“She had your bastard—”
“That’s enough!” Tom snapped.
“I’ve been square with you. But every single day of our marriage you lived a lie!”
“We’ll go over this when we’re alone.”
“Hah! As if you could ever explain! You’re beyond me. First you push him ahead for all he’s worth, then there’s years without a word to him, and now suddenly you’re taking up with him again. Who could understand what goes on in your head besides automobiles! All right, I can’t figure you out. But you can understand me. Tom, you aren’t leaving this house.”
“Let’s go, Justin.”
“Tom—” Justin started.
“Don’t you dare, Tom!” Maud was screaming.
“Let’s get a move on,” Tom said to Justin.
“Leave this room and we’re through!” Maud had never intended a challenge, but she could repress neither her fury at always playing second fiddle to her dead rival nor her own inviolable honesty: it was the same as that long ago day in their stateroom with the foghorns wailing. She opened her mouth and her anguish burst out. “Go with him and as far as I’m concerned it’s like you’re on top of that skinny, black-haired whore again!”
Tom gripped Justin’s arm, propelling him from the library.
V
For a minute there was silence in the room, yet the large, warm library seemed to ring with the sound of furious voices.
Hugh pulled back a curtain, staring after the moving red lights, his thoughts focused on his nephew and brother on the front seat of that Onyx. Shivers reverberated along his skin. It took him a while to pinpoint what he felt. Left out. Cast away. Abandoned. Forsaken. I should be with them. They’re my people. Not Caryll. But what am I to them? A cipher puffed with grandiose dreams of past and future king-making, a scarred, marred gargoyle. Alone, Hugh thought, forlorn, forlorn.
The taillights disappeared around the curve. He went to pour himself a stiff drink. At least I’m forlorn in style: Russian caviar and Polish vodka. The thought garnered him no comfort.
Maud’s hands were clasped on her lap. Her seated figure had a granitic heaviness as though she had suddenly gained thirty pounds. Why had she hurled down that gauntlet? Though the revelation of Justin’s identity had shocked and horrified her, she accepted that men were men and the past was the past, so why had it seemed so monstrous a betrayal that Tom would drive his natural son to the police station? Why was she caught up in this irrational cyclone of jealousy? Antonia was dead, and by her own sensible lights Maud had always been realistic even about that, as she mentally referred to Tom’s major adultery.
He lied to me, he deceived me all along, he lived a lie, that’s why I’m in this state, she told herself, but her honesty balked at this. If she were outraged solely by the deception, why did she have these sharp, feverish visions of stabbing the dead woman, shooting her with a pearl-handled revolver, of tightening her hands around that long, slender neck? Why this mosaic of murderous urges? Bending stiffly, she fumbled for her sewing. Unconscious of what she was doing, she pulled at the pink batiste, ripping her fine stitchery.
“Mother Bridger,” Zoe murmured. “You’re ruining Petra’s dress.”
Maud’s fingers continued to rip apart the smocking.
Zoe’s tears oozed silently without marring her loveliness. Her weeping had nothing to do with her mother-in-law. Though the revelation about her brother’s disparate blood had jarred her to her roots; it was the apparition of Justin himself—battered, still so very dear—that shocked her psyche from its self-centered locus. She had been lashed with pity for his poor bruises and for that awful, humiliated smile. Justin, whom she had always considered as invincibly strong, was vulnerable, as vulnerable as she. Maybe more vulnerable because the good have fewer defenses. Dabbing at her tears, she glanced at Caryll.
His neat brown hair was stringy with sweat. Catching her gaze, he sighed. “I hope she’s there,” he said.
“She?”
“Elisse. She has to be.” Caryll shook his head and returned to his painful reverie.
From earliest memory he had attempted with woeful lack of success to pour his soft, artistic self into the outsize mold of that iron genius who had drawn the earth together and had hammered out the machinery of mass production. Though in his adulthood Caryll had come to question the benefits of assembly lines, he had never doubted the heroic image of his father. Tom Bridger was a giant of a man. A billionaire altruist who had given the world its first seven dollar day, a brilliant offbeat from the top of his intuitive, uncultured head to his narrow (sometimes worn down) heels. Even Tom’s rages to Caryll were protean and therefore admirable.
