Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

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  The Onyx

  Jacqueline Briskin

  For Bert

  PROLOGUE

  This was not a funeral.

  The funeral, like all rites of the Bridger family, had been private. Now crowds lined the street, and the indelible flash of news cameras captured the slow procession of Swallow limousines followed by Onyxes that became smaller and more snubnosed, a model from each year backward in time. The afternoon of March 12, 1947, held respectfully still: sparse snowflakes halted in the beam of headlights, the smoke from Onyx Main’s eight monolithic power-plant stacks neither drifted nor faded but coiled immobile above the Detroit River, the flags of sixteen nations hung soddenly at half-mast in front of the Onyx World Headquarters Building. Here the crowd was thickest, pressing on the sidewalks, jamming the overpass. Everyone wore a black armband.

  The first limousine, empty, adorned with black satin rosettes, slid by. Men removed their hats or caps. “The wrong Bridger’s gone,” a drill-press operator said. “Nah,” responded his neighbor. “We’d soon be out of a job if it was the old man. A bastard, that’s what keeps things moving; Onyx needs a genuine bastard like the old man.”

  Wind gusted briefly, swirling snow, dipping the smoke into a hundred tattered gray lace veils, hurling the wisps toward a staff sergeant. The taut-faced young man gave a smile, and the salute he snapped toward the empty limousine was a parody of respect for the dead.

  Sergeant Ben Hutchinson had spent his eighth year in Detroit, and certain incidents clung to the corners of his mind, not wholly remembered, never completely forgotten, now inextricably mingled with the horrors he had witnessed at the liberation of Buchenwald.

  People were craning to see the flagged official cars that bore President Harry Truman, Governor Kim Sigler, the mayor, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, but Ben turned, shoving his way to Archibald Avenue, which was empty. As he tramped in the direction of the river his thick GI boots cut through freshly fallen snow to reveal the ugly brown slush below. From time to time he halted, gazing through wire mesh at gigantic glass-walled machine shops linked by conveyors, a triple-decker flatcar laden with new sedans, conical mountains of coal and limestone and silica rising along the wharves, the enormous rolling shed and foundry. This was the world’s largest industrial complex, the incomparable mother of mass production whose womb spewed forth a car every two minutes.

  After perhaps an hour and a half Ben started back toward Jefferson Avenue. The parade was over, traffic back to normal, the crowd dispersed. Late for his appointment, he trotted the mile of empty sidewalk in front of the administrative offices, jogging up the red brick steps of a handsome new colonial building with “Onyx Museum” carved into the gray-blue marble above the fanlight. A wooden sign, CLOSED, barred the doors. He pushed both. The left yielded to him. Taking off his cap and overcoat, he flung them, a wet khaki heap, across the admission desk. The thin wintry light seeping through the glassed dome proved the rotunda empty.

  It was a moment before Ben glanced toward the dark, cavernous halls.

  Here, at the head, in a place of honor, was a single exhibit: an odd little dragonfly of a contraption with four fragile bicycle wheels supporting the mechanical thorax. On its narrow seat a man hunched over the steering tiller. His face was slack with grief, yet even in this bad light the angular length, the thick, glossy white hair, the mouth pulled into a permanent, sardonic slant, were familiar. Ben had seen that face in a thousand newspaper photographs, encyclopedia illustrations. The March of Time, scurrilous cartoons. “Sorry I’m late, Mr. Bridger,” he said.

  “Ben?”

  Awe mingled with well-nourished hatred to form a shell of truculence around Ben. “I’m Sergeant Hutchinson, yes.”

  The briefest smile twitched the sorrowing mouth. “I called your father by his first name.”

  Ben shrugged. “What’s this about?” He pulled a tattered telegram from his uniform pocket. “Why should Caryll Bridger have willed me anything? Why should he leave me two hundred and fifty shares of Onyx?”

  “Hasn’t your father explained?”

  “He said since you’d asked me to come here, it was your nickel—Dad said you’d tell me.”

