Fortunate Son: A Novel (20 page)

EIGHTEEN HOURS
later the train pulled into Penn Station. The boys put Clea into a yellow taxi, and she gave them her cell number.

“Call me if you want to come down and see NYU,” she’d said.

The boys met a nun collecting money for homeless children and asked her if there was an inexpensive place they could stay. She told them about a place uptown, and Eric put a twenty dollar bill in her jar.

THAT NIGHT ERIC
Tanner Nolan and Thomas “Lucky” Beerman were ensconced in the men’s residence at the 92nd Street YM&YWHA.

After the first few days of exploring together, the brothers started going out separately. Thomas discovered Central Park while Eric plumbed Lower Manhattan.

For the next three weeks they explored the city. Eric liked the big buildings and the Wall Street crowd. Down among the businessmen and -women he took tours, listened and learned firsthand about how the market was run. He made impromptu appointments with personnel officers, introducing himself as a UCLA senior who was looking for student programs in the stock market. He met a female stockbroker on a tour of Morgan Stanley. Her name was Constance Baker. After a fifteen-minute conversation, she took Eric under her wing.

He had told her pretty much the truth about his coming to New York. After a long separation he and his brother had come east on a holiday to have fun and get to know each other again. They were staying at the Y.

Constance was thirty-six, handsome, and in charge. She had a boyfriend named Jim Harris, who worked commodities and lived in a big house in Brooklyn. Constance had an apartment that overlooked the Hudson River in the West Village, where she slept during the week. On the weekends she stayed with Jim at his house in Brooklyn Heights.

Meanwhile, each day Thomas would walk south on Lexington until he got to 59th Street, and then he’d head west until he got to the southernmost side of the park. It was early April, and the cherry trees were filled with the white and pink blossoms of spring. There were vast lawns and horses and thousands of people wandering in the light of morning. He’d walk up the asphalt pathways each day until he got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once there he’d give what money he had and then spend hours among the paintings, sculptures, and jewelry of the ages.

He walked from ancient Rome and Greece into Africa and South America. He sat for hours one day among the wooden boats of the cannibals of the South Sea Islands. He imagined himself in the cramped canoes carved from whole trees, traveling under canopies of green along rivers and then out on the cobalt sea.

He spent five days in a row surrounded by the arts of China, India, and Japan. This section of the museum didn’t have many visitors, and often Thomas found himself alone, sitting on a courtesy bench in front of a great stone Buddha or in a re-created shogun’s home.

Thomas loved the stillness of the paintings. He imagined that this was what his grandmother Madeline saw when she was looking at the television, but the sound and action of the TV was too much for him; just the frozen moment of men and women in motion was enough to imagine a whole world of action and life.

His favorite tableau was a doorway to the left of the entrance of the museum. It looked upon a re-created room from Pompeii. There were rose-painted walls drawn upon with pedestrian scenes and still lifes, intricately tiled floors, and a slender stone bed behind which there was the image of a window. Thomas imagined looking down from that window on the people in the street below: men in togas and women in blues and reds with no electricity or cars, no airplanes, televisions, or telephones. People like him, lopsided and broken from just living, happy among one another, next to a sea that, Eric said, was as blue as a blue crayon.

Sometimes he would have silent dialogues with his mother or Alicia while meandering through the halls of art. But not so much as before, when he was on the streets of Los Angeles. Often he found himself thinking about the afternoons when he would take the subway downtown to Washington Square Park, where every other day or so he would meet Clea Frank for coffee.

BEFORE THOMAS FIRST
called her, Clea had decided not to see him or his beautiful “brother,” Eric. After all, she didn’t know them, and they had said that they were running from the law. But when Thomas called, he didn’t ask to get together.

“I just remembered that I had your number in my pocket,” the perpetual runaway said. “And I thought I’d see how you were doin’ in school.”

“It’s really good,” she said. “I like the classes, but they’re big, impersonal, you know.”

“How about the classrooms?” Thomas asked, remembering that awful light that drove him away.

“They’re big. Sometimes there’s as many as two hundred kids in the same class. But I can do the work, and the library’s nice.”

