Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

“Yes. We’ve got them isolated. It’s checkmate. Uncle Hugh and Argo MacIlvray worked out an ad. I don’t know if you’ve seen a newspaper.” He reached for one of the stack that lay on the lambswool carpet.

  WE WANT TO WORK

  For two days now the illegal take-over of Onyx’s Woodland plant has kept the great majority of Onyx workers away from their jobs.

  We don’t like it.

  We want to work.

  Tom glanced at the newsprint, then looked out the window.

  Caryll gave a tense little cough. “Dad, there’s one more thing. In the report I told you that it happened on Justin’s shift. It’s more than that. He was the one who pulled the safety switch.”

  “He what?” Tom’s face was greenish in the gloomy light.

  “There was some kind of argument between a foreman and a worker. I only heard the foreman’s side, so I don’t know the whole story. Justin seems to have lost his temper—I’m pretty sure he was right to. The foreman looked guilty. He had a mean squint.” Caryll licked his mouth. “But I want you to know it’s not a case of shutting down because their leader’s my in-law. It’s me, Dad. I’m afraid you have a pacifist for a son.”

  Tom shrugged, a wretched movement of his shoulders. It was a bitter thing that Justin should have been the one to raise the hand against him. And it was reproachfully, unbearably bitter that this should have been touched off by some mean-spirited act. To their right the multitudinous chimneys of Woodland had come into view, eerily strange without their tributaries of smoke. Tom shivered at the sight, hiding his misery under sarcasm. “Welcome to the graveyard,” he said.

  Caryll hunched into the leather upholstery. “Dad, I don’t know what to say. I’ve cornered you into dealing with them.”

  Tom continued to frown at the vast, smokeless chimneys.

  “You’ll have to now, of course, Dad. But at least Justin’s their president. We know he’s ethical.”

  Tom shrugged again.

  On Archibald Avenue in front of Gate One maybe five hundred men shuffled in a lockstepped oval, each man’s breath steaming on the next man’s collar. Some had tied bits of linoleum to the sides of their faces to protect themselves from the bitter wind that flapped against their signs.

  END THE DOUBLE WORK WEEK

  JOIN THE AAW

  FIGHT ONYX SECURITY

  JOIN THE AAW

  KEEP YOUR JOB

  WITH

  AAW

  The car turned. Tom stared back at the picketers. His paternal guilt transmuted itself into fury. These interlopers! Deal with them? Fat chance in hell! He lifted the tube. “Stop here,” he barked at the chauffeur. Before the car had properly halted, he jumped out. Wind tangling glossy white hair around his erect head, he strode toward Archibald Avenue.

  Caryll gaped through the rear window, unable to believe that his father intended to face down the rough, hostile picketers. Alone. He breathed with hoarse little gasps, then with a peculiar whinny, plunged from the safety of the Swallow, running after the intrepid madman who had sired him. “Dad … come back.…” Wind shredded his cries.

  He caught up as Tom reached the picket line. A huge, square figure in a thick plaid jacket stepped forward.

  “Where do you two gents think you’re going?”

  “Inside,” Tom snapped.

  “This ain’t no welcoming committee. You’re crossing a picket line.”

  “To my own fucking shop!”

  “Dad,” Caryll warned in a shrill whisper, tugging at Tom’s arm.

  “Hey,” someone shouted. “The Boss is back in Detroit.”

  The news was passed around. Tom’s surprise arrival, his coming accompanied only by his son, fit everybody’s conception of him, the unpredictable, courageous loner. Tight-packed men smiled grudgingly, but they continued their shuffling, barring his way.

  “Who’s in charge?”

  A rangy man with a knit cap pulled far down over his wind-scraped face eased through the line. “I’m the picket captain, Mr. Bridger,” he drawled in a courteous, well-bred Georgia voice.

  “Let me the hell through.”

  “It’s not up to me, sir. The Brotherhood voted that nobody crosses the line.”

  “They voted? When I left the country in October, a man could get in his own shop. Has the law changed? If not, tell them to move their asses out of my way!”

  “Dad—”

  “Mr. Bridger, I reckon you’ll have to settle with AAW before you get into Woodland.”

