The Golden Calves (8 page)

“I shouldn't be at all surprised if you didn't imagine yourself a kind of Colonel Higginson discovering Emily Dickinson," she suggested bleakly one evening when he had commented too keenly on Anita's extreme devotion to her job. They had gone the previous Saturday night to a play about the Amherst poetess. “You think you may be the man who will bring her out. Big, brave, wonderful, condescending you! But there's one little difference. Emily was a genius, and Miss Vogel is a drip. So that even if you're as opaque as Higginson, it will make just as little matter. Emily remained a genius in spite of him. Miss Vogel will remain a drip in spite of you.”

When Chessie was nasty, she reminded him again uncomfortably of that Modigliani model. At such moments he could actually dislike her.

"I wonder if Anita
isn't
a bit of a genius,” he parried. ‘If you had lived more with Titians and less with torts, you might have learned to appreciate people who don't happen to believe that lawyers are the be-all and end-all of life. Or that the greatest goal of man isn't necessarily to slip off with the moneybags under a squid spray of small print.”

“Oink, oink! Do I hear the chauvinist pig grunting? We girls know that ploy. How to keep a woman out of the marketplace by turning her into a Vestal. And then tossing her the rag of aloofness to cover the bare ass of her servitude!"

Nothing could have pushed him more towards Anita than Chessie's meanness, particularly when she seemed to divine his own fantasies. If she chose to create a rival for herself by placing Anita in the compound of victims of the male, she might be building more dangerously than she knew. Mark was beginning to wonder if he could not make out the loss of a feminine role essential to what he considered the gracious society in Chessie's increasing aggressiveness, and if he might not enjoy the idea of bringing out the woman behind the Vestal in Anita. Why should anyone have to assume that he would be as clumsy as the great Emily's preceptor?

 

It was only a few days after the evening at
Siegfried
that Anita came to his office with a countenance of deep concern.

“Miss Speddon wants to talk to you. She asks you to forgive her for not coming to the museum, but she has not been at all well.”

"But of course!" he exclaimed, jumping up. “Shall I go to her now?”

"Well, I wouldn't delay it too long. I think she wants to discuss her will." She paused and then, in what struck him as an overdramatic gesture, clasped her hands beseechingly. "Oh, Mark,
do
be careful! I know you have very definite ideas about how she should leave her things. But please, please remember, that collection has been her whole life!”

He found that he was actually trembling with the sudden shock of his indignation. “And what do you think I plan to do with the collection? Hock it all and buy wrecked automobiles or old toilet seats or whatever modern art is featuring when she dies? Is
that
what you think of me?”

She recoiled as if he had moved to strike her. “No, no. It's not that at all. If
you
were the only judge, I'd have no worries. Believe me!”

“And how do you ki\ow I won't be?"

“Oh, Mark, if you only were.”

Somewhat mollified, he settled back in his chair. “Trust me, Anita. Try to trust me.”

"I will, I will. I want to so much.”

After she had gone he reflected irritably that it must be a sense of guilt that had caused his fit of temper. Yet why should he feel guilty? Had he made any representation to Anita, either by word or implication, as to the state of his mind or affections that was not true? Had she not just admitted that she was aware of his belief that a museum should be the absolute owner of its own artifacts? And did she not know on just what terms he was with Chessie? Could a Puritan in the Massachusetts Bay Colony have been more open?

Yet he was still flustered when he called that afternoon at 36th Street. The very fact that Anita was still at the museum and that Miss Speddon was to see him alone intensified a silly feeling of conspiracy. The old lady received him upstairs in her bedroom. She was fully dressed but sitting in a wheelchair, and she seemed gaunter beside the huge canopied bed draped in red damask. She made no secret of the state of her health.

“A will seems more real when you think of your executors ‘executing' it in a few months' time. Then it's more like a contract with an imminent closing date.”

"That's the way to look at it, of course. You should think of a will as operating now."

"Very true, young man." There was a faint smile on those thick white lips. “But if ‘now' is a time when you will be extinct, the idea can give you a turn.”

