Onyx (19 page)

“Caryll's waiting.”

The little boy was in bed, his washed face raised expectantly. This was their ritual. Whenever Tom was home at Caryll's bedtime—and he always tried to be—he shared his day's happenings. Tonight he talked about the foul-up with the conveyor that he'd designed to carry finished radiators from the second-floor shop where they were built down to the enormous hall where Fivers were assembled.

“Father,” Caryll said. “I've been thinking. Can't you make some red?”

“The radiators?”

“No, the cars.”

“Why?”

“Red looks pretty with dark colors like Onyx gray.”

“We have to make them alike, Caryll, so they can be cheap enough for everyone to own one.”

“It was just an idea,” said the child quickly, placatingly.

“I want your ideas,” Tom said, hugging his son's thin, supple body, cupping the curve of skull, abode of numberless questions and thoughts. Again the intensity of his emotions brought him near to tears. “Tell you what,” he said into the soft brown hair. “Saturday we'll go to Hamtramck together. Those radiators dangling along overhead are quite a sight.”

Caryll lay back in his pillow, smiling into eyes that were the clear gray of his own. Tom kissed him good night.

Maud's glossy braids hung over her blue flannel robe as she sat at her desk entering numbers into the book where she kept track of her smallest expenditure. She stopped writing as Tom closed the bedroom door. “What was that with Hugh?” she asked.

“He discovered some plans of mine tucked away.” Tom sat to unlace his shoes. Close as he felt toward Maud, he could tell her no more. Those purloined plans were entwined with Antonia.

“Will they help the appeal?”

“I'll say!”

“Isn't that the end?” Maud took off the robe. Her silk and wool nightgown showed womanly curves, the frank pressure of large, round nipples. “Onyx spends a fortune on lawyers but Hugh digs up the important evidence.” She climbed into the sturdy walnut bed, setting her glasses on the table. “Good night, dear.”

Tom slept naked, and after he undressed and turned out the light, he curled against her warm back, kissing her shoulder, tracing her firm, ample breasts through the soft fabric. Her nightgown and the linen smelled faintly of sachet, the scent of their marital nights.

“Oh, Tom,” she sighed. “I thought you were tired.”

“It's been a long time.…” His hand moved downward. Gentle, encouraging, a supplicant.

She shifted. “All right, if you want.”

“Don't you ever want, honey?”

“It's different for a woman,” she said.

For once Tom wished his wife had compromised her honesty. His mind flashed to that summer when emotions had poured from him like liquid gold. Ashamed that his erection was for a different time, another woman, he rolled onto his other side.

“Tom, you're always a romantic about it. Turn around. It doesn't bother me.”

“Bother?”

“Melisande and Yssy both hate it.”

“You mean you discuss our private—”

“No,” she said. “
They
do. Women talk, Tom, they talk. Melisande says it's a horrible mess and she always bathes right after. And Yssy says it usually hurts but she puts up with Rogers because she wants more children. A little girl. I hope she gets one this time.”

Was it his imagination or had her voice wavered in the dark? When Caryll was born the doctor had stopped a hemorrhage and there would be no other children for them. In a hidden crevice of his mind Tom regretted this bitterly. He reached for Maud's hand. “Honey, I'm sorry.”

But Maud was too practical to grieve over never-to-be-born children. “I have everything I ever wanted. You. Caryll. This house.” She touched his arm. “Tom …?”

“It's all right, honey.”

“Good night, then, dear.”

Tomorrow
, he decided,
I
'
ll go to lunch at the Pontchartrain
. The automotive men drank at the green marble bar of the Pontchartrain Hotel, they ate in the dining room and drew carburetors, gears, transmissions, on the white damask tablecloths, and afterward some of them would head for a two-story house several blocks away, excursions that did not brush Tom with guilt. The casually bought, unsatisfactory sex had nothing to do with Maud, who was his best friend.

Her breath lengthened.

Sleep eluded Tom. His nights had become insomniac with worrying about the appeal. If they lost, he would be ordered to fork over ruinous royalties, money he did not have. Though he gave huge annual bonuses to executives and generous ones to his workers, he took very little out of the business himself. Hugh was forever nagging at him to put aside massive sums for the contingency of losing. Caution was impossible for Tom. Like a drunk, like a God-possessed saint, he had no control. His goals shimmered eternally ahead of him, and he plowed back his profits.

