Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  At a faraway, muted roar he jumped. Then recalled Elisse reading him an article about Hugh’s lions: she had made several sarcastic comments about the fact that the cost of their daily beef would feed a family of four a whole month. As Justin moved along the well-remembered paths of his uncle’s exquisite self-imposed prison, his adult angers and anxieties faded and that boy—Hugh’s wholehearted disciple—took over. He found himself thinking from Hugh’s viewpoint. Hugh had taken him in, had endowed him with a palatial home, devotion, had schemed for his career. How had he been repaid? I eloped with a girl he disapproved of, I returned to challenge the Bridgers.

  Shivering violently, Justin let himself into the servants’ cloakroom. Sudden warmth dizzied him and he sat on a bench, resting his aching head between his knees a minute before he looked around for a clothes brush. Sprucing himself up, he hoped disjointedly that Hugh would not be evasive.

  III

  They awaited dinner in the downstairs library.

  Tom still wore the gray suit from the noon meeting, but Caryll and Hugh had dressed. Zoe perched on the arm of her husband’s chair, her head bent low to his so that a red-gold strand rested on his neatly combed, thinning brown hair. The years had succeeded in obliterating neither her passion for Hugh nor the dark, shaming blotch of his rejection, so she always intensified her normally affectionate manner to her husband in Hugh’s house. Let him never forget that one offer, her strange little heart said. Prove to him what he missed.

  Maud sat opposite the young couple, her ample lap covered with fine pink batiste that she was smocking into a dress for Petra—she, for one, refused to pay the outrageous prices for handmade children’s clothes! The sofa table was strewn with evening editions, each with a front-page photograph of Dickson Keeley’s pack attacking Johnny Coleman and Justin Hutchinson.

  The grainy reproductions had activated a host of shames in Tom, and his sickened self-repugnance emerged, typically, as rage. He had barked questions at Hugh, who finally retreated to a silver cart to spoon inky black caviar onto Melba toast. His fingers shook, and he did not attempt a sprinkle of hard eggs and raw onion.

  “I’ve told you and told you,” Hugh said, his voice rising. “I do not for the life of me know why Keeley went back up on the overpass. But every report says that Hutchinson attacked him.” He gulped down his caviar, not only agitated by Tom’s anger but hurt by it. “I tried to protect you, that’s all.”

  “Some opinion of me you have,” Tom said. “You really believe that I can’t appear on a public street without a goon squad, an army of gas experts, and every cop in the state of Michigan?”

  Maud’s needle ceased to flash. “Tom, Hugh explained. He was worried for you. We all were. Since Onyx shut down, Detroit’s been in an uproar. All the auto companies have increased their guards. Hugh did what he thought was necessary. What’s gotten into you? I’ve never seen you take on like this.”

  Tom scowled to keep his composure. Justin must view Hugh’s protective efforts, Keeley’s thugs, and Nugent’s skilled gassing of a holiday crowd as orchestrated by him. “From now on I’ll smile when there’s trench warfare outside Woodland.”

  “Oh, you and your sarcasm,” his wife said, her voice without condemnation.

  “The men were happy,” Hugh said. “Then those reds came and stirred them up.”

  “Happy?” Caryll gnawed at the tape over one of his nails. “Why did we need five thousand men on the Security force?”

  “Caryll, Caryll, you’re blessed with an idealistic nature.” Hugh returned to his chair, crossing his legs and shifting the conversation from himself. “Every automotive factory needs to police itself, you know that. Otherwise the Polacks are forever at the Irish, the hillbillies are thwacking the Negroes, the Italians kill one another, and the Jews take away everybody’s pay. How would we get a single day’s work done without Security?”

  “Dad used to manage.”

  “That was before this infernal Depression. You heard Captain Nugent’s report, you heard what he said.” Hugh’s diamond cuff link caught the light as he waved a hand. “The rioters would be burning Detroit by now if we hadn’t contained them. Let me tell you something else, Caryll. If you’d followed my advice, if you hadn’t been so squeamish when the Bolshies occupied the tire shop, none of this would have happened.”

