Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “Oh, you and your screwy leadership qualities. Come to dinner, then,” she said, an indefinable tremor in her voice.

  VI

  Primed to capture the towered bungalow, he stepped directly into a living room dominated by a grand piano. He had a fleeting impression of stacked magazines and a great many table lamps with domed silk shades, but Elisse had opened the door and that crazed, obsessive delight squirmed inside of him: he could scarcely keep from putting his arm around her as she introduced him to her mother. He presented the long box.

  Mrs. Kaplan peered into its cellophane window. “Roses,” she said with a smile that had a special quality; it made her look gullible as a child. Time had blurred the flesh around her eyes and jawline, yet it was impossible not to see that she must have once resembled those vapidly pretty, flowerlike girls grouped in an Alma-Tadema painting. “How lovely of you, Mr. Hutchinson,” she said in a whispery English voice. “Oh, the sweet darlings, they need to be in water.” And she wafted in her gray chiffon dress around the arch to the dining room.

  Mr. Kaplan was altogether a juicier, livelier proposition. “Mr. Hutchinson,” he said, extending a musician’s firm hand. “It’s always a pleasure to meet Elisse’s friends.” His mouth was pink and the eyes magnified by glasses were a warm chestnut brown. Balancing on his heels, teetering forward on his toes and back again, he swayed his small, rotund body. “She tells me this is your first visit to Los Angeles. How do you find it?” His English accent was not quite so comme il faut as his wife’s. Leeds, Justin decided.

  “No wonder everybody wants to come here.”

  “Have you taken in our sights? Elisse says you missed the Hollywood Bowl. Are you only keen on this new syncopation?”

  “I’m disappointed we missed you and the Pastoral Thursday,” Justin said. “And to be very honest, the only popular music I like is jazz.”

  “Gershwin uses that idiom in his Rhapsody in Blue.”

  Though music critics praised the Rhapsody, Justin found the piece shallow, bombastic, and teeth-grittingly annoying, yet on the other hand Gershwin was Jewish, so this question could be a land mine. “In Detroit we have some fine colored jazz bands, and sometimes King Oliver comes from Chicago,” he temporized. “I’m afraid I’m a lowbrow about my jazz.”

  “You hear that, Elisse?” Mr. Kaplan beamed. “Gershwin should stick to his show tunes. Jazz is a way of performing music, not writing it, and that rules out Gershwin’s orchestrations. You have good taste, Mr. Hutchinson.”

  Absurdly pleased with this compliment, Justin leaped up—Mrs. Kaplan was returning back with his roses in a tall Chinese vase.

  She moved the flowers around the room to see where they made the best display. All families have ritual roles assigned to their members, and briefly the Kaplans fell into theirs. Elisse, the practical cynic, shifting table lamps and magazines with a raised eyebrow; Mr. Kaplan, the connoisseur, offering aesthetic advice while Mrs. Kaplan, the pliant, indecisive female, allowed herself to be coerced into setting the vase in its obvious place on the piano. The small charade played itself out with near visible lines of affection, and Justin, the onlooker, was drenched with memories of another trinity—Antonia, Claude, and little Justin.

  “The red of the roses with the yellow of the Spanish shawl!” Mr. Kaplan said, kissing his fingertips.

  “Do you like them here?” Mrs. Kaplan asked Justin.

  “Exactly right,” Justin said, his voice so tight that Elisse glanced questioningly at him.

  Dinner was served by an elderly, stern-jawed colored woman named Coetta.

  “Mr. Hutchinson,” said Mrs. Kaplan, her fork wavering over her drumstick. “How do you know my brother?”

  “Through your nephew. In school, Ros … Victor was my friend.”

  “I wish you’d stop boasting about that,” said Elisse.

  “Victor’s a lovely boy, dear,” said Mrs. Kaplan absently, still looking at Justin. “You do live in America?”

  “Detroit. But you’re from England, Mrs. Kaplan, so you know how it is when you move to another country. You never quite belong in either.”

  “We all know that feeling,” she said.

  “Not Elisse.” He smiled. “The native.”

  “I meant the feeling of being an outsider,” said Mrs. Kaplan, and though her casual tone and fluttery smile had not changed, Justin, looking across the damask linen cloth at her, decided that she wasn’t such a dim bulb after all. “She tells us your stay is over tomorrow.”

