Foregone - Russell Banks

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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.

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