Fortunate Son

12

Eric graduated from Hensley High at the age of fifteen. He applied to UCLA, was accepted, and moved in to live with Christie. Six months later Christie bore their daughter, Mona. He got a job at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club as their youngest tennis pro and spent his spare time restringing fancy rackets for the wealthier clients. He made good money in tips, and his salary would do. He enjoyed his daughter, was rather perplexed by the deep love Christie felt for him, and drifted further and further away from his father.

He majored in economics because he liked numbers and the objective approach that dominated the department. He didn’t feel overworked, and if some paper came due that he didn’t have time to finish, Christie helped him by typing, reading books for him, or even writing the essays.

He didn’t feel guilty taking her help — after all, he was working twenty-five hours a week, sharing the housework, and carrying a full load at school.

His father had told Eric that if he wanted to be a parent that he had to learn to support himself. The boy didn’t mind. Actually he felt relieved when he was no longer expected to spend time at his father’s house. Ahn still made him uncomfortable, and he felt guilty about his father’s empty life.

One night Eric and Christie were sitting in the beach-house living room, with eleven-month-old Mona rolling and crawling on the couch between them.

Christie said, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Eric thought, Yes, she is, though he didn’t say it.

“She’s so happy because we love her,” Christie added.

Eric wondered about love. He felt respect for his father but not anything that he’d describe as the kind of love that he’d read about in books and saw in movies. He had more feeling for Ahn, but this too was not love — it was the remnant of fear that he felt when he was just a child. The only love that he’d ever really experienced was for Branwyn and then Thomas — who in Eric’s mind was a part of Branwyn. There was something else about Thomas that Eric felt drawn to. It was a quality that Eric remembered but couldn’t quite describe; Thomas was smart or clear or maybe even unafraid. He had something that Eric lacked, but the Golden Boy (a nickname they’d given him at college) couldn’t ever say for sure what it was.

Looking upon his straw-headed, violet-eyed daughter, Eric realized that he felt delight but not the kind of love that he knew as a child.

Even with Christie, whom he slept with every night, there was no driving passion. He compared his life to the pleasant garden that Ahn would take Eric and Thomas to when they were small. There was a big lawn and stone animals for the boys to play on. But very soon Eric became bored with the pretty grass and the whimsical creatures. He remembered that it was only Thomas who made those days bearable.

Thomas would talk to the animals, and they would tell him stories about what happened at night when all the people were gone. When the lawn became dark, the elephant battled the lion. Every night they fought and roared, baring claw and tusk, Thomas said in his breathless whisper, but no one could see them because no one was allowed in the children’s park after sunset.

At that moment Eric could see Thomas standing there in the middle of the broad lawn while Ahn sewed on the parents’ bench, chatting with the other domestics.

Eric recalled a day when he and Thomas were on top of the elephant, the largest animal in the menagerie. Thomas had raced Eric to the top, and for the first time the smaller boy won. But when he got up there he slipped on the slick head and fell to the ground below with a loud thump. Eric asked his brother if he was okay, but Thomas didn’t even cry. It wasn’t until the next morning that Branwyn noticed the swelling on his leg and took him to the emergency room.

“Eric. Eric,” Christie was saying.

“What?”

“I was talking about Mona. Don’t you care about her?”

“Sure I do. Of course.”

“Then why don’t you ever tell her that you love her?”

Because I want her to be safe, he thought. But he said, “I tell her all the time; it’s just that I do it when we’re alone.”

After a year Eric moved his family into special university housing that UCLA initiated for their younger students with children. One day he got the letter in the mail. The school took the top three floors of one of the fancy buildings on Wilshire, the Tennyson, for this experiment. Eric was chosen.

The apartment was a seven-room penthouse that looked out over a great part of L.A., even as far as the ocean. The rent was less though not quite enough less for Christie to quit her job.

But when the university was processing his papers for the apartment, they realized that Eric was now an independent minor no longer claimed by his father. A kindly clerk in the Student Housing Department felt sorry for the young father and passed his information along to the Financial Aid Office, where she knew there was a special stipend program for needy students with no other financial support.

Eric began to receive monthly checks instead of the rent bill, and all tuition expenses were taken on by the taxpayers of California. Christie enrolled in school, and the university provided full day care for Mona.

It was now Christie’s dream to become a doctor. She enrolled as a pre-med major at UCLA.

The next three years passed without incident. Anyone looking at Eric and Christie’s life together would have thought it was just about perfect. Eric rarely got sick, but whenever he did he stayed away from home, telling Christie his fear of making Mona ill. He never confessed that he was the cause of the deaths of both his mothers because of some insane fortune that allowed him to survive while others around him died.

