Onyx (22 page)

She sighed assent.

“I said unforgivable things, but how could you go away and not tell me?”

“Uncle begged you to marry me.”

He turned, peering. It was too dark to see her expression. “Never.”

“He abased himself. Uncle. He never in his life was humble.” Her voice shook. “He told you I was crazy, ill, desperate. He offered you money to marry me, he said he'd continue to pay Father's bills, he said you need never see
him
.”

“He gave you a line of bull.”

“What is the point of tormenting me?”

“He lied to you.”

“Oh, Tom.”

“If he'd even whispered you needed me, don't you think I'd have been out there like a shot? My God, I thought the sun rose and set on you.”

“Flaherty took it to you.”

“Took what?”

“Uncle's pleadings.”

Goosebumps prickled on Tom's body. “The letter,” he muttered.

“Yes, a letter.”

“I never looked at it.”

“Tom, stop this, please stop.”

“I mean it. I never read it.”

“Flaherty brought back your reply.” Her murmur was scarcely audible. “I saw your reply. It cut me into pieces of the same size.”

“Hugh had just come home from having his bandages taken off, the burn scars were hideous. I didn't want any part of your uncle.… I didn't unfold … I took the clippers … shoved the bits back in the … envelope.… I never saw … never read …”

He bent his face into his hands, and the harsh noises coming from his chest were like rocks grating together, not quite human. The wracking physical upheaval was niggling compared to his helpless, hopeless grief. During one fragment of time, one blazing, angry minute, he had cut her life, that black-haired boy's destiny, his own soul, and that temporal chip was buried, not to be resurrected, lost forever.
What might have been
was not a phrase in Tom's vocabulary, yet now each time he heard another say it, he would be haunted by the possibilities, the excruciating desire to relive that moment. He would give all he possessed to relive it. He drew deep breaths, attempting to control himself. Feeling her hand gentle on his shoulder, he clasped the palm to his wet cheek.

“You believe me?” he asked.

“Yes. Hush.”

“Oh, God … God …”

“Now you understand why I was so afraid? Tom, I've been positive you wanted to take him from me.”

“Your son?”

“Justin, yes. I was frightened that you would take him—or tell him.”

He fished for his handkerchief. “To have done that to
you
…”

“Don't, Tom. It's past, it's over.”

He blew his nose, and she moved apart on the bench. A cat rustled around the bush, its eyes electrically brilliant in the darkness; a carriage clipped around the square, the sound of hooves fading.

“Justin worshiped Claude,” she said quietly. “And Claude loved him more than Arthur or Zoe—I don't know why, but he did. You saw Zoe in the garden when you were here.… Arthur … Arthur died of scarlet fever just before Claude.” She shook her head as though to clear it.

“Anyway,” she said, after a long pause. “Claude and Justin were inseparable. In the summer they sailed together. For his fourth birthday Claude gave Justin a Shetland pony and taught him to curry it and they rode together in the park. Claude would take him to cricket matches, motoring. When Claude died, Justin was desolate. He tries to live up to what he considers Claude's expectations. I don't mean he's a prig. He's a boy, Tom, but a very nice one. He hardly ever teases Zoe—and she deserves it. Actually, he'd be just as nice without any good intentions.”

“You can be very proud of him,” Tom said, and sounded grudging to his own ears.

“Claude's the anchor in his life. If he found out about himself, it would destroy him.”

“I don't want to take him from you,” Tom said. “I have my own son.”

“His name's Caryll.” Her smile glinted in the darkness. “You married Maud Trelinack. I knew her. She's beautiful. Nice, too, such a fine, open personality.”

“She helped me get started with her own money, and at the beginning she worked. She's my wife and my friend.” Though he was telling Antonia the truth, his tone was vaguely defiant. “So you've kept track of me?”

“It's hard
not
to. You're in the papers so much when you race, and there's been talk of an English Fiver.”

“I didn't know a thing about you until Hugh mentioned that you lived in London—he's over here with me.”

“Hugh?” That metallic note of alarm. “Does he know about … Justin?”

