The Golden Calves

by Louis Auchincloss

  I’m having a nervous breakdown! she thought in surprise. So this is what it’s like.

  In the middle of a cold and dripping afternoon her buzzer rang with a scaring loudness. She was at once convinced that it was Carol and knew that she couldn’t see him. But the superintendent’s voice announced the name of her visitor as something like “Speddon.” Miss Speddon? How could Miss Speddon be coming to see her? Hers was more than a nervous breakdown. It had to be nearer insanity!

  “Send her up,” she muttered, and opened her door to watch for the elevator. Could it be one of Carol’s horrible jokes? She had met the lady only twice and then in the company of other staff members. Yet when the creaky gate opened, the grilled box disgorged, in a dripping red mackintosh and red hat absurdly like a fireman’s, none other than the great collector herself.

  “My dear Miss Vogel, I hear you’ve been ill. Miss Nesbit saw you in the park from her window yesterday, and she was concerned, because you had said you were going to your mother’s. She did not know quite what to do, so I told her I’d drive by your house on my way home and see for myself whether there was anything you needed. May I come in and have a little chat with you? You do look pulled down, my child. I’m afraid you’re going to have to let someone take care of you.”

  Such was the old lady’s gift of inspiring confidence that fifteen minutes later they were seated comfortably by the stove drinking orange juice. Anita felt it was all very unreal but also very wonderful.

  “Now that we have been over the preliminaries, and you see that I am not an interfering ogress,” Miss Speddon was saying, “and now that I see you haven’t, thank the Lord, incurred any dangerous illness, I wonder if you would allow me to be a little more personal? I cannot help feeling that the staff of my beloved museum are a kind of family of mine.”

  “Oh, please, Miss Speddon, be as personal as you choose. I cannot imagine anything more flattering.”

  “Well, then, I’ll be bold. You must know by now that in small institutions like ours everybody butts into everyone else’s business. Miss Nesbit thought you might have had a falling-out with Dr. Sweeters over his mistreatment of a cat. Could that be so?”

  “He locked it out to starve! His own pet! Because he couldn’t be bothered to find a home for it. Oh, Miss Speddon, please don’t try to reconcile us! I didn’t really like him anyway, but now I find him loathsome.”

  “My dear, I wouldn’t think of it. It was a cruel and vicious thing for him to do, and I quite agree with your assessment of his character. No, what brought me here was the idea, suggested by what Miss Nesbit told me, that there might be a bond between you and me.”

  Anita wondered whether her mild dizziness was not simply a natural reaction to the charm of this wonderful old woman. She didn’t wish her ever to stop talking; she wanted to drink orange juice and listen to her consoling words till doomsday.

  “I suspect that what we may really have in common is an overdeveloped sympathy for suffering persons. I say overdeveloped because it does not do either the sufferers or ourselves much good. But there we are—we’re stuck with it. When I was a young woman, about your age, I wanted to go abroad in the Great War to work in a hospital. I wasn’t a nurse, but I was willing to do any kind of dirty work. My father was a man of considerable influence, and he was able to arrange it for me. He warned me gravely that the shock of what I was going to see might be almost fatal to one of my sensitivity, but he qualified this by adding: ‘Daisy, it may also be the making of you. You’re too timid about life. You’ve been a wonderful companion to me since your mother died, and we’ve had a great time roaming the world together and collecting beautiful things. But I’ve been selfish. I’ve let myself monopolize your life, I’ve probably prevented you from marrying.’ He hadn’t, but there was no persuading him of this. ‘All along,’ he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for the appearance of a real love in your life. When that happened I vowed that I was not going to stand between you and it. Of course, I thought it would come in the shape of a man, and I was determined not to be small or snobbish about him. Well, it seems I was wrong. It wasn’t a man at all. Your love has come in the shape of a mission. Maybe you will see things that you cannot endure. But I have sworn to myself, and I must stand by my oath. Go and God be with you!’

