Foregone. Russell Banks
already fallen back to sleep. His body descends the carpeted stairs like water down a hillside stream, bumpity-bumpity-bump.
Seated side by side at the kitchen worktable, Cornel and his grandmother eat together. The two, grandmother and grandchild, have agreed, without ever saying, that both enjoy meals more when the child refuses to eat until coaxed to do so by the grandmother. Cornel’s middle name is Leonard, and no one in the family uses it, except on legal documents.
Fife stands unseen at the kitchen door and listens with low-level irritation as his son coaxes the grandmother to coax him to eat more oatmeal. Fife is unsure why he’s irritated. Come on, Cornel, she chirps. Come on now, honey, just two more big spoonfuls. That’s the sweet boy. There now, that wasn’t difficult, was it, honey?
He enters the breakfast room adjacent to the kitchen, and Susannah looks over and sings, Good morning, Mr. Fife. He cringes and sits at the table.
H’lo, Susannah, he says, rushing to get it over with. No eggs or anything this morning, please. Just coffee and juice.
How about some beaten biscuits, Mr. Fife? They awful good, especially since you going on a long trip today.
Yeah, fine.
Good morning, Leo, his mother-in-law calls from the kitchen.
Good morning, Jessie. Hey, Cornel, say good morning to me.
Hello, Daddy.
Jessie, if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon take a cab out to the airport. There’s no need for you to drive all the way out there and back.
No, she says. He will not call a taxi. The drive to Byrd Field is a pleasant one. And there is nothing she’d prefer this beautiful morning than to drive across Richmond in the company of her son-in-law and grandson. It’s spring, she announces. March thirty-first. And the city is too beautiful for words. Everything is suddenly blooming today, and she wants Cornel to see it all. You want to see the flowers, don’t you, honey?
Where’s Benjamin? Fife asks, suddenly aware of his father-in-law’s absence.
He left early for the club. He said to wish you well. Oh, here’s the paper, she says. Don’t get up, I’ll bring it to you. Sit still.
She strolls into the breakfast room and hands him the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
You haven’t much time, she warns. Do you want to use Benjamin’s electric shaver?
His hand goes to his cheek. He should have shaved last night, as he planned. Or else gotten up earlier this morning. He remembers Alicia’s imitation of her father.
Alicia, honey, the man’s unstable.
Then in her own voice: Of course, Daddy. What interesting twenty-two-year-old man isn’t, for God’s sake? I wouldn’t want him stable.
But, Alicia, he’s a college dropout. Not able to get himself a college degree.
He will, she answers. Did you and Uncle Jackson finish college, Daddy?
Causing her father to turn away from her, to stare out the library window at his gardens while easing sideways toward the liquor cabinet. The boy doesn’t have a penny. He doesn’t have a red cent, and his family doesn’t, either.
He will if he marries me. She lights a cigarette and casually seats herself on a window ledge.
Facing the bar, he pours a double shot of bourbon, downs it. But how’s it going to look?
To whom?
Well, to your friends, for instance. And to the rest of the family. To your own children someday. I imagine you do plan on having children. How will they explain it to their friends? Tell me that.
Alicia begins to laugh.
You laugh, but you’ll see I’m right. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him.
Alicia reported the exchange to Fife shortly after it occurred. Fife believes that was the moment when Benjamin decided to hire a private detective to check out the young man’s story, and a month later he learned that Leonard Fife had already been married once and divorced. Alicia had known it all along, but had not told her parents or anyone else. When her father put the detective’s report in front of her, Alicia laughed, and eventually so did they all, long afterwards—Fife, Jessie, even Benjamin himself. Alicia knew all about that brief, misbegotten marriage. It is not at all unusual for a sensitive, honourable young man from his background to marry his first serious girlfriend, only to learn quickly that it was a mistake. What is unusual, Daddy, is that he had the grace to call it a mistake and undo it.
In spite of the laughter and the slowly accumulated respect and trust, Fife has not forgotten the early anger, fear, and distrust. Every time he looks into a mirror and begins to shave, his razor poised high and tight to his right earlobe, he remembers, and for a second he tries to see himself as he must have looked to Benjamin back then, when he came to Richmond the first time, driving south from Boston with Alicia in her Morris Minor to meet her parents, a tall, skinny, hairy youth with a complicated, slightly sordid past and nothing more to recommend him than his plans for an even more complicated and only slightly less sordid future. He feels toward that entire period the way he would toward a birthmark—embarrassed, yet blameless.
Well, Jessie repeats, do you want to use Benjamin’s shaver?
If I have time, maybe I’ll step into a barbershop in Washington. There’s an hour and a half layover between planes. It’ll give me something to do.
All right then, she says and spins and exits into the kitchen in a swirl of yellow sundress and frozen smile.
He drinks his orange juice and coffee and munches on buttered, oven-warmed beaten biscuits, glancing across the front page of the Times-Dispatch. Vice President Hubert Humphrey is in town. Dr. Martin Luther King’s poor people’s march is unnecessary, claims Humphrey. Any grievances Dr. King might wish to air can be heard effectively by top government officials without marches or demonstrations. On the war in Vietnam, Humphrey says the Johnson-Humphrey administration is open to peace negotiations if there’s even the slightest indication that the enemy is willing to negotiate in good faith. The real peace candidate in these primaries is Lyndon B. Johnson, he says. Farther down, a box announces that tonight at nine the peace-loving President Johnson will tell the country by radio and TV that he’s ordering an increase in troops and spending for the war. Fife will be at Stanley Reinhart’s by then. They’ll probably have to watch it, with Stanley bellowing insults at Johnson. Firebombs went off yesterday in New York at Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Gimbel’s, and Klein’s, and a dynamite blast shattered thirty windows at New York’s major Selective Service induction centre.
He peers out the window of the breakfast room at a corner of the large yard, the manicured lawns, a luminous springtime shade of green already, and the blossoming dogwood and Judas trees. Through the trees and beyond he can glimpse slate-coloured scraps of the James River. The yardman, as they call him, comes slowly into view. Fife thinks his name is Joseph or Calvin or Roger. He carries a small fireplace shovel and a metal dustpan. Crossing the yard to the far corner where the lawn droops to meet a clutch of shiny dark-green magnolia trees, he stops, bends down slowly, carefully shovels a small lump of dog turd into his dustpan. Then he stands and resumes his search, passing out of Fife’s view to the other side of the house.
Your plane leaves in little over an hour, Leo! Jessie calls. We better leave for the airport in five, to be safe. Okay?
Can I go, Daddy? Cornel asks, more from a desire to be polite than a need for his father’s permission. The boy’s mother and grandmother have both reassured him that he can help take his daddy to the airport.
Yes, you can go with me, Fife says uselessly. As far as the airport, anyhow. He finishes his coffee and gets up from the table. Then you’ll have to come back here with Meema, okay?
Okay, Cornel says quietly and lapses into silence.
Is he afraid? Fife wonders. Or does he assume with the others that after a week away, Fife will be coming back here? The boy doesn’t