  “Yes. In the evening I’m taking the San Francisco train, and from there I go to Seattle. Mr. Bridger’s meeting me there.”

  “How nice. The Mr. Bridger.” She rang her silver bell. “Coetta, the chicken was lovely. Will you pass it around again?”

  After dessert—rich trifle topped with crystallized violets—Mr. Kaplan said, “How do you feel about breaking the Eighteenth Amendment, Mr. Hutchinson. There’s a bottle of schnapps in my studio.”

  Justin followed Elisse’s father up the tiled steps. The tower room, crowded by another grand piano, was furnished with music cabinets, chairs, and metal stands. “Up here I give lessons. I’m very picky whom I take,” said Mr. Kaplan, pouring brandy into wine goblets. In this studio, epicenter of his being, he did not sway or teeter.

  Justin took his glass. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Nice being shown around by a pretty flapper, eh?”

  “I’ll say.”

  “She’s bright, too, our Elisse. Graduated from college at twenty and made Phi Beta Kappa. She’s only been at the studio a couple of months and they’ve promoted her to head reader. Still, she’s not a bluestocking. She’s … peppy, isn’t that the word nowadays?”

  “There is no word,” Justin said. “She’s unique.”

  Mr. Kaplan sat on the piano bench and gulped down his brandy. “I’m not much good at this sort of thing, Mr. Hutchinson. If you want to know, I’m only firm with my viola. My music.” He shook his head, drumming a finger on the empty glass. “She used to go to high school dances with a Catholic boy. Mrs. Kaplan and I naturally tried to stop it but she refused to listen. So we told ourselves he was just another of her gentile friends. They both were graduated, class valedictorians, and went on to Southern Cal. That first semester he would pick her up in his jalopy. Toot-toot, and out she’d run, all glowing. Any kind of club that bans people, she’s against. She didn’t join the Jewish sorority. But he joined one. A fraternity. And as soon as he did—” With a clicking sound, Mr. Kaplan waved his hand in a flat, cutting gesture. “As far as they were concerned, he couldn’t even give a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl a ride to school. I don’t know what, if anything, he said to her. But it was as if candles had been snuffed out. She tried to put on a good face—you must have noticed she’s ready with quick remarks—but inside she’s soft. Sensitive. She transferred to the university at Berkeley. She didn’t get over it for a couple of years—I am not sure she’s over it yet.” He gave Justin an accusatory glance.

  Justin reddened, stand-in for a miserable, callow boy he would take passionate joy in punching.

  “Did you know,” Mr. Kaplan was asking, “that in Europe for centuries there were laws forbidding Jews to marry gentiles? In many places it was a capital offense. Even where it wasn’t, mobs would burn and sack the ghetto when such marriages took place. Today when a man or woman marries outside, we still say the kaddish, the prayer for the dead. And in many ways they are dead. They don’t belong with either group.”

  Justin noted the change of tense. “I don’t know much about Jewish history,” he said.

  “It’s a part of us, of Elisse. Next time you’re out here, it would be best if you ask another young lady to show you around.”

  “Are you going to tell that to Elisse, sir?”

  “Would I be making a fool of myself now if I hadn’t already done so?” Mr. Kaplan sighed. “Last night she told us you were coming to dinner, and the evening was important to her.”

  “To both of us.” />
  Mr. Kaplan-wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “It’s been less than a week.”

  “Once my mind is made up, I have a hard time changing. Mr. Kaplan, I promise you, I’m not like …” His voice trailed away.

  Elisse’s father was looking at him with helpless misery. “That’s what we were afraid of,” he said. “She’s not a little girl anymore. Mrs. Kaplan and I could never, never accept her getting serious about a gentile.”

  Justin’s fists clenched. What right did Harris Kaplan have to build barricades of ancient wrongs that he, Justin Hutchinson, had never perpetrated? What right to reject him impersonally without regard for his qualities, his love, only his ancestry? Unfair, unfair. “Elisse told me. I didn’t believe her,” he said in a hard commanding tone, a product of hurt.

  “We’re surprised that you’ve taken her out in the first place.” Mr. Kaplan was forming his words as if around a hot stone. “I apologize for saying this, but Onyx isn’t a very liberal company.”

