The Generous Heart Read online

  We lost the leading car for a moment in a slight bend, then picked it up again, in plain view less than a hundred yards ahead. And then it happened.

  The shining car veered, blasted its horn, its brake-lights showed red, rubber screamed, and a figure bounced above and sharply backward from the right front fender. Where it fell, half over the curb, it stayed.

  Seconds later we rolled to a stop beside it. We could see it was a man, and he was not moving. Vincent and I left the car by our separate doors. When I walked around the hood and joined him, a teen-age boy and his girl were already there, and others were hurrying toward us. I bent over the man, with Vincent. He should have been lying face down, but he wasn’t. And I saw glass splinters scattered everywhere on the road.

  “He’s dead,” somebody told us, needlessly, and I saw a hardbitten relic in a stained polo shirt, a two-pound dog, a black and white polka-dotted terrier, cradled in the crook of his arm.

  “Where’s a call box?” I asked, looking for one.

  But it wasn’t necessary. A uniformed cop walked through the knot of seven or eight onlookers gathered by now, bent down to look and feel of the body, then straightened again. Vincent and I stepped back to the side of the car, where Shana sat turned in the seat, but not otherwise moving.

  “He’s gone, all right,” I said to her white face.

  I turned and looked up the road ahead of us. So did Vincent.

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  The boy and his girl were standing about a yard away from us, and so was the fellow with the dog. At the sound of our voices, they turned.

  “Did you get the license number, mister?” asked the boy, speaking to me.

  I didn’t answer. The three-lane one-way drive was filling with cars behind us, some slowing down and bunching up in the other two lanes to the left of us. But the road ahead was empty, in all three.

  “What the hell became of Stanley and Talcott?” Vincent repeated.

  He turned and looked among the crowd about the body. So did Shana and I. We heard scraps of subdued talk.

  “There’s no crosspath here, he just walked into it.”

  “Still, why didn’t they stop?”

  “Killed instantly.”

  “Maybe they didn’t even see the guy.”

  The man with the dog, standing next to me, let go a cold laugh and remarked:

  “They saw him, all right. They put on the brakes and they tooted the horn. I was walking KO here, my dog, right over there.” He pointed, and then he turned to me. “Isn’t that right, fellow? Your car, you came right along behind.”

  “I saw it,” said the boy. “They tried to turn.”

  I looked at Vincent, and then at Shana, and then again at Vincent. He was staring blindly back at me.

  “How do you like that?” he said, mechanically. “The sons of bitches, they just drove off.”

  After a long moment Shana remarked, as a question:

  “Maybe they went to call an ambulance?”

  The sudden hope I felt, at this, and then the way it felt when I had to let it go, woke me up with a jolt. Stanley Thornhill was in that car, a close associate, in fact an acting partner in Campaign Consultants. Coming from a dinner given by an agency that had been, and still was, seeking our services. From a meeting at which, beyond a doubt, they had been discussing what new terms should be offered and asked of Campaign Consultants.

  “Didn’t anybody get the license of that car?” the cop asked in a loud voice.

  There was no reply. Then some heads turned in our direction, and I caught a murmuring.

  “Maybe they did go for an ambulance,” I said to Vincent, speaking very slowly and distinctly. The pooch in the arm of the man beside me wriggled, poked his head up, nuzzled at my elbow, and his owner gently restrained him. “I think so. It could be rough as hell, unless they come forward of their own accord. Then it wouldn’t look so lousy.”

  Vincent did not seem to hear me. But slowly reasoning along the same line I had, apparently, he suddenly reached a similar conclusion and told me, in a shocked but emphatic tone:

  “Whoever hit him, they thought they missed. They’re entitled to the benefit of the doubt, until they find out differently. Right, Jay? Whoever it was?”

  “Right,” I said. “We just don’t know what happened. Only they know that.”

  It sounded very good, and at the same time we understood much more than we said, and perfectly. I caught something a little sick but stubborn in Vincent’s insistence, his somber features dim in the diffuse light of the instrument panel, the lights of the park.

  We owed something to Millard, that intangible but clear-cut understanding declared, and to the firm, to its clients, to ourselves.

  We heard the tinkling bell of an approaching ambulance. I looked at Shana as the cop, notebook in hand, walked over to us. Her face was completely still, watching me. She could not possibly know all of the interconnecting issues, but whatever she could know, she did. Briefly, she forced something like a smile.

  The cop was young and trying to be sure of himself. He asked:

  “Did any of you people in this car get that license?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Did they swerve, put on the brakes, sound the horn, stop or slow down at all, afterwards?”

  The pause was small, but it covered everyone and everything. Then I told him, easily:

  “All we really saw was that they hit somebody.”

  “Where was this fellow, before he got hit?”

  “We didn’t notice him at all,, until they hit him, and he bounced over.”

  The cop looked at Shana, at Vincent. Vincent nodded.

  “That’s all,” he said. “He was in the air, already, when I heard the tires, and looked.”

  The cop was slow, but not asleep. He gave Vincent a careful regard.

  “Then you did hear the tires?”

  “I thought I heard something, too,” said Shana. “I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the impact.”

