The Golden Calves (24 page)

"You know much better than I do, Julia, how many people and dollars it costs society to keep up your father's style of living. And what does he give in return? He buys pictures to donate them to a museum to lower his income and death taxes. If he didn't do this, others would. He is a perfectly useless person."

In her dream, however, it was not the memory of what he had said of her father's collecting that had most upset her. It was the much sharper memory of her father's reaction to Drew and Drew's comment on
that.

"You're making Daddy furious,” she had protested. "Can't you ever shut up?”

“Not as furious as all that,” the future investment banker had sneered. “He can always take a certain amount of criticism from a brawny young man."

And
that,
she knew in the anemic light of early morning, was what had released her from Drew at last. Not because
she
had not known about her father, but because
he
had. She had always been aware that Peter overtipped good-looking bellboys, that the new chauffeur was invariably handsome, that there were many more male nudes than female among his paintings and drawings and that he was beamingly charming to his daughters' more attractive beaux. She had even been amused by an anecdote he loved to tell of an eminent Victorian scholar, whose middle-aged maiden daughters, accompanying him on summer trips to Venice, had described his partiality for gondoliers as "Papa's little weakness.” For she had always been sure that
her
papa's little weakness had never gone to such lengths. It had been a tamed, harmless thing, perhaps even contributing to his flair for art, and observed by only one person, in whose keeping it was perfectly safe.

But to have it perceived by Drew had been simply unbearable! She got up and tried to obliterate the memory with black coffee.

She spent a useless day at her office, too tired and upset to concentrate with much purpose on the new curtains for her Aunt Flora's dining room or the carpet for the lobby of 1116 Park Avenue. Quitting the office early, she went to her family's apartment, resolved to make up for her unkindness by pretending to her father that she had changed her mind about the Sargent.

After all, it was not
his
fault that she had made him the hero of her inward monodrama. It was no responsibility of his that she had woven the fantasy of the beautiful father-daughter relationship to shield her from anything in life that she had not deliberately picked out for herself, turning it this way and that to be sure it was just right for Julia Hewlett. It behooved her then, now that she had selected Mark, to be fair.

She was told that Mr. Claverack was with her father in his study. The latter had left word, however, that if she called, she was to join them there. Both men had been smoking, and the atmosphere was heavy. Passing her father to open a window, she noted with surprise how haggard he looked.

"Let me tell you at once, my dear, that Sidney has brought me some very bad news. I told you about the trouble over the appraisals. It now appears it was Mark who tipped off Uncle Sam.”

She stared at the sallow-faced chairman as she took her seat. “Why would Mark do a thing like that? Out of good citizenship?"

"I have never known him to be so public-spirited," Sidney said sneeringly. “And wouldn't even the most conscientious citizen have given me the chance to explain the matter first? And even if my explanation had not satisfied him, wouldn't he have found some less drastic way of correcting the matter? Like asking me to file amended tax returns on the basis of later discovered error? But oh, no! The holy Mark has to smear me and smear my clients. And smear the poor old museum still covered with the smears of the ugly lawsuit caused by his seduction of the Vogel woman!”

"Please, Mr. Claverack! You are speaking of a friend of mine.”

“No friend of yours, believe me, Julia. I am quite aware of your relations with him, but your father has authorized me to speak openly. Addams is a man who will stop at nothing to get his way. Because I have opposed him in his projects, he has planned to force my removal from the museum. If he happens to destroy me and my law practice at the same time, that's just the icing on the cake. And who will he replace me with? Who but the man whose compliance he has secured by the most adroit flattery in the world...”

"Too true, too true!”

Julia was shocked by the note of agony in her father's wail.

"And whose daughter,” Sidney continued, with a savage smile, “he is counting on to bring him the fortune that every smart young museum director needs to carry him to the top of the social heap."

"Daddy, do you really believe all this?”

