The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  “I’m pretty good at drawing,” I said.

  “So you’re an artist,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.”

  We sat together playing Punch-Out!! for what seemed like a very long time, Jamie draining beer after beer. By the time Arch returned with the takeout, the evening had grown cool and fragrant with the scent of the magnolia trees surrounding the pool. No one asked what had become of Vanessa; I assumed she was having dinner with her mother.

  Arch flipped on the pool lights, turning everything cornflower blue. On the other side, across the lawn, the house was lit up like the Magic Kingdom at Disney World. Indeed, the whole effect of the evening was quite magical, save for Jamie’s crack about my cheap shoes and the collection of spent beer cans he was accumulating on the pool deck.

  At some point, Jamie wandered off toward the trees behind the pool, returning with three beers in his hands.

  Arch stood. “No, thanks,” he said. “Gotta drive Charlie home. Come to think of it, we probably ought to get going.”

  I said goodbye to Jamie with a timid wave and followed Arch back across the lawn. Just inside the kitchen door, he came to an abrupt stop. Standing before the refrigerator, the door open, was a slim blond woman who looked to be about fifty, holding an open bottle of white wine by the neck in one hand and a half-full glass in the other. Her long white bathrobe had fallen open, revealing a silk nightgown beneath. She gazed at us with a benumbed expression.

  “Oh,” Arch said. “Hi, Aunt Cici. We were just leaving.”

  Aunt Cici, Mrs. Haltom. She teetered a bit. I worried that she might drop the bottle or the glass and step into the shards with her bare, tender feet.

  “Where’s Vanessa?” Arch asked.

  Mrs. Haltom muttered something as she tipped the bottle and splashed wine into her glass.

  “Vanessa!” Arch called back into the house.

  Mrs. Haltom shuffled forward toward the island countertop. Without thinking, I took the bottle and placed it on the marble surface and grasped her hand. She turned toward me and opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  “This is Charlie, Aunt Cici,” Arch said.

  Vanessa appeared in the doorway. “I thought you’d gone to bed,” she said.

  She reached for the wineglass. “Come on, Mother,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Mrs. Haltom jerked her hand back, splashing wine on her nightgown.

  Arch stepped forward and slung her arm around his shoulder.

  “Go wait in the truck,” he said to me.

  A few minutes later, Arch came out of the house, climbed into the truck, and started the engine.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said as we rolled down the long driveway.

  If anything, I felt relieved. In Montague Village, someone’s mother staggering around blind drunk didn’t arouse much notice. It was somehow reassuring to learn that such things also happened on Belle Meade Boulevard.

  When we reached Montague, Arch parked and cut the engine, perhaps waiting to see if I would invite him in. I had no intention of doing so. But neither was I eager to part from him.

  “I guess I should be going,” he said. “See you Monday.”

  “Okay.”

  I stepped out and shut the door, and stood watching as Arch navigated out of the parking lot, following his taillights down the narrow side street until he made the turn onto Gallatin and disappeared.

  four

  On Monday morning, Arch waited for me outside Dean Varnadoe’s harbor with two grocery bags, filled with pairs of used Top-Siders and duck boots just half a size too large; some faded shirts with the little alligator on the lapel; khakis and button-down shirts only slightly frayed at the collar; and a nearly new navy blazer.

  “Jamie can be a real asshole,” Arch said. “But he’s right about your shoes.”

  I put on Arch’s Top-Siders and tossed my shoes in the garbage.

  Abandoning my old life took no effort whatsoever. I woke and left the apartment an hour before the other kids in Montague went out to the bus stop, and returned after dark. No one seemed to miss me. Terrence had varsity football and a new set of friends. On nights when both Sunny and my mother were working, I might hear the rap of Louella’s cane on the door, inviting me over to have supper with her and sometimes Terrence, or offering a plate of hot food covered in tinfoil. Terrence hadn’t turned on me completely, but when we saw each other, neither of us could pretend that things had not changed between us. Hence, when I was home, I kept to myself, doing homework, yearning to be on the other side of the river in the lavish houses of Belle Meade.

