Walter Mosley: Fortunate Son

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.