The Generous Heart Read online

  The Generous Heart

  A Novel

  Kenneth Fearing

  ISBN: 978-615-5481-01-7

  Published in 2014

  Copyright © Lion Books

  Chapter I

  Jay Ravoc

  There has never been an average day at Campaign Consultants, and neither was this one.

  At ten-thirty young Thornhill came into my office, a little too sedate and deferential, as usual, but this time his self-restraint had reached a crisis. The solid expression of his wan, normally soft features seemed like a lid over the mixed excitement, relish, and concern his flat voice nevertheless conveyed.

  “Jay, the chairman of the Polyclinic drive is on the phone. I think it’s something you’d better handle.”

  I wondered again, looking at him, if there might not be some quicker method of bringing Stanley along and somehow fitting him more strongly into the firm. We could get along as we were, without anyone in the pivotal spot so long left vacant by the aging and ailing Millard Thornhill, but we could do even better with somebody in it. Stanley belonged there, and might be the answer some day, but he wasn’t now.

  And God knows, there are times when not even Millard would be the answer.

  “What’s it about?” I asked. “Is he on the phone now?”

  Stanley nodded.

  “It’s about Newell Gibbs.”

  Policlinic was a hospital in Atlantic City where we were running a campaign with a $200,000 target. They wanted to build a new wing, and our drive for them made the public appeal MUST MOTHERHOOD COME LAST?—YOUR MATERNITY WARD Is 75 YEARS OLD. Newell Gibbs was our campaign director on the spot, sent down with a couple of assistants to organize local leaders and volunteers, and when he got them all on the ball, to keep them jumping.

  I pulled the phone toward me, and told the switchboard girl:

  “Lillian, give me that New Jersey call on Mr, Thornhill’s line.” To Stanley, I said, “Can’t Gibby take care of this himself?”

  “No.” Stanley stared in morbid fascination. “Newell’s gone. He eloped yesterday with the hospital superintendent’s wife. They ran away to Baltimore.”

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece, hard, and strangled inside.

  “What wife? Not the wife of the superintendent of our own hospital?” Stanley nodded, and my voice bounced off the ceiling. “That God damn maniac, right in the middle of the campaign, surrounded by thousands of other females, he had to pick just the wrong one, just the wrong place, just the wrong time. If somebody else doesn’t kill Gibby first, I’ll do it myself.” I choked back the rest of it, waiting for the secretary of the local chairman to bring him back on the wire, and brooded out loud. “Did you know the drive was clicking so well they already talked about an extension? Now that’s out, Campaign Consultants has a black eye through that whole community, and we’ve got to find another Gibby. He was really good, too, what a damn waste. He could put over a drive to rehabilitate the horse. And do it in Detroit.”

  Stanley asked, carefully:

  “If he’s that good, do we really have to let him go?”

  “I know what you mean, Stan, but it wouldn’t work. Any kind of scandal gets around fast in the fund-raising field. These days, especially. With everybody wearing haloes, we got to have that, and wings, besides. Gibby didn’t just run off with some dame he was laying, he committed an orgy and a crime wave. No, he’s typhoid. For at least six months. Besides, how do we know what he’ll do next?”

  A voice spoke in the receiver, and a moment later, the voice of the civic leader out there, local chairman and sparkplug of the Polyclinic campaign. He didn’t let go with the thunderbolt I expected. It was a little worse. He was merely caustic, and deliberate, and too understanding and then caustic some more. We had met two or three times several months before, but neither of us would have guessed it now.

  “I suppose those things are bound to happen,” he said, at one point. “But I must congratulate you. We were promised plenty of publicity, in connection with the drive, and we are certainly getting it. Your man Newell Gibbs, the elopement to Baltimore, and the hospital campaign fill about three columns on the front page of this morning’s paper. Your trusted representative, as our contract with you describes him, has brought us more publicity in one day than all the rest of the campaign put together.”

  I told him again we were as shocked and dismayed as they were, more so in fact, since Gibbs had violated the firm’s private confidence as well as Polyclinic’s public trust, and then I brought the matter, brusquely, to a boil.

  “But it’s done, Mr. Kramer, and the question is, what would you like us to do about it now? If you want to terminate our services as of today, and finish the drive with your own staff, you would be justified, and we will end the contract. Our other two people there can stay for another fifteen days to break in the new staff. We are both stuck with an unlucky bargain, and this may be the only way to make the best of it,” Mr. Kramer didn’t think so, at all. That campaign had been rolling, he was solidly behind it himself, and what he really wanted, though he couldn’t say so, was for us to send out another Gibby, only this time a really good one, and do it by that afternoon at the latest.

  I couldn’t say that by great good fortune we had just the man available, that would mean giving his name. Instead, by great good fortune we had three topnotch directors who might be detached from campaigns elsewhere, and one of them would be down there the afternoon of the following day.

  Mr. Kramer unbent enough to indicate that the situation touched off by Gibbs had been building up to something long before he got there. But we didn’t talk about re-scheduling expenses, the goal of the drive, or fees.

  We disconnected on that slightly improved note, and then, almost immediately, I had a call from Newell Gibbs in Baltimore. His voice was very hearty.

