The Golden Calves (3 page)

Anita burst into tears. "I don't want to live after you!”

“But you will, my dear, and I trust you'll have a long and happy life. And as you choose to regard me as a mother, I think you should heed my advice. Which is this: do not rule out the idea of marriage. Keep an open mind. If the right man comes along—”

Anita could bear it no longer. “If you mean Mark Addams, I think you should know he has no thoughts of me in that line. He has a long-standing affair with a lawyer in Mr. Claverack's firm."

"A lawyer?” Miss Speddon's lips were pursed to a small
o
of surprise and distaste.

“I think you've actually met her.”

"Oh, a woman. For a moment I thought you meant ... We have to be ready for anything these days. But these liaisons must be expected of young men. They don't last forever."

"But this one seems quite permanent. They'll probably get married. And even if they don't, I have no interest like that in Mark. Let us not talk about him, please. And I promise you that I'll keep an open mind about marriage. There! Will that do? Now, why don't you tell me what you and the acting director discussed? If it was not private, that is. For I'm sure he didn't come here to tell you how much he admired me.”

“No, that was just my inference. He came, at my suggestion, to discuss my will. I gave him a copy of it and asked him for his suggestions.”

"Which, knowing Mark, I'm sure he had.”

“Yes, and actually some rather interesting ones. He thinks I should leave more questions to the discretion of the museum than I have.”

“What, for example?”

“Well, whether a particular object should be kept or sold.”

“Sold?”

“Don't look so horrified, dear. It's not that they'd do it. But as he explained, we are confronted these days with the cleverest art forgeries. It would be absurd if a museum were obliged to continue to display a Healy or an Eastman Johnson after it was established it had been painted by some smart fraud in an attic in Brooklyn.”

"If he were that smart, maybe he's a better painter than Healy or Johnson.”

But to Miss Speddon, as to all collectors, the art forger was the arch-heretic, worthy of being burned alive. "And then there is the question of new valuations. The museum should be free to move things about to give prominence to artifacts coming into or going out of fashion. Mr. Addams cited Mrs. Gardner's museum in Boston as a case in point, where the administration can't even rehang a picture. The dead hand, he said, has frozen the whole collection.”

“Oh, Miss Speddon, I beg of you, don't listen to him!”

Anita had jumped to her feet. She was trembling so that even Miss Speddon's old eyes could take it in.

"I'm afraid, my dear, that you're overwrought. Perhaps our talk today has been a bit too personal for you. Why don't you go upstairs and have a nice hot bath, and then we'll have an early supper and listen to my new recording of the Mahler Fifth?”

A
NITA'S
sense of having been as much a stranger in the family nest as an oversized cuckoo fledgling hatched from an egg covertly deposited by a slovenly mother in the home of neat, orderly bluebirds was more justified by the facts than are many such feelings of alienation. Her adoptive father was a bright, energetic advertising mein; her mother, a competent fashion designer. They had been married for three years without issue and had decided to adopt a baby girl just before Sam Vogel was sent overseas in the war. But when he returned they proceeded to have two babies of their own, to divorce and remarry, and, amid all the proliferation of offspring of different matches, and of homes in Manhattan, East Orange and Rye, the thin, darkhaired, introspective and rather gangling oldest child had always been conscious of an air of faint surprise whenever she turned up.

