Onyx (40 page)

The couple was seated in the library when the front door chimes rang. Caryll ushered in his guests. Tom stood to welcome them.

Maud found herself unable to rise from her wing chair. Long ago Tom had determined not to dredge up old hurts by involving himself—or her—with the Hutchinsons, but since this ban had never been verbalized to their son, Maud had not objected when Caryll told her he had invited Justin and Zoe. Yet now, a dulled, hopeless resentment weighed her down. It was as though Antonia herself intruded with her tall and beautiful children at the glass door to the entry hall.
In my own house
! Maud thought. No gray showed in her hair, her body—that businesslike organism—had acquired a scant inch at the trim waist, yet the elasticity of youth was gone, and while her face retained its high, handsome color and had not wrinkled, the small twin jowls gave a squareness to her fixed expression. And so she sat in her three-year-old brown velvet dinner dress, grim as the last Manchu dowager empress.

Zoe moved into the room. Still euphoric from the letters, she bubbled, “Oh, Mrs. Bridger, what a magnificent home!”

Maud pulled herself together. “It's much less grand than Hugh's,” she retorted, her eyes seeking out Justin. Because he was male, she found him less evocative of her old rival and therefore easier to take. “Would you believe it, the architect called the style British baronial.”

“It
does
remind me a bit of Monty's country place,” Justin said.

Because Maud had thoroughly enjoyed her week in the ivy-covered eighteenth-century mansion that the Edges had purchased from a Kentish baronet desolated by the death of his two sons in the Ardennes, the comment almost pleased her. “I never thought of it,” she grudged. “A good, sensible old house, Monty's.”

The rain had stopped. The mantel clock gave eight bellicose chimes.

Maud stood, placing her short, wide hand on Justin's sleeve. “Supper's ready,” she said.

Caryll glanced tentatively at Zoe, who smiled and took his arm. Tom followed the two couples across the hall, his gray eyes sardonic. The ironies of his life!

The three young people laughed and chatted over a huge, unseasoned meal. “Those extravagant dishes at Hugh's are bad for the digestion,” Maud opined. After the apple pie she said, “Tom, one brandy each, dear. No more. Zoe and I will have our coffee in the parlor.”

As the two women went into the drawing room large drops began again to drum loudly on the slate terraces. “What weather,” Maud said, banging a poker vigorously at the logs burning in one of the fireplaces: this room, stretching across the rear of the house, boasted a monstrous black marble chimney piece at either end.

She settled herself behind the coffee tray; her glasses caught two red glints of firelight, giving her a strangely blank expression. “You're tall like your mother,” she said. “And you have her eyes, but otherwise it's your brother who takes after her.”

Zoe, who had been holding her hands out to the blaze, turned. “Mother?” she asked, a tremor in her voice. Though her friends' grandparents fondly reminisced about Major Stuart, some even recalling his father or Oswald Dalzell, none ever mentioned Antonia. Those few years she had lived in Detroit might have been expunged from the calendar. Zoe had grown to accept this odd silence. “You were Mother's friend?”

“Me?” Maud's laugh was loud and humorless. “I was a seamstress and she lived in a big mansion out on Woodward Avenue—it was very swank in those days. I altered some skirts for her.” Maud paused, adding bluntly, “She had no friends in this town.”

“Hugh—”

“He was as poor as me. He met her once or twice.”

Zoe forced a smile. Her private myths jarred downward, but there was no shattering: one or two meetings obviously had been enough for Hugh to tumble as Dante had for Beatrice. “Maybe being lonely was why she didn't like it here. Justin and I have talked about it. She never voluntarily mentioned Detroit, not even when Uncle Andrew was alive.”

“He's the reason they stayed clear of her.”

“He?” Bewilderment showing in the lovely, sensual face.

“The Major.”

“Uncle Andrew … Mrs. Bridger, I don't understand.”

Maud gripped the ivory handle of the coffeepot, an odd, relentless clutch. “The gossip about the two of them was fierce.”

