The Generous Heart Read online

  “Mr. Ravoc, you are looking at a man who once embezzled twenty-six thousand four hundred and twelve dollars.” Mr. Pullen had apparently heard this before and knew he couldn’t compete with it. He was not impressed, but I was. Mr. Ides paused, and then sonorously repeated, “Twenty-six thousand four hundred and twelve dollars, exactly, not a penny more, not a penny less. What is your first reaction to that?”

  That’s too bad, Mr. Ides, I’m surprised and sorry to hear it did not seem the best way to react, Congratulations., you must have been very clever had to be discarded, and it was absolutely forbidden to say, I don’t believe a word of it, but go ahead, let’s hear the rest of the allegory.

  Instead, I laughed and remarked:

  “That’s a lot of money. Would you care to donate it to one of our charities?”

  Mr. Ides smiled, a little. But he was serious.

  a Yes. To the Restitution League.” That was very good. He had made a point, and he knew it. “It’s a lot of money, as you say, but more than that, it’s an exact sum of money. On both counts, it’s conspicuous. In my own case, the embezzlement was not a moral one, but a legal default I was not myself aware of at the time, and luckily, I was able to make repayment without any misunderstanding. But it made me think. The restitution of small sums can be anonymous, and relatively safe. But with a large amount, and an odd figure, the reparation leads to the identification of the person making it, and it may not be at all safe. You see why an organization is necessary in a situation like that?”

  He went on to say that his proposed League could offer the conscience-stricken every protection, through a variety of harmless fabrications not open to an individual acting alone. Then Mr. Pullen, clearly speaking from his own past, wanted to emphasize that there were a variety of physical, psychological, or wholly intangible wrongs for which no adequate financial atonement could be made, but only offered through technical or professional channels, with a prolonged, systematic follow-up.

  Then, together, they outlined a variety of other situations, each with a need that could be filled only by an agency such as the Restitution League. There were those who, years after a substantial embezzlement, could no longer make a full return, while on the other hand there were many who could and would, but the victims were missing or dead, and tracing them, or the heirs, called for a complex search mechanism. These reformed characters could be of mutual aid through the services of the league, which could also be a clearing house for accidental tragedies and unwitting injustices.

  These two dreamers had concocted such a wonderful wardrobe, complete with no buttons anywhere, I felt genuinely sorry it was not for us. The Restitution League had absolutely everything, except a campaign. But I decided it would be all right to tell them so.

  “This has definite possibilities,” Stanley suddenly remarked, speaking for the first time. “Don’t you think so, Jay?”

  I gave Stanley a blank stare, and spoke to Ides and Pullen.

  “You have a real cause, with a splendid case. But at this particular stage of the game you don’t have a cause for the solicitation of funds. All of your donors are direct beneficiaries, and all of your clients must also be givers. In most philanthropic efforts, there is the same identification, but it’s imaginary and round-about. Here, it’s literal. All you need is an address, some publicity, and a couple of enthusiastic workers to start the ball rolling. You fill that bill, yourselves. As for publicity, your idea is a natural attention-getter. If you would like, we can put together a sample release, to show you how it can be done. That will be our gift, the first donation to your fine idea of the new league.”

  I gave them a few more suggestions, and they went away relatively happy, thoughtful but simmering. Stanley, too, seemed a little fascinated. After a moment of silence, he asked, “Why did you turn them down, Jay?”

  “I didn’t turn them down,” I said, laughing. “I sold them. Maybe they’ve got something, and if they have, they’ll be back. If they haven’t, there’s nothing we can do about that. Come on. You said something about lunch.”

  I stood up and looked around the top of my desk, seeing nothing important except the names scribbled down during the talk with Newell Gibbs, an estimated schedule for an asthma drive, the lay-out for some advertising about the proposed recreation center of a fraternal order. Finding a substitute for Gibbs was the only matter really urgent.