"I am sure it must.”

"You are trying to be sympathetic, and I should be grateful. But there's a dreadful gulf between the young living and the old dying. We latter sometimes even feel a silly kind of superiority. I must avoid that. To work!” She moved as if to square her long sloping shoulders. “I'm beginning to see your point about the futility of rigid rules for governing my things.”

She paused to look at him carefully.

“One has to put one's trust in someone, I suppose," he offered, a bit weakly.

"That's well put," she replied judiciously. "I was afraid you'd say, ‘Oh, you can trust the museum!' Which is of course what you meant. But a good administrator should not appear too eager. Yes, I like that, Mr. Addams.”

He opted for a candid laugh. "You know too much about us, Miss Speddon. And please call me Mark.”

"Very well, I will. Mark. Because I like you. And of course I don't trust the museum—the museum, that is, as it may become in the future. I used to tell Sidney Claverack's father, the old surrogate—he married my mother's cousin, you know—that I wanted him to tie up my collection so that it would take a wicked director, aided by a wicked board of trustees, a hundred years to unravel it. Oh, I knew they'd be able to do it in the end. I'm not an idiot. I've read about what happens to charitable trusts. The best way to do it, Judge Claverack used to tell me, was by a defeasance clause so that the family got everything back if the conditions were violated. In that way, he said, you'd always have an alert watchdog, not just some sleepy old bank or trust company. But families die out.” She shook her head gravely before adding, "And some families can be bought.”

Mark reflected that an apparent detachment seemed to be his most effective role. "You could name as taker in default another museum. Then you'd have a real watchdog!”

Again she seemed amused. "You really are a very clever young man. Yes, that would not be a bad idea at all. But museums, too, can be bought. And museums can merge.”

“Aren't you perhaps overly concerned, Miss Speddon? Even the most aggressive museums today are not apt to forget the names of their patrons. Indeed, they seem the one thing they cherish. Look at the names preserved in everlasting marble in our city: Morgan, Frick, Guggenheim, Whitney—”

“Mark, Mark, hush up!" She held up both hands to check him. “Don't undo your good work. It's not my silly name I care about. Isn't there something ignoble about all those burghers and bankers hitching a ride to immortality on the shoulders of the artists they've bought? No, dear boy, I'm way beyond that.”

Chastened, Mark was silent in the pause that followed.

“Judge Claverack taught me something of the wisdom of the common law,” she continued, having recognized his subdual. "I learned that property could not be tied up in trust for longer than lives in being.
Lives
in being. Which meant a person or persons actually alive when the trust was set up. That was the limit beyond one's own death to which one should properly look. Of course, I know that charitable trusts can be set up in perpetuity, but as I have just indicated, I put no faith in perpetuity. So I have been considering that I should limit myself to the more reasonable restrictions of the common law. Lives of persons I know, Mark. Of course most of them are old, like myself.”

"But you must have many young friends, Miss Speddon. You have been the patroness of so many young artists.”

"Yes. But there is one young person who is more than a friend. Whom indeed I love like a daughter. Unless granddaughter be the more appropriate term.”

He hesitated. “Anita?”

"Anita. Of course. Nobody knows my things the way she does. And nobody cares more.”

He elected to be generous. “That is very true.”

"So long as she has a role in the management of my collection, I shall have a kind of posthumous existence. But I learned something else from Sidney's father about what lawyers call ‘perpetuities.' Those lives in being were at one time reduced to two. Two lives in being was the limit! Well, I have decided, Mark, that two is enough for me.”

“You mean you would suspend the museum's ab solute ownership of what you leave to it for the duration of two lives?"

"Not legally, perhaps. Let us say morally. I haven't worked it out with the lawyers yet. But can you guess whose the second life would be?”

He bit his lip and took the chance. “Not mine, surely?"

"Yours.”

He jumped up and strode to the middle of the room. What could she possibly mean? That he and Anita should be her trustees?

