The Golden Calves (26 page)

“No!” He broke away from her to resume his pacing. “That fellow is going to have the lesson of his life. We'll see whom the board will back: the young wise guy with the odor of the Speddon case still hanging about him or the old collector with a fortune to give away!”

“Sleep on it, Peter. We'll discuss it in the morning."

"I tell you, Augusta, I mean it! There isn't going to be any more talking. Except to my fellow trustees as to the disposition of Mr. Mark Addams.”

“You can't mean it!"

“I never meant anything more."

"If you do that, Peter Hewlett, you will have become a monster.”

"Augusta!”

"You will have allowed your crazy obsession with your gallery to eat up the last shred of your humanity. I'm afraid you will leave me no alternative but to take a very drastic step. So think before you leap, my dear. I am telling you now, in all sincerity, that if you do this thing to Mark
and
to Julia—for it will be as much to her as to him—I shall leave you.”

And as if to illustrate the execution of her threat, she abandoned him to the morose examination of his pictures.

He knew, of course—he had always known—that she was the real founder of the collection. For it had been she, and not he, who had known how to handle his terrible father.

 

The elder Hewlett had always perversely sought to identify himself with the fiercest of the new rich of his day. On his graduation from Harvard, he had appalled his parents by going to work for the aging Jay Gould. He had progressed from railroads to oil to automobiles, and finally to the purer generality of the stock market, where the art of moneymaking was not hampered by a product, amassing a fortune which, if minor compared to those connected with the big names he so admired, was enough to give him respectable admittance to their league. Shelby Hewlett had affected the mien of the tycoon, with fur collars, gold chains, large cigars and coarse language, but he was always capable of shifting roles, if the case called for it, and putting one down with a cold stare, a sniff and a sneer like “No Yale man is ever quite a gentleman.” For Shelby's joy was in playing the chameleon: the despot who brings a Scroogian turkey to an ill Cratchit child, the friend of Diamond Jim Brady who never missed a Sunday service in his front pew at St. George's, the self-proclaimed philistine who knew more about art than his morose, aesthetic only son.

Ah, but did he? Peter had a way of having the last word. It was all very well for his mother and sister, pallid females with haunted eyes, who expected and received the neglect of their lord, tempered only by a Supercilious kindness, to put up with his stealthy exits and noisy returns, but Peter deemed himself made of sterner stuff. From childhood he had cultivated the virtues his father lacked. At St. Paul's School and at Harvard he had majored in the classic languages; he had scorned athletics and men's clubs; he had sought out the company of poets and artists and enjoyed the society of older women who kept salons. As a bachelor in the nineteen thirties he had started to collect, and filled a beautiful old house in Chelsea with paintings of the Ash Can School and sculptures of Lachaise and Brancusi. For his father had settled just enough capital on him at birth to make him independent, even rich, so long as he spent with a shrewd eye. The senior Hewlett came to regret his loss of con trol over his big, gangling, sarcastic heir, but there was a running competition between them in which both seemed to find stimulation. If Shelby, a small man, tried to puff himself up with tall heels to his black, ankle-high boots and with padded shoulders, Peter seemed to be minimizing his mass by a bent posture, a high voice and fluttering hands.

Peter's lip would curl as he passed under the portico of his father's baroque mansion on Madison Avenue and faced the eclectic clutter of French eighteenth-century furnishings, “improved" by the heavy hand of a Victorian decorator.

“Heavens! Something new again. Will there be no end to your magnificence, sir? Who did that incomparable
fête champêtre?”

“Lancret.”

“But, my worshipful sire, that little painting isn't even
trying
to be a Lancret."

“Of course, it wouldn't suit an Ash Canner unless one of the huntsmen were taking a pee.”

“Do you know, that's precisely what it needs? You
do
have an eye!”

