Onyx (32 page)

“We sold two hundred and ninety-odd thousand Fivers last year.” This was a third of the American market. “Soon it'll be a million.”

Hugh forced a smile. “That's not my projection, Tom.”

“Your statisticians don't know their asses from hot rocks. Four million tires a year. Plus replacements. I can make them to last much longer than Seiberling does. And I can produce them more cheaply. A man called Farquar owns some woods on the river between here and town.” Tom scowled fiercely. To these woods he had driven with Antonia in a Curved-Dash Bridger. “I'm buying his land.”

Hugh blinked, puzzled at this conversational shift. “But Maud's already broken ground for your new house.”

“Haven't you listened to one fucking word? I need a big new machine that's capable of building every damn part of a Fiver. A new shop.”

Hugh stared at his brother. What was this nonsense? A big new machine? Manufacture ties? New shop? Hugh had
seen
the Hamtramck. No wonder the world's industrialists made pilgrimages to visit. It was the best-equipped, most ingenious instrument of mass production. This whole overheated harangue was a delusion born of poor Tom's grief. Hugh was busy assembling compassionate rebuttals when there was a ring on his private line.

Listening to the voice on the other end, he kept his expression warily in control, but his fingernails rapped against the Elizabethan table. “I'll send my chauffeur,” he said, pausing. “No. I'm sorry, but that's entirely out of the question.” Another pause. “Yes, of course I understand the seriousness, but I never leave the house … my health.” A longer pause. Hugh paled and looked cornered. “Wait a moment, Colonel Marshall.” He held a palm to the mouthpiece. “Tom, Justin's in some kind of difficulty.” Though he spoke normally, his manicured nails continued to tap anxiously.

At Justin's name Tom winced as though a raw blister had been probed. He said nothing, but his look was dangerous.

Hugh wet his lips. “The principal insists on explaining in person, he won't let Justin come home until he has. You know Colonel Marshall well.”

“Not this way I don't. Caryll's never needed bailing out.”

Hugh cowered a little, but of his two fears, Tom's anger and horrified glances, Tom's anger was the lesser. “
I
can't go. You know that.” The wheeze in his voice was an effective emotional trump, and Hugh knew it.

Tom paced to the opposite end of the long office. “When I've finished talking to Farquar about the woods,” he acquiesced.

“My brother will be there soon,” Hugh said into the phone.

IV

Justin sat unslumping on a hard bench in Colonel Marshall's waiting room, his gaze fixed on the opposite wall. He had examined every detail of the large watercolor of West Point with the words
Duty, Honor, Country
afloat in a fat white cloud, and now his attention remained riveted to the Seth Thomas clock. The hand jumped. One forty-three. He had been sitting here since eight fifty-five, when he had finished his terse explanation that in breaking up a fight between younger boys he had regrettably lost his temper. To say more, Justin was aware from his prefectorial stint at Eddington, meant those three little rotters would see to it that Bridger—a member of that outer fringe that surrounds school life the world over—would be denied even the companionship of his fellow rejects. At home the Head would have understood and let Justin off with a perfunctory caning. Here, who could tell?

The three had spent the better part of an hour telling their sides, which he was certain included no mention of Caryll Bridger. As they had passed through the waiting room the tall, skinny boy had darted a smirk of satisfaction at Justin. Since then nobody had looked at him. When Colonel Marshall had left to preside over officers' mess, he had ordered his sallow, middle-aged secretary to remain. Guard duty. She sat behind her low partition reading a magazine with aggrieved little sniffs. Justin clenched his nails into his palms, informing himself it was his continued dwelling on the lavatory scene that caused this ruthless urge to empty his bladder. He could not bring himself to ask the secretary's permission to relieve himself.

The door opened.

Colonel Marshall ushered in Tom Bridger.

Justin's first confused thought was that he had come on Caryll's account, but this he rejected instantly. He was positive those three would not have implicated Caryll, and there was no other way for Colonel Marshall to learn of the involvement.
He's here for me
, Justin thought, and his cheeks grew hot. He had tried to be scrupulously fair about Hugh's brother—after all, he had seen the man only twice, he admired his accomplishments, and besides at a time when most Americans were dead set against any foreign entanglement, Onyx was backing England with a big new plant. But that first meeting had imprinted itself on him, and his animosity persisted. This was his mother's harassing enemy.

