The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  It occurred to me that I was now almost twice as old as my mother had been when she left home. I thought of how I would have felt had I been in her place, knowing as little as I did about the ways of the world. Would I have understood how beauty made one both powerful and vulnerable? Would I have been more wary? How jealously did she guard her virtue before she met my father? How wily and persuasive had he been? Or was it just the time and the place?

  Not even Sunny could have said for certain what was going through my mother’s mind in those days. All I had to hold on to were memories of her: softly singing to me at bedtime when I was small, or the nights she came home stumble-drunk and snuggled up next to me, clinging to me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered to her.

  My mother spent most of the hours I sat in that room sleeping, peaceful but too weary, I hoped, to think of what would soon come. I had little time alone with her: nurses came and went; Jim sat on the other side of the bed, holding my mother’s hand or slouching in the corner chair, staring off toward the window, falling into fitful sleep here and there and then waking with a start to ensure that my mother did not go while he was unconscious.

  Every day, Dolly was impatient for me to finish the painting. She felt somehow that my work was time taken from her. I told her I’d promised her father.

  “I thought he wasn’t your daddy,” she said.

  “He’s paying me a lot of money,” I said.

  “For painting a picture?”

  One afternoon, when I was nearly finished with the portrait, my mother sent the nurse out of the room.

  “Let me see,” she said.

  I lifted the canvas and turned it around. I had worked my way from the eyes outward, so that the canvas surrounding her head and shoulders was still blank.

  “Look at me,” she said. “Inside a cloud.”

  I smiled. “Do you like it?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Come sit with me.”

  I put the painting back on the easel and walked over to the bed. She reached up with a frail hand to my shoulder and pulled me down to lie beside her.

  “You’ll always be my baby,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  She was barely conscious when she said it. Perhaps she was dreaming, or hallucinating. It made no difference. And because I knew she could not possibly hear or feel or remember, I let go, and I wept.

  The next Saturday, my mother died in her sleep.

  I took the painting back to the carriage house and finished it there in time for Arch to have it framed and hung in the sunroom at the farm, facing out toward the garden and the meadow, where we would gather after we buried her.

  seven

  Jim sent the jet back down to bring Pancho and Murray and Teddy up for the funeral. I vacated the carriage house for the three of them and took the guest room at the end of the hall opposite the master suite.

  The funeral was held in Saint Matthew’s Church in Leiper’s Fork, a little Anglican parish, to which my mother and Jim had retreated, both out of convenience and for the comfort of being around a congregation consisting of good country people rather than the social-club atmosphere of Saint John’s in Belle Meade. The priest spoke of my mother with sincere familiarity. In my absence, both she and Jim seemed to have become devout.

  Here’s one reason to go to church: people will show up for your funeral. Little Saint Matthew’s could not contain the crowd that assembled on my mother’s behalf; the members of the congregation were pressed in by my mother’s many other friends and acquaintances. Initially, I assumed the Belle Meaders were there for Jim, or for Arch and Vanessa, but as it turned out, many of them had come to regard my mother as a friend. One after another, they cornered me at the visitation, to pass on some surprising anecdote or to assure me that my mother would be remembered always for her graciousness and generosity. Who was this woman they described to me?

  I saw so many old faces—Kip Dodd and his wife, now retired themselves and living nearby in a farmhouse of their own; Ellen Creigh; a slew of old classmates and their parents. Just after we sat down, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find Sunny and Terrence in the second row of pews. Up to then, I had mostly kept my composure, even at the final moment in the carriage house, when Jim had sat up from his chair and grasped my mother’s hand and knew it was over. But when I saw Sunny and Terrence, my own sorrow poured out of me in streaming tears. Terrence embraced me across the pews. The years had changed everyone, but the bonds of childhood felt, at least, as if they were still binding.

