The Golden Calves by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œHow 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.
    â€œI can turn on more lights."
    â€œDon’t! It’s more mysterious like this. I think, if I were Miss Speddon, I’d be perfectly happy!”
    â€œBut 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.”
    â€œAnd be an old woman instead of a young man? And infirm instead of the picture of health?”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œDo 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