  “I know you think I behaved spinelessly, Uncle Hugh,” Caryll said. “Maybe I did. But it goes against my grain to run Onyx like a slave camp.”

  “What’s so wrong with a firm hand?” Hugh asked.

  “So that’s what you call it,” Tom put in sourly. “A mere hundred or so at Harper, only seventeen on the critical list.”

  “That miserable gas!” Caryll exclaimed. “No wonder they stampeded.”

  Zoe rested her narrow, shapely hand on her husband’s kneecap. “Can’t we talk about something else?” she asked with a pleading smile.

  “Zoe’s right,” Maud said. “There’s no unscrambling eggs. The riot’s over.”

  “A sweet opening to the negotiations,” Tom said.

  “Toujours l’audace,” Hugh said. “I cannot for the life of me understand why you’re against showing strength.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tom said.

  “Listen to me. This can be turned to our account.”

  “You really play Machiavelli to the hilt, don’t you, Hugh,” Tom said. “I went into this on the level.”

  “Macllvray and his boys are working on releases,” Hugh said.

  “Releases?” Tom asked. “What kind of releases?”

  Hugh gestured to the strew of newspapers. “That’s the other side. We have to tell ours.”

  “I’m ashamed enough as it is,” Tom said coldly.

  “This is vital, Tom. The press has never cracked down on you personally before. At the worst they’ve grudged you admiration. The news tonight is a direct attack on you. Maybe you can take it on the chin. But rotten publicity like this can kill sales for years. Trust me.”

  “And you trust me.” Tom went to the marble fireplace where Yule greenery draped the Neville crest. Though he spoke in restrained tones because of the others, his eyes were the same gray granite as when, an adolescent forced to stand in loco parentis, he had been driven too far by his angelic-faced sibling’s hypochondria or laziness. “No releases from Onyx.”

  “Tom—”

  “No releases. And that adder, Dickson Keeley, doesn’t work in my shop anymore. From here on he doesn’t work for any member of my family. Is that clear? Do you understand—”

  He stopped as the door opened. There was a moment of silence before he grunted, an obscene, belchlike sound as though a fist had hit him above the stomach. He reeled back a step, resting an arm on the mantel, leaning heavily on the broad ledge of marble as he continued to stare at the door.

  Hugh gasped and his chair creaked as he rose.

  Caryll’s head turned, his eyes widening as his mouth opened in a stupefied o, then he, too, stood.

  Maud’s sewing rustled to cover her short, wide satin shoes.

  The Tudor beamed library was drained of sound and motion, save for the fire’s crackling flames.

  IV

  Justin stood gripping the antique brass door handle. Eerie lighting from the chandeliers of the Great Hall darkened his bruises to black.

  The four men were standing. In this moment of tension a familial resemblance connected them, weaving around them so that it was impossible to miss. Despite Hugh’s scars, his whippet leanness, and dyed yellow hair (an odd vanity in a recluse), despite Caryll’s ponderous Trelinack build and balding temples, the likeness was there.

  Between Tom and Justin it was so absolute as to be electrifying.

  The beating had smudged Justin’s face in the way an impressionist artist might blur the features of his subject in order to show character and bone structure. The ultimate effect was to make the shape of Justin’s head more distinct: Though it had not been apparent before, he and Tom had the same long skull, the same cur
ve of jaw.

  The pewter hair and the white shone with identical lambency. Both men were tall, both bodies showed the vigor that carried them tirelessly through days of heavy, damaging labor. There was a force, a power in their carriage.

  Hugh looked from one to the other, and though his shock at seeing his loved and hated nephew was so immoderate to be a stranglehold around his neck, a secret smile curved his hard mouth. The long-delayed emergence of genetic configurations fit his cherished belief in ties of the blood. The mysteries of heredity cannot remain forever hidden.

  Caryll’s gaze, too, moved from his father to Justin and back again, his hand involuntarily clenching on his stomach as he viscerally experienced the shattering recognition of the long, well-guarded secret.

  Maud peered through her glasses at Justin, not looking at Tom. Her cheeks, high-colored without benefit of rouge, went sallow, and the small, harsh sound that emerged from her throat seemed to rise from deep within her bosom.

