Free The Golden Calves by Louis Auchincloss Page B

what you meant. But a good administrator should not appear too eager. Yes, I like that, Mr. Addams.”
    He opted for a candid laugh. "You know too much about us, Miss Speddon. And please call me Mark.”
    "Very well, I will. Mark. Because I like you. And of course I don’t trust the museum—the museum, that is, as it may become in the future. I used to tell Sidney Claverack’s father, the old surrogate—he married my mother’s cousin, you know—that I wanted him to tie up my collection so that it would take a wicked director, aided by a wicked board of trustees, a hundred years to unravel it. Oh, I knew they’d be able to do it in the end. I’m not an idiot. I’ve read about what happens to charitable trusts. The best way to do it, Judge Claverack used to tell me, was by a defeasance clause so that the family got everything back if the conditions were violated. In that way, he said, you’d always have an alert watchdog, not just some sleepy old bank or trust company. But families die out.” She shook her head gravely before adding, "And some families can be bought.”
    Mark reflected that an apparent detachment seemed to be his most effective role. "You could name as taker in default another museum. Then you’d have a real watchdog!”
    Again she seemed amused. "You really are a very clever young man. Yes, that would not be a bad idea at all. But museums, too, can be bought. And museums can merge.”
    â€œAren’t you perhaps overly concerned, Miss Speddon? Even the most aggressive museums today are not apt to forget the names of their patrons. Indeed, they seem the one thing they cherish. Look at the names preserved in everlasting marble in our city: Morgan, Frick, Guggenheim, Whitney—”
    â€œMark, Mark, hush up!" She held up both hands to check him. “Don’t undo your good work. It’s not my silly name I care about. Isn’t there something ignoble about all those burghers and bankers hitching a ride to immortality on the shoulders of the artists they’ve bought? No, dear boy, I’m way beyond that.”
    Chastened, Mark was silent in the pause that followed.
    â€œJudge Claverack taught me something of the wisdom of the common law,” she continued, having recognized his subdual. "I learned that property could not be tied up in trust for longer than lives in being.
Lives
in being. Which meant a person or persons actually alive when the trust was set up. That was the limit beyond one's own death to which one should properly look. Of course, I know that charitable trusts can be set up in perpetuity, but as I have just indicated, I put no faith in perpetuity. So I have been considering that I should limit myself to the more reasonable restrictions of the common law. Lives of persons I know, Mark. Of course most of them are old, like myself.”
    "But you must have many young friends, Miss Speddon. You have been the patroness of so many young artists.”
    "Yes. But there is one young person who is more than a friend. Whom indeed I love like a daughter. Unless granddaughter be the more appropriate term.”
    He hesitated. “Anita?”
    "Anita. Of course. Nobody knows my things the way she does. And nobody cares more.”
    He elected to be generous. “That is very true.”
    "So long as she has a role in the management of my collection, I shall have a kind of posthumous existence. But I learned something else from Sidney’s father about what lawyers call ‘perpetuities.’ Those lives in being were at one time reduced to two. Two lives in being was the limit! Well, I have decided, Mark, that two is enough for me.”
    â€œYou mean you would suspend the museum’s ab solute ownership of what you leave to it for the duration of two lives?"
    "Not legally, perhaps. Let us say morally. I haven’t worked it out with the lawyers yet. But can you guess whose the second life would