The Golden Calves

by Louis Auchincloss

  He threw up his hands. “How remorselessly trivial can a woman be?”

  She smiled as he stalked past her and out of his office. He was already counting the disadvantages of his new position, wondering if even a happy marriage would be worth her irrational sentimentality or the mother-in-law she would bring him. But then they would be starting a new life in California, far from all his and her old connections. It would probably be at least a year before he decided that he had left behind a better life in a better world. She shrugged, accepting now the prospect of his eternal discontent. It was the way he was.

  17

  PETER could never afterwards forget that the worst blow of his lifetime had come at the very moment he had thought his happiest. Augusta no doubt would have seen this as proof that he had never endured serious agony. But, then, Augusta had little sympathy for suffering that she deemed brought on by the sufferer.

  It was at a dinner at the Oise, with Julia and Mark, to celebrate the reconciliation that had followed the revelations of Miss Vogel.

  “Mark has something to tell you, Dad.”

  “I rather hoped you both had something to tell me.

  “It’s not what you think. That can wait.”

  “Not too long, I trust.” He leaned over to wink at her. “At your age, my love, it’s time for a girl to be thinking of her posterity.”

  “Really, Dad. I’m not an old woman yet.”

  “Of course not. But it’s still time to get cracking.”

  “Mark has something to tell you about your new gallery. It’s a decision that he and I have discussed and of which, I warn you, I highly approve.”

  Peter beamed at his prospective son-in-law. ‘Tell me, dear boy, what’s on your mind.” But he had his first premonition of disaster in the way that Mark straightened his features.

  “Well, I guess you know, Peter, that I’ve had serious doubts from the beginning about your plan of juxtaposing European and American paintings in a museum devoted to one continent. Even as a means of demonstrating your theory of influences.”

  Peter, with death in his heart, swallowed hard. “Doubts? We all have doubts. There are few certainties in this vale of tears.”

  “I guess they’re more than doubts, then. I don’t deny that you have some fascinating and provocative theories. But in my opinion they’re too speculative, too fanciful, if you will, to be so solidly implemented by a history museum.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means that I can’t see my way to having a major part of our space dedicated to a project that is, first, only semi-related to North America, and secondly, of questionable validity.”

  “You can’t see your way, you say? Why is your way suddenly so important?”

  “Well, I am the director.”

  “Has the board not approved it?”

  “Not officially, no. Of course, if you insist, I shall submit it to them. But at the same time I shall present my own arguments against it. That is what I had been hoping to avoid.”

  “Do you think for a moment, Mr. Addams—”

  “Oh, Daddy, is it Mr. Addams now?”

  “It certainly is. Do you think for a moment, sir, that the board would turn down the fabulous gift of my European paintings for any conditions that I might impose? From my knowledge of my co-fiduciaries, which is quite as good, I dare to presume, as yours, I should not deem them such killers of golden geese.”

  “If they should vote to accept your proposal, I should then put it to them that we ought to incorporate a separate museum: the Peter Hewlett Gallery of European Art.”

  “And if the board rejects that idea? If they agree to go ahead with my gallery and collection as planned?”

  “Then I have no alternative but to resign.”

  “My God, man, are you mad?” Peter slapped his hand on the table so that the glasses tinkled. “Would you risk my giving my treasures to other institutions? What the hell sort of a director does that make you?”

  “Daddy, let me introduce a note of calm. I think we could do with one. Mark has learned a lot of things since he came to the museum, and he’s learned the hard way. He may have started out as the kind of young director you like to visualize: competitive, eager, even a bit tricky. Everything for my team, and to hell with the others. Like any hard-boiled corporate type. But now he has come to see—and he has made me see, too—the cultured world as a whole. And he and I both agree that it would be a better thing if your pictures were spread over the country rather than cooped up in one institution. And that, not even the appropriate one. And under an artificial common denominator, to boot.”

  “Which daughter of mine is speaking? Goneril or Regan?”

  “Oh, Daddy. Must you be melodramatic?”

