Fortunate Son

2

Mother and child moved into Minas Nolan’s home the next morning. Branwyn expected to stay there only until Tommy could live without an oxygen tent. Minas gave her her own room and told her that he’d like to take her out for dinner the first night she was there.

Tommy and Eric were sleeping peacefully and Ahn had Dr. Nolan’s beeper number. Branwyn hadn’t eaten in the last twenty-four hours and so she said, “Okay.”

Over sausages and catfish served at the table at Fontanot’s kitchen, Minas said, “I am very attracted to you, Branwyn Beerman, but I don’t want you to feel any pressure. I have you in my house so that Thomas can heal. And it doesn’t hurt that you’re the only person who can make Eric stop his crying.”

“So you don’t mind if I sleep in my own bed?” Branwyn asked.

“No, ma’am.”

She smiled, and Fontanot delivered a plateful of homemade corn bread.

That night they went to Minas’s room. From that day on Branwyn dressed and kept her clothes in her own bedroom, but she always slept with the doctor — though three or four nights a week she sat up with her son. Thomas was very sick for the next eighteen months. He came down with pneumonia and a dozen other minor and major infections. He suffered from high fevers every other week, but between the ministrations of Minas and Ahn and Branwyn he survived. By Thomas’s second birthday, Minas declared that the former bubble boy should be able to live a normal life.

Branwyn offered to move out a week later.

“If you want me to bawl like Eric I guess you can,” Minas said.

And so Branwyn stayed on. She kept her job at Ethel’s Florist Shop. Minas taught her how to drive and bought her a blue Volvo.

Eric was jubilant. He broke glasses and windows, the dog’s leg, and three bed frames just being a “force of nature,” as Branwyn said. Meanwhile, Thomas made his way quietly through the large house, watching his foster brother and other wild things, like insects and birds and trees.

Thomas didn’t cry much, and he always stood aside when Eric came hollering for Branwyn. He got colds very often, and even the least exertion made him tired. Eric pushed him sometimes but that was unusual. As a rule the big son of Minas Nolan showed kindness to only Branwyn and Tommy. It wasn’t that he was mean to his father or others but merely that he took them for granted. People were always bringing him gifts and complimenting his size and handsome features. He learned things easily and dominated other children on the playground and later at school.

Thomas loved his brother and mother. He was also very fond of Ahn, who often sat with him when he was sick, and Minas Nolan, who liked to read to him from the red books on the top shelf in the third-floor library.

Eric had scores of cousins, four grandparents, and more uncles and aunts than either he or Thomas could count. At least one of these relations brought Eric presents every week. They never gave Thomas anything, nor did they pay much notice to the little black boy.

He didn’t seem to care though. He’d spend hours wandering through the flower garden finding rocks and sticks that he’d bring to his mother. There in her room, they would make up stories about what kind of treasure he’d found. Afterward, when Eric’s family had gone, the robust blond child would ask Thomas about what he and Branwyn had done. He’d sit on his tanned haunches listening to the soft words that Tommy used to tell about his adventures with pebbles and twigs.

Every now and then Branwyn’s mother, Madeline, would come over for lunch, usually when the doctor was away.

“Does that man ever intend to make a honest woman outta you?” Madeline would say to her daughter, and before Branwyn could answer, “Not that I think you should marry a man like that. A man that takes a woman to his bed not even six months after his wife has died an’ gone to heaven. But here you are so far away from family an’ friends, an’ they treatin’ your son like he was a servant’s child. And you do so much for him, and then he makes you work at that flower shop. That’s not right, Branwyn. You shouldn’t put up with it. Either he should marry you or at least put something away for your future an’ your boy’s future. Here he have you all to himself so that you can’t meet no eligible man, an’ he ain’t doin’ nuthin’ for you either.”

The first few times her mother said these things, and more, Branwyn tried to argue. She didn’t want to marry Minas. They had different lives, and there was no need. He was a kind man, and no matter what his family felt, she and Tommy were always at the table for dinner and he never went anywhere without asking her and her son to come along.

“I want to work and to make my own money,” Branwyn said. “And Tommy’s special. He needs a lot of attention. His growth was so slow after that long time in the hospital. I can’t ask Minas to be responsible for another man’s child.”

