Fortunate Son

Clea had her whole life planned out. She would go to college and get her degree and then work at the UN translating French, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages for the sub-Saharan African nations. She would find a young black man who was either a doctor or a lawyer and marry him and move to Montclair, New Jersey, where she would relocate her parents and her sister. Her lazy brothers could fend for themselves.

But there they were kissing passionately in the early hours, in that hurtling train. Eric awoke once and saw them. Clea had her hand on Thomas’s while he kissed her neck again and again.

It was then that Eric thought about what his brother had said about the moon and tides. The Golden Boy, Eric, closed his eyes and muffled a sigh — his brother had somehow delivered him from his fear.

E i g h te e n h our s 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.

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That n i g h t E ri c 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 Mor-gan 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 2 5 0

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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 Pom-peii. There were rose-painted walls drawn upon with pedes-trian 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 2 5 1

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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.