The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  The gala was a great education for my mother, not only in the fine points of event planning but, moreover, in how people will flatter and appease to secure a donation. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Haltom’s charities were not soup kitchens or shelters or homes for abused women, but the ballet and the opera, the art museum, the symphony, and the Yeatman and Steptoe Schools. Who am I to judge? I was hardly one to put the welfare of the homeless above the value of a Yeatman education.

  My mother hustled around the tables in her lavender evening gown, making sure everyone was getting enough wine, chatting with Ellen Creigh and Mrs. Haltom’s various bridge and tennis friends, and charming the old men, including a few of her old patrons from Café Cabernet. I felt so proud of her. She seemed to have found her niche.

  Jamie managed to force a smile for the family photos. Afterward, he waved me over.

  “Let’s hit the head,” he said, raising his eyebrows so I would know he meant to go out for a smoke.

  “You go,” I said. “It might look bad if we go at the same time.”

  Jamie wandered off, leaving me to stand next to Vanessa, watching the ballroom staff clear the dais for the band. Arch was out of town at a lacrosse tournament. I had her all to myself for once.

  “Your mom did an amazing job,” Vanessa said. “I don’t think it could have gone off better.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Right over there,” Vanessa said.

  She lifted her lovely arm and gestured toward the side of the stage. My mother stood next to Mr. Haltom, looking on as Mrs. Haltom had her moment in the spotlight. Mr. Haltom turned toward my mother and tilted his head. My mother lifted her eyes to his.

  You’d have had to be watching closely to see it. They were in the shadows. The focus of the attention was elsewhere, on Mrs. Haltom, who at that moment could not have known or cared if either of them was even in the same room. I saw, but I did not consider the implications. I was too stupidly joyful to be at a fancy party, standing next to my dream girl to feel any undercurrents swirling below the shimmering surface of the masquerade. But Vanessa saw it. She knew.

  “Hey, you two—smile!”

  Our heads turned abruptly toward a photographer taking pictures for the society pages. The camera flashed. When we glanced back, Mr. Haltom had rejoined his wife, and my mother was gone.

  eight

  Sometime in the ’70s, Mr. Haltom and Arch’s father had gone in on a large tract of land near Rock Island, Tennessee, about two hours’ drive from Nashville. The two friends wanted a retreat of their own, where they could teach their sons about the great outdoors. After David Creigh died, Jim Haltom had carried on alone, teaching the Creigh and Haltom kids to fish and shoot. But Jamie had allergies and preferred video games, and Arch’s sisters were nearing college age and disinterested. Vanessa was more earnest, and showed some aptitude, but Mrs. Haltom didn’t want a tomboy. Consequently, Arch became the sole focus of Mr. Haltom’s attentions.

  By the time I came along, Mr. Haltom was mostly too busy to get out to the hunting camp. He’d bought a retreat closer to Nashville, in Leiper’s Fork, a farmhouse, where he could keep horses. Once he could drive, Arch started going out to the hunting camp on his own. Half of it was his, after all. His father was buried there. The cabin could be called a “cabin” in the same sense that the Haltom residence could be called a house: a big stone A-frame the size of a basketball gym, with exposed wood beams, a great room, and a huge hearth. Two flights of stairs on opposite sides of the room led up to a long balcony and four bedrooms. Beneath them on the first level were two master suites. Above the mantel hung the head of an enormous elk.

  Meat on the grill and fish in the cast-iron skillet; coffee from a thermos in the early morning dark; whiskey served neat with dinner. Long walks out in the fields, silent but for the swish of the bird dog’s tail across the high grass as she sniffed at the air, then the breathless moment when she stopped and pointed at the covey hidden in the brush, followed by the flurry of wings and the roar of gunfire echoing off the distant trees. The twitch of the line, followed by the pull and the bend of the rod and the tense dance of the reel and run.

  Up early in cold darkness, Arch and I sat silent, sometimes for hours, watching the air become illuminated as the sun crept over the hidden horizon and filtered down through the canopy of trees or burned off the mist over the pond. In those quiet moments, I thought of the poster on the door of my English teacher Mrs. Shackelford’s classroom, printed under an old painting depicting two men atop a rocky overlook in the wilderness, a stream beneath them, green mountains in the distance. nothing can befall me in life which nature cannot repair, the poster read, quoting Emerson. The painting, I later learned, was named Kindred Spirits.

  In the deep silence of those still mornings, the world’s vastness became present and visible. I understood what people meant when they talked about having a “religious experience.” In my imagination, it was Arch, not God, to whom these things belonged, who showed them to me, who made me feel both sublime peace and joy.

  On my first visit to the camp, Arch led me out past the pond, which stood in a small clearing at the center of a copse of poplar trees.

  “I’ll be buried here too one day,” he said.

