Foregone. Russell Banks
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