Tom seldom made so lengthy a speech, and he never catalogued his accomplishments, even in this backhanded manner. Justin’s hopes teetered higher again as he decided that Tom needed to buck himself up before the denouement. “I never think of you as a farmboy.”
“I was, I was. The question is, should I have stuck it out in North Dakota?”
“The world’s better off by a long shot that you left.”
Tom turned, the whiteness of teeth and hair showing in the dark car. “You wouldn’t bullshit me?”
“Life’s certainly more democratic. And God knows healthier. I can remember flies hovering over the carpet of horse manure on every street.”
“Then you’re saying I haven’t turned in too rotten a performance?”
“Why ask me, why does my opinion matter?” Get on with it, get on with it! God, he was as impatient as Ben—and even more vulnerable! He yearned for some of the calm that others attributed to him. For a moment there was only the sound of the idling engine.
“The way I look at it, Justin, a man’s life works in cycles like an engine. The first stroke you’re a kid, taking in your air and gas—your ideas. The second stroke you’re growing up, compressing your charge. That means deciding your goals, what you want to do or be. Then you ignite and explode. The third stroke you’re full-grown, delivering your full power. Doing your main work.” Tom shrugged. “Then suddenly you’re old and look into your exhaust gases and try to see what you’ve done. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ve accomplished some good you can pass on to your next generation.”
Justin held his breath.
Tom stared at the curved neon letters. “Jesus, what’s happened to this place! A funeral home!” He shook his head and fell silent.
The freezing, quiet night wrapped Justin in an unendurable expectancy. He spoke first. “Tom, why did you bring me here?” His voice strove to be casual, but some vital part of him cringed. Begging, he thought. I’m begging.
“The first time I was invited here, I met your mother.…”
The flat voice faded on a dreamy, tender note that Justin would not have believed in Tom’s range had he not read those yellowed love letters.
A mindless euphoria buoyed him, and he recalled standing at the Rutland Gate front door, determined to “look after Mother,” shivering in the draft as the pale, clear gray eyes of the tall stranger gazed down at him with a pinpoint intensity. That moment was strung to this by inexorable wires. “Tell me about her,” he said hoarsely. “Tell me about Mother.”
“She came down … it was as if she were flying … she didn’t seem to touch the steps.…”
After a silence Justin prodded, “So Uncle Andrew introduced you?”
“Yes. She was beautiful.…” Tom shook his head. “I didn’t really know if she was beautiful or not. She glowed and shone … it was impossible to tell.…”
Tom’s long, narrow fingers jumped to the ignition key, plunging them into silence with a jerk that seemed unconscious, involuntary. An approaching car threw beams of light, and Justin saw Tom’s baffled, agonized expression, the sweat running down his forehead and cheeks. He appeared in the clutch of some violent struggle that his mind had little control over. His muscles clenched in a spasm, as though a pair of inhuman foxes were battling within the terrain of the lean, strong body. His face twitched and he bent forward.
Justin, remembering the earlier heart attack, inquired, “Tom? Are you all right?”
The Seven rocked in the air current of the passing car, and Tom’s expression altered jerkily, as if one of those ravenous foxes, having demolished the other, had taken over. His lips took on a set, sardonic grin.
“What is it, Tom?”
“Coming here makes me feel old, that’s all. Brings back the days of my youth.”
“Yes,” Justin heard himself say hoarsely. “You were telling me about Mother.”
“The Major had invited me to breakfast. You can bet I was quaking; still, I managed to blab out a request to use his showroom as a shop. That was the beginning.”
“And Mother?”
“She didn’t eat with us. She came down after—I told you, as if she were flying.”
“Tom, for Christ’s sake, the family knows about us! You saw their reactions tonight. You heard them!”
Tom peered ahead and the profile was implacable. “Listen, you want fiction stories, then go back to Hugh’s. He’ll tell them to you.”