But Madeline never seemed to care. In her eyes the doctor was taking advantage of her through her daughter.

“White people like that,” Madeline would say, “just like that arrogant boy that’s got Tommy runnin’ after him like some kinda slave.”

“The boys love each other, Mama,” Branwyn would argue.

“That white boy just run roughshod over Tommy, an’ you cain’t even see it,” her mother retorted. “He treatin’ Tommy like his property, his slave.”

This last word was Madeline’s worst curse. She would take Thomas in her lap and call him “poor baby” and tell him that he could come live with her whenever he wanted.

Thomas would look up at his grandmother and smell her sweet rose scent. He loved her, but he didn’t want to leave his mother. And he didn’t understand why she was always so angry. He would bring her green pebbles and seed-heavy branches that he sculpted to look like snakes. But this just seemed to upset Madeline more.

“Here he livin’ in Beverly Hills an’ all he got is sticks for toys,” the Mississippi-born Madeline would cry.

And what could Branwyn say? Any toys that she or Minas bought for Tommy wound up in Eric’s room. Whenever the blond Adonis would want to play with Tommy’s trucks or handheld electronic games, Tommy always handed them over, and after a while both he and Eric forgot who the original owner was.

One day Minas went into Eric’s room and gathered up all of Tommy’s toys and put them into a box. Eric bellowed and cried. He fell to the floor and pounded it with his fists and feet. Even Branwyn couldn’t console him. Minas brought the cardboard box to Tommy’s room on the third floor while Eric bawled and yelled on the second.

Sometime during the night, Tommy dragged the big box of toys to Eric’s room and left it outside the door.

“Why you do that, baby?” Branwyn asked her son the next morning. “Those toys belong to you.”

“It’s okay, Mama,” the tiny four-year-old replied. “Eric always wants to play with me and I don’t care. I don’t like those toys too much. They’re too bright anyway.”

How could Branwyn tell her mother that?

A year earlier Minas Nolan came home with a two-carat yellow diamond pin for her hat. He gave it to her at the dinner table so that the boys and Ahn could share in their happiness. But Branwyn put the pin away and did not wear it. Then Tommy remembered the jewel and asked his mother why she never put it on.

“It’s too bright, honey,” she’d said. “Like a big headlight on your head.”

And so he collected dead insects and pitted stones that had faces in them.

Branwyn sometimes worried that Eric took advantage of his smaller brother, but when she saw them together the fears dissipated. Eric and Tommy would go into the backyard every day after kindergarten and talk. Actually, Eric did most of the talking. Tommy was the listener, but Branwyn could see how much they loved each other.

One Saturday, just after they both had turned six, Eric had finally persuaded Tommy to play catch with their new baseball and gloves in the garden next to the glass-walled greenhouse. Branwyn was in her fourth-floor bedroom looking down on the boys. Tommy didn’t usually play catch with his brother because Eric was almost twice his size and threw too hard. But that day at breakfast, Eric promised to be careful. He was throwing underhand balls, and Tommy was smiling. But then Eric seemed to be urging the smaller boy to do something else. He kept saying, “Come on, Tommy, try it.” Finally Tommy threw the baseball overhand. It flew high and shattered one of the panes in the greenhouse wall.

The boys ran into the house.

A big yellow cat came out when they were gone. That was Golden, Ahn’s pet. She always followed the boys but never came out around them. Branwyn watched the cat stretch out on the spot where Eric had been standing. She wondered what the animal was getting from that piece of ground. It was as if the creature knew somehow that the places where the doctor’s son passed were blessed.

She sat there for much longer than she’d intended, just thinking about blessings and the yellow cat Golden. She thought about Eric, who took everything, and Tommy, who kept nothing. Eric the pirate. Eric the cowboy. Eric the spaceman. He could already read books on a third-grade level, but he was stubborn and never agreed to perform for his father’s friends.

Tommy rarely pretended to be anything. He got sick all the time and had not even met his own father.

Branwyn wondered how two such different human beings could even exist in the same world. Then she went down to see what they had to say about the baseball and Minas’s beloved greenhouse.

