The Golden Calves (6 page)

"But I don't own them.”

"Don't you, in a way? Haven't you made them yours? There's something about you, Anita, just sitting there, so quietly, so serenely, that makes me sense you have absorbed these things in a way I could never hope to in my crazy life.”

"I'm not absorbing anything that you're not.”

"Oh, but you are!” He leaned forward to stare boldly into her eyes. “You're quite wonderful, Anita. You really are. The rest of us just exist. You live.”

“Oh, Mark, you're so ridiculous.” She turned away from him with a shudder. And then suddenly she was almost angry. How dare he play with her so? She faced him now with a kind of defiance. “What about Miss Norton? Doesn't
she
live?”

He drew back, startled. Was he going to be Hippolytus, after all? But then he seemed suddenly to decide to take her question seriously. “Do you know, that's just what she doesn't do? It's law, law, law, all day and all night. I don't like to sound like a chauvinist pig, but there's something about litigation that seems to coarsen a woman. I don't know how much longer I can take Chessie's long hours and preoccupation with becoming a partner. And even if she does, will it make that much difference? The partners in her sweatshop work just as hard.''

"Sweatshops, dear me! I hope you're not talking about the museum. The temperature would hardly be the thing for my paintings.”

They both turned to the door, where their smiling hostess was standing, waiting to lead them down to dinner.

 

The opera was
Siegfried,
and they were only four in Miss Speddon's box. Mrs. Kay, a widow, tiny, old and exquisite, with neatly waved snowy hair and an air of tranquil, friendly composure which nothing could ruffle, had been waiting for them when they arrived, belonging, as she explained to Mark, to the “Asbestos Club” of those who always arrived before that canopy was lifted. Unlike most of Miss Speddon's friends, she was the mother of three middle-aged sons, all notably successful in different professions, and she was considered a font of practical wisdom by those who came to 36th Street.

Anita paid scant attention to the activities of the hero and dwarf in the first act; her mind was too full of a possible breakup between Mark and his girl friend. Her fantasy seemed to be growing out of control; like a malignant chest tumor it threatened to break the rib cage. She even wondered if Miss Speddon's old waitress had not put something in her cocktail. Could she be sure that she had heard Mark correctly? Wasn't it the Chessie Norton of her fantasy, and not the real one, whom she had heard him describe? Closing her eyes in agitation, she tried to let the music distract her.

When the lights went up for the intermission, Miss Speddon rose and gave her arm to Mark. She usually took a stroll with Anita between the first and second acts, but when the latter rose to follow, Mrs. Kay touched her arm.

“Stay with me, my dear. There's something I have to tell you.”

Alone in the box with Mrs. Kay, Anita, surprised and faintly apprehensive, waited for the old lady to speak, gazing down over the packed aisles of risen people below. The last members of the orchestra were disappearing under the stage.

Still Mrs. Kay did not speak, and the tiny smile on her thin lips had shrunk suddenly to a crisp line.

"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.

M
ARK
A
DDAMS,
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 the 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.