habit of denigrating his superiors.
When the ailing director had retired, after Mark had been in office only a year, he was named acting head, pending the decision of the committee of trustees appointed to find a successor. Of course this had aroused considerable resentment in the museum: a clique of older curators were never going to regard Mark as anything other than an upstart and the sidekick of an officious chairman of the board. But Mark knew that time was on his side and that many of the younger staff members already regarded him as the Galahad on whom they could count to pull the institution out of its doldrums and safeguard their own futures and pensions.
These latter were not content to let the museum remain a quiet, sleepy organization where the older curators, absorbed in the cultivation of their individual gardens, tended to resent the intrusion of the public and to regard a strike by guards and maintenance men as a bonanza that would turn the building into a silent haven for scholars. The juniors were eager to follow Markâs lead and turn the museum into a kind of graduate school for all ages whose artifacts would offer instruction in the history and culture of a continent, whose shop would be filled with enticing aids to learning and whose great central gallery would be available to display any of the popular visiting "megashowsâ so heavily covered by the press. By day the halls would be filled with students; by night they would glitter with benefit parties. Attendance was the new god at whose shrine Mark worshiped, and why not? What would be the good of a museum in the middle of a desert?
But if the younger staff members optimistically and naively believed that the search committee would automatically follow the guidance of its chairman, Mark, less sanguine, realized that their failure to do so (and who could tell if the fickle Claverack might not be persuaded to change his mind or even sponsor a new favorite?) would deprive him of his one chance to achieve the first position in a major museum. For what was an âacademic nude" without Sidney Claverack, and where else was he going to find such a sponsor? If the board didnât choose him, he could only go back to his old public relations firmâif indeed they still wanted him.
And if indeed he wanted to go back. Mark had always dreamed of a career that would combine material prosperity with eminence in a cultural field. At college he had wanted first to be an actor, then an artist, then a writer; but always a shrewd assessor of his own abilities, he had early divined that he was not destined to achieve high rank as servant of any of those muses. Yet his faith that he had an unusual gift, if he could only find the muse to bring it out, had never wavered. In the State House in Augusta, the home town where his father ran a small pharmaceutical business, there was a portrait gallery where the primitive likenesses of early hirsute legislators were startlingly dominated by the painting of a lady in flowing white, holding a golden goblet in outstretched hands, her mouth an oval of utterance, presumably of some strong and noble song. It was the diva Lillian Nordica, a daughter of Maine, depicted in her greatest role, Isolde. Mark had vowed that he would stand out as much from his contemporaries as the Wagnerian soprano stood out from all those worthy senators and assemblymen.
And in his first two years at the museum it had begun to look as if he might achieve his goal. It had even seemed appropriate to him that the happiness he felt in the evolution of his professional life should have been complemented by a corresponding development in his private one. It was again through Sidney Claverack that blessings seemed to flow, for he met Chessie Norton, an associate in the latterâs law firm, at a cocktail party given in the chairmanâs Park Avenue apartment. It was true that this tall redhead had not at first struck him as a
When the ailing director had retired, after Mark had been in office only a year, he was named acting head, pending the decision of the committee of trustees appointed to find a successor. Of course this had aroused considerable resentment in the museum: a clique of older curators were never going to regard Mark as anything other than an upstart and the sidekick of an officious chairman of the board. But Mark knew that time was on his side and that many of the younger staff members already regarded him as the Galahad on whom they could count to pull the institution out of its doldrums and safeguard their own futures and pensions.
These latter were not content to let the museum remain a quiet, sleepy organization where the older curators, absorbed in the cultivation of their individual gardens, tended to resent the intrusion of the public and to regard a strike by guards and maintenance men as a bonanza that would turn the building into a silent haven for scholars. The juniors were eager to follow Markâs lead and turn the museum into a kind of graduate school for all ages whose artifacts would offer instruction in the history and culture of a continent, whose shop would be filled with enticing aids to learning and whose great central gallery would be available to display any of the popular visiting "megashowsâ so heavily covered by the press. By day the halls would be filled with students; by night they would glitter with benefit parties. Attendance was the new god at whose shrine Mark worshiped, and why not? What would be the good of a museum in the middle of a desert?
But if the younger staff members optimistically and naively believed that the search committee would automatically follow the guidance of its chairman, Mark, less sanguine, realized that their failure to do so (and who could tell if the fickle Claverack might not be persuaded to change his mind or even sponsor a new favorite?) would deprive him of his one chance to achieve the first position in a major museum. For what was an âacademic nude" without Sidney Claverack, and where else was he going to find such a sponsor? If the board didnât choose him, he could only go back to his old public relations firmâif indeed they still wanted him.
And if indeed he wanted to go back. Mark had always dreamed of a career that would combine material prosperity with eminence in a cultural field. At college he had wanted first to be an actor, then an artist, then a writer; but always a shrewd assessor of his own abilities, he had early divined that he was not destined to achieve high rank as servant of any of those muses. Yet his faith that he had an unusual gift, if he could only find the muse to bring it out, had never wavered. In the State House in Augusta, the home town where his father ran a small pharmaceutical business, there was a portrait gallery where the primitive likenesses of early hirsute legislators were startlingly dominated by the painting of a lady in flowing white, holding a golden goblet in outstretched hands, her mouth an oval of utterance, presumably of some strong and noble song. It was the diva Lillian Nordica, a daughter of Maine, depicted in her greatest role, Isolde. Mark had vowed that he would stand out as much from his contemporaries as the Wagnerian soprano stood out from all those worthy senators and assemblymen.
And in his first two years at the museum it had begun to look as if he might achieve his goal. It had even seemed appropriate to him that the happiness he felt in the evolution of his professional life should have been complemented by a corresponding development in his private one. It was again through Sidney Claverack that blessings seemed to flow, for he met Chessie Norton, an associate in the latterâs law firm, at a cocktail party given in the chairmanâs Park Avenue apartment. It was true that this tall redhead had not at first struck him as a
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