Читать книгу Foregone - Russell Banks - Страница 9

Fife is well aware that the seeds were planted years earlier, in childhood and adolescence. Possibly they were planted in his parents’ lives even before he was born. But the night of March 30, 1968, fifty years ago, was when the poisonous flower first bloomed. So he begins his account there, in Richmond, Virginia, in the home of his in-laws, Jessie and Benjamin Chapman. They are the parents of his wife, whose name is Alicia Chapman, he adds. They are not the parents of Emma Flynn.

He remembers the dining room table being cleared by a maid, a middle-aged Black woman. He can’t bring her face or her name to mind, he says. There were many Black servants employed by the Chapmans, but he can only remember the faces and names of two. There is the cook, Susannah, a stout, green-eyed dark-brown woman in her mid-fifties who wears a hairnet and a starched white short-sleeved dress and soft-soled white shoes and black socks. To Susannah’s apparent amusement, Fife calls her Oh Susannah whenever he rises early and eats alone in the breakfast room adjacent to the kitchen. Which, when he and Alicia and their son Cornel stay overnight at the Chapman home in Richmond, is nearly every morning. Fife is an early riser. No one else in the family is. Susannah prepares the family’s every meal six days a week. One of the other servants, a woman whose face or name he can’t remember, cooks the family meals on Sundays.

And there is Sally. He has no trouble remembering her. Twenty-seven years earlier she was his wife Alicia’s nanny. Twenty years before that, she was Alicia’s mother’s nanny down in Charleston. Now she is his son Cornel’s. At least when Fife and Alicia visit Richmond, she is. Sally is a tall, slightly bent woman, perhaps seventy-five years old, possibly older, he’s unsure, and when he asked Alicia and her mother, they weren’t sure, either. He doesn’t feel comfortable asking Sally herself. Her personal life seems off-limits, mutually agreed upon, as if to make it nonexistent.

Sally retired, Alicia’s mother Jessie told Fife, when Alicia went north to attend Simmons College, which is to say that she is no longer employed by the Chapmans, except when intermittently brought out of her retirement to watch over Cornel during their visits from Charlottesville. In Chapman family photographs, when Sally would have been in her fifties—a broad-shouldered Black woman holding little Alicia’s hand at six or seven outside Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Grove Avenue—she was very dark, but in old age her complexion has lightened to the colour of taffy. She is handsome and mild and moves with deliberate, slow grace. She, too, wears a hairnet and white dress, but always with a dark-red cardigan sweater buttoned over her dress or draped across her shoulders, as if the central air-conditioning system keeps the Chapmans’ Richmond home too cold for her old Charleston bones. Describing her, Fife realizes that it’s Sally who his Haitian nurse Renée reminds him of—though he doesn’t say it aloud.

Other than Susannah and Sally, in Fife’s mind the Chapmans’ servants were then and still are nameless and interchangeable. He remembers them by their jobs—yardman, laundress, housekeeper, maid. He says he feels guilty for that.

But he doesn’t want to linger over his venial sins, his many small crimes and misdemeanours committed decades ago in a different country by a different man. It’s the mortal sins he’s confessing here, sins committed in this country by this man. Confession, followed by repentance and atonement, leads to forgiveness. That’s his plan, his only purpose now. His final hope, actually.

He hears Renée slide open the pocket door to the hall and step from the room and close the door again. Her departure does not break the darkness that surrounds his body or the silence that swallows his voice. Since the filming began, no one other than Fife has said a word or coughed or cleared a throat or laid down a footstep. He is sure that it was Renée leaving the room, not Emma. Emma still sits behind him somewhere over on his right. He feels the heat of her presence there, imagines the blood rushing to her face and ears as she hears the names of a wife and son she never knew existed, the catch of her breath as she learns of an American household and family that until now have been no more real than characters in a novel she has not read.

Fife’s son Cornel is just over three years old. He is an intelligent and articulate child, easy to please and eager to please. So like his mother at that age, his grandmother began noting shortly after he was born. It’s one of the Chapmans’ many unspoken ways of making Fife’s son a Chapman, more Alicia’s child than his. Tonight Cornel sleeps upstairs in the nursery, the same small room and narrow four-poster bed where his mother slept when she was three years old. Nanny Sally sits in the upholstered straight-backed chair beside his bed, silently reading her Bible in the dimmed, peach-tinted light.

Cornel’s mother Alicia is twenty-seven, the same age as Fife. She sits across the dining room table from him, her parents at either end. Her long, straight, shining cordovan-coloured hair is in sharp contrast with her bright white complexion and large grey-blue eyes. Light seems to emanate from her face. Her skin is flawless, without blemish or freckle or the tiniest disfiguration anywhere on her body, as he knows better than anyone. She never wears dark or bright lipstick or powdery makeup or costume jewellery and stays well away from the sun’s tanning rays, even though she was raised to be an athlete and is a competitive equestrian, plays a strong game of tennis, and has a golf handicap of nine. She does not hide from the sun, she merely protects herself from it. Fife himself is afraid of horses and has never played tennis or golf. Alicia is a natural beauty, people say, an impression she has done nothing since adolescence to discourage. She is known and admired both for that natural beauty and for her endless affection for children and animals, as if they are kindred spirits and she is herself a child or an animal. She volunteers at the Charlottesville child-care centre and refuses to hunt birds with her father and will not ride to the hounds because it is as cruel to the horses as to the fox. She is Jessie and Benjamin Chapman’s only child.