There was a theory among their acquaintance that father and son really loved each other, but Peter knew that was not true. His father was too much an egoist to love anyone, and Peter at times wondered somberly if that was going to be true of himself. But Augusta, a mere twenty when he was thirty-four, convinced him at last that his case was not hopeless. Everyone had marveled at her choice. Beautiful, popular, and well enough off to be beyond the suspicion of seeking the fortune that an eccentric millionaire might well leave away from his impertinent son, she had somehow found in Peter what she wanted. Perhaps it was simply that she fancied she saw what she might do with him. He only needed, perhaps, a little adroit straightening out to take his proper place in society as an
arbiter elegantiarum,
a stalwart family man and even a sufficiently important citizen. And indeed, as the years passed, Peter would stiffen in posture, expand in girth, begin to speak in deeper tones, as if the butterfly of the gaudy tycoon were emerging from the chrysalis of the pale aesthete. Was
that
what she had wanted? But then one never quite knew what Augusta wanted.

She started by coming to frank terms with her father-in-law.

“Everyone agrees that you're a great businessman, Mr. H, but you're going to have to prove it to me. My father's a pretty good businessman himself, and he's always told me a good trader never wastes a capital asset. It seems to me you're doing just that with Peter.”

"Is this a way of telling me, my pretty one, that I should shovel more gold down the drain of that decorous idler?”

“He's idle only from lack of resources. Peter has a fantastic flair for art. I know you don't share his taste, but as a good investor you should be able to spot its potential. Did you actually want to drive that terrible car—what was it called?—that you put so much money into? Of course not. You simply saw it would sell. I don't think I underrate you when I say that you
know
that Peter has a better eye than you do. Put money in it then. I'm not asking it for myself or for living expenses. Give it to Peter to buy pictures. You'll never regret it. Let me put it more strongly. It will make your name remembered when everything in this house is forgotten.”

Shelby Hewlett winced. "You do put it on the line, my girl. I won't say I like it. But you're right about not wasting principal assets. I'm not going to waste
you
,"

Compliments were lost on Augusta. “So long as you do it."

And so Peter's major collection had begun. His father ultimately even took pleasure in it, particularly when it spread to a showy royal portrait by Van Dyke or a lovely lady with powdered hair by Romney, though he was always disappointed at how briefly his son lingered in such fields.

Things changed, however, after Peter's mother died. That self-effacing lady must have exercised more control than she had been given credit for, for her widower rapidly sank into coarse and erratic ways. When he began to drink heavily and womanize, few respectable members of society cared to cross his threshold. Peter himself would not have him in the house because he upset the girls, and only Augusta's firmness prevented a total breach. When Shelby married a tough redhead, forty years his junior, Peter's maiden sister fled to an apartment hotel, and even Augusta ceased calling at the baroque mansion.

The will, when Shelby's disorderly life came to its disorderly close, was not a suprise. After provision of a trust fund for the maiden daughter, the residuary estate was divided: one-third to Peter and two-thirds to the widow.

Peter had no wish to contest. He pointed out to Augusta that his father, despite obvious eccentricities, had been of sound mind.

"He knew what he was doing. He wanted not so much to enrich Lola as to humiliate me. The only reason I got a third was to show the world that he cared for his whore exactly twice as much as he cared for his son. Also, perhaps, to keep me from suing.”

"We'll see who has the last laugh,” Augusta retorted. "For of course you're going to sue."

“Even if I can't prove undue influence?"

“But you can.”

"Do you honestly believe, Augusta, that my father was so much under the influence of that woman as not to know the natural objects of his testamentary bounty? For that's the legal test, you know. I've already discussed it with counsel."

"So have I. And with the same counsel, John Whinney, after you had finished with him. He quite agreed with me. The question is not what the law is but how it will be applied in a particular case. A judge and jury are perfectly capable of understanding and applying the moral law that underlies the common law. Maybe a man in his right mind can strip his family for an ex-prostitute, but a coin! may find it conclusive evidence of a very wrong one.”

“And say so? In those words?”

"A court doesn't have to give all its reasons. You had better let John Whinney make these decisions. Otherwise you will be taking on your own shoulders the responsibility of throwing in the gutter money that might purchase and preserve for posterity some of the most beautiful things in the world."

