Onyx (54 page)

IV

She shimmied across the waxed floor, her head tilting in a smile at her partners. Above the emerald ballgown the flesh of her arms, back, and the cleavage of her breasts were the translucent yet velvety white of the interior of a lily. She dazzled, she glowed, she vanquished every other woman, and no man could resist the near tactile pleasure of watching her. Caryll fox-trotted with his cousins' wives, friends' wives, company wives who smiled admiringly at him. His anxious desires reached out to his own wife.

She was finishing a tricky rhumba when he lost sight of her. He looked for the emerald taffeta in the crush at the buffet table, he circled the cardroom where his friends were eating the midnight supper. With a frozen little smile he continued his search through the crowded downstairs rooms of Agnes and Artie Sinclair's replica of Mount Vernon. At the last waltz Zoe reappeared in the ballroom, gliding with the top of her burnished head tucked under Dickson Keeley's squarish jaw.

Oh, God, God
, Caryll thought.
Dickson Keeley
!

On the way home she sang
Body and Soul
, her breathy little voice ruffling the soft white hairs of her fox collar.

In the hall Caryll said brusquely, “I'm having a nightcap.”

For a long time he sat on the den sofa, his gray eyes reflecting the glow of dying embers. He gulped his drink and reluctantly climbed the circular staircase.

Zoe, in a cherry kimono, brushed her hair with long, sharp strokes that crackled from the titian nape to the pink-gold ends. “I had supper with Dickson Keeley,” she said.

“Zoe, it's after two.” He sat to take off his new pumps. “I'm bushed. Let's not start.”

“He said he wished that you and he could hit it off.”

“How could you discuss me?” Caryll asked in a low, shaking voice.

“You're right, he's a nasty, pushy man with that Edward G. Robinson tough talk. He boasted his weight hadn't changed since he was at Princeton. He made me feel his biceps and thigh muscles—those conservative clothes are a pose. He wears black silk drawers with a dragon embroidered on the you-know.”

“Shut up,” Caryll growled. Beads of sweat showed on the widow's peak of his receding hairline.

“His is smaller than yours. Nothing happened. It just oozed away.”

Caryll went into his dressing room. She followed, her face puffed with unshed tears. “Why did I have to tell you that, Caryll? Why do I always? I wish I were dead! Death is calm and peaceful. Dead people can't hurt or be hurt.”

He unknotted his white tie. “You should have continued with Maurin,” he said with enforced coldness.

“Maurin! What's the point of admitting again and again that because my father died and then Mother died and Justin left me, I'm terrified of being deserted? Where has it helped me, knowing?”

“Another analyst, then.” Caryll maintained his nonjudgmental frostiness.

“Ahh, Caryll, don't act like I'm a loony who can give you rabies. I can't bear it.”

“Then I suggest you beg sympathy from one of the men you seek out, my cousins, my friends, the men who work for me.”

“You're right to despise me. You're so good, Caryll, so fine.”

“The best and finest cuckold in Detroit.”

“I never let them inside me.”

“That would be more honest.”

“Please, please say you love me.”

“Why? Because you were unsuccessful at
soixante-neuf
with Dickson Keeley?”

“Caryll, I'm drowning.”

Caryll's false remoteness dissolved: in a fury he hurled his tie to the floor. “I want to accomplish some good, manage a progressive action, and because it involves speaking to your brother—
my
friend—you punish me!”

“She owns him, that Jewish girl.”

“My God.”

“You're siding with him! He means more to you than I do!”

“Just listen to yourself.”

“You're everything to me, Caryll. You're the one person on this earth I have.”

“It won't work this time, Zoe. My mind's made up. Monday I'm contacting Justin like I said I would.”

She lunged at him, clasping her hands around his neck, pressing kisses on his averted jaw, his ear, and when he did not respond, she stepped back, letting the kimono slither into a rosy pool around her bare, high-arched feet. A plastic surgeon had traveled from Rio de Janeiro to graft the scar of her three cesareans, and only the thinnest thread of a vertical line flawed the smooth flesh above her perfumed pubic triangle. Caryll had seen her nakedness since their early adolescence, yet he could never control his awe nor—when Zoe willed it—his desire. He was aware, however, even as she caressed his tumescence with skilled delicacy, that it was not merely his wife's excessive beauty or her sensuality that bound him to her. The strongest bond was her starved and frightened heart.