  “Well, my dear, I went, trembling. And I did well to tremble. I am not going to tell you what I saw in France. Suffice it to say that my reason might have tottered had I not had so much hard work to do. Blood and bedpans can save the mind. It was the coming home on the boat, after the Armistice, that was the hardest part. Then I had the nightmare of memory with no distraction, and looking over the cold, broad, tossing Atlantic was no comfort. I can understand why two friends of mine, twin sisters, leaped to their deaths from another returning vessel. I was sorely tempted to do the same. But I resisted, and when I was home again my dear old father helped me to recover. That is another reason I came to you today: I understand you are not close to either of your parents. I do not know what I should have done at that time without the one I still had. Father took me firmly in hand and told me to fill my eyes and mind with beautiful things. He taught me to accept the ugliness of human nature by concentrating on the beautiful art man could create. Augustus, he would say, might have slaughtered in war thousands of his fellow mortals, but he left Rome a city of gleaming marble. Wagner might have been a megalomaniac and an anti-Semite, but we have Parsifal and Tristan. You may find it curious that he should have sought to save my soul with material things, that he should have offered me objects in place of ideas, but it worked. I’ve had a happy life, my dear.”

  And in the ensuing months Miss Speddon proceeded, in her own grave, imperturbable way, to supply Anita with one of her own. She persuaded her to take a longer leave of absence from the museum and to move out of her apartment into 36th Street, where she could be more comfortably looked after until she should have recovered her spirits. The visit proved to both that the bond between them was no figment of Miss Speddon’s imagination, but a very real and durable thing, and Anita agreed at last to live permanently with her new patroness and to go back to the museum, when she ultimately did, in the new and grander role of curator of the Speddon collection.

  She found herself so happy, and in so amazingly short a time, that she gratefully resolved to devote all her energies and actions henceforth to the perfecting of the role of acolyte at this new altar. It was not long before she actually exulted at having no life or friends of her own. Miss Speddon made strong, periodic objections to this, but she was old and waxing feebler by the month, and it was only natural that she should at last accept the ministrations of this efficient, understanding young woman who showed temper only when resisting any proposal that she do aught but live for the benefit of her hostess. To Anita it was as if this benign, elderly angel had winged her way down into the cavernous shadows of her bleak old life, as in a romantic engraving by Gustave Dorć, and borne her back up to an alabaster paradise of trumpets and halos.

  What did she need of her old world? What, for that matter, did she need of anyone’s? Miss Speddon’s decorous, antique society, largely female and widowed or virginal, soft, silent and gently smiling, accepted her as they would have any discreet, well-mannered young woman who had come to act as “Daisy’s” paid companion. On nights when Miss Speddon ventured into society alone, Anita would stay home and wait for her return, for all the world like a faithful dog.

  At the museum it was understood that she was now responsible directly to Miss Speddon, who paid her salary. She never thrust her opinions on her patroness, whom she accompanied on all her buying expeditions, but when asked, she would reply succinctly and to the point, and so developed, without seeking it, a definite influence over the collection. She even managed to trim some of Miss Speddon’s sentimental extravagances, particularly in the area of native crafts. For if the old lady, in art and sculpture, had a fine if conservative taste, she was inclined to purchase with too heavy a hand the quaint produce
of old villages and farms: quilts, weather vanes, grilled fences, andirons, duck decoys, pots, pans, tea kettles and the like. It sometimes seemed that in buying artifacts to trace the history of America she was trying to buy America itself.

  Anita loved everything about the life at 36th Street. Even its rigid regularity was agreeable to her. Meals were always at precisely the same time; Monday nights were for the opera, Thursdays for the concert; on Wednesdays there was apt to be a small, stately dinner at home. Weekends were passed in the large stone mansion in Fairfield, where Anita would walk in the garden or the bit of wood, or read. She found that she was becoming even more methodical than her hostess, that she minded the smallest variation in the routine. She had at last succeeded in building the stout and durable wall that seemed able to hold her old anxieties at bay. It would protect her both day and night; there was hardly a chink in it except the one through which Carol Sweeters’s mocking face occasionally peered. At last she did not mind even him. She discontinued her visits to her parents, who were willing enough to forget about her. Her fortress was ready, her drawbridge up, and she was prepared to pour down boiling oil on any who dared to scale the ramparts. Within, on an emerald greensward, she could sit safely with Evelyn Speddon. She was perfectly secure. She was almost perfectly happy.

