Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  A furious gust buffeted the Seven, and the draft penetrated Tom’s overcoat, which was open so he could massage his left shoulder and upper arm.

  His promise to Antonia, kept at such great cost, had been broken by the fixed and immutable laws of heredity. In Hugh’s library, drenched with benumbed horror, Tom had accepted that he must unload his heart to Justin and accordingly had driven him to the Major’s old place for the purpose of confessing; yet, gazing up at the limestone walls, fumbling for the right words to explain his lie-buttressed lie, he had experienced a prickling numbness on his left side, a numbness that had quickly sharpened to minor though ineffaceable twists of pain. To confess would cut his last tie with Antonia, and that he was not strong enough to do. The twinging persisted, a reminder of his old heart trouble.

  Justin’s was the only house with electricity on, and this outlined the cracker boxes on either side—once, far back in his own youth, Tom would have considered these nice homes. He lifted his gaze to the moonless, wintry sky … stars bright, stars remote, dusty trails of stars … a wave of weariness after this interminable day overcame him, and he closed his eyes.

  Antonia stood on the sidewalk, the dim porch light picking out the slender, white-stockinged ankles as well as the pale face with its malevolently whipping strands of black hair. The apparition terrified him to the point of breathlessness, for he fully comprehended that Antonia had lain more than twenty years in damp London soil, he had seen the marble canopy over her bones.

  It’s a nightmare, he told himself, and with tremendous effort opened his eyes.

  She was still there, substantial, three-dimensional, wind-tousled, but now she was bending her face to the window to show her glinting anger.

  “I’ve kept my word, darling,” he said. “Don’t haunt me like this. I kept my promise.”

  “Promise? What promise? There was nothing good or human in what you did.”

  “But … his not catching on was so important to you.”

  “Justin was important to me. My son. Had you no emotions of your own? Why have you acted like some ugly, brainless machine? Years ago when he came to Detroit, lonely and proud, you should have told him, helped him. Certainly that night at Woodland when he begged you, you should have embraced him.” When had Antonia ever used this loud, hectoring tone? “And now you’ve killed him.”

  “He’s alive.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “No! I swear to you. He’s inside.”

  Her accusation shrilled through the closed window. “You saw him in the morgue. Dead. Dead. You killed him. You killed my son.”

  “For God’s sake, he’s alive!”

  “Without his wife he’s dead.”

  Tom’s head jerked forward. He awoke.

  His heart was rampaging. How could a heart pump so violently and painfully without propelling blood through fragile capillaries? His mind was sharply logical. Instantly he perceived that Antonia’s nightmare dialogue came direct from his own inflamed conscience. To him the promise was the wafer and wine, the external symbol that gave substance to the holy invisible. And as far as Justin being alive—having suffered a similar loss, he knew the sophistry of that argument. Antonia was right. Justin’s body still moved, but his spirit was as crushed as his wife’s body.

  It was a minute or so before he realized that Justin had come outside. The heavy lumber jacket he had worn on the overpass tossed over his shoulders, his hands gripping the porch rail, his head bent, he shuddered with sobs. There was a terminal loneliness about the figure venting its grief in frozen privacy on the narrow porch. Justin might have been washed up on some desolate, uninhabited island, the last shipwrecked survivor that a more merciful fate would have allowed to perish: his loneliness was so absolute that Tom shivered. Moving stiffly, he buttoned up his coat.

  At the slam of the car door Justin looked up. By the time he reached the shelter of the porch, Justin was blowing his nose.

  “Justin,” Tom said quietly. “I didn’t have a chance back at the station to say this. But I’m sorry, so damn sorry about your wife … about Elisse.”

  Justin made a low, snorting sound, and the veranda creaked as he moved to the opposite end.

  Tom waited before he said, “All right?”

  Justin nodded.