Peter bowed to her opinion, and a long scandalous lawsuit ensued in the Surrogate's Court of the County of New York. Mr. Whinney proved himself adept at digging up mountains of dirt in the past of Lola Hewlett, to the delight of readers of the evening journals, and at driving it through rules of evidence like a garbage truck through willow fences. When Peter protested to his wife that Lola's past was not relevant to the issue of testamentary capacity, she simply responded, "Is our evidence true or isn't it?”

“Oh, I daresay it's true enough.”

“Then that should be good enough for us. I don't say I mightn't agree with you if John Whinney were smearing the woman with lies. But he's not.”

There was little question but that the public agreed with Augusta and that the court seemed likely to. Before the plaintiff had rested his case, Mrs. Hewlett's counsel sought a settlement, and their client ultimately accepted a reduction of her share of the residuary estate from two-thirds to one-tenth. It was a signal victory, and everyone agreed that Whinney had earned his fee of a quarter of a million dollars.

Peter was now able to collect to his heart's content, but, oddly enough, with increased revenues, Augusta seemed to take less interest in his acquisitions. At first he thought that she missed the excitement of hunting big game with a limited supply of bullets, but a deeper reason appeared in her lack of sympathy with his use of categories to give form and meaning to his collecting. She could never see why he should tie himself down to a particular century or nation, and she had no patience with the classifying of art into portraits or landscapes or still lifes or even abstracts. But what annoyed her most of all was his buying with an idea of furnishing some future gallery in a museum.

“Why don't you just
look?
" she would say. "Look and buy. So long as it's beautiful, so long as it speaks to you, why do you care when it was painted or by whom? Or even of what?”

He could never tie her down to a “favorite” painting or paintings, or even to a much preferred one. Augusta was nothing if not eclectic. She would subside into silent reverie before a Chinese scroll painting or a Byzantine reliquary or a Jackson Pollock or an Arshile Gorky. She avoided the jargon of critical language and seemed to have no desire to talk or even read about art. Peter speculated that she might have adopted Walter Pater's theory of the viewer as an essential complement to a work of art, completing it differently in different generations, and that the marriage of the creator and his audience was itself the artifact without need of expressed comment.

A simpler interpretation might have been that it was part and parcel of Augusta's increasing detachment from life as she grew older. Certainly the girls noted it, and were often hurt by the cool impartiality with which she regarded their personal problems. When Inez's husband deserted her, to the outrage of her father and sisters, Augusta refused to join in the clamor of denunciation, and was heard to make dry comments about what modern husbands had to put up with. And when Peter had decried the radicalism of Julia's socialist lover, she had simply remarked that the young man must have seen enough in their milieu to wish to visualize a new and braver world. But there had been one terrible moment, for which Peter wondered if he would ever find it in his heart to forgive her, when she had forsaken her usual habit of distancing herself from the fray to burst out, as he was holding forth to the girls at a family dinner about his theories of influencing: "Oh, Peter, I'm so sick of all that! Why must you go on with it? Why must you scribble ‘Peter Hewlett' all over the wonderful things you've bought? You're like a little boy chalking ‘Jack loves Lucy on the side of some noble monument. Can't you leave your masterpieces alone? Do you think they can't speak for themselves?”

***

Sitting alone now in the dark room under the lighted glory of the pictures, Peter reflected that she always meant what she said. And now she would certainly leave him if he did what he threatened. It was even possible that she would never return. What was impossible was that he should let her go. He had lived too long in the presence of her disapprovals to contemplate with any complacency what his life would be in their absence. At least while she was with him he could exercise some containment of her criticisms. Away from him, who could tell what their boundaries might be?

Almost irately he rose now to turn off all the lights by the master switch. Very well! Did that satisfy her? There he was, Peter Hewlett, a nothing in the blackness of the void that only his money had been able to illuminate. The sole light now was in the doorway where he had seen Augusta's robed figure. He saw it again, in his mind's eye, this time no longer as a high priestess, but as an aging woman, her gray hair in curlers (oh, yes, even Augusta had her little vanities!), a puffy wrapper enveloping the bony shape so cleverly enhanced by her gowns. Why was she so somber? Was she jealous of the collection, of Julia, of Mark?