The Golden Calves by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

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.

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    I N 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