For the first time Caryll was noting the dark crevices that defaced his idol.
In a moment of complicated clarity he accepted that Tom’s siring of a bastard did not offend him. Indeed, Caryll, loving and respecting Justin, derived a slender security from sharing with him the responsibility of being the giant’s son. No. It was Tom’s treatment of Justin that shook him with a grief surely akin to what he would register at his father’s graveside. Caryll reviewed the sordid, disgraceful way that Tom had kept aloof from Justin—even after that mess at school, when to show a touch of friendship would have been natural. His own semirepressed questions about Tom’s abrupt yet oddly generous treatment of his friend were answered. His father obviously felt a good deal for Justin, yet did not care to accept paternity. Caryll, himself a tenderly devoted parent, was unutterably horrified.
A tap on the door. “Dinner is served,” announced a tall footman.
“We aren’t staying,” Caryll said with unaccustomed curtness. “Have my car brought around.”
“Immediately, Mr. Bridger, sir.” The sound of the footman’s step was cut off by the closing of the metal fire door that led to the kitchen wing.
“I’ll come with you,” Maud said. The color had returned to her cheeks in red, splotchy marks.
“We’ll be glad to drop you off,” Caryll replied.
“I’m not going back to the Farm.”
Caryll gave his mother a penetrating look, asking quietly, “Would it help, then, to stay with us awhile?”
“Yes.” Maud crushed the small, ruined dress into her sewing bag. “Until I find out how to file for a divorce.”
They all stared at her.
Hugh’s nostrils flared, then he forced his expression into a show of earnestness as he reverted to his self-determined role: his brother’s keeper. It all came down to this. Tom would be happier and better off with his wife than without her. “Come on, Maud, you’ve got too much common sense for that.”
“I’ve had it up to here,” she cried.
“This must come as an awful shock, I realize that, Maud, but you can’t walk out on a whole life together, a good marriage—”
“He always wanted her.”
“You’re his wife, the one who helped him get started. You gave him his home, his heir. He’s always relied on you and your honesty.”
“All along she’s had her claws in Tom through Justin.” Maud’s voice had sunk to a loud, unhappy whisper.
“I’m the one you should blame, Maud,” Hugh said. “I put my nose in and brought him to Detroit.”
“You’ve always done Tom’s dirty work for him!”
Hugh winced, but he said smoothly, “At least stay and have dinner.”
“You aren’t going to change my mind, Hugh!” she cried. “Why couldn’t he have been honest with me? I’ve always been with him. Was he trying to protect her reputation, or what? Why did he have to skulk? That’s what hurts. All the lying and pretending. As if I cared where he poked his peter!”
The vulgarity burst out with a look of twisted misery. Hugh looked into Maud’s flushed, sweating face and fleetingly empathized with his sister-in-law. Like him, she lived by the light of Tom’s sun, and, again like him, she yearned to feel the warmth of her devotion reflected back.
“Masquerades and lies,” she cried. “The pair of you
! Always lying about everything to do with that whore—”
Zoe covered her ears and ran from the library. Caryll hurried after her, trotting behind the sensually swaying, rounded hips to the vast, high vestibule where Maud’s shouts were no longer audible.
“I couldn’t take any more,” she murmured, her enormous wet eyes fixed pleadingly on him. “Ahh, Caryll, let’s get home?”
“We have to wait for Mother,” Caryll said, tears in his own eyes. Ducking into the brocade-lined coatroom to get their things and regain his composure, he said, “Zoe, remember how we used to badger Justin about those photographs and memorabilia of his father? Your father?” He returned to settle the cape around her shoulders, and his nostrils were tickled by the drifts of specially compounded perfume rising from tawny stone martens. “Can you imagine what it must have done to him when he found out?”
“I felt so sorry for him.… I’d never seen him ashamed.”
“I couldn’t look at him. God, the way Dad’s treated him, it’s really pathological. Never inviting him—either of you—to the Farm, not even when it would have been perfectly natural. And those summers we worked at the Hamtramck, me and the Sinclairs and him! The four of us always ate in the executive dining room. Justin was never asked—well, I invited him a few times. Can you imagine Dad doing that, always leaving him out? He always handed him the tough assignments, and very few bouquets for doing well.”
