Onyx (58 page)

He shot her a look of concern.

“Nothing to worry about,” she said hastily. “I've seen a gynecologist.”

“You never told me.”

“Irving Weiner, M.D.”

“What does he say?”

“Cervicitis. Sorry it's been inconveniencing you.”

She heard him swallow. Shamed by her flip cruelty, she squinted through the windshield at the Guardian Building, the Penobscot's stepped tower, Tom Bridger's Michigan Bank of Commerce, the Ford (no connection to Henry) Building. The brash blue day, the layers of industrial smoke, gave the downtown skyscrapers the theatrical look of a modern cityscape on a backdrop scrim. She murmured, “What a rotten thing for me to say.”

“Write to your parents,” he said crisply. “Make it clear there's no baby.”

“Justin, you know I didn't mean it.”

His left hand touched her knee. Absolution. “Now tell me what's wrong,” he said.

“Nothing. The cervicitis is clearing up, I've gained two pounds as ordered, and I swear solemnly to blunt my tongue. All's right with the world.”

“You've been looking—the only word I can think of is frightened. You seem so frightened, nerved up all the time.” The traffic was heavier, and he shifted into second gear. “We ought to go home to Los Angeles. Pick up where we left off.”

“After what we've seen here?” she cried.

“You're what's important to me.”

“Justin, stop
brooding
. It's a common female problem. It's clearing up.”

“You'd tell me if anything were upsetting you?”

“I'd nag you to death with it.”

II

Justin had the second half of the swing shift. As his car pulled away, Elisse left the dishes soaking and went into the living room. The dingy, finger-stained mustard wallpaper depressed her utterly, and she picked up the one-eared elephant that Tonia had dropped on the floor, cuddling the worn stuffed toy to her as she telephoned Mitch. He promised to take the trolley over as soon as he closed headquarters.

At his expected knock, she jumped. Going to the front door, she called shrilly, “Who is it?”

“Me. Mitch.”

She pushed the dead bolt, turned the new lock, opening the door an inch while it was still chained. At the familiar short, broad figure, she relaxed.

She had perked fresh coffee for him and set out a ragged quarter of a fudge cake. “Leftovers from the Last Supper,” she said lightly enough, but her face was wretched.

“You miss them already?”

“What do you think?” She filled his cup. “Mitch, can you borrow a car?”

“For what?”

“I need somebody to drive me to the doctor.”

Thick eyebrows pulled together. “Is it what I'm thinking, Elisse?”

Her face withdrew into sharpness, and her pupils swelled. Folding her arms on the checkered oilcloth of the kitchen table, she rested her forehead in her palms. Loud sobs convulsed through her.

Mitch, behind her, kneaded her shoulders. “It's all right. It's all right.”

She stood up, weeping into the shoulder of his faded blue cotton shirt, which smelled of harsh sweat and Fels Naptha soap. She had not yet been able to let Justin hold her, but Mitch's squat body held no tormenting memories of the poetic delicacy of early love, no hauntings of fulfilled passion, no sepulchral reminders that the carnal joy of marriage was dead. After a few minutes she pulled away, blowing her nose.

“Have you found a decent person?” Mitch asked. “I won't take you to a butcher.”

“It's not an abortion.”

“Elisse?”

“Dr. Weiner's in that gray medical building on Griswold.”

“You've got me baffled. If it's on the up-and-up, why can't Justin take you?”

“It's a long story,” she said, sitting again. She had not intended to tell him, but the crying jag had lowered her inhibitions. She sketched a bare outline of Dickson Keeley's visit, whispering a sentence about the double rape, the burn. Mitch's head tilted so his good ear was toward her.

“The filthy bastard, those filthy, filthy bastards,” he growled in a thick, choking anger that she had never heard from him.

“The burn isn't healing. Dr. Weiner prescribed a salve, but the darned burn hasn't responded. Yesterday I phoned and he said he'd have to do a mite of surgery. Daddy slipped me some money, thank God.”

“Justin'll have to know you're in the hospital.”

“I wept into the mouthpiece and Dr. Weiner finally agreed to manage in his office. That's why I need you to drive me.”

