“Bridger, I realize you’re an enthusiast, but if you had heard the devilish rattling and jarring, got a whiff of the stink, seen that driver drenched in black oil from his hat to his boots, you’d accept that only a certifiable lunatic would travel in such a machine.”
“The engine must have been faulty.”
“Believe me, not even a sorcerer like you could keep one of those things in running order. The whole idea’s preposterous. If this were a sound commercial venture, why, the carriage manufacturers and bankers would be fighting like cocks to get a toehold. But none of this matters. I can’t let you have the building.”
“What, sir?”
“We need storage for the overstock of adjustable bedside tables. They aren’t selling.”
Tom’s pride would not allow him to show disappointment. “Then I guess I’ll have to find some other millionaire to pay rent to.”
The caustic remark relieved the Major. He had given himself over to the delights of ragging the boy, yet an innate softness shrank from viewing the pain he had inflicted. He rose. His gray-striped morning suit adroitly concealed an enormous belly. “I’m not going right to work, but I’ll give you a lift down Woodward—in a horse-powered vehicle, of course.”
Tom hesitated. He was off today because tonight he would overhaul the three-drum traveling belt sander. He lived a few blocks from the factory, though, and having correctly read a command into the Major’s good-natured offer, he said, “Thank you, sir.”
III
As they emerged into the hall a girl was descending the staircase, moving swiftly through the varicolored light of the Tiffany glass window, one hand skimming down the thick banister, her navy skirt catching on each step for an infinitesimal fraction of time to reveal a white foam of petticoats.
When she reached the bottom the Major said, “Antonia, my dear, you’re up with the birds. Come here and let me introduce one of my most valued men. May I present Mr. Bridger. Bridger, this is my niece, Miss Dalzell.”
The previous March, Tom, along with all Stuart employees and members of Detroit’s best families, had stood in the driving sleet by the open grave of the Major’s father, Isaac Stuart. The Major was the only relative at Woodmere Cemetery. Tom, therefore, knew niece was a euphemism. For mistress. Factory gossip had it that the Major always referred to his mistresses as “niece,” or “my young cousin.”
The girl smiled at him.
She’s beautiful, he thought. An instant later he was changing his mind. The shiny mass of black hair loosely confined by a bow, the large, thickly lashed eyes, also very dark, were certainly beautiful. So was the luminous skin. But the impetuous thrust of her narrow nose was not. And the eagerly smiling mouth was too full in the sparely fleshed face. Too tall, Tom decided, and entirely too thin. Her white cambric shirtwaist barely hinted at breasts, her shoulders were childishly fragile, her hips narrow. She can’t be more than sixteen, he thought.
But the poignancy of her youth dissolved for him when she linked her arm in the Major’s meaty one. “How nice to meet you, Mr. Bridger,” she said. “You’re the first Detroiter I’ve met.”
“My niece arrived the day before yesterday.”
“A shame for you, Miss Dalzell. You missed our summer. Heat brings out mosquitoes, and the largest, finest mosquitoes in North America are found in Detroit.” Tom attempted a bantering tone. He always did with girls. They flurried him, all of them, including the chippies he paid upstairs in the Golden Age Saloon.
“Ah, well,” said Antonia Dalzell. “I’ll have to imagine I’ve been bitten.”
“You won’t be able to conjure up our mugginess. It’s the envy of Turkish baths.”
“Alas for me, so deprived.”
“Maybe we can manage an Indian summer for you.”
She laughed, a musical sound.
The Major frowned. “I hear the carriage. My dear, I’ll see you this evening.”
“You better be on time,” she warned.
Obviously this was a joke between them. The Major chuckled. “I’ll be devilishly on time.”
Antonia extended a narrow, ringless hand, and her fingers briefly warmed Tom’s. “I’ll be expecting that Indian summer, Mr. Bridger. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
“Likewise, Miss Dalzell,” Tom said. She was beautiful, he had decided, breathtakingly beautiful. And when the Major kissed her cheek, Tom was charged with an emotion that he had never experienced before and that he could not comprehend. How could Antonia Dalzell be a “niece” of the Major’s?
