The Golden Calves

by Louis Auchincloss

  Was she in love? Was he? He sometimes suspected that the only thing that held him back was his fear that she might make fun of him as being old-fashioned. He knew that it was perfectly possible, even normal, in their day and age, for a young and healthy woman to be indefinitely, perhaps permanently, satisfied with a relationship that did not offer the security of marriage (if such security still existed) or the fulfillment of children (if they still fulfilled). Chessie was certainly unlike what his mother had regarded as a womanly woman. She did not seem to believe in any future at all—except in that partnership in Sidney Claverack’s firm.

  And when she did at last advert to the subject of marriage, it was distasteful to him. This was only because of the way she put it. They had been staying in a ski lodge in Vermont, and after a wonderful day on the slopes, at dinner, almost as if she were turning reluctantly to a rather tedious duty after an irresponsible but delightful holiday, she said abruptly: “You know, if we’re ever going to get married, we should be thinking about it now. After all, I’m thirty-one, and the women in my family have a history of early menopause.”

  He replied, after a moment of reflection, with an evasion: “Is that what Juliet whispered to Romeo from the balcony?”

  “All right, forget it!” She was instantly irate. “It’s not going to be said of me that I threw myself at a man.”

  “I can guarantee that.”

  “The next move, if any, will have to come from you.”

  “I’ll check with Ma and see if our men have a record of early impotence.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Seriously, Chessie, I’m not closing my mind on this issue.” It struck him now that he never called her “dearest” or “darling.”

  “But maybe someone else is.”

  “Oh, come off it, Chessie. It isn’t like you to be so easily hurt. Can’t a man be as businesslike as a woman? Must I be sloppily romantic while you’re bleakly down to earth?”

  She shrugged impatiently. “It’s all such crap. Let’s get back to the way we were. That was much better.”

  And she proceeded to do just that. It was one of the things that was so amazing about her. She was as cheerful for the rest of the evening as he had ever seen her. But there was no question of any lovemaking that night.

  5

  IT WAS certainly not the best thing for his relationship with Chessie that museum events should have drawn him into greater intimacy with Anita Vogel at just this time. Sidney Claverack was doing over Miss Speddon’s will—an annual procedure—and he summoned Mark to his law office to discuss the matter with a candor that even then struck the younger man as out of place in an attorney supposedly wholeheartedly devoted to his client’s interests.

  “She doesn’t really trust me. Even though I’m her cousin, and my family has represented her forever. But then she doesn’t really trust anybody. She’s hell-bent to tie up her money till the trumpet of the last judgment. But she likes you, Mark. She thinks you’re fresh and clean and idealistic and all that crap. You’d better work on that, fella. Go and see her. Talk to her about the dead hand sitting too heavily on the living.”

  “You mean talk to her about her will? How would I dare bring the subject up?”

  “You won’t have to. She will. She can’t talk to anyone from the museum for fifteen minutes without bringing it up.”

  “But wouldn’t she think it impertinent if I made suggestions? And wouldn’t it be?”

  Sidney paused, as if to find how best to bring home to this young man the gravity of the matter. “Mark, listen to me. That woman’s fortune is the break our museum has been waiting for ever since its foundation. It’s the windfall that should put us at last right up there on top with the great museums of this country. But what good will her dough do us if it’s all tied up in crazy old maid knots? You’ve got to get in there and fight. Fight for your company’s chance to take its proper rank in the world. And, all right, fight for the old girl, too, if it makes you feel any better. I mean fight for her real best interests—if she’ll only see what they are and stop being such a nanny goat.” He paused, perhaps sensing he had gone too far. “Let’s put it this way, my friend. You convince Daisy Speddon to leave us her money and collection without crippling conditions, and I’ll convince the board to name you director. Claim it of me! There’s not a trustee, including old Peter Hewlett, who wouldn’t bow to a coup like that. Hell, man, you wouldn’t even need your B.A., let alone a master’s!”

  Mark didn’t need anything beyond these magic words to go to work. The very next day he embarked on a campaign of cultivating his friendship with Anita Vogel. It was obvious that she offered him the most available key to her patroness’s mind and heart. Nor did it take him long to convert this hitherto casual and rather bantering relationship into one considerably deeper. Indeed, the friendship soon threatened to get out of his control. Mark had not previously suspected how much this tense creature fancied him, and he was amused and intrigued by the interest that she obviously and unsuccessfully tried to conceal. It was not so much that he suspected himself of returning this interest as that the contrast between her virginal isolation from the world and his own perhaps undue involvement with it made him think of himself as a kind of savage Gaul and of her as a Roman Vestal. Her deep concern with beautiful things, and unconcern with every conceivable norm and standard of his own busy life, had their attraction for him at a time when Claverack’s world had begun to seem too worldly, its rush too rushing. Might there not be a balm for him in the very commotion of Anita’s concentrated whirlpool, particularly if he were the cause of its swirling? She gave him the impression that if she ever should turn her attention from Miss Speddon’s pots and pans to a man, it would be a total transference. And that might be a sufficiently pleasant experience for the man, particularly if that man was a bit tired of being only a part of the life and career of Miss Chessie Norton.

  The latter, who had met Anita at the museum and again at Miss Speddon’s when she was assisting Mr. Claverack with the famous will, promptly flared the cause of her lover’s preoccupation.

  “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 prec
eptor?

  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 kiow 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 youn
g 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.”