The Golden Calves (12 page)

“Shortchanged them! They'll be rich, Augusta." “In that case I shouldn't interfere. But rich is a relative term, my dear. I must insist on my right to define it as of the time your will is proved. And now, having said what I came to say, I shall leave you to finish your coffee. A disagreeable thing that has to be stated should be stated only once. The next move is yours.”

 

Peter sat with Julia in the back of the maroon Cadillac limousine, en route to the city, pouring out his wrath at her mother's position. Julia, from childhood, had been by far his favorite. Doris, the youngest, who made an almost embarrassing show of filial devotion, came second; Inez trailed Doris, a poor third.

“What you should do, Dad,” Julia said, when he came at last to a pause, "is take the matter into your own hands. The collection, after all, is yours. Mummie may have helped you, sure, but I can't see that that gives her any moral right to dispose of it. You've already done plenty for us girls. Why should you provide for an indefinite population explosion of descendants? Give what you want to the museum
now.
Then it won't be subject to Mummie's right of election when you die.”

“And how do you think your mother will feel about
that?”

“She won't care. All Mummie worries about is doing her duty. Once you've taken the choice out of her hands, she'll be quite reconciled. I've even heard her say that too much money would be bad for the grandchildren. She'd never go against your wishes unless you left her in a position where she had to decide between her family and the museum. Well, don't leave her in one.”

Peter glanced inquiringly at this umpire of his marital life. Was she laughing at the antics of both her parents? Did Julia set herself up to scorn the curious money morality of the older generation, with its little fetishes about “earned” and "unearned” income and what should be considered "one's own” to dispose of and what had to be passed on down the family line? Did Julia, proud and independent as she was, regard greenbacks as simply greenbacks, gold as simply gold? Very likely. But wasn't that an integral part of her cool intelligence and her good, friendly, steady, reliable filial feeling? What a treasure she was! And what was she doing now but reaching behind the curtain of his pretenses and pulling out the naked little squealing ego that lurked there? “Why not ac knowledge the babe?” she seemed to be asking. “He may be a fine boy, after all."

"Can you really be so sure about your mother?”

"I think so. She sees life in terms of what God is expecting of Augusta Hewlett. He can't expect her to choose if there's no choice. Going to law to fight your last will and testament would be a most distasteful business to her. She'd be glad to be freed of it.”

“If I really believed that! Oh, what happiness! For you know, Julia, it wouldn't ever be a question of stripping my family. No matter what I did, there'd always be enough to educate the grandchildren, even to set them up in life, and—”

“Dad, I know all that,” Julia interrupted firmly. “Inez is simply hysterical about that noisy litter of hers. Do what you think is right with your own things and do it now.”

He leaned over to give her a quick peck on the forehead and then changed the subject, chatting nervously about this and that, anything to avoid thoughts that might intrude upon the glorious license she had just given him.

He told the chauffeur to drop Julia off at her shop on Madison Avenue and then proceeded down to the Chrysler Building, where Sidney Claverack's law firm occupied a high story. The white wall of the senior partner's office, facing a three-window panorama of the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, formed a huge mat for a Rauschenberg study of yellow and tan wheels and cogs, a fantasy of a factory interior.

"I have several things to discuss with you, Sidney, but let's get this one out of the way first.” Peter handed a piece of blue notepaper, heavily scrawled, to the expressionless lawyer. When the latter made no move to take it, he dropped it on the desk. "I received it yesterday. I gather you know who it's from.”

“Oh, yes. We've all heard from Miss Vogel.”

"And what do you plain to do about her?”

"I've done it. I've fired her.”

Peter started. "Was that wise?"

“It was unavoidable. After the things she said, not only to Mark Addams, but to me, there could be no place for her in the museum. I didn't even allow her to unpack her desk. I told her to clear out and that we'd send her things later.”

"But, Sidney, what are people going to say? Read my letter. This girl claims that you conned Daisy Speddon into signing a will that would let you junk her collection and keep the money she meant to maintain it.”