“Later on, though, he gave him important jobs.”
“Justin earned his promotions. But you’ve hit on the paradox.”
“Paradox?”
“From the day Justin started at Onyx, Dad went out of the way to teach him everything. Automobiles, engines, industrial planning, things he’s a genius at.” Caryll’s voice was musing. “Now I think of it, he must have been trying to compress their relationship within the limits of business. But why? He could have told at least the family. Mother’s a thousand times more hurt, finding out this way. And God knows it’s crushed me.” With distraught movements Caryll pulled on his overcoat. “Remember about the wedding present? I told you he was set to give Justin the same number of shares. When I asked why, he came up with some rigmarole about wanting to keep Justin at Onyx, but looking back, I’m pretty sure he had in mind that both of us would inherit equally.”
“That proves something, doesn’t it?”
“But what?”
“Don’t you think he cares a lot?”
“I always sensed he did, far more than he let on. But after Justin left, he never contacted him, never saw him until noon today. Could you imagine going nearly ten years without seeing Clarice or Petra or Lynn?”
Zoe, devoted to her pretty little daughters, said, “Never. The whole thing’s beyond me.… Do you think … maybe it’s because she’s Jewish?”
“Hugh’s the family bigot, not Dad.” Caryll’s voice caught, and he said gruffly, “Listen to me, talking so authoritatively. What do I know about Dad? That he’s been a model father to me, and he’s treated his other son abominably.”
“Caryll …”
“Yes.”
“Do you still feel the same about me?”
“What a question.”
“If it turns out I’m like Justin …?”
“My sister?”
“Yes.”
“I was a champion fool about that. One thing I am positive of. Hugh’s too stuck on our noble line to permit incest.” Caryll’s voice shook with the atypical irony. He fumbled with the knot of his scarf.
“But say if …” Her thick dark lashes lowered. “Then would you still love me?”
“Ahh, Zoe, if it were possible for me to stop, I would have years ago.”
Her sigh shivered on her furs. “It gives me the willies, your father fooling around with Mother.”
“I only met her once, at the Southwark opening, but she was so vivid, I can still remember feeling happy at being with her. She certainly wasn’t another floozy to him.”
“How are you so positive? Didn’t you just say he’s a big, dark mystery to you?”
Caryll’s sigh was wrung from him. “Feet of clay,” he muttered.
Zoe in her silver-strapped evening sandals was taller than he. Looking into her husband’s troubled, bleak gray eyes, she straightened his white silk muffler, a sincerely tender gesture. “This isn’t your problem, Caryll.”
“Who says? To discover that all along he’s abdicated his most basic responsibility!”
“Mother Bridger says she’s leaving. Are you thinking of it?” asked Zoe.
“I’m too confused to think.”
“Poor honey bear.”
“Dad needs me,” Caryll said in spite of himself, then added angrily, “The job’s hell.”
“Yes, your poor stomach.”
“I waste half my time trying to figure how he’d handle any given situation.”
“Caryll, I know sometimes I’m … bad.… But that doesn’t mean I’m not on your side. I care, care a lot. Whatever you decide, it’s all right with me.”
He clasped the warm, slim hand, grateful that for all his beautiful wife’s frailties she had never been grasping or meretricious. Then into his mind came Tom’s expression as he had listened on the phone, a peculiar baring of teeth, a glint of eyes centered with fear. What had he heard that had impelled him to accompany Justin? A shiver went down Caryll’s spine. I hope Elisse is okay, he thought, and though this was one of the times he and Zoe were perfectly attuned, he knew enough not to voice this particular alarm.
Maud’s heavy step was sounding in the Great Hall: he hurried for her thick sable coat.
CHAPTER 32
Silence clamped on the cold dark streets of Detroit. Curtains or blinds were drawn in mansions and shabby houses alike, store windows were barred, a few cars made their way through the night, but no pedestrians. After the riot the city crouched licking its wounds.