  “Justin.… Yes, Justin would do that. He’s a fair and decent man, your father, always so decent …” The long fingers trembled on the pale wood of the tiller, a feeble tattoo of sorrow, age, bewilderment.

  “I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Bridger, but there’s no reason he should leave me anything. Bridger is to Hutchinson what snake is to mongoose. Natural enemies. Besides, he never met me.”

  The older man dismounted stiffly. “I’ll take you through the museum. Maybe it will help you understand.”

  “I saw enough obsolete cars in the parade.”

  “You asked a question, Sergeant Hutchinson. If it’s answers you want, then you’ll have to bear with me.”

  “First Dad. Now you. I don’t get it. Why all the mystery?”

  Tom Bridger sighed. He pressed a switch, lighting row upon drab gray row of sturdy little vehicles. “The answer to that one,” he said, “is the long, regrettable story of my life.”

  BOOK ONE

  The Quadricycle

  If a future historian were to examine the major causes of changes in human life on this planet during the twentieth century, he would have to first fix his attention on the automobile.

  The Automotive Age: A Biography of Thomas Bridger by Michael E. Knes

  CHAPTER 1

  The year was 1894. The cool silver light of the early morning sun dissolved distances and extended the sweeping autumnal panorama of the central United States: the immensity was seldom marked by the glint of a rail or the hairline trace of a road. Distance was an enemy to be painfully vanquished.

  On the Great Plains, so recently settled, it was a losing battle. There, the sod huts and treeless gray farmhouses were islands of defeat, too remote for their inhabitants to go to church or to Grange socials, too far for a neighbor woman to help another through the terrors of confinement or to reach a doctor to ease death’s pain, too lacking in the companionship that might take the edge off a drought-stunted crop of Fife wheat. The loneliness had broken Coraline Bridger and many another.

  Southern Michigan, however, had been long settled. The gummy coal haze of industry clamped down on crowded cities. For as farmers were exiles in rural isolation, so city dwellers were imprisoned by their need to live close to work. In Detroit the meaner streets near the river were filled with men, women, and children trudging to factories. On the outskirts, however, in the rich residential area around Woodward Avenue, great oaks, sycamores, and maples guarded substantial houses whose owners were not yet about.

  II

  Beyond ironwork gateposts Tom Bridger held open his watch, but in reality he was examining Major Stuart’s place. A fat dove rustled upward to perch on one of the tall, glittering weather vanes. With its symmetrical gray limestone corner towers, steep gray slate roof, bewildering array of long windows, the fleurs-de-lys etched fancifully above its deep hem of porticoes, the architecture was vaguely sixteenth-century French—Detroiters in respectful redundance called the imposing heap a “chateau castle.” Tom’s stomach gnawed with anxiety, but the sole clue to this was a shrug.

  At two minutes to seven he snapped shut the steel case and went into the garden. Beds of well-watered zinnias had survived the recent hot spell, and their sharp scent mingled with the memory of burned leaves.

  Climbing the front steps, Tom removed his worn cap. His hair, thick as plush, like the heavy bands of his brows, was black-brown, accentuating the pal
e, clear gray of his eyes. His long, pleasant face had a faintly sarcastic expression: at nineteen, Tom was an expert at hiding sensitivity. He was tall, lean, and wore a cheap, ill-fitting sack suit. Oil ingrained the lines of his palms. His fingers, long and almost femininely narrow, were scarred with burns, and the nails were black-rimmed shells.

  In the deep shade of the portico he halted for a calming breath. The door jerked open. A squat woman whose ferociously starched white pinafore and cook’s hat made her appear troll-like stood glaring up at him.

  “Major Stuart’s expecting me,” Tom said. “I’m Thomas K. Bridger. From the Stuart Furniture.”

  Somewhere in the tenebrous depths of the oak-paneled hall, a clock began chiming the hour.

  “You’re late,” she snapped. And her skirts hissed around the pillars of the reception hall. Tom, assuming she was rushing to summon the Major, waited politely. She turned. “Put down roots, have you?”

  Reddening, Tom bolted after her.

