Onyx (51 page)

VI

Mitch drove East alone.

Justin spent that warm Christmas season pondering the evidence. On one side, the misery endemic in Detroit.

Detroit had been largely ignored by the labor movement. The AFL's primary concern was to protect skilled craftsmen, and auto workers were for the most part unskilled, assembly-line workers. Unhappy about their hours and working conditions, desperate about their lack of job security, they formed minuscule industrial unions that lacked leadership. The automobile companies squashed these chaotic little locals cruelly, firing and blackballing the membership so they could not get another job in auto, often inflicting violence. Justin had searched the newspapers for reports of frays that he knew about. He had never found a word. The omission affected him deeply: he felt obligated to go where he could most help in the silent, unfair struggle.

On the other hand, there was his family. First he would ruminate about Elisse. This was her home, she was very close to her parents. Justin would also find it difficult to leave his pretty-faced, vague mother-in-law and the stout little musician with the good-natured, rattling tongue.

And what about Ben, many-faceted, sullen genius of the family? How would a child so complicated transplant? And Tonia, his sweet baby, would probably have a cold all winter.

Justin's decision would have been easier had Mitch chosen a company other than Onyx. His filial love, hatred, resentment, admiration, passed all telling; these confused emotions clouded every issue, and he asked himself whether he could work effectively against Tom. Tom, whose voice came over the air each Sunday at the end of
The Onyx Family Variety Hour
, his flat, dry tones deriding the governmental agencies and the unions that aimed to tell a man how to “run his own shop.” Was he, Justin Hutchinson, strong enough to cut that tangle of love and animus to fight what would be a long, bitter, probably vain battle?

Don't think about Tom
, he told himself.

The question is whether to put my family on the line
.

Nightly, Elisse watched her husband chain-smoke Camels. Fearing what further devastation Detroit might wreak on him, she was terrified lest he decide, as she already had, that Detroit was where they belonged.

CHAPTER 23

Dickson Keeley's star had begun its swift ascendency on May 25, 1932, two and a half years before.

That fine spring day Zoe and her two little girls, Lynn and Clarice (Petra was not born until a year later), were on the way to a birthday party in Grosse Pointe, where the young family now lived. On that quiet stretch of Ottawa Lane where the box hedge grew high, a black Ford sedan was parked catercorner so it was impossible to get around. Zoe's custom-built Swallow halted. From the backseat of the sedan jumped three men with white silk scarves tied around their faces. They brandished Thompson submachine guns. Zoe's muscular chauffeurs were clouted senseless. The governess, watching through the glass panel, turned pale and slumped fainting in her jump seat.

Zoe had always possessed physical valor. Erect on the ostrich leather upholstery, she enfolded Lynn's and Clarice's tiny gloved hands, saying with a breathy heartiness, “Let's pretend we're in a gangster movie.”

The scarved men did not attempt to break the shatterproof glass that separated the limousine's passengers from the driver. Suddenly, inexplicably, they leaped back into the Ford, which squealed away.

It was at this hour, three, that the afternoon mail was routinely delivered to Caryll's office. One of the envelopes was typed
Personal and Urgent
. The letter was a collage of newspaper lettering:
One million in twenties behind the same hedge by four A.M. tomorrow morning or mother and girls will get acid in their faces. No police. No Security. No monkey business. We can get at them whenever we want
. Caryll's wealth inevitably attracted the notice of cranks, hoodlums, grifters. Threats like this he handed over to Police Chief Arden. He dropped the paper, choking with horror … His pretty little girls … his superlatively beautiful wife. He was buzzing his secretary to get him Chief Arden when his private line rang. Zoe's high, breathless voice was on the other end.

Tom, pale and tense, drove his shaking son downtown to the Michigan Bank of Commerce, a mustard-brick skyscraper whose lower floors were circled with Aztec tiled mosaics—Tom owned it. The president himself went to the dozen or so institutions that the bank controlled, searching out the prescribed denominations. Before midnight the Bridgers had deposited two tin suitcases of cash under the box hedge.

Hugh spoke privately to Dickson Keeley. Keeley held ex officio powwows with certain of his connections.

