The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  “Now, Bonnie,” Mrs. Haltom said. “Remind me where you came from.”

  “South Carolina,” my mother said. “Greer. It’s a little town just outside of Greenville.”

  “I’ve heard Greenville’s lovely,” Mrs. Haltom said. “What made you leave?”

  “After Charlie’s father died, I thought it might be good for us to have a fresh start,” my mother said.

  “So far from your family?”

  “I have a cousin here.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Haltom said. “The singer.”

  My mother offered no further explanation beyond a polite nod.

  “You and Ellen Creigh have become quite close,” Mrs. Haltom said.

  “She’s been very kind,” my mother said.

  “How do you like working for Kenton Tate?”

  “Mrs. Tate is wonderful,” my mother said. “Just lovely.”

  “She adores you,” Mrs. Haltom said. “She told me you’ve come along so quickly. Isn’t that right, Jim?”

  Mr. Haltom lifted his head. “Yes,” he said. “Very quickly.”

  Vanessa touched my arm. “Will you help me clear the plates?”

  I all but leapt from my chair.

  In the kitchen, we found Shirley putting away the last of the pots and pans, two hours after the end of her normal shift. When she saw us come in with the plates, she sighed and reached for her apron.

  “Please don’t, Shirley,” Vanessa said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  Shirley ignored her, strapping on her apron and stepping up to the sink with a curt efficiency.

  “I’m so sorry, Shirley,” Vanessa said, her voice weary with shame. “Can I give you a ride to the bus stop?”

  “No, thank you, honey,” Shirley said. “Y’all just get back in there. Don’t leave that poor girl alone for too long.”

  By the time we got back to the dining room, however, they were already up from the table—all but Jamie, who sat waiting for us, looking both bemused and annoyed.

  “Where’d they go?” Vanessa asked.

  “They’re giving Charlie’s mom a tour of the carriage house,” he said. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  “Let’s go find them,” Vanessa said.

  In the carriage house, Mrs. Haltom was explaining all of the work that had gone into the recent remodel. She described each phase of the project as if she’d done the job herself.

  “The original floors weren’t at all what I asked for,” she said. “So I had them ripped up and replaced.”

  “I’m sure these are much nicer,” my mother said.

  “For twenty-six thousand dollars, they ought to be,” Mrs. Haltom replied. “Right, Jim?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Mr. Haltom said.

  “There are two bedrooms in the back,” Mrs. Haltom said. “Would you like to see?”

  We followed her down the hallway. The master bedroom had a queen bed and a wall full of windows facing out on to the rose garden and a big private bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a shower. The second bedroom was smaller, with a double bed and a single window facing the boxwood grove in the backyard, but it had its own half bath and a desk and an empty bookshelf and a chest of drawers.

  Mrs. Haltom turned toward me.

  “How would you like to live in a place like this?”

  “It’d be great, I guess,” I said.

  “Quite an upgrade from where you are now, right, Bonnie?”

  “Nancy,” Mr. Haltom said, “please.”

  “I don’t understand,” my mother said. She gave Mr. Haltom a winsome glance, which seemed to plead for some gesture of mannerly intervention.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Haltom said. “Did you think I meant to insult you? On the contrary. We have a proposition for you. For you both, as a matter of fact.”

  “Jesus, Mom,” Jamie said. “Would you spit it out already?”

  “Jamie,” Mr. Haltom said.

  “As you probably know,” Mrs. Haltom said, “it’s going to be a very busy year for me. I’m chairing three different galas in addition to my normal slate of obligations. To make matters worse, the girl I’ve had for five years has decided to go and get pregnant, and I’m going to need someone more than three days a week given all of the big things that are coming.”

  “It sounds like you’ll be very busy,” my mother said.

  “The long and short of it is this,” Mrs. Haltom said. “I need a new assistant, and I’d like it to be you. I know you’re working by the hour for Kenton Tate, but I’ll need much more of your time, and it will be fairly flexible. So I’d like to put you on salary—say, thirty thousand, plus we’ll take care of whatever you owe Yeatman after financial aid. And I’d need you closer than East Nashville. So we’d like the two of you to live here.”