  It was a beautiful spot, wide enough so that the sun shone down through the gap between the branches of the trees above us. The headstone was a simple marble slab engraved with Arch’s father’s name and the years he’d been born and died above a Celtic cross. A border of flagstones marked off the grave itself. In front stood a bench Arch had built with Jim years before in what now seems a rather heavy-handed bonding ritual but which I thought of then as deep.

  “I wish I’d known him,” I said. “He must have been a great man.”

  “Not really.”

  A darkness came over Arch. I can now see that darkness for what it was, though at the time, I thought only of myself: how the confidences Arch shared with me drew me closer to him, deepened our connection, proved that I meant as much to him as he did to me—that we were, in fact, kindred spirits, like the men in the painting from English class.

  “My dad was no saint,” he said. “Not by a long shot. He was mean as hell. Uncle Jim says it was because he was depressed. Not depressed like he got the blues sometimes—the serious kind of depression, the kind you need medication for. He tried to kill himself in college. Did you know that? Of course you didn’t. He washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Uncle Jim found him and took him to the hospital. They had to pump his stomach. He went off for a while after that. Everybody thought he was just in a spin-dry clinic for booze. Not that he didn’t need that too, by the way. He went to rehab three times before he finally got sober, and that was only because of the cancer. You know what else? He was cheating on my mom when he got sick. And not with some random woman either. It was the wife of one of his best friends. They were all friends—Mom and Dad, Uncle Jim and Aunt Cici, and the Potters. It was a big scandal. The Potters actually moved to Atlanta to get away from the gossip. My mom was humiliated. Then dad got sick. That changed the subject, I guess.”

  Arch stood up from the bench and walked slowly around the headstone.

  “Everyone in Belle Meade considered my dad a first-class asshole,” Arch said. “People pitied my mother. Then along comes cancer, and just like that, Dad went from spoiled loser to saint. It’s amazing what a lethal illness can do for your reputation.”

  “How do you know all of this?” I asked.

  “I heard things. Saw things. My sisters told me some of it. They tried to hide the affair, but we knew there was something weird when the Potters just disappeared after being around our parents nonstop for most of our lives. They didn’t ever visit. Didn’t even come to the funeral. And the Potters were my oldest sister’s godparents. When I got older, I asked Uncle Jim about it, and he came clean. Said he hated to do it, but he’d promised he’d never lie to me.”

  Arch sat down next to me.r />
  “He really was brave at the end,” he said. “But I think if he’d lived, he’d still be thought of as the guy who cheated on my mother and nearly broke up the marriage of two of their dearest friends. Even if he’d quit drinking, he’d still be remembered for all the times he got plastered in public and shot his mouth off or had to be carried out to the car at the end of the night. Instead, he got to go out as a martyr.”

  I noticed that his hands were shaking.

  “That’s the thing,” he said. “Down deep, most people are pretty awful. Still, we spend half our lives pretending we’re better than we really are. I’m the worst, I know. I guard my reputation like my life depends on it. Because it sort of does. Once you screw up, you have to go through hell to get your honor back.”

  I felt like Arch’s honesty deserved a comparable disclosure.

  “Remember when I told you about my dad being a hero in Vietnam and everything?” I said. “Well, he died in Vietnam, but I don’t know a thing about him. I’ve never even seen a picture. My parents were never married. My mom got knocked up when she was fifteen years old and ran away from home. My dad was a stable boy at my mom’s summer camp. He shipped out for the Army before she even knew she was pregnant. They never saw each other again. Aunt Sunny took my mom in before I was born. My mom’s parents know I exist, but I’ve never met them. Never seen a picture of them either. I’m not even sure they’re still alive, though I figure they are, since my aunt keeps in touch with the people back home. I think she’d have told my mom if something had happened to them. Or maybe she wouldn’t.”

  Arch shook his head.

  “Damn, bud,” he said.

  “I should have told you.”

  “I understand why you wouldn’t.”

  “I wish I had.”

  “You can tell me anything, Charlie,” he said. “You’re my bud—my brother. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just . . . you understand, right? You and the Haltoms—everyone at Yeatman, really—you’re all so nice. I didn’t want you to think I was poor white trash.”

  “You know how Uncle Jim got his start, don’t you?”

  “Jamie told me.”

  “You think he gives a shit if people know where he came from?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “Well, they all know,” Arch said. “And what are they going to do about it? He can buy and sell the lot of them. And he came from nothing. Started with nothing but a shit-ton of determination. Now he’s the big dog. You could do that too, you know.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Damn right I do.”

  I wanted with all my heart to believe him.

  “Are you really named after your grandfather?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You ever think about him, or your grandmother? Ever wonder why they’ve never tracked you down?”

  “I used to ask Mom about it all the time. She always changed the subject. Eventually, I caught on that she didn’t like the questions.”

  “Did your mom have any brothers or sisters? You got any aunts and uncles out there wondering what became of you?”

  “Mom was an only child.”