The station was on the eastern edge of Highland Park, a long way from Hugh’s house. Tom, spine curved, fingers tensed lightly on the wheel, handled the little Seven coupe as though it were a racer.
They sped along Lake Shore Drive in silence.
Justin, despite his clogging apprehensions about Elisse, could not dispel the awkwardness—no, it was more an unmanning edginess—that he felt in Tom’s presence. Between them on the leatherette seat rose the specter of the lifelong deception. Though the truth had burst out a few minutes earlier in Hugh’s library, not until Tom admitted paternity would the ghostly barrier be swept away and a lost and devalued part of Justin’s self be restored. It was an old story, this reprehensibly childish need to hear fatherhood stated in Tom’s flat, laconic tones, yet that did not make it any less powerful. Justin glanced at Tom. In the dim light the long-familiar profile appeared relaxed. Yet how could Tom ignore the catastrophic scene, the mass recognition? How could he behave as though nothing worth mentioning had transpired amid Hugh’s resplendently bound first editions? Why wasn’t he admitting the truth? Why this purposeful silence?
Justin, atwitch with unanswerable questions, clammy with fears about his wife, tried to take his mind off his own problems by listing the major points in the negotiation that would commence tomorrow morning.
Tom braked for the stop sign at an empty intersection. When the signal changed, he continued along Jefferson.
Justin said, “You should have turned, Tom.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you there.”
“This is out of the way.”
“A minor detour.”
“We don’t have time for detours.”
“We’ll take five extra minutes. There’s no traffic.”
Scarcely a car moved in the normally congested downtown, no lines waited by the ticket booths of effulgently lit movie palaces, not even at the Hindu splendor of the Fox on Woodward.
“Tom,” Justin said edgily. “Let’s go straight to the station house.”
“No more than five minutes extra, I promise you.”
Justin, by now
grasping that they were headed to the mansion built by his great-uncle and inhabited by his mother, breathed deeply in an attempt to relax. Soon it began to seem predetermined, this drive through a deserted city, destiny that Tom should choose that old house as the place to tell him.
Woodward Avenue had fallen on hard times. Its arboreal arch of great trees was long gone. Commercial buildings, hock shops, shabby Coney Islands, mom ’n’ pop groceries interspersed the once proud residences—many of which, having diminished into boardinghouses or kitchenette apartments, were defaced by the metallic gleam of fire escapes.
Between the limestone towers of the Major’s chateau glowed a white neon sign: NALLEY’S FUNERAL CHAPEL. The lovingly tended gardens had given way to blacktop for mourners’ parking.
Tom braked at the curb. Shifting to neutral, nursing the idling motor, he gazed musingly at the house. “A Versailles in old Detroit.”
“The architect had Chenonceaux in mind—or so Mother told me.” Justin’s throat went taut as he mentioned Antonia.
Tom made an uncertain gesture, a reaching out toward Justin, a hapless attempt at physical contact that was more poignant for its failure. His hand cupped the gearshift.
“It’s been one long time without you, Justin.”
Euphoric gratitude roiled through Justin, and he stirred in the car seat. “I wrote often.”
“You did? I never got any letters.”
“Never mailed them.”
“I swiped photographs of your kids from Caryll,” he confessed.
“You did?” Justin was conscious of a vibrato in his voice, a sound Verdi might have used in an aria to show desperate hope. Say it now, he thought. Now!
“It used to kill the best part of an hour to get out this far,” Tom said. “That is, for those of us who couldn’t afford a bicycle. Even for the carriage class it took five times as long as it does now. Distances, kid, in case word hasn’t reached you, have changed.”
The shift from unprecedented, rumble-voiced closeness to jaunty banter sank Justin’s anticipations. “That’s pretty much your doing, Tom,” he said levelly.
Tom touched the horn. “Not to toot my own,” he said, “but next to you sits pretty much the cause of low morality in youth and the reason for weakened leg muscles and lower-back pain. Yeah, and meager church attendance, too. Robbery—felons now have speedy getaway. I’ve handed a lethal weapon to drunks and imbeciles. Disfigured the countryside with billboards and ratty tourist courts. Caused parking problems and a dearth of lonely farms for forward-thinking youths to abandon.”
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