IV
Woodward Avenue was broad, seventy-five feet wide, and the Major’s lacquered victoria joined the smart equipages now rolling toward downtown. Hooves drummed cheerfully on the uneven cedar paving blocks and the bells rang as bicycles swerved around steaming fresh horse apples.
In Cadillac Square the Major reined at the raffishly ornate marble wedding cake that was the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. “I have an appointment with Senator McMillan at the Federal Building,” he announced. “I’ll let you off here.”
Tom plunged into the industrial warren paralleling the Detroit River. The busy waterway was hidden from him by enormous sheds and tall factories with smoke-blackened chimneys. As he neared Union Station the bustle grew furious with hacks, drays, wagons: a team of Percherons crushed him into a line of foreign laborers waiting outside Fulton Iron Works employment window.
The particles of soot drifting like black snow, the roar clattering from every window were the breathing pulse of the new age. His age. Burdens were being lifted and incalculable gifts bestowed by machinery, and he was part of it. He forgot the hurt imposed by the Major.
He turned onto an unpaved alley. Three ragged boys stopped their game of floating stick boats in a puddle to watch with respectful eyes as he climbed sagging front steps. The inhabitants were considered aristocracy because the subdivided old house had electricity.
Tom lived upstairs in the back. A pair of crude pine stools were shoved under the marble-topped table that had been Coraline Bridger’s prized possession, and there was a sink and wood stove, but other wise the room was fitted out as a shop. It smelled of oil and fresh-worked metal. Racks of tools lined one wall. The window ledge was crowded with bottles of acid. Tom halted at his bench, turning the flywheel of a little contraption.
“Tom?” a boy’s adolescent voice cracked. “That you?”
Tom frowned, opening the door next to the stove.
This long, narrow closet, once part of the corridor, was just larg enough for two straw pallets placed head to head. Hugh Bridger lay below the oval window that rinsed his yellow hair in sunlight. He clutched a drawing pad. He was covered with his own and Tom’s winter jackets—that disastrous first winter in Detroit they had been forced to sell their mother’s hope chest bedding.
“So the high school’s declared a national holiday?” Tom asked sourly, in no mood to hear his younger brother’s complaints.
“Right after you left I got an attack, a fierce one. I had to breathe in steam so long that my eyeballs ache.”
“If the asthma’s bothering you how can you draw?”
“It helps me forget how bad I feel.”
“You’re playing hooky,” Tom said, irritated.
“I’m sick!”
“Ballocks! You’re embarrassed to wheeze in class.”
Stung by this truth about his vanity, Hugh slammed down his drawing pad. “A fat lot you know! You’ve never had iron bands strangling you!”
At thirteen Hugh Bridger resembled one of the angels that hover in medieval paintings, blond hair waving about a curved forehead, round pink cheeks, eyes of bright Saxony blue. His mouth, though, did not suggest angelic smiles or pouts. Even in this petulant moment it was a firm, calculating mouth. He lay back, rasping out each breath with a shudder.
After a minute Tom asked gruffly, “Need me to boil the kettle?”
“Later, please,” Hugh assented.
Tom’s being six years older, strong and domi
nant, was bad enough: his weekly pay envelope weighted the fraternal relationship unbearably. It was no wonder that Hugh used hypochondria to tilt his side of the scales and to the younger boy’s credit, he cared as much for Tom as Tom cared for him. The affection between the two ran deeper than either comprehended.
They did not speak as Tom took off his good suit, hanging it inside the slit of a bedroom, and unbuttoned the celluloid shirt collar, but sensing bad news, Hugh asked, “Didn’t Major Stuart let you rent the shed?”
Tom shook his head. “No. But he played me along, pretending he would. He made me explain about horseless carriages. Hugh, he’s seen one! In Paris. Oh, he made me into a fine monkey before he turned me down.”
“The fat old bastard,” Hugh sympathized. “Tom, what was the house like?” Hugh often strolled up Woodward Avenue at dusk in the passionate hope that the electricity or gaslights would go on before curtains were drawn so he could spy on the servant-pampered, exotic life within. “Is it like Ma’s family had in Massachusetts?”
“You know we never saw that house, Hugh.”
