The Golden Calves Read Free

dramatic?”
    "It gives me a touch of dignity when, like Cassandra, I am sure not to be believed. But to the point. If you were not so infatuated with our boss-to-be, you would roundly condemn his proposal to remove the manuscripts of early American music to the gloomy Gehenna of the library vault and put in their place some tawdry prints of opera sets. Instead of a unique collection of American colonial work we shall be faced with silly scenes from such overflogged European dead horses as
Aïda
and
Il Trovatore
."
    "That show is designed to illustrate the evolution of American operatic production. Isn’t that indigenous? Isn’t it educational?"
    â€œAh, educational! The holy word. You’d think we had no more schools or colleges. I thought museums were for the
educated.
For persons of taste and cultivation. Not for chattering schoolchildren pinching one another’s fannies while some dreary docent drones on about the influence of this on that.”
    "Really, Carol, you're a hopeless elitist."
    â€œArt is elitist. Beauty is elitist!”
    â€œAnd the public be damned.”
    "The public be double-damned! I can remember a day when you weren’t so far from my persuasion. When an idealistic young woman was happy to lose herself in the study of an ancient civilization and think nothing of museum shops full of vulgar dolls and costume jewelry or of planning shows of everything but the artifacts in one’s own institution. But that was before we fell under the spell of Young Lochinvar.”
    She always had the hateful feeling that Carol could read her mind. For how else could he deduce her emotional concern with Mark from the latter’s occasionally dropping into her office, a courtesy he rendered to all the curators? Carol was a kind of fiend. Had she not felt his power over herself? She detested being alone with him, even in her own office with the door wide open.
    "I haven’t changed that much," she said sullenly.
    "Only in that you have become the slave of fashion. I suppose you shouldn’t be too much censured for that. Fashion rules our world, from antinuclear protests to the size of bikinis. But beware! Fashion can be a merciless tyrant. It can become the storm of which I just warned you.”
    "What on earth are you talking about?”
    He raised a solemn finger as he paused for effect. "I am predicting, Anita Vogel, that within a century of Evelyn Speddon’s demise her collection will have been scattered over the auction markets of this nation from sea to shining sea!”
    "And why do you assume such a horrible thing?”
    â€œBecause your dear lady has collected everything there is to collect. With the inevitable result that in each succeeding decade at least one tenth of her artifacts will be out of fashion. And things out of fashion are necessarily disposed of."
    â€œAren't you forgetting the little matter of her will?"
    "I forget neither her will nor the firm that is drawing it. Is it not Claverack’s? But even if she puts in a hundred restrictive clauses, a judge in equity, interpreting the dead mind as it would have functioned had it existed at the moment of decision—i.e., as does his honor’s—will provide a key to open every lock. That is what the enlightened law professor of our day calls the nature of the judicial process.”
    â€œI don’t believe you!"
    "Meaning you won’t. And anyway, you needn't. You won’t live to see it all. As I say, it will take a hundred years.”
    "Oh, go away, please, Carol, go away. You just love to torture me.”
    Desperate, she covered her eyes with her hands. When she looked up, to her surprise and relief he was gone. It still lacked fifteen minutes to closing time, but she decided to go home, as she had at last learned to call Miss Speddon’s mansion on East 36th Street, lonely survivor of an era when Murray Hill had been fashionable. If Anita’s life at times struck her as a