Onyx (36 page)

“Justin? What is it?”

“Sweet, I've never met your parents.”

Abruptly she moved away, straightening her rumpled tennis dress, then staring at the sun, a crimson disk burying itself in a rufous sea. “What have they to do with our necking?” she asked in a baiting tone.

“Everything. Why don't you want me to meet them?”

“Immaterial, immaterial. You're leaving on Tuesday.”

“Are they very religious?”

“Temple twice a year.”

“Then why haven't you introduced me to them?”

“Oh, Justin, you don't understand one darn thing.” In this dying light, her lipstick gone, her bobbed hair disheveled, she looked young, defenseless, cornered.

Justin steeled himself to continue. “Do they know about me?”

“What do you think I am, a sneak? I pointed out your name in
Time
magazine, and explained I'd met you in the flesh at Uncle's, and was showing you around for the few days you were in Los Angeles.”

“And they forbade it?”

“That's hardly their style. But Mother's been sighing a lot and Daddy's had chest pains. If you're looking for approval, Justin, those aren't the signs.”

He felt a choking pressure against his windpipe. He was hurt, ludicrously so, at this sight-unseen rejection by two strangers, and into his consciousness welled all he had ever heard of the clannishness of Jews, of their outlandish diet and clothes and synagogues, of their eerie, alien desire to remain apart, the Chosen People. Yet he immediately rejected these stereotypes as not jibing with the Rosburgs' London house and country place, or with this small, pretty, brown-haired girl whom he irrevocably loved. The only remark he could summon was a bitter, “That's wonderful!”

“They're dears. Blame the world, not them.”

“For
their
prejudice?” Justin stepped out of the car, turning from her as he undid his trouser button to straighten his shirt. His anger had faded when he got back in. She had not moved. It was too dark to make out her expression. As he peered at her, a foreboding recollection of that Jewish touchiness washed over him. “I never should have said that,” he mumbled. “I'm sorry.”

“Best to have it out in the open, Justin,” she replied wearily. “I'm not about to apologize for my parents, or for what we are. If you want my honest opinion, we have less prejudice, and turn the other cheek more often than circumstances warrant. I've never heard you like that. Nasty. Clipped. Ugly. What
do
you think of Jews?”

“I haven't known many. Rosburg. Miller in my platoon. We were in the trench together when he lost his leg.”

“Is that where you got the scar?”

Shrapnel had wounded him in the shoulder. “Yes. At Belleau Wood.”

They both looked down at the clusters of electric light twinkling through the brief California dusk.

“Elisse, what you said shut me out, so I hit back,” he spoke with difficulty. “Usually I think things through before I blurt them out. But I'm not myself anymore. I've been lonely ever since Mother died, very lonely. And now—even with the obstacles you've set up—I'm not. It's as if I've been let out of solitary.”

“You sit across the street after you take me home.”

“How do you know?”

“Who else would leave a pile of Craven-A butts?”

“I'm so crazy about you I don't know if I'm coming or going. I don't sleep, I don't taste my food.”

“I know what you mean.” Her voice sounded hollow, defeated. “I have the same symptoms.”

He turned toward her. “You mean that?”

“Oh, Justin. Do you think I offer my pure white self to all men?”

“I haven't ruined it?”

“Would that you could. This is such a mess.” Sighing, she picked up his hand, kissing it. “You're my beau ideal.”

Through Justin's mind darted crazed images of himself lifting her aboard a train in her white tennis dress and small, dusty sneakers, a justice of the peace in Yuma, endless hours of nonsectarianly legalized priapic bliss in a locked compartment, followed by uxoriously tender married life in the green land of happiness. Married? Was this Justin Hutchinson who weighed every decision, the man who circled every issue, peering into its stygian heart?
What's happened to my measured calm? Elopement
?

“Put on your lipstick,” he said. “We're going to your house, and I'll meet them.”

“Daddy has a concert tonight, the Hollywood Bowl.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Justin, you have no idea—”

“Tomorrow,” he said firmly.

“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?”