  “That makes sense,” he said. “If I was your mom’s brother, I’d have found her by now.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think my grandparents were pretty pissed at Mom. They were going to send her off and have me put up for adoption. That’s why she ran away.”

  “Damn,” Arch said. “I knew I liked your mom, but now I sort of love her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She could have let you go and pretended it never happened,” he said. “Instead, she gave up everything to keep you. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. You should be proud.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  Arch put his arm around me.

  “No secrets between us anymore, right?”

  “Right.”

  He stood up from the bench.

  “Let’s go fishing,” he said.

  At home, Arch didn’t drink much; he was always exceedingly conscious of how easily even a minor indiscretion could blot his sterling reputation. At weekend parties, when he had a beer can in hand, more often than not, it was full of water from the bathroom tap, so he could maintain control without coming off as prudish. That night at the hunting camp, however, we both got plastered. Mr. Haltom kept a lot of high-end bourbon out at the cabin, and we both knocked back shots the way cowboys do in Westerns.

  After dinner, both of us good and drunk, we collapsed onto the couch in front of the hearth. Arch started unpacking his history of conquest, boasting of exploits with a plethora of girls in a multitude of settings. In the woods outside a dance at the sister camp, with a debutante from Atlanta. With a few girls from Steptoe before he’d turned his attentions to Vanessa. With the bored young wife of one of Mr. Haltom’s business associates, who had led him away from the Independence Day celebration at the country club and straddled him in the middle of the eighteenth fairway, just as the fireworks show began. It seemed like an awful lot of experience. But I believed it all, partly because of the conviction with which Arch told his tales, and partly because he seemed like the kind of guy to whom things like that actually happened. If Arch had gone all the way yet with Vanessa, he didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Even drunk, I did not want to hear Arch describe the liberties he may or may not have taken with Vanessa.

  “What about you?” he asked. “You done it yet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just haven’t had the chance, I guess.”

  “Do you jerk off?”

  I felt my face turning crimson.

  “No,” I lied.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “You need to start. Break it in good, so when you get your chance you don’t make a fool of yourself. My first time was with an older girl. She knew I was a virgin, so she sort of expected me to come fast. You might not get so lucky. You don’t want to be a premature ejaculator, do you, bud?”

  “No.”

  The room had gone dark but for the fire in the hearth. In the silence, I looked back at him and found him staring at me, grinning, his face and his eyes lit up by the firelight.

  “So do you know how?” Arch asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

  He stood up and stumbled around the table toward me.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  What happened after remains both vague and vivid in memory. Even the next morning, my head throbbing from too much whiskey, I recalled it all clearly but could not square what I remembered with reality. When I came out of the bedroom, Arch was already cooking eggs and bacon. He poured me a glass of tomato juice.

  “Here,” he said. “That’ll help.”

  We never spoke of it, ever, even after it happened again, and again. I did not allow myself to consider what it might have meant, for either of us. I knew if anyone ever found out about it that Arch and I would both be ostracized for all time by our schoolmates. But I never considered the possibility that what we were doing defined either of us in the way such a thing might, or perhaps should. Arch had slept with all of those girls, after all, and he was probably sleeping with Vanessa. As for me, I was sure I wasn’t gay. I liked girls—Vanessa first, but I wasn’t so devoted that I didn’t notice other girls, and my fantasies always only involved women. It was just Arch. He had mastered my heart almost from the first second. He was the pillar upon which my entire identity rested. After what he’d shared with me by his father’s tombstone—after he’d called me his brother—if there had been a shred of doubt before that, it was long gone. I loved him, as I had never loved anyone or anything before; as I have loved only one other since.

  nine

  One afternoon,
Jamie and I came home and found Sunny’s mustard-yellow ’73 Cutlass Supreme parked in front of the door to the carriage house.

  “Whose car is that?” Jamie said.

  Nothing that ugly had come up the Haltoms’ driveway since my mother’s Cavalier, which had been replaced by a used two-door Beemer.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What?” Jamie said. “Is it like some angry ex-boyfriend or something?”

  “Worse,” I said.

  I was afraid to face Sunny. My mother and I had both treated her very poorly. The first year we’d been with the Haltoms, we drove across town on Christmas Eve—we gave her a poinsettia and a Wal-Mart gift card; Sunny gave my mother a pair of fuzzy pink bedroom slippers and me a cartridge for the Game Boy I no longer used. We left before she’d had a chance to serve us the pecan pie she’d baked.

  “I better go by myself,” I said.

  “Fine by me,” Jamie said.

  That Jamie had no desire to meet the woman who had helped raise me, and that I was even less inclined to introduce him to her, said a lot about both of us, I think.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey, baby,” my mother said.

  I could see that both of them had been crying.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s Louella,” my mother said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Terrence’s grandmother,” my mother said.

  “Is she sick?” I asked.

  “She’s gone,” Sunny said.