Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  Justin and Zoe strolled toward Lake St. Clair, moving in and out of pools of bluish light cast by Hugh’s ornamental ironwork lamps. Zoe’s apprehensions made her throat feel bruised and she pulled up the ermine collar of her cape. When she was certain she could effect an easy modulation, she inquired, “What happened on the night of the banquet? Were you bedding Vilma Banky or Clara Bow?”

  “I hate it when you talk like that.”

  “Scabrously dirty, that’s me,” she said. “You were with a girl; weren’t you?”

  Justin’s footsteps crunched several paces on the gravel. “Rosburg’s cousin,” he admitted slowly. “I met her in London, but she’s from Los Angeles.”

  “If she got responsible, disciplined you to cut a duty for Onyx, she really must be something.”

  “She is.”

  “Oh?”

  Justin ran a hand through his hair, and said in a pleased, almost shy tone, “She’s a knockout all the way, Zozo. Brains. Sense of humor—she has a crisp, funny way about everything. We went dancing at a speak and she does as terrific a Charleston as you. She’s caring, she’s kind.”

  “I fear for you, Justin, I fear. Is she pretty?”

  “Is she ever!”

  “Tall?”

  “No, little.” He held out his hand at shoulder level. “She has curly brown hair. Well, it’s not exactly brown, it has a lot of blond in front. Her eyes are brown with green glints. Hazel, I guess it’s called.”

  “What about her nose?” There was a faint smirkiness to the question.

  “Cut that out, Zoe.” Justin spoke thoughtfully rather than angrily. Mr. Kaplan had syringed a certain easy wax from his ears, and now he was prepared to catch the enormous number of condescensions and quips that had not heretofore registered: innuendos, an unfairly patronizing tone of amusement, a cloud of nebulous, not particularly virulent anti-Semitism that distressed him and left him helpless because it emanated from people he liked and trusted.

  “One thing’s clear. You’re carrying a very large torch.”

  “I hadn’t realized what a lost sheep I’ve been.”

  “You? Stalwart, purposeful you?”

  “Since we came over, I’ve been a square peg. You’ve found people. I haven’t. Zozo, with her, I feel like … oh, I can’t explain. Alive.”

  Zoe moved apart from him on the path. She had always stifled the thought of her brother’s eventual marriage—or, as she inwardly termed it, desertion. It had been easy enough to do. Justin’s calm had attracted its opposite, the frivolously extroverted dumb Doras, yet his thoughtful depth enabled him to see beyond their twitching bottoms, fluttering lashes, their brightly painted mouths, to their essential shallowness. Zoe’s fancy had awarded her brother countless physical conquests, yet because he had never tumbled for any girl, she had assumed his heart would remain forever unscratched and pristine. Hers.

  Reaching the artificial hill, they silently ascended the sloping path to the domed summerhouse. From its balustrade Justin looked down at Lake St. Clair, black as oil with one yellow-lit tug oozing along, twinned by its perfect reflection.

  Zoe gripped the spooled railing. “Does she know you’re gone on her?”

  “It’s been mentioned, yes. But her parents are dead set against anyone who’s not the same religion.”

  “A secret engagement?”

  “I haven’t actually asked her yet. She’s young, about your age. We haven’t known one another long enough. And her parents are right, it won’t be easy. It’s not fair to push her. I’m giving her time.”

  “Impeccably just Justin.”

  “We stayed up all night talking about it.” Justin crushed out his cigarette. “I’m not naïve, I know it’s more than a religion, being Jewish. She’s positive it’ll be a handicap for me at Onyx. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “Absolutely,” Zoe said, nodding in agreement.

  “Still, it’s in her mind. Besides, she can’t bear hurting her parents.”

  “What about this cooling-off period? How long?”

  “December. Christmas.”

  “Will you be dating other girls?”

  “Oh, don’t be a nit, Zoe.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. What about her?”

  “She’s meant to go out. That’s what this is all about,” he said, clipping out the words. “It’s cold here, Zoe. Let’s get on back to the house.”

  As he opened the side door for her he said, “I didn’t mean to spill my heart.”

