Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “He’s sensitive and thoughtful, he’d put two and two together. It would destroy him.”

  In the dimness her eyes shone with tears. The small hairs at the back of Tom’s neck prickled. He realized that however implausible this rationale might sound to him, an interdiction lay in her heart and mind, and Antonia was quite capable of sacrificing their love on the altar of some hallucinatory threat to her son.

  Hallucinatory? A chill ran through him. He thought of his wife and how honest she was with him—what would the knowledge do to her? He thought of Caryll, his son. He said, “It’s just as important to me that people not know.”

  “This was a miracle.” Her whisper caught. “A one-time miracle.”

  “Nobody’s going to find out,” Tom said, reaching for her hand, pressing her palm against his heart. “Your son will never know Claude Hutchinson isn’t his father.”

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “The owner of Onyx can. I have money, I have power. I swear it to you on my life, Antonia.”

  “Secrecy can’t be bought, Tom.”

  “You bet it can.” He pulled her toward him, the level arrogance of his voice roughening to urgency as he repeated, “I swear to you on my life, Antonia. Do you believe in that?”

  Her long, tremulous sigh was one of acquiescence.

  “Thank you,” he said, touching his mouth to hers, raising the covers over their heads so she would not be chilled as he kissed the small hollows below her neck. Her pulses beat faster, her skin grew hot, and his erection pressed against her thigh. She shifted. As he went into her they both gasped.

  “Darling, this time let me,” she whispered.

  He remained still and she pressed around him, slowly, insistently carrying him farther and farther from himself, and soon he no longer noticed his heart slamming against his ribs or the pressure of her kisses on his shoulder, he knew no physical sensation other than this undulating joy. It was as though a vestigial, prehistoric sense were returned to him, as though this hard core of his being could experience the infinity of tenderness and wonder in the world. All at once the waves surged violently and she cried out. A light burst through his blood. Yet at the ultimate moment he fell prey to the tick of sadness inherent in each human joy: This could always have been mine, he thought.

  After their breathing quieted, he said, “Antonia, I give you my word. The boy will never know.” His voice was a grainy rumble. “Trust me.”

  “Ahh, Tom, I must, I must.” She spoke in such a passion of love and hopelessness that he pulled her face to his chest, consoling her.

  VI

  Upper Swithin Place, two miles or so from Rutland Gate, was a treeless enclave of apartment blocks where none of her friends would venture, yet too distinctly middle class for her servants to visit. The tall crimson-brick building had a vacancy on the ground floor, and this particular flat opened onto the side path, a narrow cement ribbon visible only to tenants who might be leaning out of the overhead windows. Tom went to great lengths to ensure that the flat not be linked to him or to Antonia. He put gold guineas into a bank for the estate agent who would pay the rent, arrange for furnishings, hire a charwoman to clean two mornings a week. Tom even went so far as to have cards printed J. Foreman so he could slip one in the small iron frame above the doorbell.

  Those first few afternoons proved typical of their hours in Upper Swithin Place. Being the more prompt, Tom would arrive to draw the chintz curtains, then Antonia would hurry in to press her cold, glowing cheek to his: she always brought something for him—maybe from her gloved fingers would dangle the strings of a pastry box, or in her chinchilla muff would be tucked new sheet music that she would later sing, accompanying herself on the upright piano. First things first, though. She retired immediately to the bathroom, where she inserted something called a pessary that during her marriage she had secured from a Dutch physician, a blessed device that obviated the need for condoms. They made love unhurriedly and to their mutual delight—if they made love a second time it was swift and guileless, an embellishment of their good-bye kisses. They put on dressing gowns and went into the other room for tea. The shaded wall brackets and false-logged gas fire cast a glow. To his surprise Tom found he could talk about Maud, recounting her doings and praising her good common sense without any wrong notes or sense of shame. His own guilts taught him the validity of Antonia’s qualms about Justin. He could not once say Caryll’s name. Even in some casual reminiscence about a family outing, coming to Caryll’s part in it, his tongue grew thick and he lapsed into silence. In fathering a child on this woman whom he adored, had he not betrayed his legitimate son, whom he loved greatly?