He rose stiffly, clicking his heels. “Colonel, sir.” He saluted. “Mr. Bridger, sir.” Another smart salute.

The Colonel touched his hat. Tom stared at his black armband and nodded brusquely. They went into the sunlit office and closed the door. Masculine voices rumbled, their meanings obliterated.

After five minutes Tom emerged. “Come on,” he snapped without slowing his stride. He marched through the halls ahead of Justin.

Mess over, the yard was shrilly alive with blue-uniformed boys, some kneeling over marble games, others playing pop-up or shooting baskets. As Justin descended the steps a hushed stillness fell on the playground.

Somebody near him made a loud, wet kissing noise. Snickers churned.

Justin climbed into the Fiver, staring ahead. Tom started the car, driving around the muddy parade ground where eight widely separated boys, the sun glinting on their patent leather visors, marched punishment tours.

“It was good of you to pick me up, sir,” Justin said. He would rather be dead than permit Tom Bridger to see his corrosive humiliation, and therefore the clipped edges of his voice brought him satisfaction.

“At Colonel Marshall's insistence. You're Hugh's responsibility, so far be it from me to interfere.”

“Thank you anyway, sir.”

“If I
did
have a vote, it'd be for a heavy thrashing. You can wipe off that smirk. I know about the cigarettes to bribe the lower graders, I know how you bat them around when they refuse to jerk you off.”

Justin felt the blood drain from his face. In his hours in the waiting room it had never occurred to him that he might be accused of any crime other than illegal smoking and fighting with a sixth-grader. His entire body trembled. His bladder froze in pain.

Tom drove swiftly. A headache bound him above the eyes. This boy, who so resembled Antonia, whom she had adored, for whose sake she had kept
him
tucked away! How dare he turn out to be a pervert bully?

He braked hard at Hugh's entrance bay. “Get upstairs,” he ordered. “I'll give it to Hugh straight.”

Justin had arranged his room to be as similar as possible to his quarters in Rutland Gate, with his mementos of Claude, his now useless cricket bats, his squash and tennis rackets, his old desk with its warmly familiar scars. Only the full-length portrait of Antonia had not been in his room but had hung in the rear drawing room. He changed into worn flannels and a tennis sweater that was unraveling a little at the elbows, familiar clothes from England. He sat at his desk, which faced the mullioned windows. Beyond the terrace bricklayers worked on the cottage that was two thirds of normal scale, Zoe's playhouse, and beyond that, half hidden by trees, Lake St. Clair glittered a barbarously hard blue. He stifled his tears, but he could not repress his dislocating, horrorstruck misery.

After a while Hugh came up, stepping into the room inflexibly, as if he were carrying a full tureen of hot soup. Justin did not put on a good face—Hugh was his friend.

Hugh sat near the desk. “Come on, Justin,” he said. He had been thoroughly shaken at the malign twist his schemes had taken, but the boy's unhappiness triggered his heartfelt sympathy. “It's not the end of the world. In a few days you'll be at a better school.”

“Have I been sacked?”

“Expelled, yes. Colonel Marshall told my brother.”

“Hugh, I'm sorry to cause you so much fuss.”

“Boys go through this stage, Justin, they do. It's part of growing up. The only wrong move you made was being caught.”

Justin traced an old initial with his shaking finger. It was one thing to have his enemies believe the worst of him, quite another to hear Hugh state it so casually. When Hugh left he made a dive for the big bathroom, heaving over the toilet until only a stringy acid came. He was sweating and wiping his face when he heard the car bring Zoe home.

She tapped on the door, inquiring, “What's going on? Why did you leave school early?” She was radically pruning her voice of English inflections.