  “Sometimes even you, brother mine, need a sympathetic ear.”

  “That I do. But it’s private, all right?”

  “Mum’s the word,” Zoe promised.

  III

  The year after Justin and Zoe had come to live with him, Hugh had added on to his red-brick Tudor mansion. The new wing included filing rooms and secretarial offices downstairs, and a large suite for himself on the second floor where he stood no chance on bumping into his wards’ guests. He was in his private upstairs library, his feet on a hassock, reading a sales chart that Justin had brought from Seattle, when Zoe burst in.

  She flung that astounding body into the chair next to his. “He’s found somebody!” she cried, tears oozing down her lovely cheeks.

  It was natural for her to turn to Hugh in her misery, natural for her to betray Justin’s confidences to him.

  She was ruinously, obsessively in love with Hugh.

  Yet Hugh, skilled at unraveling secrets through detectives’ reports, incessantly shrewd about motives, never had a glimmer. In his eyes Zoe’s smiles, her clinging interest in his conversation, her trust, were natural extensions of her childhood’s uninhibited adoration. In a way he was right. Age eight, aboard the creaking Stephen Decatur, Zoe had formulated her personal Pygmalion myth: Hugh, having worshiped her mother from afar, had seen in her, Zoe, a younger Antonia to mold as his own, and for this reason was bringing her (and therefore Justin) to Detroit. As Zoe swam into puberty her emotions swerved onto the shoals of sex. She would awaken breathless, her shapely thighs clenched together, heiress to a legacy of libidinous dreams in which Hugh caressed her budding breasts and her private orifices: those dawns she learned a manipulative technique she called “going up and over,” and Hugh’s image remained the simulacrum on which these self-seductions balanced. Enamored of Hugh as she was, adoring his wily brain, his long, slender body, his hard and sophisticated mouth, the swanlike silvering of his blond hair, the twenty-three-year age gap, his steel webs of power, his politic wisdom, even his dark red scar tissue, she inevitably viewed her legion of admirers, Caryll among them, as young, ineffectual calves.

  Hugh gave her his handkerchief. “I had a suspicion. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “She’s from Los Angeles.” Zoe’s voice, tending to the higher registers, was shrill.

  “It’s all right, Zoe,” he soothed.

  “I can’t bear some stranger taking him away from us.”

  “He’ll bring her to Detroit. You’ll see, it’ll be fine. You’re always like this at first with everything that Justin cares for. Remember that bitch pup I gave him? You hated her, then you played with her, and later when she got into your cottage and chewed your dolls, you didn’t even make a fuss.”

  “This isn’t a golden retriever, Hugh,” Zoe wailed. “It’s Rosburg’s cousin.”

  Hugh’s exhalation rasped. “Rosburg?” He forgot himself enough to turn full face to her. “Rosburg?”

  “His California cousin. Justin met her when he was in London this summer.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “He didn’t say … or did he? Alice or Elaine or something.”

  “But she is a Jewess?”

  “That’s the problem.” Zoe wiped her eyes, accepting that she had now roused Hugh to her own earlier level of alarm, yet not comprehending why the girl’s being Jewish had set him off. “He’s giving her until Christmas to decide if this is it. But he’s dead serious.”

  “It’s gone that far?”
r />   “Oh, Hugh, what do you think I’m trying to tell you?”

  “You’re not dramatizing?”

  “You saw him.”

  “He was only in Los Angeles a week. Justin never rushes into things.”

  “He’s fallen like a ton of bricks.”

  Hugh tapped the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, his eyes far away as his mind went prowling around this new threat. Zoe relaxed, clasping her hands around the short skirt of her aquamarine silk dinner gown, letting Hugh take over.

  At last he said, “I can’t believe Justin’s gone haywire.”

  Zoe murmured encouragingly.

  “These quick things often die just as quickly,” he said. “I’m tired, Zoe, dear.”

  Rising, she patted his shoulder. “You’ll figure out something. You always do.”

  “Sleep well,” he said automatically.

  The staccato clicks of her heels faded down the private hall that led to his rooms. Hugh rested his head back in the tapestry cushion, his stiff boiled shirt front moving up and down with each asthmatic breath. Justin, he thought, Justin and some Jewish girl?

