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, an hour before sitting down to dinner, Fife and his father-in-law were settled 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.