  “How close were you?”

  “A couple of hundred yards,” I said. “More or less.”

  “Farther,” said Vincent. “A couple of blocks, at least.”

  “What kind of a car was it?”

  I hesitated, but while I tested possible replies, Vincent spoke again.

  “We didn’t notice. We were all talking, and I wasn’t paying much attention.”

  “How long had it been ahead of you? Did you notice anything when you followed the car into the park entrance?”

  I cut in, quickly before Vincent could be too vague.

  “It was a light-colored coupe, a custom-built body, I think, and it looked new. I couldn’t say how long it was there, ahead of us. I didn’t see it enter the park.”

  “Notice how many were in it?”

  There was another pause, tiny, but high as a mountain.

  “I think there were two,” I said, thinly.

  “All right,” said the cop. “Is that all you know?”

  We did not reply. A light wind blew across the park, touching my face, and every single one of the fine needles of perspiration I now felt were there turned so cold I could have counted them.

  The cop looked at my driver’s license, at Vincent’s, at Shana’s, at the car registration, took our addresses, and jotted everything down. Then we started to get back into the car. But before I went around to the other side, I asked:

  “Who was the man, do you know?”

  “The stuff in his wallet says Stephen Barna.”

  The name had no meaning. And yet I seemed to know it.

  “What was he?”

  “An actor, or something, according to the stuff.”

  Shana exclaimed, softly:

  “It’s terrible.”

  The cop went away and I got into the car, started moving. We rode for a while in silence, before Vincent said the thing that I was thinking about, too.

  “That name mean anything to you, Jay?”

  “
No. But I keep thinking it should. It’s familiar.”

  “What a blast this will get, if he’s famous. It wasn’t bad enough before. Now if he used to be a star or something, that makes it complete.”

  “He was no park bum, anyway, and that means the thing gets a big play. Any actor.”

  “What a break.”

  “Did you ever hear the name?” I asked Shana. “Stephen Barna?”

  She shivered, and that was all. I glanced at her. She was far down in the seat, head lowered, the side of her face buried in the collar of her coat. We had reached Cathedral Parkway, and I nosed out of the park. A moment later I stopped at the curb before the tall block of Vincent’s apartment building. He opened the door, but did not step out. His word, not really a question, was like a heavy sigh.

  “Well?”

  I half turned in the seat, rubbed my hand over the wheel, tapped it with my fingers, found a package of cigarettes. No one else even looked at them. When it was lit,. I said:

  “Shall we call Stanley now, or shall we let this go until the morning?”

  “Call him,” said Vincent.

  “I suppose so. All right.”

  “What will you say?”

  “Ask him if he knows their car killed a man, and he’d damn well better report it, at once, with the fanciest explanation for not stopping the world ever heard.”

  Vincent made no move to get out and bring us inside.

  “He knows,” he said, at last.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And then he’s going to know that we know about it, too.”

  “What of it?”

  “Just this, Jay. He wasn’t driving that car, Talcott was. How do we know what went on, and what’s going on right this minute? He may have gotten Talcott to go back or report it ten minutes ago.”

  “Well, it won’t hurt to phone and find out.”

  “That’s just the same as accusing him of being a bastard, isn’t it? It’ll certainly make him think we thought so. And can you imagine what it’ll be like, after that? Around the office?”

  I sighed and flipped some ashes and took a deep pull at the cigarette. Idly, Shana murmured:

  “There can’t be any mud on the helping hands, can there?”

  I started to laugh, but cut it in half.

  “That’ll make me wince, some time. But right now, no, there can’t be.” To Vincent, I went on, “All right, I get the point. As of now it’s strictly Stanley’s headache, and how he handles it is up to him.”

  “The damage is done, the way I see it, and whatever else should be done, now, it can just as well wait.”

  “Until morning.”

  “Until morning,” Vincent echoed. “Until then, at least. And we’ll have to be careful about bringing it up. Let Stanley do that. See what’s what, first.”

  Vincent stepped out of the car, and I flipped my cigarette away.

  “Most likely, it’ll straighten itself out,” I told him. “We won’t have to do anything, at all.”

  “God, I hope so. Why did we have to be there, anyway? What a tough break. We could have been miles away, going somewhere else, like somebody suggested.” Vincent stared in sour surprise, as I began to laugh. “At least, we didn’t have to be looking right at it. What’s so funny, for heaven’s sake?”

  “I just remembered a story about an ostrich. Remind me to tell you, some time.”

  “All right, go to hell,” he said, his face still curdled. “See you in the morning. I hope it looks better then.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  He nodded and closed the door of the car, and I pulled away from the curb. I looked a question, which she answered.

  “I think I want to go home, Jay.”

  It was natural that she had been shaken by the accident, still more so by the rankling fact of that apparently witless, cowardly flight. And although she certainly understood the reason for it, she wouldn’t like the way Vincent and I had clamped a lid on it. But there was something else, quite different, that she was churning up. I sensed it, but I couldn’t quite imagine what it would be.

