Walter Mosley: Fortunate Son

Thomas Beerman was born with a hole in his lung. Because of this birth defect, he spent the first six months of his life in the intensive care unit at Helmutt-Briggs, a hospital in West Los Angeles. The doctors told his mother, Branwyn, that most likely he would not survive.

“Newborns with this kind of disorder, removed from the physical love of their mothers, often wither,” kind-eyed Dr. Mason Settler told her.

So she came to the hospital every day after work and watched over her son from six to eleven. She couldn’t touch him because he was kept in a glass-enclosed, germ-free environment. But they stared into each other’s eyes for hours every day.

Branwyn would read to the little boy and talk to him through the night after her shift at Ethel’s Florist Shop.

“I know you must wonder why it’s always me here and never your father,” Branwyn said to her son one Thursday evening. “Elton has a lot of good qualities, but bein’ a father is not one of them. He left me for one of my girlfriends less than a month after we found out I was having you. He told me that he’d stay if I decided not to have the baby. But Elton had the choice to be with me or not and you didn’t. I couldn’t ask you if you minded if I didn’t have you and if you didn’t have a life to live. No sunshine or sandy beaches. You don’t even know what a sandy beach is. So I told Elton he could leave if he wanted to but I was havin’ my baby.

“May Fine said that she’d be happy to be childless with a man like Elton. You know, your father is a good-looking man. He’s got big muscles and a nice smile.”

Branwyn smiled at Baby Thomas, who was then four months old. He grinned within his bubble and reached out, touching his mother’s image in the glass.

“But you know,” Branwyn continued, “May is gonna want a baby one day, and when she does, Elton and his good looks will be gone. And then she’ll be worse off than me. It’s like my mother said, ‘That Elton’s a heartbreak waitin’ to happen.’

“So he’s not here, and he probably won’t be comin’ around either. But that doesn’t matter, Tommy, because I will be with you through thick and thin, rain and shine.”

Branwyn brought children’s books and read and sang to Thomas even when he was asleep and didn’t seem to know she was there.

Dr. Minas Nolan was a heart surgeon who had temporary offices across the hall from the intensive care unit where Thomas and his mother spent that half year. Nolan was a widower, young and hale. A week after Thomas was delivered, Dr. Nolan’s wife, Joanne, had borne them a son. She died of complications thirty-six hours later. His son, Eric, came out weighing twelve pounds and twelve ounces, with a thick mane of blond hair, and arms and legs flailing. One of the nurses had commented that it was as if Eric had drained all of the life out of his mother from the inside, and by the time he was born, she was all used up.

Dr. Nolan often worked until eleven at night, when the ICU nurse on duty was forced by hospital regulations to ask Miss Beerman to leave. Branwyn always hesitated. She would have happily spent the whole night sleeping in a chair next to her baby. Then in the morning she could be the first thing he saw.

One evening, noticing the new mother linger at the unit door, Minas offered to walk Branwyn to her car.

“Oh, I don’t have a car, Doctor,” she said. “I get the bus down on Olympic.” The dark-skinned Negro woman had a beautiful smile and nearly transparent gray eyes.

“Well, then let me drive you,” the doctor offered.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I live very far away.”

“That doesn’t matter,” the doctor said. “I don’t have much to go home for. You see, my wife died in childbirth recently—”

“You poor thing,” Branwyn said, placing a hand on his forearm.

“Anyway, Eric, that’s our boy, is usually asleep when I get home, and there’s a nanny there... and I’m not very tired.”

Branwyn was taken by the doctor’s handsome Nordic features. He was blond and blue-eyed, and his smile was kind.

They drove down to Branwyn’s neighborhood near Crenshaw. He parked his silver Mercedes in front of her apartment building, and she said, “Thank you so much, Doctor. You know, it’s a long trip on that bus at night.”

There was a moment when neither of them talked or moved.

“Are you hungry, Miss Beerman?”

“Why... yes I am, Dr. Nolan.”

She wasn’t really, but the way the doctor asked the question, she knew that he needed company. A man losing a wife like that would be lost in the world, she knew.

There was an all-night place called the Rib Joint on La Brea, run by a wild character named Fontanot. He was a six-foot-seven Texan who smoked his ribs in the backyard of the restaurant and whose great big laugh could be heard from a block away.

Fontanot had a long face and sad eyes. He was very dark-skinned and powerful, in both his limbs and his will. At that time, the Rib Joint was very popular with the Hollywood set. Movie stars, directors, and big-time producers came there every night. They ordered Fontanot’s ribs for their private functions and often invited him to come along.

“I ain’t got time for no parties,” he’d say, shunning their invitations. “Make hay while the sun shines, that’s what my mama always told me to do.”

Fontanot did not fraternize much with the muckety-mucks from Hollywood. He laughed if they told a good joke, and he put ribs along with his homemade sauce on their tables.

When Minas and Branwyn came into the restaurant, sometime just before midnight, there was a line of at least a dozen parties waiting to be seated. Men and women were laughing and drinking and trying to get their names put ahead on the list. Minas hunted up a stool and put it against the jukebox so that Branwyn could get off her feet.

When Fontanot saw this simple gesture from the tiny window that looked out from his kitchen, he came out and shook hands with the doctor.

“Ira Fontanot,” the restaurateur said.

“My name’s Minas. Minas Nolan. And this is Miss Beerman.”

“You two are in love,” the sad-eyed giant informed them.

“Oh, no,” they both said at the same time.

“You might not know it yet,” Fontanot announced, “but you are in love. There’s no helpin’ that. All I need to know is if you’re hungry or not.”

“Starving,” Minas Nolan said with a deep feeling in his tone that struck Branwyn.

“Then come on back to my special table and I will serve you some barbecue.”

To be seated at the special table was the desire of every powerful customer at the Rib Joint. That table was there for Ira’s mother and for his new girlfriend.

Minda, Ira’s sainted mom, said that her son’s girlfriends were always new.

“The lady he’s seein’ might be with him for one birthday, but she’ll never see two,” Minda would say through her coarse smoker’s rasp.

Other than that, the special table, set in the corner of Ira’s kitchen, usually went empty. When a famous director like Heurick Roberts would ask Ivy, the hostess, to give him that table, she’d grin, showing her gold tooth, and say, “If I was to sit you in there with Fontanot he’d skin ya and clean ya and slather yo’ ribs wit’ sauce.”

But Minas and Branwyn didn’t know anything about the kitchen table and its special status. As a matter of fact, Branwyn thought that it was probably the worst seat in the house, being in the noisy kitchen and all, but she was willing to sit there because of that note of deep need in Minas’s voice when he declared his hunger.