  “I’ve been waiting to talk to you,” Tom said. “I dozed off and had a nightmare …”

  He had thus intended to launch another explanation of the stages of his love affair with Antonia, to tell about that half-assed posthumous loyalty. But the icy wind and the twinging of his left arm and shoulder gave him the oddest sense of dislocation. I can’t say it, even now. I’m an intractable monster, not a man.

  The dim wattage showed the miserable little twitch of Justin’s mouth as he fought for control. Tom told himself he should not be here like a sleepless predator prowling the night of Justin’s grief, yet he remained on the icy, windswept porch.

  “Remember what I said about a man’s life being like the strokes of an engine?” Tom asked. “Well, part of me has misfired completely. I never intended conditions at Onyx to be such a disgrace, but things went out of control. Power’s like that. A fulcrum. You remain an ordinary human being with the usual quirks and faults, but as you become more powerful your actions become more exaggerated. The principle of the lever, understand? When I lower my pinky, a thousand Sevens rise. When I hire Dickson Keeley, one bad man, I crush entire factories.”

  There was no reply except the wind.

  Tom clasped his palms together, the tips of his long, icy fingers touching. “What happened to Elisse, I feel guilty as hell about it.”

  “So do I.” Justin’s breath clouded.

  “You? Why you? I hired Keeley, Hugh paid that fucking gas squad. How are you to blame for what happened today?”

  “Elisse shouldn’t have been here. I never should have brought her to Detroit.”

  “Come off it, Justin,” Tom said gently.

  “I’m taking her home tomorrow.”

  “Train?”

  “Yes. It doesn’t leave till noon, so I’ll be at the opening.”

  “What?” Tom asked, bewildered.

  “The negotiation.”

  “That’s postponed, damn it, Justin.”

  “The strike’s starving people.”

  “Onyx can open. Do what has to be done in Los Angeles, then come back. We can settle the grievances then.”

  “The AAW strike committee will be at the Book Cadillac at eight.”

  “For now, just call off your pickets and bring out the sit-downers.”

  “And have them believe they’ve been sold down the river?” Justin asked in a clipped voice. “It’s all been settled. I’ll lay down our terms, then the committee’ll take over.”

  The pains in Tom’s shoulder and chest had lessened, but an intolerable arthritic malaise remained deep in the bones. He crossed the porch to rest a hand on the plaid lumber jacket.

  Justin flinched from his touch. “What a hideous death,” he said, blowing his nose again. “She was such a little thing. It always surprised me how small … she had so much spirit and heart, she seemed big.” Justin rested his forehead on the post.

  “Anything I can do to help you through the meeting?”

  “Send Caryll for your side.”

  “You mean I should stay clear?”

  “Yes.” Justin straightened. A crumb of peeling paint stuck to his bruised cheek. “Being with you is impossible,” he said. “It shouldn’t matter anymore, but it does. I despise myself for being your bastard.”

  “Justin—”

  “There’s nothing more for either of us to say, Tom.” He opened the door and went inside. Tom heard a chain being fastened. The iron sound of finality.

  He stood on the porch another minute, then went slowly down the rickety steps and through the wind to the car whose metals, rubber, fabrics, had come from mines, plantations, and factories that he owned.

  He gripped the steering wheel and closed
his eyes, thinking of Justin’s last words: I despise myself for being your bastard. That his offspring, so fine a man, should despise himself seemed the worst of the numerous sins that Tom attributed to himself.

  The Onyx coupe reverberated with the gasping sound of bitter, irreconcilable loss.

  VII

  For five days the AAW strike committee, dressed in shabby, carefully brushed suits, conferred with Onyx representatives in a seventh-floor suite with a view of the Aztec-tiled Michigan Bank of Commerce, the Bridger-owned skyscraper. Tom Bridger attended none of the sessions, and Justin Hutchinson only an hour of the first before he climbed on the streamliner with his wife’s coffin. Thus it was Caryll Bridger and Mitch Shapiro who faced each other from either end of the long walnut bargaining table. The settlement that they announced on January 13, 1936, jolted the country—the most commonly used heavy black headline:

  AUTO UNION WINS ALL!