  The Major sat at the far end of a thick-legged Jacobean table—it had been made by his top cabinetmaker. He presided over china bowls, crystal compotes, rotund silver pitchers and covered dishes.

  “Ahh, here you are, my boy, right on the dot.” He shook out a large napkin, adjusting a corner between the two top buttons of his vest. “Come on in and sit down.”

  Tom clutched his cap. Having spoken to his employer only twice, he had never anticipated the ordeal of breakfasting here. Besides, he wanted what might appear a favor. Tom’s intractable pride made any request seem like begging to him. The Major, however, was indicating a place set to his right, with the genial smile of one accustomed to having his own way. Tom shoved his cap into his pocket and sat down.

  The woman left, the green baize door swinging back and forth in her wake. “A sour woman, Ida,” the Major said. “I keep her on because she’s the sweetest cook in Detroit.” He ladled generous dollops of oatmeal into two ironstone soup bowls. “Taste this, my boy. She lets it simmer all night.”

  Tom salted his. The Major shook on brown spoonfuls of Demerara sugar that oozed downward, liquid bronze on lashings of yellow cream. The ugly cook carried in a silver platter mounded with pink fried ham slabs and fried steaks while an elderly, rawboned servant limped after her with golden scrambled eggs and beaten biscuits. Next came fluffy croquettes of Lake Michigan sturgeon. Delicate pancakes—crepes, the Major called them—nestled around crimson stewed cherries. A tray of cream cheeses surrounded by homemade crackers. Tom, a spare eater by both necessity and inclination, took little of the enormous breakfast. He tasted nothing. The Major enjoyed second helpings.

  The Major wore his graying beard trimmed in the style made popular by the Prince of Wales, to whom he bore a marked resemblance—flesh-sunken eyes, pink lips, benignly self-indulgent expression; a similar stoutness.

  This resemblance went beyond the physical. Like the aging heir to the British throne, the Major was a roué, and his gray slate roof sheltered a succession of lushly constructed young women directed here, or so it was said at Stuart Furniture, by the infamous Mrs. Corbett in New York. Tom himself had seen brightly dressed young women preening at the Major’s side as his matched black pair trotted around the Grand Circus Park or across the Belle Isle Bridge. After several months’ residence each guest would depart from the Union Station amid a volcano of new hat boxes, brass-bound steamer trunks, gladstones, dressing cases, jewel cases.

  The Major’s imperturbability to gossip, his unimpeachable social position—both sides of his family were old Boston—his youthfully distinguished military record with the Grand Army of the Republic, the three-story frame structure of the Stuart Furniture Factory along the Detroit River, enabled people to overlook the trollops revolving through his front door, and though no lady would enter this house, the Major was welcomed in the city’s best homes, many of which clustered around this recent extension of Woodward Avenue.

  The Major set down his coffee cup. “Not much of an eater are you, my boy?”

  “A minnow compared to you, sir.”

  “So you have a tongue, and a witty one.” The Major chuckled. “How long have you worked at Stuart Furniture?”

  “Eight months.”

  “Trelinack tells me you have a vocation. ‘What a mechanic the boy is, what a born mechanic!’” The Major mimicked Trelinack’s Cornish lilt. “He told me when the Beck steam engine broke down the other day you merely touched it and—presto! It worked. He called you a regular Merlin.”

  “No wand, sir. A couple of bolts had worked loose, that’s all.”

  “Trelinack’s a good foreman; he doesn’t exaggerate. Besides, I know the table shop had to close down five hours while the other mechanics tinkered with the engine, Bridge.”

  “It’s Bridger, sir. With an r on the end.”

  “Bridger, then. Where did you get your mechanical training?”

  Tom looked down at the black lines tattooing his palms. As long as he could remember he’d had the touch, and even when he was only seven or eight his father had let him fix the threshing machine, the pump. At the forge he’d experienced a mysterious easy joy unconnected to the drudgery of farm work. “I worked at Hallam Arms Works for two years.”

  “Mmm, yes. Hallam uses precision machinery on their rifles. Why did you and Hallam come to a parting of the ways?”

  Tom had had qualms that he was manufacturing death. But he simply said, “I quit.”