The boys were standing side by side next to the dishwasher in the kitchen when Branwyn entered the room. Minas, wearing his golf clothes, stood frowning over them. When she walked in, he smiled for her. This was probably why she found it so hard to leave: the happiness that she felt in everyone’s eyes whenever she entered a room.

“Eric threw a ball and broke a pane in the greenhouse wall,” Minas said.

“What?” Branwyn asked.

“Eric wasn’t careful, and he broke a window.”

“Is that true, Tommy?” Branwyn asked her son.

“Yes,” Eric said.

“No,” Tommy added. “I did it. I threw overhand and broke the window.”

“But I made him do it,” Eric said. “I kept tellin’ him to throw overhand. He didn’t wanna, an’ so it was my fault.”

Minas looked at Branwyn, bewildered at the turn of events. He often felt like this around her. He was so straightforward and certain, taking up facts like Tommy collected stones. But he never looked closely enough at what he saw. Without Branwyn, he often thought, he wouldn’t have understood the children at all.

After the boys had been chastised, they went out to play catch again. Branwyn and Minas sat at the butcher-block kitchen table.

“Will you marry me, Branwyn Beerman?” Dr. Minas Nolan asked for what seemed to him like the hundredth time.

Branwyn sighed and took his hand. She shook her head gently.

“Why not? Don’t you love me? Don’t you think I love you?”

She didn’t answer him. Her life for the five and a half years before had been like a dream. A rich and handsome doctor, a brother for her son, her son’s survival, and the flower garden. All of these things made Branwyn so happy that sometimes, when she was all alone, she cried.

At first she refused the doctor’s proposals because she felt that he needed her for Eric and not himself. His headstrong son would only heed her for the first few years. She thought that maybe Dr. Nolan looked on her the way he saw Ahn, a domestic with a few other qualities. But as time passed, she came to believe that he loved her as a woman. They went everywhere together. When they stayed in hotels, she was automatically registered as Mrs. Nolan. After a time marriage seemed like the right thing.

But then Elton came into Ethel’s Florist Shop not long after Tommy’s sixth birthday.

She hadn’t seen the tall, fine-looking Elton in Tommy’s whole lifetime, but he still made her heart skip and her breath come fast.

“Hey, sugah,” Elton said as if he’d only been away for the weekend.

“Don’t sugah me, Elton Trueblood. That’s the last thing in the world I am to you.”

Elton smiled, and Branwyn kept herself from bringing her hand up to still her breast.

“Don’t be like that, baby,” he said. “You know I just wanted to come an’ see how you doin’ an’ what’s goin’ on.”

“Your son is six years old an’ he hasn’t even met you,” Branwyn stated.

“That’s why I’m here,” Elton said. “I want to know about my boy.”

“Why?”

“Does a father need a reason?”

“The way I see it, you’re less a father and more like a sperm donor.” Branwyn had been waiting for years to hurl that insult. But the minute she did, she realized that all it proved was how strong she still felt about the man.

“Baby,” he said. “Tommy is my son.”

“How you know his name?”

“Your mother told me,” Elton said with a sly smile. “I know all about you, sugah. Your doctor boyfriend who won’t marry you—”

“At least he don’t mind a woman with a child. At least he don’t mind if that child sit on his lap and ask what the stars is made’a.”

But Elton would not be hurt.

“Come on and have lunch with me, girl,” he said. “Tell me about my boy.”

She said no and told him that she had to get back to work. When he left, she breathed a deep sigh but still didn’t feel that she had gotten enough air.

The next day Elton came back. The first time he appeared he wore sports clothes — a black dress shirt under a lime-green jacket. But today he appeared with gray-and-black-striped overalls.

“I got a job as a mechanic trainee at Brake-Co,” he told her. “In eighteen months I’ll be a licensed mechanic. I could even fix that Volvo you drivin’.”

“That’s very good for you, Elton,” Branwyn had said. “I’m sure that May must be very happy that you’re thinking about your future.”

“May? Shoot. I moved that heifer out. You know, she quit her job, got big as a house, and had the nerve to tell me that I was supposed to provide for her. Shoot. I provided a open door for her to go through and bus fare to take her home to her mama.”

