The first time I died I was about fifteen years old, and I’d saved up every last cent I got for almost half a year, lunch money, errand money, presents, running some awful risks for some of it I got out of school lockers, even some money I got for baby-sitting and pushing an old lady around in a wheelchair, until I had exactly the right amount for the finest $99.75 evening gown ever seen in the biggest department store of that suburb of Erie. It had been in the window of the store for maybe two weeks, and I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been sold on the very first day.
But I made up my mind I’d have that one, or one just like It only better, and finally I did. The very same one. But my mother found out about it before I’d worn it even once, and she took it back and got something she called sensible, in exchange. At the same time, I noticed, she and my sister blossomed out in some new things. So that was the first time I died, finding out no one had the faintest interest, really, in what I did or did not want. As far as they were concerned, I was just a corpse at my own funeral, and they were already dividing up my best clothes, not leaving me as much as a decent dress to wear at the services.
So that first night, late, I gathered up all the new things and tore them into a heap of rags. The next day there wasn’t a scene, nobody said a single word. Just nothing. And after that, they left me strictly alone.
I died again when I fell in love and nearly married some boy whose parents built a whole new house for us to live in, and then I found out the most important part in it was really a basement machine shop, crammed with expensive tools, and dozens more to be bought. My part of it, filled with any kind of furniture left over from somewhere else, was an empty shell above that basement, and that was my whole future. I didn’t say anything when he proudly took me out there and showed me through the tomb. I couldn’t. I just walked around and looked and thought, dying by inches. But afterwards, I had to accuse him and my sister of an affair they once had, promising to make it public unless they did the right thing, late as it was. My conscience wouldn’t let me close my eyes to the facts revealed in those two letters he wrote to her, which I had. And they came to their senses in time. The wedding was nice, with everyone wonderfully tactful and sympathetic toward the sister who they knew was being sacrificed. But I’ll never forget the first time I saw that new house, either.
Chapter VII
Belle Griscom
Another time I died, worse, this was in Los Angeles, that fool actually tried to kill his wife, no matter how hard I tried to prevent it, and when the police came I found out those things supposed to be the very best weren’t worth a tenth of what he claimed. Because this was against my innermost code, that whatever kind of thing it is, whether it’s only a pair of gloves, a cigarette case, or one’s personal stationery, it has to be among the best of its kind. Not necessarily the most expensive, just recognized as being of the highest quality for that class, from possessions to relationships, because these all add up to one’s actual style of living, and if there is something in it not the finest of its type, then why have it at all?
The interview with Shana Hepworth had been going just right, for a while, I had her worried and frightened. It was easy, as I knew it would be, but it was a little too easy. Then she brought out the hand with those bandages, at the same time inviting me to touch Havoc’s cream, daring me to try it, and in a single, terrible moment I understood what a mediocre person Fenner was, how coarse, stubborn, and reckless he always would be; above all, how dangerous that made him now. When I told Shana Hepworth her friend Ravoc, whom I had never met or even seen, was trying to play a lone hand and might do something desperate, I had really drawn a picture of Fenner.
In spite of our understanding, he had sent her something actually filled with a deadly corrosive. And he had done so without letting me know it had been sent. Worst of all, he had let me walk into this, not even realizing what a trap this could be for me, or perhaps knowing it, and not caring much, or even enjoying the thought. Why? To see what my face looked like, I suppose, before they closed the lid.
I went down the corridor of the salon scarcely seeing it, and at first not aware I heard the girl at the switchboard, as I passed her, intone into the mouthpiece:
“Here’s Mr. Ravoc, Mrs. Hepworth. Calling from Atlantic City. Shall I put him right on?” Then, speaking away from the mouthpiece, she told one of the attendants, “I don’t know how serious it was, but she sent for Dr. Dwight. She said it was a new line of cream for the salon.”
Then I was out of the building, and the phrases began to echo, until finally I heard them, clearly, with more and more meaning. They hadn’t wasted a minute getting together in meeting Fenner’s stupid, fantastic, transparent attack. She had never for a moment doubted the whole thing was the work of an imbecile, believed all along I must be a part of it, and they were probably laughing about my interview with her right now. Before they hit back, quick and hard.
And I hated her for being so sure of herself, of him. What gave her the right to any such guarantee? It was a pity Fenner’s try hadn’t worked. My only objection to it, before I met her face to face, was personal. It hurt, to think of my own looks being spoiled. That, and the fact it was dangerous, especially the way Fenner would mismanage it. But now that I had for the first time met her in the flesh, seen and felt the stabbing, almost pitying disdain of her temperament, so loaded with immunity, so protected by that invisible guarantee she could afford to be alive, alive and lawless, I could wish she would suddenly find herself up against some awful reality she would never forget. I could prescribe a few, myself, situations that would give her a fast education about the facts of love.
A slow, silent hemorrhage of tears fell inside me, each of them a pebble, a rock, dropping one by one back into the pool of a quarry abandoned a long time ago, but these falling stones had not even yet filled up that place from which the marble crosses had once been taken, and never would. I can’t remember when I first noticed this steady downfall, but after the day I died in surrogate’s court, finally understanding Dorr’s real will would never be upheld, I became aware this rain of sand and pebbles had always been there.
