Onyx (37 page)

“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 find 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
.”

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.