Rejection once again. He hadn’t thought it possible. A groan escaped Justin, and he set his teeth into his lower lip to silence it. And then he was buried in a crushing avalanche of emotion—anger, hurt, shame, perplexity, loss, embarrassment for his evaporated pipe dreams. Yet in his misery he could not repress a twinge of pity for Tom, for his desperate attempt to maintain such a lie. Why? For what? Justin clenched his fist against his forehead, and a sharp jab of pain brought him back to reality.
Elisse. The circumstances of his birth seemed a ridiculous trifle in comparison to this ultimate exigency. Elisse. The police have her, and God knows what they’re doing to her. And here I sit: Why aren’t I at the station, bailing her out?
“Tom, let’s get a move on,” he said curtly.
“Right.” Tom started the car. “Sorry about the detour.”
After a mile or so they passed a brightly lighted delicatessen.
“Stop!” Justin ordered.
The coupe squealed to a halt. “What’s up?”
“That place was open. Back up. I need to get some sandwiches.”
“Food! Now?”
“For the women. It’s something we always try to do when people are taken in. Most of them have never been inside a jail and they need a bit of cheering.” His voice was brusque with anger that the deli sandwiches for the imprisoned women had won over his nervestrung personal terrors about Elisse.
Tom shifted into reverse. “There’s such a thing as having principles that are too high, Justin, God help you.”
At the old three-story fortress-like police station, Justin flung open the car door.
“I’ll tag along,” Tom said.
“No need.” Justin, one foot on the running board, hefted out two cartons redolent with spicy odors.
“The voice of a substantial taxpayer greases the gears of the law.”
“You better get back to Hugh’s.” Justin could not help venting some of his shame at Tom’s ultimate rejection. He added tonelessly, “Mrs. Bridger seemed upset about something or other.”
“The hell with you!”
“Thanks for the lift,” Justin said in the same colorless tone.
“I’ll hang around for—”
“Somebody will pick us up. We don’t need you!” Justin burst out, and the Onyx rocked as he kicked shut the door.
II
The crowded cells resembled animal cages with their barred roofs below the ceiling. The place smelled of vomit, nervous bodies, and lidless toilets.
A turnkey shouted above the shrill feminine hubbub, “Here’s your pimp, girlies.”
Sixty or so blushing women rose from bare-springed cots, straightening shapeless coats with embarrassed tugs. To most of them, being here, for whatever reason, was a scarring disgrace.
Justin peered around.
Elisse was not here!
The dizziness returned, full force, and gripping the lower carton harder, he said in a loud, clear voice, “To those of you who don’t know me, or can’t recognize me behind these shiners, I’m president of the Amalgamated Automobile Workers. I’m proud of you, proud that you were arrested standing up for the right of every American worker to organize. Tomorrow morning we’ll have lawyers down here to bail you out. In the meantime, here’s an evening snack from the Brotherhood.”
As he passed thick corned beef or ham sandwiches between bars, he repeated, “Has anyone in here seen Elisse? My wife? She’s yea high.” He held his hand to his shoulder. “Brown hair.”
“Oh, men,” shrugged one jovial loom girl whom he recognized as an
AAW member. Swallowing a mouthful of sandwich, she said, “Elisse isn’t just ‘yea high’ with brown hair. She’s kinda stunning. A lot like Janet Gaynor, as a matter of fact.”
“I think so, too, Gertie.” Justin smiled. “Was she with you today?”
Gertie shook her head. “Not today, Prof. I never seen her today.”
“I did.” A thickset woman spoke up from a nearby cell.
Justin strode to her. “Where?”
“Near the overpass.”
“When was that?”
“A minute or so before the creeps gassed us.” The fat woman wore a frayed man’s hat, which gave her a Tugboat Annie raffishness. “She was crazy. She didn’t see nothing except the way they was working on your face.”
“Was she arrested?”
“They packed me into a Black Maria.”
“You’re sure she wasn’t brought in?”
“She wasn’t with us, I never seen her after that, so let’s hope she wasn’t.”
Justin hurried to hand out the last few sandwiches.
III
The pudgy-faced desk sergeant continued his telephone conversation, idly picking his ear with the eraser end of his pencil, ignoring Justin.