Tom wanted to put the miserable mess behind them. “Of course not.”

“You're positive?”

“Nobody knows,” Tom said quietly. “He's your husband's son.” It was a tarnished sophistry, yet he realized that for him it was true: Antonia's son had nothing to do with him.

“He is,” she said. “Claude married me before he was born.”

Tom was remembering how she had looked at him at the Com-stocks' ball, her beautiful eyes stupid with pain.
My God
, he thought.
No wonder she didn't want me near her
. Sighing, he muttered, “What you must have gone through.”

“At first it was terrible. But Claude and I were happy. Very.” She paused. “I still care for him, Tom.”

“Do you hate me?”

She stood, pulling the cape around her. “I never did,” she said. “I couldn't.”

IX

Too shaken to go upstairs, she slipped into the room off the front door. Here Claude had met with his clients. His dark law books were interspersed with equally somberly bound Carlyle and Macaulay: his private income combined with the one her uncle had settled on her had made his practice a hobby rather than a necessity, and he had had plenty of time to read the ponderously written history he enjoyed. She did not take off her cape or press the light switch, but felt her way to the desk chair. Tom's grief had been terrible to her, yet at the same time exalting. Those hoarse sobs denied the cruelties, present and historical, that she had never quite been able to attribute to him.

Antonia rubbed her eyes as if she were pushing away the fragments of a nightmare. In the darkness she was again feeling the disjointed panic of those last few days in Detroit. The opiates that Nurse Girardin had needled into her had trapped her in endless visions of Tom berating her for gross sexual uncleanliness. She winced, remembering how she had been tied down in what seemed an eternity of Tom's angry voice counting the ways her caresses and kisses disgusted him. Seasickness had increased her drugged misery, and by the time they had landed she was so weak and delirious that she had to be carried ashore. In London the frightened specialist discontinued the laudanum. Antonia drew a curtain of lethargic melancholy around herself, emerging to read to her father and feign smiles for her uncle. Her nature was too volatile, though, for retreat, and as she grew stronger physically, she began to put out timid feelers. During her sixth month her uncle ran into Claude lunching at the American Club—the younger man confessed he was traveling for the time-honored reason of forgetting love. The early winter dusk fell, and the Major suggested they return to his new home in Rutland Gate. When Antonia came into the drawing room, Claude glanced, startled, at the gentle mound under her loose wrapper. The Major tactfully left them alone. Antonia, ashamed and miserably aware of the last time they had met, in another drawing room, on another continent, went to the fire. Her face colored by the flames, she explained that she still loved the man, but he did not love her enough to marry her.

“He's a fool, then, child, a fool,” said Claude—and for once his badinage did not seem out of place. Soon he was again bearing chocolate boxes through snowfalls. He wanted her enough to share her with that mysterious invalid upstairs, the Major, and another man's child—years later he told her he had felt like a condemned prisoner being given a second chance. Between them he and the Major cajoled her into marriage. They were right, of course. She understood that when Claude held the shawled, thrashing infant whose crest of black hair was still moist with mucus and blood, the sign of his arduous voyage through the birth canal. “Our son has a fine head of hair,” Claude said, kissing the baby.

Antonia leaned back in the pillows, her exhaustion mildly tinged with embarrassment that Claude should be witness to the postnatal mess—they hadn't yet slept together. Her predominant emotion was humble gratitude for this baby, this husband. “Claude, you've given us everything.” She began to cry weakly.

“Stop that, child. You've made me the happiest man alive.”

Antonia carried the gift of happiness, and Claude basked in her bounty. She was tender of his solemnity, his too hearty voice with strangers, his awkward embraces, and in this charmingly bright house, warmed by matrimony. Claude no longer believed himself such a dull fellow—and he no longer was. They shared the minor discords, the pleasures, worrisome frets, the prideful smiles common to parents of a growing family.