The following afternoon when Caryll and Tom returned to Ottawa Lane, they found the tin suitcases intact. Later in the week a Ford sedan with the bodies of three unidentified men was fished from Lake Erie: this might have been coincidence—the Oakland Sugar House Gang, the Purple Gang, and Palma and Tocco's men routinely slaughtered one another—but in the glove compartment were tucked three white silk scarves.

At Hugh's suggestion, Tom awarded Dickson Keeley the job of protecting the family. The Bridger homes in Detroit became Keeley's personal beat. In addition, Keeley assigned handpicked crews to the gatehouse of Tom and Maud's restored plantation in Virginia. (Tom Bridger had indeed suffered a coronary the day of Justin's departure. In response to doctors' orders that her husband “get way from it all,” Maud had purchased the Virginia estate.) And, finally, Keeley arranged for the guarding of Caryll and Zoe's yacht,
Beaufort
, of their hacienda in Palm Beach and their pied-à-terre at the Sherry-Netherland in New York.

The following winter Colonel Hazelford retired as the Onyx security chief. Tom, bedeviled by the seventy percent shrinkage in car sales and fearful that despite Onyx's decent pay envelopes a union might further deprive him of management power in his beleaguered domain, appointed Dickson Keeley as Colonel Hazelford's successor.

The Onyx executives, including Colonel Hazelford, had moved their offices to the new tall Tower near Gate Five, but when Keeley took over, Security went back to the old Administration Building. In a remote; sprawling warren a Gamewall board blinked red lights at the movements of Security patrols in Woodland, and switchboards lit up constantly with the required daily calls from those three thousand khaki-uniformed men, as well as from the plainclothesmen who in turn spied on them. Here was the accounting office for the slush fund—at Hugh's advice, in every plant in the country one Onyx man in four was paid a few dollars beyond his clock time to report on any union activity, however tentative.

Tom thoroughly mistrusted Keeley, and chafed at the mean-spirited times that made him a necessity. Caryll despised the man for his strutting cockiness and hoodlum friends. Yet since the acid-throwing threat both Bridgers had relied on Keeley to protect their families, and later they saw him as the necessary evil that allowed them to maintain their open-shop policy. Neither clearly discerned the miasma of fear that had spread through their clean, well-lit factories.

II

That second week of January 1935 a blizzard blew down from the Arctic Circle, and although an Onyx snowplow had cleared the miles from the Farm to the city, Tom decided to stay home. The annual financial reports had come. After breakfast he went gloomily to the library, where he sat frowning over the wide sheets. Onyx had lost 6.7 million, and the Swallow Company, small as it was, had dropped an additional million. At Caryll's dogged insistence he had bought Swallow in 1930, when it was about to go into receivership. A luxury car! Who could afford luxury nowadays? They had sold less than a thousand Swallows this year. Both deficits would come out of Tom's personal funds, as had similar sums the previous year. Tom always had been indifferent to cash cold in a vault; anteing up was not what had caused his oppression. It was this damn paralyzing impotency. He had lost control.
Maybe it's time to throw in the towel
, he thought, then visualized the hordes of workers who poured daily through his gates. If he threw in the towel, they'd be tossed in with it.

A vicious gust of wind tore at fir branches, and he did not hear the low buzz that meant he had a call. At the second sounding he lifted the telephone.

Hugh said, “So you didn't go in today.”

“Seemed like perfect weather to look over the books,” Tom replied. “What's up?”

“Hutchinson's coming to Detroit!”

Tom's hand trembled and the gold pencil fell. The brothers rarely mentioned Justin. At first Tom's coronary had prevented frank discussion, and after his recovery it seemed safer not to talk about the young man's self-exile. Tom was uncertain what, exactly, Hugh had told Justin; Hugh could not know whether Justin had given him away by speaking of the letters. Avoidance and uncertainty, while enabling them to coexist and converse about business matters, had eroded their relationship into jumpy fear on Hugh's part and a straitjacket remoteness on Tom's.

“Tom? Still there?”

“Yes.” Tom's eyes were gray embers in smoke-dark smudges.

“He's given up his practice. Rented his house.”

