Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  Lombardo gave way to the Perrault band. A Charleston blared. Zoe looped her train over her arm. Eyes glinting like huge black diamonds, veil bouncing on her red-gold hair, slender, voluptuous body prancing, gorgeous legs encased in sheer white silk stockings, kicking and twisting, she bobbed across the floor with her groom, who though clumsier and slower was charged by her sexual electricity.

  “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight,” the ushers agreed, winking enviously.

  As guests gathered to watch Zoe cut the six-tiered cake, Tom moved next to Justin. “After they take off, come on upstairs.”

  “No, Tom,” Justin said. “Work can wait until tomorrow.”

  “No heavy manual labor, Justin. I promise. I need your signature, that’s all. It’ll only take a minute.” Tom tapped a passable imitation of Zoe’s Charleston step. “Christmas and weddings you get off, Justin.”

  III

  Justin duty-danced with the female guests, fortifying himself between turns. He was gulping a Scotch and soda when Tom tapped his shoulder, drawing him aside.

  “Zoe’s locked herself in,” Tom said quietly. “Her maid says it’s been an hour. Caryll tried to talk her out. Not a peep. He’s decided she’s not in there, and he’s flopping around like a goldfish out of its bowl. Checking the garage, the skating house, the barns—he just took a flashlight out to the cars.” Tom’s cheeks were sucked in, leaving deep hollows. “I’d hate like hell to humiliate him—them—by turning loose the Security hounds unless I have to.”

  Justin tried to hide his dismay. He stood staring at Tom. “Let me see what’s going on,” he said at last.

  The roses on the staircase had wilted, their odor stained the air. Justin, more than a little drunk, was fighting the urge to get out of this overscented, overheated, overcrowded house and finish the job. Drown himself in a bottle, find oblivion, avoid this newest crisis with his sister, escape from his unremitting doubts about Elisse.

  As soon as he had learned the wedding date he had placed a long distance call, explaining why he could not be out at Christmas, promising to be there by New Year’s. Then he had been forced to telephone again with another explanation that he could not leave Detroit until Caryll returned from his honeymoon. Tom had come as close to begging as Justin could recall: It’s a hell of a time, he’d said, gruffly. Justin, stick around. Both connections had been rotten, Elisse’s voice had risen and fallen as though traveling through ocean waves, the roaring had swallowed entire sentences. She had asked him to repeat. Constrained by the technical difficulties, he doubted he’d been able to convey that the month’s postponement was agony for him.

  Her letters continued, terse, witty, impersonal. He no longer saved them. Those letters robbed him of his self-esteem. He could no longer see himself as a fair-minded, sensible adult male intent on protecting a young girl from her own impulsiveness by giving her time to think things through. Instead he had become a demon jumping about in rage, jealousy, doubt, and incurable horniness. At one of Zoe’s engagement parties he had gone home with a shapely grass widow, then at her front door had found himself backing away from her deep, tongued kisses. He slept badly and for the first time barked at the men working under him. Only one certainty remained. He wanted to marry Elisse Kaplan and live out his days with her.

  Outside Zoe’s room three bridesmaids in their crimson dresses circled the middle-aged, voluble Belgian lady’s maid, whose fluted cap bobbed toward the closed door as she explained what had transpired. The idea of publicly importuning his sister nauseated Justin. Through the clutch of alcohol came what seemed an intelligent alternative.

  Slipping into the nearby sewing room, he opened one of the casement windows, leaning across the deep embrasure into frosty night air. Forty feet below, the empty stone terrace was lit by Christmas bulbs that blurred into fuzzy red and green circles. There was, or so he recalled, a smooth limestone ornamental ridge that ran around the second story.

  Kicking off his shoes, he climbed out, supporting his weight by gripping the window frame until his stockinged feet were splayed along the ridge. It was far narrower than he had thought, maybe three or four inches. His fingers sought purchase on rough walls; he inched along. Justin Hutchinson, human fly. He scrambled gratefully across another baronially deep window ledge, willed himself to another vertical surface. One of his feet slipped. He clutched a lead drainpipe, his heart banging askew as he blessed Maud Bridger’s insistence on solidity.