Her meaning, not in the least cryptic, sank like an anchor into Zoe's consciousness. It was not the weight of incest that horrified the girl, it was something infinitely more vile. Necrophilia. Zoe's memories of the Major were faded and confined, like the odor of his sour medicines, to the big front bedroom where he had served out his sentence of cancer. That yellow-skinned, skeletal cadaver joined to the entrancing glow, that was Antonia? Hideous and defiling baloney. A lie! Of course it was! So why were goosebumps rising on her bare white arms?

“Cream?” Maud inquired.

“Please,” Zoe said dully. “But she was his niece.”

“That was the part the social set relished. I sewed in a lot of big houses, and they'd go over and over it right in front of me.”

“My grandfather lived in the house too.”

“Nobody ever saw
him
,” Maud said. “Before she came, the Major always had a girl, the bad sort, living out there. He'd pass them off as relatives. After she showed up, he had nobody. When he took your mother off to Europe, they cackled like it was the final proof.” Maud handed Zoe the demitasse cup. “Help yourself to sugar.”

“I don't take any,” Zoe whispered. The little cup rattled on the gold-washed saucer, and she carefully set the bone china down.

Suddenly Maud's eyes felt hot and dry. Her candor had been tinged with the need to get back at Antonia through the next generation. Yet seeing this gorgeous young creature collapse like a wet dishrag, Maud was overcome with contrition. As a matter of fact, the dinner had gone pleasantly, and looking down her damask-covered table, seeing Caryll's delight at entertaining his friends, she had found herself smiling and laughing along with her son.

“A useless bunch, society women, nothing better to do than invent scandals,” Maud said, laying down her weapons.

“Yes, vicious,” Zoe said in a high, hollow voice.

“I just wanted you to know I never believed one word.” Thus, with her broad, pleasant smile, Maud put her signature on a belated armistice with her dead rival's two offspring.

“I know you didn't, Mrs. Bridger,” Zoe said fervently. Turning, she began to heap praise on an enormous, murky still life above the piano.

Engrossed in conversation, the three men came into the room.

Caryll sat on the love seat next to Zoe. “When you're done with your coffee, I'll give you and Justin the grand tour.”

Tom said, “I want to discuss the shutdown with Justin. He can see the place some other time.”

He spoke in that peremptory tone Zoe had noticed he used often in connection with Justin. Did Mr. Bridger's coldness toward them have anything to do with their mother's supposed affair with Uncle Andrew? Zoe clasped her shaking hands together.

“It's only nine thirty,” Caryll said. “Dad, you'll have plenty of time later.”

“I've been thinking about the shutdown too,” Justin said. “How do we change over to the Seven with the shortest layoff for the men?”

Tom, Caryll, and Justin glanced at each other, their eyes worried—and guilty: they had a staggering task ahead of them and the workers, they knew, would suffer the most.

Detroit always hung on grimly in the months when automobile factories routinely shut down while machine tools were altered in order to manufacture the new models. Some hands managed to find temporary jobs, but most struggled to survive on savings. The Seven, which still had to be designed and built, was to be entirely new, a fast, smart, smooth-riding, revolutionary car. The problems were immense. Every single one of the five to six thousand parts of the prototype had to be designed to the exacting standard that Tom demanded, then meticulously tested. This accomplished, Woodland's fortune in machinery (specifically made to build the Fiver) would be torn from its foundation pits. Gigantic new machines would have to be devised to build the Seven. There had never been a changeover of such scope in American industry, so there was no certainty how long it would take. Tom had hopes of scheduling production on the Seven within a calendar year, so at best this meant that many of the hundreds of thousands of employees at the Onyx Detroit plants and the assemblies would be thrown out of work for a year.

“Once we start installing the new machinery, we can begin a call-in,” Tom sighed. “But it won't be easy on them.”

“I've beefed up our credit union, and I'm working on a plan for employment agencies within the various plants to find the men temporary jobs,” Justin said. “It's no panacea, but it'll help. I'd like to have things pretty well in hand before I take that vacation in December.” This last sentence was uttered with a swift frostiness.

Tom said, “Go along with Zoe, Caryll.”