  Arch began to offer me rides home in the afternoon and kept nudging Jamie and me together. I didn’t object. Few childhood friendships begin through any kind of sincere linking of souls; people mostly cling to whatever they can grasp. I was a good choice of companions for Jamie. I was a better student than he was, but nowhere near the top of the class. Nor was I an athlete, or a star debater, or a musician. Being good at drawing and painting didn’t win you any popularity contests at Yeatman. So I had no advantages over Jamie, and every reason to be impressed, even awed, by the trappings of wealth that were commonplace to most of the other boys. I was eager and earnest, just happy to be there.

  Jamie told me things I wasn’t meant to know—about his mother’s drinking and pill-popping, for instance, and about his father’s ruthlessness.

  “Don’t buy his whole gentleman act,” Jamie said. “My dad is a pure son of a bitch. He destroys anyone who crosses him. He always gets what he’s after. The guys who don’t like it just have to sit there and suck on it.”

  I said nothing. But I had no trouble believing Jim Haltom got what he wanted.

  “It’s hilarious, really, watching all of those ‘old Nashville’ snobs bowing to kiss his ring,” Jamie said. “It must kill them, having to suck up to a hick from the sticks like my father.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You don’t know? My dad’s no blue blood. He’s a hillbilly. I’ve got cousins who are married to each other. Dad’s disowned his whole family, but everyone who’s been around long enough knows he’s new money trash. He never would have gone to college if he wasn’t good at football. Then when he got to Vandy, he latched on to Uncle David, and the rest is history.”

  “Uncle David?” I asked.

  “Arch’s dad,” he said. “He was a snob like all the rest of them, but even snobs get starstruck by the starting fullback. And once Dad saw the way people like Uncle David lived, he went after it like he was running the ball against Alabama. Which is why people who don’t know any better assume he’s a fifth-generation Belle Meader, not a guy who grew up going barefoot nine months of the year.”

  Jamie’s revelations about his father did not disillusion me; instead, they engendered even greater admiration and empathy. I knew exactly how Jim must have felt to come from nothing and find himself surrounded by people who had everything.

  “You know who hates him the most?” he said. “Fucking Varnadoe. He can’t stand it that my dad chairs the board at his precious Yeatman School. All the old guys are delusional about Yeatman, but Varny’s the worse, because of his fancy degrees and all of that Greek and Roman bullshit. He thinks he’s Marcus-fucking-Aurelius and my dad’s like some barbarian invader defiling the empire.”

  I told Arch what Jamie had said about his father and Varnadoe.

  “Jamie’s so full of shit,” Arch said.

  In the library, I dug the old Vanderbilt yearbooks out of the stacks and found Jim Haltom’s pictures there. There were shots of him clutching a football, gazing off into the distance, his brow furrowed with determination. The years had made him a bit heavier and grayer, but he still had the same look in his eyes—the intense gaze, always probing, looking for the next guy to knock on his ass.

  Later that fall, I was often the Haltoms’ guest at Vanderbilt games. I watched Jim Haltom huddled with business acqua
intances, paying no attention to what was going on in the stadium; half of the time, he never left the tailgate. (Admittedly, the Commodores didn’t offer anyone much to get excited about.)

  The more I learned about Jim Haltom, the more I watched him, the more I began to see him as a role model. He had taken his opportunity and made the most of it. This, I thought, was how one rose in the world. I wasn’t from the hills of East Tennessee, but my father was born and raised in Appalachia, just like Mr. Haltom. I began to draw conclusions. Without football, Mr. Haltom would never have left the woods of East Tennessee. Without Mr. Haltom, I’d never have left the streets of East Nashville. Having climbed out of his meager circumstances, he’d deigned to lift another like him, though perhaps less gifted, into the position of advantage he’d needed to achieve his remarkable rise. It was obvious, I thought. Jim Haltom was my fairy godfather. To deserve it, I merely had to follow the lead of his true son—Arch Creigh.

