to it, in the end. He didn’t have the will to live, so he had to die. It should be easier now for the rest of us. For me anyhow. For I’ve decided to live!’ ”

  Mark divined that the only way to respond to this was in the same tone. The girl would have spurned any expression of sympathy in which her ringing hammer detected the smallest pitch of falseness. But didn’t such hammers have a way of creating the very falseness they were looking for?

  “And that helped you? Her Spartan attitude?”

  “Ultimately. It also helped me accept how soon Bruce was forgotten. I saw why some people make a cult of the dead. It’s the only way to avoid total oblivion. And maybe the dead should be forgotten. When I saw how utterly all the protesting of the sixties was swept under the rug, when I saw that I was turning from a would-be martyr to a by-passed crank, I decided to follow Mother and live. I resolved to fight only for things that I personally cared about. A personal interest gives you direction and push and hate.” Chessie’s stare was now illuminated as if by a small flame. “I wanted to be a lawyer, and I wanted to end discrimination against women in law firms and courtrooms. Well, I and my likes have just about done it!”

  It excited him to feel that she too could be excited. “So now that battle is won, what remains? To become a partner and make a lot of money? Maybe a judge?”

  Her repeated study of his countenance seemed to seek further assurance that he was not laughing at her. Again she nodded. “Something like that.”

  “What about marriage and a family? Or is that too Darien?”

  “I haven’t ruled them out.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  She didn’t smile. “I haven’t ruled anything out, Mark Addams.”

  Indeed she had not, for their relationship almost at once developed into the affair that had now lasted for more than two years. Chessie continued to resent men in general and Mark, in some respects, in particular—she persisted in dubbing him a sentimentalist who was much too keen about many matters that she regarded as trivial—but she was under no misapprehension as to the importance of a man in her life. When their affair started, he had imagined it was going to be largely a physical one, to which he had no objection, but he had soon discovered that the sexual act was the prelude to the unfolding of some unexpected aspects of her personality. When Chessie’s major suspicions of his male chauvinism were overcome, she became a congenial and sympathetic friend. If she worked as hard as ever in the office, she devoted most of her free time to him, and she manifested a zeal for plays, operas, concerts and even museums that he had not suspected to exist behind the façade she had first presented of a rather lan guid disenchantment. Chessie had been deeply hurt by her brother and by her own disappointments, and she was leery of being hurt again, but she still had a sharp appetite for life.