Pulling on his robe, feeling his way down the stairs to the sitting room, he stretched out on the sofa. How many nights had he lain here brooding about those black-robed judges with their calm, unrelenting faces? What would they decide?

The windows were growing light when he finally slept. He dreamed he was in that clearing, green shadows of the sycamore dappling Antonia's luminous white body as she held out her arms to him, a tenderly erotic invitation. “Ahh, Tom,” she murmured. “How I've missed you.…” The dream, like all his dreams of her, was colored with an intensity that tied every detail to his soul, and his possession of her was so real that he awoke with a harsh, triumphant cry. The embarrassing thing that happens to adolescent boys had happened to him.

VII

Hugh sat back in his office chair, frowning at the single page that had come from the envelope marked
Personal and Confidential
.

Hugh had gravitated quite naturally to snooping.

Rogers Sinclair was in charge of sales, but Rogers was a salesman, a glad hand with no fine touch, and certain early Onyx dealers had been deadbeats, swindlers, and in one publicized case, a bigamist. Hugh had therefore hired a two-man team of traveling detectives to check out every dealership candidate. The reports, a lifetime of intricate secrets, had proved heady reading for the recluse. From time to time his investigatory probing ran far afield from dealerships, and on these occasions he retained a New York firm.

It was their London correspondent who had compiled the list of Antonia Dalzell's vital statistics from 1899 to the present. Hugh was frowning because a small fire in the registry office had destroyed the two statistics most vital to him.

These were the date of her marriage to Claude Hutchinson, American—the letter informed him that this marriage had occurred sometime in either 1899 or 1900—and the birthday of her oldest child, a son, Justin, in 1900.

The remaining information was precise. Oswald Dalzell, her father, had died of pneumonia on January 27, 1901. Her youngest child, a daughter, Zoe, was born on September 1, 1906. There was a middle child, a son, Arthur; however, he had died of scarlet fever on March 25, 1908. A week later Claude Hutchinson had succumbed to the same disease. The widow had a leasehold on a house in Rutland Gate, London, inherited from her uncle, Major Andrew Stuart, also of that address, who had died of cancer on August 17, 1909.

The boy
, Hugh thought.
When was Antonia's boy born
?

He would never have been asking this question had he thought more of Caryll or less of Tom. But as it was, perceiving Caryll as afraid of him, he deplored the fact that this timorous mumbler was his brilliant meteor of a brother's only child. Or was he? Hugh frowned a long time at the paper before he refolded it along its three creases.

Tom whistled. “Quite a hunk!”

The brothers were going over Onyx's profit and loss sheet in Hugh's office. The black number at the bottom was very substantial.

“Tom,” Hugh said. “Draw it all out.”

“Are you crazy? I need this—and a damn sight more—to build the English plant.”

The idea of putting up a factory in England had come to Tom a year earlier when Montgomery Edge, who held Onyx's London franchise, had visited in Detroit. Monty was able, ambitious, and—most important to Tom—deeply knowledgeable in every idiosyncrasy of the internal-combustion engine.

“This isn't the time to expand,” Hugh said. “This isn't the time to build factories.”

“You sound like a bookkeeper.”

“If the appeal loses, the court'll strip Onyx of everything to pay those royalties. Keep this profit. You'll have a half million to fall back on.”

“I'm not about to fall, Hugh, but if I do, I have a cushion.”

Hugh was aware how uncomfortably thin this cushion was. The New York detectives had found out for him that Tom had less than ten thousand dollars cash, and that in his wife's name. Hugh marveled that his brother could commit himself so utterly, holding back nothing, though by now he had accepted that this plunging courage as well as Tom's quirky genius were the raw ingredients of his success.

“I'm going to England with you,” he said.

Tom had been stretching. His arms dropped. “What?”

“I'll sail with you on the
Oceanic
.”

“Leave your lair?”

“If you're crazy enough to go ahead with this, I must,” Hugh said, gazing directly at his brother. “We'll need a good many dealers, and to check the applicants I have to be there.”

Tom swallowed the subterfuge. “No sacrifice too great for Onyx?” he said, his voice jaunty with pleasure.