He would usually stay in a motel down by the beach when he got ill. But during his last infection he stayed at a fellow classmate’s parents’ guesthouse in Bel-Air. The student was named Michael Smith. The guesthouse was rarely used, and Michael liked having Eric around because Eric was commonly acknowledged as the best undergraduate student in the Economics Department. Eric remained in isolation during the infectious period, but he promised to help Michael with his work once he’d recovered.

Eric liked Michael. He was a slender, anemic-looking young man with brown eyes, brown hair, deeply tanned skin, and almost no apparent personality. His mother had died delivering his sister, Raela Timor. His father, Ralph, remarried and then, soon after, died because of a freak aviation accident.

The accident had to do with a sudden downdraft over the Santa Monica freeway. Ralph Smith was driving his VW Bug home when a single-engine Cessna was coming in for a landing at Santa Monica Airport. The plane was blown down upon the nearly empty highway — empty except for the elder Mr. Smith. It was three in the morning, and Ralph, as usual, had been working late. His car was clipped by the plane’s right wing. The pilot survived with a broken ankle. Ralph only had a few bruises, but the hospital decided to keep him overnight. By morning the ill-fated bookkeeper was sick. The physician on duty, a heart specialist, assumed it was a heart condition. He prescribed blood-pressure inhibitors and bed rest. It wasn’t until after Ralph died three days later that the autopsy revealed a blood infection that he’d probably contracted on his first night in the hospital.

Ralph’s new wife, Maya, didn’t think that she could raise two children and so adopted Raela, giving the child her last name, with the intention of putting Michael up for adoption if no one else in the Smith family would take him.

Maya had already entered into the adoption process when she met Kronin Stark, a wealthy businessman who had no office but instead conducted his various businesses from a small table in the lounge of the posh Cape Hotel of Beverly Hills. Stark went to the hotel every morning to meet with international businessmen of every stripe and nationality. They would talk for either minutes or hours, at the end of which time the lucky ones would be smiling and leaving with a handshake. Some people had been noticed leaving Kronin’s table distraught and near tears. Once or twice his meetings had been followed by suicide a few days later.

Maya Timor had gone to the Cape Hotel looking for a job. She’d heard from friends that it was a great place to work with good benefits and some security. She left Michael at home because he was old enough to take care of himself, but she brought Raela along with her. Everybody liked the raven-haired Raela, and Maya felt that the child’s presence was something like a blessing.

“I don’t know, Mom,” Maya once said to Jayne Henderson-Timor. “When you look in those eyes you think that she can see right into your soul. It’s scary, but at the same time you can’t turn away.”

Jayne suggested that her daughter take the child to see a doctor. That had been the beginning of the deterioration of the grandmother-mother bond.

The hotel wasn’t hiring, but before Maya found this out, Raela wandered into the lounge and saw the great bulk of Kronin Stark. She came up to the empty chair in front of him (just vacated without a handshake) and sat down.

“Who are you?” the six-year-old beauty asked.

“My name is Stark.”

“It sounds like you have rocks in your throat,” she said.

“That’s because I’m very serious.”

“It’s no fun being serious all the time,” the child said. “If you’re too serious your mouth gets stuck in a frown and then nobody likes you.”

“Raela,” Maya Timor said. She was coming from the bad news at the front desk. “I’m sorry if she’s bothering you, sir.”

“Not at all,” the humongous businessman replied. “As a matter of fact, she’s done me a service. She reminded me why I’m sitting in this chair.”

The big man smiled, and Maya noticed the ten-carat ruby that festooned the baby finger of his left hand.

“Raela is your name?” he asked the girl.

“Yes, it is.”

“And what is your mother’s name?”

“Maya,” Raela and Maya said together.

Kronin told the girl that they served very good strawberry pancakes at the Cape and invited both mother and daughter to breakfast. After that they repaired to the roof, where there was an Olympic-size swimming pool. A little deal with the pool man and a swimming suit was found for the girl.

While the child swam, her long, dark hair flowing behind her like a fan, Kronin made polite conversation with Maya.

“Her father named her,” Maya said, “after a fantasy princess he made up when he was a child.”

“She is regal,” Kronin admitted. “You say her father died?”

“Mother too. I’m in the process of adopting her. It’s too bad, but I don’t have the wherewithal to keep her and her brother too.”

Maya was never certain if Stark kept calling because of her or her adopted daughter. But he’d call every week and take her and the children to some beach or restaurant.

Michael was in awe of Kronin — his size, his voice, the way people served him wherever they went. He traveled in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and lived in a big house in Bel-Air. Kronin didn’t care about the boy, but he saw how much Raela loved him and so he asked Maya if they could keep the boy when they got married.

