The Golden Calves by Louis Auchincloss Page A

president, as ‘candy ass’ as you choose. It is not going to make a particle of difference to any of us.”
    "You mean the board won’t care about the intentions of Miss Speddon?”
    â€œMy dear fellow, you are being positively crude. Of course the board will care. The board will care very much. But it has always been my firm tenet that the intentions of a decedent, expressed or implied, legally binding or merely morally so, must be construed, like our revered Constitution, in accordance with changing times and conditions. The one thing we can never know is what a dead person would have thought about any current issue if alive. And for that simple reason it is necessary for the dead to rely on the living to decide these questions. It isn’t a matter of should or should not. There is simply no way that the dead can choose.”
    "But aren’t you speaking of the passage of considerable time? Surely it can’t be that difficult to interpret intentions expressed only months ago?”
    And now Mark saw for the first time in his own experience—though he had certainly heard about it from others—the shadow that flitted across the features of the chairman when he found himself confronted with that rare individual who did not know how to bend before the right persuasion.
    â€œI think you may be forgetting, Mr. Director, that I am looking forward to our working together congenially in the years to come. Obviously you and I do not wish anything to change our happy relationship.”
    Mark swallowed hard. "Nothing will, sir, of course.”
    Sidney rose to his feet, at once beaming, and turned to the door. ‘That is just fine, fella. Just fine. But just don’t you forget it.”
    If Anita Vogel had been associated with his initial rise to power at the museum, he supposed it was only fair that the first crack in the smooth surface of his professional success should coincide with the rift in the sympathy between them. If the cheerful countenance of Sidney Claverack was now overcast with a hint of admonition, with the unpleasant reminder that future benefits were not going to be accorded without some contribution by the beneficiary, might it not have been anticipated that the woman on whose affections he had based his plan of advance should be at least in part the cause?
    She burst into his office, pale with anger, the very next morning, to ask if he knew that the executors of Miss Speddon’s estate had already disposed of her doll collection at a private sale. And he hadn’t! And then a very peculiar thing took place, something he could not explain at the time or afterwards. He had been standing by the window of his office when she came in, and she had gone up to him, pressing her irate face closely, almost menacingly, to his. Certainly there was nothing in the least like a sexual advance in her attitude; on the contrary, it seemed to fling his old fantasies to the scrap heap of vulgar things with which a Vestal Virgin could have nothing to do. There was something in her white, desperate stare that appeared to slam the ivory gates of the world of art and beauty and relegate him to the lesser kingdom of Claverack, in which he was doomed to play a minor and even a humiliating role. And it might have seemed his last chance or at least his own final gesture of defiance to kiss her suddenly on her wet lips.
    â€œMr. Addams, you have insulted me!” she cried in a hoarse voice, jumping back and placing a chair between them. "I see now I was a fool to imagine you could ever be a friend or that you could ever care about anything but crowds and headlines. Well, there may be one soul in this jungle of philistines who will listen to me! I’ll take my case to Mr. Hewlett. We’ll see if
he
will allow the museum to be plundered by you and your crooked shyster of a boss!”
    And before he could say another word, she was gone.

8
    P ETER H EWLETT was always the first down for