  VII

  The first ten days, drowning in the liquid purity of Antonia’s enormous dark eyes, he did not let Monty know he was in London. Then, early one morning when an icy drizzle fell, he telephoned.

  “Jolly glad you’re here, Tom,” Monty said. “Something interesting’s come on the market in Southwark.”

  “I’ve had breakfast. Pick me up.”

  The chauffeur drove them along the south side of the Thames, passing chimneyed factories and endless, prison-like blocks of flats. Shawled women dragged pallid children among stalls whose peddlers hawked their mean wares. A queue of thinly dressed unemployed men hunched shivering in the rain outside an ironworks.

  “An excellent labor pool,” Monty commented.

  “You don’t have to tell me. I’ve lived in places like this.”

  They came to a long brick wall. Monty leaned forward, rapping on the glass, and the Rolls glided to a halt in front of massive iron gates beyond which railroad spurs crisscrossed acres of wetly glistening cobbles. A row of warehouses blocked the view of the river.

  Tom crossed his arms, clasping his elbows.

  Yes, he thought. This is the place. Yes. Long ago he had determined to build the British plant, and now, because of Antonia, he needed an excuse to visit London often. But the excitement tingling through him did not derive from logic or need. It was an intuitive response. And time had proved over and over to him the validity of such first impressions.

  The chauffeur unlocked the gate chain, and they drove inside.

  Monty raised his large black umbrella to protect them both, but Tom strode ahead, barely glancing at the warehouses with their great sliding metal doors, jumping muddy puddles to stand on the embankment of the rain-dotted Thames where boats huddled along, each under its cloud of smoke.

  Monty caught up. He pointed to blackened stumps of pilings. “The wharves burned, but there’s excellent dockage.”

  “So I see,” Tom said. “The place is fine.”

  Monty’s smile struggled between triumph and disbelief. The shoulders of Tom’s gray overcoat had darkened, and the Englishman said, “Here, stand under this. You’re getting soaked.”

  “I won’t melt.”

  “Let’s inspect the buildings.”

  “Why? They’ll either be torn down or completely renovated.”

  “You really are going ahead?”

  “Full speed. The British Fiver’ll sell for seventy-five pounds.”

  “Seventy-five quid!” Monty’s carefully acquired accent dropped. This, then, was what American automotive chaps meant by Tom Bridger’s crazed-missionary streak. He peered into the lean, wet face to ascertain Tom was not joking. “There’s not a perishing British motorcar at twice that! My God, seventy-five quid! How’ll you cover the losses?”

  “Get pretty girls to collect in cans for needy automobile manufacturers.” Tom’s eyes held a cruel, sardonic glint. “Want to be in charge?”

  Monty’s sandy mustache quivered. What a devil of a pincers. To be offered his fondest hope—but by a lunatic. He said cautiously, “Maybe we could manage at a hundred and ten pounds—if we set our minds to it. Trim expenses. Instead of vanadium, use ordinary steel and—”

  “The Fiver’s top-notch. She’ll be that way on both sides of the Atlantic.”

  “How in the devil, at that p
rice?”

  “We’ll reduce the man-hours it takes to build her.”

  “Tom, I’m quite stupid, actually. Explain that to me.”

  “It’s very simple. The cost of anything, whether it’s a loaf of bread, an ocean liner, or a car, depends on the number of man-hours needed to transform it from raw material to finished goods.”

  “And what about capital? Have you forgotten capital investment?”

  “Capital is a word invented by economists. Jargon. Buildings and machines are made by men, designed by men, built from materials produced or mined by man. In other words, accumulated man-hours.” Tom paused. “I’ll worry about the capital. What we have to do, you and me, is figure how to produce a top-notch, cheap British car.”

  They continued to walk. Monty’s face pared into the shrewdness of his half-starved apprentice days. “Tom, ever broken down a job into its various steps?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A line of men each performing one individual step.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Take a flywheel magneto. Everybody in the industry uses skilled mechanics to make magnetos. But say one were to break it down into steps, devise a small assembly line.”

