The Golden Calves

by Louis Auchincloss

  10

  SIDNEY CLAVERACK, now only two years short of his sixtieth birthday, had conceded finally to himself that his success in life—at least by his own standards—was going to be measured, if at all, by what he would achieve as chairman of his museum. He had had greater goals in the past, to be sure: a high court appointment, the Senate, even a fortune; but these had not and now would not be realized. His managing partnership in a middlesized law firm was all very well, but certainly no great shakes in the league to which he had aspired, and some people were always going to say he owed it to his father, as they had in the past no doubt said that his father had owed it to his. The Claveracks and their firm, specializing in the administration of the estates of prosperous New York burghers, went back to the eighteen forties, and Sidney had tended to think of his male forebears as gentle altar boys tending the constantly lit and relit candles of the new rich. But if he were ever to stand out from that dim, respectable line, there was only one way still open: to have revitalized, nay, to have remade—to have in fact created—a great cultural institution. That might not earn one the plaudits of the mob—never, it is true, to be despised—but it would surely merit the approval of a minority so esteemed for its discrimination as to become in due time the opinion of the many.

  His father had always taught him: “A proper ambition is to do something, not just to be somebody.” But Sidney even as a boy had never for a minute believed that anyone, including his didactic parent, had given more than lip service to such a dictum. No, the essence—the quintessence, indeed—of ambition was to be, or rather be always becoming, “somebody,” and Sidney had never known real happiness except at those times when he could rest the burden of his thoughts and emotions on the step of a stairway that he knew he could continue to ascend any moment he chose. Always, when deprived of that blessed sense of being about to rise further, of still being, whatever the nature or duration of the pause, “on his way,” he would become tense, depressed and ultimately, if the situation did not change, despairing.

  Only once had he sought an explanation for this need of a constantly salted immediate future, and that was sifter his loss of the Senate race, when some nasty questions had been raised in the press as to the nature of his fund-raising. He had been sufficiently confounded to suspect that his mental processes were not so normal as he had supposed, and he had consulted a popular psychiatrist, author of the bestselling Your Ego and My Id, not for deep analysis, or even for free association lying on a couch—for he had no desire to have even a doctor poking into his subconscious—but simply to discuss openly the observable, ascertainable facts of his background and upbringing.

  Dr. Klinger, a Freudian, made much of Sidney’s father’s judgeship. When he learned that Surrogate Claverack had married late and been elevated to the bench early, he could not resist the conclusion that Sidney as a little boy (and an only child at that) must have formed the image of a terrifying parent robed in billowing black who, with a few stabbing scratches of a pen> could send even a son—or perhaps particularly a son—to the grim chair with the hanging straps. Sidney had pointed out that his father’s court had been without criminal jurisdiction, and that, taken early into the confidence of his kindly progenitor, he had known the mundane nature of the latter’s judicial duties from childhood. He had even explained to Klinger that for the scion of a Knickerbocker family like Judge Claverack to have achieved a seat on the bench in a Tammany-dominated town had required a personality prone to jokes and winning smiles rather than one disposed to frowns and Olympian pronouncements. But the good doctor had simply pounced on this. What was more formidable to a child than the beaming geniality of a big, strong man, or more alarming than to see that grizzled head lowered to address one or to watch those flashing eyes behind the glittering pince-nez and to hear that booming “How now, my little man”?

  Klinger, being Jewish, also tended to find a deeply inhibiting force in what he called the “stiff, tight, Upper East Side Protestant social enclave” of the Claveracks, and when Sidney had again explained his father’s many political affiliations and his mother’s humbler origin (she had been the trained nurse of his paternal grandmother), he had revised his opinion only to add a certain “social confusion” to his patient’s obvious insularity. And when Sidney had gone on to argue that his father, in the interests of a possible political career for his son, had taught him to avoid the anglicized speech of his contemporaries and to adopt at least a moderate version of the voice of the people, the adaptable medical man had promptly riposted that to send a boy off to a snobbish New England preparatory school with a Brooklyn accent had been almost to guarantee his future insecurity.