  Hugh’s feelings for his unacknowledged nephew were possessive and extended far beyond the terrain of mere philoprogenitive love. His respect and admiration for the younger man were fiercely partisan. At first he had been furious with Tom for not personally guiding Justin around the Hamtramck, for not welcoming him to the Farm, for refusing to acknowledge Justin’s achievements and decencies, the boy’s ability to lead. Oh, Hugh understood that it took a formidable effort for Tom to maintain his seemingly cold-blooded distance. Justin did not. And though it was against Justin’s nature to air his hurts or complain, it was more than apparent to Hugh that some vital part of the boy was numbed by Tom’s attitude.

  Hugh had finally accepted that Tom’s yammerings about that antediluvian promise made to Antonia were for real. Tom would never, never replace Caryll—that milky boy—with his firstborn son, his true heir.

  The focus of Hugh’s life had shifted from his brother to his nephew.

  In the years since he had altered his allegiance, he had planned for Justin a palace far larger than Onyx: it was an automotive monopoly far greater than the one that George Selden long ago had hoped to form with his patent. Every manufacturer—Ford, Onyx, General Motors, Marmon, Hudson, Chrysler, Packard, Studebaker, you name them—under one roof to be governed in harmony, efficiency, and decency by Justin. Hugh had already started to construct. He had quietly bought stock in Sterns and General Motors, had aimed subtle propaganda at directors of smaller outfits, who might be coerced into surrendering their companies for shares in this new entity.

  Needless to say, Justin had no inkling of this grandiose plan.

  Hugh rose from his chair to gaze out the window at the lights of his estate. This damn girl, he thought, she’ll queer everything.

  Hugh, perhaps in keeping with his reclusive style of life, bore no animosity toward any group. His sole prejudice was against those people who looked upon him with abhorrence or fear; however, he was too astute to underestimate the bigotry of others. This industry’ll never get behind a man with a Jewish wife, he thought. Never in a million years.

  I must find out what’s what in order to figure out how to shake her loose. He went back to his chair and sat, waiting.

  By midnight Hugh could hear the little creaks and sighs that breathe through a house when all therein are asleep. He rose, stretching like a cat, then locked the doors to his suite. Moving to the adjacent library, he stood before a large portrait, one of those Renaissance renderings of a dimensionless, whey-faced girl: an art historian had authenticated the subject as Lady Jane Neville, and Hugh had forked over a great deal. Ignoring his presumed ancestress, he touched a curlicue in the center left of the gilt frame, at the same time exerting pressure on the lower left corner. The painting swung open on oiled hinges to reveal a safe. His office staff believed all of his private papers were concealed in the capacious walk-in Mosler safe downstairs, as did Justin and Tom. Only Hugh and a New Orleans cabinetmaker knew of the existence of this hidey-hole. Shuffling through manila envelopes penciled lightly in his own meticulous hand, Hugh extracted one, carrying it to his library table.

  The top page was also in his hand:

  Dickson Keeley

  b. January 5, 1892, of Persis (Dickson) and Judge Barnes Keeley, in Elizabeth, N.J.

  Sexual proclivities (three photo. incl.)

  Information from the private files of Mr. Woodrow Wilson in re dismissal from Princeton, 1912.

  Dept. of Army documents in re discharge, 1918.

  Hugh had read the dossier before, but he turned the pages again to reassure himself that Dickson Keeley would remain his creature. Locking the envelope back in the safe, he went into his bedroom to use the telephone.

  IV

  “You weren’t very explicit last night, about what you had in mind, Mr. Bridger, but I figured you’d want an eyeful of these.” Dickson Keeley swung his briefcase onto the Elizabethan table, drawing out a roll of drafting paper.