  Mrs. Haltom swung her hand back in a long, circular wave around the room.

  “I don’t know what to say,” my mother murmured.

  “Say yes,” Mrs. Haltom said.

  “But Mrs. Tate,” my mother started.

  “I’ve already spoken to her. I’ll loan you out when she needs you until she can find a new girl of her own. She doesn’t really need you, you know. She just likes the company. Same for your deal at Serenity. That was just a favor to Ellen. They’ll get on fine without you.”

  “So you would want me to start right away?” my mother asked.

  “You can move in tomorrow if you like.”

  My mother bowed her head. Her cheeks had turned crimson. Mr. Haltom and Vanessa seemed even more embarrassed.

  I should have felt ashamed, or affronted, but I was giddy. I didn’t give much thought to the reasoning behind the invitation. If anything, I assumed it was just another case of competition between Belle Meade grande dames. All Mrs. Haltom wanted, after all, was to be Mrs. Creigh—to be revered as an icon of genteel grace and largesse. I had no real consciousness of humility, or humiliation—of that sort, anyway.

  Even if she knew what she was in for with Mrs. Haltom, my mother couldn’t refuse. She’d never even graduated from high school; it would have taken her years to get anywhere close to what Mrs. Haltom was offering her overnight. And Mrs. Haltom knew, by making the offer in front of me, that if my mother refused or demurred, she’d have to justify turning down a chance to get us both out of Montague Village, where the sound of gunfire and breaking bottles drifted through the walls at night and the few people who had ever greeted me with kindness now looked on me with a resentment bordering on hatred.

  My mother had to take the job, but not just for me. Ever since she’d brought me to Yeatman, I could sense her longing for the kind of life she’d given up. She saw women her own age who had never been forced to work to survive, whose hardest choice seemed to be whether to spend spring break on a private Gulf Coast beach or on the slopes in Vail, whose biggest worry seemed to be whether their sons would get into Vanderbilt. By living in the Haltoms’ carriage house and working for Mrs. Haltom, my mother knew she would not be equal to any of those women, but she’d at least enjoy some proximity to their privilege.

  “Children,” my mother said, addressing Jamie and Vanessa, “would you approve of our living here?”

  “Of course, Miss Boykin,” Vanessa said.

  “Yeah,” said Jamie. “I think it would be cool.”

  I nodded.

  “Jim?” my mother asked.

  “Absolutely, Bonnie,” Mr. Haltom said, recovering himself somewhat. “Charlie’s practically a member of the family now. I know it seems very sudden, but we feel like you’ll be happy here, and we know you’ll do a fine job.”

  “Thank you,” my mother said.

  “So you accept?” Mrs. Haltom said.

  “I do,” my mother said, with all of the enthusiasm of a mail-order bride.

  “Grand,” Mrs. Haltom said.

  Sunny sat on the couch smoking while we carried our boxes out. The Haltoms’ caretaker, Scott, had driven over to help us move.

  “I won’t be holding your room,” she s
aid. “So don’t come crawling back when that old bitch kicks you out on the street.”

  My mother didn’t say a word. She might have felt guilty about ditching Sunny, who had taken us in when no one else would. She probably also worried that Sunny was right—that our elevation would be cut short by a change of heart or a misstep.

  In any case, our last moments as a makeshift family were depressingly unceremonious. Sunny refused to get up off the couch; my mother had no interest in appeasing her.

  “I’ll give you a call when I find out our new number,” my mother finally said.

  “You do that,” Sunny said.

  “Bye, Aunt Sunny,” I said.

  “See you around, kiddo.”

  We must have seemed so ungrateful. But what could we do? Sunny couldn’t possibly have thought my mother would be better off staying at Café Divorcée with nothing to show for it but gray roots and a gin blossom.

  We walked out to the parking lot. Scott had already started back toward Belle Meade. My mother and I climbed into the Cavalier and followed him.

  seven

  Ours was not an especially unusual arrangement. In recent years, the wealthier Yeatman families had taken to sponsoring financial aid boys and rehabilitating their families’ circumstances. De’Ante Gillette, a football star who ended up going to Furman on a full athletic scholarship, had lived with Graham Burke’s family since the eighth grade. After De’Ante started at Yeatman, his mother transitioned from selling Avon to managing the cosmetics department at one of Graham’s father’s department stores. Jarrett Hutcherson had his own bedroom at Haynes Reynolds’s house and stayed there at least three nights a week.