It was not that they weren't nice to her. They were. But there was a resounding normalcy about them all, a blare of loud laughter, a constant whirring of balls being thrown and caught, from which she tended to shrink to an all-too-easily forgotten isolation. She had performed her function, after all. The fact of her adoption, as so often happens, had rendered the adopters not only fertile but fecund. She had been a device that, had she not been human, would have been disposed of. And then, too, the advertising father and designing mother had only moderately prospered; they had done well enough by normal standards, but their broods were large, and the private education deemed mandatory in the metropolitan area took more than all the income there was. Oh, true, Anita was paid for as well; she was by no means Cinderella with the wicked sisters, but she would never have presumed to ask for the extra tuition for a master of art history degree on top of her bachelor's from Hunter. For that she had paid with a hard-won partial scholarship, her wages as a night waitress and an occasional check from her mother; and when, with the aid of a professor who had taken a particular interest in her work, she had secured a job at the Museum of North America, there seemed to be a feeling among all the Vogels, understandably enough, that she should be henceforth pretty much on her own. She would of course continue to go to her father's in East Orange on Thanksgiving and to her mother's in Rye for Christmas, and there would always be occasional summer weekends, and much would be made of her on each arrival—for half an hour. It was all right; Anita neither expected nor really wanted anything more. She liked her room on top of a brownstone only two blocks from where she worked. The museum had soon become her family and her life.

She worked for three years in the pre-Columbian department, which embraced the vast field from the early Mayas to the Esquimaux and whose overall head was Carol Sweeters. She did not at first work directly for him, as she was assigned to a subdepartment of East Coast Indians in which he took little interest, but when he was putting together a major show of the museum's Yucatán artifacts, and the assistant in charge suddenly left for a job in another museum, he selected Anita, quite arbitrarily as she then thought, to take the defector's place. But she soon discovered he had been watching her more closely than she had supposed.

"I note that you have been faithful over a few things, Miss Vogel," he told her in his sneering tone. "I shall now make you lord over many."

“But may I go back to my Seminóles when we've done the show?”

“If you still wish it then. You have been working with savages. The Mayas, you will find, had a civilization in some ways as high as our own. Not that that's saying much.”

“Because they studied the stars and devised a calendar?"

"And because they built beautiful temples and adorned them with beautiful objects. I miss my guess, Miss Vogel, if you do not lose your heart to the Mayas.”

Anita dutifully took home several books on the Mayas and read them at night. She became fascinated by their concept of an agrarian society that kept warfare to a minimum. Indeed, they had appeared to regard it only as a defensive measure against invading tribes. When left to themselves, it seemed, they enjoyed a tranquil existence under clear blue skies, worshiping their strange gods on the high steps of their wonderful temples. There was, it was true, some suggestion in the books of human sacrifice, but Anita eagerly pursued the evidence that this aspect of their ritual may have been exaggerated or misunderstood by earlier historians. She had all her life suffered from a violent horror of all forms of bloodshed, with terrible nightmares about people being tortured or burned alive or devoured by tawny beasts. Indeed, she had often been afraid to go to bed at all, a state of affairs that had done little to contribute to her popularity in those early homes of dreamless sleepers.

Carol Sweeters was then in his late thirties, unmarried, and, despite his ugliness, had a reputation of success with the ladies at the museum. Anita was never sure how much she really liked him, but she could not help being intrigued by all that he took for granted, including his bland assumption that she could ask for nothing better than to share his bed.

"What are you holding out for?” he demanded one night in a cafeteria—he was notoriously stingy on dates—when she for the second time firmly declined to go back to his apartment. “A proposal of marriage? Don't you think I could do better?"

“Much. And so could I.”

“Oh, I see your game. You think you're the shy, intense type that's going to catch the millionaire sated with silly society beauties. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Or that girl in
Rebecca
with Max de Winter. Except you're not apt to find Rochester or de Winter in the Indian department of a second-class museum on Central Park West. Or do you dream of a passing trustee? ‘And what is
your
name, my pretty little assistant curator?' Dream on, poor girl!"

"Well, if I do catch one, I'll promise to make him raise your salary. So you can afford to take the underlings you plan to seduce to better places for dinner."

He cackled with pleasure. “So that's it! Here I've been wasting my time talking about ancient tribes, and all the while you could be had for some crêpes suzettes and a bottle of bubbly.”

"You might try them, anyway.”

“But I will! Shall we adjourn to some high-cost nightery? Before going to my apartment?”

"I'm not going to your apartment, Carol. Please understand that.”

“You find me so unattractive?”

