Fortunate Son: A Novel (2 page)

The next night they were both quiet on the drive. The only words the doctor spoke were “thank you” when Branwyn got out to go to her door.

She liked it that Minas stayed in front of her apartment until she was well into the building.

MINAS NOLAN WORKED
nearly every day after his wife died. And almost every night he stayed late and drove Branwyn Beerman to her door. After many days had passed, he made an appointment to talk to Dr. Mason Settler about Thomas Beerman’s condition.

“There’s nothing more I can do, Minas,” Dr. Settler, head of the pediatric section of the ICU, said. “I’m surprised that the boy has lived so long. You know, his immune system is off, and I don’t like the way he’s breathing.”

“You can’t just let him die without trying something, Doctor,” Minas said.

“What?” the elder Dr. Settler asked.

“Something.”

TWO WEEKS LATER,
when Minas and Branwyn pulled up in front of her building, she hesitated before opening the car door.

“Dr. Nolan.”

“Yes, Miss Beerman?”

She took a deep breath and then said, “I have something I want to ask you.”

“What’s that?” he said in a whisper.

“Do you ever plan to kiss me?”

Dr. Minas Nolan had never in his life been without words. And even then he thought he had an answer to Branwyn’s question. But when he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out.

“Never mind,” Branwyn said, and she pulled the handle on the door.

Minas reached out for her arm.

“No,” he said.

“No what?”

“I . . .”

“What?”

“I never, I never thought that you wanted me to . . . and I was afraid that you’d stop coming with me if I . . .”

Branwyn turned toward the doctor and held out her arms. He rushed into the embrace, and they both sighed. They hugged without kissing for the longest time. It seemed that with each movement of their shoulders they got closer and closer, until one of them would groan in satisfaction and chills would jump off their skin.

“Let’s go back to your place,” Branwyn said finally.

That’s when he first kissed her.

He turned the ignition and slipped the car into gear.

She touched the side of his neck with two fingers and said, “You drive me crazy.”

THEY NEVER WENT
to sleep that night. The first rays of the sun found them nestled together, thinking very close to the same thoughts.

“I’m worried about Thomas,” Minas said after a very long, satisfying silence.

“What do you mean?” Branwyn asked, rousing from her lassitude. She had just been thinking that she had enough time to go see Thomas before she had to be at work.

“Dr. Settler doesn’t know what he’s doing for the boy. He just keeps him in that bubble, waiting for him to die.”

“No.”

“Yes. He has no positive prognosis. I think you need to try something else.”

“Like what?”

“You need to take him out of that place and hold him and love him. Maybe he’ll live.”

“Maybe?” Branwyn asked, knowing that this man cared more for her than the whole of Helmutt-Briggs Hospital and every other doctor she had ever known.

She was thinking over what he had said when loud crying erupted from somewhere outside the master bedroom. Minas jumped up, and Branwyn followed him into the room across the hall. There, in a large crib, sat a giant baby with golden hair and eyes the color of the Atlantic Ocean. He was hollering, but there was no pain or sorrow in his face, just mild anger that he’d become hungry a moment before the nanny brought his food.

The nanny was a small Asian woman (later, Branwyn would find out that Ahn was from Vietnam) who seemed too small even to lift the child tyrant—Eric. But she hefted the thirty-five-pound infant from his crib and stuffed the rubber nipple of the plastic bottle into his mouth.

“He’s so big,” Branwyn marveled. “Twice the size of Thomas. And his eyes so blue. I never seen anything like it.”

Eric, nestled in the tiny nanny’s arms, suckled the bottle noisily while staring with wonder into Branwyn’s eyes.

“He like you,” Ahn said with a nod and a smile.

Branwyn tried to figure out how old the woman was. She couldn’t tell by the weathered face or the tiny features. She smiled at the woman and held out her arms, taking the behemoth baby to her breast.

Eric dropped his bottle and stared open-mouthed at the woman holding him. He made a soft one-syllable sound and put his hands on her face.

“Ga,” he said.

“Ga,” Branwyn replied with a smile.

Suddenly Eric started crying, hollering.

“You stop that crying right now, Eric Nolan,” Branwyn said in a stern but loving voice.

Abruptly baby Eric stopped, surprise infusing his beautiful, brutal face.

Ahn smiled and hummed.

“That’s the first time he’s ever obeyed anybody,” Minas said softly so as not to break the spell. “Usually when he cries, there’s no stopping him.”

“That’s because Eric and I understand each other. Don’t we, boy?”

Eric laughed and reached out for Branwyn’s face like a man come in from the cold, holding his hands up to a fire.

Ahn made breakfast while Branwyn, Eric, and Minas went to the drawing room on the first floor. There they sat on the divan that faced a picture window looking out on the Nolans’ exquisite flower garden.

“It’s so beautiful, Doctor,” Branwyn said while bouncing the baby on her lap. “You have more flowers than the florist I work for.”

“My wife loved flowers.”

“So do I.”

Minas was looking at his son’s white body beaming against Branwyn’s dark-blue dress and darker-still skin.

“Don’t you think that you should call me Minas or honey or something like that?”

Branwyn laughed and so did Eric.

Then a deep sadness invaded the woman’s face.

“Did I say something wrong?” Minas asked her.

“I shouldn’t be happy like this when my baby can’t even be comforted by my arms.”

Minas opened his mouth to say something, but again he could not find the words.

