Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

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.”