Onyx (10 page)

When they had quieted, he raised on his elbow. She smiled, then gazed up at laced branches whose greenery was reflected dark in her eyes.

“Mine?” he said, tugging a strand of her loosened hair.

“I love you.”

“Always?”

“Forever.”

“I want to marry you now, but I can't support you yet. Not with your father, too. This year, though, we sold twice as many automobiles as we have in the whole time since the shop opened. Soon—six months at most—I'll be able to.” To speak of money, which had never meant a damn to him, when his emotions were molten fire and should stream out in song or poetry! “We'll be married then.”

“Yes.”

“Some things about me aren't so wonderful. Antonia, I needed you to belong to me, so I took advantage of your unhappiness.”

Taking his hand, she held it between her breasts. “I wanted you, too, Tom,” she said, and kissed his chin.

On the drive back to Detroit, he told her about his father's screaming death, about his mother's madness and suicide.

III

A buggy with a rubber top waited under the porte cochere.

“Dr. McKenzie's here!” Antonia cried. Before Tom could help her, she climbed out, missing the oval footstand, losing her balance and falling to her knees, pushing rapidly to her feet, skimming over the gravel, lifting her skirts to take the porch steps two at a time, slamming the knocker of the side door, a wild bird beating against the cage.

Almost immediately the door was opened by a short, spare man carrying a leather bag.

“Dr. McKenzie! What's happened to Father?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. This morning you were so worried that I decided to drop by on the way home. The chest's clear as a bell.”

Antonia was taking off the duster and goggles and scarf. She handed them to Tom. “Thank you for the demonstration, Mr. Bridger,” she said, her voice joyous. She ran inside.

The doctor extended his hand: the weathered skin, like that of his face, was covered with freckles. “I'm Dr. McKenzie.”

“I'm Tom Bridger.”

As they shook hands the sharp hazel eyes fixed professionally on Tom.

“What happened to your nose?”

Tom had forgotten the fight this noon, and Dr. McKenzie's reminder made him aware of the pain. “It's nothing. I bumped into a machine in the shop.”

“It could be broken. Let me take a look.”

“I'm fine, thank you, sir.”

“As you say.” The doctor walked up to the automobile. “So you've been taking Miss Dalzell out in a horseless carriage.”

“A Curved-Dash Bridger.” Tom folded the duster and scarf with the goggles into the wicker basket.

“Now I remember. That's where I heard your name. So you're the Major's young partner.” He circled the machine. “In Chicago I rode in an electric brougham. But this runs on gasoline. I can smell it. What keeps your contraption from blowing up?”

It was a doctor's trick. While Tom explained the internal-combustion machine, McKenzie watched him intently.

The doctor glanced up at the house. “Not much of a life, not the way for a lively, pretty girl to live, cooped up with elderly servants and an invalid. And it's not even her own choice.”

“But she thinks she's the only one who can look after Mr. Dalzell,” Tom said, then paused. “The Major, does he insist?”

“Andrew? He dotes on the child. He uses every means short of force to keep her out of the sickroom.”

“But you said—”

“Her nature traps her, her own nature. Bridger, I've been in this profession nearly thirty years, so I've had ample opportunity to observe humanity at its best and worst. And there's still matters beyond my comprehension. Why are a few people so defenseless against their emotions? Most of us learn early on to chloroform ourselves against feeling the extremes of pain or pleasure. Most of us are dulled to real joy or real agony—it's for the best, of course. But then there's the few. The sensitives, I call them. They love more deeply, they have greater happiness. And their misery is correspondingly more terrible. I fear for her. Mr. Dalzell's present condition has improved, but he's gravely ill.” The doctor avoided the knowing glance that would have been professional betrayal. “To be honest, I worry less about my patient than his daughter. She's so exceedingly vulnerable. Have I made it clear what I meant, no choice?”

Tom held himself immobile in the late afternoon sunlight. “She's a wonderful girl,” he said.

“With the Major in New York, she's very lonely.”

“I'm her friend.”