  “Don’t talk much about yourself, do you?”

  “Sir, you’re the one with the gift of gab.”

  “That I am,” the Major said. “Well, my boy, what is it you wished to talk to me about?”

  Tom drew a breath. “The small building in the yard, the one near the street entry—”

  “My show room.”

  “Yes. It’s empty and I have a use for it—I’d pay you rent, sir, of course.”

  The Major’s chair groaned as he leaned back. “Well, well, well. Bridge—”

  “Bridger.”

  “You’d be surprised at how unique an occasion this is. When a man at the factory wants something from me, it’s invariably a raise in salary. So I’ve evolved a little trick. I make him come here to ask for it. This house overwhelms him, as does dour Ida’s excellent table. Besides, there’s my august presence. Few get out their request, Bridger—I got it correct this time, didn’t I? You’re the first to come here requesting to pay me.”

  “Then I can rent the building?”

  “What do you want it for?”

  “A shop. Trelinack generally asks me to stay overtime on call. This way I could keep busy in between repairs.”

  “So you tinker in your free time, too, ehh? What miraculous contraption are you building?”

  Tom’s upper lip raised as he smiled, making him appear vulnerable. His teeth were uneven and very white. “Sir, do you know anything about horseless road vehicles?”

  The Major had been selecting a cigar from his tortoiseshell humidor. He shot Tom a sharp look, and then with a secret smile busied himself lighting the Havana. “I’ve heard the usual idle talk about a mechanical replacement for the horse,” he said finally.

  “It’s more than idle talk. There have been articles in American Machinist. I’m working on an engine right now, and so is a friend of mine, Henry Ford.”

  “Ford? Is he here in Detroit?”

  “Yes. Chief engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company. There’s work going on all around the country. So far, though, the successful vehicles are in France and Germany, made by Daimler, Benz, Panhard, the Peugeot brothers.”

  “And you’re tossing your cap into the American horseless carriage ring, I take it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Won’t you need cash for your experiments, a good deal of cash?” The Major’s questioning tone was sincere, his bearded face sober; however, he was a stout cat relishing his game.

  Tom, clenching scarred, oil-grimed hands on the table, did not recognize he was a mouse. “You pay me well.
”

  “Yes, but you’re young. Why play Faust? Why waste youth on foolish inventions?”

  “A machine faster than a horse, more reliable, never needing to be rested or watered, never bolting—is that foolish? Sir, with this vehicle farmers wouldn’t be nailed down to their farms, people could move around, life would be better for factory workers.”

  “So your machine will be cheap enough for everyone?”

  “Eventually, yes. Most families will own one.”

  The Major hid his smile by clamping down on his cigar. “Mmm, I see. What sort of power plant will your carriage run on? A steam engine?”

  Tom shook his head. “Some people are thinking about steam, but as far as I’m concerned, the furnace and boiler are far too heavy. The internal-combustion engine’s light. It runs on gasoline—that’s a by-product of crude petroleum.”

  “Last month, when I was in Paris …” The Major blew a ring of smoke before pulling out his plum. “Last month in Paris I saw one of these petrol wagons. It was built in the Panhard and Levassor shop.”

  Redness blotched Tom’s neck. “Then I’ve just made a horse’s ass of myself, explaining the machines. You already knew …”

  “Ancient as I’m sure I seem to you, Bridger, I’m no dinosaur. I keep up on modern invention, I keep up. Naturally I was curious to see this new idiocy.”

  Two white marks showed in Tom’s flushed jaw. Yet neither anger nor embarrassment could stay his excitement. “How far did you go? How fast?”

  “Great God, Bridger! Petroleum’s highly volatile. The machine might have exploded at any minute. Naturally I didn’t entrust myself to it.”

  “But you saw it run?”

  The Major wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Run? It rattled at a snail’s pace down Avenue d’Ivry leaving a trail of foul odors and shying horses. Then it shuddered violently. And stopped. The driver jumped out and began tinkering with the engine. As far as I know, he’s still tinkering.”

  “I wish I could have been there!”