Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “Everything is fine. Caryll has something to show you.” As Tom lifted his eyes again to the darkened windows, Justin added quickly, “In the museum. I’m meant to steer you over there.”

  “Hop in, then,” Tom said. As they pulled away Tom asked, “Well, what is it? Why’d he miss breakfast?”

  Shrugging his shoulders in a noncommittal way, Justin lit a cigarette. Tom glanced over as the match flared briefly on the familiar profile. How like her he is, Tom thought.

  He had come to rely on this large, reassuringly decent young man who moved with the relaxed authority of an athlete, rely on him in a way that he did on nobody else: not Hugh, not Caryll, certainly not his brothers-in-law nor the three Sinclair nephews who worked at Onyx. Sometimes he cursed his oath to Antonia, but for the most part he blessed it, for it imposed on him a discretion that might otherwise have been lacking. Damn it, Hugh was dead on target about Justin’s abilities! Without that old, still sacred promise how easy it might be to shamelessly demote Caryll, whom he loved with the same fatherly tenderness as ever. Tom did not realize quite the extent of the gruffness and rebuffs he aimed at Justin, but Onyx’s top dogs often discussed how dedicated the Boss was, advancing a brilliant underling however much he personally disliked him.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me what this mystery’s all about?” Tom asked.

  “It’s up to Caryll.”

  “There aren’t many men around Woodland who’d hold out on me,” Tom said, curving off the bridge toward the museum. “Damn few.” A note of approval had crept into his tone.

  “I don’t know about that.” Justin sounded happy.

  Tom stifled an impulse to reach over and touch him.

  The red-brick colonial structure that housed models of Onyxes and Bridgers was isolated from the rest of the factory complex. Caryll paced up and down the white pillared portico. Hurrying to the car, he said, “Thanks for coming, Dad.”

  The exhibit cars were gone, and much of the space was cut off by a divider wall with built-in blackboards. Waist-high benches displayed a gleaming six-cylinder engine, a braking system, headlights, Houdaille hydraulic shock absorbers, assorted parts.

  But what drew the eye was a gleaming maroon two-door coupe built low to the ground. It had the sleek contours of a Bugatti Brescia, the gleaming grill of a Marmon, the streamlined fenders of a Duesenberg, the slanted windshield of an Oakland.

  Tom balled his fists in his pockets, circling the shamelessly borrowed gaud. Justin watched from the door, but Caryll trailed him.

  “What do you think, Dad?” His slight stammer echoed in the barnlike emptiness.

  Tom was unable to reply. Outrage was percolating through him in round bursts. The two of them have ganged up on me. They have concocted this miserable obscenity. They’re telling me the Fiver’s old! I’m old.

  Caryll said, “She can be modified in every way.”

  Tom stalked to the benches. The rational part of his brain told him his hurt was caused by time’s erosion of his dream, not by Caryll and Justin. But at the moment of violation who listens to reason? Not Tom Bridger. He burst out. “Are the pair of you breaking out on your own? Starting your own shop? I don’t remember ordering anyone to build this damn thing!”

  “All the dealers’ suggestions are incorporated,” Caryll placated.

  “Shit!”

  “It’s what p-people want,” Caryll stammered.

  Justin came over. “Tom, they’ve been suffering, the dealers. This year they grossed quiet a bit less than last year—three have filed bankruptcy. Caryll’s the one who hears their problems and complaints.”

  “I know Caryll’s job! I damn well gave it to him!”

  Justin went on calmly, “They tell him the customers want headlights that don’t die when they stop the car, they want a shifting gear transmission, and none of them delight in cleaning the sparks every few hundred miles. They want a smoother ride, less noise. They’re switching from the Fiver. They’d rather have a used car than a new Onyx. They want what Caryll’s got here. Styling.”

  Tom, as always, was unable to sustain an attack on Caryll. In his agony he turned on Justin.

  “They, they! Hutchinson, whoever they are, they can go fuck themselves! I’m not in automobiles to make some jazzed-up gadget that falls apart like cowshit in a rainstorm!” He slammed his fist at a fender. The metal did not yield. The spasm of pain shooting up his arm dizzied him.

