Onyx (49 page)

Zoe felt an unexpected twinge of shame at how important her fraudulent acceptance seemed to him.

VIII

Justin, though, was the one that canceled.

He had been back at the Book Cadillac maybe an hour when the telephone rang. Elisse picked it up.

“Mother!” she cried. “How did you find us? … Yes … That was clever.… Can't you speak a little louder?”

“Elisse. What is it?” Justin asked.

“I see.… Yes, Mother.… Yes, but what do the other doctors say?” Tears were streaming down Elisse's cheeks, and she dabbed at them with her wadded handkerchief. “Mother, he'll be fine.… Yes, of course we'll be there.… Don't be silly.… As soon as we can.” She held the phone to her bed jacket. “Daddy's had some sort of attack.”

Justin reached for the instrument. “Mrs. Kaplan, where is he?”

“The Cedars of Lebanon Hospital,” said the girlish, faraway voice. “Dr. Levin won't tell me anything.”

“I'll try to get through to him right away, then I'll be back to you.”

“Oh, thank you ever so much.”

“The express leaves Chicago at nine. We'll be on it. Mrs. Kaplan, do you have Dr. Levin's number handy? And better give me the hospital number.” He opened his small morocco notebook.

Elisse was already taking clothes from the closet.

BOOK FOUR

The Amalgamated Automobile Workers

When they tie the can to a union man,

Sit down! Sit down!

When the speedup comes, just twiddle your thumbs.

Sit down! Sit down!

When the boss won't talk, don't take a walk.

Sit down! Sit down!

CHAPTER 22

“When were they booked?” Justin interrupted, a pruned, legal query.

“This morning. They were held overnight,” Mitch replied. “The police administered their routine clouting.”

Justin's lips shaped the words
sons of bitches
. “And the charges?”

“The usual. Illegal assembly and disturbing the peace.”

The telephone rang. Dust flew in the sunlight as Mitch reached across the desk to answer. He held the receiver to his good ear. “AAW headquarters, Shapiro speaking.… Of course I know who you are.… Yes, Pete Fannin's wife.…”

December 10, 1934.

A warm, sunny Monday in Los Angeles, the windows were open in Mitch's one-room bachelor apartment, which doubled as the office of Amalgamated Automobile Workers, one of the numerous small locals that swirled futilely around the Depression-stymied industry. The space was crammed with Mitch's battered desk, two gray metal filing cabinets, a stack of folding chairs, a carton of handbills that gave off the thick odor of mimeograph chemicals. To the doors of the Murphy bed were thumbtacked photographs of Mitch with hulking, beatle-browed John L. Lewis, Mitch with William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, and others in the hierarchies of Labor and the Communist party.

Justin, to give the illusion of not eavesdropping, had turned to look out the window. At thirty-four his hair had turned a premature, glossy gray, a hereditary trait that served him well by endowing him with the appearance of vigorous, dependable maturity so prized in the legal profession.

Two days after Edsel Ford had written offering him the head post at Ford's Shreveport assembly plant, a letter had arrived from Henry Ford countermanding the offer—an everyday humiliation inflicted by the tough old man on his talented, sensitive son. By then, however, the correspondence was irrelevant. Justin could not abandon Mr. Kaplan, pale-lipped from gallbladder surgery, incarcerated behind the bars of his hospital bed, or Mrs. Kaplan, weeping and totally at sea. Elisse was ill with constant nausea—caused by her pregnancy, they were soon to learn. Life conspired to keep him in Los Angeles. To Justin it seemed inevitable that he enroll at USC Law School. He was well into his first year, a father himself, before he accepted the implications of leaving the industry that his biological father had almost single-handedly founded to enter Claude Hutchinson's profession. Subconsciously he had desired to carry on the tradition as well as the name—if, unfortunately, not the genes—of the man whom he posthumously loved, respected, and for most of his life had thought of as “Father.”

