Onyx (59 page)

Catching her eye, he explained, “I have three girls. And you?”

“One,” Elisse retorted. “She's this very size.”

A beaming elderly saleslady swooped down on them. “Isn't she a love, Mr. Bridger? We got her in yesterday. That's real human hair. She comes with a trunk that holds three more outfits. Would you like me to add her to your bill?”

“Mmm. Clarice is wild about Shirley Temple. Yes. Please send her out with the other things.”

“Of course, Mr. Bridger.”

The effusive repetition of the name identified him; however, the dry churning in Elisse's chest had nothing to do with her hatred of the Bridger family, neither was she righteously indignant at the offhanded expenditure of a sum that a tirebuilder wrenched his guts out for two and a half weeks to earn. It took her several choking breaths to realize she was jealous. A dumb, vicarious sibling jealousy. That Caryll Bridger could bestow this gift while Justin could not afford any toy here! As the saleslady bore away the doll Caryll Bridger inquired, “You weren't going to take her, were you?”

Did that polite question mean
You can't afford it
? Dead, she'd rather be dead than admit Justin the lesser in any way.

“No. This.” She snatched up a floppy-eared blue dog. Her tone as belligerent as Ben's, she said, “I'm Elisse Hutchinson.”

“Justin's wife! Of all people!”

“He told his sister we were in Detroit and wanted to see you.”

“I know, but … well, you know … families.”

“The Jewish sister-in-law in the woodpile?”

He turned crimson and his neck tendons showed. “Of course not.”

He's the only one who wrote to Justin
, she thought. Her anger disintegrated, although her jealousy—that absurd jealousy—vibrated as strongly. “I didn't mean to shout at you, Mr. Bridger.”

“Caryll. I'm truly sorry we haven't gotten together. It's nothing to do with your religion—how awful that you should have thought that. It's … my wife … she, uh, adored Justin, and, uh, no girl would have been g-good enough f-for him.” He reached for the blue dog in her arms. “Let me buy that for your little girl.”

Retribution? Charity? “Don't be silly,” she said. The gray-haired saleslady had returned, and Elisse thrust the toy at her. “I'm taking this.”

During the transaction Caryll kept his teeth bared in a polite, conciliatory smile, and when the woman handed Elisse the paper bag with Hudson's calligraphy, he asked, “Do you have time for a cup of coffee?”

Looking into the round face, she saw a flustered, hangdog appeal that tugged at her gooey heart. “I'm dying for one,” she said.

The high-ceilinged tearoom was emptying of the luncheon crowd, and the hostess led them to a quiet corner. Elisse shed her jacket to better display the pretty pink fagoted blouse that her parents had bought her during their brief stay, annoyed equally by her vanity and by her rivalrous thrust to prove Justin in tip-top financial shape. Could there be anything more pointlessly inane? What was she trying to prove? That they were in Detroit for high living?

The pastry cart was wheeled over. “Go ahead,” Caryll said. “Please.”

“The eclairs look wonderful,” she admitted.

Sugar and caffeine in her bloodstream, she continued her attempt to prove Justin's superiority by showing he had not wed a shrew but a charmer. In her own ears her witticisms sounded stilted, awkward, yet Caryll smiled and laughed.

“My brother-in-law's a very lucky guy,” he said.

“And aren't I the fink, finding I like Big Business?”
What a way to put it! Too cute
.

Caryll smiled. “Even in war there are truces.”

“And this certainly is no-man's-land.” She glanced oh so coyly at the well-dressed shoppers adawdle over final cups of coffee.

“True,” he said. “But you've got me wrong, Elisse. I'm all for your union.”

She felt a frisson through her pelvis at the memory of the cigar being smoked over her head. “I'd never have suspected. And Security's not in on it, either.”

He reddened. “My father's always had two firm rules. Onyx pays the tops. And nobody tells him how to make cars.”

“Somebody has to. He hasn't the foggiest how grim it is, working in a speeded up stretch-out.”

