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

all of those things. Except with Bruce, pot led to cocaine. He pro tested, he marched, he smashed windows—as I did—as we all did—until we became disillusioned with disillusionment. Bruce held a news conference in New Haven and announced that he was going to kill himself.”
    "Which of course he didn’t.”
    â€œWhich of course he did.” A spark in Chessie's eyes seemed to reprove him for daring to question the dark integrity of the Nortons. “He shot himself in our cellar in Darien. Dad could never understand or cope with it. He turned away, refused to talk about it. Mother was worse and yet better. In time I came to think her quite wonderful. ‘Bruce has made his choice,’ she told me. There is a kind of relief to it, in the end. He didn’t have the will to live, so he had to die. It should be easier now for the rest of us. For me anyhow. For I’ve decided to live!’ ”
    Mark divined that the only way to respond to this was in the same tone. The girl would have spurned any expression of sympathy in which her ringing hammer detected the smallest pitch of falseness. But didn’t such hammers have a way of creating the very falseness they were looking for?
    â€œAnd that helped you? Her Spartan attitude?”
    "Ultimately. It also helped me accept how soon Bruce was forgotten. I saw why some people make a cult of the dead. It’s the only way to avoid total oblivion. And maybe the dead should be forgotten. When I saw how utterly all the protesting of the sixties was swept under the rug, when I saw that I was turning from a would-be martyr to a by-passed crank, I decided to follow Mother and live. I resolved to fight only for things that I personally cared about. A personal interest gives you direction and push and hate.” Chessie’s stare was now illuminated as if by a small flame. “I wanted to be a lawyer, and I wanted to end discrimination against women in law firms and courtrooms. Well, I and my likes have just about done it!”
    It excited him to feel that she too could be excited. "So now that battle is won, what remains? To become a partner and make a lot of money? Maybe a judge?”
    Her repeated study of his countenance seemed to seek further assurance that he was not laughing at her. Again she nodded. “Something like that."
    "What about marriage and a family? Or is that too Darien?”
    "I haven’t ruled them out.”
    "I'm glad to hear that.”
    She didn’t smile. "I haven't ruled anything out, Mark Addams.”
    Indeed she had not, for their relationship almost at once developed into the affair that had now lasted for more than two years. Chessie continued to resent men in general and Mark, in some respects, in particular—she persisted in dubbing him a sentimentalist who was much too keen about many matters that she regarded as trivial—but she was under no misapprehension as to the importance of a man in her life. When their affair started, he had imagined it was going to be largely a physical one, to which he had no objection, but he had soon discovered that the sexual act was the prelude to the unfolding of some unexpected aspects of her personality. When Chessie’s major suspicions of his male chauvinism were overcome, she became a congenial and sympathetic friend. If she worked as hard as ever in the office, she devoted most of her free time to him, and she manifested a zeal for plays, operas, concerts and even museums that he had not suspected to exist behind the façade she had first presented of a rather lan guid disenchantment. Chessie had been deeply hurt by her brother and by her own disappointments, and she was leery of being hurt again, but she still had a sharp appetite for life.
    Was she in love? Was
he?
He sometimes suspected that the only thing that held him back was his fear that she might make fun of him as being old-fashioned. He knew that it was perfectly possible, even normal,