Sidney jumped to his feet and shook his fist in the air. “I don't give a good god damn what people say! Miss Speddon, in the full possession of her faculties, gave me a wide discretion, and I intend to use it. And use it to make her the greatest benefactor in the history of the museum! Now we can have all those things we've been dreaming about. And that she
knew
we'd been dreaming about. The new Mayan gallery. The Indian hall. The great Modern America wing! Do you think I'm going to be stopped by the shrieks of one crazed female who wants the money used for the care and feeding of a million gewgaws put together by whimsy and sentimentality? Sure, a few people are going to grumble. Sure, we'll get some angry letters. Maybe some nasty newspaper articles. But in two years' time nobody is going to remember even who Miss Vogel is, and everybody will be singing the praises of the board of trustees that brought about the renaissance of a great museum!"

"Sidney, Sidney, you're going too fast.” Peter shook his head reproachfully. ‘This is a matter for the board. It may even be a matter for a special meeting."

"Look here, Peter." Sidney had resumed his seat and now leaned towards his co-trustee, his chin thrust forward, his hands placed palm down on the blotter, with an air of grave and final appeal. “You and I
are
that board. Between us we're responsible for half the annual contributions. Nobody else could or even wants to run the place. So long as we stand together, we're an irresistible force!"

“It may be as you say. But I have a conscience, Sidney. I respected and liked Daisy Speddon.”

"Then put up any tablet or statue in her memory that you want. Rename the place the Evelyn Speddon Institute. I'll go along. And while we're on the subject, let me tell you something else. Something we can do now if you'll come up with a million bucks. The Peter K. Hewlett Gallery of American Painters and Their Forerunners. We can build it on the lot to the west, where there's room for your whole collection. Of course, I don't want to use too much of the Speddon money on another trustee's things ... that might look too bad ... but—"

“And anyway I shouldn't need the Speddon money,” Peter interrupted hastily. "No, no, I could do it all myself. Oh, my God!" He jumped to his feet now, as if the whole sudden dazzling vision had exploded to lift him up and up. Who was this monster sitting so placidly at his desk before the panorama of the two boroughs? “Get thee behind me, Satan!” he fairly screeched and then marveled as the room echoed with the strange rattle of his own laughter.

T
HE COILED JADE SERPENT
covered the whole blotter on Carol Sweeters's desk. Its emerald-green body formed sixteen concentric circles of diminishing circumferences; its head, with black orbs of eyes and a round bulbous snout, filled the small central space, its chin resting on the edge of the innermost coil, so that it appeared to be staring balefully at the curator. It was presumably a "vision serpent,” symbolizing a hallucination of the Mayas, who saw some of their gods as zoomorphs. But the vision serpent was usually bicephalic. Where was the other head? Not broken off, for Carol could see on the outer circumference, where the beast diminished into a tail, what appeared to be a rattle. Why had he not been more struck by this when he had examined it in Zürich?

A fake? Pre-Columbian art had always peculiarly attracted forgers. Carol had brooded over this piece for two hours now without moving from his desk. He knew he couldn't be fooled. He
knew
it. He ran his fingers lightly over the jade scales and felt the feathers on the outer layer. Vision serpents sometimes had small feathers. But of course a forger would know that.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine blood dripping from a wound on his hand, his knee, his thigh, seeking the giddiness that a Maya would experience as his strength eroded with the loss of his life fluid. Then he blinked and glanced quickly back at the serpent. Yes! There
was
a gleam of something like red in those opaque orbs, a kind of ruddy glow that now died away. The vision serpent was summoned up in a state of mind affected by loss of blood. Oh, let people say he was crazy—say it, that is, if he were ever a fool enough to utter his thoughts—but he
knew
he could always feel out a true Mayan piece.

"May I have another look, sir?"

It was Fred Farr in the doorway, spookily skinny and cerebral, with red, stiff, curly hair, buck teeth and a drooping jaw, a scholar, too much so, Carol thought, Teutonic in his concern with minutiae. He had already expressed unwelcome doubts.