“I don't sleep with every man I find not unattractive."

“Do you sleep with
any
men?"

"That's my business.”

He looked at her critically. "I shouldn't be at all surprised if you were still a virgin. That's not a fashionable quality, you know.”

"Nor am I a fashionable woman.”

"Then you
are
a virgin!” When she made no answer he pursued: “Seriously, Anita, I find
you
attractive. I can think of no reason that you and I should not enjoy a discreet and decorous affair.”

“There is no reason. Except that I do not wish it. Let's leave it at that, shall we? I find your company amusing. And I admire you professionally. Isn't that enough?"

“For a beginning, yes.”

"Well, let us always be beginning.”

"You'll go out with me again?”

"If you'll take me to a better place. We can go Dutch, if it's not too much better."

“Never! I'm an old-fashioned man.”

“Which is why you want to seduce virgins, no doubt.”

Carol's interest in her, not unsurprisingly, was stimulated by her resistance, so much so that she became apprehensive that he might infer that she was trying to allure him. She knew that the only effective step would have been to refuse to go out with him altogether, but she was afraid of incurring his terrible wrath, and besides, when he was not being libidinous, he could be extremely entertaining, and who else was making any effort to entertain her? On their next date he took her to a French restaurant in the East Fifties.

"I wonder if there's not something in your idea that every man, deep down, hankers for a virgin bride.”

"I never expressed any such idea. There was no question of marriage that I remember in the relationship that you proposed.”

“Ah, but if there
had
been?"

“But there wasn't. Nor was I looking for one.”

“All right, then call it my idea. A virgin bride might have some of the charm of a new car. So many girls today have mileage.”

After this, abruptly and much to her relief, he changed the subject, and for the rest of their very good meal he talked entrancingly about personalities at the museum. He knew everything about everyone and seemed perfectly willing to trust her with the most flagrant indiscretions. She would not have believed how much was going on under the dull, flat surface of cultural institutional life. But she could not help laughing, even when rather shocked, and when he took her home and did not even suggest that he should come upstairs for a nightcap, she allowed him to implant a warm, wet kiss on her still reluctant lips.

There were times now when he seemed almost content to let things go on indefinitely as they had been going, with a scholastic companionship at the office and an occasional "platonic” lunch or dinner. But he always insisted on paying for the latter, and she could not believe that a man so innately stingy would not expect an ultimate compensation. Sometimes, in his bad moods, he would wax so nasty as to seem to relieve her of the smallest obligation to him, but she had grown immune to the barbs of his wit, no matter how pointed and vile—and she knew that he knew this. He seemed to be counting on her being attracted to his very repulsiveness, and was he counting altogether in vain? She could not be sure. And there was another thing: she suffered from a sense of having beguiled him under false pretenses. For she was not, as she had half-implied, a virgin.

In graduate school she had had an affair that lasted a month with a fellow student, a pale, scrawny, oily-haired young man with a bad complexion and a desperate intensity, who had been distressingly open about wanting to prove to himself that he was not homosexual. They had confided everything about their unhappy childhoods to each other during sandwich lunches on park benches, and he had pounced on the idea that she too needed reassurance—reassurance that her feeling of rejection by her adoptive parents had not permanently frozen her in the conviction that she was impossible to love. Might they not each gain emotional emancipation by burning away the husk of a paralyzing neurosis in the deliberately kindled fire of sexual intercourse? And who was to say? Maybe they would find love, “true love,” whatever that might be, while they were at it.

It was not a success for either, and they ended on a sorry note of mutual recrimination. Anita could not avoid considering the possible deduction that her suspicion of her own unlovableness might be more than a suspicion, as his, of his homosexuality, soon proved an exact prognostication. Was it not safer, was it not happier, was it not even nobler to relegate all thoughts of romance to the iron cupboard of fantasy, where, no matter how lurid, how throbbing with the unmentionable, the almost unthinkable, they could still be kept mysteriously un-contaminating and clean?