Onyx (70 page)

The blow to her head had dulled neural connections between her brain and her hands. Vomit-soaked fabric slipped through her fingers. She sank to her knees, making weak, swimming movements at the trousers and skirts struggling and pressing around her
. You have to pull yourself up,
she thought, her brain desperately alert, her hands sliding sluggishly along a coarse-haired fur coat. She continued to fall into the squirming, shoving darkness, the enveloping darkness, the inevitable darkness. She struggled with her enfeebled resources to rise, and a tormented, screaming wail gathered loudness until it filled the universe
.

A heavy workboot caught her just above the nape, a coup de grace. She fell under the feet of coughing, gas-panicked stampeders
.

Boots and shoes trampled her, puncturing her intestines and organs, pulping her flesh. There was no merciful lulling, no numbness. Her maddened scream was cut off when a woman's narrow heel destroyed her larynx
.

In agony, Elisse's life was, quite literally, stamped out. In the last instants that she would wear the raiment of mortal flesh, however, she was vouchsafed comfort. A sense of failure had always dogged her. To her mind she was a rotten daughter, an apostate mother, of late a sadly tepid wife, a Jew in name only, a zero in her dedication to the causes to which she adhered. Her decisions inevitably had been governed by her emotions. She was, or so she had believed until now, betrayed at every turn by that spongy will of hers. She had never possessed the fixed compass point of logic or the eternal truth of ethics. Now, though, she perceived her life differently. On this little ball of spinning mud, she, a finite atom, had made the minuscule decisions permitted her from the only place she could trust. Her own soft and very mortal heart
.

A body stumbled athwart her head, smothering the last breath from her
.

And then she was remembering from earliest childhood. She and her parents stood around a table set with the good red Haviland china, the bone-handled English sterling silver, and a dish arrayed with a sprig of parsley, a lamb shank, a hard egg, a broken matzo, all the Passover symbols. Her father, with a foolishly happy smile, held up a sacramental ruby imprisoned within a wine glass. Behind him glowed a large form
. The angel Elijah,
she thought
, he's come to drink his wine.
How wondrous that the angel should have Justin's face. Nobody in this world would ever know that Elisse Kaplan Hutchinson's final comprehensive thought before the last revelation engulfed her was the one with which for five thousand years Jews have greeted Death. Elisse's piping voice joined with Daddy's and Mother's in the only Hebrew words she knew
: Adonai elohenu, Adonai echod.

The Lord our God, the Lord is One
.

V

“Oh my sweet, my poor sweet,” Justin whispered. Bending to kiss what had been his wife's forehead, he was transfixed by the same desire that had overcome him years earlier. To elope with Elisse, to carry her to some enchanted green land where he could cherish and protect her, to live the rest of his days with her in that place where she would make him smile with her sharp, witty tongue, where she would share his life and love, where the warmth of her heart would melt the bitter curse of his loneliness.

Unless he could take her to that land his tormented, breaking heart was doomed to a death as irrevocably final and absolute as hers.

Shuddering with vehement, uncontrollable sobs, he stooped to lift the martyred remnants of her.

Tom and the young policeman took his arms, propelling him from the icy morgue.

VI

It was nearly three in the morning.

Tom hunched shivering in his car. A freezing wind had come up, whirling occasional scraps of old newspapers in a dance past the feeble bulb on Justin's front porch.

Justin, after that maddened, wrenching outburst in the morgue, had leaned his head against the basement corridor wall for what had seemed an eternity. He had gasped aloud in a harrowing struggle to control the physical manifestations of his grief, then had returned upstairs, paying no attention to Tom or the police other than to avert his head from them as he spoke into the telephone. He spoke quietly and without inflection, first to his home, then to Nalley's, the mortuary in the Major's chateau.