Now she is six months pregnant with her and Fife’s second child, making her parents proud, they often say, as if she managed to conceive it on her own. She pushes her chair slowly, carefully, away from the dining room table and stands a little unsteadily, holding on to the chair back with both hands for a few seconds, finding her balance. A slim, narrow-shouldered woman with boyish hips, she carries her unborn child high up, close to her rib cage. The Chapmans hope the child will be a girl, but this is 1968, and ultrasound is not yet a common procedure for determining an unborn child’s sex, so they can only hope.

Fife himself says he has no preference. If it is a girl, they will name her Little Jessie, after Alicia’s mother. If a boy, they will name him Little Ben, after Alicia’s father. Cornel was named after Fife’s father, despite the Chapmans’ initial opposition. It was a fight Fife almost lost. The Chapmans thought Cornel a slightly comical name, until Alicia suggested that it actually sounds southern, almost antebellum, not, as they claimed, too New England blue-collar. After that, the Chapmans liked the name, and with their Tidewater accent slightly mispronounced it, so that it sounded more like “Colonel” or “Kernel.” Fife and Alicia find the mispronunciation amusing. At home in Charlottesville, two hours west of Richmond, away from Alicia’s parents and their friends, the boy’s name has become Colonel, intentionally, but in an affectionate, mildly mocking way. It has likely stuck to him for his entire life, especially if he stayed in the South, where childhood nicknames like Bubba and Shug, Missy and Boo, often become adult names. Fife is sure that today, if he is alive, he is still called Colonel, though he does not know his son’s last name.

Alicia pats her large ovoid belly with a mixture of pride and slight discomfort and smiles at her husband and her parents one by one. Her mother extends her foot under the table and touches the buzzer that will call the maid from the kitchen to clear the table.

Kicking, Alicia winces. My baby’s active tonight. If y’all don’t mind, I’m going upstairs to lie down. Like her parents, she speaks with a strong Tidewater accent, which to Fife sounds more affected than southern, as if they are trying for a South London drawl and failing to get it right.

Jessie reminds Benjamin that Jackson will be arriving at eight. It is now seven forty-five, she notes. Jackson is very punctual, Benjamin, as you know. Unfailingly so.

Benjamin nods patiently, passively. He’s more familiar with his older brother’s habits and inclinations than she is. Fife doesn’t understand why she is scolding Benjamin. Does she even know she’s scolding him?

Benjamin says to Fife, Let’s us go to the library for a snootful, Leonard. We can wait for Jackson there.

Earlier, an hour before sitting down to dinner, Fife and his father-in-law were settled in rattan chairs on the screened back porch beneath the slow-turning overhead fan, smoking and drinking bourbon and water over ice in heavy crystal highball glasses. Away from the ladies, as Benjamin likes to say. It is a custom observed whenever Fife and Alicia visit Richmond, especially lately, with Alicia avoiding alcohol and tobacco during her pregnancy and Jessie devoting the cocktail hour to supervising Cornel’s dinner and bath and bedtime preparations. Fife smokes his pipe, and Benjamin smokes a cigar. Fife enjoys the smell of burning tobacco mingling with the aromas that float through the screened walls of the porch from the bayberry and viburnum and Virginia sweetspire shrubs in carefully tended plots and rows near the house and out along the farther edges of the wide mint-green lawn. He likes the sound of ice cubes clicking against crystal, the cool disproportionate weight of the glass in his hand, the burnt-sugar smell of the bourbon when he brings the glass to his lips. He likes to watch the sun drop slowly toward the live oaks on the far side of the James River and the river turn satiny black as the sun disappears behind the silhouetted trees. He likes the low rumbling sound of his father-in-law’s voice.

Benjamin calls his son-in-law Leonard, not Fife or Leo. Would Leonard mind having a personal conversation after dinner? With him and Alicia’s uncle Jackson.

Startled, Fife says, Sure, no problem. He has no plans for tonight. Maybe a little reading is all. He doesn’t mention it, because he knows it’s outside Benjamin’s interest or ken, but he’s still preparing to defend his dissertation in June and plans to submit it for publication next year.

He doesn’t understand Benjamin’s use of the phrase personal conversation. Personal for whom? For the brothers, Benjamin and Jackson Chapman? For the son-in-law, Leonard Fife? He assumes it has something to do with family and money, but doesn’t know how to ask in what way it concerns family and money. Five years into this marriage, and he still has trouble penetrating his in-laws’ tangled southern formalities and habitual turns of phrase. He is still unable to understand quickly what they are trying to tell him or ask of him.