"I'm sorry, Miss Speddon. I don't understand. I sense that you're offering me a great compliment, perhaps a great trust, but I don't see how it's meant to work.”

“Sit down, my friend. Sit down and listen to me.” She waited while he complied. "I'm going to talk to you with what may strike you as a shocking candor. But I claim the privilege of the moribund. Pray do not interrupt until I have finished.” She folded her thin, brown, speckled, blue-veined hands in her lap and gazed down at them. "I sense you have a more than casual interest in Anita, and I suspect she has at least an equal one in you. Oh, I'm quite aware that nothing may come of this. I'm not a romantic old fool. And I also know you have some kind of attachment to a young woman in Sidney's office, though I'm told this may be on the wane. There is certainly no impediment on Anita's side. I intend to leave Anita a bequest that will make her, if not rich, at least independent for life. I think you should know this, not because I deem you mercenary, but on the contrary because I deem you not in the least mercenary. You have voluntarily adopted a profession that will yield you a small fraction of the income that a man of your abilities could command on today's financial mar ket. I know this from Sidney, who has the highest regard for you. Indeed, he assures me that you have his voice for the directorship of the museum. If you and Anita should ever see your way to marrying, you would have a comfortable income between you.”

Mark was almost panting now. There was simply too much to take in. “And your collection? How would it be affected?”

“I am relieved that you do not reject the idea of matrimony out of hand.”

"Oh, no. Oh, no. Not at all."

“Good. That is more than a start. Very well. Here it is. I exact no hard conditions. If Anita can tell me there is no obstacle to your union, that you and she can contemplate with equanimity the probability—no, I do not even stipulate that—the
possibility
that your relationship may one day develop into marriage, I will bequeath my collection and two thirds of my residuary estate outright, unconditionally, to the museum.”

"But, Miss Speddon, think of all the chances you'd be taking! I might die, or Anita might change her mind, or the museum might fire me ... Anything could happen.”

"I am fully aware of all that. I am also aware that I have very little time. The will must be drawn and signed. I am quite willing to take the chance that you and Anita may decide just to be friends. You would still be united in taking care of my things at the museum. Perhaps even more united. Moral obligations can be stronger than legal ones. Aren't gambling debts paid first for the very reason that they can't be enforced at law? Oh, you needn't worry about me, my lad. I'm an old Machiavelli!”

Mark made no apology now for rising and pacing the long chamber. His mind was astonishingly clear. He guessed that Sidney had been the one to tell Miss Speddon of the deterioration of his relations with Chessie. How had he known? At the office, of course. They always knew everything at the office. And wasn't it perfectly true? At least on his part? Hadn't Chessie been riding him unmercifully? And wasn't the prospect of Anita's submissive passion at least as agreeable as Chessie's hard green stare? Not to speak of Anita's future income being easier to live with than Chessie's future partnership percentage? For wouldn't he and Anita both owe their affluence to Miss Speddon, as opposed to his being constantly reminded of Chessie's greater earning power? And he would be director! Oh bliss, oh tenfold bliss, oh bliss ineffable and unimaginable! He felt a fierce, painful swelling about his heart. What normal man would not be tempted by so noble and inspired an offer?

He turned to the old lady and exclaimed, "Miss Speddon, I will say just what you want me to say!”

“No more?”

He paused. It was important with her not to overdo it. Never to overdo it.

“No more. But I will say it happily. I will say it enthusiastically."

"Then that's all I ask. Let us seal our bargain with a handshake, dear boy. And tell Anita to speak to me when you and she are ready.”

W
HEN
M
ARK
went to Chessie's apartment after work he had still not spoken to Anita. He thought he might be able to gain some insight from Chessie about the proposed revision of her client's will. But it turned out to be an unfortunate topic.

Chessie's apartment reflected her personal philosophy in being starkly free of frills. The furniture, of black metal and canvas, was minimal, and there were two wall-sized abstracts, fields of single color, a black on black and a red on red. Over the logless fireplace hung a nude portrait of her late brother.