Soon after, the man whose name Tom had so often heard—Mitch Shapiro—had arrived. It was the stocky labor organizer who had wept when he and Justin shared a mourners' embrace, Mitch who had given Tom such a bloodshot glance of contempt that Tom had retreated to wait in his Seven outside the fortress-like station until the two emerged. Tom had been incapable of leaving Justin. That demented sobbing outburst over the poor, mutilated corpse had wracked Tom; he had never witnessed grief so engulfing, so raw, and the eruptíon was doubly devastating, coming from a man as self-contained as Justin. Though he knew his help was not wanted, he had followed the old car here.

A furious gust buffeted the Seven, and the draft penetrated Tom's overcoat, which was open so he could massage his left shoulder and upper arm.

His promise to Antonia, kept at such great cost, had been broken by the fixed and immutable laws of heredity. In Hugh's library, drenched with benumbed horror, Tom had accepted that he must unload his heart to Justin and accordingly had driven him to the Major's old place for the purpose of confessing; yet, gazing up at the limestone walls, fumbling for the right words to explain his lie-buttressed lie, he had experienced a prickling numbness on his left side, a numbness that had quickly sharpened to minor though ineffaceable twists of pain. To confess would cut his last tie with Antonia, and that he was not strong enough to do. The twinging persisted, a reminder of his old heart trouble.

Justin's was the only house with electricity on, and this outlined the cracker boxes on either side—once, far back in his own youth, Tom would have considered these nice homes. He lifted his gaze to the moonless, wintry sky … stars bright, stars remote, dusty trails of stars … a wave of weariness after this interminable day overcame him, and he closed his eyes.

Antonia stood on the sidewalk, the dim porch light picking out the slender, white-stockinged ankles as well as the pale face with its malevolently whipping strands of black hair. The apparition terrified him to the point of breathlessness, for he fully comprehended that Antonia had lain more than twenty years in damp London soil, he had seen the marble canopy over her bones.

It's a nightmare
, he told himself, and with tremendous effort opened his eyes.

She was still there, substantial, three-dimensional, wind-tousled, but now she was bending her face to the window to show her glinting anger.

“I've kept my word, darling,” he said. “Don't haunt me like this. I kept my promise.”

“Promise? What promise? There was nothing good or human in what you did.”

“But … his not catching on was so important to you.”

“
Justin
was important to me. My son. Had you no emotions of your own? Why have you acted like some ugly, brainless machine? Years ago when he came to Detroit, lonely and proud, you should have told him, helped him. Certainly that night at Woodland when he begged you, you should have embraced him.” When had Antonia ever used this loud, hectoring tone? “And now you've killed him.”

“He's alive.”

“He's dead.”

“No! I swear to you. He's inside.”

Her accusation shrilled through the closed window. “You saw him in the morgue. Dead. Dead. You killed him. You killed my son.”

“For God's sake, he's alive!”

“
Without his wife he's dead
.”

Tom's head jerked forward. He awoke.

His heart was rampaging. How could a heart pump so violently and painfully without propelling blood through fragile capillaries? His mind was sharply logical. Instantly he perceived that Antonia's nightmare dialogue came direct from his own inflamed conscience. To him the promise was the wafer and wine, the external symbol that gave substance to the holy invisible. And as far as Justin being alive—having suffered a similar loss, he knew the sophistry of
that
argument. Antonia was right. Justin's body still moved, but his spirit was as crushed as his wife's body.

It was a minute or so before he realized that Justin had come outside. The heavy lumber jacket he had worn on the overpass tossed over his shoulders, his hands gripping the porch rail, his head bent, he shuddered with sobs. There was a terminal loneliness about the figure venting its grief in frozen privacy on the narrow porch. Justin might have been washed up on some desolate, uninhabited island, the last shipwrecked survivor that a more merciful fate would have allowed to perish: his loneliness was so absolute that Tom shivered. Moving stiffly, he buttoned up his coat.

At the slam of the car door Justin looked up. By the time he reached the shelter of the porch, Justin was blowing his nose.

“Justin,” Tom said quietly. “I didn't have a chance back at the station to say this. But I'm sorry, so damn sorry about your wife … about Elisse.”

Justin made a low, snorting sound, and the veranda creaked as he moved to the opposite end.

Tom waited before he said, “All right?”