  “It might be faster.”

  “Yes, but you’re missing my point. Each task would be simple. A turn of a spanner, an adjustment.”

  “What a rotten, unsatisfying way to spend your life, turning one bolt all day long.”

  “We’d save a fortune if we figured out how to utilize unskilled labor.” Monty glanced eloquently at the rain-hazed mustard-brick warrens. “Them.”

  “It’s depressing.”

  “You’re the one who set the bloody seventy-five pounds. How in the devil did you arrive at that number, Tom?”

  “While we were over here, Hugh worked on some statistics. I figured it was a good price for a lot of Englishmen.”

  “Your average navvy able to afford a motorcar? Never in a million years!” Monty hooted. “Tom, you’re a candidate for Bedlam.”

  “You’re not the first to give me the news,” Tom said wryly. They were back at the Rolls. “Let’s get started. The sooner we tackle the estate agents, the sooner we’ll have the property.”

  “You meant it, then? I’m to head up British Onyx?”

  “Unless you’d rather keep the London franchise.”

  “I’m not a lunatic.”

  VIII

  “Again?” Maud asked. “You were over with Hugh last spring, then most of January and all of February. And you say you’re going back again in June? Why?”

  “The Southwark factory’s big, Maud,” Tom said. “Who else can check the plans?”

  He was sitting at the kitchen table while she fixed and served him late-night scrambled eggs.

  “What about Monty?” she asked.

  “Problems, problems, they come up and I’m the only one who can solve them.” He attempted to sound offhand, but his wife’s response to his upcoming trip had made him tense with guilty apprehension: flat C exposed as a love nest.

  “This brings up something I have to discuss.” Maud’s high coloring was more intense, and despite the practical apron enveloping her dowdy wool dress, she looked handsome. Obviously nervous, too, as she pulled out a chair.

  Tom clenched the butter knife, wishing he had a drink under his belt. “Sounds serious. Go ahead. Shoot.”

  Her frank, bespectacled eyes leveled on him. “I won’t beat about the bush,” she blurted. “I heard about a place near the Pontchartrain where there’s women. Somebody said you go there.”

  Tom went weak with reprieve. But then, how could anyone have guessed about Antonia? He had been excessively careful. The guilty flee where no man pursueth, he chided himself. He looked at Maud and smiled. Another wife would have kept silent about a slip as minor and impersonal as a visit to a cathouse. But his Maud always had to have every single card on the table. He shook his head, his irritation streaked with fondness. “Honey, why listen to gossip?”

  “Is it true?”

  “I haven’t been there in forever.” He halted abruptly: he was confessing fidelity to Antonia, not her. “How about some coffee?”

  At the stove, pouring from the reheated percolator, facing away from him, she asked, “Are there places like that in England?”

  “Not that I know about.”

  “You’re there so much.”

  “Business.”

  “Don’t snap at me, Tom. I just wanted you to know that I understand about that sort of thing. And I won’t say it doesn’t hurt me, because it does, but I’d much rather know.” She turned.

  There was the saddest look on her face, and for a moment Tom remembered their wedding night at the Russell House: they had used her money for the hotel room. Maud had stood staunchly by the drawn curtains, telling him in this same way that she understood she was second choice, an involuntary, sorrowful honesty that drew him to her in sympathy and warmth. Now he got up and patted her firm shoulder. “Maud, honey, you’re my wife. I care a lot.”

  “It’s all right, Tom,” she said. “The main thing is that we must always be honest with each other. That’s the one thing I couldn’t stand, you lying to me.”

  IX

  The next three years Tom went often to England.

  Antonia endured his absences as she would a jail term, but when she was with him, she could shut out the world. Tom, missing her as profoundly, lacked her ability to live in the moment, and in flat C he was always conscious, however marginally, of the ticking of the Biedermeier clock in the small sitting room, time moving inexorably toward another separation.

