Onyx (55 page)

III

“The White House, our country's swank new booby hatch!” Tom said. “The inmates are encouraged to think up schemes that elude the normal mind.”

Caryll sat back in the leather chair, breathing deeply. He had come directly to Woodland from the Municipal Airport, and though it had not been a particularly rough journey, flying nauseated and frightened him: his stomach was still queasy.

“At first I thought it was nuts too,” he said. “But as I gave it more time I realized Mr. Roosevelt was right. A third of the country's out of work. Those people need a lifeline.”

“A lifeline can pull the rescuer into the drink, son, remember that.”

“Our wages
are
high. A lot of families
do
manage on half what we pay.”

“You've never been hungry. Believe me, it's to be avoided. I refuse to starve the people who work for me.”

Caryll hyperventilated again, forcing himself to continue. “There are professors and engineers living in board shacks down at the dump, there are black babies dying in Inkster. Onyx is not an island.”

“Did Mr. Roosevelt promise to deliver his humanitarian message to them?” Tom jerked his head toward the rain-spotted windows: his tenth-story office in the Tower had a hundred and eighty degree view of Woodland. Abruptly his temper flared, not at Caryll, not at Roosevelt—that brilliant and manipulative politician—but at the reality of destitute families wintering in tarpaper shacks, of malnourished babies in Inkster. “I say no to him!”

“Dad—”

“I knew going to Washington was a mistake! That man can sell anything to anyone! He's a goddamn hypnotist!” Tom returned to his desk, a long-faced, prematurely white-haired man in a trim gray suit, controlling his temper. “Since I first started hiring, Caryll, I've paid the kind of wage I'd like to get. That's not about to change. No cutting paychecks in half, not in my shop.”

IV

Lynn's birthday had fallen on the Saturday her parents were in Washington, so her party was postponed a week. Since it was a warm afternoon, they celebrated outside. Spring sunshine cast a rosy, Renoir haze on the seemingly limitless grounds, and twenty little girls (nine of them Trelinack descendants) in pale organdy frocks trailed multicolored balloons across vivid green lawns and played party games under giant, newly leafed trees while parents sat on the terrace smiling benevolently at them over cocktails. Everyone trooped into the playhouse to watch Lynn cut her cake. Tom captured the bouncing, excited children on his noisy new Bell and Howell home-movie camera, then returned to the terrace. Glancing into the library, he saw his son.

Caryll was hunched over on a chair, his arms clamped around his knees, his spine arched like a cat's.

“Caryll, what the hell is it?”

“Indigestion,” Caryll muttered. Sweat dripped from his cheeks.

Tom ran to the telephone, summoning Fairburn, his own doctor, and Balashov, Caryll and Zoe's internist.

The guests went home before Lynn opened her presents, and it was left to Miss Henderson to soothe the disappointed child. The immediate family sat in the graciously proportioned drawing room, Zoe breaking into unnervingly erratic sobs, Maud wiping her glasses, Tom by the windows glumly watching servants clear away the debris of the party.

Balashov came downstairs and the two women rose, Zoe pliant as a flower, Maud pillar-like—her once trim waist and fine bosom had collected postmenopausal padding.

“It's an intestinal spasm,” said the doctor, his hands working in a prudent washing gesture.

“What's that?” Tom asked. “An ulcer?”

“We don't believe there's damage to the duodenal wall, no,” said the doctor carefully. “The pain is this intense because it's self-perpetuating. We've given him a hypodermic. Generally these episodes pass when the cycle is broken.”

“Pain doesn't jump out from walls,” Tom said. “What caused it?”

“We can't be sure,” Balashov replied. “We think stress.”

“But he's going to be all right?” asked Zoe in a high little voice.

“We believe so,” Balashov said, the American Medical Association's voice of caution speaking to the near and dear of an immensely rich, drugged patient. “We'll begin running tests on Monday.”

Maud took off her glasses, wiping them again. “I don't like that waiting,” she said.

“We can't disturb him until then, Mrs. Bridger,” the doctor said, bowing slightly.

“But you're doing everything you can for him?” Zoe asked.

“Absolutely, Mrs. Bridger,” the doctor said with another little bow.