“You just kicked her out? An’ she ain’t got no job?” Branwyn asked. “How’s she gonna live?”

“She moved out my house and three doors down to August Murphy’s apartment. Never even got on a bus. Just walked down the street, knocked on his door, an’ went in. Now you know she had to know the brother pretty damn well to move in with only five minutes’ notice.”

“What did you do about that?”

“Nuthin’. I was glad she was gone. All she evah did was lie around the house and talk about how this girl had bad extensions and that one was a cow.”

Branwyn remembered how May, when she was in a bad mood, had a sour nature. She would bad-mouth everybody except the person she was talking to at the moment.

“So you got tired of all that mess she talked, huh?” Branwyn asked, forgetting for a moment that he’d walked out on her when she was pregnant with his child.

“Even before we started fightin’ I was thinkin’ about you, Brawn,” Elton said. “’Bout how you always had a good word to say ’bout ev’rythang. An’ I was thinkin’ ’bout my son. You know, as soon as I found out that he was home I come ovah... but you’as already gone.”

Branwyn loved Elton’s simple language and his artfully told lies.

“Why didn’t you come after you found out where I was?” she asked, swinging her words like an ax.

“I didn’t know, Brawn,” he said, his voice rising into a higher register. “I swear. I went to your mama, but she was mad at me for bein’ a fool. It was only when she seen I was serious about a job and I left May, then she told me about where you was.”

“What do you want with me, Elton?”

“I just wanna see my son, baby.”

“Now how am I supposed to believe that? You left me three weeks after the doctor told me I was expecting. You never came to the hospital once to see your son.”

“I was scared, honey,” Elton said in a forced whisper. “I didn’t wanna see my boy with a hole in his chest, in a glass cage.”

The bell over the door rang, and a small white woman, who had a tiny hairless dog on a leash, came in.

“Hello, Mrs. Freemont,” Branwyn said. “I’ll be right with you,” and then to Elton, “You got to go.”

“What about Thomas?”

“Leave now, Elton. I don’t wanna lose this job over you.”

Elton gave Branwyn a hard look that she withstood with stony silence. Finally he turned away and walked out.

Elton came back four more times before Branwyn agreed to have lunch with him. The florist was on Pico, near Doheny. There was a hotel a few blocks away that had a restaurant Branwyn liked. They prepared a delicious tuna salad that she made sure to have twice a week.

Elton was wearing a T-shirt with a three-button collar and tan pants that hugged his butt. Branwyn had been dreaming about his lips and those hips for the two weeks since he’d first appeared at Ethel’s.

Why does he come by so often? she wondered each night. On one of those nights, the doctor had made love to her. And while he did, she closed her eyes and remembered the fever that took her over when Elton was in her bed. And when she remembered Elton and the things he did to her, she got so excited that she had one of those soul-shaking orgasms that left her shivering like a leaf — and crying too.

Afterward she couldn’t even talk to Minas. He lay back with his hands behind his head, proud of the way he’d made her holler and cry. He didn’t know, she thought, that she was cheating on him even while they were making love.

That was why she refused the doctor’s proposal of marriage that day after Eric took the blame for her son’s misdemeanor. If he knew the passion in her heart, he’d never give her a ring.

It wasn’t that she wanted to marry Elton. She didn’t dream about a house with him and Thomas anymore. She knew that as time went by, he’d come home later and later each night until finally he’d start skipping nights and then weeks and then he’d be gone. Her mother was right the first time when she compared him to heartbreak. But none of that changed how much she wanted him to kiss her and lay the flats of his hands on her sides.

How could she say yes to Minas Nolan when she was wanton in her heart? And why wasn’t Elton the kind of man that she could run to and live with until she was old and half-blind?

On the day she was to meet Elton for lunch, Branwyn brought Thomas to work with her. She made him wear his nice gray cotton pants and the maroon sweater that Eric, with the help of Ahn, had given him for his birthday.

Ethel Gorseman loved little Thomas because he never got into trouble when he was alone. If Eric came into the shop for any reason, the florist kept her eye on him every second. She liked Eric too, but he was a “walking disaster” in her opinion. If Eric ever came in alone with Branwyn, Ethel would hire Jessop, who owned the small arcade across the street, to look after him. She’d give Eric five dollars so that he could eat hot dogs and play video games instead of breaking her vases and tipping over her shelves.

