A Sense of Entitlement

The granddaughter of the dying literary icon lived in a million dollar three-bedroom townhouse on Boston’s exclusive Beacon Street. The twenty-four year old expected nothing less than the opulent luxury that Sheldon Harrison’s wealth permitted. Charlotte Emerson lived comfortably off the spoils of her grandfather’s apparent genius. Charlotte is tall and slender, but might not be considered conventionally attractive. Her clear blue eyes are dazzling but devoid of any warmth, but charming nonetheless. Her long slender nose looked correct for her narrow face, although that was a recent development. Minor plastic surgery transformed her wide and humped nose to a sensuous point, an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan with a quick slice. She was by all standards, attractive and sexy, but not as attractive as she thought she should be. The granddaughter of the great Sheldon Harrison should be a ravenous beauty! Any disappointment she might have felt over her minor natural shortcomings was overshadowed by her superb education at Brown University and postgraduate work at Yale. She possessed unshakable confidence in her abilities and made sure her associates revered her superiority. Of late, she is preoccupied with an upcoming sojourn to Europe. Her grandfather’s condition is a secondary matter; she even ignored the advice of his doctor not to leave the country. Her terse response upon hearing the sound advice angered her grandfather’s long-time physician; he left the room in disgust. She scoffed at his sentimentality and took comfort in the fact that he also had cancer. She cared nothing for his life; he was only a fish among the sea of her complex life. Charlotte’s friends from Brown had planned the trip at the last minute and it was unthinkable that they would go without their financial and spiritual leader. She was annoyed when her preparations were interrupted by the deterioration of her grandfather’s condition. His timing could not have been worse. The entire group gleefully anticipated the planned debauchery; reviving their carefree coed days when they thought they were the center of the universe. A less complicated time when they actually believed they were the enlightened torchbearers of America’s intellectual class. The misguided arrogance soon gave way to a softer form of elitism that allowed them to coexist with real world souls, born of necessity rather than maturation. Charlotte sighed and sat on her windowsill to watch the action on the street below. Her less affluent neighbors were boorishly fighting over a parking space on the narrow and crowded street. She laughed to herself and thought about her two private spots in a nearby garage and the fact she had only one car. Pity never crossed her mind; it was unnatural for her to think of the inconveniences of others. They were ordinary people whose lives would make little impact on the world they inhabited. Their existence hardly made a ripple in her neighborhood. Her neighbors were hardly middle class; they were predominately urban professionals of varied wealth. The confined streets were lined with BMWs, Mercedes, Sport Utility Vehicles and an occasional Volvo for the few who had children. Seldom did Charlotte see more than one child per family. The forty- year-old first-time mothers who chose their career over children until the very last moment was the norm; looking like grandparents they wheeled their toddlers to the oasis of the Public Gardens in their starched white shirts and khaki caps. Charlotte snickered at their bourgeois lives and dismissed them as upper-class toilers with little appeal. They were all charlatans whose law degrees and German automobiles were only props used to convince themselves they were among the elite. Attorneys with no expertise other than cramming for the Bar exam miraculously considered themselves authorities on art, music and literature without having done one creative thing in their sorry lives. This amused the young socialite to no end; they were nothing but spruced-up middle class fools who decided they were extraordinary because of their address and income. She really believed, silently amongst mixed company, that the middle class was the scourge of America. A bunch of mindless consumers who pollute and tarnish at every turn, serfs as her grandfather used to call them. She smiled when she thought of this. She felt a wave of guilt and sorrow for the old man she owed so much to, she really did love him in her own way. The hot sun pierced the large front window and warmed her tanned skin. Her thoughts quickly shifted as she caught a glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror near the window. She never allowed her tan to exceed a slight glow, a healthy hint of exposure. Her long fingers traced the outline of her colorful sundress. She admired her tight curves and squeezed her tight buttocks together to further feed her ego. Her finely tuned muscles rippled over her freckled shoulders. Her hair was normally a light brown, but the sun added streaks of blond. Her blue eyes were striking against her toasted skin and bleached hair. Summer was her best season; she knew this and planned extensively to look her best during the brief, but scorching New England summers. With all these superficial thoughts occupying her mind she forgot about her ailing grandfather, he was a distant thorn that sometimes pricked her into sadness. She looked away from the mirror and back down to the contemptible world below. She tapped on the glass when she recognized the awkward figure of her cousin gazing up at her. Wilton Saunders was the son of Charlotte’s aunt, her mother’s sister and daughter of Sheldon Harrison.