"But, my poor darling, I don't see that I have any alternative! How could Mark not have come to me first before going to the federal authorities? And when he did a thing like that, how can I look back to all the horror of that lawsuit and not see it in the very light I tried so hard
not
to see it in? Isn't it obvious now that Mark was trying to seduce that poor Vogel girl to gain control of the Speddon money? And when that backfired, and he knew Sidney was on to him, what did he do but turn to me and, through me, to
you?
In my naïveté I thought he was lonely, abandoned by his lawyer mistress. In fact, I see now that he probably kicked her out once she had won his suit and was no longer any use to him! The worst part of it all is that I've exposed you to this adventurer. Damn it all, Julia, I've actually thrust you into his arms!”

“Daddy, cool it, please. Nobody's thrust me into anyone's arms. I'm not a pillow.”

She rose and walked to the books. Did she believe a word of it? Did she even care if it was true? She ran a fingernail over the bindings nearest her. The volumes that were turned face out to expose their golden armorial bearings were from the libraries of the maiden daughters of Louis XV. Red, green and yellow, with lozenges enclosing three lilies of France, they proclaimed their owners: Adelaide, Victoire, Sophie. As a girl she had wanted to write a book about them. Unmarried, living in the most beautiful palace in the world, surrounded by beautiful things, painted by Nattier—who said their lives were unfulfilled? Was her life unfulfilled? She turned back to the two men.

“Has Mark admitted that he went to the tax authorities?” she asked Claverack.

"On the contrary, he has denied it. But a Treasury official admitted to me that the tip came from the museum, and there is no one there but Addams who could have linked the appraisals to my office. In that, I have no doubt he enjoyed the assistance of his paramour.”

"Do you refer to Chessie Norton?”

"That surprises you, doesn't it? You had thought their intrigue terminated? No, your father's wrong about that. When I voiced my suspicions to my new partner, for that is what, in my folly, I had made Miss Norton, she did not bother, like her confederate, to deny them. She simply informed me that she had just accepted a partnership in a newly organized all-woman law firm. What, you may ask, does she get out of all this? Perhaps Mr. Addams has promised her that he will buy her new firm a law library when he has wed his heiress.”

"That strikes me, Mr. Claverack, as a contemptible suggestion. But not a bad idea. If Mark and I ever marry, that law library may be a joint gift."

"Julia, my child, you wouldn't marry him after this!”

"It's just what I might do, Daddy. If he's still willing to take the daughter of a man who let him down so cheaply.”

And leaving the gaping pair, she walked out of the room with the lightest heart she had had in eight years.

“I'
M SORRY,
Miss Hewlett, I don't believe a word that you've told me."

Anita Vogel stared in cold anger across her desk at her handsome, importunate visitor. It seemed to her that this daughter of privilege was guilty of the ultimate insolence in invading her office to spray pellets of dirt over the character of Anita's one good friend. Was it not perversity in a princess to leave her palace to grab matches from the hand of the little match girl?

“You may be quite right, Miss Vogel. I only thought I had to tell you. I
know
Mark didn't do it.”

“How can you know that?”

“Well, a woman can, you know. She can feel it.”

“Then can't I feel the same about Dr. Sweeters?”

“Of course you can.”

Like all princesses, she had to have the last word. She had to be reasonable, democratic, while her victim was making a fool of herself with ridiculous fantasies of being Hans Christian Andersen's match girl. Anita reflected bitterly that Miss Hewlett and her father were even worse than Claverack. The ex-chairman was simply a reptile; one knew that one had constantly to face him, never for a moment to turn one's back. But the Hewletts pretended to be men and women of good will; it was their confident conviction that they benefited the community. As they never doubted themselves, it did not occur to them that others could doubt them. Yet had Anita not seen Peter Hewlett endorse Claverack in the plotted wrecking of Miss Speddon's plans? Oh,
now
he was back on the side of the angels, sure, now that the battle had been fought
to
a temporary victory, now that it was fashionable once more to give lip service to "dear old Daisy's" ideals.

