Onyx (3 page)

Tom lived upstairs in the back. A pair of crude pine stools were shoved under the marble-topped table that had been Coraline Bridger's prized possession, and there was a sink and wood stove, but other wise the room was fitted out as a shop. It smelled of oil and fresh-worked metal. Racks of tools lined one wall. The window ledge was crowded with bottles of acid. Tom halted at his bench, turning the flywheel of a little contraption.

“Tom?” a boy's adolescent voice cracked. “That you?”

Tom frowned, opening the door next to the stove.

This long, narrow closet, once part of the corridor, was just larg enough for two straw pallets placed head to head. Hugh Bridger lay below the oval window that rinsed his yellow hair in sunlight. He clutched a drawing pad. He was covered with his own and Tom's winter jackets—that disastrous first winter in Detroit they had been forced to sell their mother's hope chest bedding.

“So the high school's declared a national holiday?” Tom asked sourly, in no mood to hear his younger brother's complaints.

“Right after you left I got an attack, a fierce one. I had to breathe in steam so long that my eyeballs ache.”

“If the asthma's bothering you how can you draw?”

“It helps me forget how bad I feel.”

“You're playing hooky,” Tom said, irritated.

“I'm sick!”

“Ballocks! You're embarrassed to wheeze in class.”

Stung by this truth about his vanity, Hugh slammed down his drawing pad. “A fat lot you know! You've never had iron bands strangling you!”

At thirteen Hugh Bridger resembled one of the angels that hover in medieval paintings, blond hair waving about a curved forehead, round pink cheeks, eyes of bright Saxony blue. His mouth, though, did not suggest angelic smiles or pouts. Even in this petulant moment it was a firm, calculating mouth. He lay back, rasping out each breath with a shudder.

After a minute Tom asked gruffly, “Need me to boil the kettle?”

“Later, please,” Hugh assented.

Tom's being six years older, strong and dominant, was bad enough: his weekly pay envelope weighted the fraternal relationship unbearably. It was no wonder that Hugh used hypochondria to tilt his side of the scales and to the younger boy's credit, he cared as much for Tom as Tom cared for him. The affection between the two ran deeper than either comprehended.

They did not speak as Tom took off his good suit, hanging it inside the slit of a bedroom, and unbuttoned the celluloid shirt collar, but sensing bad news, Hugh asked, “Didn't Major Stuart let you rent the shed?”

Tom shook his head. “No. But he played me along, pretending he would. He made me explain about horseless carriages. Hugh, he's seen one! In Paris. Oh, he made me into a fine monkey before he turned me down.”

“The fat old bastard,” Hugh sympathized. “Tom, what was the house like?” Hugh often strolled up Woodward Avenue at dusk in the passionate hope that the electricity or gaslights would go on before curtains were drawn so he could spy on the servant-pampered, exotic life within. “Is it like Ma's family had in Massachusetts?”

“You know we never saw that house, Hugh.”

“Ma described everything often enough. The fanlights, the rosewood furniture like our table, the silver engraved with the Neville crest.”

“There's no Neville crest on us,” Tom said uneasily.

“There is! We
are
descended from them. Through the Neville that was known as Warwick the Kingmaker back in the fifteenth century. We're related to English royalty. Ma explained it all!”

The coin of Coraline Bridger's despairing mendacity had grown thin-edged from passing between the brothers, yet Hugh's belief in its counterfeit shine remained painful to Tom. “The Major's house. Well, the front hall's enormous. There's a huge stained-glass window on the landing—you can see it to the right of the porte cochere. The dining room bulges because it's part of one of the towers. We had breakfast in there.”

“We?” Hugh cried. “You ate with the Major, Tom? What did you have?”

As Tom described the ugly servants and excellent food the gnawing hunger he felt in his gut had little to do with the neglected meal. He longed to say something, anything, about Antonia Dalzell. “He's got a new somebody out there.”

“You met his mistress?” Hugh sat up, his thin arms hugged across the chest of his torn union suit.

“As we were leaving a girl came down. He introduced her as his niece.”

“Maybe she is,” Hugh said, disappointed.

“He doesn't have any relatives. It's just a smoke screen.”