  Later, at the reception, Terrence and I stole away together for a few minutes. We had so much to say to each other, and so little. I learned that Terrence’s life had taken a path even more circuitous than my own. He had gone to Tennessee State on a football scholarship, but a knee injury had cut short his great promise as an athlete. Even before that, he’d had a divided soul, split between the gratification and rhapsodies of lay preaching and the money he could make on the corners of our old neighborhood. He’d done two short stretches in state prison for it.

  Recently, however, Terrence had returned to the church and given up dealing, working as a trainer at the Y and a mentor and football coach in a program for “at-risk youth.” He was back living with Rev Joseph and had begun to preach again. His story of reform gave him enormous credibility with young people. And he hadn’t done anything that wasn’t being done by a dozen Jamie Haltoms in prep school dorm rooms and fraternity houses. Rich kids go to rehab; black kids go to prison.

  “I’ll have to come to church sometime,” I said. “See you preach. You have the gift.”

  “It’s just the spirit talking,” he said. “You saved, Charlie?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Not yet.”

  “When you’re ready, he’ll be waiting.”

  I nodded. Terrence shook his head.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Where the hell you been, boy?” he said.

  “I took a wrong turn,” I said. “But I found my way home.”

  “You call this ‘home’?” he asked.

  Later, back home—back at the Creighs’, I should say—I went out with Teddy to smoke in the breezeway beside the carriage house.

  “I liked your friend Terrence,” she said.

  “We go way back.” I unknotted the tie I’d borrowed from Arch.

  “When are you planning to go to his church?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I probably won’t,” I said. “Thank you for coming, by the way. I know you hate it here.”

  “How could I not?” she said. “But, yes, I do hate it here. I can’t stand the humidity. Or the good ole boys. I wish we could go home this afternoon.”

  “I think I’m going to stick around for a while longer,” I said.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “I’ve got some work lined up,” I said. “Houses, portraits. Enough to keep me busy for a while.”

  “You have work in San Miguel too.”

  “Yes, but these are commissions. Guaranteed money. Good money. It might be pity, but all of a sudden, everyone in Belle Meade wants me to do a painting for them.”

  Teddy gave me a long look. “You’re staying,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I mean for good,” she said. “You won’t come back.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I wanted to say “Of course I will. It will be only a month or two, and I’ll come back flush with cash, and life will go on as it was before.” Or that I just needed a little time to make peace with the past, to make sense of what I was feeling. To hang around long enough to remember that Arch and Vanessa hadn’t needed me before and didn’t need me now. To realize that the life I had in Mexico was enough—more than enough; better than I deserved. That San Miguel was home; that I knew what was gripping me was just nostalgia, but I needed to feel it and see it through to the end so I could go back without regrets. But I knew if I said those things, they would just be what I wanted to be true, and
not what was. So I said nothing, which was the same, it seems, as saying yes.

  “I need to take a shower,” she said. “I’ve been sweating like a pig all day.”

  The next day, Teddy, Pancho, and Murray went back to Mexico.

  After two months, I received a box containing some clothes and a few other things I’d left behind, along with a single black-and-white photograph Teddy had taken of me in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. On the back, she’d written: Carlitos, como lo recordaré. Charlie, as I’ll remember him.

  eight

  The last week of May, Arch gave the commencement address at Yeatman—an eerie echo of my own graduation. Arch knew what a powerful platform the lectern at a Yeatman commencement could be: a captive audience, which included many of the city’s most affluent and influential citizens. He was not naïve to the length of his odds.

  Arch’s sole experience in politics had been a term on the school board, where his most memorable accomplishment had been a concerted effort to blow the whole thing up. Citing “irreconcilable dysfunction” and “well-intentioned but incompetent” members, Arch had sent a letter to the mayor’s office and the news media, calling for a resolution to disband the elected school board and return to a system where the mayor appointed representatives of his own choosing.

  “Speaking as one myself, I believe our school board representatives want what’s best for our young people,” Arch had written in the letter. “But as a whole, we lack the experience, expertise, and available time to accomplish our aims.”