“Head off, Zoe,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

He sat with his chin pressing into his palms. His initial shock over, he was able to perceive a ubiquitous substructure beneath all of his lonely misadventures on this continent. The code of ethics, the reticence, the way of dealing with problems that he had packed aboard the
Stephen Decatur
were not cargo that could survive an Atlantic crossing. He mulled this over, avoiding blame, anger, self-pity. Within him was an unassimilable streak, or maybe it was a black obstinacy, that prevented him from easy adaptation. He could not jettison the past that was filled with his father, his mother (he knuckled away an unmanly tear), he could not grow a chameleon conscience, he could not tailor a new self for himself as Zoe was doing. With his penknife he carved into his old desk:
To thine own self be true
, a futile bravado that showed rawly on the oak and did nothing to numb either his grief or his loneliness.

Hugh, a solitary, respected his right to privacy. At dinnertime Zoe knocked again. Again Justin told her to go away. He had not eaten since breakfast, and he felt he would never more be hungry. At ten he undressed and turned out the lights.

Another knock.

“It's late, you little nit,” he called. “Way past your bedtime.”

“It's me, Tom Bridger.”

Tom came in, switching on the overhead light. He drew a breath at the full-length portrait: with slapdash brushwork and strange lavender skin tones, the artist, a modern, had captured Antonia's lively, impetuous charm. He turned quickly away.

“Caryll explained what happened at school. Those little bastards gang up on everybody, he said. They were after him when you interfered.”

Justin felt no vindicatory triumph, only a pitying admiration for a young, shy boy with the grace to admit to the woebegone crime of being a patsy. “Any senior would have,” he said tersely and lay back in the pillow, hoping Tom would take the hint.

Instead, he came to the foot of the bed. “Why didn't you tell the story to Colonel Marshall?”

“He heard my side, sir.”

“Not all of it, not by a long shot. Otherwise he never would have believed Hoenig and the Thatcher twins. As soon as you realized what they were up to, why didn't you telephone him and clear yourself?”

The answer to this lay in Justin's code. Caryll, a younger, weaker boy, needed his protection as much as ever: to waver under fire would be pusillanimous. Yet mud sticks to a sensitive surface, and Justin felt the shame of the charge as hotly as if it were true. “Sir,” he said in a low voice, “I was asleep.”

“If you're trying to make me feel even more of a shit, you've succeeded. I'm on my way to school now to put this right.”

Justin's head raised urgently from the pillow. “No!”

“What's the point of waiting until tomorrow?”

“I don't want you to go at all. Ever.”

“That's insane.”

“Sir, leave it as it is.” There was a surprising command in his tone.

“What am I supposed to do, let him keep on thinking you're a powder-puff bully?”

“This afternoon you said it was none of your affair.” Justin rolled onto his side, facing the wall.

“Listen to me. It's not just the kissing noises and the sneers. You're being expelled, don't you understand? You won't get into college and—” Tom stopped. Justin's breathing came in muffled sighs, and the blankets were shuddering. Tom glanced up at the portrait, as if to beg forgiveness for his doubts and anger.
You had every right to be proud, Antonia, he
is
very special
. “I'll do it your way,” he said quietly. “Good night, Justin.”

V

The following morning after Tom dropped off Caryll at school, he continued out beyond Gaukler Point to Hugh's place.

At the first curve in the driveway two setters barked around Justin as he walked along, head bent, hands thrust into the pockets of a too small maroon blazer. Tom drove by. Justin glanced up, nodding. Tom parked on the curve ahead, getting out to lean against a front mudguard. When Justin caught up, he asked, “Ever driven a Fiver?”

“Good morning, sir,” Justin said in a subdued voice. “No.”

“Any car?”

“My mother's Lanchester. Drum—he was our man; you may remember him—taught me.”

“Like to try this?”

“Thanks, but I don't feel much like it this morning.”

“Things that bad?”

“Nothing to do with the other,” Justin said too hastily. The dogs were running circles on the grass, their tongues lolling to catch dew. He looked at them, not Tom. “It was a mistake coming over here. I don't fit in at all.”

“Look, Justin, I don't get much comfort from the way I behaved yesterday—”

“No need to fret over that, sir.”

“Let me finish. I understand you didn't stoop to set
me
right. There have been times when I've kept quiet, too, after I was unfairly attacked. But I couldn't figure out why you didn't want Colonel Marshall to know what really happened. This morning it came to me. You think if those little turds are punished, they'll never let Caryll forget it. Am I right?”