“Now I know why you sent the kids to your parents.”

“How could I risk keeping them here?”

Mitch drank his cold coffee. “You ought to tell Justin.”

“Keeley's plan exactly!” she cried. “Don't you see, Mitch? Justin's brother to the Crown Princess, so he's afraid to touch him. He thinks he can scare Justin off through me.”

“He ought to take you home.”

“
What
?”

“If you don't tell him, I will.”

“Can this be dedicated Mitch Shapiro speaking?” Since he had confessed over a bowl of soup in the Book Cadillac that hopeless love of her had driven him into the Party, then had embarrassed her thoroughly by saying he was merely trying to cheer her up, a question had lingered: Did he love her or didn't he? Yet wasn't it the height of conceit to imagine that Mitch might nurse anything so bourgeois as an unrequited passion?

“It's one thing to rough up men, but—”

“I survived.”

“I know you've worked your heart out, but—”

“Oh, cut it out, Mitch!” She clapped a fist into a palm. “How can you talk like this? Now, when we're finally getting someplace?”

Mitch stared at her. Her face, thinner, tanless, pink at the nose from crying, had a lit-up fervor that dazzled and weakened him; this face was yet more lovely to him than her previous sleekly tanned beauty. Sighing, he capitulated. “Leo Jackson, he's in the Young Communist League, has a Fiver.”

“My appointment's ten tomorrow morning.”

“What about Justin?”

“He won't be here. He's changing to the morning shift.”

III

Elisse chewed her lower lip as Mitch drove the borrowed Fiver, a trembly old 1924 Runabout with a fouled spark plug.

Over the noisy putt-popping, he asked, “How do you feel about Zawitsky?”

Elisse snapped out of her reverie. “Are you kidding?” The bearlike widower, after twenty-five years at Onyx, had lost his job—a tap on the shoulder by a uniformed Security guard and that was it—the same day that his son had gotten word of winning a scholarship. “Zawitsky's my buddy.”

“I figured he'll take Ben's room and I'll take Tonia's. Then somebody'll always be around the house with you.”

“So you're not telling Justin?”

“Did you really think I would?”

“You were fuming. I haven't seen you like that since Martha called you a Trotskyite.” Elisse's pretty bitch smile showed briefly. “Mitch, thank you.” And then she clasped her hands and was silent again.

As Dr. Weiner came into the examining room Elisse, from her position on the stirrup table, said, “Here I am, ready for the Saturnalia.” A forlorn little joke referring to the toga-like sheet that draped her.

The doctor's aquiline face did not relinquish its tight-lipped aloofness. This repair surgery ought to have been done at Detroit General, where a spinal could be administered, but these years he practiced less than perfect medicine on malnourished women, battered women, women hemorrhaging from botched abortions, burying his dismay under impenetrable professionalism. He had not asked Elisse how she had acquired her loathsome burn, for the simple reason that he no longer had the emotional capital to invest in his patients. He glanced at the stout German refugee, his nurse, and she snapped rubber gloves on him.

Elisse stared through the open sash window to the madly blue sky, trying to empty her mind so the dope pills could work. But thoughts popped up, as clear and sharply formed as cartoons. Her father in his studio playing a duet with Ben. Justin holding her hand at a Garbo movie—which one? Lying on the beach at Santa Monica, the sun hot on her back. Somewhere nearby in the tall gray medical building a radio was playing—or was this, too, imagined? A trained tenor voice was singing.

From yon far country blows …

The doctor murmured something to the nurse, who whispered gutturally. There was the hiss of the sterilizer, the clink of instruments.

And then it began, the agony that melted like ice through her entire body, dripping through her convulsed fingertips and toes.

What are those blue remembered hills
?

The dope should have stopped her from feeling this, shouldn't it? She breathed in loud gasps but did not cry out. Instead, she listened.

What spires, what farms are those
?

The eternal, never-ending icy pain had been part of her existence forever.

Oh, from yon far country blows …

Pain.