  When Klinger persisted, despite his patient’s objections, in seeking to turn to the inquiry of early manifestations of sexuality, including contacts with other boys at boarding school, Sidney discontinued the sessions, not because such episodes had been lacking in the monastic academy which he had attended for four long years, but because he had no desire to make a record of them. Who could tell, after all, in an age of ever widening congressional investigation, what files, hitherto deemed confidential, might not be torn from their cabinets and exhibited to a gleeful public?

  And so he had no explanation of the drives in school, college and law school that had pushed him down such different avenues towards such varying goals. He had tried the standard one of athletics to the standard end of popularity, until recurrent attacks of asthma had deflected him to the pursuit of high grades. When at Yale he discovered that these added little to a man’s social prestige, he turned his efforts to parties and good times, cultivating a languid social manner and a cynical wit, and when at Yale Law School he found that seriousness was now the style, he worked assiduously and successfully to attain an editorship of the Law Journal But if he always did well, the top positions, to which he aspired so passionately, eluded him. He was an editor but not the chief editor, as at preparatory school he had been a prefect but not the senior prefect, and as at Yale he had been elected to Wolf’s Head but not to Skull and Bones. And this continued throughout his life. He became a state but not a United States senator, as in his oil ventures he made a million but not ten. It was why the Museum of North America had begun to seem his last chance to make the big league.

  Sometimes he thought it was because he never seemed to be able to let himself go “all out” in any one field. It was as if he had to be holding something back, to be persistently hedging his bets. This was certainly true of his personal relations. Although so long as she lived he was always at ease with his adoring, plain, sensible, simple old mother, and even with the benign, uncritical father whose high opinion of him, he perfectly realized, was as unchangeable as it was undeserved, he was never really close to any other humans of either sex. With men his relationships went little further than jokes and story-swapping, and with women he was apt to cultivate the appearance rather than the actuality of romance. He would take out only the most popular and sought-after girls, who enjoyed his wit and high spending and would often use him as a foil in their game of catching one of his even more eligible companions.

  When he did marry it was to just the kind of girl he had pictured in the most secret corner of his mind, the very opposite of what he would have liked to boast about to other bachelors, plain but by no means ugly, of a disposition calm to the point of dullness, who was never going to try to take him apart and thereby incur the risk of not being able to put him together again. She seemed to accept him as he was and gave all the appearance of allowing him to do his own things and to think his own thoughts while she raised their two children with faultless care. Helena Ballard, the rather crushed product of dowdy but respectable parents, had, with the instinct of certain girls of solid but impecunious brownstone background, always been sure that an acceptable husband would one day present himself. That he should have some kind of inward or outward flaw to make him seek out such a one as Helena Ballard was taken quite for granted. The only thing that disgruntled
Sidney, in the two and a half decades of his marriage to this woman of whose strength of character he became increasingly and at times uncomfortably aware, was that she never once showed the smallest curiosity as to what that flaw was.

  He had first approached modern art, like so many men of affairs, as an investment. If fortunes could be made out of artists such as Motherwell, Pollock and de Kooning, who had been bargains only decades back, it was obvious that the process could be repeated. He never attempted to select for himself among unknown painters in the Village or in Chelsea, but he paid fees to dealers to keep an eye out for him, and little by little he began to buy. He would hang his purchases in his office, or in parts of the apartment where his wife did not object too vociferously, and he would listen silently with a shrug or half-smile as his friends made the usual banal jokes about them. He never tried to defend his art, nor did he even wish to. It made almost as little sense to him as it did to his guests.

  Almost. And then, on a visit to an exhibition of amateur abstract painters at his bar association, he had what he afterwards deemed a species of near mystic revelation. He had hitherto doubted (without admitting his doubts to anyone) that there could be any valid criterion for judging an abstract. If it didn’t have to look like anything, how could one say it was well or poorly executed? But what struck him that day was that the paintings in that hall, some of them by men he knew and respected, were the most wretched of daubs. They were dead, dead as Queen Anne, if mortality and English queens had any application to nonrepresentational art.