“You’re asking me to marry you?” was her response.

“If you will have me.”

Kronin was a force in the world of business. He created dynasties and destroyed men and businesses on a daily basis, rarely picking up the phone more than twice in a day. He was a giant both physically and mentally and saw the people around him as a different species somehow, lesser beings. And so when Raela appeared before him he was surprised. Something about the child’s eyes, her demeanor, enchanted him. That’s the reason he asked the hotel supplicant Maya to stay for breakfast — he wanted to see what made her child so fetching.

Over the weeks Kronin found himself falling in love, not with Maya but with the child. He found himself eager to leave the Cape in the evening, when he was to have a family date with Maya Timor, the nonentity Michael, and the transcendent child Raela.

He had had many women in his life: movie stars, heiresses, and divas of various ilk. And he wasn’t a snob, in the ordinary way. He’d dallied with barmaids and secretaries, lady lawyers and prostitutes of all races, ages, and states of relative beauty.

The billionaire wasn’t looking for companionship or sexual gratification or love. What he wanted, what he craved, was a queen: a woman that could carry his power with grace, a woman that would bear him children he wouldn’t want to drown. It was plain to see that the woman he wanted was the woman Raela would one day become.

Kronin adopted Raela and not Michael, but the boy was still deeply loyal to him. The reason that he studied economics was to impress the man he wanted to be his father. He dreamed that one day Kronin would need his help, and there Michael would be, ready to comply. But he didn’t have a good head for numbers, nor did he understand even the simplest part of his sister’s father’s business. That’s why when Eric had asked him if he knew where he could stay to keep his family from catching his cold, Michael was quick to suggest Kronin’s guesthouse.

Eric would sit in the small, glass-walled house reading advanced texts in economic theory and novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He loved James and Balzac, Dumas and Eliot. He also watched tennis and boxing on a small portable TV they had out back. He ate canned soup, heated on a hot plate, and avoided all other contact until, on the morning of the fourth day of his sojourn at the Stark home, he heard a knock on the door.

He pulled back the curtain and saw a tall, dark-featured girl who was a stranger to him. Raela was fifteen then and slender. Everything about her face was perfectly proportioned, but her eyes seemed large anyway. She smiled and waved.

“Hello,” Eric said through the closed glass door.

“Hi,” the girl said with a grin.

“Who are you?”

“Raela,” she said with a guttural roll at the back of her throat.

“I’m Eric.”

“I know. Mikey says that you’re afraid to get people sick so you stay out here.”

“That’s right,” Eric said. He too was smiling, though he wasn’t sure why. He found himself watching the girl’s eyes, not looking into them but observing them as if they were rough gems.

“That’s stupid,” she said. “People get sick all the time. My father says that if you get sick that’s good because it makes you stronger to fight other colds.”

“Once I got sick and my mother caught it and she died,” the nineteen-year-old senior said. This was also a surprise. It was the first time he had admitted to anyone this deep-rooted belief in his own guilt. But at that moment he didn’t feel guilty.

Raela’s face took on the sadness in Eric’s heart.

“That’s awful,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean it’ll happen with me.”

“How could I know that?” he asked.

“Let’s flip a coin.”

They settled on the rules of their game. The best out of five, but the winner had to win by at least two. Eric had never in his life lost that configuration.

They started at 10:15 a.m.

At noon she was only one flip up on him.

Eric opened the door, and the teenager came into the college man’s room. They sat across from each other on sofa chairs, and she told him everything that she’d felt in her short life and he told her everything that he’d experienced. He told her about the tennis game and Christie and Mona and Thomas. When he talked about Mama Branwyn, the girl moved to sit next to him. She held his hand, listening with rapt attention and without any question of his seemingly overblown ego.

“Sometimes I wonder why people like me so much,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like I’m any better than anybody. Lots of people I’ve read about have done truly amazing things. They invented electricity or brought Christianity to Ireland. They conquered the world or made things so beautiful that people line up five thousand years later to see their works.”

“Yeah,” Eric said. It was a brief reply, but Raela knew that he was moved by her words. “But most people don’t care about that kinda stuff. They see blue eyes or a nice body and they believe that they can get somewhere.”

“Where?” Raela asked, looking into Eric’s eyes.

He could see that she wasn’t besotted with him. It was his knowledge she was after.

“I don’t know. It’s like someplace that they imagine you come from. A room somewhere where the food is better and the TVs are bigger and then they can have anything they want.”

“Yeah,” Raela said with a big smile.