  “Hello, Jay, this is Gibby.”

  “Hello, Romeo.”

  “Oh, you heard?”

  “Plenty. Congratulations, you bum, and give my sympathy to the lucky lady.”

  Newell sounded injured, but willing to forgive.

  “Listen, Jay, you don’t think I actually wanted to walk out on the campaign, do you? When I tell you the kind of a set-up this was, you’ll be the first to say I did the only thing possible. That crazy female was threatening, for no reason at all, to go to the mayor, the city council, and the newspapers. If I hadn’t disappeared, there might have been a page-one story we’d never live down. I knew they’d get in touch with the office, and it seemed better if you didn’t know anything about it. You ought to be grateful.”

  I could see that this one would always have more and more angles, without end, a fine headache for somebody, but not for me. Still, I owed it to Gibby to listen, and besides, I was a little curious.

  “Don’t they know where you are now?” I asked.

  “No, of course not. I haven’t called anybody until this minute.”

  “And where’s the little woman?”

  “At home, I hope. By now, she realizes this is the best way for all concerned. Say, what is this? Is she missing?”

  It could be an act, of course. But I didn’t think so.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you, Gibby. Look under the bed. You ran away together.”

  There was a sharp outcry.

  “What? Oh, no. Jay, this is one of your horrible jokes.”

  “Furthermore, you made the papers down there, and they know you’re in Baltimore.” There were some more mangled noises, but I went on, “That’s Polyclinic’s story, and it’s also ours. Permanently. You know the score. Unless that babe turns up and it was all a mistake. If you get your virtue back, it won’t be so permanent.”

  “But where could she be? I haven’t even
seen her since day before yesterday. You believe me, don’t you, Jay?”

  I said, exasperated:

  “Yes, but what difference does that make? Use your head now, like you should have used it in the first place. And listen, Gibby. You put us in one hell of a spot down there, and we want to do what we can to get ourselves off the hook in a big way. Who do you know that can take over?” It was very rare for the firm to employ temporary directors, but there are always exceptions, and at this moment nobody on our regular staff was both free and possessed of that extra resourcefulness a new man would face, cold, in a bad situation. And Gibbs knew everybody in the field. “This is an emergency, you louse. Suggest somebody. We’ll bring him in from anywhere.”

  He reviewed a few names, then recalled in each case that the man was already handling a drive. Then although I suggested some more, none of them were both right and available, and I had to leave it there, still pending, but hoping for the best.

  When I hung up at last, I was surprised to see that Stanley was still with me, watching impassively from a corner of the wide room.

  “I think we’ll pull it out of the fire,” I said. “But we need a good director, and in a hurry. Did you want to see me about something else?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “I wonder if we could have lunch?”

  I looked at my desk pad.

  “Some people are due from a thing called the Restitution League. I don’t know how long we’ll be. Was there something especially important?”

  Stanley’s eyelids fluttered rapidly over eyes that were, nevertheless, blue and steady as twin bits of porcelain.

  “Confidentially, yes.”

  “What about?”

  “Between us, about my father.”

  “Anything the matter?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want it repeated, but I think maybe there is. It’s in connection with the Generous Heart.” This was a private agency working among people living, sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically, on borrowed time. It described its clients as miraculous survivors of attempted suicide, their own uncontrollable impulses toward homicide, fatal maladies that were temporarily arrested or perhaps even cured. “It’s a personal matter. I think my father is willing to change his mind about handling that account, for reasons of his own. And I think we should. It would take a little time to tell you about it, though.”

  He stopped and waited, hoping I’d show some measure of agreement right now. I didn’t.

  “You know how I feel about that,” I told him. “They’ve got a good case, but it’s limited. They don’t need us, and we don’t need them. But all right, we’ll talk about it again at lunch, if you want. I ought to be through with these Restitution people before one o’clock at the latest. Make it then.”

  Stanley nodded and started for the door, but when he reached it, hesitated for a moment to wonder out loud.

  “Confidentially, how do you feel about Restitution?”

  There could be no adequate nutshell answer to that. I told him it had possibilities, invited him to sit in on some of the conference if he wanted, and then pointedly asked when we could expect his survey report for the Hillside alumnae about their projected library campaign. Stanley’s exemplary interest in the business, steadily mounting since Millard’s virtual retirement, sort of curled up and wilted. Those survey reports, compounded of dull and obstinate figures that had to be blended with hopeful and rather exalted logic, were deceptive necessities. They were necessary to the institution, in selling its own people, and necessary to us, in selling a drive to the institution. They were hard work, and Stanley had not yet learned to love doing them.

  “Nothing ever happens in this business, unless you make it happen,” I told him, flatly, knowing it sounded too pompous, but also knowing it was too true. “Hillside is a good account. Remember, every alumna is married to some other account, and they all really want us. But they have to be told why.”

  Stanley muttered an assurance about the report and took himself off. Then minutes after he left the phone rang and Lillian announced that Mr. Joseph Pullen and Mr. Johan Ides, of the Restitution League, were here to see me.