  As often as I could, I went home with Jamie after school until my mother or Sunny could get there to pick me up. The Haltom house was big enough to get lost in; you could go a week without having to see anyone you wanted to avoid. I rarely saw Mr. and Mrs. Haltom in the same room together. They were both very busy, Mr. Haltom with his business ventures, Mrs. Haltom with her social calendar and her philanthropy and the various regimens she undertook in her war against the twin tolls of time and booze.

  One afternoon, I left the game room and went into the kitchen for a Coke. Mrs. Haltom was at the club playing golf; Vanessa wasn’t home yet. Shirley was downstairs vacuuming. Jamie, I knew, was immersed in his video game. I left the Coke sweating on the glass-top table at the foot of the landing and tiptoed up the stairs and into Vanessa’s bedroom.

  The room had matching bedding and wallpaper, all in the flowery prints popular among people who took their decorating cues from Southern Living. Above the desk was a corkboard festooned with photographs.

  I couldn’t help myself; I slid the top drawer of the dresser open to gape at her underwear. I noticed something peeking out from beneath a sheet of floral contact paper—a wallet-sized school portrait of Vanessa, taken a few years earlier: braces and glasses, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. I should not have been surprised; I’d already learned from Jamie that Vanessa had only recently grown out of her awkward phase. Still, the picture transformed her in my imagination. Up to that point, she had hardly been real to me—more like an icon of idealized Southern womanhood in bloom. I tucked the picture into my front left pocket so I could take it home and look at it later, promising myself I’d return it the next time I visited and could slip upstairs unnoticed.

  I left Vanessa’s room and walked down the hallway toward the master bedroom. The door was cracked. I pushed it open and stepped inside. Against the wall stood an enormous canopy bed. In the corner sat a chaise lounge, and a table holding a stack of magazines and a single empty wineglass. A red-and-blue Persian rug covered most of the floor. In the corner nearest one closet door, a men’s valet stand. In the opposite corner, Mrs. Haltom’s white bathrobe hanging from a hook on the back of the door.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Mrs. Haltom stood in the doorway, dressed in a white golf skirt and a polo shirt the color of a fresh-cut lime. How had I not heard her coming up the stairs?

  “Where’s Jamie?” she asked.

  I stood frozen as Mrs. Haltom took her measure of me. I felt as if I might wet my pants.

  “He could play those goddamned games for hours and not notice if the sun had gone down and risen again,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Where are you from, Charlie?” she asked.

  “Nashville,” I said.

  “I mean what part,” she said. “I know you’re one of Jim’s projects, but I don’t know where you live.”

  “East Nashville,” I said.

  “I see,” she said. “And do you live with both of your parents?”

  “With my mom,” I said. “And my aunt.”

  “And what do they do?”

  “My mom works at a restaurant,” I said. “My aunt’s a singer.”

  “A singer?” Mrs. Haltom said. “Have I heard of her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Her name’s Sunny Brown.”

  “Sunny Brown?” She grimaced, as if the words tasted sour in her mouth.

  I was silent. I’d never thought about the name; she was just Aunt Sunny.

  “Has she recorded anything?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. She sings at . . . a bar.”

  “I’m sure she’s very good,” Mrs. Haltom said. “She was probably the best singer in her little town and came to Nashville thinking she was going to be a big star one day. This town is full of Sunny Browns, you know. None of them imagines that the peak of their career will be singing for tips in some shitty bar.”

  Perhaps Mrs. Haltom had heard Sunny singing in the airport back before her husband bought them their own plane. I did not ask her.

  “Is your mother a singer too?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “What about your father? What does he do?”

  I recited the amended version of my father’s demise and my mother’s struggles as a young single mom getting by with the help of a kindhearted cousin.

  “Sounds like a good story for a country song,” Mrs. Haltom said, her tone mercilessly dry. “Maybe Sunny Brown should write it. It might be her ticket to the top.”