  He reached Zoe’s windows cold stone sober, breathing in loud gasps, sweating with fear that Caryll was right, she wasn’t inside and he’d have to go back the same way he had come.

  He rapped on a leaded pane. “Zoe,” he called urgently. “Zoe!”

  A curtain drew aside, and a nimbus of light shone around brilliant hair. Hastily she drew the curtains, opening the adjacent window.

  He jumped into the room, brushing dirt from his cutaway.

  “Enter Count Dracula,” she said, waving a near empty bottle of Mumm’s. Her enormous eyes were red from weeping, yet her smile quivered with high-strung vivacity. On the floor lay the crumpled wedding gown for which he had just paid a small fortune, and the froth of veil. Her round, luminous breasts spilled from lace-trimmed crepe de chine teddies embroidered with her name, and her velvet thighs were bare above knotted white silk.

  He closed the window. “Get dressed,” he snapped.

  “Here in Castle Carpathia we’re drunken on the blood of white gripes—grapes.”

  “You’re not that sozzled,” he said grimly. “Get dressed, Zoe. Your husband’s going crazy out there.”

  “Not my husband,” she denied, holding the bottle to her lips. “How could I be married to a boy who lets people walk over him?”

  Justin wrenched the champagne from her grasp. “Put on your clothes.”

  There was a banging on the door. Zoe flung herself on the bed, weeping anew. Her sobs held an anguish that went beyond willful, drunken tearfulness.

  Justin sat on the edge of the mattress. “It’s going to be fine, absolutely fine,” he soothed. “Caryll’s not weak. He’s understanding. Gentle.”

  “I’ve hashed up my life,” she wailed. “Like Mother.”

  “Brides often get the nerve up, Zozo. He’s the right one for you.”

  “You don’t know the first thing, not the first thing. If you did, you wouldn’t be mooning after some impossible girl who doesn’t even want you.” Zoe lifted her head. Strands of perfumed hair veiled her tear-filled eyes. “Brother of mine, we’re both idiots about love, you and me. We’re incapable of picking the right one. It’s in the blood.”

  “I can remember our parents,” he said. “They had a wonderful life together. Mother and Father—”

  “What makes you so sure Daddy was that?” she interrupted in a shrill voice. “Our Father which art in heaven?”

  Justin’s eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t drink. It makes you ugly.”

  “That’s what I am. Ugly and blue. I’ve married the wrong man, just like Mother. My mother-in-law, honest in the extreme …” Zoe stumbled over the word. “She told me it should have been Mother and Uncle Andrew.”

  “Stop this, Zoe,” Justin snapped.

  “Mother didn’t need a husband, she needed a front for Uncle Andrew …” With a convulsive sob Zoe buried her face in a pillow.

  Justin stared ahead blankly, his hands knotting into fists. The old sick question of his boyhood was upon him, that question bound up with his birthday, his parents’ never mentioned, never celebrated anniversary. It had been unbearable to think that his revered dead father had succumbed to this itch in the blood, this phallic heat to play the cad with a haloed creature like Mother. Even now, fully cognizant in his maturity that his parents must have been creatures of flesh, blood, and animal urges, he felt unclean probing their sexual proclivities—and the coupling Zoe had suggested was foul beyond thinking. Like her, he remembered the Major in his decline, a ravaged ancient.

  Knocks reverberated o
n wood, muffled voices chorused, “Zoe, Zoe.”

  “Get up,” he commanded.

  Gasping and sniffing, she obeyed. He pressed his hand between her naked shoulders, steering her into the enormous bathroom.

  “Throw cold water on your face,” he said. “Brush your teeth.”

  He washed his own face and hands under the bath faucet, watching the filthy water drain away. He pulled Zoe into the dressing room, where an ivory suit and a Russian lynx coat hung in readiness.

  Twenty-five minutes later the bride and groom ran through a gaudy shower of streamers, confetti, and rice. Younger guests braved the clear, frosty night, trooping outside, champagne glasses in hand, to shout best wishes as the newlyweds climbed into a brand new, custom-built Onyx. The wedding night would be spent aboard Tom’s railroad car, which was being hitched on to the Royal Poinciana en route to the Baardsons’ Palm Beach winter palace. With a loud backfire the car disappeared into dark woods. All at once it was no longer a wedding but a gathering of people, many of them bitter rivals.