  Tom glared, then turned, the wind tugging at his dark gray topcoat as he stamped back to the Swallow.

  “That was some risk you took, Dad. They’re desperate men.”

  Tom ignored the remark, snapping through the tube, “Find a hardware store.” His voice had that loud, sardonic flatness, and Caryll, with a sharp pang near his navel, accepted that his father had fallen into the demon fire of rage, and until this anger burned itself out, he could not approach reason.

  After a couple of blocks they came to a dingy garage whose flaking sign announced that hardware items were sold here. Tom went in, emerging with a bulky, jangling package. He ordered the chauffeur to drive them back to Gate One. Caryll said nothing. No demurral would register.

  This time Tom waited for the ashen-faced chauffeur to open the door. The long, sleek automobile attracted reporters from the open beer joint, as well as ten policemen. The cops kept glancing up at store roofs where Security watched from behind machine guns.

  “Let me at the gate,” Tom ordered. “I promise I won’t trespass on my own damn shop!”

  The pickets glanced questioningly toward their captain, and in this moment of uncertainty Tom shoved with his heavy, clanking package, barreling through the line. He tore open brown paper.

  Metal rang on metal as he passed a shining length of new chain four times around the steel posts of the gates, which were already locked. He snapped a Schlage padlock through the links.

  “There,” Tom said loudly. “Let them camp inside until they rot!” Veins stood out in his temples.

  The nearest pickets heard him: they blinked as if a sudden, confusing brilliance had blinded them.

  A young reporter called, “What did you say, Mr. Bridger?”

  “I’ve given the squatters on my property permission to camp indefinitely. I’ve closed my shop.”

  “We closed it for you!” shouted a picketer with a thin, cold-empurpled face.

  “Great!” Tom snapped. “Then both sides agree. The world can get along without any more Onyxes.”

  “You mean this is a permanent decision?” asked another reporter.

  “The only kind I ever make. Go back to your papers, tell your readers I’ve quit.”

  “Quit?”

  “Gone out of business. Is that clear enough?”

  A dismayed murmur stirred like the wind along the picket line. On the rooftops the khaki men squinted through their sights. Tom jammed his hands in his pockets, striding back to the Swallow.

  They drove northward toward the Farm in silence.

  Caryll’s jaw was tense, and around his lips the flesh had a sickly bluish cast. His father, having lost his famed temper, to all intents had committed hara-kiri in front of him, and Caryll, in shock, was unable to sort out the multiple repercussions that would affect both sides in the struggle.

  After several miles Tom rested his head in his hands, and the sight of that proud, bent neck brought scalding tears of pity to Caryll’s eyes.

  II

  Extra!

  Extra!

  The cries of newsboys shrilled into the wind. Extras were rare in Detroit, and many poor people bought a paper. Wire services spread the news, and Extras were printed in every language. Terrier-sturdy Fivers were still driven by millions, and Sevens, too, had become part of the world landscape. Now there would be no more.

  To most people the story was as newsworthy as a declaration of war, and to those millions around the globe who depended—directly or indirectly—on Onyx for their
livelihood, infinitely more disastrous.

  III

  Caryll rubbed the back of his neck as he proofread the draft of his reply to Prime Minister Baldwin, editing out every trace of his mortified horror, and at the bottom of the second paragraph, printing in the margin: Mr. Prime Minister, my father’s decision was reached after years of sustaining heavy losses.

  Like almost everybody else the British leader refused to believe that Tom intended to stand by that symbolic affixing of the Schlage lock two weeks earlier. Who could believe that any man walked away from factories, rubber plantations, mines, a shipping line, railroads, stretches of timber? Tom, for his part, had holed up at the Farm, refusing to open letters that arrived in thick governmental envelopes, in gray Onyx envelopes, or in five-and-dime envelopes: refusing to read any of the inundation of mail from all over the world, some addressed merely Tom Bridger, USA. He would not speak on the phone, and Caryll was the only visitor admitted. Abashed gate guards had turned away Hugh’s Swallow and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins’s flagged Cadillac limousine. Tom’s dry, cracked lips formed a smile so bitter and forbidding that even blunt, insensitive Maud kept her silence. Caryll could not bring himself to ask how to carry this albatross, this shut-down industrial giant. His few stammered questions received no reply. There was something unhealthy about his father’s undeviating silence that Caryll connected with the coronary he had suffered after Justin’s departure. He knew his father’s omnipresent grimace was one of mortal anguish. An unstoppable force had met an immovable object and, yes, that could mean another coronary. He saw his fear reflected in his mother’s bespectacled eyes.