“Eric says that the library at UCLA is so big that you could sleep in it at night and nobody would find you . . . if you wanted to, I mean.”

“How is Eric?”

“He’s fine. He met a woman down on Wall Street who’s showin’ him about how investing works. I think he’s happy. I hope so.”

“Why would you worry about him?” Clea asked, forgetting that she didn’t want to know the boys. “He’s got everything.”

“He’s my brother,” Thomas explained.

“Deposit another ten cents for five additional minutes,” the mechanical operator said.

“I better be goin’,” Thomas said. “That was my last quarter.”

“What’s your number?” Clea asked. “I’ll call you back.”

“I don’t see one.”

“Why don’t you come down to Washington Square Park?” she said. “I could meet you under the archway at five.”

The phone disconnected, and Clea wasn’t sure that Thomas heard what she said. But at five she found him at the foot of Fifth Avenue and the park, sitting on the ground at the wire barrier that fenced off the crumbling arch from foot traffic.

“You made it,” she said, wondering to herself why she had asked him to come. It had been a week since she’d seen him, and she’d already been out on her first date with a good-looking senior who was about to start law school at Columbia.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I didn’t have any money, so I had to walk.”

“From where?”

“I was up at Ninety-second and Lexington, but that wasn’t so bad. I used to walk all day long when I lived in L.A.”

Clea didn’t know why she looked forward to seeing Thomas. She still talked to Brad (the future lawyer) and went out with him on weekends. But Thomas made her feel comfortable, and when he kissed her he seemed to be telling her something, something dear and intimate. When Bradley kissed her it was strong, and he seemed to know what he wanted. He made her want it too, though she hadn’t given in yet.

But she had agreed to go away with Bradley to Martha’s Vineyard with a bunch of seniors who had rented a house for the long weekend. They would stay in the same bedroom. She told herself that she wanted to go, and her new girlfriends in the dorm agreed that she should.

THOMAS WAS WALKING
across a broad green field in Central Park. The day was so beautiful that he didn’t want to go into the museum just yet. He had not been so happy since he was a child. All day he walked and studied and dreamed about kissing Clea, and in the evening he got together with his brother and they talked about their day.

Eric was liking New York too. Constance had gotten him an afternoon job as an intern, and he spent four hours a day with other college students learning about high finance. But in the evenings he was happy to be quiet and listen to his brother regale him with facts about Mesopotamian cylinder seals and pre-Columbian clay whistles.

Thomas was walking across that field, thinking about asking Eric to come with him to the museum tomorrow, Saturday, when he walked into someone’s chest.

“Excuse me,” he said as he looked up and saw the blue uniform of the NYPD.

“Put your hands up, son,” the policeman said, “up and behind your head.”

CLEA’S CELL PHONE
rang just when she was beginning to wonder if Thomas had somehow figured out that she was going away for the weekend with Bradley. He hadn’t called about getting together, and they hadn’t seen each other since Tuesday. She still wanted to be friends with the lame man-child, but there was no future with him.

“Hello?”

“Clea, it’s Eric.”

“Hi. I was expecting Lucky.”

“They got him in jail.”

“What for?”

“Some kid mugged a woman in Central Park, and they grabbed Tommy for it.”

“He wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“No. They found the kid who did it, but Tommy didn’t have any ID and so they took him to jail as a vagrant.”

“A vagrant?” Clea was amazed. Maybe he really was jinxed.

“He told’em his name was Bruno Frank, so . . .”

“Where are you?”

WHEN CLEA CALLED
Bradley his machine answered. She was relieved not to have to talk to him, and also not to be going with him to the Vineyard.

The police station was on 86th Street. The sergeant in charge asked her a dozen questions about Bruno.

“What is his birthday?”

“January 12, 1986.”

“What is his middle name?”

“No one in our family has middle names.”

“Why doesn’t he have ID?”

“He doesn’t have a license and, anyway, he lost his wallet.”