IV

Hugh and Caryll buried their hatchet in a joint attempt to propel Tom into using the double work week throughout Woodland. Hugh thirsted after publicity to launch the new models, and Caryll had received three telephone calls ripe with Rooseveltian charm and command. Tom, though, finding the thin paychecks more abhorrent than ever, had also come to view them as further wedges between himself and Justin. The other two argued, logically, that labor unrest at Onyx had been no greater than at any rival company: more, tire production was up—the men were driven by foremen and anxiety. So why not be patriotic? Abrasively, reluctantly, Tom threw them a sop. On September 3 the battery shop went on the double work week.

The four dangling sixty-watt bulbs shed an uncongenial light in the storefront, which despite the late hour, nearly eleven, was crowded and noisy. Elisse, her face determinedly cheerful, a cushion under her, was stationed at the rickety secretarial table, signing up the last of a long line, most of them from the battery shop. Men clustered talking union, and the three female members perched together in a corner, handbags clutched on their laps—Clara Jannings, the tall, full-bosomed ex-teacher, had convinced many of her fellow loom girls to sign union cards.

Elisse folded the final torn dollar in the tin box, glancing at Justin. He climbed on an orange crate. Voices subsided, folding chairs scraped as ragged lines formed in front of him. No Robert's Rules of Order here. Justin led old and new members in an open discussion of AAW aims. Fair working conditions. Seniority rights. The end of Security. The end of chiseling foremen. The return to a full day's work that a man might feed his family.

A thin machinist asked angrily, “So how much more of this do we gotta take? When do we show them sons of bitches?”

Someone else chimed in, “Yeah, what about a strike?”

“We have six thousand, and that's jolly damn good,” Justin replied. “But you know and I know that if we walk out tomorrow, all six thousand strong, there would be so many applicants for our jobs that Employment would have to corral them in the parking lots.”

“If the world's full of scabs, what's the point of a union?”

“Yeah, what's the use of all this if we can't put the screws to 'em?”

“There's another kind of strike,” Justin said quietly. “The men don't walk out. They stay inside. A sit-down strike.”

A large pitman stood. “What about the boss? What's he doing while they sit? Why don't he throw them out?”

“Management has itself a neat little problem,” Justin said. “A free-for-all would wreck their expensive machinery.”

After a brief silence heads nodded. Yeah. Yeah.

“Prof, tell us about it.”

Justin explained that the sit-down strike had been used in Europe before the war.

The pitman said bitterly, “So we try this Europe game, so we stay in our shops until we starve, so what? They keep on making cars and trucks around us.”

“They can't,” Justin retorted. “That's the beauty of it. Woodland's a finely tuned machine, every part calibrated to work with every other part. If, say, batteries and tires aren't spewing out, the machine grinds to a halt.”

“That's right. Nothin' works without the flow.”

“What did you call it again?”

“A sit-down,” Justin said.

V

Once a week she took the trolley downtown for Dr. Weiner's swift, silent examination. On the last Friday in September, after his routine swabbing with icy antiseptic, he pronounced, “Healed.”

“That's a big speech for you, Doctor.”

“You can sleep with your husband again,” he said.

A constant drawing pain had persisted. The area around the stitches felt thin, taut, poppable as a balloon, and heaped onto Elisse's recollections of the rape were lurid fantasies of making love … hemorrhages, gushes of pulpy flesh, a red swamp.… She needed reassurance in the worst way, but looking into the purposefully guarded aquiline face, she found she could ask no questions.

Dazed, she emerged into the humid, swarming streets and without conscious decision made her way to the nearby opulent peace of Hudson's toy department. A polio outbreak in Wayne County had given her the excuse to let the children remain longer in California. She missed them murderously, and to buck herself up after her doctor's appointment, she would indulge herself by selecting playthings for them that she could in no way afford and had no intention of buying.

Her knees went wobbly. She rested on an upholstered stool. The glass counter boasted one magnificent display, a large, golden-curled Shirley Temple doll jaunty in a white fur coat and fur beret. Idly she turned over the ticket. Fifty dollars!

A man wandered over to examine the doll. He was in his thirties, round-faced and balding at the temples. He looked vaguely familiar, but his tailoring was discreet and at the same time modish; she knew none of Detroit's upper crust.