  And then Mark Addams came to the museum.

  3

  IN HER three conventual years at 36th Street Anita had learned to exercise a tight control over vagrant sexual attractions. At “home,” as she now called Miss Speddon’s residences in town and country, there was little enough to disturb her, and at the museum her sober deportment and dutiful industriousness had done little to allure her fellow workers. But it took more than this to exempt her mind from the intrusion of male images. What she taught herself to do when one of these threatened to fix itself more than briefly in her reflections was to create the mental drama of a romantic relationship, deliberately converting mere possibilities into vibrant but nonetheless transient fictions. This happened with one of the younger trustees, who chose to make it his particular function to become thoroughly familiar with the Speddon collection, and again with a handsome accountant with whom she had to work on the insurance problems raised by the theft of an important artifact. Both were married men; neither had the smallest apparent biological interest in her; but their imagined counterparts could be briefly diverting and ultimately dismissed. And her little games went far to rein force the old conclusion that she was never going to attract the kind of man that attracted her. Which was just as well, anyway, was it not, if she had resolved to dedicate her life to better things?

  Mark Addams, however, was different. Not only was he permanently present, having to walk by her office door several times a day to his own at the end of the corridor; he took a persistent, friendly, rather jovial interest in her. It was not, certainly, a romantic interest—he had plenty of that outside the office—but he had a way of seeming playfully to imply it was a pity that it wasn’t. She had never had to cope with anything quite like this before, and her heart let her down by quivering outrageously whenever he addressed her as “Pal.”

  The trouble was that even their slight actual relationship was not so utterly remote from the fantasy that she defensively constructed around it as had been the fairy tales she had fabricated of the trustee and the accountant. About Mark she had invented the fable that the acting director, crushed by his failure to win the permanent post and abandoned by the crude lawyer lover whose greedy heart yearned only for success, had turned in his desolation to a more sympathetic heart. Now, however ridiculous this was, it was not inconceivable that Mark should be passed over for the directorship, and Anita had recently heard rumors that all might not be well between him and his girl friend. She even seemed—however much the idea alarmed her—to make out a correlation between the cheerful note of Mark’s address and the warm words that he used in her imagination. Suppose—a panic-making thought—she should lose her mental balance and betray her preoccupations by some blabbed, involuntary remark to him? Would he not then, like Hippolytus hearing the shameful confes sion of his infatuated stepmother, draw back in horror and shock?

  When Miss Speddon informed her on a Monday evening when she returned from work that she had invited Mr. Addams to dinner and the opera that very night, Anita in dismay was about to plead a headache, and checked herself only when she realized that this might be interpreted as too great rather than too small an interest in the prospective guest. And so an hour later, washed and dressed but miserably tense, she found herself alone with Mark in the parlor. Miss Speddon never appeared at cocktails, staying in her room until dinner was announced. Mark, of course, was as much at ease as Anita was not. Glass in hand, he roamed the long dusky chamber, surveying with a critical but admiring eye the portraits on the walls—a Gilbert Stuart, a Rembrandt Peale, two Copleys—and the vast Frederick Church panorama of the Amazon, which seemed to open the end wall into a glorious window on wide dark water and thick dark foliage.

  “How wonderful to live with these things!” he exclaimed. “To be surrounded by them, to be a part of them. To be eaten up by them! And, my God, look at that vase! It’s early Ming, isn’t it? Why, there’s a whole set of them.”

  The pictures were lit, as were the cabinets, but on the tables in the corners it was not easy to make out each object.

  “I can turn on more lights.”

  “Don’t! It’s more mysterious like this. I think, if I were Miss Speddon, I’d be perfectly happy!”