Eric and Thomas had worked out all of the lies on the train ride before they got to Denver. Later on, after they had reached New York, Clea had told Thomas it was all right to use her last name. She hadn’t really believed that Thomas was in such deep trouble, or that the police would just grab him off the street for no reason.

Eric posed as Clea’s boyfriend from NYU.

“Your brother should really have identification,” the policeman said.

“I’ll get him to do it, officer,” she said, relieved.

The three caught a cab a few blocks away. Eric gave the driver an address on the West Side Highway near 12th Street. There they entered a twelve-story glass apartment building. The doorman seemed leery at first, but when Eric gave him his name he handed over the key and allowed them entrance.

As he worked a key on the door of the penthouse, Clea asked, “Why are they letting us in here?”

“Connie said that I could stay here on the weekends if I wanted. She said that she’d leave my name at the desk.”

“But shouldn’t you knock?” Clea asked.

“She spends every weekend with her boyfriend in Brooklyn,” Eric answered. “I thought we could go out in the Village this weekend. Connie said that it’s a pretty big place.”

The transparent walls allowed a nearly unobstructed view up and down the Hudson River. They could see the Statue of Liberty and across to Hoboken.

“I WAS SUPPOSED
to go away with some kids to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend,” Clea was saying that evening after they had eaten take-out Chinese. “But I’d rather be here with you guys.”

Thomas had been quiet since getting out of jail. He sat close to the future linguist and ate hardly at all.

“What’s wrong, Lucky?” she asked.

“I don’t like bein’ in jail. But I think that’s where I’m gonna end up.”

“No,” Eric said. “I won’t let that happen.”

“I didn’t do nuthin’ today, man. I was just walkin’ in the park thinkin’ about you guys an’ the pictures. But those cops just grabbed me, and even though they knew I didn’t do nuthin’, they took me to jail. One suckah in there started beatin’ on me the minute he saw me. I didn’t even look at him.”

There was a pronounced lump over Thomas’s left eye.

“I’m sorry,” Eric said.

“They just see a black man,” Clea said, “and they think he did something wrong. It happens all the time.”

“I never had such a good life as I do right now,” Thomas said, unaffected by apologies or explanations. “I got friends and places t’sleep an’ that museum. You know, I could spend every day for a year lookin’ in there. I could live there. I asked them about bein’ a guard, but you know you need a real Social Security numbah and a phone and a high school degree at least to work there. And even if you walk in the park, you could get grabbed up an’ put in the Tombs.”

They were sitting on a leather couch in front of a low glass coffee table. The sunset lit a fire behind New Jersey.

Without warning, the door to the hall came open and a woman walked in.

Eric jumped to his feet.

“Connie,” he said.

“Hello, Eric.” She had short red hair and an aggressive, angular face.

When Thomas met her eye, he thought he saw disappointment, but then she put on a bright smile.

Sharp as a hatchet.
The words came into Thomas’s mind. After a moment he remembered that it was something Ahn used to say.

“I’m sorry,” Eric was saying, “but I thought you said you were away on weekends.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just came back for a few things. Who are your friends?”

Eric introduced Thomas as his brother and Clea as his brother’s friend. Connie smiled and asked, “Does anybody want a drink?”

Clea joined their hostess for a glass of white wine. Eric had a Coke, and Thomas took tap water without ice.

Then Constance Baker regaled them with stories about her day. It mostly concerned trading and investments. A terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia caused a flurry because of a bus manufacturer. Only Eric seemed to understand what she was talking about.

But Constance was a good host. She asked Clea about NYU and then if Thomas was in school too.

“I wanted to go to school,” Thomas said, “but it wouldn’t make no difference.”

“Why not?”

“It just wouldn’t.”

“Hm,” Constance mused. “Eric, will you come into the other room for a moment please?”

They went into her bedroom, and she closed the door.

“I think she likes your brother,” Clea said.

“Everybody likes Eric. When we were kids he used to go to parties all the time.”

“Didn’t you go?”

“Not too much. No. I coulda gone, I guess, but I liked stayin’ home with my mother. We used to talk a lot.”

“Is that Eric’s mother too?”

“Not by blood. But she loved Eric and me.”