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Authors: Louis Auchincloss

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BOOK: The Golden Calves
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"If the collection's great enough, don't you have to compromise?”

“No! The museum should stand together on that. Every artifact should be in its correct historical place, not all huddled together promiscuously.”

Mark smiled at her vehemence. "What about your sacred Miss Speddon?”

"Miss Speddon attaches no conditions to her gifts except that they be permanently shown.”

"Still, a permanent showing ... that's a fairly stiff condition.”

"You don't have to take them if you don't want to show them.”

“Even if they turn out to be fakes?”

“Miss Speddon doesn't buy fakes.''

"All right, all right!” He threw up his hands in surrender. “We'll let that pass. Though I think you may find that your great patroness is not quite so rigid as you suppose. Anyway, promise me that you'll be my friend. My best friend. If I'm named director.”

Really, the man was unbearable. How could he torture her so? Only by closing her eyes could she bring herself to ask what she now asked. "What will Miss Norton say to that?”

Chessie Norton was the female lawyer with whom Mark had been having an affair for the past three years. The only reason they didn't share an apartment was that Mark feared it might hurt him with some of the older trustees, and in particular with Miss Speddon.

"Chessie perfectly understands that my life in the museum is as much a thing apart from her as her law firm is apart from me. Chessie would not dream of taking offense at any of my professional relationships.”

For once Anita found the looming presence of Carol Sweeters in her doorway a relief. Mark, nodding to him only curtly, at once took his leave.

“Well, well,
well!
We seem to be great favorites of Young Lochinvar these days. He'll be sweeping you off on his charger down Central Park West. And those of us who are so unblessed as to form a less agreeable image on the lordly pupil of his hawklike eye must learn to cling to the fringes of your privileged skirt.”

Carol Sweeters had a way of staring at a person from a doorway as if that individual's appearance had aroused in him the same boredom and disgust that his own was apt to evoke, returning to the world with interest its presumed reaction to himself. It was not so much that he was plain as that he seemed somehow unfinished, or even slept in. His sandy hair was messy; his features were bunched together in the center of a rotund countenance; his figure, which might have been tolerable if better distributed, tended to bulge and tighten in the wrong places. And yet he held one's attention. He was intelligent, damnably intelligent, and his character had the strength of perpetual aggressiveness.

“What do you want, Carol?”

“Want!” His eyebrows soared in outrage. “Oh, I see. We cannot obtrude, can we, on the sacred time of the eminence not so
grise
of the new administration? Well, if I may crave a word with one who was not always so averse to the approaches of your humble servant, who even, if I presume to recall it, permitted, on one or more occasions, her chaste lips to be—shall we say brushed?—by the coarser ones of...”

"Oh, Carol, shut up! You're disgusting.”

“Disgusting
now.
But less disgusting once upon a time.”

“Get on with it, please. Whatever it was you came in for."

"I shall be brief.” But the mottled color of his cheeks belied the coolness of his tone. She knew he was furious. "Have you heard what Lochinvar...?"

Let us call him by his right name.”

“What Addams—excuse me,
Mr.
Addams—plans to do with the little music hall on the third floor?”

"No. But what concern is that of mine?"

“A straw in the wind, my dear. No more. But enough of them may forecast the storm that will blow little me away—and thee, too, I trow—and maybe even the great Miss Speddon herself, with all her cloud-topped towers and gorgeous palaces—yea, leaving not a rack behind!”

"Must you be so dramatic?”

"It gives me a touch of dignity when, like Cassandra, I am sure not to be believed. But to the point. If you were not so infatuated with our boss-to-be, you would roundly condemn his proposal to remove the manuscripts of early American music to the gloomy Gehenna of the library vault and put in their place some tawdry prints of opera sets. Instead of a unique collection of American colonial work we shall be faced with silly scenes from such overflogged European dead horses as
Aïda
and
Il Trovatore
."

"That show is designed to illustrate the evolution of American operatic production. Isn't that indigenous? Isn't it educational?"

“Ah, educational! The holy word. You'd think we had no more schools or colleges. I thought museums were for the
educated.
For persons of taste and cultivation. Not for chattering schoolchildren pinching one another's fannies while some dreary docent drones on about the influence of this on that.”

"Really, Carol, you're a hopeless elitist."

“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.”

BOOK: The Golden Calves
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