Foregone E-Book

Russell Banks

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 511

Beschreibung

At the centre of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex-star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife's wife and alongside Malcolm's producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession. Imaginatively structured around Fife's secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man's mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR FOREGONE

‘Banks, a conduit for the confounded and the unlucky, a writer acutely attuned to place and ambiance, is at his most magnetic and provocative in this portrait of a celebrated documentary filmmaker on the brink of death … Masterful’ – Booklist (Starred Review)

‘Foregone is a subtle meditation on a life composed of half-forgotten impulses and their endless consequences, misapprehensions of others that are accepted and exploited almost passively, a minor heroism that is only enhanced by demurral. In the rages of a sick old man profound questions arise – what is a life? A self? And what is lost when truth destroys the fabrications that sustain other lives?’ – Marilynne Robinson

‘Banks keeps the audience rapt’ – Publishers Weekly

‘Banks, who turned 80 this year, explores aging, memory, and reputation in thoughtful and touching ways, enhanced by the correspondence between aspects of Leo’s life and the writer’s own history’ – Kirkus(Starred Review)

‘Russell Banks is, word for word, idea for idea, one of the great American novelists. Foregone is a book about not coming to a conclusion. Banks presents us with a series of mirrors, some of them broken, some of them intact, and all of them wildly reflective of our times. It is a book about the shifting shapes of memory and the chimerical nature of our lives’ – Colum McCann

‘Russell Banks, as cinematographer, is known to move in close. Foregone focuses his sharp eye on the feints and fictions amid life’s ‘facts,’ as he reveals his fascinatingly fallible character, Fife, whose personal life has been contextualized by history. As we zig-zag through the character’s past and present, it becomes apparent that the writer is simultaneously, and subtly, demonstrating the act of writing fiction. Fife is aptly named; he’s an instrument piercing the soundtrack we call life, as the drummer marches on’ – Ann Beattie

PRAISE FOR RUSSELL BANKS

‘A splendid epic… a marvellous book’ – Time Out

‘A startling work of vision… A great American novel’ – Independent

‘An utterly compelling story, a tragedy of near-classic proportions with extraordinary resonances’ – Financial Times

‘One of the overlooked classics of American literature’ – Guardian on Cloudsplitter

‘Cloudsplitter is a masterwork’ – New Yorker

‘This beautifully written book’s most brilliant strategy is… to explore the complexity of grief and hope’ – Vogue

‘Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with a tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portrait of America more than any other – the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it’ – Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient

‘Russell Banks knows everything worth knowing… and much, much more’ – Washington Post

‘One of our best and most ambitious novelists’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power’ – Boston Globe

To Chase, the beloved

Recalling who I was, I see somebody else.

In memory the past becomes the present.

Who I was is somebody I love,

Yet only in a dream.

– Fernando Pessoa, The Past Becomes Present

1

Fife twists in the wheelchair and says to the woman who’s pushing it, I forget why I agreed to this. Tell me why I agreed to this.

It’s the first time he’s asked her. It’s not a question, it’s a light, self-mocking, self-pitying joke, and he says it in French, but she doesn’t seem to get it. She’s Haitian, in her mid-fifties, a little humorless, brusque and professional – exactly what he and Emma wanted in a nurse. Now he’s not so sure. Her name is Renée Jacques. She speaks English with reluctance and a French he understands with difficulty, although he’s supposedly fluent, at least in Québécois.

She reaches over him and opens the bedroom door and eases the wheelchair over the threshold into the hallway. They pass the closed door to the adjacent bedroom that Emma has used for her office and for sleeping since Fife started staying awake all night with the sweats and chills. He wonders if she’s in there now. Hiding from Malcolm and his film crew. Hiding from her husband’s sickness. His dying.

If he could, he’d hide, too. He asks Renée again to tell him why he agreed to this.

He knows she thinks he’s only whining and doesn’t really want her to answer. She says, Monsieur Fife agreed to make the interview because he’s famous for something to do with cinema, and famous people are required to make interviews. She says, They have already been here an hour setting up their lights and moving furniture and covering all the living room windows with black cloth. I hope they plan to put everything back the way it was before they depart from here, she adds.

Fife asks if she’s sure Madame Fife – her name is Emma Flynn, but he calls her Madame Fife – is still at home. She didn’t go out without telling me, did she? He lowers his voice as if talking to himself and says in English, I fucking need her here. She’s the only reason I agreed to this goddamn thing. If she isn’t there while I do it, I’m going to shut it down before we start. You know what I mean? he asks the nurse.