  “Between us, Jay, what did you think about it?”

  “About what?”

  “The Restitution League.”

  “I told you. Those dreamers. They’re sort of refreshing.”

  “That idea of theirs, it could be dynamite. Don’t you think? In the wrong hands, I mean.”

  I felt in the pocket of my coat for my pipe and pouch.

  “I don’t get you,” I said. “This whole business is one of trust, and therefore it’s all dynamite, if you want to look at it like that. Why?”

  “I just wondered. By the way, who’s going to do their sample release? Vincent?”

  I knew there had to be a silver lining, somewhere, after Newell Gibbs, and all at once I found it.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, Stanley, wondering who might have a fresh approach to a unique idea. And do you know who’d do the best job, and get some fun out of it, besides? You would.”

  I knew, as we went out, Vincent Beechwood would do the actual job. But a publicity story by Stanley, for strictly private release, might keep him busy in his own office for as much as a day.

  Chapter II

  Jay Ravoc

  That evening’s function at the Hotel Commonwealth, a dinner launching our $250,000 drive for Inner Light, did not demand my personal appearance, but I decided to look in on it, anyway. Ten or fifteen years ago I decided I had no further interest in these events, and then still later I developed an allergy to banquet chicken and green peas, a phobia about arrangements and speeches prepared by our own staff, under my supervision, but not quite recognizable as finally rendered by prominent after-dinner speakers. After a while, all causes began to sound alike, and although there are thousands of hotels and centers and clubs, after a while all dining rooms began to look the same.

  When I made that discovery, I had reached the breaking point. That was a long time ago. Then, after that, I began to attend these fund-raising functions in earnest.

  Tonight’s banquet for Inner Light, an agency to aid the disfigured and blemished, had been arranged by Helena Roebels, our program director of functions and affairs, as the opening event in a campaign planned and managed by Vincent Beechwood. There was no necessity for my presence, but the account was new, it could easily grow into an annual drive for two or three million, and there had been too many rumors that without Millard Thornhill we had slowed down and were content to coast along on established connections, routine, and prestige.

  This might be true. I didn’t see how it could be, but it might be. In this business nothing, absolutely nothing, can be taken for granted. And I had never seen the assembled Inner Light people before—only five or six of their top leaders and sponsors, and some of their professional staff. It seemed wise to be in closer touch with them, and to start now.

  And finally, I came to this opening event of the campaign because Shana insisted on doing so. She had read some of Vincent’s advance publicity about work the agency did among what it described as the irregular and imperfect, and when she learned we were handling the campaign for them, she had to know all there was to know about it. The fascination the subject had for Shana, at first glance the unlikeliest interest imaginable, could hardly be anything but a professional one.

  Shana Hepworth was chief sorceress in a Fifty-seventh Street grotto where, out of bubbling vats and racking engines, with incantations and by brute force, they claimed to fabricate wisps of feminine appeal and personality more delicate than a rainbow’s shadow. Although she was not the sole owner of this particular witch’s cavern, she managed it, the rituals used in it were adaptations and creations of h
er own.

  Shana, herself, was the product of some other formula, altogether. She probably thought she communicated it to her patrons, but I didn’t think she could. It stands to reason that some element of the formula would always evaporate under analysis, and that would be the most important agent, the tincture of smoke and powdered owl’s feather that made the whole conjuration operate.

  But Shana Hepworth’s formula, except for that unknown essence, was relatively simple. She was one part solid mule, one part quaking diffidence, and one part clear sex, all poured into a pale brunette measure about five feet three inches tall and mixed with the wheels of an adding machine. Her hair was so fine, heavy, and polished it had a faint sparkle, and there were no shadings of darkness between the pupil and cornea of her eyes, they were just different degrees of pure black.

