“You never complained about anything. If I told you something, you just listened to me. Children are supposed to fight with their parents. Sons are supposed to want to push their fathers aside. But I always felt that you were trying to protect me instead of the other way around.
“But now that you’re asking about your mothers, I see that I haven’t been there for you.”
Eric was staring at his father’s face, imagining that he had his sketch pad before him. He would paint the portrait of his father many years later, but this was the sitting for that canvas.
The drained blue eyes and graying blond hair, the gaunt jowls and dry lips.
“Would you like to go down to Malibu this morning, son?” Minas asked.
“I have to do something, Dad.”
“What’s that?”
“Christie’s going to the doctor. I told her that I’d go with.”
“You’re still with her?”
Eric had seen Christie almost every day for a year. “Yeah, Dad.”
It was 7:05, and Minas dawdled at the table.
1 4 1
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“I could come home early,” the doctor offered.
“Sure, Dad.”
A h n cam e out of the storeroom moments after Minas left.
She stood near the door staring at Eric.
“Hi, Ahn,” the young man said.
She came up to the table and sat in the doctor’s chair.
Ahn was the only person that Eric had ever been afraid of.
It was long ago that he’d first felt this fear, before he was twelve and after Thomas had been taken away. He would find Ahn standing somewhere, staring at him. When he’d ask her why, she wouldn’t say anything, just wander away only to return later, still staring silently.
“The only thing I remember,” she began, “before I ran to the refugee camp, was a story that a very old man said to me.
I don’t know who he was. Maybe my grandfather, maybe some elder in the village where we work in rice paddies.
“He told me the story about a young woman who fell in love with a tiger. The woman go to her mother and tell her that she is in love with the tiger that lived in the north jungle.
F o r t u n a t e S o n
“The girl said nothing more to her mother about her love.
That night she disappeared from the house of her parents, taking with her a yellow robe that many generations of her family’s women had worn on their wedding day. Three years passed and nothing was heard about the girl until one morning an infant boy was found in the middle of the village swaddled in a bloody yellow cloth. A beautiful boy with tiger’s eyes and a roar instead of crying. The grandmother took in the child, and he became a great king. But he was always heartbroken and sad because he had no true mother or any father at all.
“And one day, while he was on a crusade to unite all his people, he was beset by a tiger. His retainers mortally wounded the beast, but before the tiger died the young king looked deeply into his eyes. There he saw the truth: that his father, the tiger, had devoured his mother, but she lived on inside of him. The boy had found both his mother and his father, but in finding them they were slain.”
Ahn stood up and walked from the room. Eric felt the warning in her words. He even understood the general meaning of the tale. But he didn’t know what role she saw him in.
Was he the tiger or the boy? Was Christie the village girl? Was Ahn the powerless mother? He sat there for over an hour considering the parable. He went over it again and again.
He imagined the stately tiger walking through the jungle with the golden apparition of the village girl astride his back.
In his jaws the tiger carried a bloodied yellow cloth in which the royal baby was wrapped. The image made his