She doesn’t answer. Just keeps pushing the wheelchair slowly down the long, dark, narrow hallway.

He tells her that what he plans to say today he doesn’t want to say twice and probably won’t have the chance to say again anyhow.

Renée Jacques is nearly six feet tall and square-shouldered, very dark, with high, prominent cheekbones and eyes set wide in her face. She reminds him of someone he knew many years ago, but can’t remember who. Fife likes the sheen cast by her smooth brown skin. She is a home-care day nurse and doesn’t have to wear a uniform on the job unless the client requests it. Emma, when she hired Renée, had specified no uniform, please, my husband does not want a uniformed nurse, but Renée showed up in crisp whites anyhow. It spooked Fife at first, but after ten days he has gotten used to it. Also, his condition is worse now than when she first arrived. He’s weaker and more addled – only intermittently, but with increasing frequency – and is less able to pretend that he is only temporarily disabled, out of whack, recovering from a curable illness. The nurse’s uniform doesn’t bother him as much now. They’re ready to add a night nurse, and this time Emma has not specified, please, no uniform.

Renée pushes the wheelchair across the kitchen, and as they pass through the breakfast room, Fife flashes a glance out the tall, narrow twenty-paned window and down at the black domed tops of umbrellas fighting the wind on Sherbrooke. Large flakes of soft snow are mixed into the rain, and a slick gray slush covers the sidewalks. Traffic sloshes soundlessly past. Gusts of wind beat in silence against the thick walls of the fortress-like gray cut-stone building. The large, rambling apartment takes up the entire southeast half of the third floor. The archdiocese of Montreal used the building to house the nuns of the Little Franciscan Sisters of Mary in the 1890s and sold it in the 1960s to a developer who converted it into a dozen high-ceilinged six- and seven-room luxury apartments.

Renée says that Madame Fife took one look at the weather and said she was glad to stay home today. Madame Fife is working in her office on her computer. She asked Renée to tell Fife that she will come out to see him when the film people start the interview.

Yeah, well, I can’t do this if she’s not here. You know what I mean? he asks again.

Renée says, since he will in reality be talking to a movie camera and the man doing the interview and the people who will someday watch the movie on television, can’t he pretend that he’s talking to his wife, the same as if she was there in reality?

He says, You talk too much.

You asked if I knew what you mean about wanting her to hear you in the interview.

Yes, I did. But still, you talk too much.

She slides open the heavy pocket door to the living room and shoves the wheelchair over the high threshold into the darkened room. The Fifes’ apartment was originally occupied by the monseigneur who supervised the seminary. It’s a wood-paneled three-bedroom flat with a formal dining room, parlor, reception hall, office, and library that Fife uses as an editing room. He bought the apartment in the late 1980s when the bottom fell out of Westmount real estate. Leonard Fife and Emma Flynn are childless, bilingual, socially attractive, and artistic semi-celebrities, and over the years they have adapted the rooms to suit the overlapping needs of their professional and personal lives.

Nothing in the room is the way he remembers it. Instead of entering a large high-ceilinged living room with four tall curtained windows, a room comfortably furnished with mid-twentieth-century sofas and chairs and lamps and tables, Fife has entered a black box of unknown dimensions. He can feel the presence of several other people in the box, perhaps as many as four. Their silence is sudden, like held breath, as if caused by his entry, as if they don’t want him to know they have been talking about him. About his illness.

They exhale, and he hears them breathing. His sense of smell and taste are nearly deadened, and his sight has turned cloudy, but his hearing is still reliable.

Over here, Leo! It’s Malcolm, speaking in English. He says, Vincent, give us some light, will you?

Vincent is the cameraman – though he prefers to be called director of photography. DP. He asks Malcolm if he wants the houselights on. So Leo can get his bearings, he adds. Good morning, Leo. Thanks for letting us do this, man. Really appreciate it. Among friends Leonard Fife is known as Leo. Vincent is a tall, pear-shaped man with narrow shoulders and head and the delicate small hands of a jeweler. He’s wearing his pink-rimmed designer eyeglasses today. He has a blond mustache, wispy and ill-trimmed, pouting red lips, and watery pale-blue eyes.