  Justin did not go back inside. Without a thought he abdicated his hostly duties and was scarcely aware of his surroundings as he tramped by the limousines lined under marquees to the garage where his Fiver was parked.

  He had utterly forgotten about the paper that Tom had asked him to sign.

  IV

  When Hugh heard the Fiver, he was ensconced in a sixteenth-century bishop’s chair that he had recently acquired for the drawing room, celebrating his ward’s nuptials in his usual solitary fashion. Going into the Great Hall to ascertain it was Justin, he called, “Here I am!” returning to pour Dom Pérignon into the second glass.

  One look at Justin’s drained face and Hugh accepted that something at the wedding had gone monstrously awry. He sat back in Genoese ecclesiastical velvet, waiting.

  Justin took a sip, then set down the glass.

  “Hugh, Zoe had a bit of a crisis. She locked herself in her room. No, it’s all right now,” he said as Hugh moved to stand. “She left with Caryll.” He sighed, then looked directly at Hugh. “It seems she was upset by some old gossip about Mother—it’s not the kind of thing I care to repeat. But I’ve always nursed a few doubts of my own. They have to do with, well, my birthday. A few weeks before Mother was killed, I asked her about it. She said she would explain when I was old enough. I certainly knew the facts of life by then. Anyway, it wasn’t like her to put me off on the grounds of age.” Justin fingered the rim of the crystal glass. “After she died, I let it pretty much alone. Hugh, I don’t even like mentioning it, but what Zoe said was unthinkable.”

  “That business about Antonia and Major Stuart?”

  “So you heard it too.”

  “Gossip. Spitefully malicious gossip.”

  “But … well. There’s me. I was born only a few months after they married.”

  Hugh pressed his hands together in a steeple, looking over his manicured fingertips at his nephew.

  Justin’s face was the yellowed white of tallow, yet he gazed steadily back. “Can you remember anything about them when they lived in Detroit? Hugh, I’ve imagined such terrible things.…”

  Hugh made no immediate reply. That he reveal the truth was asking too much. Tom’s rages were a forest fire that destroyed himself and others blindly and sometimes permanently. Hugh had everything to lose. And what did he have to gain? His plans were far from complete. He had nothing to gain.

  Yet the deep-set blue eyes held such despair that Hugh heaved a resonant sigh. What was it like for so decent and fair a young man to strangle on the thought of being the fruit of incest?

  A log burned in half, falling noisily. They both turned toward the fireplace, which was swathed in Yule greenery. Christmas, Hugh thought, season of comfort and joy.

  “I have some papers that might shed light on the matter,” he said slowly.

  “Papers?”

  “Letters, actually. Nobody has any idea that they exist, and it would be bad for me, very, if anyone found out.”

  “I wouldn’t betray a confidence.”

  “Of course not. But these … well, there’ll be a temptation.”

  “You have my word.”

  “I’ll count on it, then.”

  Upstairs, Hugh went directly to the portrait of Lady Jane Neville, swinging it aside to reveal a safe that Justin had not known existed. Working the combination, Hugh selected an envelope whose plumped out accordion folds were tied with faded red string. He handed it to Justin.

  “Mrs. J. Foreman,” Justin read aloud. “Mother knew people called Foreman … acquaintances of hers. They never came to the house. I haven’t thought of that name in years.”

  “It’s very important that you never mention it.”

  “Right,” Justin said. “Hugh, I appreciate what you’re doing. It’s, well, very decent.”

  More than decent, Hugh thought. Foolhardy. Halfway repenting his holiday season generosity, he said quietly, “I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes.” He went into his bedroom, leaving the safe open, a sign of immeasurable trust.

  Justin sat on the couch, pulling off his shoes. Absently he rubbed at soles that ached from dancing. Both socks were torn from his climb. Weariness and the raw devastation caused by his questions about his mother added to the unreal quality of Hugh’s secret cache and this fat, mysterious envelope. Oh, he was aware that Hugh, center of Onyx Security, gathered detective reports, yet loving Hugh as he did, it was inconceivable to Justin that he himself should be caught in the sticky web. He lit a cigarette. Holding it between his lips, he slowly, deliberately unwound the string from the packet.