  Inventions and improvements were cross-fertilized on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Monty’s flywheel magneto was the first example. When Tom had returned to Detroit, he had taken his old toolbox to the Hamtramck plant, stood with the skilled mechanics behind his own little heap of materials, and, like the others, had assembled a magneto on the flywheel in about twenty minutes. The following Saturday he returned with Caryll. Working very slowly, he assembled a magneto, halting at each step to describe to the boy what he had done. Caryll, gray eyes round with importance, wrote down the description, numbering it.

  Setting down his wrench, Tom asked, “How many steps is that?”

  “Twenty-nine, Dad.”

  Tom wiped his hands with a rag. “Come on. Let’s get over to the machine shop.”

  As they left the busy mechanics grinned. Everybody in the Hamtramck knew two things about the boss: He spent mighty little time in his large office suite, and his boy earned his allowance here on Saturdays.

  Job seekers formed a perpetual line at the employment office on Conant Street. Ten days later Tom hired twenty-nine unskilled applicants, leading them, a bobbling line of caps and knitted hats, to a building where a waist-high gray iron workbench had been constructed. It was exactly wide enough to hold an Onyx flywheel. Close-together bins were heaped with various glinting scraps of metal. Tom showed each man his simple task. He pulled a switch. A drive chain driven by a worm shaft and worm gear clanked, and the flywheel at one end of the bench shivered forward. A man fed another into the vise.

  Tom perched on a stool, his arms crossed, in an attitude of peculiar, watchful relaxation that the camera sometimes caught. He had spent hours arranging and rearranging this moving bench so that each man received his task under his hands, never having to shift his feet. Three of his new employees performed their jobs clumsily. He slowed the belt to eighteen inches per minute. After a while he was able to speed it up again.

  The flesh below his cheekbones drew in, his upper lip raised to give him an air of vulnerability. Few would suspect his experiment had been a success. The time it took to produce a magneto had shrunk from twenty minutes to twelve. It’ll be less, far less, Tom thought, when they get used to a traveling bench.

  Tom stared a long time at the workers, his thoughts bleakly ambivalent. The repetitive movements desolated him, yet this drab monotony wa
s the way to bring the Fiver—transportation—into everyone’s reach.

  He walked slowly over to Administration to tell Olaf Baardson, who was now in charge of the Hamtramck, about the new mobile workbench. Over his brother-in-law’s arguments Tom ordered that the new unskilled assembly workers receive the same clock pay as mechanics. A few weeks later the engineering department swarmed through the factory, reorganizing and reshaping every shop.

  Thus it was that Onyx developed the first moving assembly line ever used, anywhere.

  CHAPTER 12

  The British Onyx factory had its grand opening on June 2, 1914.

  Early that morning it rained for an hour or so, but by afternoon the azure sky held only a few whorling, very high clouds, and sun had dried the miles of tricolor bunting—the white was marked with batik-like pink patterns from the red dye, the blue faded to mauve. Police held back a crowd that surged toward every chauffeured limousine entering the gates. Though for nearly two years now the factory had been turning out Fivers that sold for £80, the engine blocks had been shipped from Detroit. Ten weeks earlier the first fully British-produced Onyx had come off the line, so they were having a public celebration. The young Prince of Wales, as keen on automobiles as his late grandfather, Edward VII, had agreed to cut the opening ribbon.

  Alongside the main assembly, striped marquees had been erected to shelter top-hatted men, women wearing summer furs over pastel afternoon gowns, and a few older children, all boys. Monty, flushed and laughing, moved about making his aristocratic guests welcome.

  Tom, Maud, Caryll, and Trelinack had come over for the festivities. Trelinack, standing by himself, appeared shrunken into his brand new frock coat: since his wife’s death the previous winter he had shed weight like a deserted basset hound and clung pathetically to his family. From his vantage point his anxious eyes could make out only the tan crown of Maud’s hat; however, he had a fine view of Tom and Caryll, who were showing the body chute to Sir Henry Royce. Like Monty, Tom was flushed with excitement. Both were high, drunk with the accomplishment of completing the best-equipped industrial complex in Europe.