  “We’ve gone over this often enough, God knows,” Justin said. “Is a car transportation, or luxury goods? I respect your opinion, Tom. It’s mine, too. Utility. So long as it gets you from here to there reliably, who cares about the rest? But it’s not a philosophical question anymore. On this last trip I realized that. Los Angeles is a pacesetter, and Los Angeles doesn’t want Fivers anymore. We no longer have a choice.”

  “We? You forget yourself. I’m selling damn near as many Fivers as I did last year. My shop is first in sales.”

  “In 1924 you had fifty-three percent of the market and now, two years later, you have forty-one percent.” Justin’s voice was quiet, yet it reverberated through the hall. “Give me the sack any time you want, but you can’t alter those figures, Tom.”

  Tom felt a vise clamp down, compressing his anger until it was a poisonous bubble in his chest. He had brought forth a miracle, but that was decades ago, and people were no longer content to span distances, they demanded gilded carriages. In tying the world together he had delivered a new symbol of human worth: What kind of a car do you drive?

  Tom could not let either of them guess at the alarming rate of his heart. Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus. My temper. It hasn’t aged well. He rested both palms on the hood, staring into his distorted reflection. He hated them both for being right, for being young, for not having learned the attritions of time, for not knowing the unconsolable and irreversible process that withers the muscles and dries the juices.

  Daylight was streaming through the high windows.

  Justin went to switch off the dangling, green-shaded fixtures. Tom moved around the prototype again, and Justin watched him. “It’s a beginning, Tom, that’s all, a place to start. Take an unbiased look.”

  The voice with its salvationary calm ultimately worked on Tom, transforming him from a wounded lion at bay to a near rational being. His face expressionless—it was the deep lines that carved sardonic humor into his face—he rounded the model again. This time it seemed less a purloined mockery. Too much flash and jazz, he thought; still, Caryll’s got the taste to steal the best.

  He went to the engine and stared down. He tapped a cylinder with his finger. “Not a six,” he said, the finger still drumming. “We’ll want an eight.”

  “But Dad, an eight’ll put us out of the low-priced field,” Caryll said earnestly. “Chevrolet’s a six.”

  “Since when do we imitate General Motors?” Tom asked.

  “But—” Caryll started.

  Justin’s laughter burst out, a rippling, joyous, youthful release that proved how successfully he had been clothing his tension. “Wake up, Caryll. Wake up.”

  Caryll, too, laughed. “So the model’s on the front burner,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, yes, sir, it’s hot,” Justin replied.

  Justin punched Caryll’s bicep, Caryll slapped back, a near embrace. Tom watched the two jubilant young men. They’ll drag me into the future yet, he thought. My sons.

  Until now he had never permitted Justin to share this innermost place in his heart with Caryll: he had been unable to prevent himself from viewing Justin as a munificent wealth, a beloved person, yet had managed for the most part to keep paternity out of it. He shook his head, dazed. My sons. Because it was a fresh way to think, it was therefore more powerful.

  My sons, he thought again, sucking on the phrase as he would a delectable fruit.

  VI

  That morning Tom summoned his brother-in-law, Olaf Baardson, once his patternmaker, along with the heads of the four engineering departments. Men in broad-sh
ouldered dark suits crowded around the maroon coupe and the parts on the benches, pointing out weaknesses and inadequacies and potential problems.

  The museum became a design shop, a workshop, a laboratory. Guarded with a secrecy that would have done credit to the czarist police, enshrouded by rumors, this was GHQ for the onslaught on the new model. Meals were brought in, cots set up. Tom rarely left. His wrenching antipathy for the Seven, as they called the future car, had evaporated. He was cresting on a wave of creativity as strong and infallible and possessive as the surge that had built the quadricycle—it was no coincidence that he often dreamed of the summer girl, the thin young Antonia who had dwelled in Major Stuart’s chateau.

  Caryll, too, bivouacked in the museum, feeling infinitely more secure than when he himself had been the chief of staff issuing the orders. The prototype had been scrapped. He and the designers sketched new and original ideas for the body and interior on the blackboards—in reality blackboard cloths that could be rolled up and saved. For the first time he was happy at Onyx. He was helping form a beautiful car, he was using his own gift of artistic taste. He rarely stammered, his jaw muscles relaxed, and he was able to do something that took more courage than he previously had possessed.