Malcolm, too, says good morning and thanks Fife. Let’s hold off on the lights for now, Vincent. It took us a fucking hour to get it totally dark, he says, and all the lamps and light fixtures are unplugged and moved.

Vincent hits a handheld switch, and a small, sharply cut circle of light appears on the bare wooden floor. It’s where Fife will be interrogated. He remembers that section of floor being covered by the kilim carpet he and Emma brought back from Iran in ’88. Fife would prefer to keep the room in total darkness, forget the pin-spot, just let him be a disembodied voice speaking from empty dark to embodied dark. But he knows what kind of film Malcolm has planned.

Fife hopes he won’t have to hear Malcolm and his crew tell him again how great he looks. He got more than enough lame, lying compliments from them last month when they came up from Toronto to visit him at the Segal Cancer Centre and someone had the bright idea to shoot this interview.

Actually, he thinks it was his idea, not Malcolm’s or anyone else’s. And it wasn’t because he thought he looked good enough to be on-camera: he knows what he looks like. It was because he knew he was dying.

A woman’s voice trills out of the darkness, thanking him. Fife recognizes the voice as Diana’s, Malcolm’s producer and longtime home companion. They are all grateful to him, she says. Her thin, high-pitched voice sounds to Fife like a repressed shriek. Fife has always hated her voice. Anytime you want to take a break, she says, or rest or whatever, just do it. Don’t push yourself.

Malcolm and his crew are based in Toronto, and everyone is speaking English now. To Renée, Diana says, Bring the wheelchair over here into the spotlight, will you, dear? We’re not going to film the chair, just Leo’s face, neck, and shoulders, sometimes straight on, sometimes in profile or from behind. Everything else will be blacked out. She says it with the authority of a grade-school teacher.

Renée probably couldn’t care less how they intend to shoot Fife, but she understands Diana’s English well enough to place his wheelchair directly under the pin-spot.

It’s the style you invented, man, says Malcolm. Backlight the off-camera side of the subject’s face, nothing else. He steps up to the wheelchair and lays a hand on Fife’s shoulder. Seemed only appropriate, he says. Right? Hope you don’t object.

No, I don’t object.

Consider it a protégé’s homage, man.

A protégé’s homage. Fair enough, I guess. What are you using for a camera?

Vincent answers. The Sony FS7.

Who else is here? In the room, I mean.

Malcolm says, Sloan’s over there in the corner. She’ll mic you and run the sound with that and a boom, if we need it. The Sony’s sound needs help. You met her a couple times in Toronto.

I remember, Fife says, cutting him off. He believes that Malcolm is having an affair with the girl. She’s Nova Scotian, a pretty redheaded kid with freckles and can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five. Malcolm is close to fifty now. How is that possible? Fife has ex-students, protégés, who are old enough to have inappropriate affairs with interns and famous enough to be able to hook and land the financing and distribution for a filmed final interview with Leonard Fife, himself a documentarian, but too old and sick now for inappropriate affairs and famous only in certain unfashionably leftist quarters, a filmmaker who couldn’t raise the money on his own for a project like this.

Malcolm MacLeod films the history of Canada, soft-focused liberal takes on early settlement, les coureurs de bois, the native peoples, Loyalist immigrants from the War of American Independence, American slaves who followed the North Star on the Underground Railroad, hockey, Cajun music. He’s the Ken Burns of the North, and now he’s documenting his old professor’s final confession. It will be his mentor’s last interview, and Malcolm has written out twenty-five questions designed to seduce Fife into making the kind of provocative and sometimes profound remarks and observations that he is famous for, at least among those who know him personally or studied with him at Concordia back in the 1970s and ’80s or read interviews with him in the Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques and Cinema Canada in the ’80s, when it was run by his friends Connie and Jean-Pierre Tadros.

Fife tells Renée to park him wherever they want him and then please bring Madame Fife in here, he has something important that he must tell her.

Renée moves his chair into the circle of light. She sets the brake and disappears into the darkness beyond.

Fife wants to know where the camera is located.

Don’t worry about it, man. All you got to do is sit there and do what you do best.

Which is?

Talk.

Talk? That’s what I do best?

You know what I mean. What you do better than anyone else. What you do best, of course, is make your films. You sure you’re feeling up to this, Leo? I don’t want to push you, bro. We don’t have to do the entire shoot today, if you’re not up to it. Maybe just a couple hours or so, or until we use up the first card. We can come back tomorrow to continue.

