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 the ghost of Malcolm Lowry, Fife said, to Sardinia the next, tracing the footprints of D. H. Lawrence, he explained, and last winter break to ski in Vermont, ostensibly in search of the spirit of Robert Frost—Fife has started to write a little poetry and is thinking of giving up on prose fiction, but hasn’t yet told anyone, not even Alicia.
In Vermont in January, they stayed with Fife’s old Boston friends, the Reinharts, Stanley and Gloria, who showed them a small house for sale in the same village, which Alicia’s trust would allow them to buy and renovate. Fife realized then, but did not tell Alicia, that if he came up with a good reason, they could live in Vermont instead of Charlottesville, Virginia, while he wrote his dissertation on Frost—he’s already decided to change his dissertation topic from Stephen Crane’s relation to capitalism to Robert Frost’s. At Stanley’s urging and Alicia’s reluctant acquiescence, Fife allowed himself to be interviewed for an assistant professorship, a tenure-track position, at nearby Goddard College for a salary lower than what he was being paid as an adjunct at UVA. The small, financially strapped college was happy to add a rising young scholar soon to receive his PhD from a prestigious southern university and offered him the position immediately following his interview with the dean. It did not hurt that Fife was vouched for by one of the most beloved and admired members of the faculty, the well-known Boston artist Stanley Reinhart.
These, then, are the indulgences that Fife and Alicia have been granting to themselves, and that do not seem in any way excessive or reckless to the Chapman family. They are in fact further evidence of the young man’s and Alicia’s common sense and realism.
We’d like for you to consider a proposition, Jackson says. Just give it some consideration is all. Ben and I have been discussing it thoroughly together, and with our attorneys at WWW and the other members of the board. We’d like you to hold off on your purchase of that place in Vermont. Let me get to the point, son. Instead of going off to Vermont and taking that nice little job at that nice little college, we’d like you to think about joining Doctor Todd’s. We’d like you to consider becoming chief executive officer of the company. Not right off, of course. But soon. Maybe very soon. A year or two. I would stay on as president another year, or more if needed, and brother Ben would stay on as chief financial officer, while you learn the ropes, so to speak. When you felt ready to take over as CEO, a position that doesn’t exactly exist yet, since me and Ben pretty much cover that job between us, we would step aside and officially retire. We’d stay on the board, of course, and be available to you for support and advice as long as you wanted. But the company, Doctor Todd’s, would be yours, Leonard. Not Beech & Nettleson’s. We’d negotiate a decent stock transfer. The company would stay in the family for another generation. Or more.
Fife affects wide-eyed surprise and humble pleasure. He tries to look as if the brothers have offered to nominate him for lieutenant governor of the state of Virginia. He takes a sip of cognac, studies his cold cigar for a few seconds as if lost in thought and relights it, then puts the cigar down in the ashtray as if he’s made a decision.
Benjamin says, Well, what about it, son?
Fife finds himself answering with a slight Tidewater accent. I am surprised and flattered by your proposal, sir. This is not something I have ever contemplated, working for Doctor Todd’s. Not in any capacity. Never mind becoming chief executive. My education and professional experience, as you both know, sir, have ill prepared me for such a position—
Benjamin interrupts, Hell, neither me nor Jack studied business at the university. I was chemical engineering, and Jackson was … What did you major in, Jack? Before you got bounced.
Jackson laughs. Alcohol and women, I guess. That and a little geology. Rocks ’n’ Rivers, we called it. R and R. Easiest major