  A fund-raiser arranged by Helena Roebels runs on precision timing. I could calculate that Inner Light’s president would push aside his empty dessert dish at eight-forty and rise to make the introductory remarks, speaking from notes on cards prepared by Vincent’s assistant, then the organization’s campaign chairman would deliver a fifteen-minute speech, using an outline prepared by Vincent personally, and then there would be one or two home-made talks by members of the agency’s staff, or professionals outstanding in the field of its work.

  I timed it accurately to arrive for these, after dinner with Shana at DeLucca’s, and after the faltering echo of Vincent’s best thoughts had been delivered. We found him, with Helena Roebels and two others at the usual table reserved for Campaign Consultants. Shana had met Vincent, a small, compact, chronically short-circuited man of my own age, with hair prematurely white, emphatically thick, and wavy, and I introduced her to the others.

  Shana looked around the room holding fifty or more tables, with few empty places at any of them, peered intently at the speakers’ dais where a specialist in plastic surgery stood talking into a table microphone, and then she leaned toward me, faintly frowning.

  “I don’t see anything the matter with them,” she murmured.

  “There isn’t,” I told her. “You rarely see any of an agency’s clients at a special-gifts dinner like this.”

  Shana’s sense of logic began to vibrate.

  “But these people are your clients, I thought. At all of these dinners. You said.”

  “They’re our clients, yes, but Inner Light’s clients, what he’s talking about now,” I indicated the speaker, “—that’s entirely different. The actual cases, the patients an agency takes care of, what would they be doing at a dinner to raise money for them?” She did not look entirely satisfied. “But don’t worry, you’ll get the facts you’re interested in much quicker this way. Straight, too.”

  There were well over three hundred people present, and they all looked solid. Many of the faces were vaguely familiar to me, and a few were quite well known, active leaders in a variety of other charities. I saw that we even had with us a strange mystery man who for years had come and gone at these fund-raising dinners, without ever having had any known affiliation with any drive or institution. The theory about him was that he had no family, and hated to dine alone. At an average of fifty dollars a plate, minimum, he was always more than welcome. A year ago, before they founded Restitution and it came to occupy their exclusive attention, Mr. Pullen or Mr. Ides might have been seen here. Both seen and heard, and probably it was at just such a dinner somewhere that fate brought them together. Or more accurately, was no longer able to keep them apart.

  Vincent spoke under the voice of the woman, an eminent psychiatrist, now addressing the dinner group.

  “It looks good, Jay. There ought to be fifty thousand here. Besides the one forty-five or so we haven’t announced.”

  “One ninety-five,” I said. “Are you going to announce?”

  “What do you think? It might be a shot in the arm, wake them up. But I don’t know.”

  “Or they might think it’s all over, and go to sleep.” The goal of a quarter of a million ought to be a simple follow-up job now, with nearly four-fifths of the amount raised or pledged. But any drop in the pressure is bad. “Why not just say, nearing the halfway mark?”

  Vincent shrugged, and changed the subject.

  “Did you see Stanley?”

  “Here?”

  “Somewhere around the hotel, I think. Maybe some other function. He and that friend of his, used to be a Chest man somewhere, on my way in I saw them come out of the Marine Bar and take an elevator.”

  “You don’t mean that Charles Talcott character?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vincent. “Why, who is he?”

  “Just a drifter,” I said, already regretting I’d mentioned him at all. Our profession was literally built out of angles and angels, to begin with, and at some time in his life it seemed like a natural, virgin gold mine, just waiting for his little hammer and chisel, to every grifter ever born. Any regular in the field develops a sixth, seventh, and eighth sense for these sharpshooters who are all angle and no angel, and the two or three times I had met Talcott, always with Stanley, my private stethoscopes and radars crackled with static. “Maybe Stanley’s decided to be our new contact man,” I finished, lamely. “That would be a start in the right direction.”

  Vincent snickered.

  “At least, after a whole year without the old man, it would be a start in some direction. But what do a couple of contact men do, when they contact each other?”

  We traded a look of sad understanding on the subject of Stanley, and let it go at that.