  For days the country talked of little else. The contract granted the union more than it had asked. Some decided that the public outrage over the deaths and the open beating of the two union officials had shamed the company into capitulation, others said it was Caryll Bridger’s earnest generosity that had prevailed, but the consensus was that the automotive pioneer, Tom Bridger, a puzzling oddball, never did anything halfway.

  At Woodland’s reopening the first shift swung in singing and waving small blue and white union flags. The double work week was ended, the few remaining Security wore uniforms, a seniority system from now on would govern layoffs and rehiring, and shop stewards were to be elected that week. Those fired for union activity were already lined up outside Employment for their back wages—they would be rehired according to the new seniority system.

  To the other auto manufacturers’ consternation Onyx announced that all their plants would from now on be operated as closed shops, and the company would automatically check off dues from paychecks, transferring them to the AAW treasury.

  “Tom Bridger,” pronounced the aging Henry Ford, “has made a gift of the automotive industry to Moscow.” This same angry sentiment resounded more blasphemously in every thick-carpeted executive suite of every motorcar factory.

  In later years the settlement would be hailed as the greatest about-face in industrial history, the major landmark in American labor relations, the first contract ever wrested from an automotive company—and the most generous. Walter Reuther would say in 1946, when the AAW merged with the United Auto Workers, “Labor of America saw in the AAW victory a brilliant glow that lit the darkness of the Depression.”

  Each time Tom glimpsed a blue and white union button on the lapel of one of the multitude of workers, he would think of Justin and again experience that irreconcilable, guilt-ridden grief—yet he never regretted those buttons. They meant that the spirit of his older son lived within his factories.

  EPILOGUE

  The display spots were off in the new Onyx Museum, and the tall, angular white-haired man and the somewhat shorter, wiry young staff sergeant cast uneven, slow-moving shadows as they traversed the stillness of the three cavernous halls of automobiles.

  Tom’s ironic, occasionally grieving voice had finished what he knew of his life’s story, and the two were silent as they reached the last car, the 1947, the postwar model. Her sapphire-blue paint glowed with the iridescent depths once seen only on the forty-times-painted, lovingly hand-buffed automobiles of aristocracy. Her hood was long, sleekly long, she was built without a running board to mar her distinctive lines, her white sidewalls shone like ivory around silver-chromed hubcaps; she drew both pairs of eyes from the vista behind her, lumbering tanks, drab khaki trucks, jeeps, ambulances. Her design conjured up the happy highways of peace.

  Tom turned away, unable to look upon Caryll’s legacy to the company that had destroyed him.

  Ben, in his quick, nervous stride, circled the model once, then read from the lectern: “‘Hundred horsepower hydraulic brakes.’ Etcetera, etcetera.” He formed a circle with thumb and forefinger. “Perfecto,” he said. “Quite a museum you have here altogether, sir. How dare anyone challenge that you’re the colossus of the low-price field?”

  “A couple or three companies do,” Tom replied. “Well?”

  “Comment you want on your cautionary tale?” Ben asked. “The history of the automotive industry is a picture of human crime and misfortune.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Why else would I misquote Voltaire?”

  “Are you always so damn itchy?”

  “I’m allergic. Believe it or not I invariably break out in hives when I learn I’m grandson to the legend of our machine age.”

  “A sharp tongue won’t cut me, Ben. At twenty I lacked your education but spoke the same language.”

  “As a matter of fact, this afternoon’s restored my faith in Mendel. I’ve always wondered with Sir Galahad for a dad how I turned out to be such a turd.”

  Tom smiled. So did Ben; then, clearly deciding this was an act of treachery, he frowned. “I don’t know the legalities for turning down a bequest, but count me out.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “That stock Uncle Caryll left me in his will, I won’t take it.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I despise reparations. Is that clear enough?”

  “All I know is there’s only five percent of Onyx that doesn’t belong to me. Caryll and Zoe’s wedding gift. Caryll’s left you his ownership. Those two hundred and fifty shares are two and a half percent of the shop.”

