Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  Involuntary spasms convulsed her womb, shaking along her thighs, her belly, increasing in violence as if she were being torn apart that an unreasoning, mindlessly ecstatic creature might be born. Her pupils swollen, she looked up at Justin in surprise. “Oh, I love you forever and ever, darling,” she gasped, her hands flailing on his shoulders as if urging him to move more swiftly. She rose up and down to meet him, crying incoherently that she loved him, forever.… Oh, forever. With a sobbing cry he collapsed on her.

  Chill ventilation from the open window cooled their sweat-glossed bodies. Justin pulled one of the blankets over them.

  “Nice Justin,” she said.

  “Nice Elisse.”

  Shyly, she kissed the arch of his nose.

  “The one thing I am sure of is that I belong to you,” he said.

  She wondered that even in her anxiety she had doubted this. Justin’s innate decency would balk at marrying her, any woman, without love.

  “Those things,” she said. “You didn’t use one.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “You’re the one who always remembered. Was it because you didn’t want to leave me with a little one?”

  Embarrassment showed on his face, but he said firmly, “That’s over. We’re going to forget that.”

  “No more polar bear swims, Justin.”

  “That’s the easiest promise I’ve ever made,” he said. “I don’t want to die. Today I proved it to myself.”

  They were lying side by side. She twined her fingers in his. “Tell a simple young girl from the sticks, are there other ways of, uh, prevention?”

  “I think a doctor can prescribe some gadget for the woman. I don’t know much about it either.” He kissed her cheek. “I never realized until just now that the rubber was ruining things for—”

  “Never!” she interrupted. “Everything we do is very fine. But that now … it was bliss, sheer bliss.” She looked at him in alarm. “Justin, what if I’m having a baby?”

  He smiled. “It’s a bit late to worry. And what if you are? We’re married.” He flinched. “Elisse, how could he leave Mother in the lurch? He loved her!” Justin’s eyes were desperate.

  She pulled his face to the rumpled pale blue wool over her breasts. Thy people shall be my people, darling, she thought, but I cannot for the life of me understand them.

  III

  The cloudy weather continued, and many of the hotel guests left. Justin and Elisse walked along the deserted beach for hours, he with his trouser legs rolled up, she bare-legged, their purple-tinged feet marking parallels in the wet sand. This was a new Justin, bewildered, with frown lines between his deep-set blue eyes as he spoke about his past. He desired, she understood, to unfold his life to her, and this opening-up served double duty as a catharsis of his morbid inner pressures. He discussed his relationships from a scrupulously fair distance, he omitted damaging evidence, yet even so there were times when she had to pretend it was blowing sand that caused the water in her eyes. The image that rasped most at her heart was Tom Bridger showing Caryll some vast, cacophonous new machinery at the Hamtramck while Justin, a tall, doubtless somewhat gangly, adolescent, trailed, too proud to beg for attention yet bereft at being ignored by a man he admired, a lonely shadow attached to the real substance of parental affection. Justin was recently orphaned, Elisse thought in belated partisan grief: even if the boy weren’t his own son, didn’t Tom Bridger know there’s a constitutional restraint on cruel and unusual punishment?

  “About my financial situation,” Justin said five days after the watery debacle. “I don’t have any savings.” He did not mention that Zoe’s magnificent trousseau and her wedding had wiped him out. “There’s a trust fund from my great uncle. Zoe and I can’t touch the principle—our children will be the remaindermen. My share of the interest’s no fortune, only about three thousand a year.”

  “Sounds big to me. I toil for a hundred and twenty a month,” Elisse said. She had telephoned Columbia, and a disgruntled Mr. Briskin had told her that if she were back in a couple of weeks, she’d still have a job. “We’re in clover, Justin. Why not wait a bit before you decide what you’ll do?”

  “I know what I’m going to do.” He halted, squinting at the bleak purple line of the horizon. “Pretty soon we’ll go back,” he said.

  “To Detroit?”

  “I had things set up so they could manage the shutdown without me. But the changeover’s a far bigger job. It’s never been done on this scale. To build the Seven every single piece of machinery will have to be new. In Woodland alone that’s thousands of machines, some of them monsters. There’ll be new layouts in every assembly plant.”

