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. All of us.
Sadly, we’ll be a long ways from Richmond starting in the fall. But 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