  The sheaf of opened envelopes were caramel with age, all addressed to Mrs. J. Foreman/ Flat C/ 8 Upper Swithin Place/ London/ Eng. in Tom’s uneducated scrawl. Tom! Who invariably dictated to a typist.

  Justin opened one at random:

  Antonia, Sweetheart,

  I miss you so much I could cry, sumtimes I do.

  The clumsily formed, misspelled sentences leaped out at him. Tenderly obscene, passionate, yearning. He read swiftly. One small, coherent edge of his mind was embarrassed to be eavesdropping, another was admiring—why had he been so stupidly civilized, why had he never written such words to Elisse? The letter was undated. Justin glanced at the envelope. Postmarked March 26, 1911. A few months after his mother had explained that “Mr. Bridger’s” anger was due to Uncle Andrew’s possible involvement in an arson. Justin read two more letters, finding several references to a previous love affair between them, and to “your boy.” The fourth letter he chose was dated September 11, 1914. His eyes jumped to his own name.

  Justin looks so much like you. Nobody could guess I’m his father. As far as I’m conserned, Caryll is my only son. I sware to you, sweetheart, after we are married nobody will find out about your boy.

  Justin’s dress shirt had gone limp with sweat. He was aware of his own breathing, of a pressure behind his eyes, of well-defined nausea. He felt if he read another scrawled word he would vomit. He piled the letters on the hearth, his hand shaking so that he had difficulty using his new gold lighter—Caryll had given him one of the ushers’ gifts—making three fumbling passes before he succeeded in lighting the small blaze that Hugh had not lit more than a decade ago on another continent. When the flames died, he touched the lighter to the remaining scraps. He was kneeling at this final task when Hugh came in.

  “A lot of things must be clearer now,” Hugh said. “Why I brought you here, why Tom has forced himself to be so cold. Justin, he promised her that you’d never learn that he’s your father. Keeping that promise is his number-one priority.”

  Standing, Justin peered down at the mound of ashes. “If I’m not who I was,” he asked dully, “who am I?” The question seemed meaningless. He could not think or feel. It was as though he were stricken with a peculiar form of amnesia that blanks out not the past but the present. “I’m nobody. Nothing.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the son of the richest man in A
merica. Maybe the world,” Hugh soothed. “I’ve always imagined what would have happened if he had married Antonia. I’ve always wanted to set things to right. Justin, you’re the firstborn. You’re the one who should inherit Onyx.”

  Justin’s hands opened and closed. “How did you get these?” he asked dully.

  “When I went to England to bring you here, I cleaned out their flat.”

  Justin nodded. “Yes.”

  “Tom loves you, he wants to acknowledge you—but you understand now why he can’t.”

  Justin bent to stir the still warm ashes with his forefinger. He said nothing.

  Hugh made one of his rare misjudgments. “Surely you see that it’s impossible, you and that Kaplan girl.”

  Justin looked up. His furious blue eyes glinted through narrowed lids. “How do you know about Elisse?”

  “Zoe.” Hugh’s mouth went dry as he realized his mistake.

  “It was meant to be private.”

  Hugh sat on the arm of the chair nearest his nephew. “You know our Zoe.”

  “And after she told you, you had Elisse checked out,” Justin said, roughly.

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  Justin shot a disgusted glance at the open portrait, and at the safe with its neatly heaped folders and envelopes. “Haven’t you?”

  The raw, hard note of command jolted the truth from Hugh. “What if I have?”

  “You snooping son of a bitch, prying into her life!”

  “There are so many other things for us to talk about,” Hugh pleaded.

  “What gave you the damn right?”

  “You’re my nephew, Justin, all I have. Believe me, she’s not worthy of you, not in any way. She’s a nobody, a little red who’s already two-timing you with one of her own kind.” Hugh took a deep breath. “Forget her, Justin, forget her.”

  Sweat streamed on Justin’s stark white face. “Just keep your nose out of her concerns. And mine!”