  During his abortive college years Dickson Keeley had been on the Princeton crew, and one would guess, by the shoulder and bicep development under his conservative dark suit, that he had continued to row. Detroit was the nation’s principal port of entry for illegal liquor, and while the rumor that Dickson Keeley had at one time personally ferried booze in from Canada was not true, he indeed had connections among the city’s big-time bootleggers. With his polished manners and dangerous smile he was considered—erroneously—to be a ladies’ man. His worst enemies, and he had a great many enemies, conceded his reckless bravery. He was heartily disliked by Colonel Hazelford, his boss in Security, which was an arm of the Social Welfare department: Hugh’s terrain. Hugh had personally hired him, so his job was secure.

  “Plans of Caryll’s pet project?” Hugh asked.

  “So he’s broadcast the news to the family?”

  “On the contrary. But I have my sources.” Zoe had told him.

  Dickson Keeley extended the papers across the table. “Getting these was no lead-pipe cinch. Over there in the museum they keep the doors and windows shut tighter than a rat’s ass.” In Keeley’s cultured, educated drawl the tough’s lingo sounded like a foreign tongue.

  Hugh waved negligently. “Leak them over to Ford or General Motors.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “Every part’ll be altered once my brother gets his hands on the prototype.”

  “So he’s in on it too?”

  “Hardly,” Hugh said. “But Chevrolet’s eating up the market, and if we don’t replace the Fiver soon, we’re out of business.”

  “Your nephew’s showing Hutchinson the model this morning, and if he, Hutchinson, gives the green light, the two of them plan to spring it on the boss.”

  “Keep me informed.”

  “Yes, they’ve invited me along to take notes and pictures!”

  “Don’t get cocky with me,” Hugh said. “And speaking of Hutchinson, why haven’t you been reporting to me about him?”

  Dickson Keeley’s squarish jaw dropped in surprise. “Hutchinson? He lives here.”

  “Keeley, you do remember why I give you an extra hundred a week and expenses?”

  “To check on the top brass,” Dickson Keeley said. “Where’s the body buried?”

  “There’s a girl in Los Angeles.”

  “Name?” Dickson Keeley asked, looking at him with pale, unblinking eyes.

  Hugh fought a wave of nausea. In his effort to save Justin from this girl, save him from the oblivion of a mixed marriage, he was betraying the faith between them. It can’t be helped, he told himself, but when he picked up his letter opener, he slashed at the sealed envelope before him as if he could cut away his self-disgust. “I don’t know anything about her,” he said, adding, “yet.”

  V

  Three mornings later, at six thirty, Tom was inching through Gate One, part of the crush that converged on
Woodland before the shift change. Headlights shone, although the sky was already paling. To his left he could see the outline of three vessels low-laden with what must be ore, coke, or limestone, as they plowed from the Detroit River into the privately dredged canal. A mile and a half to his right, invisible beyond the steel mills, the glass plant, the rubber shop, the main assembly, enormous arc lights were burning so that inspectors could check over Fivers ready to be loaded onto flatcars. Woodland was a monstrous female in perpetual, noisy heat, spewing from her womb a ceaseless litter of sturdy, ugly little cars. This year they had produced—and sold—over a million and three quarters, down from the previous two years, but still more than any other company.

  As the next car, a 1920 sedan, edged through the gate the driver recognized him and rolled down the window. “Good morning, Mr. Bridger, boss,” called the man in a respectful Slavic voice, and his three passengers touched their caps. Tom lifted his arm in an awkward wave. I’ll never learn to be comfortable playing king, he thought. More workers in their cars were turning to him in recognition, and he heaved a sigh of relief when the stream of traffic spilled into one of the endless parking lots. Bouncing over railroad tracks and passing under moving conveyors, he arrived at Administration. Though the executive workday did not begin until eight thirty, he noted with approval that in the long two-story building many windows were already lit. Caryll had left home before he had, so why were his offices dark?

  Justin stood under the lights, jotting on one of his long yellow pads. Seeing him, Tom sat up straighter and the margins of a smile crinkled around his gray eyes. He sternly rationed his time alone with Justin, and when he stumbled into additional, unplanned moments like these, he felt like a child being handed an unexpected Hershey bar.

  His car was the only one permitted to park by the main entry, and as he braked Justin strode down the steps to meet him. “Tom,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “What’s the problem?” Tom hid his pleasure under a careful acidity.