Part of it is that the Chapmans are not just southerners. They are wealthy Virginians. In Benjamin and his brother Jackson’s case wealthy by inheritance, in Jessie’s, by virtue of her marriage to Benjamin. In Alicia’s case by virtue of her grandparents’ and parents’ generosity. Fife, on the other hand, is not wealthy. He is poor. Although, by virtue of his marriage to Benjamin and Jessie Chapman’s only child, who since she turned twenty-one has received a substantial annual income from the trust fund established by her grandparents, Fife himself expects to be wealthy someday. And for now he is able to live more or less as if that day has already arrived.

The Chapman brothers, Benjamin and Jackson, are sole owners of a company founded by their late father that manufactures nationally famous foot-care products called Doctor Todd’s. The original Dr. Todd was a late-nineteenth-century Richmond druggist and amateur podiatrist who patented and sold home-made remedies for athlete’s foot, fallen arches, ingrown toenails, and other podiatric afflictions. His concoctions became so popular that in 1929 he was able to sell the patents and the Doctor Todd’s name to Benjamin and Jackson’s father, Ephraim Chapman, and live handsomely for the rest of his life. Ephraim Chapman was a successful tobacco merchant who anticipated the coming tobacco wars two generations ahead of the Reynolds and the Dukes and was looking for a promising way to get out of the business. In taking over and industrializing the manufacture and distribution of Dr. Todd’s home-made foot care remedies, Ephraim Chapman by the time he died in 1950 had become as rich as any of the tobacco barons, and Doctor Todd’s had become a trusted brand name like Vicks, Schwinn, Hartz, and Heinz. The products practically sold themselves. After their father’s death, all the Chapman brothers had to do was keep the machine running and let the men and women their father had hired run the factory and advertise and distribute the products, and when employees died or retired or took a job elsewhere, simply replace them with someone of equal ability. They barely had to put in half days at the office.

Benjamin leads Fife from the dining room through the living room, which they call the parlour, into the room they call the library to await the arrival of Jackson. The library is a male clubroom—maroon leather chairs and sofa, fireplace, mahogany bookcases filled with unread sets of books in matched bindings, framed prints of English setters and spaniels and game birds, with a bar and an eighteenth-century curly maple writing table. Not so much a room in which to read or study as a room in which men drink bourbon and branch water or gaze at their brandy snifters, smoke cigars, and talk business and politics without having to distinguish between the two.

Fife over the last five years has stayed in his wife’s parents’ house at least two hundred days and nights, first as an undergraduate at Richmond Professional Institute downtown and then as a graduate student and part-time instructor teaching freshman English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is becoming, in a sense, a scholar. His area of expertise is the early-twentieth-century American novel. He himself has been writing a late-twentieth-century American novel for the last two of those five years, since he and Alicia moved to Charlottesville. For all that, he has never found it desirable during his dozens of lengthy stays in the house to read or write in this room. The library is rarely used, the room belongs to Benjamin alone, and though Fife has been explicitly invited by both Jessie and Benjamin to feel free to use it for his work while Benjamin is at Doctor Todd’s or when, since Fife has no interest in accompanying him, Benjamin is on the golf course or hunting doves and quail with his dogs, Fife generally avoids the library. Whenever he enters the room, he feels like a supplicant. When he sits on, not in, the leather sofa or one of the oversized chairs or draws a desk chair up to the writing table, prepared to read or write or correct and grade student essays, he feels as if he’s about to be interviewed for a job by someone who has no intention of hiring him, someone who has already filled the position with a more qualified applicant. He has tried explaining to Alicia his preference for working, reading, and writing upstairs in their bedroom instead of in the library, and she claims to understand and sympathize.

The library is where I had to go and sit time-out when I did something bad during the day, she says to Fife. And Daddy, after he got home and heard about it from Mummy, would bring me there to scold me.

Benjamin Chapman pours three fingers of Rémy Martin into a snifter and offers it to Fife.

Thank you, Fife says, taking the glass globe in both hands to warm it. He sits in the chair nearest the fireplace. Even though it’s a warm, balmy spring evening, someone has been told to lay and set a fire. Benjamin pours himself his second, or maybe it’s his third, bourbon and branch over ice and stands by the bar. He’s a tall, angular, square-jawed man, tanned and fit. His metallic white hair is short and lies flat against his bony skull. So he won’t have to comb it when he steps from the shower, he likes to say. He wears a pale-blue short-sleeved shirt, oxford-cloth button-down, and a loosened Brooks Brothers striped repp tie and pressed khaki trousers. He left his blazer in the dining room, draped over the back of his chair. When later he goes upstairs to his bedroom, the jacket will be carefully hung in his bedroom closet.