  Which had to mean, did it not, that other abstracts could be living? At home he re-examined his purchases and decided that he was now in a position to choose among them. He found that he liked some color arrangements, some groupings, some figures, and disliked others. Without even asking himself why, he sent the ones that did not meet with his favor back to the dealers, and hung the rest more prominently about the apartment. Helena made rather a fuss, but only a slight one, really. Basically, she never looked at a picture of any kind.

  And now he began to actually enjoy buying pictures. It was a solitary pleasure, as he did not have any friend close enough to share it with, but of what pleasure in his life had that not been true? He never bought a picture that was not recommended by a dealer he trusted, but he felt free now to reject many that were. As a collector he exercised only a veto power. He avoided discussions of modern art; he could not even pretend to understand them. He put his trust in his peculiar star, and that celestial body seemed to favor him. Less than a decade after the visit to the bar association gallery he was known in metropolitan artistic circles as a minor, eccentric but on the whole respected purchaser of contemporary art.

  When he ultimately decided to unite his two central interests by promoting the development of modern art at the Museum of North America, he felt a thrill in the sensation that here, at long last, was the key that fitted the lock that would turn—oh, so easily and smoothly, and with such a divinely welcoming click!—to open the portal to the “first” position which had so far eluded him. And indeed, with the Speddon will he seemed not only to have passed through those gates but to be roaming at will in his own Garden of Eden!

  He even found himself for the first time giving tongue to a principle. It was at a press conference after the public announcement of the expansion plan of the museum, when he was asked this question: “Isn’t your new museum, Mr. Claverack, going to be somewhat out of proportion? It will be more than half contemporary. How do you reconcile that with your basic function of illustrating the history of North America?”

  “Isn’t it a question of whether you look at history horizontally or vertically? Suppose you are telling the story of a family. There’s a grandfather, say, a son and eight grandchildren. Do those eight grandchildren occupy one third or eight tenths of your story?”

  “You mean if the thirteen colonies had a population of four million at the time of the Revolution, they’d only get that fraction of space—let’s see. What’s four million over our population today?”

  “That’s it! There may be more people living at the present time than have died in recorded history. Or at least we’re getting to that point.”

  “But aren’t you saying, sir, that the past is too thinly populated to be worth bothering about? Aren’t you throwing history out the window? Is there no question of quality? Surely the city of Florence produced more great art in one generation than the whole continent of South America has since the days of the Incas. How did Tennyson put it? ‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay’?”

  “Provided you take the last fifty years.”

  The publicity that followed this statement was more than any he had gotten since his Senate campaign. Nobody could entirely discount Sidney Claverack now. Even Helena.

  Or perhaps only Helena. She had a way, for all her indifference to her spouse’s major interests, of poking an occasionally probing finger into sensitive areas. How she divined the whereabouts of these he couldn’t tell; it had to be a kind of instinct. This happened on a morning at breakfast in the exciting week when he received the blueprints for his museum master plan. She had put down her coffee cup and gazed across the table at him with placid, patient eyes until, unable to feign a further absorption in his paper, he had looked up. Her oblong face and oval chin, so oddly squared by her straight black hair and bangs, were immobile to the point of menace.

  “Your cousin Lucy Pinchet told me a funny thing yesterday.”

  “Oh? Where did you see Lucy?”

  “At the Colony Club. I was waiting for Molly Spears at lunch time when Lucy came over. She said to warn you there was an article coming out in the next issue of Art in Town. Something about Cousin Daisy’s estate and undue influence and I don’t know what else.”

  He had a sudden searing vision of Miss Vogel, nude, skinny, bound to a tree and pierced with arrows. An ugly, anguished, female Sebastian. He drew another arrow from his quiver.