  He invited Zoe and Justin home to dinner.

  CHAPTER 18

  The rainy Thursday evening that they were to dine at the Farm, Justin arrived home a little before seven. On the salver in his room, amid his other mail, was a thin letter from Elisse. He had less than ten minutes to change, yet he took it to his desk, hunching to study the small, angular writing, the Beverly Hills postmark, even the profile of Washington on the carmine stamp before he slit the envelope. As he smoothed open the single folded sheet, the porches of his brow drew down over his eyes, adding a shadow of dread to his expression.

  Since Tom, Olaf Baardson, and Caryll had sequestered themselves in the museum, Justin had taken charge of Woodland and the Hamtramck as well as the assembly plants; his sixteen-hour workdays spent unscrambling foul-ups were his salvation. He had no time to brood about letters like this. The first breezy paragraph described her servitude at Columbia, the second, in the same light vein, told of a meeting at Mitch’s place, and she closed with her unvarying: You’ll be hearing again from/Elisse.

  He pressed his hands on either side of his face as though to squeeze from his skull the inexorable chain of questions. Was she stringing him along? Had she already decided against the rigors of intermarriage? Had she found some up-and-coming Jewish liberal? Was his Elisse Kaplan real—or had he himself invented a warm, idealistic girl to place below the sleek California suntan?

  I can’t take any more of this, he thought. I’ll put in a long-distance call. An outright violation of their agreement. His hand hesitated over the telephone.

  A rap on his door. “Decent?” Zoe called.

  Hastily reversing Elisse’s letter on his blotter, he called back, “Come on in.”

  “You aren’t ready,” Zoe accused.

  She wore her indignation like an accessory to her sumptuous beauty. Her simple dinner dress revealed the upper curves of her breasts, then ran like cream to her knees: the narrow diamond bracelet, inherited from Antonia, that encircled the rounded whiteness of her upper left arm was her sole adornment—that bracelet and her enormous, glittering dark eyes.

  “You look like a tiger lily,” Justin said.

  Zoe did not acknowledge the fraternal compliment. “Justin, you know good and well this is the first time Caryll’s gotten up the nerve to invite us. In fear and trembling he told me they mangez at eight on the dot. As if I hadn’t heard it from everybody already!” Zoe’s jitters, rivaling Caryll’s, stemmed from her infrequent meetings with the Bridgers at Hugh’s ritually formal entertainments, anxieties that she connected not to the couple’s unrivaled wealth but to Tom’s brief, caustic laugh and Maud’s unblinking, bespectacled gaze.

  Justin patted her shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll be there in plenty of time, Zozo.” The dressing room door closed behind him.

  Zoe moved edgily around, touching his bookends, running a fingertip around the speaker horn of his new Atwater Kent Compact Radio, turning over his letter. Reading idly at first, she sank into his chair, absently noticing that the warmth of his body lingered in the leather. Refolding the paper, she searched through drawers of his boyhood desk until she found a stack of opened envelopes addressed in the same small, angular hand.

  She had read eight of the letters and was extracting a ninth when Justin returned, black hair wetly tousled, feet bare as he stuffed his evening shirt into his satin-striped trousers. From the dressing room he stared at her.

  “Clever and funny,” Zoe said, holding up the unread sheet.

  Against Justin’s abrupt pallor, his eyes were a startling blue. Striding across the room, he yanked the linen paper from her fingers. “What an absolute beast you can be!”

  “Temper,” Zoe murmured.

  “When you’re in the room, must I lock my things?” He shoved the letters and envelopes into the open drawer. One corner caught as he banged, and he had to slam it with his palm to shut it properly.

  “Is she actually organizing a strike?”

  “Mind your own business!”

  “I’d go to all the dances if I were you, I’d get back in the groove. You don’t stand a ghost of a chance with the California pink lady.”