  At the speaker’s table, Judge Everett Landry got up to deliver Vincent’s moving plea for the donation of gifts to support the work of Inner Light. The Judge was one of our best orators, a life-long friend of the elder Thornhill, a man who could occasionally be persuaded to appear at a function of this kind and sponsor a cause he had not previously supported, purely on the basis of that friendship, his own good intentions, and doubtless a lot of vanity. He was a name, and he could speak. When some client agency did not have a notable who quite filled the bill, supplying somebody who did was part of Campaign Consultants’ services.

  He now pulled every organ-stop known to the human emotions, in building to a climax of appeal for large gifts of money. Using Vincent’s phrases, of course, since the Judge had never heard about Inner Light until we told him.

  We left before the proceedings ended, knowing pledges made at the dinner alone had gone over sixty-thousand dollars. Vincent left with Shana and myself. Helena Roebels had gone earlier, and the two assistants from our office stayed to give a personal touch until the evening closed.

  In the wide lobby of the Commonwealth I stopped on our way out to look at the hotel’s bulletin board. Including the function held by Inner Light, there were five dinners given in separate dining rooms by five organizations, listed on the schedule of that night’s events. One of the other affairs, designating a room so small it must have been a planning conference, was a directors’ dinner for the Generous Heart, on the mezzanine.

  The other three names meant nothing, but that one did. That would be Stanley’s purpose here, though God knows why. Generous Heart wanted a campaign, but none of its officers or sponsors cared to spend much money in order to have one. It had been offered to us, we had thoroughly discussed it, with Haley Robbins, Vincent, and myself opposed to taking it on, and only Stanley in favor of doing so. And he had brought it up two or three times, since.

  It had taken only a moment to scan the bulletin board, scarcely breaking my stride, and I now caught up with Shana and Vincent, just as they were turning to look for me. I started to mention the listing to Vincent, but checked myself. There was nothing to say.

  My car was parked not far from a side entrance of the hotel. Shana wanted to dance, I wanted to see a promising night game on TV, and Vincent wanted to go home.

  He lived at Cathedral Parkway, and we thought we’d perhaps talk him out of it while driving him there.

  When we came to th
e car, and just before we got in, Vincent looked back toward the hotel, and said:

  “There’s Stanley now.” He was recognizable, directly under a street light, and so was the man with him. “Is that Talcott?”

  “That’s him,” I said.

  They got into a light-colored luxury coupe, so shiny it might have been cream-white, the body a custom-built job, probably new. It was not Stanley’s, whose family sedan was familiar to the whole office.

  We climbed into my own coupe, and resumed the discussion about where we’d go.

  “I happen to know a place,” I said.

  Vincent slouched down in the seat and spoke without turning his head.

  “Home.”

  “This place is the same as home,” I said. “There’s a fight every night.”

  “You bastard.”

  It had slipped my mind that Vincent was having some difficulty. The week before, Lucille Beechwood had phoned up during our regular poker session, and somebody, instead of saying he had just stepped out for a moment, absent-mindedly volunteered the information that he hadn’t been there at all, and wouldn’t be.

  “Well, anyway, at this place I have in mind, they offer both dancing and television.”

  “Oh, nice,” said Shana. “You can watch the game over my shoulder while we dance. But what can I be doing?”

  We had been approaching one of the entrances to Central Park. The bright coupe, ahead of us all the time, apparently still had the same course. It swung over and into the entrance at a fast but even rate, and a moment later, we followed.

  “I still say I’m going home,” said Vincent. “If you must have more company, there’s Stanley.”

  We were on a road that curved a little in long, easy arcs that led diagonally to the upper west corner of the Park. It was quiet, with not much traffic, and not many pedestrians on the paths along the roadway. The grass, the bushes, the leaves of the trees, showed pale and colorless wherever they lay in the lights we passed, mottled and dark where in reverse and away from them.