Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  Hugh fled around the corner.

  He searched the dingy tiled hall of Eight Upper Swithin Place, climbing two flights of stairs before realizing he must go outside and along the narrow path, where the wind blew more sharply. He admitted himself to flat C with a key that he had procured at considerable expense.

  The charwoman, knowing nothing of her pseudonymous employer’s death, had continued to clean, so the place was in order except for the broken gilt clock set neatly on old newspaper, but to Hugh the walls already emanated that dankness of long-unused places. He kept on his coat. Opening the wardrobe, he felt through masculine dressing gowns and silvery drifts of negligees that smelled of light floral perfume. He searched meticulously through cabinets and drawers. He was on the ready to let himself out when he spied a toffee box. The crimson guardsmen on the decal seemed a bit worn. He picked up the tin.

  Inside were a strew of letters addressed to Mrs. J. Foreman in his brother’s hand.

  Hugh frowned. Tom always dictated, never exposing his chancy spelling or his untutored scrawl.

  The little sitting room seemed colder than ever. Hugh let out a shivery sigh. He had come to flat C not as a voyeur or a spy but to carry out a fraternal obligation. Tom had a largeness about him—call it a grandeur of spirit—that prevented him from realizing the infinite number of grubby little details necessary to the keeping of secrets, so he would not even consider there might be any loose ends after Antonia’s death. Besides, Hugh had seen the extent of Tom’s desolation. He guessed that Tom, unable to force himself to return, would eventually inform the estate agent that the place was no longer wanted and to dispose of its contents. Therefore, Hugh had taken it upon himself to erase any sign of the trysting occupants.

  Piling the letters in the kitchen sink, he struck a match. He held it so long that the flame died. He discarded the matchstick and carried the letters to the scrubbed deal table.

  As he read his eyes blurred, and he wiped away tears. People spoke of Tom as an enigma, elusive in his genius, more unpredictable than an earthquake, but Hugh, having spent a lifetime in thrall to this phenomenon, having paid a cool fortune to worm out Tom’s private life, had felt he shared each of Tom’s mental vistas and secret landscapes, a joint tenancy that helped make up for being a circus sideshow. Yet now, as he folded these yearningly tender, erotic love letters, it was being forced on him that his brother had another persona. Or once had. With Antonia gone, Hugh thought bleakly, the man who wrote these letters is dead.

  I should burn them, he thought; I should. Yet with a grave robber’s shiver he thrust the packet into the deep pocket of his ulster.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Detroit Military Academy was conceded to be academically tops; therefore parents ignored the drumroll claptrap that vibrated beyond classrooms, and entrusted their sons as full-time boarders. The handful of day students, among them Justin, were assigned fealty to one of the two austere dormitories that jutted to the right and left of the three-story brick school building. These barracks, A Company and B Company, engaged in a tense rivalry in drill squad and athletics that spilled over into the relatively unimportant areas of schoolwork and blue good-conduct rosettes.

  Justin became part of A Company. Though he was not yet fifteen, his tests placed him in the twelfth grade.

  Antonia’s death clutched the boy obdurately, and he sought to assuage his grief in the royal manner, erecting a fanciful Taj Mahal to honor his dead beloved. For his black-haired and lovely ghost, Justin heaped a mound of honors. Far ahead of his classmates in every subject except American history, he concealed neither his knowledge nor his quick intelligence, garnering a First in studies. On the drill field he swiftly mastered the clumping, wheeling elephantine ballet, and at inspection the drill major found never a spot on his blue uniform nor smudges on his white gloves. The baseball season opened: having bowled for the Eddington cricket eleven, he trained himself as a skillful, steady pitcher. The senior elite in both dormitories admitted here was a jewel in A Company’s crown. Nobody mentioned this to Justin. He was respected, disliked, and left alone. Mourning enhanced his natural reserve—it seemed as disrespectful as cutting the black grosgrain bands from his sleeves to form smiles or voice the cheerful Americanisms that would have brought him a measure of acceptance. At recess and during lunch hour he pursued his solitary way around the primeval cedars that had been left to encircle the schoolgrounds.