  “You’re telling me—” Her voice cracked with astonishment. “You mean after all that’s happened you’re staying at Onyx?”

  “If Tom wants me.” He skidded a flat stone across a wavelet—the tide was out. “If we can look each other in the eye once things are out in the open. I don’t mean publicly, of course, but between him and me.”

  “You’re not an indentured servant. You don’t owe him one red bean, Justin.”

  “It isn’t a matter of owing, Elisse. I can’t run away from what I am.”

  She shivered, terrified for Justin, who was returning to the fishbloods who had driven him to within an ace of doing himself in, and she nursed a far lesser anxiety on her own behalf about meeting Justin’s sister, who was a gorgeous Society girl who appeared in the news-reels. Yet she did not argue. Justin was responding to that atavistic pull that few, apparently, could resist: he was searching for the ties to his progenitor. She reached her arm to encircle his waist. They sloshed through icy yellow-white spume. “I saw some railroad schedules on the front desk,” she said.

  IV

  Hugh ordered telegrams dispatched to Onyx dealers around the world: JANUARY 12 1927/ MAKE WAY FOR THE SEVEN/ TODAY LAST FIVER ROLLS OFF LINE. Hugh also arranged that the press be at Woodland and that Onyx movie photographers film Tom as he accompanied the last engine block down the main assembly. Tom shook hands with many of the close-standing ranks of his employees, who afterward stared down at their suddenly idle hands as they accepted that they were being laid off in the midst of an exceptionally cold winter. Around two that afternoon the final bolt was tightened on the dark gray car. An eerie silence wadded the endless hall. Almost exactly one half of the cars in the United States were Fivers, and now there would be no more.

  Snowflakes drifted from mottled clouds as Tom drove the last Fiver to the Triple E Building. A crowd stood under the canopy that sheltered the replica of the quadricycle. Tom tried to make a connection with the hungry, obsessed twenty-year-old who had driven the original, but peering through the tunnel of the years, he could see only Antonia’s enormous, dark glowing eyes. As he halted the executives, engineers, reporters, and guests applauded. A path was made for Maud, bulky in her sable coat, as she came heavily down the shallow steps.

  “Surprise, Tom,” she said, beaming.

  Expecting some form of automotive memorabilia or award, he laughed aloud. Following his wife were Caryll and Zoe, who danced ahead to engulf him in perfume as she pressed her smooth, warm cheek to his. “Congratulations, Father Bridger.”

  “Why aren’t you two sunbathing in Palm Beach?” Tom asked.

  “What, and miss this?” retorted Caryll, grasping his father’s shoulders, hugging him. They smiled at each other, then quickly stepped apart, embarrassed at their public display of affection.

  A mechanic had been cranking the quadricycle. Tom said, “Go ahead, Caryll. Show ’em how an old-timer runs.”

  “I’ve never driven her.”

  “Nothing to it. She’s warmed up. Just use the tiller to steer.”

  So Caryll climbed into the vibrating little mechanism, which jerked and swiveled along the snow-powdered company road as uncertain as a bird with a broken wing. Tom had added a brake. Caryll, unable to find the lever, jolted to a clattering halt against a low brick wall. Reinforced bicycle spokes cru
mpled. Caryll climbed out, crimson.

  Tom walked up, shaking his head. “Got to teach you how to drive,” he said, trying to ease the situation with a joke. But Caryll barely smiled.

  A few minutes later Tom stood on the carpeted platform of Triple E’s main auditorium, fielding questions about the Seven.

  “Any advance sketches?” inquired the heavyset man from Automobile Age.

  “Brynie, you know better than that,” Tom called back. “Nobody sees her until we unveil her to the public.”

  “But the prototype is complete?” boomed the man from The New York Times.

  “Sure,” Tom lied. “And she’s a beaut.” Though he had never felt comfortable at these press conferences Hugh arranged, he had learned to parry with reporters to Onyx’s advantage.

  From the last row a voice called out, “Who hired Justin Hutchinson away from you? Ford or General Motors?”

  “When Hutchinson gets back from his vacation, come on over and ask him yourself.” Tom turned to Caryll, who sat on his right at the speakers’ table. “Your turn.”

