The Golden Calves

by Louis Auchincloss

  “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.

  16

  “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 fo
r 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?”

  “Really? I don’t agree with them at all. You just mentioned Cortez. Can anyone deny the role that Spain, inquisitors as well as conquistadors, played in this continent?”

  “But El Greco, they say, had nothing to do with all that. Of course, maybe he had nothing to do with the painting, either. Maybe it was done by some nineteenth-century Spanish artist.”

  “You mean it’s a fake? Oh, Mr. Hewlett! Your masterpiece?”

  “Stranger things have happened to collectors. But however interesting this subject is, I don’t suppose it’s what you came to discuss with me.”

  “In a way it may be. A friend of mine, I’m sorry to say, has done a very cruel thing. He thought he was justified, but there could be no justification. Any more than there was justification for that.” She pointed to the canvas. “I mean the burnings.”

  He looked at the painting as if considering this for the first time. “And was this cruel thing done to someone at the museum?”

  She took in the twinkling condescension of his kindness. He was not taking her seriously. “To several persons, Mr. Hewlett. Including yourself.”

  “Me!”

  “It was Carol Sweeters who told the Revenue people about the appraisals. He knew that you and Mr. Claverack would assume that Mark Addams had done it, and he wanted to get Mark into trouble. He has always hated Mark.”

  But Hewlett seemed abruptly indifferent to the motive. He actually clapped his hands.

  “But this is wonderful news, Miss Vogel! You are quite right that the cruelty of the act redounded upon myself. For I make no secret of the fact that Mark and my daughter have been the closest friends. Perhaps you knew that?”

  “It was she who suspected Carol.”

  “Indeed! Well, you can imagine how painful it was for me to think that Mark was undermining the institution of which he was director.”

  She turned to the door. “And now that that’s been cleared up, I can go back to work.”

  Hewlett at this seemed to take in that there might be repercussions in the matter even for one so lowly. “You’re very kind to have come to tell me. Won’t you stay and have a cup of tea or a drink? I can make it all right at the museum, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “No, thank you. I think I’d better go.”

  “But, my dear Miss Vogel, may this not have been distressing to you as well? You mentioned that Dr. Sweeters was a friend.”

  “Yes, and of course it’s distressing when a friend behaves like that. And painful to have to tell on him. But I couldn’t stand by and see Mark hurt.”

  “You saw that it would hurt him?”

  “How could it not?”

  “Mightn’t a board of enlightened trustees take the attitude that he had simply done his duty as a citizen?”

  “Would you think that, Mr. Hewlett?”

  He sighed. “No, trustees are only human, and nobody likes a snitcher. But that gets me to my point. When I inform them, as I fear I must, of what you have just told me, will your friend Sweeters not be in just the hole that you have so generously pulled Mark out of?”

  “But that will be his fault.”

  “I understand he has been offered an excellent position in California. Would he not be well advised to accept it?”

  “Perhaps he will. When I tell him what I’ve done.”

  “Ah, you’ll do that?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You’re a brave girl. But did I not hear that they want you, too?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t leave the museum so long as I could be of any help with the Speddon collection.”

  He smiled foxily. “You mean, so long as you’re needed as a watchdog? Oh, even trustees know something of what goes on, Miss Vogel. But supposing I were to give you my word, as the new chairman of the board, that you will be kept informed of any proposed change in the disposition of Miss Speddon’s things?”

  She suddenly recalled her feeling at a children’s party in Rye, given by her mother for her half-sister, when a smiling, insinuating, hand-fluttering gypsy of a trickman had somehow emptied her pockets without her feeling a thing and held up her miserable belongings to the laughing company; Were the Hewletts going to rob her of all her prejudices?

  “Why would you undertake to do that?”

  “Because I think we owe it to you. And because—let me be bold—I dare to speculate that you and Carol Sweeters, away from all this, may forget all about it.”

  “And live happily ever after?”

  “That, my dear lady, is surely your affair and not mine.”

  His tone was a bit dryer; clearly, he was accustomed to having his big heart more readily appreciated. Well, what did she really have to gain from that turbid, windy organ?

  “Let me ask you one thing, sir. Will Mr. Claverack be returning to the board?”

  “A good question. The answer is no. Mr. Claverack is entering into a settlement with Uncle Sam, pursuant to which some heavy fines will be paid. And that will be the end of the matter. But the stipulations contain admissions on his part that will make it impossible, in my opinion, for the board to take him back.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hewlett.” There was no avoiding now what she had to say at the end. “And, really, you have been most kind.”

  It was her turn now to stand in the doorway. Carol did not look up from the paper he was pretending to read. But he obviously knew she was there.

  “Can I help yo
u, Miss Vogel?”

  “I want to talk about the L.A. job. I thought I might take it, after all.”

  It was rare for Carol to let his expression admit surprise, but looking up now, he did so. “You mean you wouldn’t mind working with a cat slaughterer?”

  “Not if he promised never to do it again.”

  He rose. “What are you trying to tell me, Anita?”

  “That we’re in the same boat now.”

  “Going where?”

  “To California. An hour ago you were in the position of having used confidential information to damage a friend of mine. Now things have changed. I’m just as guilty as you. I have told Mr.

  Hewlett what you did. I have restored Mark to his good graces and sent you to Coventry.”

  His face was like a field of battle before the first assault. He seemed to be waiting, prepared either for the bugle call of charge or the fluttering flag of truce.

  “And you did that because Addams was such a dear friend?”

  “I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.”

  “And not just for him?”

  “I’d have done it for anyone. I’d have done it for you, had things been the other way round.”

  “And how do you feel about the man who put you in the position of having to do it?”

  “I’ve told you. We’re in the same boat now. I feel about you exactly the way I feel about myself.”

  “Do you love yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Not much!”

  “I don’t, Carol.”

  “Then you don’t love me.”

  “Does that have to follow?”

  “Then you do love me.”

  “Really, is this the place to discuss that? Can’t you take me out to dinner tonight?”

  “I suppose you’ve always loved me, really,” he mused. ‘I’ve been an ass not to have seen it. Or did I really see it all along? But yes, I’ll take you out to dinner. Only tell me one thing. Don’t you really think the less of me for what I did?”

  “If it had been for the museum, as you said, I might have. But I think I liked your doing it out of jealousy.”