Raela knew in her heart that this man was meant to be hers, and he knew it too. They talked until the sun went down. In that time his chest cold cleared up, and she made him promise to be her friend.

“Raela,” a man’s voice called from out in the yard.

“Out here with Eric, Daddy,” the innocent girl exclaimed, jumping to her feet.

He walked into the guesthouse, a rhinoceros nosing its way into a mole’s den.

Eric had never met anyone like Kronin Stark. He was at least six and a half feet tall, weighing well over three hundred pounds. His black hair was too long for a man his age, and his mustache was so profuse that it overwhelmed his trim beard. He had huge hands and great black eyes made to mesmerize.

When he asked, “What’s this?” Eric felt a small quelling in his heart.

“This is my new friend, Eric, Daddy,” Raela said with absolute certainty.

“I thought that he was your brother’s friend?”

“We can share. Eric and I flipped coins and came up even almost.”

Surprise registered on the big man’s face. His brow furrowed, and he began to take deeper consideration of the young man.

“I see,” he said at last. “Well... welcome to the family, Eric.”

As the billionaire turned to leave, the Golden Boy watched him, unable to speak or even to register what had just happened.

“See?” Raela said. “We will be friends forever and that’s that.”

The final tone of Raela’s exuberance stayed with Eric, but it didn’t make him at all happy. He had found the girl who would become the woman for him, but he didn’t want to sink the lives of his daughter and her mother in order to have her. He feared what could happen. On the short drive home he considered deserting Christie, going to Mexico or Ghana and starting a new life far away from anyone he could hurt. He thought of telling Christie the truth: that he had to leave in order to save her more pain. Raela, he knew, would have believed him, but Christie would never understand.

Driving down Sunset Boulevard, Eric felt the trap of his fate closing in. He thought about the tiger’s son who was the cause of his parents’ death. In his fantasy Raela transformed into a great feline, and she stalked Mona and Christie in a dark alley. He could see them but could not stop the monster from pouncing; he couldn’t because the monster was his own leaping heart.

His eyes were stinging from a sudden sweat, and his hands, also sweating, slipped and shook upon the steering wheel. He pulled to the curb and tried to think his way out of the vision that he believed was true.

People appeared to him. His father wouldn’t know what to say, he knew. Ahn would agree with his assessment of the problem and shake her head fatalistically. Michael and Christie and Mona were useless. He had no other friends that could help.

All he could think of was Tommy and Mama Branwyn. But she was dead, and no matter how quickly he opened his eyes he never caught a glimpse of her as Tommy had done. And his brother was lost to him. He believed that if he found Thomas he might be saved from his own cursed luck. But there was no sign of Thomas anywhere in L.A. Even his grandmother had lost track of him.

Having lost his brother again in his mind, Eric realized and accepted that he was alone in the world. He decided that he’d never talk to Raela again. He could control his destiny. He didn’t have to give in to the gravity he felt in her presence.

After all it still wasn’t love that he felt. There was a rightness in the combination of him and Michael’s sister. She was his other half in some way, his equal. She’d be immune to his providence.

But he would never see her again and his family would be safe. Mona would grow up and move away, and he and Christie would live into old age, her resenting his distance and him guarding her life.

The sweat broke and Eric laughed to himself. He felt as if he had jousted with a tiger. He’d battled an inner demon and won, with no one but himself to mark the victory.

Eric came home to find Drew Peters sitting on the sofa, casually talking to Christie.

She seemed a little nervous, but Eric felt that that was only natural. Drew and Christie had been together, off and on, since they were twelve. There was a deep bond between them, and it must have been difficult for them to sit together when she was now with Eric.

“Hey, Drew,” Eric said.

“I won that last point” were the first words out of his mouth.

“You would have,” Eric agreed for the hundredth time, “if the sun hadn’t come out right then.”

“You better believe it,” Drew added. “I had your ass.”

Eric sat with them and talked about Drew’s work at Yale. He went in wanting to become a physicist, but now he was interested in painting. His father was angry about the change of major, but he didn’t care.

“I’m going to do what’s right for me,” Drew said with deep conviction and maybe even a little anger. “And I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

Eric had little to say about his own work. It wasn’t much different than the studies he did at Hensley. Mona toddled in while they talked. She crawled up onto her father’s knee and went instantly to sleep there.

Christie watched them with a frown on her face.

Drew soon excused himself, and Christie went to bed with a headache.

Eric sat on the little patio twenty-five stories above L.A. The building was also on a hill and so looked far out on the horizon. Mona woke up and said, “Daddy?”

“Yes, baby?”

“Do you love me?”

“Very much,” he said.

He kissed her to cover up the lie.