  Zoe, who had continued to look at Caryll, turned to the entry. She saw Justin.

  For her there was only the djinn-like materialization of her brother: in her emotional ferment there was nothing else. Her fingers loosened on the stemmed crystal, and splashes of martini darkened the exquisitely draped azure silk jersey of her dinner gown. She set down the cocktail glass, and the clink rang through the pall of unnatural silence.

  Justin closed the door.

  Zoe and Justin stared at each other with a hunger that swept aside animosities as well as the harsh victories of time. Their innocent selves returned, the strong, incorruptibly fair older brother, the willful, turbulent little beauty, who had dwelled together in the tall early Victorian house with a joyous, vibrant black-haired woman.

  Justin held out his arms, and Zoe plunged across priceless antique Aubusson rugs. Each clasped the other’s waist, hugging.

  “Oh, your poor face,” she said in a rushed whisper. “Your poor, poor face.”

  “Zozo, how I’ve missed you.”

  “You’ve gone all gray.” She pressed her warm, perfumed cheek to his. When they pulled apart, he clasped both her hands.

  Tom had kept his eyes on Justin, and Maud’s owl gaze, too, remained on the embracing brother and sister.

  But Caryll continued to stare from his father to Justin, his expression of painful recognition usurped by one of horror. Zoe? his lips moved silently. Zoe, too?

  Hugh ran a fingernail down the arm of his chair, an irritating rasp that he did not realize he was causing. Surprised by the blundering of delight at Justin’s presence, amazed by the resurrection of his old avuncular love, horrified by Justin’s bruises, he said the first thing that flashed into his head. “I didn’t hear any car.”

  “I took the Guelin place’s lakeshore path, climbed over your wall. Then the servants’ cloakroom.”

  “Yes, that door’s always open.”

  Justin leaned against the doorjamb, his urgency about Elisse muted by a wave of vertigo only in part attributable to his bashing. Expecting Hugh alone, he had not calculated on the psychic cost of seeing his sister and the gathered Bridgers. He inhaled deeply to regain his equilibrium.

  “Dad?” Caryll muttered, stretching his hand with a child’s gesture of dependence toward Tom. “My God, Dad?”

  Tom’s normal sardonic expression had deserted him: the lower half of his long, angular face had fallen, giving him the appearance of toothless age. He turned away from Justin’s accusatory bruises and Caryll’s burning, horrified eyes, resting his elbows on the end of the mantel.

  Maud’s topaz beads were rising and falling on the rich, gloomy brown satin over her bosom. With a loud, incongruous burst of laughter, she said, “Now I see why you pushed to marry her.”

  Tom did not shift. The fire flickered ruddy patterns on his white hair.

  “Mother, then it’s true?” Caryll asked.

  “Everyone said she was a whore.”

  Zoe asked shrilly, “What is all this?”

  “Mother?” Caryll repeated.

  “You have eyes,” Maud said loudly. “See for yourself.”

  Caryll looked neither at his father nor at Justin. Touching the tip of his tongue to his lips, he said, “Yes.”

  Zoe returned across the room to her husband. “Please, Caryll. What’s going on?”

  Caryll reached to hold his wife, then his arm jerked to his side as though the gorgeously sensual body were corseted in molten metal.

  “She’s not your father’s, Caryll.” Maud’s laugh was mirthless. “He didn’t start going to England until after she was born. If he had, the story would have been quite different. But he didn’t. So she’s not his child.”

  “What is everybody talking about?” Zoe cried, tossing her vivid, burnished head, a gesture left over from childhood tantrums. “I can’t bear it!”

  “Justin and Caryll are brothers,” Maud said with clogged vindictiveness.

  “Brothers-in-law,” Zoe denied.

  “Half brothers,” Maud said in that same thick intonation.

  Zoe flopped into the sofa, limp. After a moment her beautiful, stricken eyes sought Justin. “Is it true?”

  Yet in my lineaments they trace/ Some features of my father’s face. “Afraid so. Yes.”

  “Father Bridger and Mother?”

  Justin nodded.

  “But that’s hideous.… There was Uncle Andrew, too. Creepy … horrible …” Zoe’s murmur was barely audible. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “When I found out, I left Detroit. I felt … ashamed. Zozo, you can understand that, can’t you? Ashamed.”