“Don't tell me it should have two heads,” Carol muttered. "In this particular part of the Yucatán the vision serpent made do with one.”

A ghost of a smile indicated that Farr recognized the joke. “I suppose a forger's trouble would be in simulating reverence. He's apt to show too much or too little."

"And which does this?”

"That's what I can't make out.”

"Why should it show any?” Carol demanded.

“Well, isn't Mayan art largely of a religious nature? Those anthropomorphs and zoomorphs are all gods and goddesses or at least creatures of the spirit world. The man who made them must have worked for priests.”

"Does that have to mean that he believed all the crap he heard from the priests?”

Farr formed his lips into a circle of faint surprise. “One doesn't tend to think of doubt among the Mayas. Like other early civilizations, theirs seems to have been marked by extreme conformity."

“Seems? To whom? And even if it was, that doesn't mean the artists conformed. In their minds, I mean. Great artists never believe in anything but art."

“Really? Would you say that of the Middle Ages? Would you say it, for example, of the man who carved the figures on the north transept of Chartres?”

Carol, exasperated, jumped up. “Well, of course there are always going to be exceptions. I'll concede that a few stonecutters and glassmakers in the hysteria of the twelfth century may have believed that Jesus was born of a virgin and could walk on water. But the greatest artists, never! Do you think for a minute that Michelangelo and Leonardo weren't laughing up their sleeves at their silly popes and bishops? That's exactly what sets them apart from ordinary mortals. While the idiots of the human species were feeding each other to lions or flames, or cutting off their own balls for the gratification of sadistic deities, it was the artist who stood aside, knowing it was all grist for his own glorious mill! And that is why, too, now that the churches have fallen into disuse, or given place to nutsy California evangelists, the museums have become the true temples. The new godless are beginning to glimpse the terrible and wonderful truth that there is nothing on earth to worship but art!”

“It's an interesting thesis. Perhaps you should write a book on it.”

“Oh, go soak your head.”

“Yes, sir.” But Farr turned back in the doorway. “Actually, I think I'm going to agree with you about the snake.”

"Of course you are.”

Carol returned to his silent study of the coiled asp. Staring into the center of its rings, he tried mentally to drape them around his torso and then to tighten their grasp, to be crushed by a beast converted into a giant anaconda, which indeed perhaps it was, so that in becoming it, he would be it, and being it, be its creator, for the artist and his product had become indistinguishable. That sculptor had lived under a cloudless sky amid broad flat plains; he had climbed to the top of the pyramid temple to survey the green and yellow vegetation for miles and miles, and he would have come down to his atelier to put the heart of the country and his own heart into this curled-up apod. And he would have been happy, happy as a mortal could be!

Damn the telephone.

“Mr. Sweeters? The director would like to see you."

"Tell his high mightiness, good Miss Swayne, that I will come to him by and by."

He swore under his breath. Addams, like the beak-nosed warrior with the eagle headdress in the tablet leaning against the wall, could go slit his penis. What else was he good for? There may have been some sense, after all, in the bloodletting customs of the Mayas. Most administrators of any period were good for nothing but to shed their own blood, and if the populace chose to believe that this propitiated the gods, it may have been the best thing they could do. If they weren't shedding their own blood, they'd sure as hell be shedding someone else's.

Double-damn the telephone.

“Carol? It's Anita. Can you still talk to me? Or am I such anathema up there it'll cost you your job?”

"If our little Napoleon has tapped this wire, I hope he's listening in right now. Do you hear me, Addams? You're ‘nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.' ”

"Heavens. You don't suppose he's really listening?"

“If he is, you can tell him it's from
Lear.
Kent to Oswald. For I doubt he got beyond
Twelfth Night
in high school."

“Oh, Carol, it's good to hear that old tone again. I've missed you.”

“If that is so, the ghost of a starved feline in the streets of Newport must be haunting you.”