  II

  The first morning after Easter vacation Zoe overslept. Hugh’s chauffeur delivered both children to their respective schools late. Justin’s first class was Latin, and being a familiar traveler to Caesar’s Gaul, he decided to take an absent for the period rather than a tardy. He trotted down the empty staircase to the basement lavatory where, amid odors of Lysol and human effluvia, seniors were tacitly permitted to break the rule against smoking. He lounged below the row of clerestory windows (these were on ground level outside) to retrieve his contraband cigarettes from under his left garter.

  A trio of sixth-graders burst in. The boys were at the stage when growth can spurt unpredictably outward or upward. The dark blue uniforms of the shorter two (they were fraternal twins) strained around thick bodies, while the third was a tall ectomorph with clever, hooded eyes set into a thin face. Justin had observed this triumvirate bullying less fortunate classmates, the myopic and badly coordinated boys. Not knowing any of the three by name, he thought of them as “those thorough little rotters.”

  He lit a Sweet Caporal, ignoring their envious glances and their noisy urinating contest. They were buttoning their flies when Caryll Bridger opened the door. Caryll glanced at them apprehensively and seemed on the point of flight. Then he saw Justin.

  “Hello, Hutchinson.” He warded off the trio’s depradations by loudly casting the rune of a senior name.

  Justin gave him the casual yet benevolent wave he had bestowed on the tadpoles at home. “Bridger,” he said.

  Caryll, avoiding the urinal and his classmates, edged toward the row of green-doored cubicles.

  “Bridger pees squatting,” said one of the twins.

  “Sure. How else?” drawled the spindly, clever-looking boy—he was the leader. “That’s the way girls do piss.”

  With a sickly smile Caryll pushed open the high-hung door.

  “Girl, girl, Bridger’s a girl,” taunted the twins.

  Justin had been a prefect at Eddington. Dropping his cigarette, he stood erect. “All right, you three,” he commanded. “Get back to class.”

  The twins scuffled toward the door.

  The tall, skinny one stood his ground. “Who do you think you are? Cla-ahss.” His daring parody of Justin’s broad a drew appreciative snickers from his cohorts. He went on, “In Blightyland you might have been a peer of the realm, but around here you’re nobody. Come on, Thatchers. Let’s do it for B Company. Prove that Bridger’s a girl. Pants him!”

  Caryll, his breath coming in shallow gasps, darted toward the door. As he neared it the twins glanced at each other and at the same instant lunged with a credible tackle. Tormenters and tormented crashed to the green-tiled floor.

  “Stop that!” Justin shouted.

  The thin boy, joining the melee of navy blue uniforms, panted, “Go suck, Limey.” He reached for Caryll’s buttons.

  Justin’s hands clamped on skinny shoulders. As he jerked their leader away the twins released Caryll, who jumped to his feet, rushing out into the basement corridor and up the cement staircase.

  “We’ll get you later,” called the thin one. “Oh, boy, Bridger, will you ever pay!”

  Justin’s body went rigid. His fingers clenched into narrow, sinewy shoulders, and he shook the smaller boy as a terrier shakes a rat.

  “Hutchinson!”

  Kneeling outside to peer through the open windows, his bushy black eyebrows and gray mustache sprouting from his apoplectic face, was Colonel Marshall.

  III

  That morning Tom visited Hugh for the first time since Antonia’s deat
h.

  At first the tragedy had felled Tom. For several weeks, incapable of reason or action, he had holed up in his suite at the Pontchartrain, taking none of his many telephone calls, sleeping little, keeping the curtains closed so that one narrow streak of wintry light penetrated his disordered bedroom—he refused entry to the chambermaids, occasionally admitting the room waiter with a sandwich and a fifth of Scotch. The constant chill he felt was an actual drop in his temperature, as though his body as well as his mind were clasped by Antonia’s slender, dead arms. Hugh was away. The rest of the family were too awed by Tom—and too afraid of his temper—to find out what was going on at the hotel. It was Maud who dared visit. Her practical eyes saw none of his mental anguish, only that he was very ill. Invoking their son’s name, she coaxed him home. He had pneumonia.

  When he recovered, his lassitude was gone; his grief was not. He plunged headlong into the Hamtramck, sorrow whipping him to ever greater frenzies.