“Is she all rouge and golden tossing curls? Does she have enormous bazzoms like the redhead we saw him with outside White's Grand Theater? Does she smell of French perfume? Was she in a satin and lace negligee, the new whore?”

Tom had been grinning at his brother's spurious guesses. Antonia had the look of innocence. Yet at the word
whore
he saw, distinctly and clearly, a trimmed gray beard brushing against a luminous cheek. “She's just that,” he said coldly. “The Major's new whore.”

He kicked the door shut.

V

He stood at his bench, his breath rapid, his hands clenched at his sides. His fury bewildered him. Oh, he had a quick and foul temper, he admitted that—but why this trembling rage that a black-haired young girl earned her living at the oldest profession? He had seen her for three minutes at most, so what did he care if she slept in the Major's bed?

He frowned down at his engine.

Few people would have recognized it as that. Tom's rudimentary engine, rather than being heavy or cumbersome, was deceptively delicate. The cylinder, reamed from one-inch gas pipe, resembled the barrel of an ancient handgun and was connected to a few gears and a lathe flywheel. A few months earlier Tom had seen the diagram of an elaborate internal-combustion engine in
American Machinist
. He had no technical training—indeed, he had never been to any kind of school—and he possessed no die-cutting tools. A five-dollar credit line limited him at Gundel's Hardware, so of necessity his mechanism differed from the diagram.

Tom's eyes hardened to a steel gray, and he bent over the engine, checking the clasps that fastened it to the board. Lugging it to the sink, he attached the grounding wire to the faucet. Then he climbed on a stool to unscrew the light bulb over the sink. Working carefully, he attached the filaments to the socket. He needed electricity for the ignition. Taking a tiny screwdriver, he adjusted the two brass clock valves. His angular face grew intent, his miseries forgotten.

“Hugh.”

The younger boy pushed open the door. Kneeling on the end of his mattress, he looked apprehensively at the engine covering the sink.

Tom said, “I need you a minute. She's ready.”

“You're going to try here? Tom, that's crazy! You'll blow up the whole building. Trelinack said so.”

“He is a cabinetmaker, not a mechanic. I know what I'm doing.”

“Can't it wait?”

“What for? I didn't get my shop, did I?”

“You'll find one.”

“Like hell. How many places in Detroit are wired for electric? Get on over. You'll splash in the oil.”

“Me?” Hugh wheezed violently. “I'll strangle from the fumes.”

“Hugh!”

“Gasoline explodes, it burns, it—”

“Marine engines run on it, and so do Silent Otto motors,” Tom snapped. “I'd feed the oil myself but I need both hands.”

Hugh inched reluctantly across cracked linoleum.

Tom handed him an oiling can. “See this.” He pointed to a hollow tube. “When I tell you, drip into it.”

Tom adjusted a screw under the oil cup and at the same moment gave the flywheel a vigorous spin. The cylinder pipe sucked in air and petroleum, the light flickered as if a thunderstorm raged. A hard mechanical cough pulsed through the flat. The engine worked with a four-stroke method. On the first stroke the piston drew gasoline into the cylinder, the second stroke compressed the fuel until at deadpoint the spark caused an explosion, which drove the piston back down, its third stroke. The fourth stroke discharged the burned gas, leaving the cylinder ready for another intake of gasoline.

The steel piston rod began to move, its flash reflecting in Tom's eyes. Light sweat shone on his forehead. “She works, Hugh,” he whispered. “She works.…”

Hugh, shifting as far as possible from the tiny yellow flames that licked from the exhaust, extended his arm to feed the engine. After what seemed to him an interminable minute, he asked, “Is that enough?”

“Yes.”

Hugh, slamming shut the door, threw himself on the pallet. Tom continued to gaze at the engine long after it had coughed into immobility.

VI

When Obediah Bridger delivered Tom, his first child, Coraline Neville Bridger's mind already had been affected by the treeless monotony, the crude sod cabin, the choking summer and bonebleak winter, the awesome loneliness of the Dakota Territory. She and her husband had come west a year before, she a bride accustomed to the niceties of a Massachusetts township, he a farmer lured by the promise of cheap land.

Obediah's blue eyes were deep set, the shadow of the occipital bone intensifying the color. What Tom would remember most about his father were those deep-set blue eyes.

