him to wink and grin. His expression remains the same, however.
Jackson waves the offer off and says, Jesus Christ, Ben, this is no way to have us a sit-down conversation! Haul those chairs over here by the sofa. He crosses the room and drops himself into the middle of the sofa. The meeting is now his. Fife has no brothers or sisters and is fascinated by interactions among siblings. Their earliest accommodation to one another’s presence and personality seems to last into old age. Jackson has probably been overriding Benjamin’s conversations since his younger brother first learned to speak.
Ben tells me you’re driving north tomorrow in order to sign the papers and close the deal on a little place you’ve bought up there. A place where you and Alicia plan on living after she has her baby. That right, son?
That’s correct, sir. I’ve taken a position …
I know, he says. You got yourself a teaching job up there. Up in Vermont. A long ways from your children’s grandparents, Leonard. A damned long ways from family. Your own family, your mom and dad, they still up there in Vermont?
Eastern Massachusetts. Not too far. Actually, they moved back to Maine not long ago.
Maine.
Yes. It’s where they’re from originally. It’s just my mother and father. A few cousins and aunts and uncles. My family’s not … not close. Not like Alicia and her parents. Or you and your daughters and grandkids.
Yes, but they’ll be nearby. Even in Maine. It’s hell not to have your kids and grandkids nearby. Maine, never been there, actually. You, Ben?
Nope. Never.
Living in Vermont, we probably won’t see my parents any more than we do now living in Virginia. A couple times a year. On holidays. My folks are not outgoing, let’s say. Not like you all, sir.
Fife has not told his parents that he and Alicia will soon be leaving the South and resettling in a village barely three hours’ drive north of his childhood home in Strafford, Massachusetts, and four hours west of his parents’ retirement home in Maine. Nor has he told his parents that, effective May 31, at the end of the spring semester, he has resigned his position as a part-time adjunct teacher of freshman composition at the University of Virginia. Nor has he mentioned to his parents that during the winter break two and a half months ago, he and Alicia flew to Boston and drove to Vermont where they signed a contract to buy an 1820s house in the village of Plainfield, or that he will fly to Boston alone tomorrow and drive back up to Plainfield, this time carrying a cashier’s cheque for $23,000 as payment for the house, and while there he will arrange with a contractor to begin renovations of the place under the watchful eye of Fife’s old friend, Stanley Reinhart, the artist and a professor of studio art at Goddard College, the man who introduced him to the college and the college to him, the man whose isolated, spartan living and working arrangements Fife intends, despite Alicia’s trust fund, to emulate. He has not told Benjamin and Jackson Chapman that the move to Vermont is motivated entirely by his desire to put as many miles as possible between their families and Fife himself and Alicia and Cornel and, when it’s born, their new baby. He does not say that the chair of the English department of the University of Virginia has offered him an extra course for the fall semester and a three-year contract on the condition that he publish his dissertation during that period. He has not told Alicia, either. She does not know that they could, if they wished, stay on in Charlottesville for at least another three years.
Jackson takes a large swallow of scotch and says, Son, let me cut to the chase here. My brother and me, we’ve been discussing a proposal. A business arrangement that we would like you to consider. Before you make your big move back north.
Fife does not remember either of these men ever addressing him before 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
