The Golden Calves by Louis Auchincloss

of all places?” Anita repeated, anguished now. "Miss Speddon may be back any moment.”
    â€œNot until the curtain. She has arranged that with me. It was entirely her idea. She wants you to be prepared, but not to discuss it with her. Death, she believes, should be a private affair. When she comes back, she will press your hand, and that will be all. She is counting on you to be very brave. And to look after her things."
    "And she will not count on me in vain,” Anita murmured. For just a second she allowed herself the indulgence of covering her face with her hands. Then she turned back to Mrs. Kay. "I’m all right now. Tell me more about it.”
    As Mrs. Kay, in her low, measured tones, proceeded to explain the exact state of Evelyn Speddon’s degenerating heart, Anita found her mind as much a jumble of jarring thoughts as there were noises from the chattering auditorium below. Something seemed to want to escape from that mind; it was as if she had to close every aperture, pressing down with imagined fingers on its roof to keep enclosed the notion that what went on there was only her own business, that that dark cavern hid an amorality only blameless if never translated into words or deeds. For otherwise what would become of a soul that felt a wicked thrill at the intrusion of action into an existence so stale? Was the curtain about to rise on a drama in her own life, as it was about to rise on the second act of Wagner’s music drama? And did poor Miss Speddon have to perish for Anita’s liberty, her distraction, her libidinous fantasies? Surely such an Anita had to be a monster, even if she kept the knowledge to herself!
    â€œHere they come now,” Mrs. Kay was saying, and Anita jumped up as her patroness, with a gravely inquiring look, stepped into the box and took her hand to give it a quick, tight squeeze before taking her seat. Anita, returning that squeeze, said nothing and looked nothing, but hurriedly took her own place in the second row. But she had noted for the first time the glaze of death on those long gray cheeks.
    The lights dimmed, and she listened to Mark, who was murmuring something facetious about the dragon soon to be felled by the hero. She shuddered in unutterable dismay at her mental picture of Mark, clad in a bearskin, approaching her poor patroness with the gleaming Nothung in his murderous hand.

4
    M ARK A DDAMS, contrary to what was generally believed by the staff of the museum, was by no means assured of the board’s vote for the directorship, and nobody was more aware of this than he. He had the backing of the powerful chairman, which might have been sufficient for any other position on the staff, but even docile trustees have a way of showing surprising independence when it comes to the selection of a chief executive officer, and Mark had to contend with what the second ranking board member, Peter Hewlett, termed his “academic nudity." Mark had a B.A. from Bowdoin, where he had majored in history of art, but no master’s or doctor’s degree. After college he had gone into advertising and from there into a public relations firm, and it was as a rising young officer in charge of fund-raising for the Museum of North America that he had first come to the attention of Sidney Claverack.
    Working congenially together, the two had managed to double the institution’s endowment, and Claverack, delighted with the man he now chose to regard as his protégé, had contributed his own money to make possible Mark’s employment as “assistant director in charge of development” at a salary equal to what Mark’s firm had been paying him and actually in excess of that of the about-to-retire director, who was sixty-five and suffering from emphysema.
    â€œI’m going to put all my cards on the table,” Claverack had said to him. “I don't mind telling you that you seem to be just what I’ve been looking for as director of