The Golden Calves (21 page)

Inez's glance at her father was baleful. “I thought I'd better rescue Mark from the early morning lecture. I'll bet you're on the subject of the museum already."

"If we are, it's because Mark brought it up.”

“Did he? Then you have him obsessed." Angered perhaps that Mark should look so fresh, in contrast to her own puffed cheek pouches and dark undereyes, infallible evidence of her late hours and alcoholic consumption, she proceeded now to challenge her parent on his own ground. She turned to Mark. “I suppose you were talking about Daddy's new gallery. Or is it galleries, by now? I know it's heresy to say it, but how far can you really go along with his little game of giving every artist abroad some kind of Western ticket to fit him into a museum supposedly dedicated to North America? The games people play to cram things into categories where they don't belong! Is Henry James a Yank or a limey? Did that hysterical last-minute change of citizenship really give him to His Britannic Majesty? And what about T. S. Eliot? And John Sargent? And Arshile Gorky and Rothko and de Kooning and all the rest? And Einstein? God bless America! A few more pogroms abroad, and Daddy can stick all the world into your museum!”

Peter put down his napkin and left the breakfast table. He thought it almost safe to abandon Mark to a woman making herself quite so unattractive.

In the back seat of the old Cadillac limousine, returning to the city that afternoon, Mark revealed to Peter that Inez had asked him down for the following weekend.

“I hope you're coming," Peter responded in a tone that committed him to nothing.

"As a matter of fact, I'm not. I told her I had a heavy work schedule. I trust you don't mind, sir.”

The “sir" still occasionally slipped out. Peter let it pass. "I don't mind at all, dear boy. As a matter of fact, I shall be staying in town myself next weekend.”

Delighted with this victory over Inez, he decided to push his luck, and he invited Mark, when they arrived in town, to dine with him a second time at the Patroons. His weekend house guest obviously had no excuse, and he seemed willing to accept; Peter enjoyed a sense of exhilaration when he found himself once again with his young friend in the huge dining hall under the ceiling of naked nymphs, who were safely made only of paint.

"You know, Mark, there
is
something to be said for men's clubs. It may be heresy to utter the words, at least in liberal circles, but I impenitently maintain that the sexes have something to gain from occasional segregation. It's not really so much a case of excluding women as it is of excluding sex. Of having some place where social relations can be conducted without the intrusion of physical attractions.”

Mark looked around at the bad portraits of the old men and smiled. "What about homosexuals? Wouldn't you have to keep them out too?”

"Most emphatically! Except those who stayed firmly in the closet. I'd have no pinching at my bar.”

“When you put out to sea? I used to have arguments on that subject with my friend Chessie. She claimed that no close human relationship was free from all degree of sexual attraction. You might not be conscious of it, but there it was.”

"Even between you and me?" Peter chuckled as if he had cited some boundary mark of fleshlessness. But he was sorry as soon as he had said it. It was only too evident, even to his reluctant and prudish imagination, that in his desire to enfold this handsome young man in what he liked to think were paternal arms, all kinds of homoerotic urgings might lurk. He felt no great need to worry about this, because he was perfectly aware that nothing short of a mind-numbing stroke would ever keep him from behaving like a gentleman. It was nonetheless the better part of valor not to go skipping around on those slippery borders. "Well, I suppose we're all monsters in our ids. But I still think men have something to offer men, and women no doubt women, in occasional isolation from the other sex.”

“I don't think any but fanatical women's libbers would give you much of an argument on that. It's just the doing business in clubs that they don't want to be kept out of."

“But we don't do business at the Patroons!”

“Oh, Peter, how can you say that? You do it all the time. You're doing it tonight. Isn't the museum your real business?”

"Then everything's business."

"Isn't that what Marley's ghost said? ‘Mankind was my business'!”

“But not womankind."

This was a subject on which Peter could wax very hot, but he was sure that there was no subject over which it was worth his while to get angry at Mark.

The next morning he telephoned Inez to tell her that Mark was not coming down the following weekend. He must have allowed some note of satisfaction to creep into his tone, but even so he was hardly prepared for the poisoned arrow that she now struck into his heart.

