The Golden Calves Read Online Free PDF

listening.
    â€œLafayette?” her mother queried. "Did he spend his summers there?"
    Anita had to say something. "What ever happened to your cat, Carol? Did it die?”
    "Not that I know of. But I couldn’t keep it in New York. I have no one to care for it when the museum sends me on trips.”
    â€œYou left it with a friend?”
    â€œI didn’t know anyone who wanted it.”
    "Then what
did
you do with it?"
    â€œI just left it.”
    "In the house?"
    â€œOf course not.” Carol began to show impatience. “I had to leave the house broom-clean. I left it outside.”
    â€œIn the street?” Anita closed her eyes as her heart seemed to miss a beat. “You locked it out? Oh, Carol, you didn’t! Tell me you didn’t.”
    "What else was I to do?”
    â€œBut how was it to live?”
    At this point her mother, sensing that the issue was becoming touchy, intervened. “Oh, cats are full of resources. It probably found mice and things.”
    "Lots of summer people do that,” Anita’s stepfather observed. ‘They buy a puppy or a kitten for the kiddies when they go to the lake and leave it there when it’s time to go home.”
    â€œLeave it to starve!”
    â€œOh, Anita, you’re just being dramatic,” interposed the older stepbrother. “Meg and I did that with a cat in Vermont last summer. As Ma says, a cat can live off the land.”
    "I'd like to see you living off the land in Newport in the middle of winter!”
    Anita said no more after this because she couldn’t; it was as if she had turned into a pebble of muted horror in a puddle of alien frogs. Carol and her family seemed suddenly to belong to the same species of fauna; in such a jungle one could only yearn for the immunity of the inanimate. Carol, taking her silence as the signal they were through with a subject that was of no basic importance, proceeded to divert the table, even her brothers, with theories of why the civilization of the Mayas had crumbled so suddenly and inexplicably.
    In the car going back to the city she complained of the onset of a migraine headache, and he switched on the radio for the Philharmonic concert. When they heard the acrid blast of the
Boléro,
he offered to turn to a milder station, but she insisted that he leave it on, that it distracted her from the pain. And as her heart pounded to the throbbing rhythms, she closed her eyes for a vision of giddy reds and blacks alternating like a flashing night club sign in the empty dome of her mind and wondered whether she would not always loathe the man who was driving the car. At her house she fled without a word of thanks or farewell.
    ***
    By the following day, after a night of sleepless reflection, she was ready for anything he could say to her. She was even ready for what he actually offered: a mock proposal of marriage. Of course it might even have been serious; she was well aware how necessary it was for him to screen his gravest intentions behind a bristling hedge of irony. He came to her little office and seated himself solemnly before her desk.
    â€œDo you realize we have been acting out a novel, my dear Anita? And that truth is once again proven to be stranger than fiction? Only I had flattered myself that if such a thing happened to one so well read as I, it might be in the form of prose by Dostoyevski or Flaubert. But not at all. I find myself following the lines of the great Jane herself. It is in that favorite novel of the weaker sex,
Pride and Prejudice,
that I discover my banal little tale. For Darcy and Eliza agree no more about the vulgar Mrs. Bennet than you and I about the deplorable woman who is redeemed only by the good taste that she showed in choosing so rare a bundle from the adoption agency. Darcy looked with no more gloom at an alliance with Mrs. Bennet than I at one with your ma. But like him I must confess: ‘In vain have I struggled ... My feelings will not be