Onyx (29 page)

When Tom had hired Irving Elliot, a senior partner in a firm specializing in divorce, she had experienced an immeasurable relief: the matter was out of her hands, so be it, she could neither obstruct nor alter the course of events, her life was surging toward the boundless possibilities of marriage. But now she stood on a figurative poopdeck to hold a questioning spyglass on the future. Sanctified by holy vows, would this reckless confluence of passions and obsessions that was her relationship with Tom become deep, safe love? She hoped so. Often she felt as if her torso were being torn in half below the rib cage by the unrestrainable tidal force of all that she felt for him. Her eyes focused on the letter.
Come back to America. What's indiscreet about us being on the same continent? It will be safer for you and your children here
. The uneven scrawl jumped with his impatience and command, and her mouth softened in tenderness, as though he had touched her.

The kettle whistled. Tucking the letter back in the tin box, she made tea, carrying the tray to the wicker telephone table. She put in her call.

“Hallo, Mother,” Justin answered. His voice sounded deeper on the wire, almost a man's voice. “It's a bit late.”

“I know. We've been rushed—this morning a new group of wounded came in.”

“The war'll be over before I'm old enough to go.”

Please heaven
, she thought, grasping the receiver more tightly. Justin was a scant three years younger than Private Mayberry. “Would Father have wanted you champing the bit to get your German?” she asked.
Bless you, Claude, for your pacifism
, she thought.

“He wouldn't even hunt, would he,” Justin reminisced, his voice cracking.

“How's Zoe?”

“Having tea at Janey Smith-Tolliver's. Mother, remember last spring when Rosburg's cousins came over from Berlin? I've thought a lot about them. They were very decent chaps. But, well, we're at war … what if I had to shoot one of them?”

“Had your tea?”

“Not yet.”

“Then why don't we discuss it at dinner?”

“Rather!” When he dined alone with her, he savored his small glass of wine, the candlelight, being grown-up. “I'll tell Mrs. Drum.” Cook now ran the canteen of the munitions works where the three former housemaids fitted shells: the Drums with one elderly laundress managed the house—and Drum, at sixty-two, talked everlastingly about driving an ambulance at the Front.

Antonia hung up. Taking her cup to the sofa, she considered her son. How he puzzled and worried every moral issue! In a land suddenly rife with pat chauvinism, he maintained his flawless criteria for justice.
But he had his unruly streak
, Antonia thought, smiling. A few weeks ago during the Christmas holidays he and some classmates had been caught when police shut down one of those music halls where girls kicked up plump, black-stockinged thighs, and already this term a master had caned him for smoking cigarettes. Antonia, to be honest, found these crimes endearing. Important to her was that Justin never tormented a weaker boy, managed a fraternal benevolence toward the incorrigible Zoe, and let Caesar, wheezing and incontinent with age, sleep in his room until the mongrel died.
He'll be a very nice man
, she thought, smiling again.
I'll loathe his girls on sight
.

The sofa jolted.

Antonia cried out as hot tea spilled on her lap. The Biedermeier clock had plummeted from the mantel, its case shattering resoundingly on the tiles.

The flat had shaken as though London had twitched its skin.

Antonia tottered on rubber legs to the window, which was still rattling. “The light,” she muttered, careening to switch off the lamp.

A lesser explosion vibrated under her stockinged feet.

In the darkness she stumbled against the telephone table. Her tea tray crashed onto the rug. She jumped across broken crockery to unpin the blackout curtains.

In the next building people stood at lit windows. There were confused shouts. “Zeppelin raid!”

At the end of the narrow path an anemic glow brightened alarmingly under her horrified gaze. Shoving open the window, she craned out. Overhead a searchlight beam moved eastward, and in this mobile rivulet of light two zeppelins—sleek sharks—were swimming toward Hyde Park. Toward Rutland Gate! Zoe was with Janey Smith-Tolliver on Harley Street. But Justin was home!

“Justin,” she cried, and the tensing of her esophagus twisted the name into
Juzzi
.

She stamped into her shoes, dragging her thick wool cape around her. She forgot her hat, yet remembered the chocolate box. Slamming the front door, she pounded along the narrow cement path.