  Ask any stranger on the street the achievements of Tom Bridger and nine chances out of ten you would hear a Fiver joke. If you protested, you would be told, “There’s over a million Fivers on the road, aren’t there?” And if you persisted beyond that in demanding another achievement, the hypothetical stranger might reply, “He invented this new-fangled mass production out there at his Hamtramck factory.”

  But Tom, prisoner of his demonic misery, had a different viewpoint of his enormous, shining, glass-roofed plant. What an inefficient bitch this is, he thought. No wonder I can’t get prices down. And in order to bring forth a cheaper Fiver, he conceived the idea of controlling production from the start—ore, coal, rubber, raw lumber, silicates.

  He had felt the need to discuss his thoughts about this much larger, vertically integrated factory, and that was why he was visiting Hugh.

  As he drove along the edge of Lake St. Clair he raged inwardly at Hugh’s busybody behavior and felt the sick, queasy dismay in the pit of his stomach that he experienced each time he thought of Justin ensconced so nearby. When my poor darling only wanted to keep us apart!

  Hugh, on his part, had gone weak with relief at Tom’s terse phone call that he was on the way over. He had been upset—even unnerved—by his brother’s continued absence and silence. Yet were it possible to turn back the clock, he would not move even the second hand. It was no longer simply a matter of his long-range scheme: each day brought a deeper affection for the grave, upright boy, and also there were the pleasures of Zoe’s compelling if unstable charm. He looked back on his life before the children’s arrival as a grotesquely barren desert.

  Hearing Tom’s ring at the front door, he hurried from his office, trotting nervously along the Great Hall. Greeting his brother, he took a figurative step backward. Rogers and Olaf had informed him that since the bout with pneumonia Tom was a different man: arbitrary, implacable, foul-mouthed. Still, this did not prepare Hugh for the physical transformation. Tom had lost weight: in his angular face the gray eyes shone with tubercular brilliance. Though he was not yet forty, his hair had turned a thick, glossy white.

  Ignoring Hugh’s outstretched hand, Tom strode ahead of him into the office. Pacing, he launched into a febrile denunciation of Onyx’s inadequacies. Hugh sat at his desk, his hand on his chest, torn between pity and fear of the moment when fraternal vitriol would pour over him.

  “The thing is,” Tom said, “we need to manufacture our own glass, tires, the cardboard we use in the packing. Everything.”

  “But … Tom, that sort of plant would have to be colossal. There’s never been anything half that size. It’s out of the question.”

  Tom jerked his head impatiently. “Take tires, for example,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with what we’re doing? Buying them from Seiberling in Akron?”

  “We sold two hundred and ninety-odd thousand Fivers last year.” This was a third of the American market. “Soon it’ll be a million.”

  Hugh forced a smile. “That’s not my projection, Tom.”

  “Your statisticians don’t know their asses from hot rocks. Four million tires a year. Plus replacements. I can make them to last much longer than Seiberling does. And I can produce them more cheaply. A man called Farquar owns some woods on the river between here and town.” Tom scowled fiercely. To these woods he had driven with Antonia in a Curved-Dash Bridger. “I’m buying his land.”

  Hugh blinked, puzzled at this conversational shift. “But Maud’s already broken ground for your new house.”

  “Haven’t you listened to one fucking word? I need a big new machine that’s capable of building every damn part of a Fiver. A new shop.”

  Hugh stared at his brother. What was this nonsense? A big new machine? Manufacture ties? New shop? Hugh had seen the Hamtramck. No wonder the world’s industrialists made pilgrimages to visit. It was the best-equipped, most ingenious instrument of mass production. This whole overheated harangue was a delusion born of poor Tom’s grief. Hugh was busy assembling compassionate rebuttals when there was a ring on his private line.

  Listening to the voice on the other end, he kept his expression warily in control, but his fingernails rapped against the Elizabethan table. “I’ll send my chauffeur,” he said, pausing. “No. I’m sorry, but that’s entirely out of the question.” Another pause. “Yes, of course I understand the seriousness, but I never leave the house … my health.” A longer pause. Hugh paled and looked cornered. “Wait a moment, Colonel Marshall.” He held a palm to the mouthpiece. “Tom, Justin’s in some kind of difficulty.” Though he spoke normally, his manicured nails continued to tap anxiously.