  She lived across town, in the east eighties. In five minutes I thought of a lot of things to say that would ease or break the strain, but dropped them all, half-formed. None of them meant much, and our relationship lived its own life, independent of our conversation. That was either direct, or total nonsense for the sake of nonsense, or we just shut up. Or something. But it was seldom merely a habit.

  I stopped the car in front of the building where Shana shared an apartment with an older sister, and walked with her into the wide and deep lobby, empty except for a building attendant at the far end. I pressed the button for the automatic elevator. While we waited for it to descend, she looked at me out of level eyes so still they might have been painted. I took her hand and pressed it. There was a return, but faint.

  “Don’t think about this evening, Shana,” I told her. “Don’t let it touch you, don’t even remember it. It’s my worry. And Vincent’s. Not yours.”

  She spoke in a voice that was very soft, a breath of air arriving across a thousand miles.

  “What do you worry about, when you worry about it?”

  “What?”

  “What worries you most, that he was an actor instead of a park bum, or you had the bad luck not to be looking the other way? Or that you have no safety-first campaign, and what a pity, the man’s death was completely wasted, and you shouldn’t have bothered to stop, at all?”

  My hands gripped her elbows. It would be nice to shake them until she rattled all the way back to her first rag doll and piggy bank. But at the same time, why? This was the Shana that was most alive. I blazed at her.

  “Damn it, how do you know what I feel? When some maniac isn’t buzzing in my ears, and I’ve got time to feel at all.” The cage of the elevator had arrived and its door had rolled quietly open. “Besides, you already told me I’m a heartless monster, and I agreed. What would a female face designer know about publicity?”

  Her voice took on an edge of shrillness.

  “You’ve got a heart, but you forgot it some place. At Campaign Consultants. It fell under the table at Inner Light.”

  “I beg your pardon,” somebody said.

  Some people edged around us, a little wide-eyed, and Shana stepped away, moved into the elevator. She pressed a button and the door started to close.

  “You’re the one I’m worried about,” she said. “You. Good night.”

  The door slid shut, blotting her out. I walked back through the lobby, knowing that she probably would, too. For no reason at all And that hurt. For no reason with any useful, practical purpose on earth.

  Chapter III

  Vincent Beechwood

  It is not much fun to have to take Jay and Haley Robbins even in the small daily doses unavoidable at the office, though sometimes Haley isn’t so bad, there are times when I think Haley isn’t really a stuffed shirt, maybe he’s just trying too hard to learn how to be one. But Jay disguised one minute as a deep philosopher, the next minute as a practical executive with a great vision, and then five minutes later suddenly remembering he was nearly an All-American athlete twenty years ago, that average, week-in and week-out Jay gets to be wearing, at best, but Jay when he thinks he is being humorous is something too ripe and awful to be believed. How a sensitive person like Shana can stand him, what her character ever saw in his, to begin with, is another one of those mysteries.

  She was on the verge of hysterics right now, though Jay the joker, blind as usual, sensed nothing.

  Inside and somewhere far down I was still shivering, myself, feeling the shock of the accident again, then dizzy again at finding the car was simply not there, just gone, and there we all were, suddenly pretending we didn’t know a thing about it, so that I began to wonder whether we had seen anything, after all. It was more like some fast action in a few jumpy seconds of a scene in a newsreel. I wished we hadn’t been there, and said so, our presence hadn’t made a bit of
difference one way or the other, anyway.

  Jay actually laughed.

  “I just remembered a story about an ostrich,” he said, airily. “Remind me to tell you, some time.”

  This witticism had some deep reference to me, clear only to Jay, and maybe it even had a meaning, at some other time. But now I merely said:

  “All right, go to hell. See you in the morning. I hope it looks better then.”

  He said good night. I closed the door of Jay’s car, nodded to Shana, walked on into the building.

  When I let myself into the apartment it looked good, very peaceful, with the living room dark as usual, lit only by the pale glow of the television panel, and filled as usual with the brisk, steady, remote dialogue that came from the set. Some human heads showed in outline here and there, turned to the mannikins on the screen. They would be Lucille, Ruth and Robert if their homework was supposed to be done, maybe a schoolmate of theirs who lived in the same building, and probably a married brother or sister of Lucille’s, also with mate, and surely the mate had brought a friend.

  I tiptoed into a small room that was temporarily mine again, now that Eileen had returned to school after the holidays. There were only four things in the room that were really mine, the stack of bills on the desk, the mounted sea-bass on the wall above it, a bottle of cognac on a book-case otherwise filled with the children’s skates, seashells, comic books, fragments of a chemistry set, and there it still was, the tanned skin of a live baby boa-constrictor Jay once sent me when he was in the Air Force. Big joke.

  I poured and drank half a tumbler of the cognac, then poured again. The scene in the park began to lose some of its sharp edges. It dissolved enough that I turned to the stack of bills, payments due, overdue, and those shortly falling due, and my uneasiness about these equalized the afterthought of the other. If my figures were correct, and they were, we were maintaining what had for some time now been a fixed margin of three hundred a month, deficit, the difference between all income and all expenses.

  Lucille came in and we exchanged a kiss.

  “Arthur’s here,” she said. “Aren’t you coming out?”

  “In a minute.”

  “What have you decided?” she asked. “He wants to know.”