“Ma described everything often enough. The fanlights, the rosewood furniture like our table, the silver engraved with the Neville crest.”
“There’s no Neville crest on us,” Tom said uneasily.
“There is! We are descended from them. Through the Neville that was known as Warwick the Kingmaker back in the fifteenth century. We’re related to English royalty. Ma explained it all!”
The coin of Coraline Bridger’s despairing mendacity had grown thin-edged from passing between the brothers, yet Hugh’s belief in its counterfeit shine remained painful to Tom. “The Major’s house. Well, the front hall’s enormous. There’s a huge stained-glass window on the landing—you can see it to the right of the porte cochere. The dining room bulges because it’s part of one of the towers. We had breakfast in there.”
“We?” Hugh cried. “You ate with the Major, Tom? What did you have?”
As Tom described the ugly servants and excellent food the gnawing hunger he felt in his gut had little to do with the neglected meal. He longed to say something, anything, about Antonia Dalzell. “He’s got a new somebody out there.”
“You met his mistress?” Hugh sat up, his thin arms hugged across the chest of his torn union suit.
“As we were leaving a girl came down. He introduced her as his niece.”
“Maybe she is,” Hugh said, disappointed.
“He doesn’t have any relatives. It’s just a smoke screen.”
“Is she all rouge and golden tossing curls? Does she have enormous bazzoms like the redhead we saw him with outside White’s Grand Theater? Does she smell of French perfume? Was she in a satin and lace negligee, the new whore?”
Tom had been grinning at his brother’s spurious guesses. Antonia had the look of innocence. Yet at the word whore he saw, distinctly and clearly, a trimmed gray beard brushing against a luminous cheek. “She’s just that,” he said coldly. “The Major’s new whore.”
He kicked the door shut.
V
He stood at his bench, his breath rapid, his hands clenched at his sides. His fury bewildered him. Oh, he had a quick and foul temper, he admitted that—but why this trembling rage that a black-haired young girl earned her living at the oldest profession? He had seen her for three minutes at most, so what did he care if she slept in the Major’s bed?
He frowned down at his engine.
Few people would have recognized it as that. Tom’s rudimentary engine, rather than being heavy or cumbersome, was deceptively delicate. The cylinder, reamed from one-inch gas pipe, resembled the barrel of an ancient handgun and was connected to a few gears and a lathe flywheel. A few months earlier Tom had seen the diagram of an elaborate internal-combustion engine in American Machinist. He had no technical training—indeed, he had never been to any kind of school—and he possessed no die-cutting tools. A five-dollar credit line limited him at Gundel’s Hardware, so of necessity his mechanism differed from the diagram.
Tom’s eyes hardened to a steel gray, and he bent over the engine, checking the clasps that fastened it to the board. Lugging it to the sink, he attached the grounding wire to the faucet. Then he climbed on a stool to unscrew the light bulb over the sink. Working carefully, he attached the filaments to the socket. He needed electricity for the ignition. Taking a tiny screwdriver, he adjusted the two brass clock valves. His angular face grew intent, his miseries forgotten.
“Hugh.”
The younger boy pushed open the door. Kneeling on the end of his mattress, he looked apprehensively at the engine covering the sink.
Tom said, “I need you a minute. She’s ready.”
“You’re going to try here? Tom, that’s crazy! You’ll blow up the whole building. Trelinack said so.”
“He is a cabinetmaker, not a mechanic. I know what I’m doing.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“What for? I didn’t get my shop, did I?”
“You’ll find one.”
“Like hell. How many places in Detroit are wired for electric? Get on over. You’ll splash in the oil.”
“Me?” Hugh wheezed violently. “I’ll strangle from the fumes.”
“Hugh!”
“Gasoline explodes, it burns, it—”
“Marine engines run on it, and so do Silent Otto motors,” Tom snapped. “I’d feed the oil myself but I need both hands.”
Hugh inched reluctantly across cracked linoleum.
Tom handed him an oiling can. “See this.” He pointed to a hollow tube. “When I tell you, drip into it.”