Justin nodded.

“I've been waiting to talk to you,” Tom said. “I dozed off and had a nightmare …”

He had thus intended to launch another explanation of the stages of his love affair with Antonia, to tell about that half-assed posthumous loyalty. But the icy wind and the twinging of his left arm and shoulder gave him the oddest sense of dislocation.
I can't say it, even now. I'm an intractable monster, not a man
.

The dim wattage showed the miserable little twitch of Justin's mouth as he fought for control. Tom told himself he should not be here like a sleepless predator prowling the night of Justin's grief, yet he remained on the icy, windswept porch.

“Remember what I said about a man's life being like the strokes of an engine?” Tom asked. “Well, part of me has misfired completely. I never intended conditions at Onyx to be such a disgrace, but things went out of control. Power's like that. A fulcrum. You remain an ordinary human being with the usual quirks and faults, but as you become more powerful your actions become more exaggerated. The principle of the lever, understand? When I lower my pinky, a thousand Sevens rise. When I hire Dickson Keeley, one bad man, I crush entire factories.”

There was no reply except the wind.

Tom clasped his palms together, the tips of his long, icy fingers touching. “What happened to Elisse, I feel guilty as hell about it.”

“So do I.” Justin's breath clouded.

“You? Why you?
I
hired Keeley, Hugh paid that fucking gas squad. How are you to blame for what happened today?”

“Elisse shouldn't have been here. I never should have brought her to Detroit.”

“Come off it, Justin,” Tom said gently.

“I'm taking her home tomorrow.”

“Train?”

“Yes. It doesn't leave till noon, so I'll be at the opening.”

“What?” Tom asked, bewildered.

“The negotiation.”

“That's postponed, damn it, Justin.”

“The strike's starving people.”

“Onyx can open. Do what has to be done in Los Angeles, then come back. We can settle the grievances then.”

“The AAW strike committee will be at the Book Cadillac at eight.”

“For now, just call off your pickets and bring out the sit-downers.”

“And have them believe they've been sold down the river?” Justin asked in a clipped voice. “It's all been settled. I'll lay down our terms, then the committee'll take over.”

The pains in Tom's shoulder and chest had lessened, but an intolerable arthritic malaise remained deep in the bones. He crossed the porch to rest a hand on the plaid lumber jacket.

Justin flinched from his touch. “What a hideous death,” he said, blowing his nose again. “She was such a little thing. It always surprised me how small … she had so much spirit and heart, she seemed big.” Justin rested his forehead on the post.

“Anything I can do to help you through the meeting?”

“Send Caryll for your side.”

“You mean I should stay clear?”

“Yes.” Justin straightened. A crumb of peeling paint stuck to his bruised cheek. “Being with you is impossible,” he said. “It shouldn't matter anymore, but it does. I despise myself for being your bastard.”

“Justin—”

“There's nothing more for either of us to say, Tom.” He opened the door and went inside. Tom heard a chain being fastened. The iron sound of finality.

He stood on the porch another minute, then went slowly down the rickety steps and through the wind to the car whose metals, rubber, fabrics, had come from mines, plantations, and factories that he owned.

He gripped the steering wheel and closed his eyes, thinking of Justin's last words:
I despise myself for being your bastard
. That his offspring, so fine a man, should despise himself seemed the worst of the numerous sins that Tom attributed to himself.

The Onyx coupe reverberated with the gasping sound of bitter, irreconcilable loss.

VII

For five days the AAW strike committee, dressed in shabby, carefully brushed suits, conferred with Onyx representatives in a seventh-floor suite with a view of the Aztec-tiled Michigan Bank of Commerce, the Bridger-owned skyscraper. Tom Bridger attended none of the sessions, and Justin Hutchinson only an hour of the first before he climbed on the streamliner with his wife's coffin. Thus it was Caryll Bridger and Mitch Shapiro who faced each other from either end of the long walnut bargaining table. The settlement that they announced on January 13, 1936, jolted the country—the most commonly used heavy black headline:

AUTO UNION WINS ALL!