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

in their day and age, for a young and healthy woman to be indefinitely, perhaps permanently, satisfied with a relationship that did not offer the security of marriage (if such security still existed) or the fulfillment of children (if they still fulfilled). Chessie was certainly unlike what his mother had regarded as a womanly woman. She did not seem to believe in any future at all—except in that partnership in Sidney Claverack’s firm.
    And when she did at last advert to the subject of marriage, it was distasteful to him. This was only because of the way she put it. They had been staying in a ski lodge in Vermont, and after a wonderful day on the slopes, at dinner, almost as if she were turning reluctantly to a rather tedious duty after an irresponsible but delightful holiday, she said abruptly: "You know, if we’re ever going to get married, we should be thinking about it now. After all, I’m thirty-one, and the women in my family have a history of early menopause.”
    He replied, after a moment of reflection, with an evasion: “Is that what Juliet whispered to Romeo from the balcony?"
    "All right, forget it!" She was instantly irate. “It’s not going to be said of me that I threw myself at a man."
    â€œI can guarantee that."
    â€œThe next move, if any, will have to come from you."
    "I’ll check with Ma and see if our men have a record of early impotence.”
    â€œVery funny.”
    "Seriously, Chessie, I’m not closing my mind on this issue.” It struck him now that he never called her "dearest” or "darling.”
    â€œBut maybe someone else is."
    â€œOh, come off it, Chessie. It isn’t like you to be so easily hurt. Can't a man be as businesslike as a woman? Must I be sloppily romantic while you’re bleakly down to earth?”
    She shrugged impatiently. “It’s all such crap. Let’s get back to the way we were. That was much better.”
    And she proceeded to do just that. It was one of the things that was so amazing about her. She was as cheerful for the rest of the evening as he had ever seen her. But there was no question of any lovemaking that night.

5
    I T WAS certainly not the best thing for his relationship with Chessie that museum events should have drawn him into greater intimacy with Anita Vogel at just this time. Sidney Claverack was doing over Miss Speddon’s will—an annual procedure—and he summoned Mark to his law office to discuss the matter with a candor that even then struck the younger man as out of place in an attorney supposedly wholeheartedly devoted to his client’s interests.
    â€œShe doesn’t really trust me. Even though I’m her cousin, and my family has represented her forever. But then she doesn’t really trust anybody. She’s hell-bent to tie up her money till the trumpet of the last judgment. But she likes
you,
Mark. She thinks you’re fresh and clean and idealistic and all that crap. You’d better work on that, fella. Go and see her. Talk to her about the dead hand sitting too heavily on the living.”
    "You mean talk to her about her will? How would I dare bring the subject up?”
    "You won't have to. She will. She can’t talk to anyone from the museum for fifteen minutes without bringing it up.”
    "But wouldn’t she think it impertinent if I made suggestions? And wouldn’t it be?”
    Sidney paused, as if to find how best to bring home to this young man the gravity of the matter. “Mark, listen to me. That woman’s fortune is the break our museum has been waiting for ever since its foundation. It’s the windfall that should put us at last right up there on top with the great museums of this country. But what good will her dough do us if it’s all tied up in crazy old maid knots? You’ve got to get in there and fight. Fight for your company’s chance to take its proper rank in the world. And, all right, fight for the