Tom adjusted a screw under the oil cup and at the same moment gave the flywheel a vigorous spin. The cylinder pipe sucked in air and petroleum, the light flickered as if a thunderstorm raged. A hard mechanical cough pulsed through the flat. The engine worked with a four-stroke method. On the first stroke the piston drew gasoline into the cylinder, the second stroke compressed the fuel until at deadpoint the spark caused an explosion, which drove the piston back down, its third stroke. The fourth stroke discharged the burned gas, leaving the cylinder ready for another intake of gasoline.
The steel piston rod began to move, its flash reflecting in Tom’s eyes. Light sweat shone on his forehead. “She works, Hugh,” he whispered. “She works.…”
Hugh, shifting as far as possible from the tiny yellow flames that licked from the exhaust, extended his arm to feed the engine. After what seemed to him an interminable minute, he asked, “Is that enough?”
“Yes.”
Hugh, slamming shut the door, threw himself on the pallet. Tom continued to gaze at the engine long after it had coughed into immobility.
VI
When Obediah Bridger delivered Tom, his first child, Coraline Neville Bridger’s mind already had been affected by the treeless monotony, the crude sod cabin, the choking summer and bonebleak winter, the awesome loneliness of the Dakota Territory. She and her husband had come west a year before, she a bride accustomed to the niceties of a Massachusetts township, he a farmer lured by the promise of cheap land.
Obediah’s blue eyes were deep set, the shadow of the occipital bone intensifying the color. What Tom would remember most about his father were those deep-set blue eyes.
Coraline’s natural loquacity bubbled around Tom. It was she who drilled the boy in his lessons, for the school house, fifteen miles away, may as well have been on another planet. His father needed him for chores, though, and before the child was nine his schooling had dwindled to an occasional winter lesson. Hugh was six years younger, and by the time he came along, Coraline was embroidering her incessant chatter with fantasies of wealth and a chivalric Neville ancestry.
With her curling yellow hair and dimples she had been considered a pretty girl, so maybe it was inevitable that her fantasies should take a sexual turn. She began visualizing a dragoon captain riding to abduct her, his helmet’s magnificent horsehair plume bobbing above the tall Fife wheat. One hot night in September,
after Obediah was asleep, she ratted her fading hair into a pompadour, pinched color into her cheeks, and crossed the moonlit yard to the barn.
The next morning Tom found her. Dried blood from her wrists stiffened her nightgown. Her body fluids had already sunk, pressing her into the straw so that with her mouth open in a rictus sardonicus, the smile of death, she looked as if she were amorously engaging a lover.
The following June, Obediah screamed away his life in the agony of a burst appendix.
Tom, who was fourteen, dug his father’s grave with savage strokes. The same enemy had killed both his parents. Distance. The lonely deprivation of distance. He loathed the tepid green, infinitely remote prairie. He sold the farm to a Swede for the price of two railroad tickets to Detroit. (Hugh was only eight, but Tom never considered leaving his brother in the orphanage at Fargo.) That first year in Detroit, Tom worked in a foundry, dangerous labor far too hard for his adolescent strength. He did not earn enough to feed the two of them properly, much less rent them a place of their own. He repaired watches evenings and Sundays. That year his face took on the black-shadowed, pared look of a runner beyond the limit of endurance.
This brutal boyhood compressed his capacity for love.
VII
Major Stuart visited with Senator McMillan, his old friend, until after ten. By then Fort Street was less congested and he held the reins laxly while his mind wandered back to the mechanic. Unusual boy, the Major thought. But why? What set young Bridger apart from other employees summoned to the house? His offer to pay rent? His self-possession? No, it was more than that. When he had talked about the horseless carriages, he had seemed stronger, larger, his cheeks were taut, his gaze intently fixed—something compelling about those gray eyes. Damn me, the Major thought. That’s the way I must look when I ache to bed a pretty woman.
“Passion,” he said aloud, slapping his stout thigh. “The boy has passion.”
Othello was switching his glossy tail. Iago arching his neck. Magnificent animals. No wonder since time immemorial man had thrilled to horseflesh. But that evil-smelling vehicle lurching down the Avenue d’lvry—who could become passionate about that? A mechanic, the Major thought, laughing. Only a mechanic!
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