Tommy wished that she would give him five dollars and send him over to visit Jessop when he was there, but she never did. Instead she would tell him about how florists keep flowers alive and why it was such a good job.

That day Branwyn had kept Tommy out of school. The excuse she gave Minas was that he had a cold, but that wasn’t so remarkable. Thomas was used to runny noses and coughing. Most of his life he’d been sick with something.

When Elton came in at noon, wearing his mechanic’s overalls, Branwyn pushed Thomas forward and said, “Elton Trueblood, this is your son, Thomas.”

She said these words almost as a challenge. But when she saw the love and joy in Elton’s eyes, she bit her lower lip and tasted salty tears coming down into her mouth.

Looking at them together, anyone would have known them for father and son. Elton reached out his hand, and Thomas shook it like he had been taught to by Minas.

“I’m your father,” Elton said.

“Pleased to meet you, Daddy,” Thomas said.

For a long time he had been wanting to call someone daddy. Eric said that to Minas, but Branwyn had always told Thomas that Dr. Nolan wasn’t his father. Minas would say that he wished that Thomas was his son too, but that only meant that he wasn’t.

Eric called Branwyn “Mama Branwyn.” But Thomas knew that that was okay because Eric’s mother had died.

Looking up into Elton’s hard, dark face, Thomas was a little scared, but he knew that he had to be nice to Elton because his mother had made him wear nice clothes. And so he let the big man hold his hand as they walked down Pico to the hotel where his mother liked to eat.

Elton kept asking the boy questions. What’s your favorite color? Do you have a girlfriend at that white school?

While they were sitting in the restaurant, Elton gave little Thomas a problem to solve.

“There’s a man,” he said, “with a fox, a big rooster, and a sack’a corn. He comes to a river where there’s a tiny li’l boat. The boat is so small that the man can only carry one with him across the river at a time. But if he takes the corn, the fox will eat the rooster, and if he takes the fox, the rooster will eat the corn.”

“Then he should take the rooster ’cause the fox won’t eat corn,” Thomas said with a smile.

“Then what?” Elton asked.

“Then he could come back for the... the fox.”

“But if he leaves the fox on the other side when he goes back to get the corn, the fox will eat the rooster,” Elton said with a sly smile.

Watching his father’s smile, Thomas forgot the riddle. This was his father he was looking at. His father like Dr. Nolan was Eric’s father. He had the same black skin that Thomas had and the same kinky hair.

“Stop bothering him, Elton,” Branwyn said, feeling that Thomas was confused by being cross-examined like some criminal.

“I’m just doin’ what a father’s s’posed t’be doin’, Brawn,” Elton said. “Helpin’ him to understand how hard the world is to see sometimes. Is he a li’l slow in school?”

“No.”

“I mean, it’s just a child’s riddle really,” Elton continued. “Just a trick.”

He looked at Thomas hopefully, but the small boy only stared at him, the foxes and chickens and grain gone from his head. He was wondering if Elton would come live with them in Dr. Nolan’s big house.

After lunch Branwyn went back to the flower shop and cried. She sat on a stool at the back of the big orchid refrigerator. Thomas stood next to her and held her hand.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?”

“I’m just happy, baby,” she said, choking on every other word.

“You don’t sound happy.”

“Sometimes people cry when they’re happy.”

“What made you so happy?”

“Seeing you and your father together at the same table, talking and telling each other things.”

“Uh-huh.”

Branwyn turned to her son and looked into his eyes.

“Would you want to live with your father if you had the chance?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Would he come an’ stay at our house?”

“No. We’d have to move away from Minas and Eric.”

“Could Eric come live with us?”

“No. He’d have to stay with his own father.”

Thomas thought and thought, standing there in the refrigerated room. He thought about his new father and his brother, Eric. He thought about his mother crying and wished that she didn’t have to be so happy.

“Maybe Daddy could come and visit sometimes,” he said at last. “And then I could still go to school with Eric and read with Dr. Nolan.”