Tom insisted the doctors spend the night in the house.

A high-legged hospital bed was installed in Caryll's upstairs study, and the older of the nurses—two were spelling each other—pinned a linen guest towel over the desk lamp. By this withered light Tom sat charting the rise and fall of the chest beneath the immaculately turned covers. Caryll's face, slackened by opiates, was worn and lined.
He's a man
, Tom thought with a ripple of shock.
A man in early middle age who looks older
. The thought was damning.
When have I ever credited him with adulthood? To me he's always been a boy
. A boy to be cherished, guided, looked after, protected from all manner of evil. Never to be respected, deferred to, listened to. Tom smoothed the taut covers. Stress, Balashov said. Stress?
Since he came back from Washington he's been pale and edgy. Caryll, I squashed you good and well on that, didn't I? When you tried to convince me about Roosevelt's idea, I shut you up with my usual sledgehammer finesse
.

The bedroom door opened and Zoe came in, tying her flimsy robe around her waist. Her third visit in an hour. She gazed down at her husband, her matchless eyes filling with tears. For years now Tom had damned back a torrential resentment toward this daughter of his beloved, this wife of his son, mother of his grandchildren, this gorgeous creature who trotted around Detroit like a sleek racing mare in heat. For the copious moisture in her dark eyes, Tom forgave her every one of those scabrously ribald remarks that were invariably choked off as he approached—Zoe, forgiven much because she loved Caryll much.

“He hasn't moved,” she whispered.

“He's in deep sleep, Mrs. Bridger. The morphine.” The nurse spoke normally. “Why not try a little shut-eye yourself. Take that pill Dr. Balashov gave you.”

“How can I sleep?”

“I never get more than three or four hours,” Tom said. “I'll stand guard.”

“You'll call me right away if anything happens, Father Bridger?”

“As soon as he wakes up.”

“Do you think …” Zoe's voice trailed away. “He looks so …”

Tom saw Antonia in the dark, vulnerably loving wet eyes. He put his hand gently on hers. “Caryll's going to be fine, honey,” he said.

She returned to the bedroom.

Tom resumed his watch.

Caryll awoke without pain. The doctors, delighted to be off the hook, prescribed Wheatena with cream and went home. Tom breakfasted with his son.

“I've been thinking about that trick of Roosevelt's,” he said. “Thin paychecks aren't the idea of the century, we need fat ones to jolt the economy in the ass, but on the other hand I haven't come up with any brilliant solutions either. So we'll be guinea pigs. See how the idea goes over in—say—the rubber shop.”

Caryll's spoon clinked in the bowl. He lay back in the cranked-up bed, examining his father. “Dad, why the turnabout?”

“Patriotism, what else?”

“Because of last night?”

“Sure. Don't I structure all of my major decisions around your bellycramps?”

The testiness of his father's tone reassured Caryll. “The tire department, then, Dad,” he said.

Too late Tom recalled that Justin worked in tires.

Tom's choice of the rubber shop, though unpremeditated, was not coincidental. He had spent fully half of the dimly lit, anxious night brooding about his other son. Since Justin's return how many times had he resolved to visit him, to hug his only grandson and the baby—Antonia's namesake? To meet that girl whom he persisted in visualizing as darkly, biblically statuesque? Justin's address and telephone number were scrawled in the small book whose leather was curved by the warmth of Tom's body, but as often as he opened it to
H
he never could bring himself to call. It seemed to Tom that making the first reconciliatory move would be an admission as damning as a positive blood test for paternity. He had braved a heart attack to keep mum; he could wait until Justin contacted him. Couldn't he?

Setting down his cup, he moved restlessly to the window.
I don't want Justin in the thick of it, but if I change my mind, who knows what damn questions Caryll will ask
? He said, “That's right. Rubber.”

“When shall we put it into operation?”

“The month of happiness and weddings,” Tom said, his voice wry, his eyes forlorn. “June.”

Caryll's lab tests disclosed nothing untoward, but the doctors, wanting to be on the safe side, continued his bland ulcer diet.

CHAPTER 26

On Monday, May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court exploded its decision. The NRA was unconstitutional.