III

Up the street a four-story building was on fire. Smoke and flames poured from the lower windows. People raced about, a patternless mob, some barging back toward the blazing flats and shops, others scurrying away from the fire. A wild, insistent tintinnabulation. She retreated to the edge of the path as a horse-drawn fire engine erupted past, brass-helmeted firemen clinging to the sides. She began to run in the direction of her home. Ahead of her the sky sucked at brown-tinted smoke. Other fires. She galloped at breakneck, careless speed, not pacing herself for the more than two miles. There were fewer people in the street. Suddenly a white light burst. A frozen moment that affirmed the heaviest coils of smoke lay in the direction of Rutland Gate.
Oh, you German pigs
, she thought.
You dirty pigs
! Gasping, clutching the heavy, awkward box to her overtaxed heart, she began to pray mindlessly.
Please, God, let Justin be all right, let Justin be safe. Please, God, let Justin …

She swerved onto a cobbled lane that led to the Brompton Road. The fire's mottled brown shadows silhouetted ancient cottages. From this viewpoint wasn't the smoke less ominously centered? It no longer seemed to be quite over Rutland Gate.
Please, God
. But how could she be positive?

Holding her skirts above her calves, she raced pell-mell over uneven stones. Sweat poured down her forehead, half blinding her. Her hairpins had loosened, and moist strands flailed at her cheeks, catching on her bared teeth. Blood thundered in her ears.

She did not hear the motor.

The driver of course had on no lights. The first she knew of the car was a sudden blow hitting above the small of her back.

Her mouth opened in a gasp of surprise. The box wrenched itself from her hold, chocolates scattering about her as she slammed against a wall. The force with which she hit the bricks caromed her away.

She fell full weight, as if from a high window.

Ancient cobblestones slammed at her head. The universe cracked with an endless implosion. Nebulae burst and danced behind her eyes.

The driver had braked. Headlights shone.

It's not an Onyx
, she thought, and entered into darkness.

IV

She knew she was in a hospital from the familiar chlorine odors, but her other senses were hazed, as if a mucilage protected the outer world from the pain that shrieked inside her head.

Formless shadows drifted, their hoarse whispers traveling through the small bones of her ears to bang hurtfully against her brain.

“She's coming round.”

“Mrs. Hutchinson.” An earnest masculine voice. “Mrs. Hutchinson. Can you hear me?”

How could he expect an answer when flames of agony immolated her?

“Mother?”

Justin
, she thought.
He's safe
. An elusive coolness briefly eased her.

“Mummy?”

A blow crashed against her jaw. Amplified torment blazed through her, and she heard a whimper.

“Zoe! You mustn't touch her. She needs to know you and Justin are here, that's all. Here, stand next to me.”

Antonia attempted to smile reassurance up at the shifting light and dark that were her children, but the effort wearied her perilously.

She closed her eyes.

On a flat, featureless, twilit plain stretching horizonlessly, eternally, stood Claude, Arthur, her uncle, and her father, motionless and isolated from one another by intolerable distances: the peculiar contained radiance that illuminated each made the sense of chilling infinity yet more lonely. Her father's vacant eyes were fixed on her. Uncle, his neatly trimmed beard like a halo slipped around his cancer-wasted features, gazed imploringly at her. Claude, his handsome chin raised, held out an arm, beckoning. And Arthur, small, round, sandy-haired, in his striped flannel nightshirt, gave her that flushed, apologetic glance he had worn when he came to tell her that his bed was wet—Arthur, not self-reliant like Justin or imperious like Zoe, just a sweet, pudgy little boy who wanted to sit in her lap and hear “Greensleeves” and “Shenandoah.”

Why are they come here
, she wondered inside her ring of fiery pain.
Why don't they comfort one another? Why are they come to me
?

“Mother.” Justin's voice sounded above the rustlings. How much time had elapsed? She could not tell. Her head shrilled as excruciatingly, yet now she could answer the shape above her.

“Ju …”

“It's me,” he replied triumphantly. “See, Dr. Smith-Tolliver, she knows me.”

The earnest male voice approved.

Another outline, shorter, formed over her. “Mummy, can you see me? Can you, Mummy? It's Zoe.”