When he hung up, Justin demanded, “Where’s Elisse Hutchinson?”
The sergeant yawned mightily. “Didn’t you find her in the south cellblock?”
“You know all the women in there have been booked.”
“So? Since when do you union comrades give your real names?”
“It’s illegal to hold her without booking her.”
“You Bolshies and your rights.”
“Where have you got her?” Justin’s palm slammed on the desk, rattling the pencil holder. “Where is she?”
The full cheeks quivered. “You’re sucking for more of that medicine you got on the overpass!”
A flat voice behind Justin said, “Chief Arden figured Mrs. Hutchinson was here.”
The sergeant goggled at Tom. “Mr. Bridger,” he mumbled respectfully. “What … why are you here, sir?”
“We’re together.” Tom indicated Justin. “What about that other woman?”
“There aren’t any, Mr. Bridger.”
Tom’s mouth twitched. “Arden mentioned one.” His voice was low and frightened.
Steady, steady, Justin told himself. He felt as though every drop of his blood had halted in the terrible necessity that he not move or scream out questions. He must wait, he must listen. The wall clock ticked noisily against his ears. In this big, shabby place that smelled of stale tobacco smoke, everything was in abeyance. The little cluster of blue-uniformed cops beyond the scarred oak barrier formed a tableau. The crown of pain encircled his head.
The desk sergeant’s full face was composing itself into jowled gravity. “The chief told you about that?”
“He did.”
“Everything, sir?”
“How should I know? He’s home. Give him a ring and find out.”
“That’s not necessary, Mr. Bridger.” The sergeant turned. “Mushski, take the union man down to 117.”
“Me?” asked a young cop, nervously fingering back his profuse, wavy blond hair.
“You, Mushski.” The sergeant added with a veiled vindictiveness, “It ain’t up to us to deny anyone their rights.”
Tom followed the young cop and Justin to the freight elevator: none of the three spoke as they jerked down to the basement with its dank labyrinth of corridors. The torn muscles in Justin’s groin had stiffened, and he spraddled as he limped swiftly after Mushski. They turned at a hallway. The one door was at the end. Above the scarred woodwork was painted 117.
Mushski gripped the doorknob, blurting, “Here we are.”
Justin blinked rapidly, and Tom gripped his arm.
The profound chill with its reek of carbolic and undertones of thicker, meatlike odors told them where they were even before Mushski pressed the switch. Four dangling bulbs glared on unplastered brick walls and a gray cement floor with moisture darkening around the drain hole to prove a recent hosing down.
Along the windowless walls ranged waist-high tables. Four were occupied by sheet-draped bodies. The feet protruded, bare and pitiful for their veined whiteness, their bunions and corns, their manilatagged right big toes.
“They haven’t made any announcement yet, or contacted the families,” Mushski said apologetically. “There was four deaths on Archibald today. Three men and a woman. The woman got no identification on her.”
Tom, having secured this information on the telephone in Hugh’s library, had been hoping against hope that it would have nothing to do with Justin’s wife.
Justin limped to the table where the policeman was drawing back the sheet from the head of the smallest corpse.
VI
A khaki arm descended and the billy club hit her head. Her hat flew off. Her feet grew heavy, their weight pulling at her thighs and buckling her knees.
“Justin,” she gasped.
The heaviness of her feet drew her inexorably downward.
Again she thought trampled to death, this time in conjunction with herself. If I fall under this herd, I’ll be trampled to death. Yet she was not afraid. Death was an abstraction inextricably mingled with old people, death was not possible, that was all. How could she die? She was young, Justin needed her, her children needed her. I can’t duck out on Ben and Tonia, she thought, not permanently, not until they’re grown. They need me. To halt her fall she grasped at the lapels of a man’s coat.
The blow to her head had dulled neural connections between her brain and her hands. Vomit-soaked fabric slipped through her fingers. She sank to her knees, making weak, swimming movements at the trousers and skirts struggling and pressing around her. You have to pull yourself up, she thought, her brain desperately alert, her hands sliding sluggishly along a coarse-haired fur coat. She continued to fall into the squirming, shoving darkness, the enveloping darkness, the inevitable darkness. She struggled with her enfeebled resources to rise, and a tormented, screaming wail gathered loudness until it filled the universe.