But it would not always be. There had to be a way to prevent Fenner from spoiling this thing, the best opportunity, if he only knew it, I ever had to wake up from this living death and change into the person I really am. Fenner himself would benefit. We already were benefiting, with three of us drawing a thousand a month from Generous Heart, just as a small beginning, the most exciting charity I ever heard about, and stranger still, exciting partly because I knew, for the first time in my life, I had a responsible job that counted for something in the lives of people that were total strangers, besides being unfortunate. And next, I would have this place with Inner Light. And then others.
I stepped into a taxi, not sure of what the next move had to be, not even quite certain of my reason for giving the driver the address of Campaign Consultants. Stanley had given emphatic orders for all of us to stay away from his own office, and I knew that if I phoned, he would arrange for a meeting, all right, but somewhere else.
As soon as I gave the address, I knew my choice was the right one. Only Stanley could judge this complication, see a way to handle the danger and even turn it to good account. And this was certainly an emergency. It more than justified taking it to him directly, dramatically, by surprise, and on his own ground. Stanley had changed since the early days, when Fenner had all the initiative, deciding which account to investigate and which not, what angle to publicize, how to keep the clients sold on the jobs we were doing for them, and stay with us, regardless of the cost. Now, Fenner had completely lost that touch, if he ever had it. Somewhere along the way, these last seven or eight years, it was Stanley whose insight into people and values showed all of his decisions to be right. Character, that explained the difference. But what a difference, one that could only grow wider as we reached always higher into the profession, something so much bigger already than plain investigation and simple public
relations, as it used to be. Philanthropy, now, the grandest, deepest experience one can have.
Stanley had already given me a glimpse of this, and heaven knows he had tried to show Fenner and Charley the meaning of it, too, though Charley Talcott never had been anything but a hopeless mess, and now it seemed Fenner was losing every spark of whatever little force and sanity and resourcefulness he may have once possessed.
But whatever Stanley told us about the scope of the work, it was pale and lifeless in comparison with the real thing, as I paid off the driver and went into the old, solid building and for the first time saw with my own eyes still more of the organized power and action that continually found its direction here.
There was a girl at the reception desk on the main floor. I gave her my name, told her I wanted to see Mr. Thornhill, and knew by her unquestioning call to his office that he must be here. Then my eyes moved slowly around the room. There were autographed pictures of two presidents, of royalty, of familiar political faces, of others known only as fabulously wealthy, and I knew the connection, like those autographs, would have to be genuine. Otherwise they would simply not be here.
And then my gaze went up a spiral staircase that seemed to rise without end, and I saw banners, streamers, slogans, old but still familiar emblems so much a part of everyone’s background they were as deep as history itself. DISASTER STRIKES DISASTER was a story-book landmark related to the entire social register, in drives for big figures pulling more zeros than long trains of freight, and now I found it here, where it began, not a childhood incantation picked out of the air, from no place at all, as I had imagined it must be. Then I saw the poster for our own agency, THE GENEROUS HEART GROWS RICH IN GIVING, among the others, THE BLIND ARE WATCHING You, YOUR GIFT TO YOUTH HOUSE STOPS DELINQUENCY BEFORE IT STARTS, LET THE SLUM CHILD BREATHE. The building was a storehouse of values that were lasting, irreproachable, nothing in it not first-rate.
The Generous Heart
“Mr. Thornhill will see you, Mrs. Griscom,” said the receptionist. “Take the elevator to the second floor.”
I took the single automatic elevator one flight, and crossed the carpeted hall to a solid wooden door with an old-fashioned nameplate: Mittard Thornhill I went into a huge, high-ceilinged room with so many tall windows it seemed more like a museum than an office. The place was so big and strange I thought at first it must be empty, and a broad desk in a far corner of the room was in fact deserted. Then I heard the door click shut behind me, and turned. Stanley stood there for a moment, silent and watchful as he must have been when I walked straight past him. Now he slowly smiled, reached me in a few steps that made no sound on the thick rug, took me by the elbow and together we walked the length of the office to the desk. He gave a slight turn to a chair on one side of it, definitely waited while I lowered myself into it, with the same precise, deliberate motion then went around the desk to his own place. Seated there, he did not seem as medium in height and build as I always remembered him. Nor did his small face and features now seem at all so indefinite or indistinct.
“Stanley, you know only the most dreadful emergency would bring me here,” I began.
He nodded, but not at me, as though, instead, in confirmation of some decision of his own.
“The important thing is, you are finally here. And yon came without my having to send for you.”
Just for that moment it gave me an odd turn, like looking at a familiar photograph but from a peculiar angle, like seeing it on end, or upside down. Then it came back to me that the last time Stanley talked about it at all, and that was hardly more than a year ago, he had been In a perfect fever about me, and here he was, talking right where he had left off, still running the same temperature. Well, Stanley was made like that, with a personality so full of wrinkles, nothing about him should ever be really surprising. This purely personal matter, which I had not really altogether forgotten, could be harmless, even a help. But it might also turn out to be one of those astonishing risks full of penalties that struck any old place, like streaked lightning, and never twice in the same place.