“Elisse, we aren't talking about some New York banker or stockholder. Dad's early life was as poor and bleak as they come. He was born on a North Dakota farm so lonely that my grandmother killed herself. My grandfather died of appendicitis because no doctor could travel the fifty miles to their farm—I've always figured that was his motivating force, to do away with that kind of isolation. As a boy he worked thirteen, fourteen hours a day at a foundry as a puddler's helper, dangerous and backbreaking work, then came home to tinker on his invention. He built his first automobile before anyone in Detroit knew what one was. He refused to turn out expensive cars like everyone else was doing, cars only the rich could afford. He fought a trust to build the Fiver.”

“I never said he wasn't a giant. But this isn't 1895, it's 1935.”

“Don't blame Dad for the Depression. He's lost a fortune.”

“You just don't know what goes on at Woodland. The worm's-eye view. Men shrivel, they go deaf, their nerves are shot. It's tough, hard work, God, so hard. The pace is killing. And they're forever worrying they'll lose their jobs. No matter how many years they've worked, they can be fired any minute. Security's worse than the German Gestapo.”

He sighed. “It's rotten, I know that, Elisse. But tell me honestly, is life any sweeter at Ford or Hudson—or any other company?”

“You try feeding a family on a twenty-hour paycheck.”

Caryll fiddled with his coffee spoon. “Blame that on me. That's my fault. Unemployment is the country's big problem. I argued Dad into giving the double work week a try.”

“Then I should say thank you. You've built the AAW.”

“Why didn't you pick another company? Dad's more dead set against a closed shop than the rest. He's convinced he's his workers' best friend—”

“Hah!”

“—and he'll do anything before he'll let shop stewards give orders at Onyx.”

“We mean business.”

“You don't stand a chance.”

“Let's talk about how angry the men in tires and batteries are because they can't feed their kids or pay rent on a one-room shack. Let's talk about how everyone at Onyx is terrified they'll be in the same fix, let's talk about all our John Doe members!”

“Elisse, Dad's not an easy man to read, but take it from me. In his lifetime there'll never be a closed shop in Onyx.” An assuredness welded Caryll's voice. In his richly discreet tailoring he looked powerful and invincible. The ranged forces of capitalism …

The energy drained abruptly from her, and she felt as weak and dazed as when she had emerged from Dr. Weiner's office. “Ahh, what's the point discussing it anyway? We're the opposition, shouting across mountaintops.” She nibbled at the last of her eclair. “You never told me about Petra.”

Caryll smiled—could anyone with those gentle, warm gray eyes be a bloodsucking capitalist?—and talked about his youngest. As he helped Elisse on with her jacket he said, “Zoe … well … she's Zoe. Visiting's impossible. But Justin will always be my friend. And now we're friends too, Elisse. If you need anything, ever, call me.”

She nodded.

“I mean it. I'm on your side.”

“Caryll, you're okay,” she said, managing animation, planting a kiss on his cheek, which smelled of expensive shaving lotion.

“Uh-oh. You're forgetting your package.”

As she took the light, bulky bag, she had to sit down again. Panic was dizzying her. What had she done? She had thrown away the grocery money on a three-buck toy to impress the heir to the largest privately owned empire on earth, that's what. You can eat neither pride nor plush dogs, so for four adults there would be nothing except a few pinto beans and one can of tomatoes until payday next week.

Inventing an excuse about the powder room, she waited until Caryll entered a large brown elevator, then ran over to catch the next one, traveling down to the toy department.

The elderly saleslady refused to refund her money. “That item was on sale, madam.”

“How was I to know that?”

“See? Here on the bill? Sale merchandise. Not returnable.”

“I don't want a damn reject for my baby!” Elisse raised her trembling hand to her forehead. Through a blur she saw her saleslady waddle to a thin woman, presumably the department manager. The two bent their heads together, looking at her, and she thought she heard the name Bridger. The saleslady returned with folded bills and some change.

Elisse ducked into the emergency stairwell.

She huddled weeping on a metal-edged step that was as cold as a gravestone. What had happened to lively, witty little Elisse Hutchinson that she made scenes in department stores, that she sent her children from her, that she feared the sweet, moist marital embrace?

