Fortunate Son

One evening, noticing the new mother linger at the unit door, Minas offered to walk Branwyn to her car.

“Oh, I don’t have a car, Doctor,” she said. “I get the bus down on Olympic.” The dark-skinned Negro woman had a beautiful smile and nearly transparent gray eyes.

“Well, then let me drive you,” the doctor offered.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I live very far away.”

“That doesn’t matter,” the doctor said. “I don’t have much to go home for. You see, my wife died in childbirth recently —”

“You poor thing,” Branwyn said, placing a hand on his forearm.

“Anyway, Eric, that’s our boy, is usually asleep when I get home, and there’s a nanny there . . . and I’m not very tired.”

Branwyn was taken by the doctor’s handsome Nordic features. He was blond and blue-eyed, and his smile was kind.

They drove down to Branwyn’s neighborhood near Crenshaw. He parked his silver Mercedes in front of her apartment building, and she said, “Thank you so much, Doctor. You know, it’s a long trip on that bus at night.”

There was a moment when neither of them talked or moved.

“Are you hungry, Miss Beerman?”

“Why . . . yes I am, Dr. Nolan.”

She wasn’t really, but the way the doctor asked the question, she knew that he needed company. A man losing a wife like that would be lost in the world, she knew.

5

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

There was an all-night place called the Rib Joint on La Brea, run by a wild character named Fontanot. He was a six-foot-seven Texan who smoked his ribs in the backyard of the restaurant and whose great big laugh could be heard from a block away.

Fontanot had a long face and sad eyes. He was very dark-skinned and powerful, in both his limbs and his will. At that time, the Rib Joint was very popular with the Hollywood set.

Movie stars, directors, and big-time producers came there every night. They ordered Fontanot’s ribs for their private functions and often invited him to come along.

“I ain’t got time for no parties,” he’d say, shunning their invitations. “Make hay while the sun shines, that’s what my mama always told me to do.”

Fontanot did not fraternize much with the muckety-mucks from Hollywood. He laughed if they told a good joke, and he put ribs along with his homemade sauce on their tables.

When Minas and Branwyn came into the restaurant, sometime just before midnight, there was a line of at least a dozen parties waiting to be seated. Men and women were laughing and drinking and trying to get their names put ahead on the list. Minas hunted up a stool and put it against the jukebox so that Branwyn could get off her feet.

When Fontanot saw this simple gesture from the tiny window that looked out from his kitchen, he came out and shook hands with the doctor.

“Ira Fontanot,” the restaurateur said.

“My name’s Minas. Minas Nolan. And this is Miss Beerman.”

“You two are in love,” the sad-eyed giant informed them.

“Oh, no,” they both said at the same time.

“You might not know it yet,” Fontanot announced, “but 6

F o r t u n a t e S o n

you are in love. There’s no helpin’ that. All I need to know is if you’re hungry or not.”

“Starving,” Minas Nolan said with a deep feeling in his tone that struck Branwyn.

“Then come on back to my special table and I will serve you some barbecue.”

To be seated at the special table was the desire of every powerful customer at the Rib Joint. That table was there for Ira’s mother and for his new girlfriend.

Minda, Ira’s sainted mom, said that her son’s girlfriends were always new.

“The lady he’s seein’ might be with him for one birthday, but she’ll never see two,” Minda would say through her coarse smoker’s rasp.

Other than that, the special table, set in the corner of Ira’s kitchen, usually went empty. When a famous director like Heurick Roberts would ask Ivy, the hostess, to give him that table, she’d grin, showing her gold tooth, and say, “If I was to sit you in there with Fontanot he’d skin ya and clean ya and slather yo’ ribs wit’ sauce.”

But Minas and Branwyn didn’t know anything about the kitchen table and its special status. As a matter of fact, Branwyn thought that it was probably the worst seat in the house, being in the noisy kitchen and all, but she was willing to sit there because of that note of deep need in Minas’s voice when he declared his hunger.

Minas asked for ribs, but Fontanot told him that if he was hungry he wanted the restaurant’s special smoked sausages.

“Sausages stick to your ribs, boy,” the big chef declared.

“An’ what will you have, Miss Beerman?”

“I don’t eat much meat,” she admitted with a slight bow of her head.

7

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

Minas thought that she was such a kind woman that she was afraid that her appetite would somehow bruise Fontanot’s feelings.

“I got catfish come up ev’ry day from Lake Charles, Louisiana,” Fontanot said. “They’s a farm down there where they introduce wild fish every six weeks. You know, the big catfish farms got they fish so inbred that you might as well call’em sole.”