“Did you talk him out of it?”

“Why should I have done that? I told him that I wouldn't be there myself.”

“And why did you do that?”

"Because I won't!”

"Isn't that a rather sudden change of plans?”

"Really, Inez, what are you getting at?"

“Simply that the poor young man, who is after all a kind of dependent of yours, couldn't very well agree to come to your house when he'd been coldly informed that you wouldn't be there.”

“Coldly? I wasn't cold."

"Do you think I can't imagine how you said it?”

“Inez, I repeat. What the hell are you getting at?”

“Watch out, Daddy. We don't want you turning into a dirty old man who wants the handsome young director all to himself.”

Even in the red wrath that made the room around him seem to crackle, he was still aware that a last-minute moderation was making Inez try feebly to turn her murderous onslaught into the appearance of a bad joke. And then a kind of panic seized him. Was he really known that way? Did people actually smirk as they said such things about him? At last he emitted an audible growl of anger and hate. "Don't be more of a bitch than God made you.”

Her scream deafened him, and he dropped the telephone on the desk. As his hearing returned, he gazed at the instrument in dismay. He could make out a babbling and the words “unnatural father” and "beast” and then a great hullabaloo of tears and threats of leaving the house with all her brood. With a deep sigh of recognition at the irreparable damage he might have done, he put the instrument back in its cradle.

***

Julia, the following evening, was dining with him and Mark at the French restaurant Oise, amid scarlet draperies and eighteenth-century portraits that were actually not copies. Peter had deliberately selected the place as the most expensive in town to reward Julia for her diplomacy that same day in patching up a truce with the alienated Inez. For it had come over Peter in a horrible moment that if Augusta should return to find Inez and her family gone, in addition to all the business of the gifts and the gallery, she might really walk out on him for good.

Julia had never seemed brighter nor more brilliant, and she and Mark, studying their menus and prices, were having a congenial time making up, as he had urged them, the most expensive meal that money could buy and then blandly ordering it. They seemed in the shortest possible time to have established a happy rapport and one that entirely included him. Peter beamed at both of them. How did Julia do it?

As the meal progressed, she turned from the subject of food and wines to the topic that Inez had despised.

"I've heard that your forte is handling collectors, Mark. Perhaps because you understand that the collector himself is a kind of artist. I used to play a game of trying to piece together the great collectors from their collections. With J. P. Morgan it was obviously magnificence. All the gaudy courts of old Europe glitter in his things. With Frick it was to create an illustrated history of art. With Mrs. Havemeyer ... no, I was never sure what Mrs. Havemeyer was after. Her El Greco cardinal put me off. Why a cruel and bigoted grand inquisitor? And then I read somewhere that the subject wasn't Guevara at all, but some other, lovable old cardinal who had collected rare books and manuscripts.''

"And she wouldn't have bought him had she known that?” Mark asked.

"I really think she might not have. Is that absurd? I don't know why I should associate poor Mrs. Havemeyer with the inquisitor, and yet I felt he was somehow a key.”

"What about your father?”

"Oh, Daddy ... well.” She fixed a long, affectionate gaze on Peter. "Daddy likes to capture the world in little perfect slices and tuck it away in jars. Each picture must be a whole in itself. His El Greco, the
Auto-da-Fé,
is just that and only that, as his crucifixions are only crucifixions. And his landscapes are always detached and independent as the rest of the geography.”

"Which is why he's so passionate about Cézanne? And maybe why there are no seascapes?”

"That's it! One can't look at seascapes without thinking of more sea. And I'll go a step further. It may be why there are no abstracts.”

"Because they can't be separated from infinity?”

“And infinity terrifies me!” Peter broke in now with delight. "Oh, you two read me like a book."

Julia reached for his hand resting on the table. "And it's a very good book."

“A classic,” Mark agreed.

"Well, that calls for champagne! Mark will think I'm always ordering champagne. Why not?"

When he went back to his apartment that night, Peter was thoroughly relieved and happy. He decided that he had never had a more wonderful evening in his whole life. But the trouble with wonderful evenings was the speed with which they were over. There was only one thing that would make this one last forever.

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.

M
ARK,
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.