He says to Fife, Would you like an excellent cigar made with leaves grown from smuggled Cuban seeds and rolled by Cuban exiles? A good anti–Fidel Cuban cigar, he adds. His little joke.

Fife hesitates. He’s trying again to quit smoking, this time mainly because of Alicia’s pregnancy. He quit cigarettes for the more authorial pipe when he first enrolled as a graduate student at UVA and lately smokes his pipe only on the porch when Alicia is not there or out in the backyard or on campus when they’re at home in Charlottesville. He says yes, he’d like an anti–Fidel Cuban.

Benjamin takes the chair next to Fife’s. They clip the ends off their cigars with Benjamin’s brass clipper and light up. The silky moist aroma of the grey smoke merges with the dry smell of the burning logs in the fireplace. For the next fifteen minutes the men smoke and sip in a polite if slightly uncomfortable silence. They are used to relying on their wives to enable personal conversations between them and rarely find themselves topically pre-positioned and on their own like this.

Finally Benjamin manages to say, So, I gather this is a crucial moment in your lives. For you and Alicia, I mean.

Yes, sir. It is. A big change for all of us.

I expect so. All of us.

Sadly, we’ll be a long ways from Richmond starting in the fall. But you’ll have to come visit us in Vermont sometimes. Often.

Yes. Never been there before, Leonard. To Vermont.

We’ll come down as often as possible, of course. Especially when I’m not teaching. When college is out.

Yes. That’s your territory, isn’t it? Vermont.

No, not exactly. Eastern Massachusetts. But, yes, sir, you could say it is my territory. Fife has struggled to adopt the southern manner of addressing an older male as sir. It’s easier with ma’am.

Well, I expect you’ll be happier up there. Among your own kind, so to speak.

Not really. I’ve come to love the South. Especially Charlottesville and Richmond.

You love Richmond. Benjamin states it, as if he doesn’t quite believe him.

Yes, sir. I do.

It’s a shame you couldn’t land a decent academic position at one of the universities hereabouts. Though I expect it’ll please you to get back to your native New England.

It’s a good little college, Goddard.

One of those new progressive colleges, I understand. From Alicia’s description.

Yes, sir.

That’s good. That would probably suit you better than, say, UVA?

Yes, sir. Although I’d be happy to stay at Virginia if they saw fit to keep me on. They don’t care to hire their own, unfortunately. Maybe someday, after I’ve taught elsewhere a few years and have tenure …

Benjamin stands and walks to the library door. A woman, one of the servants who served the family at dinner and whose name and face Fife still can’t call up, is greeting Benjamin’s brother, Jackson, at the front hall.

Benjamin says, Bring Mr. Chapman to the library, Nancy.

He remembers her now. Nancy. Fife stands, glass in one hand, cigar in the other, and mentally catalogues her name and promises himself that in order to remember it, he will use it the next time he has an opportunity to speak with her. Nancy.

At sixty-six Jackson Chapman is two years older than his brother and two shirt sizes larger, a bluff, hearty, red-faced man with a loud voice and hands the size of welders’ gloves. He, too, wears a blue button-down short-sleeve dress shirt, loosened striped repp tie, blazer, and khakis—the Doctor Todd’s management uniform.

Of the brothers, Jackson takes up more space, but Benjamin is more physically graceful. Almost elegant in his movements, he’s more restrained overall and indirect, though Fife has always assumed that beneath Benjamin’s polite reserve, he is as bullheaded and oblivious as his older brother, of whom Fife is not especially fond. But then Fife is not exactly fond of Benjamin, either. Secretly, he respects neither man. When Alicia asked why, he could not name a reason. She wants to know the reason her husband doesn’t respect her father and uncle. Their inherited wealth, perhaps. Their apparent assumption that it’s deserved. Their conservative Republican politics. All of the above. None of the above. Something else.

Jackson Chapman and his wife, Charlene, live in a house that was a wedding gift from Jackson’s father in the same Carillon Park neighbourhood as Benjamin’s family. They raised their three daughters there. Their large brick colonial with the white-columned front and sprawling lawns was the model a few years later for Benjamin’s wedding gift from his father. In the five years since he joined the family, Fife has seen a lot of Jackson, a little of Jackson’s wife Charlene, and not much of their three daughters, who, by the time he came to town, had all left Richmond for happier homes and marriages elsewhere in the deeper South. It is understood in the family that Charlene is unhappy and rarely leaves her bedroom. Alicia says that her aunt is an alcoholic pillhead who makes everyone in the family miserable. She admires her uncle for his forbearance and doesn’t blame her cousins for marrying professional men from far away.

Jackson shakes his brother’s hand, then envelops Fife’s, giving it a good crunch for manly emphasis and to show it’s no mere courtesy, he means it, he’s glad to see him, and heads straight for the bar, where he half-fills an old-fashioned glass with ice and tops it off with scotch.