“What makes you so damn positive he's headed for Detroit?”

“He's shipped his furniture here. The move has something to do with
her
, you may be sure of that. Jews!”

“You're cracked.”

“When it comes to that ingrate, I am. At least Keeley'll keep him away from our plants.”

“No,” Tom said harshly.

“What's that?”

“I won't let him touch Justin.” Tom had no inkling that Dickson Keeley was Hugh's creature.

“And you call
me
cracked!” Hugh cried. For a long moment neither brother spoke. Hugh's voice, dulcet in its persuasiveness, broke the silence. “Tom, Justin used to be a fair man, and a decent one.
She
has changed him. Let someone like that get a toehold through him, and before the year's out, Moscow or Jerusalem will be calling the shots at Onyx. You can't let Hutchinson in, Tom. You know their red friend, Shapiro, is here already. I've told you that.”

“Keeley knows how to keep the men from signing union cards. We haven't had any real trouble in our plants.”

“Tom, listen to me—”

“Justin will never be shut out of my shop!” Tom slapped down the receiver.

His breath coming in deep sighs, he went to the window to watch the curling snowflakes.

Eight years nearly to the day
, he thought.
Eight years
.

Though aware that his guilt and the attendant agony at denying Justin had brought on his heart attack, he knew that given a chance to replay the shameful scene, he would have cut the shrieked filth—and nothing more. He would still honor his pledge to Antonia. He would lie his way to hell to keep that promise. It was no longer something he contemplated in a rational way: it had become a mystical religious commandment. Meanwhile the physical damage had been repaired, he had regained his normal vigor. Yet his spirit was changed. His remorseful grief had curved around itself like an arthritic hand, never permitting the sufferer to forget his painfully crippling disease.

Tom rested his forehead against the glass, looking out at wind-driven snowflakes. His son, whom he loved and had rejected, was returning to fight him. Bitter news. Yet a redemptive flicker informed him that any contact would be better than the lifeless limbo of these past eight years.
How could I have screamed that awful shit about his wife
? Tom thought for the millionth time—he attributed Justin's continuing silence to that outburst. Hugh, equally ravaged by the lack of communication, had given in totally to bigotry, finding it simpler to blame Elisse's Jewishness than Justin himself.

Slowly, as if each movement pained him, Tom took out his wallet. Hidden in a leather pocket were two snapshots that he had lifted from Caryll's study. One print, dog-eared and cut by a vein down the center, showed Justin smiling on an angry-looking newborn infant.
Our grandson
, thought Tom,
our only grandson
. It comforted him that all his grandchildren were Antonia's too—that thus he and she would be joined into the unknowable future. The other snapshot, new and clean, was of a baby smiling on a blanket, sunbonnet ribbons untied, plump arms extended toward the photographer, whose feminine shadow fell across the picture.

Tom stared from one snapshot to the other, then picked up the telephone again. When he had Hugh on the line, he said, “No games, Hugh. Anything happens to him, and it's your head.”

III

Whatever the prevailing conditions, a plant as enormous as Woodland inevitably took on men every day. The Employment Office would not open until five thirty the following morning, yet at ten, when Justin arrived at Gate Four, a hundred or so applicants were hunched into their coats, coughing or blowing on their frayed gloves. To brave the night a few had swathed themselves in burlap. Here and there small bonfires cast a glow from the depths of trash cans. Justin took his place, stamping his new boots in the slush, a futile attempt to alleviate the painful prickling of his cold-numbed toes. At that he was lucky. Most of the men had on shabby, thin-soled shoes.

By midnight another five or six hundred huddled in docile misery against the seemingly endless brick wall while mounted police patrolled. After the hoofbeats faded, a tall man ahead of Justin took something glittering from his pocket, hitting the object—it was a mouth organ—against his palm. Chords rose with measured sweetness into the icy dark, some kind of folk ballad out of Appalachia that rollicked then drifted sweetly and mournfully into silence. For a long time nobody spoke.

At five thirty a group of khaki-overcoated Security carrying shotguns appeared behind the wire mesh gate.

“Ten in. Ten away,” boomed a megaphoned voice.