Coraline's natural loquacity bubbled around Tom. It was she who drilled the boy in his lessons, for the school house, fifteen miles away, may as well have been on another planet. His father needed him for chores, though, and before the child was nine his schooling had dwindled to an occasional winter lesson. Hugh was six years younger, and by the time he came along, Coraline was embroidering her incessant chatter with fantasies of wealth and a chivalric Neville ancestry.

With her curling yellow hair and dimples she had been considered a pretty girl, so maybe it was inevitable that her fantasies should take a sexual turn. She began visualizing a dragoon captain riding to abduct her, his helmet's magnificent horsehair plume bobbing above the tall Fife wheat. One hot night in September, after Obediah was asleep, she ratted her fading hair into a pompadour, pinched color into her cheeks, and crossed the moonlit yard to the barn.

The next morning Tom found her. Dried blood from her wrists stiffened her nightgown. Her body fluids had already sunk, pressing her into the straw so that with her mouth open in a
rictus sardonicus
, the smile of death, she looked as if she were amorously engaging a lover.

The following June, Obediah screamed away his life in the agony of a burst appendix.

Tom, who was fourteen, dug his father's grave with savage strokes. The same enemy had killed both his parents. Distance. The lonely deprivation of distance. He loathed the tepid green, infinitely remote prairie. He sold the farm to a Swede for the price of two railroad tickets to Detroit. (Hugh was only eight, but Tom never considered leaving his brother in the orphanage at Fargo.) That first year in Detroit, Tom worked in a foundry, dangerous labor far too hard for his adolescent strength. He did not earn enough to feed the two of them properly, much less rent them a place of their own. He repaired watches evenings and Sundays. That year his face took on the black-shadowed, pared look of a runner beyond the limit of endurance.

This brutal boyhood compressed his capacity for love.

VII

Major Stuart visited with Senator McMillan, his old friend, until after ten. By then Fort Street was less congested and he held the reins laxly while his mind wandered back to the mechanic. Unusual boy, the Major thought. But why? What set young Bridger apart from other employees summoned to the house? His offer to pay rent? His self-possession? No, it was more than that. When he had talked about the horseless carriages, he had seemed stronger, larger, his cheeks were taut, his gaze intently fixed—something compelling about those gray eyes.
Damn me
, the Major thought.
That's the way I must look when I ache to bed a pretty woman
.

“Passion,” he said aloud, slapping his stout thigh. “The boy has passion.”

Othello was switching his glossy tail. Iago arching his neck. Magnificent animals. No wonder since time immemorial man had thrilled to horseflesh. But that evil-smelling vehicle lurching down the Avenue d'lvry—who could become passionate about
that
? A mechanic, the Major thought, laughing. Only a mechanic!

He was still chuckling as he came to a block-long frame structure. Above the flat roof rose ironwork letters:

STUART FURNITURE COMPANY

In the precise center, below the
NIT
, an arched entry led to the yard, and this tunnel had an amplifying effect on the cacophony within, shooting it out like a cannonball. The Major had already taken out his silver-handled whip, using it smartly on his pair.

On the steps of his office he squinted through the resinous haze at the building Bridger hungered after. A thick coat of beige dust obscured the windows, streaks weathered the double doors. The Major's red lips drew into a hard line. Normally he avoided looking in this direction. Priding himself on his business acumen, he disliked looking upon his failures. Five years earlier he had started a line of inlaid marquetry dining room furniture, erecting this cottage to display a sample suite: in overestimating the public's demand for top-notch cabinetry, he had lost a good deal of money. And now there was the overstock of those miserable bedside tables to be stored here. Another failure. He turned and opened the door.

The narrow-shouldered man at a typewriting machine looked up, touching his green eyeshade in an obsequious little salute. “Good morning, Major, sir. Fine day isn't it, sir?”

The Major, abstracted, nodded to his secretary. “Heldenstern, we have a mechanic called Bridger. Find him, will you, and send him in to me.”

A few minutes later Trelinack, the head foreman, was admitted. “Sir, Mr. Heldenstern tells me you want Bridger directly. But Tom's set to repair the three-drum sander tonight, so he's off now.”