  “Henry Ford published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Justin said. “Not Mr. Bridger.”

  “Then you have Jews at the top?”

  “We have Jewish dealers, a great many of them.”

  “But no executives?”

  Justin shook his head. “It’s hardly a matter of policy, though.” Again he felt awkward, defensive, and obscurely in the wrong. Why weren’t there any?

  “What about the wives?”

  Again Justin shook his head.

  “I read in that magazine about the future you have ahead of you.”

  “My job’s not the problem.”

  “When it comes to this sort of thing, you’d be surprised. If you just left tomorrow and didn’t write or come back, it’d be the best thing. For both of you.”

  “I couldn’t promise that, Mr. Kaplan. Elisse wouldn’t want me to.” He could feel the blood pulsing in his veins, yet his manner remained calm.

  Mr. Kaplan’s mouth worked anxiously. Justin recognized that in this calamitously awkward scratching match, the stout, ingratiating little musician was fighting beyond his strength. “This life you have in Detroit, it will be impossible for her, for our Elisse.”

  “It is a huge decision,” Justin said. “We haven’t talked about anything … serious.”

  “But you intend to?”

  Justin nodded.

  Mr. Kaplan opened the keyboard and sounded middle C. “When you have a child, it’s like your nerves are tied to another person. You feel their pain, all of it, but you can’t do anything to prevent them from getting hurt.”

  “Not Elisse, never through me.”

  “Believe me, Mr. Hutchinson, this … this friendship is difficult enough for Mrs. Kaplan and me. But Elisse is the one who will take it on the chin.”

  “No,” Justin said.

  Mr. Kaplan sounded the note again. “You’re wrong for her, wrong for each other.”

  Justin stared into his brandy. After a long silence, he said, “I won’t push her.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Zoe strolled up and down the long platform of the Detroit depot, awed glances and zephyrs of silence trailing her.

  Her beauty struck the eye like a blow.

  Her luminous, finely pored skin was subtly tinged with pink, her eyes appeared yet more meltingly dark in contrast to the red-gold waves around the brim of her cloche, her full mouth was set in a beguiling pout. But it was her body that dumbfounded. Zoe’s curves and symmetries transcended the imagination and overcame the smartly waistless Nile-green ensemble she wore: the sensuality of her lush body was so great it vaguely disturbed yet ultimately delighted the beholder.

  “Zoe. Zoe!”

  Caryll Bridger was jogging after her in his slightly duckfooted stride. Although tabloids often grappled with the question of who was the world’s wealthiest billionaire, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Aga Khan, the King of England, or Tom Bridger, Zoe saw Caryll not as the heir to an incalculable fortune but as a round-faced young man whose gentle gray eyes shone as he smiled at her and lifted his homburg, just another of the dozen or so automotive executives mad for her.

  “Caryll,” she said irritably. This was one of the days when his transparent adoration rubbed her the wrong way. “So you’ve declared a holiday.”

  “I’m here to meet them too,” he said, matching his steps to hers. Caryll, taking after the Trelinack side, was broad of bone and without height. Barefoot in their swimsuits, the two measured the same, but Zoe, dressed up and wearing her green suede high-heeled pumps, was taller than he. “Is it on for tonight?” he asked.

  “Whatever are you talking about?”

  “The dance,” he said. “I asked you last week, and you said you’d tell me. Remember? It’s for Mavis and Ted.” A scrubby friend from Detroit Military Academy had blossomed into a handsome swan and was carrying off a lumber heiress amid a great deal of prenuptial fanfare—much to Caryll’s jubilation. There were so few functions to which he could invite Zoe. The Bridgers never had joined the Yondotega Club, the Detroit Club, the Bloomfield Country Club, they did not mingle with the automotive ascendancy. Their social life was limited to family functions. To these Justin and Zoe were never invited. Caryll was aware that his parents had influenced and encouraged his aunts in this exclusion, yet Maud never mentioned the ban, and this atypical obliqueness threw him so uneasily off-balance that he never questioned her, never asked his Aunt Melisande if he could invite the girl he loved and the man he considered his best friend to her masterfully coordinated thés dansants or balls, never asked his stout little Aunt Yssy if he could bring them along to her noisy, congenial Open Houses. “Paul Whiteman’s in town to play for it.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, this’ll be Justin’s first night home.”