  At Justin’s name Tom winced as though a raw blister had been probed. He said nothing, but his look was dangerous.

  Hugh wet his lips. “The principal insists on explaining in person, he won’t let Justin come home until he has. You know Colonel Marshall well.”

  “Not this way I don’t. Caryll’s never needed bailing out.”

  Hugh cowered a little, but of his two fears, Tom’s anger and horrified glances, Tom’s anger was the lesser. “I can’t go. You know that.” The wheeze in his voice was an effective emotional trump, and Hugh knew it.

  Tom paced to the opposite end of the long office. “When I’ve finished talking to Farquar about the woods,” he acquiesced.

  “My brother will be there soon,” Hugh said into the phone.

  IV

  Justin sat unslumping on a hard bench in Colonel Marshall’s waiting room, his gaze fixed on the opposite wall. He had examined every detail of the large watercolor of West Point with the words Duty, Honor, Country afloat in a fat white cloud, and now his attention remained riveted to the Seth Thomas clock. The hand jumped. One forty-three. He had been sitting here since eight fifty-five, when he had finished his terse explanation that in breaking up a fight between younger boys he had regrettably lost his temper. To say more, Justin was aware from his prefectorial stint at Eddington, meant those three little rotters would see to it that Bridger—a member of that outer fringe that surrounds school life the world over—would be denied even the companionship of his fellow rejects. At home the Head would have understood and let Justin off with a perfunctory caning. Here, who could tell?

  The three had spent the better part of an hour telling their sides, which he was certain included no mention of Caryll Bridger. As they had passed through the waiting room the tall, skinny boy had darted a smirk of satisfaction at Justin. Since then nobody had looked at him. When Colonel Marshall had left to preside over officers’ mess, he had ordered his sallow, middle-aged secretary to remain. Guard duty. She sat behind her low partition reading a magazine with aggrieved little sniffs. Justin clenched his nails into his palms, informing himself it was his continued dwelling on the lavatory scene that caused this ruthless urge to empty his bladder. He could not bring himself to ask the secretary’s permission to relieve himself.

  The door opened.

  Colonel Marshall ushered in Tom Bridger.

  Justin’s first confused thought
was that he had come on Caryll’s account, but this he rejected instantly. He was positive those three would not have implicated Caryll, and there was no other way for Colonel Marshall to learn of the involvement. He’s here for me, Justin thought, and his cheeks grew hot. He had tried to be scrupulously fair about Hugh’s brother—after all, he had seen the man only twice, he admired his accomplishments, and besides at a time when most Americans were dead set against any foreign entanglement, Onyx was backing England with a big new plant. But that first meeting had imprinted itself on him, and his animosity persisted. This was his mother’s harassing enemy.

  He rose stiffly, clicking his heels. “Colonel, sir.” He saluted. “Mr. Bridger, sir.” Another smart salute.

  The Colonel touched his hat. Tom stared at his black armband and nodded brusquely. They went into the sunlit office and closed the door. Masculine voices rumbled, their meanings obliterated.

  After five minutes Tom emerged. “Come on,” he snapped without slowing his stride. He marched through the halls ahead of Justin.

  Mess over, the yard was shrilly alive with blue-uniformed boys, some kneeling over marble games, others playing pop-up or shooting baskets. As Justin descended the steps a hushed stillness fell on the playground.

  Somebody near him made a loud, wet kissing noise. Snickers churned.

  Justin climbed into the Fiver, staring ahead. Tom started the car, driving around the muddy parade ground where eight widely separated boys, the sun glinting on their patent leather visors, marched punishment tours.

  “It was good of you to pick me up, sir,” Justin said. He would rather be dead than permit Tom Bridger to see his corrosive humiliation, and therefore the clipped edges of his voice brought him satisfaction.

  “At Colonel Marshall’s insistence. You’re Hugh’s responsibility, so far be it from me to interfere.”

  “Thank you anyway, sir.”

  “If I did have a vote, it’d be for a heavy thrashing. You can wipe off that smirk. I know about the cigarettes to bribe the lower graders, I know how you bat them around when they refuse to jerk you off.”