  The two weeks of acting as deputy in what he considered a great public wrong had taken their toll on Caryll. His stomach clenched, his stammer was worse, two of his nails were taped because he had bitten them to the bleeding quick. He saw his inability to so much as raise a convincing argument to his father about reopening as a devastating personal indictment.

  He jabbed the buzzer on his desk for a secretary—the guest rooms had been dismantled and furnished as offices for his Tower staff. Plump, lively Betty hurried in, the pleats of her skirt swishing. She took the pile of edited letters for retyping and set down a handful of clippings.

  Caryll followed the strike news obsessively. Frostbitten men still tramped with their placards while others huddled self-incarcerated within the dead heart of Woodland; a grotesque denial of Tom’s closing up shop. Yet Caryll accepted that Justin—still immured—and the other strike leaders had no choice, for the cruel reality was that in Detroit alone, the closing of Onyx had drafted 125,000 more into the army of unemployed. There were no jobs. There was not enough cash in the overburdened welfare offices to feed the families for a single week, much less furnish coal or pay the rent. So the strikers were condemned to sit or trudge—and hope for a miracle.

  The phone rang.

  Brewster Vance, Caryll’s executive aide, put through only the urgent, top-level calls, so on the other end of the line a government dignitary, a world leader, or a relative was primed to coerce Caryll into doing what he wished, to the point of daft self-flagellation, that he were empowered to do: light up Onyx. Popping one of his antacid mints into his mouth, he picked up the phone.

  In the course of the afternoon he spoke to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to General Douglas MacArthur, to Mayor Murphy, to his Uncle Olaf. He received a delegation of gray-faced dealers. Edsel Ford dropped by to inquire nervously if there was any truth to the rumor that Onyx would become a General Motors subsidiary. “Dad’s not selling out, he’s closing down,” Caryll reassured. “Edsel, you tell me. How do you go about closing an empire? I’ve been tearing out my remaining hair.” The sons of two powerful, strong-willed geniuses exchanged commiserative glances.

  The butler drew the curtains at five thirty when he brought up Caryll’s glass of milk, and Caryll took time to look at the clippings.

  Strikers double up to save coal was the caption of a wire-service photograph of unshaven men, thin women, and thinner children crowding around a potbellied stove.

  In Hamtramck last night three houses belonging to AAW members were burned to the ground. Police are investigating arson.

  CAN U.S. ECONOMY SURVIVE MINUS HALF THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY?

  NEW YORK CAR DEALER LEAPS FROM BROOKLYN BRIDGE

  STRIKER BEATEN TO DEATH BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANT

  A Woodland janitor was found frozen to death in his home in Inkster.

  Caryll set down his empty glass carefully and hunched over, his elbows clamped to his knees. I must have an ulcer, he thought, whatever the lab tests show, I must. He was a staunch believer in the current wisdom that stomach ailments were psychosomatic: he attributed his painful gut to his adoration of his wife—he never should have let his weakness where Zoe was concerned prevent him from contacting Justin. Together, he and Justin might have averted this evil hour, this catastrophe.

  He pressed his sweating forehead to his knees.

  Is it too late? he thought. Dad had wanted to give Justin five percent of Onyx. Strange, that. Still, it proves enormous trust and respect if not affection. If Justin wrote a letter—Dad hasn’t opened any of his letters. If Justin wrote a letter, I would read it to Dad. Force him to listen. Between us, maybe we could nudge him into some sort of compromise. Hah! That’s a laugh. Dad’s changed the world, but when has he ever changed his mind? Once. The time that Justin and I, together, convinced him to build the Seven. Who knows what goes on in Dad’s head? Maybe he’s waiting for a token submission from the other side, from Justin.