  “Of course, we’d be happy to take the American pictures,” Mark put in cautiously. “And place all of them in your special gallery.”

  “You’ll take them my way or not at all!”

  “Daddy, please don’t have a temper tantrum.”

  “I’m not having a temper tantrum, Julia. I’m much too concerned for that. And I’m going home right now. You are welcome to finish your meal. Please order anything you want. I’ll tell Pierre to put it all on my bill, including the tip. Good night. I hope you have a charming evening discussing what an old idiot and philistine I am.”

  “Daddy!”

  “If you’ll just hear me out, Mr. Hewlett—”

  “Good night!”

  He found the apartment dark, with lights on only in the hall and the corridor leading to his bedroom. Augusta had retired. He went to the gallery and switched on the bulbs over each of the pictures so that they shone brilliantly and independently in the murky void. He walked slowly down the long chamber, pausing with an aching heart before every frame. Had ever a mam been so treated by those he loved? Was the world worthy of his treasures? Stopping before the El Greco, he wondered whether it would not be a fitting end for him and his collection to expire like Sardanapalus in the conflagration of a giant funeral pyre.

  “What happened tonight, Peter?”

  Silhouetted in the hall light at the end of the gallery was the robed figure of Augusta.

  “Addams doesn’t want my things!” he cried out in a burst of agony. “He doesn’t want my gallery. And Julia’s put him up to it!”

  “Oh, my poor darling.” She came swiftly down the room and put her arms around him, pressing her head against his chest. “I thought this was coming. Never mind. There Eire lots of other things you can do with your paintings. Better things, too.”

  “No!” He broke away from her to resume his pacing. “That fellow is going to have the lesson of his life. We’ll see whom the board will back: the young wise guy with the odor of the Speddon case still hanging about him or the old collector with a fortune to give away!”

  “Sleep on it, Peter. We’ll discuss it in the morning.”

  “I tell you, Augusta, I mean it! There isn’t going to be any more talking. Except to my fellow trustees as to the disposition of Mr. Mark Addams.”

  “You can’t mean it!”

  “I never meant anything more.”

  “If you do that, Peter Hewlett, you will have become a monster.”

  “Augusta!”

  “You will have allowed your crazy obsession with your gallery to eat up the last shred of your humanity. I’m afraid you will leave me no alternative but to take a very drastic step. So think before you leap, my dear. I am telling you now, in all sincerity, that if you do this thing to Mark and to Julia—for it will be as much to her as to him—I shall leave you.”

  And as if to illustrate the execution of her threat, she abandoned him to the morose examination of his pictures.

  He knew, of course—he had always known—that she was the real founder of the collection. For it had been she, and not he, who had known how to handle his terrible father.

  The elder Hewlett had always perversely sought to identify himself with the fiercest of the new rich of his day. On his
graduation from Harvard, he had appalled his parents by going to work for the aging Jay Gould. He had progressed from railroads to oil to automobiles, and finally to the purer generality of the stock market, where the art of moneymaking was not hampered by a product, amassing a fortune which, if minor compared to those connected with the big names he so admired, was enough to give him respectable admittance to their league. Shelby Hewlett had affected the mien of the tycoon, with fur collars, gold chains, large cigars and coarse language, but he was always capable of shifting roles, if the case called for it, and putting one down with a cold stare, a sniff and a sneer like “No Yale man is ever quite a gentleman.” For Shelby’s joy was in playing the chameleon: the despot who brings a Scroogian turkey to an ill Cratchit child, the friend of Diamond Jim Brady who never missed a Sunday service in his front pew at St. George’s, the self-proclaimed philistine who knew more about art than his morose, aesthetic only son.