  Mrs. Haltom’s face darkened. She looked me over, glancing up and down, examining me the way you might a painting you suspected might be counterfeit.

  “Empty your pockets,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s not every day that I catch someone snooping around in my bedroom.”

  I glanced at the door.

  “Pull them out,” she said. “I want to see the lining.”

  Head bowed, I pulled out the cotton pocket liners, lamely trying to palm the picture of Vanessa.

  “Give me that,” she said.

  I picked up the picture and handed it to her.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “In Jamie’s room,” I said. “On the floor. I just picked it up to give it back to him.”

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  I stuffed my pockets back in and kept my hands there. I looked at the door again. I wanted to run, not just from the room, but out the door and down the driveway and onto Belle Meade Boulevard to Harding Pike and all the way across the river.

  “Not a very flattering picture,” she said.

  She held it out to me.

  “Here,” she said. “You can have it.”

  I kept my hands in my pockets.

  “Go ahead, take it,” she said. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell her. Run along, now, Romeo.”

  Later that night, back home, I took the picture out and placed it on the desk in front of me, reliving the shame I’d felt when Mrs. Haltom ordered me to empty my pockets. I put the picture into a shoebox filled with baseball cards and swore I’d never look at it again.

  five

  The week before Thanksgiving, my mother announced that Nancy had phoned and invited both of us to the annual “leftovers party” the Haltoms held on the Friday after the holiday.

  “That’s nice,” my mother said. “Don’t you think?”

  Every time Sunny or my mother picked me up from the Haltoms’ or the Creighs’, I ran out the door, anxious to leave before anyone could see my aunt with her bottle-blond bouffant in her mustard-yellow ’73 Cutlass Supreme or my mother behind the wheel of her old Chevy Cavalier.

  “You have to work, right?” I asked.

  “I have the night off,” she said.

  “But you have plans,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  She glanced over at me with a purse-lipped smile.

  “If you’re going to spend so much time with these people,” my mother said, “I ought to get to know them a little bit.
”

  I held my breath as we rolled through the Haltoms’ gate. Cars were parked along the driveway. In front of the house stood two valets in red windbreakers. To my relief, my mother parked her Cavalier behind the last car down the hill and out of the reach of the floodlight mounted atop the garage.

  As we approached the house, I led my mother to the kitchen door, where I always entered with Jamie when we arrived after school. But before we reached it, I heard Jim Haltom’s voice.

  “Charlie!” he cried, his voice sharp, almost angry.

  We rounded the corner to find him standing on the porch, Arch behind him, holding the door open.

  “Y’all come on in the front,” he said, a tad out of breath. “Please.”

  Later, Arch explained to me why Mr. Haltom had made such a fuss. To people of Mr. Haltom’s generation, Arch said, the kitchen door was for servants.

  The party turned out to be a larger gathering than I’d expected. There were at least twenty people milling around in the entrance hall underneath the big chandelier, even more in the drawing room.

  “Would you like a drink, Bonnie?” Mr. Haltom said. “There are cocktails and wine. And we’ve just opened some nice champagne.”

  “Champagne sounds lovely,” my mother said.

  I never quite got used to watching my mother transform herself back into the debutante-in-waiting she’d once been. Then again, I, too, had become adept at dissembling. Perhaps it was an inherited trait.

  “Hello, Miss Boykin,” Arch said.

  Arch asked my mother about our Thanksgiving. He commented on the weather, complimented me on how well I was doing at Yeatman. Mr. Haltom handed my mother a flute of champagne. My mother thanked him and took a dainty sip.

  “Come on,” Arch said. “Everybody’s in the pool house.”

  I glanced over at my mother, now surrounded by both Mr. and Mrs. Haltom and Mrs. Creigh. She looked both elated and a bit helpless.

  “I should probably stay with my mom,” I said. “She doesn’t know anybody.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Arch said. “Come on.”