A heavy workboot caught her just above the nape, a coup de grace. She fell under the feet of coughing, gas-panicked stampeders.
Boots and shoes trampled her, puncturing her intestines and organs, pulping her flesh. There was no merciful lulling, no numbness. Her maddened scream was cut off when a woman’s narrow heel destroyed her larynx.
In agony, Elisse’s life was, quite literally, stamped out. In the last instants that she would wear the raiment of mortal flesh, however, she was vouchsafed comfort. A sense of failure had always dogged her. To her mind she was a rotten daughter, an apostate mother, of late a sadly tepid wife, a Jew in name only, a zero in her dedication to the causes to which she adhered. Her decisions inevitably had been governed by her emotions. She was, or so she had believed until now, betrayed at every turn by that spongy will of hers. She had never possessed the fixed compass point of logic or the eternal truth of ethics. Now, though, she perceived her life differently. On this little ball of spinning mud, she, a finite atom, had made the minuscule decisions permitted her from the only place she could trust. Her own soft and very mortal heart.
A body stumbled athwart her head, smothering the last breath from her.
And then she was remembering from earliest childhood. She and her parents stood around a table set with the good red Haviland china, the bone-handled English sterling silver, and a dish arrayed with a sprig of parsley, a lamb shank, a hard egg, a broken matzo, all the Passover symbols. Her father, with a foolishly happy smile, held up a sacramental ruby imprisoned within a wine glass. Behind him glowed a large form. The angel Elijah, she thought, he’s come to drink his wine. How wondrous that the angel should have Justin’s face. Nobody in this world would ever know that Elisse Kaplan Hutchinson’s final comprehensive thought before the last revelation engulfed her was the one with which for five thousand years Jews have greeted Death. Elisse’s piping voice joined with Daddy’s
and Mother’s in the only Hebrew words she knew: Adonai elohenu, Adonai echod.
The Lord our God, the Lord is One.
V
“Oh my sweet, my poor sweet,” Justin whispered. Bending to kiss what had been his wife’s forehead, he was transfixed by the same desire that had overcome him years earlier. To elope with Elisse, to carry her to some enchanted green land where he could cherish and protect her, to live the rest of his days with her in that place where she would make him smile with her sharp, witty tongue, where she would share his life and love, where the warmth of her heart would melt the bitter curse of his loneliness.
Unless he could take her to that land his tormented, breaking heart was doomed to a death as irrevocably final and absolute as hers.
Shuddering with vehement, uncontrollable sobs, he stooped to lift the martyred remnants of her.
Tom and the young policeman took his arms, propelling him from the icy morgue.
VI
It was nearly three in the morning.
Tom hunched shivering in his car. A freezing wind had come up, whirling occasional scraps of old newspapers in a dance past the feeble bulb on Justin’s front porch.
Justin, after that maddened, wrenching outburst in the morgue, had leaned his head against the basement corridor wall for what had seemed an eternity. He had gasped aloud in a harrowing struggle to control the physical manifestations of his grief, then had returned upstairs, paying no attention to Tom or the police other than to avert his head from them as he spoke into the telephone. He spoke quietly and without inflection, first to his home, then to Nalley’s, the mortuary in the Major’s chateau.
Soon after, the man whose name Tom had so often heard—Mitch Shapiro—had arrived. It was the stocky labor organizer who had wept when he and Justin shared a mourners’ embrace, Mitch who had given Tom such a bloodshot glance of contempt that Tom had retreated to wait in his Seven outside the fortress-like station until the two emerged. Tom had been incapable of leaving Justin. That demented sobbing outburst over the poor, mutilated corpse had wracked Tom; he had never witnessed grief so engulfing, so raw, and the eruptíon was doubly devastating, coming from a man as self-contained as Justin. Though he knew his help was not wanted, he had followed the old car here.
Onyx Page 53