  Caryll tentatively straightened his spine. The spasm had eased. Massaging below his waistcoat, he thought: There’ll be hell to pay if Zoe finds out, but I have to try.

  He went through his dressing room into the bedroom where sweet scents and Zoe’s breathy voice twined from the open door of her bathroom—she made her telephone calls during her marathon soaks.

  “I have to go out for a bit,” he called.

  “Hold on, Joan.” Splashing sounds. “Caryll, the Rochevilles and Artie and Agnes are coming to dinner.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  From the heated ten-car garage he took one of the Sevens used by the servants, driving at his cautious thirty to Woodland Park, where he slowed at unlit corners to peer at street signs.

  He braked at an ugly matchbox house. The door was opened by a short, broad man who clutched a napkin and stared questioningly at him. Voices, as of a party, burst out with the aroma of peppered cabbage.

  Caryll was positive he had the wrong house. “Is this M-Mrs. Hutchinson’s residence?”

  The man examined him. “You’re Caryll Bridger, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to disturb—”

  “Elisse! You have a visitor!” The call was triumphant.

  IV

  The huck toweling on which Justin curled did nothing to alleviate the hardness of the floor (there had been hundreds of cases of canned food stored away but no bedding), and he had the unpleasant sensation that his bones had sunk through his flesh to be embraced by dank cement. Yet he did not stir. To get up meant to put on a confident face as president of the sour-smelling, doomed Brotherhood.

  The rubber shop supervisor had had a table model Radiola stashed in his filing cabinet, and this crackling link with the outside world informed them that they were striking a moribund company. The sit-downers, though, laughed at the thought that anyone, even Tom Bridger, could walk away from a cool billion. “Old Tom’s playin’ it cagey, this is his way of bustin’ the strike” was the sanguine consensus. After semistarvation on their double work week pay, after the preying incubus of fear at losing their jobs, the wracking speedup, the humiliation of being a badge number not a name, Security’s impersonal brutalizing, they had finally restored their manhood by hitting back. And despite two isolated weeks of worrying about their families, most of them were blessed with a light-hearted assuredness of victory.


  But Justin knew Tom. Tom’s motivations might be complex but he never behaved deviously. Thus he shared none of the prevalent optimism. And now, feigning sleep, he saw this barren industrial complex as a metaphor for the world, the guiding hand (Tom’s? God’s?) absent, life bumbling along without reason or meaning.

  “Hey, Prof!”

  Justin groaned, blinking.

  A dark, stubbled face hung above his. “Prof, wake up! Your missus is here.”

  “What the devil …?”

  “Over by the main door.”

  Justin was on his feet, gaping at the small, pretty woman unwinding a long plaid scarf from her curly brown hair as she smiled animatedly at him. He ran clomping in unlaced boots, halting, and as she began to laugh he swept her into a hug that raised her from the ground. Reticent about public displays, Justin was conscious of the good-natured guffaws, yet he could not deny himself an extra second of holding her, inhaling her crisp, unique fragrances—and neither could he repress a tinge of anguish that this physical yearning had somehow become unilateral.

  Setting her down, he demanded, “What are you doing here? How did you get past the police at the gates?”

  “Magic,” she laughed. “Here, help me with my coat.”

  “What have you got in this? Bricks?”

  Dramatically she opened the front to show two filled pillowcases. Undoing a safety pin, she extricated an envelope folded from brown packing paper. Eyes sparkling, she said, “Mail wasn’t part of the deal, so I sneaked it by the law.”

  Men were converging, drawn by the swirl of excitement.

  Seeing Coleman, she went to him, resting her hand on the gangling mountain boy’s sleeve. “Johnny, the baby, he died … the night after the sit-down started.… The Brothers were at the funeral, so many … I …” Her voice tightened and she shook her head.

  Justin, tying his bootlaces, was appointing committees to sort and pass out the letters. Elisse wiped her eyes, staring around the enormous hall with its bewilderment of conveyors and machinery.

  Justin took her arm.

  “It really dwarfs you, doesn’t it,” she said. “Know something, I’ve never been inside a factory before.”