“Why do you think I've been unburdening myself to you? Here, bend down. I'm going to look at your nose.”

As light fingers moved on his face tears came into Tom's eyes.

“Not broken,” the doctor pronounced. “I'll put on a proper plaster.”

“Thank you, sir.”

When Dr. McKenzie closed his bag, he said, “My prescription for Miss Dalzell is that you take her riding.” He climbed into his buggy, clicking the reins. His brown gelding circled wide around the Curved-Dash Bridger as though sensing they were inimical.

IV

“A racer?” Hugh asked.

“Two cylinders, not one like the Curved-Dash. Light, though. Powerful and light.”

It was not yet six, and they were on the way to work. The bronze sun glared. It was already a scorcher.

“You've lost me.” Hugh pushed back his straw hat. “You must have said a thousand times that racing doesn't interest you.”

Tom was grinning. “And you must have told me a thousand times it's the way for people to hear about the Curved-Dash.”

The devious streak in Hugh's nature prodded him toward a new profession called public relations, the art of getting your name before the public without paying. The Major had been right about competition. There was a lure about automobile racing, a crude, raw excitement that came from speed, and the newspapers catered to their readers: each rally meant columns about the winning machines. Free advertising.

Hugh said thoughtfully, “There's a race being promoted right here. Tom, think of the play Detroit papers would give a Detroit chauffeur. We'd be deluged.”

“First I have to build her.”

“I have every faith,” Hugh said.

Tom always had been propelled by forces he could not fully comprehend. Now, though, he understood what drove him. Thursday afternoons weren't enough. He wanted to wake mornings with her, he wanted to have constant access to that smile, he wanted to possess her gifts of joy and happiness.

Through that hot June and July he blazed like a spinning comet. He hammered up a board partition, cutting off a few square yards of the shop. Here he worked on the racer whenever he could. Mostly at night. Hugh crouched yawning over the drafting desk, trying to sketch parts visible only in his brother's teeming brain. Oh, those plans were rough going. Tom was a cut-and-try man, Hugh no skilled draftsman, so they bickered constantly, their arguments often reaching the cursing stage, yet being brothers they continued to work where outsiders would have walked away.

By August the racer had taken form.

If the quadricycle had been a dragonfly, this was a grasshopper, a long, narrow skeleton of angle iron, steel, and reinforced wood waiting to spring forward on pneumatic tires specially ordered from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron.

V

When the Major's train pulled into the Detroit depot, he was counting and recounting his belongings—ledger, valise, hat, coat, umbrella, briefcase—with an old man's morbid lack of self-confidence.

For the Major the past few days had been the emotional equivalent of a crippling stroke. On August 6, J. P. Morgan had returned to New York and the Major had immediately hurried to the triangular, six-story marble banking house on Wall Street. There, in his friend's glass-encased office, he had requested a loan. At first the banker had been warm, advising him to pull in his horns and ride out this damnable depression. The Major explained that the loan was imperative. Morgan repeated his advice, this time a cold financier.
Ride it out
, he said.
Be thankful you have other assets
. The Major, having dipped deeply into capital for his personal expenses, was too ashamed to admit its depletion. “I have excellent collateral,” he said, placing the carefully worked-over ledger on Morgan's desk. The banker waved it away. “I'm sorry, Stuart, but I cannot in good conscience float a loan on any furniture factory, even yours.” The Major, bracing himself in his chair, had breathed heavily a full minute before he told the banker, “Make arrangements to find me a buyer.” As he had spoken a sharp pain had torn at his throat. Selling the factory that his grandfather had founded, that he and his father had built, was like selling an arm, a leg, his eyes.

The wheels stopped and the Major jerked back into the plush seat. “But what choice do I have?” he mumbled. His outside income came to around a thousand a year, barely enough to stint along with a couple of raw Irish servant girls in the house. No cook, no carriage, no horses, no rowdy entertainments, no London tailoring, no pretty women. The Major feared the loss of his physical comforts as keenly as he feared the humiliation of poverty. “I can't let an asset insured for a quarter of a million stand idle, can I?” He pushed open the door to the narrow corridor.