“Zzz …”

“She knows me, too!”

“Mother, you're awake. That's a jolly good sign. Soon you'll be well.” Her son's fingers engulfed her limp hand. How resolute his grip, this son of hers who would soon be a man.

The warm, strong hand somehow convinced her that Tom was in the hospital room.
Darling, I hurt so much
, she thought.
Hold me and stop the hurt
.

She closed her eyes. On that eerie, twilit landscape, her father, uncle, husband, and little boy gazed sorrowfully, pleadingly at her.

“Mother?”

“Mummy?”

She looked up, focusing with grisly effort on the mismatched shadows.
Tom isn't here
, she thought, and winced as her eyelids closed.

The others remained isolate in their mephitic gloom, and she accepted with a kind of holy wonder that she was the fixed point of their mortal joys. She did not, even now, realize it was her rare gift to love the unlovable. Instead she thought:
How dear they are, how fine it is that I can cheer them up, can warm them with a kiss. It'll be a snap to make them smile. How alone they look, how sad and alone in that cold land
.

For the last time on this earth Antonia Dalzell Hutchinson was permitted a choice. Her lips parted, her bandaged rib cage expelled air, and the faint sound hung amid hygienic odors as she moved with that swift, impulsive grace into the twilight to comfort the solitary figures of her dead.

CHAPTER 14

MRS HUTCHINSON KILLED ZEPPELIN RAID LAST NIGHT STOP HAVE TAKEN CHARGE OF CHILDREN STOP EDGE

Hugh gave not so much as a passing query to Monty's taking charge of the orphans: the Edges and Antonia were friends, she had no family, and in such situations men of power and importance like Monty stepped in. The telegram rustled from Hugh's hand, falling silent on the office carpet.… He was remembering a soft voice guiding him through his black night. He buried his poor clown's face in his hands. His tears were not exactly grief but a mournful farewell, the lachrymose equivalent of a final taps sounding for the youth and joy he had possessed vicariously through his brother.

Tom …

Tom had moved to the Pontchartrain, and though he had never mentioned divorce (Maud, too, continued her atypical sidestepping of any discussion on that issue), Hugh was well aware of what was up. These last months Tom had been seized with that same flush of creativity as when he'd built the racer for Antonia. It was possible to catch the crackling vibrations of his impatience and feel the physical force of his happiness. What about all that love? Where would it go? Cut off, amputated, would Tom bleed to death, like their mother in her nest of suicidal straw?

Hugh blew his nose.
It's up to me to tell him
. His reddened eyes rested on the three telephones. Like that? A mortal blow struck by a disembodied voice?
I'll have to go over there to the factory
, Hugh thought. The cantankerous nerves of his chest protested. Reaching in the top desk drawer for his new asthma medicine, he popped the yellow pill in his mouth, swallowing it without water, before he spoke to Tom's secretary, telling him to get the boss to his office.

Hugh sent for his chauffeur, ordering the astonished Canadian to bring around the Packard Twin Six.

They drove through a day dismally suited to his task: near freezing, swollen with purple clouds. The cheerless light showed the yellow grass and bare trees of the new small estates that had replaced the ribbon farms along the Detroit River. The city had sprouted tall buildings. Sunk into his gloomy dread, Hugh paid no attention to the altered landscape. But when they came to the small brick houses and Polish shops of Hamtramck, he drew his breath sharply and leaned toward the window, gazing up at Onyx's five looming power plants. The buildings behind cement walls went on forever. The sheer immensity of the place! Pride overcame Hugh's lugubrious dread, and a tingling sensation spread through his entire body. All this from nothing, in less than fifteen years! Tom's accomplishment. After a minute he changed it to
our
accomplishment. The second shift was going full blast but parts were borne from one shop to another by conveyors and craneways, so few men were to be seen in the broad alleyways.

Today was Saturday: management worked only in the morning. Trotting up the wide, deserted brick steps to the empty lobby of Administration, Hugh blessed Antonia for this final act of kindness: for dying on the right day. He jogged up empty staircases, fumbling along deserted corridors until he came to the glass-topped door painted
T. K. Bridger
.