I picked up the thread about where we’d left off, too. That left a margin safe but wide enough for anything.
“Of course,” I said. “And it’s not the first time I thought of it. I nearly did before, often.”
He smiled so dreamily, almost wistfully, I thought he might begin to purr. But he didn’t. When he finally spoke, still smiling, he said:
“No, you didn’t, and don’t spoil it by lying now. You came because you had to. In a way, it was a test. The right person breaks with the fixed patterns and the old rules, but only at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reason. What is it?”
I remembered that awful moment in the office of the salon. It made me taut all over again, and close to hysteria. Only an accident, the accident that I caught sight of those bandages, had saved my own face from those same terrible scars.
“It’s Fenner,” I said, tensely, and waited.
Stanley did not lose his smile, but he almost yawned.
“Of course. It would have to be. What about him?”
“Shana Hepworth got scalded with some acid face cream he sent her. And I barely escaped, myself.”
The smile vanished. Stanley’s round blue eyes just stared, very wide and still.
“Fenner? Are you sure?” I didn’t bother to reply, or even nod. “How badly is she burned, and does she know who sent it?”
“I just came from her office, at the salon,” I said. “Stanley, it was the worst moment I ever had. I thought I’d die.”
Stanley suddenly stood up, wild.
“Was Jay Ravoc there? Does he know about this?”
“The poison was sent in his name, as a gift. Fenner intends to send still more. But he promised me, definitely, it would be something harmless, just to frighten her.”
He repeated, harshly:
“Where is Ravoc now?”
“He’s still in Atlantic City. But that cream was nothing harmless. It’s like lava. Just a touch of it eats clear to the bone. And she tried to force some of it on me. It was the closest call I ever had.”
“Then she wasn’t hospitalized?”
“Those bandages. I never saw anything so awful.”
“Exactly how much did her face get burned?”
“She’ll have scars for the rest of her life.”
Stanley slowly sat down again, and a faint smile returned.
“You’re a good actress, Belle. But I’m not the right audience for amateurs. You forget, my whole life is dedicated to the study and diagnosis of really professional liars. I know what makes every single one of them tick, and how, and why. I don’t mean you, your exaggerations are simply human, your sympathies are easily moved, you play up to a situation like a medium taken in by her own trance, and you really can’t help yourself. You don’t have any ulterior motives, you just think you do. Personally, I think it’s charming.” Some of this gave me an eerie feeling that I just missed getting what he meant, though absolutely all of it was true, and seemed strange only because no one had ever before been sensitive to these simple things, or even taken the trouble to notice them. I could imagine, in fact I could almost hear, the common, cynical reply this would draw from Fenner. But Stanley, without the slightest hesitation, now passed into still another mood. “It’s you I appreciate, Belle, not your talent for scenes. Now tell me exactly what happened.”
I let myself lean back in the chair and relax, already feeling much better, quite calm, but more than calm, a calm like ecstasy. Stanley was not perfect. He had moments of childish egotism, and then perfectly futile tantrums of panic and rage when some little thing went wrong, but underneath all of that he had the wonderful eye of the true connoisseur. That was something he never lost. We were alike, in a way, both of us artists who had not yet found a way genuine enough to draw out the very best we could do.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll give you the bare facts. I went there to interview her ab
out that hit-and-run driver she had refused to report. I could see she was frightened. I told her it was all so useless, because all she had to do was persuade Ravoc to co-operate with his partners, the way they always had, and the whole thing would be dropped.”
Stanley’s fingers began to drum on the desk. Then stopped.
“How did you know about that drive in the park? Didn’t she wonder about that?”
“She didn’t ask.”
Stanley gave a slight, positive nod.
“She couldn’t,” he said. “She couldn’t admit she was there, and even too much curiosity about the affair would show she had guilty information about it, and was frightened. It was a poor bluff, but the only one possible. She was frightened, all right, they always are when they have to face even a tiny part of the truth about themselves. Then what happened?”
“Then a girl came in with a package that had just been delivered. She opened it. It was a jar of face cream from Jay Ravoc, she said, something special, and wouldn’t I like to try some then and there. I almost said yes. But when she took the top off of it, something went wrong, it happened so fast I could hardly describe it, as though molten bubbles scattered over everything, but I can’t be sure.”
“You’re doing fine,” Stanley coaxed. “Try.”
“Well, she screamed she was on fire, and I felt something stinging my own face and eyes, and the next thing I knew, I’d jumped up and run out.”
“Is that all?” Stanley asked, impatient and demanding. “I know you’re giving the facts, as well as you remember them, but there must be more. You mentioned bandages. You must have stayed long enough to see them applied.”
It certainly must have happened like that, just about the way I began to remember it now.
“When she screamed some people came in, and they got a doctor. I stayed, trying to help, naturally. I’d forgotten that part. I guess I actually was in a trance, for a while.”
The Generous Heart Page 10