“Right.”

“Remember, Hugh? You always talked about traveling in Europe. Maybe we can get a quick boat over to France.”

“Strictly business, Tom, though I know you're dying for a social companion.”

They both smiled. In the industry Tom was famed for his indifference to the extravagant entertainments of the new automotive royalty—he didn't even own a dinner suit.

The massive carton of fading blueprints was turned over to the attorneys. There was nothing to do but wait. In November the three judges of the Circuit Court of Appeals would hear the oral arguments, ponder the exhibits, read the briefs, then retire to decide the fate of Ford and Onyx.

November … and this was April.

On the blustery morning of April 11 Tom and Hugh boarded the Wolverine, the first leg of their journey. As they pulled out of the depot Tom was experiencing the taut nerves that he felt at the start of an endurance race—in a way he was challenging those three judges. Hugh huddled in a corner seat of their compartment, wondering about Antonia's boy. Enmeshed in his schemes, he did not notice the view as the train chugged past the ugly miles of Detroit industry and out onto the windswept farmland.

CHAPTER 10

They had not expected to be greeted at Southampton, but as they emerged from the canvas-covered gangway, Montgomery Edge was waving. When the Englishman had been in Detroit, Hugh had not met him, and during the introduction the recluse gazed stiffly ahead, his face and body remaining rigid as they maneuvered through the bustling, crowded pier sheds. Edge's chauffeur opened the door, and Hugh climbed in hastily. Tom paused to touch the hood of the Rolls-Royce. The mirror finish came from forty coats of paint—each one hand-rubbed—with a final varnishing in a room sheeted so that no dust could penetrate.

“She's a corker,” Tom said appreciatively.

“Yes, a decent enough machine, the Silver Ghost,” Montgomery Edge agreed. “Their gift to me when I left them.”

The limousine glided between horsecarts and lorries. Hugh, his nerves still jumpy, glanced covertly at the Englishman next to him. Montgomery Edge. Of medium height, with fresh pink cheeks and a bristle of mustache that matched his sandy hair, Monty looked born to carry 20-gauge sporting shotguns on long hunting weekends. Hugh, though, had run a superior check on him before giving the go-ahead for the crucial London franchise. Born Alfie Edge, son of a Manchester drayman, he had apprenticed at Henry Royce's electric craneworks long before that alliterative merger with the Honorable Charles S. Rolls. Edge's name had been enhanced, his accent had undergone a metamorphosis, his thrusting brilliance had learned to conceal itself, and he had taken to wife Edwina, glacial daughter of Nigel Alexander, K.C., a marriage apparently lacking the physical dimension, for Monty had a mistress tucked away in a St. John's Wood flat.

What Hugh could not know was that the Edges had been set for Tom to stay at their home. When Montgomery Edge heard that Tom's peculiar brother was accompanying him, he had brought forth a string of drayman's oaths. He needed time to impress Tom, for he was determined to become commander in chief of the Fiver's conquest of Britain.

Hugh's personal secretary, who had gone up on the train with the baggage, was waiting at the Hyde Park Hotel. Though it was after four, Hugh sent the pallid, efficient Harvard graduate out to make contact with the London detective firm.

The following afternoon Hugh received a photograph of the third form at Eddington College School on Wigmore Street. Justin Hutchinson, the third from the left in the back row, was the tallest of the sixteen boys. Hugh peered at the dark-haired oval, and decided that the chemical imprint had caught a brooding depth of eyes that was familiar. He took the picture to a window. Maybe the child had moved. A slightly blurred enigma.

II

Tom and Hugh slipped back into their old bachelor ways, bickering yet close. At breakfast, sniping about some business matter, both seemed to forget they were in a large, comfortable hotel suite with a view of Hyde Park and acted as if they were impoverished boys back in that drab flat. Tom left early each morning with Monty to search for factory sites, and on the two evenings that they returned home in time, the Edges entertained him. Hugh spent his days and evenings poring over dealer applications, Onyx's local balance sheets, the British advertising. The photograph of the third form was locked in the hotel safe. Craftily Hugh awaited the propitious hour to spring his news: if he spoke too soon, Tom might suspect his sudden willingness to go on this journey.