  “I guess I should have listened to Addams.”

  “What has he got to do with it?”

  “He said we shouldn’t have fired the Vogel woman. Of course this is all her spite.”

  “Then it’s not true? You’re not really selling all Cousin Daisy’s things?”

  He looked at her more sharply now. Had she actually read that article?

  “Well, of course, we’ve had to do a good deal of weeding out. Cousin Daisy had a very eclectic collection and a lot of it not of the first rank. Which was why she gave me such wide discretion.”

  “Really? It doesn’t sound like her at all. I thought she thought everything she bought was an absolute treasure. Right down to the last buttonhook and thimble.”

  “Why are you taking such a great interest in Cousin Daisy all of a sudden? It was all I could do to get you to call on her while she was alive.”

  “Well, I never could stand her old maid sentimentality and her drooling over beautiful things. That kind of frustrated lesbianism I had quite enough of as a girl, thank you very much, when Mother shipped me off to stay with the maiden aunts in Northeast Harbor. But family is family, after all, if we’re going to be smeared all over the public prints…”

  “One article in a low-circulation art magazine is hardly being smeared in the public prints.”

  “Well, so long as you say so. But I’d hate to have people insinuating we hadn’t done right by Cousin Daisy.”

  Sidney knew that he was now on notice, if it came to a row, which side his wife would be on. For Helena was a tribal creature. She was a loyal enough spouse, but her primary duty would always be to the chief medicine man. So long as Sidney remained strictly within the rules of the village, she would obey him. But the moment he strayed, she would, with an appalling impassivity, hand him over to voodoo for whatever emasculation was prescribed.

  In his dressing room, getting ready for the office, he tried to reduce the matter to its correct proportions. After all, the will had been admitted to probate, the estate half-ad
ministered and court approval obtained for the major sales and distributions. What could the Vogel bitch do but whimper? A little public whimpering would soon pass. And in the meantime he had his plan, his master plan! The outline in white lines on blue paper of what would soon be soaring arches and marble walls! Nothing must be allowed to destroy his pleasure in the realization of his bold decision to reorient the entire museum into a chronological series of galleries culminating in the great Modern American wing. What a glory it was going to be, with its political, religious and scientific exhibits, its documents and dioramas and splendid artifacts, climaxing in the giant comic strip cartoon dramatizing the coincidence in time of the moon landing and the tragedy of Chappaquiddick!

  On his way to the subway, which he always took to Grand Central, he bought a copy of Art in Town. He saw at once that the article was a good deal worse than he had feared; the ride was not nearly long enough to finish it. At his office he closed his door and told his secretary he would take no calls.

  Its title was “The Conning of Evelyn Speddon.” The first page of the piece faced a full page of photographs: of Miss Speddon, of the façade of the museum, of Mark Addams and of Sidney himself. The text told of Mark’s calls on the old lady during her last illness and prior to the execution of a new will, only weeks before her demise. It strongly implied that Addams had given the testatrix the impression that he was romantically interested in her ward. It ended with a partial list of the sales made by the executors and the museum, and a prediction of extensive deaccessioning in the future.

  Sidney brooded for a silent hour. Even when his mind was seething, it could still work closely on a problem. What, after all, was this but the work of the same old imp, grinning in the path before him, that had leaked the story of the cribbed term paper at Yale which had cost him his bid to Skull and Bones, and tipped off the New York Times to the illegal campaign contribution? So long as one knew in time, damage could often be contained. He had been able to put about his own version of the term paper story so as to salvage a bid from another senior society, and to handle the campaign trouble in a way to avoid all danger of indictment. Half-truths, quarter-truths lost much of their menace once one was apprised of their circulation. As here now. Oh, yes, the article might even turn out to be a blessing in disguise, a warning that he had been going a bit too far in the Speddon matter, a small malignant tumor that was still operable, that could very likely be excised, completely encapsulated in untainted flesh. He picked up the telephone.