Benjamin and Fife return to their chairs by the fire. Benjamin asks his brother if he’d like an excellent cigar made with leaves grown from Cuban seeds and rolled by Cuban exiles. An anti-Fidel cigar. Fife glances over at his father-in-law, expecting him to wink and grin. His expression remains the same, however.

Jackson waves the offer off and says, Jesus Christ, Ben, this is no way to have us a sit-down conversation! Haul those chairs over here by the sofa. He crosses the room and drops himself into the middle of the sofa. The meeting is now his. Fife has no brothers or sisters and is fascinated by interactions among siblings. Their earliest accommodation to one another’s presence and personality seems to last into old age. Jackson has probably been overriding Benjamin’s conversations since his younger brother first learned to speak.

Ben tells me you’re driving north tomorrow in order to sign the papers and close the deal on a little place you’ve bought up there. A place where you and Alicia plan on living after she has her baby. That right, son?

That’s correct, sir. I’ve taken a position …

I know, he says. You got yourself a teaching job up there. Up in Vermont. A long ways from your children’s grandparents, Leonard. A damned long ways from family. Your own family, your mom and dad, they still up there in Vermont?

Eastern Massachusetts. Not too far. Actually, they moved back to Maine not long ago.

Maine.

Yes. It’s where they’re from originally. It’s just my mother and father. A few cousins and aunts and uncles. My family’s not … not close. Not like Alicia and her parents. Or you and your daughters and grandkids.

Yes, but they’ll be nearby. Even in Maine. It’s hell not to have your kids and grandkids nearby. Maine, never been there, actually. You, Ben?

Nope. Never.

Living in Vermont, we probably won’t see my parents any more than we do now living in Virginia. A couple times a year. On holidays. My folks are not outgoing, let’s say. Not like you all, sir.

Fife has not told his parents that he and Alicia will soon be leaving the South and resettling in a village barely three hours’ drive north of his childhood home in Strafford, Massachusetts, and four hours west of his parents’ retirement home in Maine. Nor has he told his parents that, effective May 31, at the end of the spring semester, he has resigned his position as a part-time adjunct teacher of freshman composition at the University of Virginia. Nor has he mentioned to his parents that during the winter break two and a half months ago, he and Alicia flew to Boston and drove to Vermont where they signed a contract to buy an 1820s house in the village of Plainfield, or that he will fly to Boston alone tomorrow and drive back up to Plainfield, this time carrying a cashier’s cheque for $23,000 as payment for the house, and while there he will arrange with a contractor to begin renovations of the place under the watchful eye of Fife’s old friend, Stanley Reinhart, the artist and a professor of studio art at Goddard College, the man who introduced him to the college and the college to him, the man whose isolated, spartan living and working arrangements Fife intends, despite Alicia’s trust fund, to emulate. He has not told Benjamin and Jackson Chapman that the move to Vermont is motivated entirely by his desire to put as many miles as possible between their families and Fife himself and Alicia and Cornel and, when it’s born, their new baby. He does not say that the chair of the English department of the University of Virginia has offered him an extra course for the fall semester and a three-year contract on the condition that he publish his dissertation during that period. He has not told Alicia, either. She does not know that they could, if they wished, stay on in Charlottesville for at least another three years.

Jackson takes a large swallow of scotch and says, Son, let me cut to the chase here. My brother and me, we’ve been discussing a proposal. A business arrangement that we would like you to consider. Before you make your big move back north.

Fife does not remember either of these men ever addressing him before as son.

I’m listening, sir, he says. He has no idea what’s coming, but he knows that whatever business arrangement they propose, he’ll swat it away. Politely, but emphatically, unequivocally. Fife wants to be disentangled from these people. It’s not because he dislikes his wife’s family, he has told her, or disapproves of them. It’s because their wealth and privilege, their manners and taste, their luxuries and leisure, even their genteel southern white politics, have for so long seduced him and in that way given them power over him that he no longer knows the difference between him and them. It’s not their fault—they’ve been incredibly generous and open-minded and inclusive. It’s his fault. That’s what he tells his wife, Alicia.

From the day she brought him down here from Boston to be presented to her parents as her wonderful, brilliant, handsome boyfriend, a young man claiming to be a writer while supporting himself by working in a Boston bookstore—a college dropout, yes, but no matter, Mummy and Daddy, since you don’t need a college degree to be a writer, look at Hemingway and Faulkner, look at Herman Melville, and yes, he is a northerner, but he’s not Jewish and definitely not a Negro, although he is very liberal when it comes to racial issues, like you two, or, more accurately, like Mother, for while Daddy is a man who believes in fairness and justice and equal opportunity, he does not think long-established racial and social conventions and practices should be tinkered with for no unavoidable reason—from that first day, Fife was captured by Alicia’s family, manacled and bound to them as if he had arrived in Richmond with no family of his own, no antecedents, no cultural context, not even any friends.