Antonia had boarded the train. Brushing hastily by the passengers that crowded the corridor, she flung herself at the Major, hugging him with a child's unfettered, rough embrace. “Uncle, Uncle. It's been so long!”

He kissed her cheek, then drew her into the compartment, holding both her hands to look into that glowing, utterly unique face. “My dearest girl, my dear, I missed you so.…” His sigh degenerated into a sob. Then he pulled himself together. “How delightful you look. Young Hutchinson must have been bringing you the right kind of bonbons.”

A subtle pink clouded her face. “I asked Claude not to call,” she said.

“What's that?”

“I told Claude he mustn't visit me.”

“You never mentioned this in your letters. Is it that foolishness of yours? Guilt? I've told you over and over not to feel guilty because you're capable of turning a head or two.”

She laughed. “It's dreadful to be such a delightfully clever girl, and so charming, with such a pretty voice.” Wordlessly she sang two bars of Papagena's music.

The Major gave an unanticipated snort of laughter. God, she cheered him!

She looked down. “Tom's been chauffeuring me out to the country.”

“Tom?”

“Mr. Bridger. Your partner in the Bridger Automobile Company.”

The Major sank down into the seat, resting his head on the starched lace antimacassar. He was experiencing that same tearing pain in his throat as when his friend had refused him a loan. Betrayals, everywhere betrayals.

Antonia sat next to him. “Uncle, what is it?” she asked in a frightened voice.

“I'd like to get home,” he said thickly. “My business didn't go well.”

“That's awful. You look so pale. Tired. How could I not have noticed?” She took his pigskin briefcase. “I'll find a porter. You go out to the carriage.”

By the time the brougham was moving under the shady trees of Woodward Avenue, the Major's color had returned.

Antonia said, “Part of your business has been doing wonderfully well. Last week Tom sold two automobiles in a single day.” Though she was smiling, there was that determined tone in her voice the Major had come to recognize. “He's entering a race in October.
That
should draw buyers like flies.”

“So far no profit's come out of his shop, nothing, not a single dollar.”

“He's been expanding, buying machinery, lathes and things.”

“The time has come when all my resources must pay.” The Major paused. He wanted to tell her about his terrible problems, but instead he said, “I can no longer indulge myself by subsidizing his shop.”

The shadow of her parasol fringe wavered on her forehead. “Uncle, you can't take this out on Tom.”

“There's no connection, none. But I'm glad you've brought up the matter.” The fear that he was losing Antonia, child of his heart if not his loins, made his face go stony. He might have hated her as he said cuttingly, “A decently bred man would have asked permission.”

“He's coming tonight, Uncle.”

“Then you told him about your father?”

“He's coming to see you,” she murmured.

It's worse by far than I imagined
, thought the Major, closing his eyes on the bright August afternoon.

VI

Antonia sat in the dark gazebo. Honeysuckle vines were trained to drape over the scrolled ironwork, the domed cupola rose to a fantastic spire, the rustic bark furniture had been built by a top Stuart cabinetmaker. This was Antonia's favorite hot weather retreat. Here she would bring her sheet music to practice a new song, or dreamily pull stamens from bugle-shaped honeysuckle blossoms for the drop of nectar as she read, or simply luxuriate in the outdoors. Tonight, however, she took no pleasure in the velvety warmth, the rich night scents, the moonless, star-peppered sky. She was concentrating on the yellow light streaming through the curtains of the study windows. Her uncle had ushered Tom in fifteen minutes earlier, banging the door closed after them with the firmness of a jailor.

The Major's vehemence against Tom should have infuriated Antonia. Each time her anger rose, however, she remembered the Gare du Nord and the stout, cigar-odored presence who had come to Europe for the one purpose of helping her father.

A shape moved, ghostly and insubstantial behind the curtain. It was impossible to tell whether it was Tom or the Major. The second shadow moved close in an implied hostility that made her shudder, then moved out of sight swiftly. She knew it was Tom.