Embracing, they moved toward the turned-down bed.

Afterward she trailed kisses down his neck. “It drives me wild when you put anything ahead of me.”

“I never have.”

“You won't call Justin?”

Caryll hesitated.

“
Don't let me drown
!”

Caryll sighed deeply and rolled over to turn off the bedside lamp. “All right, Zoe.”

“You won't see him?”

“I won't,” Caryll promised, condemning himself for this starstruck, pitying love that was surely his greatest weakness.

CHAPTER 25

In the upper right-hand corner of the thick, creamy card was embossed THE WHITE HOUSE: the few lines below were scrawled in a thick, sharp slant:

Tom
,

Mrs. Roosevelt and I would be delighted if you and Mrs. Bridger would join us for the weekend of May 3. We have also extended an invitation to your son and daughter-in-law
.

Looking forward to renewing our friendship
.

FDR

P.S. There will be no discussion of the NRA
.

The postscript was a humorous one. Attempting to woo Tom into signing the code, the President, in addition to twice dispatching his secretary of labor, Madame Perkins, to Detroit, had put in many richly jocund personal calls. Tom, halfway succumbing to Rooseveltian charm, had recognized the political tiger in the man. This handwritten invitation meant that some favor, probably self-damaging, was wanted of him. Hugh and Argo Macllvray composed his regrets.

Caryll and Zoe flew in the family Lockheed Vega to Washington.

II

Just before five on Sunday afternoon a bland-faced aide led Caryll through corridors to a small, comfortably furnished sitting room. Reddish light slanted through the western windows to touch the President's massive, graying head. Seated behind a leather-topped desk that hid his crippled legs, wearing a nautical, gold-buttoned blazer and a navy scarf knotted around his muscular neck, he looked powerful and strong.

The aide excused himself.

Caryll had spent the weekend with the Roosevelts, he had dined several times with Harding, shown Hoover around Woodland, and Coolidge had been the honored guest at his wedding. This, though, was the first time he had been alone with a president. Sweat formed under his arms, and his boyhood stammer flourished. “G-good afternoon, M-Mr. P-President.”

“Make yourself comfortable, Caryll.” Roosevelt's teeth remained clenched on his cigarette holder as he smiled and gestured at the slipcovered easy chairs.

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Caryll relaxed slightly.

“I looked down into the garden a while ago and saw you playing croquet with Mrs. Roosevelt, Elliott, and that pretty wife of yours.”

“We've had a wonderful two days, Mr. President.”

“A shame your father and mother couldn't join us.”

“Dad wants a raincheck.”

“He does, eh?” Behind the pince-nez the close-set eyes twinkled. “Well, Tom Bridger must have mellowed since our telephone talks.
That
Tom Bridger meant it when he said no.”

Flustered again, Caryll managed a sickly smile. “You have me there, sir.”

“A remarkable man, your father. The true visionary of the machine age. The world would be pretty much the same if one or the other of us politicians hadn't been born. But without Tom Bridger we'd be living in a far different place. I don't think he realizes how people look up to him.”

Caryll shifted his weight uneasily. “Mr. President, he might not have signed the NRA certificate, but he complies fully with the code.”

“You don't have to tell me! I listen to the Onyx hour.” The smile faded. “The truth is, Caryll, I agree with him. It's far from a perfect package. We bundled too much together. Codes of competition within each industry as well as regulation of all labor practices. But there I go. I promised not to discuss
that
. I asked you here so we could talk about the main problem the country faces. It's unemployment, don't you agree?”

“Absolutely, Mr. President. Unemployment.”

“Dole's not the answer. A man needs work to give him hope and pride, he needs work to give him an identity and make him feel human.”

“You've made a real dent, sir, with the CCC, the WPA.”

“A beginning, that's all. We need support from industry.”

“Onyx has plans for a new glass factory in Nashville, and a cold sheet finishing mill at the Hamtramck.”