A secretary popped into Hugh's silent office to blurt out the news. Hugh, after his initial exultation, sat back lacing his fingers and asking himself how he could tie this in with the crazy new policy at the tire shop, how he could best use this to Onyx's advantage. However many twists his loyalties had taken since that freezing night when he had ridden ahead of Tom's first quadricycle, he had never ceased pouring himself into his work: it was his doing that Onyx's advertising was uncluttered and effective, his doing that Tom, Onyx, and Woodland, a troika, received more columns in the country's press than Garbo, Chaplin, Will Rogers, Lindbergh, and the Prince of Wales combined. He remained immobile, gazing up at the magnificent linenfold ceiling molding. After about fifteen minutes he nodded. He did not stir again for several minutes, then he picked up the interoffice phone. “MacIlvray, come in here,” he commanded.

The rest of the day he and the obese writer polished and refined a full-page advertisement that ran in more than two hundred daily newspapers: Tom Bridger, who had refused to sign the unconstitutional NRA code, had joined forces with the President to cure unemployment.
We at Onyx call it the double work week
.

The double work week …

It had a prosperous ring that made men and women peer out from their bleakness. Tom Bridger, that offbeat, tinkering genius who had set the world on wheels, was rolling Old Man Depression away. Hope rippled across the United States and dealers reported a miracle that had not occurred since the Crash. Down payments were made in advance on the as yet unveiled 1936 models.

At Woodland men mumbled to one another, “Double work week, what sort of bull is that?” They turned hastily away, unwilling to show the tightwire fear that soon they, too, would be on half pay.

In the red brick tire factory, old employees and new alike hefted their weekly envelopes knowing that double work week meant no milk or new shoes for the kids, no doctor for the wife when she had the new one.

Justin was changing to his workclothes in the washroom when the gangling pit worker said from the corner of his mouth, “Prof, where's that AAW headquarters at?”

“2415 Miller Road.”

“Been thinking about joining,” mumbled the pit worker, hiding his lip movements by shifting his licorice-flavored tobacco to his other cheek. In the rubber shop soapstone flew, parching your throat and nostrils, yet if you drank much water you became bloated, so men chewed to kill the thirst. “Yew fellers sure was right about the union. I reckon we got to stand together.”

The gangling mountain man spoke for the whole tire department.

Mitch quit his part-time WPA job. He and Elisse kept the storefront headquarters open. Tonia toddled between massive workboots while men laboriously signed their names to union cards. The acrid stench of rubber clinging to them pervaded the summer stuffiness, the sound of their worried voices filled the narrow store as they lined up in front of the painted kitchen table where Prof's wife, the treasurer, sat.

Elisse entered names in her ledger, sorting crumpled bills and coins into the black tin treasury box. Membership was fifty cents, monthly dues fifty more. Sometimes a shamefaced applicant would ask if he could put down a dime or a nickle. “I'm kind of low right now.”

“Next payday, then,” Elisse would say, crisply businesslike, clinking change into compartments, but her vision would swim as she made note of the debt.

Day after day men came twitching from their brief, speeded-up, stretched-out work. A feverish, reckless glint in their eyes, they walked openly through the front door. Who cared if Security spotted them? What did they have to lose?

II

“As soon as we find out, we give them the swift boot,” Dickson Keeley said. “Welfare's not so easy to get, and if you do get it, it's still not enough to buy beans.”

“Then how do you explain a membership of nearly twelve hundred?”

It was a hot, muggy afternoon and the two were following the gravel path to the lion run—Hugh, earlier in the year, had imported two pairs captured on the Serengeti, and the carelessly brave animals fascinated him endlessly.

“Simple,” Dickson Keeley retorted. “Twice as many shifts, twice as many men who think they're being shafted. They act like they're deposed royalty or something.”

“You need more Security on this.”

“I have a hook on every third man in the rubber shop. What got into the boss, picking tires for his double work week? Hutchinson! Even my handpicked stoolies don't turn in full reports. They're for the big bastard.”

At the word
bastard
a peculiar sneer formed on Hugh's still handsome profile. After a few paces he asked, “What about Shapiro? What do the men think of
him
?”