  When I pointed out that most of these boys were ringers who’d dramatically improved the fortunes of the football team, Arch assured me that countless lavish acts of generosity were dispensed without anyone ever noticing, simply because the beneficiaries were not minorities or star athletes. Sometimes, he said, they were even from the same zip code as the Haltoms and the Creighs.

  “You have no idea how many people driving around Belle Meade in new Beemers don’t have two nickels to rub together,” Arch said.

  So I was afforded the illusion that my good fortune resulted solely from beneficence.

  In her new position, my mother’s main tasks were running errands, managing Mrs. Haltom’s appointments and checkbook, making phone calls, and writing thank-you notes, letters of invitation, and the occasional bit of personal correspondence. My mother had lovely handwriting. She wrote perfect cursive on evenly spaced lines so precise that they would have seemed machinelike if not for their softness and femininity. I could practice for a thousand hours and still be incapable of producing a single line of cursive like my mother’s.

  “If only you knew calligraphy,” Mrs. Haltom sighed.

  Among my mother’s new amenities was the use of the Haltoms’ Jaguar. Sometimes I rode along. It was easy to see why they’d named the car after a cat—the engine positively purred.

  One afternoon, we were driving home on Highway 100, a long stretch of road running parallel to the Harpeth River.

  “Watch this,” my mother said.

  She threw the gearshift into second. The car lurched; that gentle purr turned into a roar, dropping and rising again as she moved through the gears up to fifth. The trees along the roadside became a hurtling blur. As we neared a turn in the road, my mother shifted back into fourth and eased off the accelerator. The car drifted back down to normal speed, and the engine resumed its quiet hum. My mother giggled like a schoolgirl, her eyes bright with exhilaration.

  The hard part of the job was not the work itself. Mrs. Haltom wanted to be a good person, I think—or at least, she wanted to be seen as such. Looking back now, the thought of her in those years fills me with a far greater measure of pity than resentment. Was she entitled, selfish, manipulative, spiteful? Yes, she was all of those things. But could it be the case that those outward flaws were merely symptoms of a deeper malaise? I think they were.

  Most of us imagine that, were we to be as fortunate as she was—to have millions in the bank, to live in a sprawling manse on Belle Meade Boulevard, to have servants at our beck and call, to fly around in a private jet and buy whatever we liked without even looking at the price tags, to have a social calendar filled with grand events in opulent settings—most of us imagine this would be more than enough to make us happy, or, at least, content. But what if we were to have all of these things and discover that they weren’t enough?

  I, for one, could not then conceive how anyone could have all the Haltoms did and be unhappy. But I have never known anyone as unhappy as Mrs. Haltom—at least, no one who seemed to have less reason to be so.

  It might have been easier if she were simply awful. But she had moments of what felt like real tenderness, and would precede or follow an eruption of temper with gestures of touching generosity. Once, the day after calling my mother “useless” for neglecting to pay a bill (my mother swore she’d never seen the bill in the first place), Mrs. Haltom surprised her with a “girls’ day” at the spa. Another time, she gave my mother an expensive clutch purse she’d bought in Paris (“It doesn’t match anything I own,” she said), only to berate her the next day for taking too long on a trip to the bank. My mother never learned to shake off the feelings of worthlessness that followed phrases like “After all I’ve done for you.”

  Still, my mother remained loyal. “I think she just gets lonely when Jim’s out of town,” she would say, or “She doesn’t mean the things she says when she’s tipsy.”

  “You just remember, honey,” Shirley told her, “half of what she’s paying you for is the right to treat you like trash.”

  Since my mother also dropped off and picked up Mrs. Haltom’s prescriptions, we knew the variety of drugs she kept at her disposal—Valium, Seconal, Xanax, Percodan, Lortab, Dexedrine, Ritalin. It was no wonder Mrs. Haltom couldn’t remember whether she’d handed a credit card bill over to my mother, or that she was so irritable between noon and five, when she was stranded in the fog between one night’s indulgences and the next.