Antonia curved her arms on her husband's desk, burying her face as she remembered the day when the doctor had pronounced the dread words “scarlet fever,” ordering a sheet hung over the front door as a sign of quarantine. Though she could remember her father's and uncle's deaths with sad tranquillity, even after two years the untimely ends of her little son and her husband crushed her with angry, unaccepting grief.

Mrs. Drum's steps rang on the back stairs, signaling that Zoe had been tucked in bed. Antonia went into the hall, hanging up her cape and smoothing her hair in the mirror before she went to kiss her baby girl good night.

She tapped on her son's door.

X

Justin, too, had been sitting in the dark. He sat hunched in front of the unlit fire, one arm around Caesar, his long-legged, predominantly collie dog. As Antonia switched on the light he turned his head from her. Why not? He must be embarrassed by that scene she had made at the front door. They both needed time to compose themselves. She called to Caesar, scratching the flat place between the mongrel's ears.

Justin's room was a large one, and he had arranged his things not too neatly but with what seemed to him a sense of order. His lead guardsmen and hussars, some headless, were lined in squadrons along the shelves in front of his books. One side of the chest of drawers supported his cricket bats—he was considered the best bowler in Eddington's lower forms. Above the fireplace hung a stylized print of a 1909 Lanchester: like many boys his age he was passionate about motorcars and was forever after her to buy one. The ell to the left of the door he had transformed into a shrine to Claude with framed photographs on the wall, an octagonal glass case of relics: Claude's Beta Theta Pi hatband and pin, his heavy turnip-shaped watch, and other gleaming bits of property including the gold cigarette case that she had bought for him at Asprey's.

Antonia sat in the grubby easy chair. “I'm sorry I lost my temper,” she said with the same contrite murmur she would have used in apologizing to an adult.

“It's all right, Mother.”

“I shouted at you over nothing.”

“Mr. Bridger shouldn't have barged in like that,” he said forcefully.

She pressed her mouth closed, biting the lower lip, and after a hesitation said, “In Detroit he worked for Uncle.”

“He did? You never mentioned it—Mother, you know how keen I am on racing. Uncle Andrew never said a word.”

“Uncle rented a building in his factory to Mr. Bridger. They were partners.”

“Uncle Andrew owned part of Onyx?”

“In those days it wasn't Onyx, it was the Bridger Automobile Company. In the '90s people threw stones at motorcars and called them devil wagons. Or laughed at them.”

“I know that, Mother.”

“When Uncle's factory burned down, Mr. Bridger's brother was terribly burned.” She spoke breathily. “Mr. Bridger blamed Uncle.”

“What a rotter! As if it were Uncle Andrew's fault.”

“Lloyd's investigators came to Detroit.”

Her son's nostrils flared as he looked questioningly at her.

“The furniture business was doing badly. Uncle was better off with the insurance money than with the factory.” She drew a long, sighing breath. “I never knew whether they were right to investigate or not, Justin. It didn't make any difference to what I felt for Uncle. Can you understand?”

Justin went to the window. The curtains weren't drawn, and he stared into the moonless night toward red Mars. Antonia was accustomed to his pauses. Justin assimilated knowledge before affixing right and wrong in his mind: he saw the moral order in black, white, and every shade of gray, an uncomfortable breadth of vision for any age. “In school,” he said slowly, “people are beastly to Rosburg, so he's turned into a sneak. I can see that they wouldn't like a sneak. But he's still my friend.”

This was the first time he had mentioned Rosburg's misfortunes, but the headmaster had told her that Rosburg, maligned “for his faith,” told on his tormentors and Justin, a leader in the scruffy, noisy lower forms, did all he could to protect the Jewish child. Justin's decency made her throat ache with love, yet at the same time she felt a rasp of self-excoriation at her own behavior. What a wall of subterfuges she had built! And was piling yet higher.

“That's exactly it,” she said.

“He's a famous racer, Mr. Bridger, but he's not very fair.” Justin's anathema.

“Why do you say that?”

“He looked at me as if I were a germ under a microscope. He was against me before I said a word.”

“I'm sure you misunderstood,” she said, her voice taking on specious adult tones.

“I
admire
him tremendously.”