  I went out to meet them. They were crackpots, but they happened to be substantial crackpots, and rather nice ones. They regularly took part in other causes where each, advancing some wild proposition, could be given a certain amount of leeway with no harm done to anyone as long as he was alone. But now gravity had brought them together, and they had founded a new cause of their own, the Restitution League. They waited in the lobby, to discuss raising funds for it.

  The offices of Campaign Consultants were located in the west side uptown area. We were in a four-story structure that had once been a family mansion, with a name still a footnote in history, long since converted like all of the adjacent buildings to apartments, studios, medical and business suites. My own office was a large, high-ceilinged room on the first floor a little above street level, with two other associates of the firm on the same floor, and with Stanley using Millard’s office on the floor above.

  The interior of the building was all professional except for the wide, sweeping staircase that spiraled clear to the top. But now the walls of the reception room and the one wall of the stairway leading upward displayed a few of the banners, posters, blown-up slogans and designs and photographs of celebrated campaigns waged successfully by the firm in the twenty years of its past, others rising to a climax now. They proclaimed DISASTER STRIKES DISASTER, the first of the great national drives with which Millard had put this company on its feet and created a legend still remembered in the field, other national campaigns that were still hardy perennials of ours—THE BLIND ARE WATCHING YOU, LET THE SLUM CHILD BREATHE, HELP THE ARTHRITIC HELP THEMSELVES, and a variety of local drives we had managed everywhere—YOUR GIFT TO YOUTH HOUSE STOPS DELINQUENCY BEFORE IT STARTS, MAKE THE MEMORIAL CHAPEL YOUR LASTING GIFT. THE COMMUNITY CENTER IS THE COMMUNITY HEART.

  These displays seemed to form one long, silent, unbearable scream for help, giving a strange illusion in the quiet and rather luxurious background of our offices that either this mute outcry or the setting, itself, must be artificial, that one or the other might be real, but not both.

  But both were real, as true as commonplace facts can ever be. And if it appeared that we prospered through the anguish, the desperate needs and tragedies of others, that appearance was correct. But it was also true that without us that torrent of human wants, hopes, and miseries would still flow somewhere, rushing through even darker and broader channels, and that unless we did manage to prosper, we would not be here very long as financial promoters for our clients, most of them educators, scientists, professionals skilled at everything except raising the money needed to carry on their work. In fact we were ourselves in sharp competition with other veteran hunters of that phantom of the jungle, the human heart, and if we failed, the whole job failed.

  Practically everyone has a heart, as a matter of fact, except the members of Bohn & Shirlaw, Payton Helmuth & Associates, Fund Guidance, Welfare Counselors, Foundation of Foundations, and the seven or eight other professional fund-raising firms competing with us for the cream of the institutions and causes, those accounts that did not regularly employ their own staffs to secure gifts.

  If our business was a paradox, I could think of plenty of others that were no less so, and fortunately, a paradox does not worry or frighten me, as it sometimes does the unwary, on first entering this peculiar world of organized moaning and licensed panhandling. It is enough for me that since these social disorders exist it seems reasonable to palliate or prevent them, and that it takes a lot of expert arm-twisting to raise the money necessary to do it. Campaign Consultants had that skill. We were much better than any of our rivals, of course, however worthy and well-intentioned even their best efforts might be.

  At this moment, though, I wondered whether to pass the Restitution League along to Allied Philanthropies, generously acknowledging that the other firm specialized in just the
sort of effort the Restitution League seemed to require, or to tell the visitors, softening the blow, that their idea was full of moth holes.

  I met Mr. Joseph Pullen for the first time, and Mr. Johan Ides, a casual memory from elsewhere, and brought them into my office. Both were well known, by record and by reputation, as special givers often above $5,000, and as eccentrics. They were not to be brushed off, and they were not to be embraced.

  They were both over sixty, Pullen very stout, with a tremendous head of hair still black, Ides also rather stout, but dark and leathery and nearly bald, with hot brown eyes.

  When they were seated and I was in back of my own desk, I said:

  “Gentlemen, your letter about the Restitution League has some ideas that caught my imagination at once.” This was true, though perhaps not true enough. “You may have a case there, with a big potential.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Pullen. “Are you just saying that, or do you really mean it?”

  “I might mean it more when I hear more about it,” I said, smiling, and looked up as Stanley Thornhill came into the room. I introduced him, explaining, “Mr. Thornhill was interested, too, and wanted to learn more.”

  As they stood up and shook hands Mr. Pullen said, with the customary respect and uncertainty:

  “Millard Thornhill?”

  “Stanley Thornhill,” I told him. “Millard is with us chiefly in an advisory capacity, these days.” There was no point in stressing either the prolonged illness or the very rare, brief, and vague memos we still received from the legendary Millard. When they were seated, I went on, “But of course, gentlemen, the first thing I want to know about your cause is this: why must there be any organization at all, to aid a person who wants to make restitution, and how is it restitution, if he doesn’t give it, himself?”

  I had pressed the right button, for they both started to speak at once, and it was a moment or two before Mr. Ides silenced his companion. He had a slow, resonant voice, but what he finally said commanded all the available attention.