  “But you live all day with beautiful things, Mark.”

  “Ah, but I have to share them with the public! With the staff. They’re all ticketed and classified. Here they’d just be mine.” He turned, grinning, to clench and unclench his fists, mimicking a miser. “They’d have no function beyond my personal edification. Oh, yes, I think to be rich would be to be perfectly happy. I’d trade places with Miss Speddon tomorrow.”

  “And be an old woman instead of a young man? And infirm instead of the picture of health?”

  “The infirmity would not be so good, I grant. But I shouldn’t mind the age or even the sex so long as I had a couple of years to enjoy these things. What’s time, after all? Don’t we measure life by intensity?”

  “Of course you’re not serious.”

  “Do you know I almost am, Anita?” he responded in a tone that at least simulated earnestness. He came over to sit on the divan beside her. ‘There are times when I wonder if our game is worth the candle. The whole business of storing and cataloguing and exhibiting beautiful objects. When the only way to take them in is to live with them, as you do.”

  “But I don’t own them.”

  “Don’t you, in a way? Haven’t you made them yours? There’s something about you, Anita, just sitting there, so quietly, so serenely, that makes me sense you have absorbed these things in a way I could never hope to in my crazy life.”

  “I’m not absorbing anything that you’re not.”

  “Oh, but you are!” He leaned forward to stare boldly into her eyes. “You’re quite wonderful, Anita. You really are. The rest of us just exist. You live.”

  “Oh, Mark, you’re so ridiculous.” She turned away from him with a shudder. And then suddenly she was almost angry. How dare he play with her so? She faced him now with a kind of defiance. “What about Miss Norton? Doesn’t she live?”

  He drew back, startled. Was he going to be Hippolytus, after all? But then he seemed suddenly to decide to take her question seriously. “Do you know, that’s just what she doesn’t do? It’s law, law, law, all day and all night. I don’t like to sound like a chauvinist pig, but there’s something about litigation that seems to coarsen a woman. I don’t know how much longer I can take Chessie’s long hours and preoccupation with becoming a partner. And even if she does, will it make that much difference? The partners in her sweatshop work just as hard.’’

  “Sweatshops, dear me! I hope you’re not talking about the museum. The temperature would hardl
y be the thing for my paintings.”

  They both turned to the door, where their smiling hostess was standing, waiting to lead them down to dinner.

  The opera was Siegfried, and they were only four in Miss Speddon’s box. Mrs. Kay, a widow, tiny, old and exquisite, with neatly waved snowy hair and an air of tranquil, friendly composure which nothing could ruffle, had been waiting for them when they arrived, belonging, as she explained to Mark, to the “Asbestos Club” of those who always arrived before that canopy was lifted. Unlike most of Miss Speddon’s friends, she was the mother of three middle-aged sons, all notably successful in different professions, and she was considered a font of practical wisdom by those who came to 36th Street.

  Anita paid scant attention to the activities of the hero and dwarf in the first act; her mind was too full of a possible breakup between Mark and his girl friend. Her fantasy seemed to be growing out of control; like a malignant chest tumor it threatened to break the rib cage. She even wondered if Miss Speddon’s old waitress had not put something in her cocktail. Could she be sure that she had heard Mark correctly? Wasn’t it the Chessie Norton of her fantasy, and not the real one, whom she had heard him describe? Closing her eyes in agitation, she tried to let the music distract her.

  When the lights went up for the intermission, Miss Speddon rose and gave her arm to Mark. She usually took a stroll with Anita between the first and second acts, but when the latter rose to follow, Mrs. Kay touched her arm.

  “Stay with me, my dear. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Alone in the box with Mrs. Kay, Anita, surprised and faintly apprehensive, waited for the old lady to speak, gazing down over the packed aisles of risen people below. The last members of the orchestra were disappearing under the stage.

  Still Mrs. Kay did not speak, and the tiny smile on her thin lips had shrunk suddenly to a crisp line.