Diana chimes in and confirms. We can stay in Montreal all week, if it suits you, Leo. We can download and edit in the hotel as we go. There’s no need to shoot it all in one day and go back to Toronto for the editing.

Fife says, No, I want to keep you right here. Until I finish telling everything.

What do you mean, everything? Diana asks. Malcolm and I have worked up some great questions for you.

I’m sure you have.

The young woman, Sloan, has stepped from the darkness into his circle of light and is miking him. She clips the tiny mic onto the collar band of the long-sleeved black mock turtleneck shirt that has been part of Fife’s uniform for decades. He likes being touched by her. He likes the mingled odor of cigarettes and sweat and minty shampoo. He can’t catch the scent of much, but he can smell her. Young women, their scent is different and better than that of middle-aged and older women. It’s as if desire and longing for desire have distinct and different odors. When Emma leans down in the morning to kiss his cheek before leaving for their production company office downtown, he inhales the smell of English breakfast tea and unscented soap. The odor of a longing for desire. This young woman, Sloan, she smells of desire itself.

It’s not fair to notice that, he thinks.

But it is true. And Emma’s morning smell is not unpleasant. Just empty of desire and filled with a wish for it to return. He wonders what he smells like now, especially to a young woman. To Sloan. Can she pick up the odor of his medications, the antiandrogens he was on for months and the Taxotere and prednisone he started this past week? Can she smell the biphosphonates he’s taking to keep his bones from breaking under the weight of his body, the morphine patches, the urine dripping from his bladder into the catheter and tube emptying into the bag hooked onto his chair? The bits of dried feces clinging to his ass? To Sloan he must smell like a hospital ward for chemically castrated old men dying of cancer.

Tell me again why I came home from the hospital, he says to no one in particular.

Malcolm says, Well, I imagine you’re a hell of a lot happier here. With Emma being close by, I mean. And everything that’s familiar.

Fife says, There’s no more being happy or happier, Malcolm. He’d like to add – but doesn’t – that for him now there’s only more pain and less pain, more and less nausea and diarrhea, more and less dread, more and less fear. Along with more and less shame, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, depression. And more and less confusion. Forget happy and happier, he says.

C’mon, Leo. Don’t talk like that, Malcolm says.

I believe I can talk any damned way I want now.

Yes, that’s true, you can. That’s why we’re here today. Right?

Right.

Sloan puts her headphones on, and the darkness swallows her.

Where the hell is my wife? Fife asks the darkness. He can still smell Sloan.

Right behind you, Emma says in her low smoker’s voice. Renée told me you wouldn’t do this unless I’m present. True?

Mostly true. Maybe I’d do it, but differently. Very differently. If you weren’t here, I mean.

Why? This is for posterity. I’m not posterity, she says and laughs. I’m your wife.

It’s easier for me to know what to say and what not to say when I know who I’m talking to.

You’re talking to Malcolm, she says. You’re making a movie.

No! No, I’m not. Malcolm and Vincent and Diana and Sloan, they’re making a movie. They’re here to film and record me, so they can cut and splice my image and words together and make from those digitalized images and words a one- or two-hour movie that they sold to the Canadian Broadcasting Company so it can be resold to Canadian television viewers after I’m gone and before I’m forgotten. Malcolm and Diana won’t be listening to me and watching me. They’re too busy making a movie about me. I’m just the subject. Different thing. But if I know who I’m talking to, I can be more than a subject. That’s why I need you here.

Emma asks Diana for some light so she can find someplace to sit.

Sloan, Diana says, give us some light. But Sloan is listening to Fife through her headphones.

Vincent reaches for a wall switch and flips on the ceiling light, and Fife sees that they have pushed all the furniture against the far wall opposite the blacked-out windows, making the living room seem as large and empty as a hotel ballroom. With all the furniture clustered in front of the fireplace and built-in bookshelves, the room feels tilted onto its side, as if they’re passengers on a cruise ship, and the ship has struck a reef and is listing and is about to go down. Fife suddenly feels nauseous. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit. The ship is sinking. All hands on deck. Women and children and sick old men first.

Emma crosses to the pile of furniture, and the ship lists a few inches farther in that direction. She sits on the sofa by the wall and crosses her arms and legs.

Be careful, Fife says to her.

What? Careful of what?

Nothing. Diana, please shut off the room lights. It’s disorienting. The spot’s okay, but I don’t want to see the room. Or be seen in it.

Oh, c’mon, Leo, you look great, Diana says. Really, you do.