“You do? Excellent, excellent. A step in the right direction, but the problem is enormous. Fifteen million unemployed.” The President paused. “The solution we've come up with is on a grand scale.”

“Solution, Mr. President?”

Letting Caryll dangle, Roosevelt fitted a fresh cigarette into his holder. Caryll jumped up, leaning across the desk with his lighter. “Thanks,” Roosevelt said. “What if every employer hired two men instead of one?”

“Mr. President?”

“Don't stare at me like that. We're not asking you to double Onyx's payroll. What we have in mind is to reduce the weekly hours by half. Give one job to two men.”

For the same reason that Tom had stayed put in Detroit, Caryll had traveled to Washington. He had been hoping the President
would
lay some task on him. Since Zoe's ritualized, quasi-adultery—a stab at self-destruction, Maurin, her ex-psychoanalyst, termed these episodes—had forced him to renounce his hopes of red-hot accomplishment with Justin, Caryll had sunk into deep despondency. His faith in himself, never strong, had shriveled. Salvation seemed to lay in substituting an equally meaningful task.

But this—this?

His first coherent thought was, how can any family survive on half a week's work with the minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour? He almost blurted this out, then realized it was a foolish question to put to a politician as astute as Roosevelt. He, his Cabinet, and the brain trust, several of whom Caryll and Zoe had met at dinner on Friday, must have considered the ramifications.

The President leaned back in his chair. The gold rim of his pince-nez caught the sunlight. “Well? How will it go in Detroit?”

“The automotive industry …” Caryll cleared his throat. “We have a pretty good wage scale.”

“So you're on our side.”

“Mr. President,” said Caryll, awkwardly, “we'd be asking our workers to accept a drastic cut.”

“I realize that.” Roosevelt looked weary and strained. “But the men who haven't had a pay envelope to take home to their families in five years, what about them? Don't we have an obligation to them?”

Caryll sighed, thinking of the men who wore no shirts under their threadbare suit jackets slogging passively from Gate Four after a turndown, the thin wraiths who leaned on lampposts cringing away when you glanced at them. His own plans had always been of bettering conditions at Onyx, but the President was forcing him to look at things on a larger scale. Unemployment, a terrible cancer, clogged the lungs and heart of the country, and there would be no health until those beaten, submissive cells were returned to society.

Roosevelt, watching him, guessed his thoughts. “If we don't find jobs for those men, and find them soon, they'll die. Maybe they'll keep on breathing, but they'll be dead. And so will their families.”

“I agree with you, Mr. President,” Caryll said. “How do the other manufacturers think their labor forces will react to your plan?”

“You're the first I've approached. Detroit's the obvious spot—unemployment's ferocious there—and Onyx is the place to begin. Your father has no stockholders or board of directors to contend with. Besides, he's an idealist. Oh, Tom would laugh, hearing that, but between us, what else can you call him? His seven-dollar-minimum day, his lack of discriminatory hiring are landmarks.” The toothy smile flattered yet was sincere. “In a couple of weeks I'm discussing this with Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, Chrysler. My arguments to them would have bite if Onyx were already on the bandwagon.”

“It's up to my father, Mr. President. He's the boss.”

“Don't I know it!” Roosevelt laughed. “Still, you're his second in command.”

“Like Vice-President Garner,” Caryll said, and then reddened furiously. One did not joke with presidents.

Roosevelt laughed again. “
Touché
.”

“I'll explain your thoughts to Dad. I'll try to make him understand our larger obligations.” He was sweating again.

“The unemployed of this country are in agony, Caryll. Relief's no answer for them. Self-respect is.”

“I'll do what I can to convert Dad.”

“You're with us, then?”

“All the way, Mr. President. I'll do my best.”

“I'm counting on you, Caryll,” said the President in the insinuatingly warm tones with which he addressed his friends during his Fireside Chats.

Deep in Caryll's being the moths of doubt flittered, but he did not let these misgivings invade his conscious mind. Desperate to absolve himself of his earlier weakness, it seemed to him that convincing his father to agree to the President's plan would be the means. He climbed the ladder of the Lockheed Vega, his shoulders squared with determination.