He cannot blame them. He did it to himself. It was as if he arrived in Richmond with no memories and therefore no past. And now, five years later, he has made up his mind to take his memories and his past back, to be the man he was once on the verge of becoming and believes he would have become, if he had not fallen in love with Alicia Chapman.

Alicia does not know this yet. She herself has no desire to be free of her parents and their life. Yes, she has repeatedly declared that she will never end up like her mother, spending her days shopping and giving orders to Negroes, but her parents’ life is hers, after all. She believes, as do they, that Fife has taken this full-time tenure-track position at a small college in Vermont because it’s the only way for him to move ahead in his budding academic career. She and her parents also believe that he’s taken the job in order to obtain a small degree of financial independence from the Chapman family, an impulse they admire. A man ought to be financially independent of his wife’s inherited wealth. Or at least he should strive to be. Nonetheless, it is true, and wholly understandable, since the young man has not yet accumulated any capital of his own, that the couple will be purchasing the house in Vermont with a cashier’s cheque issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, drawn on the trust account of Alicia Violet Chapman and authorized by the trustees, Benjamin and Jessie Chapman and their attorney, Prescott Withers of Withers, Woodson and Wrall, who insisted only that title to the house be held solely by the Alicia Violet Chapman Trust.

Jackson Chapman takes a second serious swallow of scotch and begins by elaborating on something that Fife already knows. For months the brothers have been anxiously evaluating an offer by Beech & Nettleson, the multinational pharmaceutical corporation, to buy Doctor Todd’s. Beech & Nettleson has already bought up half a dozen small, family-owned manufacturers of health and beauty products, bringing them under a single management group based in Wilmington, Delaware, streamlining the purchased companies’ staffs and production methods and siphoning off the profits for distribution to Beech & Nettleson shareholders. Jackson and Benjamin Chapman have all but decided to sell the company they inherited from their father.

Since we began discussions with them back in January, Jackson says, B and N’s offer has gone up considerably.

By a whole bunch of millions, Benjamin says.

Jackson says, We do not expect them to sweeten the deal any further, however. We have reached a point, Leonard, where we must fish and stop cutting bait.

Benjamin adds that he and his brother do not want to sell the company. Their father created Doctor Todd’s, and they have devoted their lives to making it into the kind of company he would be proud of. But they have both reached an age when they must either pass Doctor Todd’s on to the next generation of Chapmans or else sell it to Beech & Nettleson.

That’s the problem, Benjamin says.

What’s the problem? Fife asks.

The next generation is the damned problem, Jackson says. It’s all girls! Ben’s one and my three. And not a one of them cut out to run a company. And my three sons-in-law, they all got their own enterprises down there in Atlanta and Mobile, anyhow. One’s a preacher and the other two are in the medical field. No disrespect, but the truth is, none of my girls or the boys they married is cut out to run a damned lemonade stand. If one of my girls was a man and had common sense and was prepared to join the company and eventually run Doctor Todd’s, okay, me and Ben could turn down Beech & Nettleson flat and stop all talk of selling right now.

Jackson looks straight at Fife and stops speaking. His brother looks at Fife also. A long silence ensues.

Fife knows what the Chapman brothers are proposing, but he can barely believe what he knows. Five years ago, when he first arrived in Richmond, having followed Alicia home from Simmons College like a stray dog she’d given part of her lunch to, her entire family, including Jackson’s wife, Charlene, and their daughters, treated him as a minor character in a rebellious stage of Alicia’s life that she would soon outgrow. The Chapman women and Jackson’s daughters did seem to think that he was handsome and interestingly roguish and intellectual, a beatnik with good manners, someone to flirt with. The men treated him like a worker they’d fire if they weren’t stuck with a damned union agreement they’d been forced to sign years ago. The family consensus was that Benjamin and Jessie had spoiled their only child, and Fife was the result. If no one overreacted, she’d soon get bored with her small rebellion and would tell the fellow to move on.

But then Fife and Alicia eloped to South Carolina, and their marriage became a legal fact of the Chapman family life, and the Chapman brothers treated him like a mistake that Alicia would have to live with, for a few years, anyhow—for which reason Benjamin Chapman refused to correct Fife when, even after he’d become a son-in-law, he continued to address Benjamin as Mr. Chapman. No point in letting the boy become overly familial.

The women and daughters, including his new wife Alicia, viewed Fife as a project, a boy they could educate about Virginia society and show how to dress for it. His new mother-in-law paid for his root canal work and the bridge necessitated by the inadequate dental care he had received when he was a child and then paid his undergraduate tuition at Richmond Professional Institute, and his new wife’s trust fund paid for their living expenses and the rented apartment down in the Fan District near the campus, so that he and Alicia, who had dropped out of Simmons, could concentrate on their studies and finish in under three years, which they both did, magna cum laude. At their graduation ceremony dinner, Fife called his father-in-law Mr. Chapman for the last time.

Leonard, please call me Benjamin.

Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

By the time Cornel, the first grandchild, was born, and Fife had received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and was accepted into the PhD program at UVA, all the Chapmans, men, women, and girls alike, had finally accepted him as a subsidiary member of the family. He was theirs now, and they his. Not quite as if he was born to it, more like he was adopted, but you had to admire the young man’s determination to make an academic career for himself. They say it’s not easy to land one of those Woodrow Wilson Fellowships. Very competitive. The young man was evidently not a gold digger. In fact, he seems to be managing his and Alicia’s finances in a responsible way, living like a regular graduate student and young teaching assistant who is not the beneficiary by marriage of a multimillion-dollar trust fund. They are young and artistic, so there are, of course, a few indulgences. Like his teaching only part-time so he can write his novel and finish up his graduate studies, while Alicia concentrates on raising little Cornel and decorating their apartment in Charlottesville. And taking a two-week winter vacation in Mexico one year, in search of the ghost of Malcolm Lowry, Fife said, to Sardinia the next, tracing the footprints of D. H. Lawrence, he explained, and last winter break to ski in Vermont, ostensibly in search of the spirit of Robert Frost—Fife has started to write a little poetry and is thinking of giving up on prose fiction, but hasn’t yet told anyone, not even Alicia.

In Vermont in January, they stayed with Fife’s old Boston friends, the Reinharts, Stanley and Gloria, who showed them a small house for sale in the same village, which Alicia’s trust would allow them to buy and renovate. Fife realized then, but did not tell Alicia, that if he came up with a good reason, they could live in Vermont instead of Charlottesville, Virginia, while he wrote his dissertation on Frost—he’s already decided to change his dissertation topic from Stephen Crane’s relation to capitalism to Robert Frost’s. At Stanley’s urging and Alicia’s reluctant acquiescence, Fife allowed himself to be interviewed for an assistant professorship, a tenure-track position, at nearby Goddard College for a salary lower than what he was being paid as an adjunct at UVA. The small, financially strapped college was happy to add a rising young scholar soon to receive his PhD from a prestigious southern university and offered him the position immediately following his interview with the dean. It did not hurt that Fife was vouched for by one of the most beloved and admired members of the faculty, the well-known Boston artist Stanley Reinhart.

These, then, are the indulgences that Fife and Alicia have been granting to themselves, and that do not seem in any way excessive or reckless to the Chapman family. They are in fact further evidence of the young man’s and Alicia’s common sense and realism.

We’d like for you to consider a proposition, Jackson says. Just give it some consideration is all. Ben and I have been discussing it thoroughly together, and with our attorneys at WWW and the other members of the board. We’d like you to hold off on your purchase of that place in Vermont. Let me get to the point, son. Instead of going off to Vermont and taking that nice little job at that nice little college, we’d like you to think about joining Doctor Todd’s. We’d like you to consider becoming chief executive officer of the company. Not right off, of course. But soon. Maybe very soon. A year or two. I would stay on as president another year, or more if needed, and brother Ben would stay on as chief financial officer, while you learn the ropes, so to speak. When you felt ready to take over as CEO, a position that doesn’t exactly exist yet, since me and Ben pretty much cover that job between us, we would step aside and officially retire. We’d stay on the board, of course, and be available to you for support and advice as long as you wanted. But the company, Doctor Todd’s, would be yours, Leonard. Not Beech & Nettleson’s. We’d negotiate a decent stock transfer. The company would stay in the family for another generation. Or more.

Fife affects wide-eyed surprise and humble pleasure. He tries to look as if the brothers have offered to nominate him for lieutenant governor of the state of Virginia. He takes a sip of cognac, studies his cold cigar for a few seconds as if lost in thought and relights it, then puts the cigar down in the ashtray as if he’s made a decision.

Benjamin says, Well, what about it, son?

Fife finds himself answering with a slight Tidewater accent. I am surprised and flattered by your proposal, sir. This is not something I have ever contemplated, working for Doctor Todd’s. Not in any capacity. Never mind becoming chief executive. My education and professional experience, as you both know, sir, have ill prepared me for such a position—

Benjamin interrupts, Hell, neither me nor Jack studied business at the university. I was chemical engineering, and Jackson was … What did you major in, Jack? Before you got bounced.

Jackson laughs. Alcohol and women, I guess. That and a little geology. Rocks ’n’ Rivers, we called it. R and R. Easiest major at UVA in those days. Most everybody in R and R thought he’d end up making millions in the oil industry, and a lot of ’em did. That and tobacco. But Daddy, he wanted to pass Doctor Todd’s on to us, so we went to work for him straight out of college and learned on the job. Same as you would do, Leonard. And someday you could pass Doctor Todd’s on to your son, Cornel. And let me tell you, that would make our daddy, Cornel’s great-granddaddy, very happy.