  Ah, but did he? Peter had a way of having the last word. It was all very well for his mother and sister, pallid females with haunted eyes, who expected and received the neglect of their lord, tempered only by a Supercilious kindness, to put up with his stealthy exits and noisy returns, but Peter deemed himself made of sterner stuff. From childhood he had cultivated the virtues his father lacked. At St. Paul’s School and at Harvard he had majored in the classic languages; he had scorned athletics and men’s clubs; he had sought out the company of poets and artists and enjoyed the society of older women who kept salons. As a bachelor in the nineteen thirties he had started to collect, and filled a beautiful old house in Chelsea with paintings of the Ash Can School and sculptures of Lachaise and Brancusi. For his father had settled just enough capital on him at birth to make him independent, even rich, so long as he spent with a shrewd eye. The senior Hewlett came to regret his loss of con trol over his big, gangling, sarcastic heir, but there was a running competition between them in which both seemed to find stimulation. If Shelby, a small man, tried to puff himself up with tall heels to his black, ankle-high boots and with padded shoulders, Peter seemed to be minimizing his mass by a bent posture, a high voice and fluttering hands.

  Peter’s lip would curl as he passed under the portico of his father’s baroque mansion on Madison Avenue and faced the eclectic clutter of French eighteenth-century furnishings, “improved” by the heavy hand of a Victorian decorator.

  “Heavens! Something new again. Will there be no end to your magnificence, sir? Who did that incomparable fête champêtre?”

  “Lancret.”

  “But, my worshipful sire, that little painting isn’t even trying to be a Lancret.”

  “Of course, it wouldn’t suit an Ash Canner unless one of the huntsmen were taking a pee.”

  “Do you know, that’s precisely what it needs? You do have an eye!”

  There was a theory among their acquaintance that father and son really loved each other, but Peter knew that was not true. His father was too much an egoist to love anyone, and Peter at times wondered somberly if that was going to be true of himself. But Augusta, a mere twenty when he was thirty-four, convinced him at last that his case was not hopeless. Everyone had marveled at her choice. Beautiful, popular, and well enough off to be beyond the suspicion of seeking the fortune that an eccentric millionaire might well leave away from his impertinent son, she had somehow found in Peter what she wanted. Perhaps it was simply that she fancied she saw what she might do with him. He only needed, perhaps, a little adroit straightening out to take his proper place in society as an arbiter elegantiarum, a stalwart family man and even a sufficiently important citizen. And indeed, as the years passed, Peter would stiffen in posture, expand in girth, begin to speak in deeper tones, as if the butterfly of the gaudy tycoon were emerging from the chrysalis of the pale aesthete. Was that what she had wanted? But then one never quite knew what Augusta wanted.

  She started by coming to frank terms with her father-in-law.

  “Everyone agrees that you’re a great businessman, Mr. H, but you’re going to have to prove it to me. My father’s a pretty good businessman himself, and he’s always told me a good trader never wastes a capital asset. It seems to me you’re doing just that with Peter.”

  “Is this a way of telling me, my pretty one, that I should shovel more gold down the drain of that decorous idler?”

  “He’s idle only from lack of resources. Peter has a fantastic flair for art. I know you don’t share his taste, but as a good investor you should be able to spot its potential. Did you actually want to drive that terrible car—what was it called?—that you put so much money into? Of course not. You simply saw it would sell. I don’t think I underrate you when I say that you know that Peter has a better eye than you do. Put money in it then. I’m not asking it for myself or for living expenses. Give it to Peter to buy pictures. You’ll never regret it. Let me put it more strongly. It will make your name remembered when everything in this house is forgotten.”

  Shelby Hewlett winced. “You do put it on the line, my girl. I won’t say I like it. But you’re right about not wasting principal assets. I’m not going to waste you,”

  Compliments were lost on Augusta. “So long as you do it.”

  And so Peter’s major collection had begun. His father ultimately even took pleasure in it, particularly when it spread to a showy royal portrait by Van Dyke or a lovely lady with powdered hair by Romney, though he was always disappointed at how briefly his son lingered in such fields.