The princess had risen. "I hope you can forgive me, Miss Vogel. I thought I was doing my duty.”

"If you were doing your duty, there's nothing to forgive."

“Good day, then, Miss Vogel.”

Alone, Anita gazed miserably at the little red stone Mayan frog that Carol had given her on her birthday. They wanted to take even Carol from her now! She closed her eyes to sense the long sweep of the foaming remnant of a breaker up a fiat beach. It reached her now, lying on the sand; she was halfinundated with pleasant water, and then it receded. Where would she be without his grumpiness, his nastiness, his odd way of showing a devotion that had survived her every coolness?

And there he was, frowning at her from the doorway.

"You know, I almost miss Claverack. There's no one left to hate around here.”

"According to Miss Hewlett, who just left, you hate Mark.”

"She came to tell you
that?”

“Not in so many words. She thinks you were the one who broke the story of the appraisals.”

“Not a bad guess.”

She stared at him in horror. His grin had become fixed and ... yes,
evil!

“Carol, you didn't!”

“Oh, but I did, baby. That lawsuit didn't quite do the trick, did it? Claverack and Addams were only scotched. I had to give the poor fellows their
coup de grâce.
"

Her mind had become a furnace of Mayan tortures and a starved cat. “Oh, you can't have, you can't! You can't have been so vile.”

“What the hell! You've been in this thing with me from the beginning. It was the only way to clean up this institution.”

She leaned forward, her hands over her face. He moved around her to put an arm over her shoulders, but she shook him off. "Leave me be! I was right in the first place about the cat. I should never have forgiven you!”

She waited now for the angry screeching laugh that she remembered so vividly from their first real row. But it didn't come. And when she opened her eyes to look for him, he was gone.

 

She was ushered into the gallery, where the butler told her she was to wait for Mr. Hewlett. She spotted the El Greco at once and approached it gingerly. "When the Spaniards came to Mexico,” Carol had told her once, "they found that even the Mayas had very little to teach them about cruelty.”

But almost immediately she found herself studying the painting with the greatest intensity. It was a large, square canvas, full of billowing smoke over three stakes on which three writhing, elongated figures were chained, surrounded by a guard of gravely watching, golden-casqued soldiers. In the background was a view of a hillside Toledo, recalling the famous landscape at the Metropolitan. She noted that the expression on the faces of the soldiers, in contrast to the agonized, upward stares of the heretics, seemed composed. They were as calm and sober as the nobles in
The Burial of Count Orgaz.
She wondered whether their grim duty might have been an accepted routine, a ritual as automatic as a daily mass, and if the writhing of the victims was as much a part of the sacrament as the consecration of the bread and wine. What was, was, those pale faces seemed to be saying. Flesh blackened by fire and flesh encased in golden armor was the flesh of God, the flesh of the world.

“Do you find it significant that there are
three
stakes?” came a voice from behind her, and she turned quickly to face the collector.

“For the three crosses?”

"That's what usually strikes people. Though it would have been the most fearful heresy in that day. One can't assume that El Greco saw the heretics as martyrs. And yet it's hard for me to believe that he was on the side of those smug soldiers."

She found herself oddly at ease with his impromptu approach. "Maybe he sided with both. To a sensitive soul, wouldn't burning a man be as bad as being burned? Even worse?”

"To a
sensitive
soul, perhaps. But were Spanish soldiers sensitive? Was Cortez? Was Pizarro?”

"How do we really know? That may be just what the artist is trying to say. It might be a picture of the essential human condition. Torturing and being tortured.”

“And all saved?”

“Or all damned.”

“Dear me, Miss Vogel, what a dismal conclusion!”

“I don't know. At least they'd all be together!” It was certainly curious to be discussing such things with Mr. Hewlett. But she still had a sense of elation. Maybe what the painter was telling her was that she and Carol were one.

"Do you know there are actually people who think that painting wouldn't belong in the Museum of North America?"