  Tom’s shoulders twitched under the finely tailored gray worsted, but he gave no other sign. His inner anguish at the disintegration of his long-kept vow to Antonia far outbalanced the hysteria that gripped the air in Hugh’s library.

  “So you’re Hugh’s nephew. That’s why he brought us here.” A blush stained Zoe’s flawlessly rounded throat. “Who told you?”

  Hugh caught his breath. Somewhere in the office wing a phone jangled, then was silent.

  “I found out, that’s all,” Justin said.

  “How?” Zoe persisted.

  “Einstein.” Justin managed a battered grin. “I proved the theory of relativity.”

  No one smiled. But Zoe nodded and rested her head back.

  Hugh exhaled raggedly. Tom’s love letters would remain a heap of blackened ashes. Justin never betrayed a confidence, and had he, Hugh, accepted this, he could have avoided nearly a decade of treading on eggshells with his brother as well as general wretchedness. That old tribal affection for his nephew was reasserting itself in stronger and stronger waves.

  “Zoe …?” Caryll muttered raggedly.

  “Your mother’s right, Caryll,” Justin said. “No need to worry. This has nothing to do with Zoe. I’m the only bastard.” He forced another bruised grin.

  “You look rotten, Justin,” Hugh said. “How about a drink? It used to be Scotch.”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “You need bucking up,” Hugh said.

  “You do look woozy, Justin,” Zoe said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Why are you here?” asked Maud bluntly.

  Justin planted his muddy shoes apart. His bruised face suddenly wary, vaguely hostile, as though he had been thrust into enemy territory, he looked directly at Hugh. “My wife is missing.”

  “Your wife?” Hugh asked, the warmth retreating from his voice.

  “I want her.”

  “She’s not here.” Hugh was overly polite. “I do assure you she’s not.”

  Caryll asked, “Was Elisse in that mess today?”

  “Yes. She was supposed to meet me at the sound truck after I came down from the overpass. She never showed up. I don’t know where she is, but the police took a lot of people in.”

  “If she’s been arrested,” Hugh said, “you can post bail.”

  “I tried to.” Justin’s eyes showed intensely blue between slitted, bruised l
ids. “She hasn’t been booked.”

  “Then she hasn’t been arrested.”

  “Find her.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no way I can.”

  “The department’s in your pocket.”

  “Hardly. Might I suggest you telephone some of her union friends. Maybe she stopped off to visit.”

  Tom took a step away from the fireplace. His left hand clenching and unclenching, he spoke to Hugh, his first words since Justin had opened the door. “Call Arden.”

  “Say she has been taken downtown, Tom,” Hugh replied. “How would he know? The police chief? One woman? On a day like this?”

  “Call,” Tom ordered.

  “There’s no point.”

  Tom strode to the shadowy ell where a spindle-legged Tudor cabinet housed the telephone. “What’s his home number, Arden?” he snapped.

  Hugh recited from memory.

  Tom asked the operator for the number, then identified himself, asking for Chief Arden. Waiting, he switched on the floor lamp. Without a greeting he said that he was looking for Mrs. Elisse Hutchinson, yes, that’s right, she was the AAW president’s wife, and the last anyone had seen her was in that crappy deal on Archibald. At the inaudible reply his expression briefly wavered, the vulnerable upper lip curling back to reveal his uneven white teeth. “I see,” he said in a flat, inflectionless tone, listening another half minute before he replaced the earpiece as delicately as if it were a precision tool.

  Justin had come to stand near him. “Where is she?”

  “Quite a few women are in the Fifth Precinct Station.”

  “So she’s there?” Justin asked.

  “Probably. I’ll run you over.”

  “That’s quite unnecessary,” Hugh said. “I’ll have Gallagher take him in his car.”

  “Yes,” Maud said. Concentric circles formed around her mouth so that her face seemed like an illustration of the angered, puffing wind god. “You stay put, Tom.”

  “Come on, Justin.”

  “You’re not to go!” Maud cried.

  “Maud,” Tom said, a plea undershadowed by warning.