  “He can come with us. He’s never tired. Zoe, Paul Whiteman! There’s another band, too.”

  “Oh, who cares? Hugh’s looking forward to seeing Justin.”

  “You love to dance,” Caryll persisted. “They can talk tomorrow.”

  “What about you? I should think you’d want to stay home to butter up your father before you spring the new car on him.”

  “I want to show Justin the prototype first,” Caryll said, regretting he had confided in Zoe, who lacked any regard for secrets. “The design’s slick, but I’m worried about mechanical problems. Justin’s got the knack of finding them.”

  “You’re afraid of your father.”

  Caryll’s smile had frayed. Though accustomed to Zoe’s inexplicably shifting moods and insecurities and aware that if he remained steadfast, soon she would be cajoling him, he was too hopelessly in love to ignore her taunts. “I’m not.”

  “Everybody is. Except Hugh and Justin.”

  “Dad’s a legend, he’s famous. No wonder people are intimidated by him.”

  “We’re talking about you.”

  “Every time I try to argue with him about cars, I remember he just about built the industry and all I’ve ever done is be his son.”

  “So you let Justin shield you.”

  Caryll bit the inside of his lip to keep his failing composure. She had come dangerously close to the truth. Though Tom never voiced respect for Justin, and often was inexplicably curt with him, Caryll knew that for Justin alone would his father compromise. Therefore, when it came to pressing his own ideas, Caryll generally went in tandem with his friend. “I can pick you up at ten or eleven—as late as you want.”

  “When you beg you sound so wet.” The platform had begun to shake. The train roared into the station. Leaving Caryll red with mortification, Zoe flashed around baggage carts, passengers, the colored redcaps, arriving at the last car, Tom’s private car, before the steward had let down the steps. Justin jumped down.

  The young man’s reticence vanished in a bear hug that lifted his sister from the ground. “Zozo!”

  She printed his cheek with her bright coral lipstick. “You gorgeous man! How I missed you!”

  He laughed. “When did you fi
nd time? From your letters I got the impression you’ve been out dancing until three every single night.”

  “I’m a wreck when you’re not here,” she said sincerely, kissing lipstick onto his other cheek.

  II

  That afternoon she stayed in Hugh’s antique-paneled office, her spectacular legs coiled over the arm of a leather easy chair, listening quietly as Justin reported to Hugh on the assembly plant departments that were Hugh’s bailiwick: social welfare, advertising, public relations. Zoe did not focus on the dialogue—business bored her silly—but on the resplendently warm, deep-toned affection in the masculine voices. She glanced from one to the other as they spoke, these two in whose presence alone she felt confident of her place in the world’s scheme. Justin, she noted approvingly, had one shirt cuff showing. Clothes never stayed neat on his large, comfortably muscled body; he was springy, casual. Hugh, on the other hand, in his double-breasted pinstripe, was lithe and elegant. They pleased her equally.

  The discussion continued through dinner. The table was cleared, and the three were left cognac and a magnificent Paul Storr epergne overflowing with nuts and large, perfect peaches.

  “Did you ever discover what ruined the piston machine in the Glendale assembly?” Hugh asked. “I heard rumors of labor sabotage.”

  “Nothing so dramatic. The plant manager pushes too hard, that’s all. I’ve told Tom.”

  “Have you ever realized, Justin, that nine times out of ten you side with labor?” Hugh was smiling.

  “Be that as it may, Hugh.” Justin smiled back. “The manager speeded up the line until nobody could keep the pace. A tool fell into the machinery. If a foreman hadn’t immediately thrown the switch, we’d have had much more damage.”

  “You haven’t mentioned the dealer banquet out in Los Angeles.”

  “A fine success. Or so they told me.”

  “Weren’t you there?”

  “I missed that one.”

  “You?” Hugh asked, surprised. “Why?”

  A stab of intuition pierced Zoe’s heart. He’s found somebody, she thought. A girl. The girl. He’s going to desert me.

  Hugh was chuckling. “No need to look so hangdog, Justin. You’re enough of a stickler to be entitled to a night off now and then.” He stood. “You two need a chance to catch up. And I have work to do. Good night, mes enfants.”