Definitely, Malcolm says. You look great. Too bad we’re only going to shoot your beautiful, brooding bald head.

The light goes out, and Fife is once again illuminated solely and from above by the Speedlite. The ship is leveled, and his nausea passes.

You know the drill, Malcolm says. Ready?

Yes. Ready as I’ll ever be. Or ever was.

Ready, everyone? Vincent? Sloan?

Yes.

Yes.

Diana?

Yes.

Malcolm says Fife’s name and the date, April 1, 2018, and location, Montreal, Quebec, and claps his hands once in front of Vincent’s FS7. The camera is attached to a tripod on a track that orbits the circle of light on the bare floor and stares at the featureless, flat-black side of Fife’s face, like the dark side of the moon. The unseen side is lit by the overhead spot. His silhouette has a molten golden edge, a penumbra surrounded by impenetrable black space. Malcolm is right, Fife still has a beautiful, brooding bald head. At least in profile. The illness and chemo have dissolved a quarter of his body, liquefying his flesh, pushing forward the long arc of his nose and his cheekbones and prominent chin and the plates of his skull. He looks like a polished Roman coin.

For a few seconds everyone is silent, waiting for Malcolm’s first question. But suddenly Fife says that he’s going to answer a question that no one knows to ask today. Or no one is rude enough to ask. It was asked of him many times long ago and over the years, asked privately and in public and presumably answered truthfully and completely over and over, so to ask it yet again would be either stupid or insulting. And to ask it on this particular occasion would seem stupid or insulting or both, when in fact it is neither.

The question, he says, is simply this: Why did you decide in the spring of 1968 to leave the United States and migrate to Canada?

For nearly fifty years he has been answering that question, creating and reaffirming the widespread belief, at least among Canadians, that Leonard Fife was one of the more than sixty thousand young American men who fled to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to avoid being sent by the US military to Vietnam. Those sixty thousand men were either draft dodgers or deserters. For half a century Leonard Fife was believed to be a draft dodger. It’s what he claimed on the day he crossed the border from Vermont into Canada and asked for asylum. He’s claimed it ever since that day.

The truth, however, as always, is more complicated and ambiguous. Therefore, consider the preceding as merely a preface. For here begins Malcolm MacLeod’s controversial film Oh, Canada. Although brilliantly shot and edited by MacLeod and produced by his wife Diana in the late Leonard Fife’s own manner, it is in some ways a disheartening, disillusioning film about Fife, one of Canada’s most celebrated and admired documentary filmmakers. Oh, Canada shocked and disappointed the millions of Canadians who admired Leonard Fife for being one of those sixty thousand Americans who fled north in the late 1960s to escape being sent by the American government to kill or die in Vietnam. While his filmed deathbed confession may have been cathartic for Fife himself, it has brought many Canadians to question their past and present national policy of offering asylum to so-called refugees. Refugees are people who have fled their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution if they return home. They are assumed to have seen or experienced many horrors. A refugee is different from an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who chooses to settle permanently in another country. Refugees are thought to have been forced to flee. Leonard Fife claimed to be a refugee.

2

Fife is well aware that the seeds were planted years earlier, in childhood and adolescence. Possibly they were planted in his parents’ lives even before he was born. But the night of March 30, 1968, fifty years ago, was when the poisonous flower first bloomed. So he begins his account there, in Richmond, Virginia, in the home of his in-laws, Jessie and Benjamin Chapman. They are the parents of his wife, whose name is Alicia Chapman, he adds. They are not the parents of Emma Flynn.

He remembers the dining room table being cleared by a maid, a middle-aged Black woman. He can’t bring her face or her name to mind, he says. There were many Black servants employed by the Chapmans, but he can only remember the faces and names of two. There is the cook, Susannah, a stout, green-eyed dark-brown woman in her mid-fifties who wears a hairnet and a starched white short-sleeved dress and soft-soled white shoes and black socks. To Susannah’s apparent amusement, Fife calls her Oh Susannah whenever he rises early and eats alone in the breakfast room adjacent to the kitchen. Which, when he and Alicia and their son Cornel stay overnight at the Chapman home in Richmond, is nearly every morning. Fife is an early riser. No one else in the family is. Susannah prepares the family’s every meal six days a week. One of the other servants, a woman whose face or name he can’t remember, cooks the family meals on Sundays.