  Caryll, still red about the ears from his altercation with the quadricycle, further mortified by the smirky glances that slid from him to his bride in the front row, pushed awkwardly to his feet. Tom sat, one ankle on his knee, his arms akimbo, seemingly alert, yet not listening. He had never compared his sons, he told himself, and he wasn’t going to do so now, yet impinging on his brain were two images: Justin, replying to similar damn fool questions with unflappable calm; Justin, an English cigarette between his lips, smoothly handling a test car on the Woodland test track. Tom’s conscious mind was fixed on the typed papers in his bureau drawer. I asked him to sign and he took off.

  The shutdown had been one continuous foul-up in the hands of Phil and Artie Sinclair, making Tom more than ever aware of the extent to which he relied on Justin. But his hurt at the defection, so unlike Justin, went far deeper than impotent dismay at the chaos inflicted on Onyx. Though he had behaved like an employer more than a chummy mentor—people say you don’t even like him—he had always delighted in Justin’s respect and warmed to his obvious if unspoken affection. Thus it was a bitter dose of salts that Justin had never confided in him about a serious romance, had not sent a telegraph or letter informing him of the elopement. He would not have known about Justin’s marriage if Hugh hadn’t told him. She’s some cheap little Hollywood Jewess, and a labor organizer at that. I don’t see how we can trust him anymore, not with a wife like that. She’s the one who got him to bolt. He’s a changed man, I tell you, Tom, a changed man. A complete new phonograph record for Hugh. Suddenly he was dead set against Justin, because of the girl.

  Tom wouldn’t have cared if she were a whirling dervish or Lenin’s mother-in-law.

  He wanted Justin back.

  As soon as he had recovered from his initial hurt and sense of abandonment, he had been filled with remorse. I handled the whole deal all wrong, he thought repeatedly. Why hadn’t he managed to preserve the necessary ambiguities while at the same time stamping a seal of permanency on their relationship?

  Tom’s fingers dug into his biceps as he gazed unseeing at the audience of newsmen. The minute Justin gets back, he thought, I’ll get those damn shares signed, sealed, and notarized. The one important thing is to keep him tied here with me.

  “Dad?” Caryll was looking questioningly down at him. “Aren’t you more qualified to answer that one?”

  Tom rose. “Repeat the question slowly, will you?”

  CHAPTER 21

  The heavy mesh doors of Woodland’s Gate One were chained shut.

  The taxi’s three hoots reverberated in the snowy stillness. After a minute the guardhouse door opened and a thin, boyish figure in a khaki uniform came down the wooden steps. “Sorry, no taxis inside,” he said. His small, almost delicate hand rested on the Colt .45 in his holster.

  Justin, surprised at the military automatic, rolled down the window. “It’s all right. I’m Justin Hutchinson, Mr. Bridger’s assistant.”

  The boy blinked nervously. “It’s orders, sir. No cabs.”

  “Righto. I’ll walk.” Resigning himself to the mile or so to the Administration Building, Justin paid off the driver. “Damn,” he muttered when he discovered the pedestrian gate also locked. Trotting up the guardhouse stoop, he rapped sharply at the counter window. An elderly guard with dewlaps appeared. Justin, explaining who he was, demanded the gate be opened.

  “Sorry, sir, but you need identification.” The wrinkled finger tapped an unfamiliar blue ticket pinned to his lapel below the German silver Onyx badge.

  “What is this rigmarole?” Justin snapped. “I’m Mr. Bridger’s assistant.”

  “We recognized you, Mr. Hutchinson,” the man said appeasingly. “But since the shutdown we got new rules. Not even the top brass moves through this gate without an identification ticket.”

  “Let me speak to whoever’s in charge.”

  The boards of the covered veranda creaked as Justin tramped up and down to keep warm. After a few minutes the window opened again and a round, bald head emerged. “They’ve told me the story, Mr. Hutchinson, and I’m sorry, but the rule applies to everybody excepting the two Mr. Bridgers. We’re protecting the Seven.”

  “I’ll use your telephone,” Justin said preemptively.

  “Sorry, sir. Can’t let anyone in the guardhouse.”

  “What is everybody shaking about?”

  “You, sir,” replied the bald man. “You’re a big shot, but it’s our jobs if anybody gets by that’s not wearing a blue badge. Mr. Keeley laid down the law to us.”