III

Zoe slipped her hand into Caryll's as their footsteps echoed around the swimming pool in its glassed-enclosed wing. She kept it there as they peered into the game room with its two Brunswick-Balke-Collender pool tables. They went into the music room to inspect the organ screen, stepping onto the sunporch, which smelled of rain even though the floor-length glass windows were closed. She said little, but her lush body communicated against his side with soft turns and pressures. Attuned to Zoe's precarious moods, Caryll felt not only the normal shivers of happiness and desire but also foreboding. Clearly she was distraught, and he steeled himself against hurt for he knew hurt was inevitable: Zoe, during her squalls, invariably wounded him.

They climbed the heavily carved oak staircase that Maud checked daily with a white cotton glove to insure that the maids had dusted properly. Her door was ajar.

“Mother's room,” Caryll said.

Zoe nodded to the adjacent door, which was closed. “Your father's?” she asked.

“No, the sewing room,” Caryll replied stiffly. He had long been aware that his parents avoided each other's bedchambers and that his father hopped with agility into the beds of a succession of floozies. Loving both parents, he never affixed blame, yet the situation disturbed him deeply.

“People that age,” Zoe murmured.

“Right,” Caryll said. He pushed open the door.

A bedside lamp that turned the furniture into looming shadows spotlit Maud's four-poster.

With a meaningful glance Zoe murmured, “Caryll?”

Harrowingly stirred by her invitation as well as the sweet, musky odalisque perfume she was wearing, he raised her hand, kissing it. “Darling.”

She put her arms around him, rubbing her fingers deep into his buttocks, her pelvis wriggling against his. Caryll was shaking, embarrassed by a monumental erection.

“I love you so much,” he murmured in her ear.

“Must you get sticky before we do this?”

“It means everything to me. Let's go to my car.”

“Now,” she said.

“Zoe—”

“Of course, if you don't want to …”

“Oh, God, Zoe. My study—”

“Here,” she interrupted.

“Zoe, it's wrong.”

“And you say you love me.” Pulling away, she turned. Though she did not bend her head or make a sound, he knew she was weeping.

He pressed against her back, nuzzling his chin on her velvety shoulder. “What is it, darling?”

“She hates me.”

“Mother? She likes you. I was surprised, but she likes both of you. I can tell.”

“She said …”

Caryll felt the tremor convulse her body. “Hush, it's all right, Zoe, everything is all right.”

“Ahh, Caryll, it's such a rotten, rotten world.”

Closing the door, he fingered the tears from her eyes, his adoration strengthened by a protective tenderness for these strange, wracking insecurities of hers. She hiked up her skirt to let his fingers work the pearl button at her waist, her lace-edged panties fell, and she stepped out of them, and her satin pumps, to sit on the edge of Maud's dressing stool. Caryll knelt before her. In the dim light the rich white flesh above knotted silk stockings glowed elusively. Pressing her thighs apart, he kissed up to the trimmed and scented golden pubic curls, using both hands to raise the moist epithelium toward himself. Soon she lifted her thighs to his shoulders. Her gasping breaths rustled through Maud's bedroom. When she slumped forward, he kissed her bent neck for minutes before standing. Shakily, he undid the buttons of his fly.

They were both virgins. From the time that Zoe was twelve and he fourteen, this worship of unconsummated flesh had kept him from other girls who were most certainly willing to go all the way. (Caryll was not unaware of the aphrodisiac smell of great wealth). Was he the only one for Zoe? Though he savaged himself with doubts, he was fairly positive he was.

After she had made use of his handkerchief, delicately, he pulled her to her feet and took her in his arms. “Zoe, you don't have to worry about Mother.”

“I'm fine now.”

“She sees how I feel about you, darling. She thinks you're swell, too.”

“It's all right, Caryll.”

“You need somebody to look after you, somebody you're absolutely sure of. Let's get married.” As he spoke his arms dropped to his sides. He swallowed audibly. His proposal came as a shock even to him. True, he had imagined these words often enough, yet he had never had the trust to apply them to craft what was their unpredictable relationship. “Zoe, marry me.”

“You're too real,” she said, touching his cheek. “I don't mean to push you around the way I do, Caryll. But sometimes I get so scared inside.”

“Let me take my chances.”

“You're fine, sensitive,” she said, bending for her silken pool of lingerie. “It wouldn't work.”