CHAPTER 28

In the middle of October, Lord Montgomery Edge suffered a coronary, and Edwina ended her cable to Detroit on a chilling note:
Doctors uncertain of outcome
.

Tom booked immediate passage.

When he arrived in London the Edges' pillared town house overlooking Regent's Park was abustle.

Monty, in a plaid dressing gown, held conferences with groups involved in the building and selling of the perky little four-cylinder European Tiny Onyx. Besides being Tom's viceroy in Great Britain, he was also in charge of the factories in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Italy, and Turkey as well as the dealer outlets from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle.

Tom did not bother to disguise his relief at his friend's vigor. After a heartfelt, shamefaced masculine bearhug, he said, “You rest. Get back on your feet. I'll take over for a while.”

“Old chap, I fully intend to be in my office tomorrow.”

“You and your trick heart scared the water out of me. Relax. And that's an order!”

The two men smiled at each other.

Tom worked a fog-shrouded week near St. Paul's Cathedral in the imposing old stone mansion that had been renamed Onyx House. The following Monday morning Edge showed up in the City, his rested, ruddy face determined.

There was no reason for Tom to stay in London, and later he would question why he had tarried. Yet at the time the city of his cherished years with Antonia soothed him, and he lost a mite of his relentless remorse at having turned Justin against him, he grieved a little less that he had never seen his own grandchildren. This
never
was not entirely accurate: at home he had often driven by Justin's ugly little house in Woodland Park and once had been rewarded by the sight of a wiry small boy hurling his pocketknife into yellow crabgrass—the boy had a tough, angry expression that had captivated Tom.

He hung around London, booking passage at the end of November.

When he landed, newsboys on the Hoboken docks were hawking Extras: ONYX TAKEN OVER BY WORKERS.

II

During Tom's absences Caryll stepped with diffident reluctance into his father's place: he fretted over how to handle each problem the way that Tom would. On
The Onyx Family Variety Hour
he mouthed Tom's inviolable belief in the financially curative powers of low-priced automobiles, high pay, and mass production. In the executive dining room he presided over lunch from Tom's chair at the big round table.

The week after Tom's departure Dickson Keeley remarked, “We haven't done a plant-wide time-motion study in two years.”

Caryll continued to cut his pink roast lamb. His old loathing had swelled morbidly since Zoe's episode with Keeley, and he could not stand to look at the man. “What do you think, Uncle Olaf?”

“Auh. We're ready for one.” Olaf's new false teeth thickened his Norwegian accent. “Tom and I were talking about it.”

Caryll nodded in Dickson Keeley's direction. “Go ahead.”

The same afternoon pairs of men, each twosome consisting of a pacemaker and an engineer with a stopwatch, were everyplace in Woodland. A pacemaker worked one job for three days, and his speed was accepted as the norm. Since pacemakers were young, athletic specimens intent on proving their stamina, they pressed furiously, and since they were part of Security, foremen dared not complain when they neglected to bore-drill, solder, grind, or punch a part racing by in front of them. The sight of a hefty pacemaker straining red-faced at his slapdash job drove the men wild.
That
speed was being clicked off by the engineers.
That
speed was the one at which they would be expected to work. Indefinitely, and without fouling up.

Behind the time-motion pairs trailed a sinister rumor: the double work week was a success, and the boss had decided to put all Woodland on four-hour shifts during which a man would be expected to blaze out six hours of production. Which meant, or so frightened whispers tumbled from sides of mouths, a third of the men would be out of work. The loss of pay and speedup was horrifying, but what chilled to the very bone marrow was the thought of being laid off.

Men from every department at Woodland streamed through the sheet-iron back door of headquarters. For the most part they became John Doe members, which meant they did not sign union cards though they paid dues and pledged their allegiance to AAW.

III

He lay on top of her, his heart pounding, his ears warm and tingling. He had found release but none of his old triumphant joy, for he had known she was indulging if not enduring him, known that her final gasps were caused by the orgiastic rhythm of his own body.

He snapped the lamp switch. The light showed a face nearly as white as the pillow slip.