  Keeley? Justin mentally scanned through Security’s echelons. Keeley rang no bell. He must be one of those underling strutters who thrive on fear, Justin thought, and made a mental note to talk to Colonel Hazelford about firing this Keeley, then recalled that he might no longer be in a prodding position.

  “I’ll find a pay phone,” he said.

  The hamburger joints and Coney Islands on Archibald that normally did a brisk business at all hours of day and night were closed, and across one window was whitewashed: Out to lunch until Woodland reopens. Justin was well aware of the disastrous ripple effects when any automotive plant closed to retool. And Onyx was the largest. It’s a long, cold winter for everybody in Detroit, Justin thought, thrusting his gloved hands deep into his pockets.

  There was nothing open until he reached the Paloverde Oil station at the corner of Jefferson: he often bought gas here and the manager, grousing about disastrous losses to his company, led him to the wall telephone.

  Caryll was out of his office, so Justin asked the raspy-voiced secretary to track down her boss. “Tell him I’ll be at this number.” Feeling chilled, demoralized, an unwanted outsider, yet more darkly apprehensive about the coming interview with Tom, Justin sat on a stool in the unheated garage to await Caryll’s call.

  II

  It was past six and the secretaries were gone as Tom, rotating his tired shoulders, let himself into his private office. The lamp burning on the desk at the far end of the commodious room did not dispel the darkness. Tom, smelling cigarette smoke, peered around.

  A shadow was detaching itself from near the drawn curtains. “Good evening, Tom,” Justin said quietly.

  Exuberant relief and sheer manic joy socked the breath out of Tom. He gripped the oak doorjamb.

  “Justin,” he called cheerfully. “You damn near scared the water out of me.” He pressed the switch, and brass-armed wall fixtures blazed.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to,” Justin said.

  “Been here long?”

  “An hour or so.”

  “So why didn’t you have Mrs. Collins ring for me?”

  “She said you were watching a casting.”

  “Yes, yes. The engine block. Remember? Olaf and his entire engineering crew swore up and down that it was impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine in a single block. Well, I figured out a way. And God damn if it didn’t work! Two banks of four cy
linders at an angle of ninety degrees, a Gothic shape. The Onyx Seven’ll be as powerful as the fancy ten-thousand-buck jobs.”

  As Tom explained the details of the engine, he was examining Justin, the breadth and height, the beloved inheritance of black hair and finely chiseled Roman nose, the slightly rumpled clothing that for some reason he always associated with the young man’s absolute integrity. Justin’s deep-set blue eyes refused to meet Tom’s gaze, a reticence that Tom took as endearing proof of a newlywed’s embarrassment. Worrying that he might throw his arms around the returned prodigal, he forced a dryness into his voice. “I guess there was no point interrupting me. After a month, why rush?”

  “I’ve been in California. I’m married, Tom.”

  “So Hugh tells me.”

  Justin’s eyes flickered oddly. “Hugh?”

  “You took the plunge on the thirtieth in Tijuana, right?”

  “He certainly keeps tabs,” Justin said in a level tone.

  “Didn’t you wire him?”

  Justin carefully ground out his cigarette in an ashtray he had already filled. “Nobody except Zoe. She and Caryll were in Palm Beach, so I doubt if he heard it from her.”

  “That’s how it goes,” Tom said. His pulses were trotting with inane, juvenile satisfaction that his sibling had also been ignored. “Try to keep anything from my brother.”

  “Her name’s Elisse.”

  “Elisse, eh?” Grinning, Tom went to the long table that held a scale model of the 1912 Fiver as well as a silver tray with glasses and a tantalus. “How about a drink?”

  “I could use one.”

  Pointing at the Scotch, Tom raised a questioning gray eyebrow.

  “Please,” Justin said. “Straight.”

  Tom poured the drinks and raised his glass. “To Elisse Hutchinson,” he said.

  Justin tossed down the Scotch with a stiff wrist. Normally he took soda and nursed his booze. I’ve never seen him with such a case of jitters, Tom thought. Maybe he’s worried I’m going to can him. For a pleasurable moment he visualized himself benevolently handing Justin the paper to sign—Caryll and Zoe had signed theirs last week—while a dark, biblically lovely young woman watched in the background.