Benjamin says, I know you’re thinking of your writing ambitions, Leonard. And your scholarly interests. You wouldn’t have to give all that up. In anticipation of this conversation I had my secretary—you recall meeting Lucy at our party here last Christmas—I had Lucy find me some famous writers who successfully combined business and literature, and she came up with quite a few. Benjamin draws a notebook from his shirt pocket and opens it.

Fife is touched by this gesture. He is moved that his father-in-law has done this bit of research into a type of work that he ordinarily regards with suspicion and condescension.

Some of them were poets, he says, which makes sense, on account of there being fewer words in poems than novels, he adds and laughs. But look here, he says, tapping his notebook. T. S. Eliot, he was a banker. Won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Wallace Stevens, who was almost as famous as T. S. Eliot, he ran a big insurance company up in Hartford, Connecticut. You probably know his poetry. A couple were doctors, like Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer. And the English novelist Trollope, he was actually a postal inspector for the government. Mark Twain was a publisher, among other things. Bet you didn’t know that. Published Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs of the War, which kind of surprised me. I always thought Twain was a southerner. A riverboat captain, I seem to recall. Nathaniel Hawthorne, there’s another civil servant. He worked as a customs officer. So did your favourite, Herman Melville. It’s a long list, Leonard. It surprised me.

Never read any of those fellows, Jackson says. Not since college anyhow.

These are not lives that Fife envies or desires for himself, the lives of poets and writers who were also bankers, insurance executives, civil servants, physicians. For Fife, it is the slightly mad ones who count most, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Stephen Crane, and the writers who made youthful poverty attractive, like Hemingway, Joyce, Frost, and Faulkner, whose deprivations and sacrifices when young were rewarded with fame and riches later, while they were still living. None of them, not the mad ones, certainly, and not the bohemians either, would have agreed to be the chief operating officer of a company that manufactures foot powder. None of them would have agreed to be the podiatry-products king of America.

For Fife, it’s humiliating enough as it is, earning a doctorate in literature and working as a part-time adjunct professor and writing unpublished, maybe unpublishable, novels, stories, and poems in the air-conditioned comfort of an apartment—and soon, a house—paid for by his wife’s trust fund. If he accepts Benjamin and Jackson Chapman’s offer to stay here in Richmond and take over his in-laws’ family business, whether he is good at it or not—though he is sure that if Benjamin and Jackson Chapman, who are neither clever nor industrious, can handle the job, he can handle it, too—in a few years he and Alicia and their children will be living in a big brick colonial Carillon Park mansion that overlooks the James River, and he will join the Country Club of Virginia, the Chamber of Commerce, the board of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and one night after a half dozen bourbons and branch he will go into the library and lock the door and put a bullet in his brain.

Whoever, whatever, he is now, though he’s only partially solidified as a self-created being, if he accepts their offer, he will liquefy and eventually vaporize. He will become an invisible, odourless gas, and the best thing he can do to make sense of what he has done to himself is light a match, like one of those self-immolating Vietnamese monks protesting the war in Vietnam.

Fife stands and sets his glass on the coffee table, leaving his half-smoked cigar lying in the large antique pewter plate they’re using as an ashtray. Well, you’ve given me a lot to think on, he says. There’s that Tidewater accent again, he notes, too late to curb it. Of course I’ll need to discuss your offer first with Alicia, he says. This concerns her life as much as it does mine. It’s too late to change our plans to complete the purchase of the Vermont property, he says. Not without forfeiting the deposit. But it’s a good investment, regardless of what we decide, and would make a nice little summer place for someone, if not for us. How soon do you need to know my—our—decision? I was planning on staying in Vermont for a week to get the renovations on the house started.

Benjamin says he should take his time, as it’s the biggest decision he’ll ever make in his life. They can hold Beech & Nettleson off another week or two, no problem. But take longer, if you need to.

Fife says, I think that Alicia and I will want a block of time to consider all the ramifications. Because there’s a lot of ’em, he adds, smiling broadly, as if he’s already made up his mind to accept their offer and has become one of them. A lot of ramifications. I couldn’t commence working for Doctor Todd’s till June first, you realize. When the spring term’s finished in Charlottesville. Probably have to get me a shorter haircut, too, Fife says and laughs.

The Chapman brothers laugh, too. They’re relieved he said it and they didn’t have to. It would not do for Doctor Todd’s CEO-in-training to look like some kind of long-haired hippie protester. He probably ought to get rid of that moustache, too.

We’d have to find us a place to live here in Richmond.

You could always stay with us till you had your own place, Leonard.

We got that big three-bedroom apartment over the garage, Jackson adds.

All Alicia’s doctors are in Charlottesville, Fife says, and she’s due in early June.

We can recommend people here at VCU Medical Center. Best doctors in Virginia are right here, Leonard.

Okay, then. Give me a week to decide. Fife shakes Jackson’s hand with emphasis, as if they have a deal, and then shakes his father-in-law’s hand, and turning, exits quickly from the library, wearing a smile that’s almost a grin, and makes his way up the wide, carpeted stairs.