  Off the record, he’d been blunt: “It was an idiot circus,” he told me, “run by some of the stubbornest jackasses who ever stumbled out of the barn.”

  The initiative died, but its failure turned out to be a boon for Arch. The newspapers painted him as a truth-telling idea man. He didn’t have the support of the mayor’s office or the city council. But he had the papers, especially the Herald, owned by Engage South, a media company belonging to a Yeatman alum. And the television stations could never resist a pretty face. Arch looked like a savior to the white working class, just as disgust with politicians was peaking.

  How did a guy like Arch Creigh—born into wealth, educated privately from pre-K through graduate school, married to the daughter of a billionaire, as handsome as a film star, with family ties going back almost to Jamestown—become a Man of the People? After all, the People were the ones who shopped at Wal-Mart, who spent their lives traveling back and forth between backbreaking jobs and weary inertia at home, who ended up being forced to live off disability and Medicaid benefits. How on earth could the People see a guy who lived on Belle Meade Boulevard as their champion?

  There is nothing in this world to which people connect more willingly in uncertain times than the appearance of genuine certainty. If there was one true thing that could be said about Arch, it was this: he seemed so sure of himself that people couldn’t help but believe in him.

  All of which led up to that moment on the quad at Yeatman.

  “Just a little more than a decade ago,” he said, “I sat where you boys are sitting now, at the end of six years of the hardest work I’ve ever done. Trust me, Wall Street is a piece of cake after AP Physics and Latin during football season. So when I was asked to speak to you today, I was a little intimidated. I know from experience that you hear a lot of speeches. You might get a little numb to so much good advice.”

  Laughter rippled across the assembly. They were all primed to love him before he even opened his mouth.

  “I had to spend a lot of time thinking about what I would say to you,” Arch continued. “Then just last week, I came across an article in the newspaper that really got my attention. The title of the piece was ‘Why Men Fail.’ According to this piece, nationwide, over the last ten years, we’ve seen a sharp decline in male academic performance at every level. Statistically, fewer men are graduating from college than women, and even fewer are going on to complete graduate programs. There are a lot of single moms in America, but they are staying single by choice, because the fathers of their children aren’t providers. So the women are taking care of themselves. When I first started working in finance, my mentor told me that his best employees were single moms, not guys like me. I got the message. This message really got me thinking about the importance of what you’ve experienced here at Yeatman. It’s trained you to hold on to something most people have lost.”

  Arch let that note linger. A dramatic hush fell over the assembly.

  “While we must meet the challenges of a changing world with fresh ideas and perspectives, there’s a sense here in Nashville, and especially at Yeatman, that some of the old stuff is worth holding on to. It’s this stuff—these ideals—that are the foundation your life will be built upon.”

  He went on like that for a while, paying homage to Yeatman, celebrating the graduating class as exceptions to the trends he’d just described. He then shifted into his own narrative: the privilege in which he’d grown up, followed by the wrenching ordeal of his father’s illness and deterioration and the devastating blow of his death. The courage he’d learned both from the way his father had faced sickness and death and from his mother’s stoic determination to nurture and shelter her children while nursing her husband and, after his death, her stoic resolve to shepherd the family through their collective grief. The strength of character and generosity he’d learned from his uncle Jim, and the parallels between the path Arch’s mother had walked and the one Jim now followed himself as a widower and father of a young daughter. The grace and wisdom Arch had learned with Vanessa by his side, brilliant and driven and more accomplished than most of her male peers.

  All of it was crafted to signal the formation of his own ambitions, his will to power, as it were, couched in the impression of a labor of love—as an exhibition of noblesse oblige.

  “You are coming of age in a world that wants you to believe it’s okay to be mediocre,” Arch said. “There are no really great men left, the world tells you, so why bother trying to be one? I believe there are bigger things—harder things; things that must be done by the people who are capable of doing them. Our city needs the right kind of leadership to carry us into the new century, so that we can build a better future without giving up the best parts of the culture and traditions that define what I like to call ‘the spirit of Nashville.’ So I’m making it official, right here and now. As of this morning, I’ve resigned my position at Chadderton Dobbs. I want to be your next mayor.”

