Foregone - Russell Banks

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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

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