  “The whole Onyx shooting match?”

  “Yes.”

  Ben whistled. “A cool fortune.”

  “Quite a few million,” Tom agreed.

  “Good. Excellent. Double insurance. I’ll turn it down. And Aunt Zoe’s bound to contest.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Well, you know the beautiful lady and I don’t, so I’ll have to take your word that she lacks the mercenary instincts of your wife.”

  The vast sums involved in Tom and Maud’s divorce had captivated a Depression-sunk populace hungry to learn that the incalculably wealthy had their problems, too. On the other hand, their quiet remarriage a year later was buried on back pages.

  “What was that crack about reparations?” Tom asked.

  “I’ll tell you.” Ben’s voice slid up a half octave. “At Onyx good and decent people were barbarically savaged. My parents. That’s what I mean by reparations. There’s no way your millions can make it up.”

  “Your uncle wanted you to have his holdings.” Tom’s sigh was grievingly deep. “He was a fine man. Ask your father.”

  “I was at Buchenwald at the liberation. I’ve always connected i: with Onyx in my mind.”

  “What an ugly thing to say!”

  “You think so?” Momentarily the edgy tension left Ben’s fine-featured face. Above the ill-fitting uniform he looked a wrung out deserted child. “I have a missing piece of your story. About Mother.”

  “I’ve always felt I’m guilty of her death.”

  “A regrettable accident. I blame you for it, too. But this incident probes deeper into the true heart of evil. One night she was visited by certain of your dignitaries—”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I swear not. Who were they?”

  “Later I recognized one from photographs, your former big mar, Dickson Keeley.” Ben stared at the center of the gleaming new windshield as he described shivering on the dark stairtop, the broaccast melodrama of The Green Hornet assaulting him as he saw his mother violated.

  Tom’s hands trembled, and he sank down on cold marble, his back curved against a tire. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”

  “Mother and I are Jewish, sir. He didn’t come to help us.”

  “Your father, did he know about it?”

  “Mother sent me and Tonia away right after,” Ben said with a wan smile. “But I’m positive Dad never knew. Mr. Keeley died intact.”
<
br />   In 1942 the Lincoln that Dickson Keeley was driving blew up, an inferno death reputedly caused by Keeley’s underworld chums. Hugh, from his lonely lakeside hermitage that was visited only by Tom, claimed to have certain knowledge of the underworld connection.

  “Thanks for the tour, sir.” Ben gave a mocking salute. “Interesting exhibits, fascinating tales.”

  He walked to the empty rotunda.

  Halted.

  His hands were at his sides, bending and contorting as though fingering his violin. The anger around his eyes and mouth softenec He gazed back into the hall where Tom sat, white-haired Lear on the floor, dwarfed, surrounded, overwhelmed by vehicles of his own making.

  Ben returned slowly.

  Tom didn’t look up. “Museum’s closed,” he said.

  Not smiling, Ben rested a strong, long-fingered hand on blue metal. “I don’t blame you for what happened to Mother, not anymore.”

  “You should.”

  “Know something? Since that night I’ve visualized you as Lucifer. The evil one. The lord of darkness. You had all the horror and glamour of absolute evil. You gave us cars to speed and lust in. You were a hundred times larger than the devil, and a thousand times more vengeful. You sent your werewolves to destroy Mother. I must’ve read everything written about you. Biographies, articles, doctoral dissertations, newspaper fluff. A lot of them put you down out of envy. Because you’re a monumental success.”

  “Screw the pity, Sergeant Hutchinson. You don’t have to flatter me.”

  “You think I’m saying this because you’re old? Because one of your sons just died and the other won’t come near you? Not me. Never. Not Ben Hutchinson. Not that kind of crap. No.” Ben rapped sharply on the new Onyx. “I believe you. You never meant harm to Mother. And as for not being able to tell Dad what you feel for him, well, I can’t tell him how much I love him, either.” The words clicked out, staccato.