  Before he could say another word, the whole assembly was on its feet, cheering. You would have thought someone had paid them. Maybe someone did.

  I was on my feet as well, my eyes damp with tears of awe and admiration. No one had to pay me. I believed it all; I still do. Some people are exceptional. And without a doubt, Arch was the most exceptional person I ever knew. But no one, however exceptional, transcends the bitter fact of his humanity. Like the man says in that old book they made us read back in senior year: “There’s always something.” And no great temple was ever built without a few bodies buried beneath its foundation.

  nine

  Arch set up his campaign office in an old storefront at the edge of Germantown, on the north side of downtown, west of the river. The location provided easy access to the bypass and the interstates, and put some distance between Arch and Belle Meade. He went to a different church every Sunday and started sprinkling conversations with references to scripture. He visited schools and scout troops and civic organizations. There were fish fries and softball leagues, potlucks and neighborhood block parties. There were also private donor dinners and gatherings at country clubs and the lavish homes of Arch and Vanessa’s neighbors.

  Arch had the right side of the spectrum locked up. The only other conservative candidate in the race was Justin Jeffs, a certifiable kook whose campaign promises included a plan to require all Tennessee state flags be shorn of gold fringe “so they’ll fly right” and a proposal to refurbish the infamous statue of Confederate her
o and Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest on I-65 between Nashville and Brentwood.

  By tradition, mayoral elections were not partisan, but tribalism had long since infiltrated every aspect of American life, and the gulf between Arch, with his GOP ties and conservative rhetoric, and Democrat operators like Clem Cardwell and the outspokenly liberal upstart councilwoman Marylou Greene could not be ignored. Davidson County tilted to the left, but not so far that a conservative couldn’t win over the more independent-minded voters. All Arch had to do was sit back, let Clement and Greene rip each other apart fighting over the Democratic base, wait for the smoke to clear, and step forward as the voice of reason and moderation, free of ties to the Clintons. His charm would offset his inexperience. People were sick of politicians anyway. They were ready to get behind a charismatic businessman with a smart, beautiful wife and a fortune in the bank, to prove he knew what he was doing—never mind that he’d been born with money and married even more of it.

  Fair bet, I thought. What did I know anyway? I was too busy painting to pay much attention. Ironically, the portrait I’d made of my mother, borne of the deepest pain I’d ever experienced, had turned my work into just another thing people with means felt compelled to acquire; in short order, a Charles Boykin of the wife or the kids became another status symbol, like Spode china or a BMW or a Yeatman class ring.

  I hadn’t spent much time with children until I’d started painting them for a living. I was struck by how much more complex they could be than they seemed from a distance. The girl who compulsively scratched at scabs on her knees and arms. The restless boy with the hovering mother who corrected his every gesture. Nary a father was to be seen; in this milieu, even the working mothers appeared to be responsible for all of their children’s appointments and obligations.

  Most of the children I saw were not obviously troubled; they were sweet and generous, well-mannered and mature. Groomed. They would follow the same path as Arch and Vanessa: private elementary; Yeatman or Steptoe or one of the other pricey day schools in Nashville, or maybe a boarding school in Virginia or New England; respectable university; graduate school in business or law or medicine. They would play golf and tennis, become skilled swimmers, go to summer camp in the Carolinas, spend a semester abroad in Europe, and maybe work for a while on a dude ranch in Wyoming, learning to love the arts and the wonders of history and the great outdoors. They would go on church mission trips to poor countries and come home swollen with pride for having touched the lives of the less fortunate. They would volunteer at soup kitchens and homeless shelters, tutor at public elementary schools, make a black friend and form a genuine respect for the challenges he faced. They would “give back,” as the saying goes, in the form of generous contributions of both money and time to church and charity.