A few weeks after Thomas had broken the greenhouse window, Eric came down with the flu. It was a bad flu, and he had a fever of 105. Minas was worried, and Ahn kept boiling eucalyptus leaves and bringing the steaming pots into the boy’s room. Eric was shivering and crying all through the night. He was in pain, and only Branwyn’s company would calm him. She sat up with him for most of three days. At the end of that time, Eric was laughing and playing and Branwyn was very tired, and so she went to bed.

The next afternoon, when Thomas and Eric got home from first grade, Thomas went to his mother’s room and found her still in bed.

“You tired, Mama?” Thomas asked.

“Very much, baby. I sat up so long with Eric, and now all I want is to sleep.”

Thomas and Eric spent many hours at her side that afternoon and evening, both of them trying to make her laugh.

She kept her eyes open as long as she could, but more and more she just slept. Minas wanted her to go to the hospital, but she refused.

“Hospital is just a death sentence,” she told him. “All I need is rest.”

On the third day Branwyn was not better. Eric heard his father tell Ahn that Branwyn had agreed to go to the hospital in the morning.

The blond tank rumbled up to his brother’s room and said, “They’re taking Mama Branwyn to the hospital in the morning. We should pick flowers for her so her room’ll be pretty.”

“The hospital?” Thomas said.

Thomas hated the hospital. He’d been there half a dozen times that he could remember. Twice for pneumonia that had developed after he’d come down with chest colds, twice for broken bones, once for a cut when he fell down on a broken bottle, and one time when he fainted in school for no apparent reason. Every time he went they gave him shots, and twice he’d had to spend the night. He knew that people sometimes died in the hospital, and so when he went to bed later that night, he couldn’t go to sleep. He sat up remembering the stories of how his mother came every day and they looked at each other through the glass bubble. He believed that she had saved him by being there, and he wondered who would be there for her if he was at school.

Thomas went to her room after midnight. Branwyn stayed in her own bedroom when she was sick. She needed everything quiet and “no man kicking around in the bed.”

He climbed up quietly on the bed and stared into his mother’s face. At first he planned just to look at her as she’d told him she’d done when he was asleep in the ICU.

“Didn’t you wake me up?” he asked her.

“No, baby. You needed to sleep to get better and so I just sat there, but I’m sure you knew I was there in your dreams.”

Thomas planned to do the same thing, to sit so close that his mother’s dreams would drink him in. But after a few minutes he worried that maybe she had died. She was so quiet, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

“Mama?”

She opened her eyes and said, “Yes, baby?”

“I know how to answer the story.”

“What story?”

“The one Daddy said.”

“What is it?”

“First you take the rooster to the other side an’ leave him there. Then you come back and get the fox and bring him to the other side. Then you put the rooster back in the boat and take him back and leave him on the first side and you take the corn over to where the fox is. Now the corn and the fox are together but that’s okay, and so you can go back an’ get the rooster.”

“You’re so smart, Thomas. Your father will be very happy.”

“Will you be okay now that I said it?” the boy asked.

“Why you cryin’, honey?”

“Because you’re sick and I don’t want you to die.”

Branwyn sat up. Thomas crawled up close to her and leaned against her slender shoulder.

“Are you scared ’cause I’m goin’ to the hospital?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s only for some tests,” she said. “Will you do what Dr. Nolan tells you while I’m gone?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know that I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not gonna die, baby. I’m gonna go in there and stay for a day or two and then I’ll be back here and wide awake.”

“But sometimes people die in the hospital,” he insisted.

“Sometimes,” she agreed. “But even when they do they don’t really die.”

“What happens to’em?”

“They just change. They’re still here in the hearts of all the people that loved them. Your grandmother says that she talks to granddaddy every night before she goes to bed. He’s still there for her whenever she gets sad.

“But you don’t have to worry about that. I’m still strong and healthy. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. You know that, right?”

“I guess.”

“Come here and lie down next to me,” she said. “Sleep with me in the bed tonight.”

And Thomas nestled up next to his mother, and they whispered secrets and little jokes until he finally fell asleep in her arms.

The next morning Thomas went to wake up Minas Nolan in his bed.

“Mama won’t wake up,” he told his mother’s lover. “But she said that it’s okay ’cause nobody never dies.”