  Things changed, however, after Peter’s mother died. That self-effacing lady must have exercised more control than she had been given credit for, for her widower rapidly sank into coarse and erratic ways. When he began to drink heavily and womanize, few respectable members of society cared to cross his threshold. Peter himself would not have him in the house because he upset the girls, and only Augusta’s firmness prevented a total breach. When Shelby married a tough redhead, forty years his junior, Peter’s maiden sister fled to an apartment hotel, and even Augusta ceased calling at the baroque mansion.

  The will, when Shelby’s disorderly life came to its disorderly close, was not a suprise. After provision of a trust fund for the maiden daughter, the residuary estate was divided: one-third to Peter and two-thirds to the widow.

  Peter had no wish to contest. He pointed out to Augusta that his father, despite obvious eccentricities, had been of sound mind.

  “He knew what he was doing. He wanted not so much to enrich Lola as to humiliate me. The only reason I got a third was to show the world that he cared for his whore exactly twice as much as he cared for his son. Also, perhaps, to keep me from suing.”

  “We’ll see who has the last laugh,” Augusta retorted. “For of course you’re going to sue.”

  “Even if I can’t prove undue influence?”

  “But you can.”

  “Do you honestly believe, Augusta, that my father was so much under the influence of that woman as not to know the natural objects of his testamentary bounty? For that’s the legal test, you know. I’ve already discussed it with counsel.”

  “So have I. And with the same counsel, John Whinney, after you had finished with him. He quite agreed with me. The question is not what the law is but how it will be applied in a particular case. A judge and jury are perfectly capable of understanding and applying the moral law that underlies the common law. Maybe a man in his right mind can strip his family for an ex-prostitute, but a coin! may find it conclusive evidence of a very wrong one.”

  “And say so? In those words?”

  “A court doesn’t have to give all its reasons. You had better let John Whinney make these decisions. Otherwise you will be taking on your own shoulders the responsibility of throwing in the gutter money that might purchase and preserve for posterity some of the most beautiful things in the world.”

  Peter bowed to her opinion, and a long scandalous lawsuit ensued in the Surrogate’s Court of the County of New York. Mr. Whinney proved himself adept at digging up mountains of dirt in th
e past of Lola Hewlett, to the delight of readers of the evening journals, and at driving it through rules of evidence like a garbage truck through willow fences. When Peter protested to his wife that Lola’s past was not relevant to the issue of testamentary capacity, she simply responded, “Is our evidence true or isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I daresay it’s true enough.”

  “Then that should be good enough for us. I don’t say I mightn’t agree with you if John Whinney were smearing the woman with lies. But he’s not.”

  There was little question but that the public agreed with Augusta and that the court seemed likely to. Before the plaintiff had rested his case, Mrs. Hewlett’s counsel sought a settlement, and their client ultimately accepted a reduction of her share of the residuary estate from two-thirds to one-tenth. It was a signal victory, and everyone agreed that Whinney had earned his fee of a quarter of a million dollars.

  Peter was now able to collect to his heart’s content, but, oddly enough, with increased revenues, Augusta seemed to take less interest in his acquisitions. At first he thought that she missed the excitement of hunting big game with a limited supply of bullets, but a deeper reason appeared in her lack of sympathy with his use of categories to give form and meaning to his collecting. She could never see why he should tie himself down to a particular century or nation, and she had no patience with the classifying of art into portraits or landscapes or still lifes or even abstracts. But what annoyed her most of all was his buying with an idea of furnishing some future gallery in a museum.

  “Why don’t you just look?” she would say. “Look and buy. So long as it’s beautiful, so long as it speaks to you, why do you care when it was painted or by whom? Or even of what?”

  He could never tie her down to a “favorite” painting or paintings, or even to a much preferred one. Augusta was nothing if not eclectic. She would subside into silent reverie before a Chinese scroll painting or a Byzantine reliquary or a Jackson Pollock or an Arshile Gorky. She avoided the jargon of critical language and seemed to have no desire to talk or even read about art. Peter speculated that she might have adopted Walter Pater’s theory of the viewer as an essential complement to a work of art, completing it differently in different generations, and that the marriage of the creator and his audience was itself the artifact without need of expressed comment.