Though Justin graduated into the teeth of the Depression, he was invited to join the two most prestigious Los Angeles law firms. He and Elisse decided, however, that money and position were not fitting goals in this iniquitous new decade. He turned both down. The small family had continued to manage on the checks that arrived quarterly from London. Justin's fledgling private practice—busy from the very first—consisted mostly of
pro bono
referrals from the American Civil Liberties Union and unpaid cases from Mitch's floundering union. Had Justin been forced to grade his two careers according to personal fulfillment, he would have awarded far lower marks to these years of fighting eviction notices and collecting back pay, yet his face wore a sheen of content. Buoyed by a happy marriage, he shed his vitality and grace in a manner he did not recognize.

Mitch hung up. “Mollie Fannin. Another sad story.” He shook his head. “Her husband was a punch-press operator at the Chevrolet assembly. Pete. A couple of months ago he joined AAW, he paid his dues secretly, but still they found out. He was fired. Blacklisted. They're starving. Mollie wanted to know if I'd heard of a job for her, any kind of work, even for a couple of days. Not because they're down to eating fried dough, but because she wants to give her children Christmas. The excuses they make up! As if we aren't all in the same boat.”

“Maybe she does want some stocking stuffers.”

“Santa Claus? When the system's falling apart?”

Justin smiled. “You'll have to bear with us human beings, Mitch. Most of us think about the weather and our kids, not the Revolution.” He took out his worn wallet. “Have her clean up headquarters.”

“Donations should go to the AAW relief fund.”

“Nevertheless. This is for Mollie Fannin.” Justin set four crumpled ones on the desk. “It's all I have on me. Elisse handles the finances.”

“And she's even more sentimental about giving,” Mitch said, shoving the bills into his pocket. He got up to unfold a banged metal chair. “Here, Justin, sit down. There's something I have to discuss with you.” He waited until Justin sat. “A week from Thursday this won't be headquarters.”

Justin asked sympathetically, “Been asked to move again?”

“For once the landlord's on our side,” Mitch said. “No. I'm driving back to Detroit.”

“Not again.”

Mitch had already made three attempts to organize a local in the automotive capital: on his last tour of duty he had tackled Woodland. Dickson Keeley, now head of Security, had personally kicked him out of Gate One, breaking several of his ribs.

“I'm wasting time here, Justin. What's the point of attacking the tentacles? You have to go for the heart.”

The unsettling bleakness in Justin's eyes was not connected to Mitch's persistent failures. When reminded of Detroit, province of the Bridgers, the humiliation of being the family bastard drenched him while at the same time he was stricken with pangs of loneliness for his blood kin. With difficulty he extracted the last Camel from a crumpled pack: years ago he had given up frivolities like imported cigarettes.

Mitch was saying, “… in Wayne County fifty-three percent of the auto workers are unemployed. It's murder there. Workers are worse off than slaves—slaves are guaranteed food. You bring in mass production and men become interchangeable, more dispensable than the cheapest tool.”

“Conditions are always worse—”

“Children are scavenging through the garbage cans,” Mitch interrupted. “Come with me, Justin.”

“
What
?”

“Drive back to Detroit with me.”

“Impossible.” Justin's lips were tensed. “I have cases on the docket all month.”

“A vacation isn't what I had in mind. You were trained in every department at Onyx. You'll have no trouble getting a job in the industry.”

The implication of these words sank gradually into Justin's brain. “You want me to become an organizing director for AAW?”

Mitch stared across the cluttered desk. “Get wise to yourself, Justin. It's where you belong.”

“And what about my family? What about them?”

“Elisse can bring the kids later, on the train,” Mitch said. “I know you're not political, so there's no point arguing on ideological grounds.” Mitch's own ideology had never particularly meshed with the party line, and he had nearly quit when Central Committee ordered him to head an unemployment council. He belonged, short, muscular body and tough, blinkered soul, to the labor movement. “It's a moral issue, Justin. You're no moral coward; you don't evade the issues. You're a natural for this. It's getting worse back there, not better. You can't shut your eyes to that. Detroit's one big, festering sore.”

“I can't change that.”

“It's time we had a top man on our side—don't look so indignant. You know you're a natural leader. You could convince those bitter, frightened men that their one hope is collective bargaining.” Mitch paused, adding in a less resonant, more personal tone, “You're close to the Bridgers.”