Eric opened his mouth too, and Ahn—who had just entered the room carrying a platter of sliced fruit, cheese, and bread—had the distinct feeling that the baby could have spoken if he wanted to. But Eric just stared at the black woman with the intensity of a much older child.

“I have to go to the hospital . . . , Minas.”

“I’ll drive you,” the handsome doctor said.

ON THE RIDE,
the doctor said again that Thomas would never get better as long as he was in that bubble.

“He needs his mother’s arms and the sun,” Minas told her.

“That’s what I told Dr. Settler, but he said that with Tommy’s lung like it is he’s liable to get an infection and die if they let him out.”

“He won’t grow in there,” Minas said, “and he won’t get better.”

“But what will happen if I take him out?”

“He’ll be your baby in your arms.”

“But will he die?”

“I don’t know. He might. But one thing’s for sure . . . he’ll never grow to be a man in the ICU.”

THE DOCTOR DROPPED
Branwyn off at Helmutt-Briggs and then drove back to his home in Beverly Hills. Before he was in the front door, he could hear Eric’s howls. Minas found the boy and Ahn in the nursery. She was holding him, and he was battering her face with pudgy fists. The boy had been screaming at the top of his lungs until his milky skin turned red.

“He won’t stop,” Ahn told the doctor.

Minas took the boy in his arms. Eric fought and struggled and screamed and shouted and hollered. Hot tears flooded out of his eyes. Every now and then he’d stop long enough to be fed, but as soon as the bottle was empty, he started in crying again.

It was like that all day. Dr. Nolan examined the boy for gas and then infection, but he couldn’t find anything and the baby couldn’t talk. All he could do was yell and cry.

At four thirty in the afternoon, after what seemed like three years of tears to the doctor and Ahn, the telephone rang. Minas rushed to it, hoping for some heart attack or stroke that would take him to the peaceful operating room.

“Dr. Nolan?” a woman asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m calling from the ICU at Helmutt-Briggs. We were told that you’re familiar with a woman named Branwyn Beerman.”

“Yes.”

“Well, Doctor,” the woman said, “we think that she removed her son from the isolation unit he occupied. He’s gone from the hospital, and the number we have for her on file has been disconnected.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Do you know how we can get in touch with her?”

Eric was screaming two rooms away.

“Don’t you have an address for her on file?” Minas asked.

“We don’t have the staff to send, Doctor, and the head of the unit has ruled out calling the police.”

“So, again, what do you want from me?” Nolan asked.

“We thought that maybe you knew how to reach her. Her baby might die outside of the isolation unit.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, I don’t know how to reach her.”

MINAS NOLAN, THE
Vietnamese nanny, Ahn, and Eric all piled into the silver Mercedes and drove down to a street off Crenshaw. There were no buzzers at the front door, and the mailboxes had numbers but no names.

On the first floor of the dilapidated, modern building, only one apartment door in the long corridor of doors was open; just inside sat an extraordinarily thin black man wearing only a pair of black cotton pants.

“Evenin’,” the man said to Minas as he hurried by with his son and the nanny looking for some sign of Branwyn.

“Hello,” Minas replied. “Excuse me, sir.”

“You lost?” the old man asked. “You look lost.”

“I’m looking for Branwyn Beerman.”

“You from that hospital?” the man asked suspiciously.

“I’m a friend of hers.”

“Then why don’t you know where she live at?”

“I’ve never been up to her apartment. I’ve only ever dropped her off at the door.”

“Oh,” the man said, smiling now. “You’re that doctor always takes her home after she visits with her poor baby.”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“You not comin’ to take her baby away now are ya?”

“No, sir. I’m the one who suggested that she take Tommy out of there.”

The whole time in the car and while they stood in the hall talking to the old man (whose name was Terry Barker), Eric screamed deafeningly. Nothing that Ahn or Minas did or said could stop him.

Terry told them that Branwyn lived on the fifth floor, but the elevator didn’t work.

They scaled the stairs and made it to 5G. The door came open before they knocked. Branwyn was standing there, beautiful with babe in arms.

“I heard Eric from out on the street,” she said. “I would have come down to meet you, but I didn’t want to jostle little Tommy.”

Thomas Beerman was small and still in his mother’s arms. He moved his head only to keep an eye on her face. His hands were holding tight to her thumb and forefinger.

Eric stopped crying when Branwyn appeared.

“Can we come in?” Minas asked, relieved at the silence Branwyn brought into his life.

MINAS NOLAN CHECKED
baby Thomas for signs of disease or decay.

“His breath is a little labored,” Minas announced. “It would probably be best to put him in an oxygen tent for part of each day.”

“I don’t have no oxygen tent,” Branwyn said.

She was sitting on the bed with both boys. Thomas was in her lap, while Eric nestled up against her thigh. At one point Eric raised his head and looked at Tommy. He brought his hand down with some force against the recently liberated baby’s head. Thomas didn’t cry but merely frowned at the pain.

Branwyn grabbed the offending forearm and said, “Eric Nolan, you are welcome in my house but only if you are kind to my son, Tommy. Do you understand me?”

Eric’s face twisted into agony. He was about to let out a scream.

“I don’t want any’a that yellin’ in my house,” Branwyn said, and Eric’s expression changed into wonder.

“I had an oxygen tent brought over to my place for Joanne when she had pneumonia last year,” Minas said. “Why don’t you come and stay with us until young Thomas here has built up his strength?”

Branwyn thought about saying no, but Tommy needed a doctor and it was plain to see that Eric needed a mom.

2

M
OTHER 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.”