Foregone - Russell Banks

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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,

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