“Onyx? Is that where you're going? You want
me
to try to unionize
Onyx
?”

“Outside of Ford it's the most repressive company there is. Woodland's turned into a prison with Keeley's brigades of plug-uglies.” Mitch clasped his bicep to his newly mended ribs. “Take it from me.”

Justin sat very still. Any movement and he would be on his feet screaming at this infuriating zealot, his best friend. “If it's some jolly tie-in with the Bridgers you're looking for, that lets me out.”

“I know you don't have your hand in the pocket of your brother-in-law's family, but you certainly know them. And every bit of inside information about Tom and Hugh Bridger is an advantage.”

Justin's hands were shaking. Putting out his cigarette, he clasped them to his knees. His weakest bastion was unwittingly being stormed. How he missed Tom, Hugh, Caryll! How he longed to see Zoe! She had never replied to his letters. When headlines informed him of the birth of Lynn, the oldest of his three nieces, he had sent a sterling porringer: Caryll had written a thank-you note, signing both names, and now the two men corresponded with occasional, faintly elegiac letters that spoke of the past and seldom mentioned their divergent present lives.

Mitch was watching him.

“I'm not going with you,” Justin said decisively.

“Oppressed and oppressor, there's only two sides.”

“One more, I'm afraid, Mitch. The lawyer's side.” Justin managed a smile at the old saw, and got to his feet. “Los Angeles is our home.”

Mitch opened a drawer of the nearest filing cabinet where letters were mounded. He shoved a random handful into a folder. “Take these along and read them,” he said. “Then make up your mind.”

II

That afternoon Miss Gunther telephoned Elisse to explain that Ben was being kept late and it was necessary for her to pick him up. Having received other high-pitched summonses from Ben's teachers, Elisse, unnerved, left the gingerbread ingredients on the kitchen table to run in and waken Tonia from her nap.

The school was six residential blocks to the east. Elisse pushed the lacquered English pram by stucco bungalows with neat front yards sporting recently transplanted red poinsettias and jolly red Santas. Here and there a dark fir tree was festooned with colored lights, attesting that the householder could afford to waste electricity.
This Depression's not all it's cracked up to be
, Elisse thought.

Outside the second-grade classroom waited Miss Gunther: the teacher's gray hair crinkled in the same shade and rough texture as her eternal gray tweed suit. Elisse rocked the well-sprung perambulator so that Tonia would not cry while the district attorney voice rapped out a report of Ben's latest fight over his theft of another boy's lunch.

Elisse glanced through the glass inset of the door. Alone in the empty schoolroom, Ben surely realized that this muted tirade was about him, yet he sat in a rear desk gazing toward the blackboard with his chin lifted in disdainful calm. He had Elisse's delicate frame and her curly light brown hair, which at the moment was tangled over his wide forehead, further shadowing the deep-set blue eyes. Elisse caught her breath at the miracles of heredity. His peachy skin, dusted with golden freckles, clung to the facial bones, giving an odd, adult intensity to his expression.

He leaned back, regarding a thumb before chewing on the nail: no nail-biter, he must have felt a roughness. His hands were sensitive, and though he seldom cried, a grazed knuckle could cause tears of pain—the hands of a musician said his grandfather, who was teaching him the violin. Ben, sharply, nervously intelligent, had skipped a semester. A loner, he never exchanged visits with his classmates. Elisse loved him fiercely, and did not understand him at all.

“He's never had this kind of problem, stealing,” she said.

The gold chain of Miss Gunther's pince-nez shook. “I found the lunch pail in his desk.”

“I didn't mean I doubted you,” Elisse said, torn between defending her son and not alienating the gray witch who had him in her fell clutch six hours a day. “Did you ask him to explain?”

“That,” sniffed Miss Gunther, “is up to the parents.”

Witch
, Elisse thought again.

As they started home Elisse asked Ben, “Didn't your own sandwich and cupcake please you?”

“There wasn't anything in Jerrold's pail, just a couple of hard heels of bread.”

“Oh, my God,” Elisse muttered. “He is hungry.”

“Maybe he deserves to be.”