And there is Sally. He has no trouble remembering her. Twenty-seven years earlier she was his wife Alicia’s nanny. Twenty years before that, she was Alicia’s mother’s nanny down in Charleston. Now she is his son Cornel’s. At least when Fife and Alicia visit Richmond, she is. Sally is a tall, slightly bent woman, perhaps seventy-five years old, possibly older, he’s unsure, and when he asked Alicia and her mother, they weren’t sure, either. He doesn’t feel comfortable asking Sally herself. Her personal life seems off-limits, mutually agreed upon, as if to make it nonexistent.

Sally retired, Alicia’s mother Jessie told Fife, when Alicia went north to attend Simmons College, which is to say that she is no longer employed by the Chapmans, except when intermittently brought out of her retirement to watch over Cornel during their visits from Charlottesville. In Chapman family photographs, when Sally would have been in her fifties – a broad-shouldered Black woman holding little Alicia’s hand at six or seven outside Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Grove Avenue – she was very dark, but in old age her complexion has lightened to the color of taffy. She is handsome and mild and moves with deliberate, slow grace. She, too, wears a hairnet and white dress, but always with a dark-red cardigan sweater buttoned over her dress or draped across her shoulders, as if the central air-conditioning system keeps the Chapmans’ Richmond home too cold for her old Charleston bones. Describing her, Fife realizes that it’s Sally who his Haitian nurse Renée reminds him of – though he doesn’t say it aloud.

Other than Susannah and Sally, in Fife’s mind the Chapmans’ servants were then and still are nameless and interchangeable. He remembers them by their jobs – yardman, laundress, housekeeper, maid. He says he feels guilty for that.

But he doesn’t want to linger over his venial sins, his many small crimes and misdemeanors committed decades ago in a different country by a different man. It’s the mortal sins he’s confessing here, sins committed in this country by this man. Confession, followed by repentance and atonement, leads to forgiveness. That’s his plan, his only purpose now. His final hope, actually.

He hears Renée slide open the pocket door to the hall and step from the room and close the door again. Her departure does not break the darkness that surrounds his body or the silence that swallows his voice. Since the filming began, no one other than Fife has said a word or coughed or cleared a throat or laid down a footstep. He is sure that it was Renée leaving the room, not Emma. Emma still sits behind him somewhere over on his right. He feels the heat of her presence there, imagines the blood rushing to her face and ears as she hears the names of a wife and son she never knew existed, the catch of her breath as she learns of an American household and family that until now have been no more real than characters in a novel she has not read.

Fife’s son Cornel is just over three years old. He is an intelligent and articulate child, easy to please and eager to please. So like his mother at that age, his grandmother began noting shortly after he was born. It’s one of the Chapmans’ many unspoken ways of making Fife’s son a Chapman, more Alicia’s child than his. Tonight Cornel sleeps upstairs in the nursery, the same small room and narrow four-poster bed where his mother slept when she was three years old. Nanny Sally sits in the upholstered straight-backed chair beside his bed, silently reading her Bible in the dimmed, peach-tinted light.

Cornel’s mother Alicia is twenty-seven, the same age as Fife. She sits across the dining room table from him, her parents at either end. Her long, straight, shining cordovan-colored hair is in sharp contrast with her bright white complexion and large gray-blue eyes. Light seems to emanate from her face. Her skin is flawless, without blemish or freckle or the tiniest disfiguration anywhere on her body, as he knows better than anyone. She never wears dark or bright lipstick or powdery makeup or costume jewelry and stays well away from the sun’s tanning rays, even though she was raised to be an athlete and is a competitive equestrian, plays a strong game of tennis, and has a golf handicap of nine. She does not hide from the sun, she merely protects herself from it. Fife himself is afraid of horses and has never played tennis or golf. Alicia is a natural beauty, people say, an impression she has done nothing since adolescence to discourage. She is known and admired both for that natural beauty and for her endless affection for children and animals, as if they are kindred spirits and she is herself a child or an animal. She volunteers at the Charlottesville child-care center and refuses to hunt birds with her father and will not ride to the hounds because it 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 homemade 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 homemade 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 parlor, 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. The library is rarely used, the room belongs to Benjamin alone, and though Fife has been explicitly invited 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 oversize 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 gray 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 catalogs 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 neighborhood 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 envelopes 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 and rolled by Cuban exiles. An anti-Fidel cigar. Fife glances over at his father-in-law, expecting 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 check 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 check 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.