  Giving her a furious, stricken look, Justin stormed back into the dressing room. One of his photographs of Claude slipped askew, and Zoe, humming, realigned it, briefly looking into the handsome face with the cleft chin and very white skin that she had inherited. Claude had died when she was two, so she had no memory whatsoever of him: the filial honor momentarily in her eyes reflected Justin’s canonization of her father rather than any emotions of her own.

  Had anyone but her brother just raged at her, she would be pressed against the door, healing the breach with her most fetching wiles. However, this was Justin, her only blood kin, so she was no more ruffled by his outburst than by her own parting cruelty. Wait until I tell Hugh there’s not a thing in the world to worry about with this Elisse Kaplan, she thought, raising both shapely arms over her head, wriggling her fingertips upward.

  II

  Maud and Tom had continued to buy land in Bloomfield Hills until their place—the Farm—was nearly two thousand acres. Much of this land had been cleared, and the mansion crouched with its back to primeval forest that had seen Ottawa and Wyandot braves. The rugged Marblehead limestone walls, the massive tile roof clumped with chimneys, had been planned with Maud’s regard for durability rather than lavishness or grace. Yet for all the dark carving and vault-ceilinged corridors, the Farm exuded the homelike odors of Devoe furniture polish and baked apples.

  Once Tom’s grief had carbonized to its indestructible, diamond core, he was surprised to find that he could live here contentedly with Maud. Yet why not? She was Caryll’s mother, her honesty and loyalty were firmly uncompromising, she was once more his best friend. He was grateful that she never complained about the gorgeousassed mistresses foisted on him by his unfaithful body—it seemed to him that his lust should have died a decent death with his love.

  The couple was seated in the library when the front door chimes rang. Caryll ushered in his guests. Tom stood to welcome them.

  Maud found herself unable to rise from her wing chair. Long ago Tom had determined not to dredge up old hurts by involving himself—or her—with the Hutchinsons, but since this ban had never been verbalized to their son, Maud had not objected when Caryll told her he had invited Justin and Zoe. Yet now, a dulled, hopeless resentment weighed her down. It was as though Antonia herself intruded with her tall and beautiful children at the glass door to the entry hall. In my own house! Maud thought. No gray showed in her hair, her body—that businesslike organism—had acquired a scant inch at the trim waist, yet the elasticity of youth was gone, and while her face retained its high, handsome color and had not wrinkled, the small twin jowls ga
ve a squareness to her fixed expression. And so she sat in her three-year-old brown velvet dinner dress, grim as the last Manchu dowager empress.

  Zoe moved into the room. Still euphoric from the letters, she bubbled, “Oh, Mrs. Bridger, what a magnificent home!”

  Maud pulled herself together. “It’s much less grand than Hugh’s,” she retorted, her eyes seeking out Justin. Because he was male, she found him less evocative of her old rival and therefore easier to take. “Would you believe it, the architect called the style British baronial.”

  “It does remind me a bit of Monty’s country place,” Justin said.

  Because Maud had thoroughly enjoyed her week in the ivy-covered eighteenth-century mansion that the Edges had purchased from a Kentish baronet desolated by the death of his two sons in the Ardennes, the comment almost pleased her. “I never thought of it,” she grudged. “A good, sensible old house, Monty’s.”

  The rain had stopped. The mantel clock gave eight bellicose chimes.

  Maud stood, placing her short, wide hand on Justin’s sleeve. “Supper’s ready,” she said.

  Caryll glanced tentatively at Zoe, who smiled and took his arm. Tom followed the two couples across the hall, his gray eyes sardonic. The ironies of his life!

  The three young people laughed and chatted over a huge, unseasoned meal. “Those extravagant dishes at Hugh’s are bad for the digestion,” Maud opined. After the apple pie she said, “Tom, one brandy each, dear. No more. Zoe and I will have our coffee in the parlor.”

  As the two women went into the drawing room large drops began again to drum loudly on the slate terraces. “What weather,” Maud said, banging a poker vigorously at the logs burning in one of the fireplaces: this room, stretching across the rear of the house, boasted a monstrous black marble chimney piece at either end.

  She settled herself behind the coffee tray; her glasses caught two red glints of firelight, giving her a strangely blank expression. “You’re tall like your mother,” she said. “And you have her eyes, but otherwise it’s your brother who takes after her.”