  Sometimes, I heard my mother weeping quietly in her room. The drain was often clogged with the clumps of hair she was losing.

  But Mrs. Haltom always countered her cruelties with kindnesses. She passed on the bulk of her wardrobe to my mother and paid to have it altered. She schooled my mother in her own version of the rules of etiquette and the minutiae of party planning and social arrangements. She taught my mother how to play bridge and took her along on shopping trips to New York and Los Angeles and, once, to Paris. It beat the hell out of carrying a tray for a living. Wasn’t it all worth the occasional insult?

  I thought so, when I thought about it at all, which wasn’t often.

  Sometimes at night, after Jamie gave up and went off to play video games or listen to music, I sat at the kitchen table with Vanessa while she studied, doing my own homework or drawing in my sketchbook. By sophomore year, I’d had pieces featured in the school art show and a painting chosen as the cover of the literary magazine. So it no longer seemed inappropriate for me to draw Vanessa right in front of her. I sketched her face at least half a dozen times, first in pencil, then in charcoal and pastel, sometimes abstractly in imitation of Matisse and Picasso’s line drawings, but more often realistically, so I could take my time memorizing her features.

  There were many other sketches in my notebook, some better than others: Dean Varnadoe, holding his cane aloft at the head of the classroom; Miss Whitten poised in front of one of her own canvases. As my technique improved, I moved beyond the problem of realistic representation and became entranced by the mysteries suggested by a particular gesture or pose.

  One morning, during the spring of our junior year, I sat down in Dean Varnadoe’s classroom before the beginning of first period and opened up my book to work on my most recent drawing of Vanessa, taken from a photograph—the two of us standing next to each other at the Association of Fundraising Pro
fessionals gala, where Mrs. Haltom was honored as Philanthropist of the Year. Vanessa wore a sleeveless gown the color of mint cream; I had on a rented tuxedo with a silver ready-tied-tie-and-cummerbund set. In the photograph, I am grinning stupidly, but Vanessa’s expression is sanguine, her hair pinned up in a delicate chignon, a few loose strands tickling her eyes, her cheeks sprinkled with freckles.

  My eyes moved back and forth between the photo and the paper, trying to make the face on the page speak to me the way the real one did. The intensity of my concentration was such that I did not notice Varnadoe stand up from his desk and come around behind me to examine my work.

  “Very nice, Mr. Boykin,” he said. “May I have a look?”

  I handed him the sketchbook.

  “The young Miss Haltom?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Quite a fine likeness,” he murmured.

  He flipped through the sketchbook. I felt a mild twinge of fear, but also one of pride. When he reached the drawing of himself, he raised his brow and let out a low whistle.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” he said. “On the contrary. I’m flattered.”

  He flipped back to the picture of Vanessa and set the sketchbook back down on the desk in front of me.

  “She’s an intriguing girl, isn’t she?” he said.

  “You know her?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen her on the stage. She was Olivia in Twelfth Night last spring, no? I remember it well. That’s not a face one easily forgets. Very cool. Easily misread for arrogance, I suspect. Look closely, however, and you notice that the mood is more melancholy. You capture that well.”

  “Do you think she would like it?” I asked.

  “I think she would admire it,” he said. “I’m not sure she’d like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Some people don’t want to be seen so clearly,” he said.

  Two other boys came through the door, carrying on a loud debate about Vanderbilt’s prospects in the SEC basketball tournament. I shut my sketchbook and stuffed it into my backpack.

  The night we posed for that picture had been my first black-tie dinner. I did not know at the time what a farce the gala had turned out to be. Determining that the association had hired what she considered to be an inferior catering company, Mrs. Haltom had had my mother cancel the original contract and enlist another at nearly twice the expense. The association had originally agreed to have a local performer donate his talents, but Mrs. Haltom wanted dancing, so a soul band was flown down from New York and paid a considerable fee so that Mrs. Haltom and her pals could shake it to covers of “Mustang Sally” and “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.”