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 at UVA in those days. Most everybody in R and R thought he’d end up making millions in the oil industry, and a lot of ’em did. That and tobacco. But Daddy, he wanted to pass Doctor Todd’s on to us, so we went to work for him straight out of college and learned on the job. Same as you would do, Leonard. And someday you could pass Doctor Todd’s on to your son, Cornel. And let me tell you, that would make our daddy, Cornel’s great-granddaddy, very happy.
Benjamin says, I know you’re thinking of your writing ambitions, Leonard. And your scholarly interests. You wouldn’t have to give all that up. In anticipation of this conversation I had my secretary—you recall meeting Lucy at our party here last Christmas—I had Lucy find me some famous writers who successfully combined business and literature, and she came up with quite a few. Benjamin draws a notebook from his shirt pocket and opens it.
Fife is touched by this gesture. He is moved that his father-in-law has done this bit of research into a type of work that he ordinarily regards with suspicion and condescension.
Some of them were poets, he says, which makes sense, on account of there being fewer words in poems than novels, he adds and laughs. But look here, he says, tapping his notebook. T. S. Eliot, he was a banker. Won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Wallace Stevens, who was almost as famous as T. S. Eliot, he ran a big insurance company up in Hartford, Connecticut. You probably know his poetry. A couple were doctors, like Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer. And the English novelist Trollope, he was actually a postal inspector for the government. Mark Twain was a publisher, among other things. Bet you didn’t know that. Published Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs of the War, which kind of surprised me. I always thought Twain was a southerner. A riverboat captain, I seem to recall. Nathaniel Hawthorne, there’s another civil servant. He worked as a customs officer. So did your favourite, Herman Melville. It’s a long list, Leonard. It surprised me.
Never read any of those fellows, Jackson says. Not since college anyhow.
These are not lives that Fife envies or desires for himself, the lives of poets and writers who were also bankers, insurance executives, civil servants, physicians. For Fife, it is the slightly mad ones who count most, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Stephen Crane, and the writers who made youthful poverty attractive, like Hemingway, Joyce, Frost, and Faulkner, whose deprivations and sacrifices when young were rewarded with fame and riches later, while they were still living. None of them, not the mad ones, certainly, and not the bohemians either, would have agreed to be the chief operating officer of a company that manufactures foot powder. None of them would have agreed to be the podiatry-products king of America.
For Fife, it’s humiliating enough as it is, earning a doctorate in literature and working as a part-time adjunct professor and writing unpublished, maybe unpublishable, novels, stories, and poems in the air-conditioned comfort of an apartment—and soon, a house—paid for by his wife’s trust fund. If he accepts Benjamin and Jackson Chapman’s offer to stay here in Richmond and take over his in-laws’ family business, whether he is good at it or not—though he is sure that if Benjamin and Jackson Chapman, who are neither clever nor industrious, can handle the job, he can handle it, too—in a few years he and Alicia and their children will be living in a big brick colonial Carillon Park mansion that overlooks the James River, and he will join the Country Club of Virginia, the Chamber of Commerce, the board of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and one night after a half dozen bourbons and branch he will go into the library and lock the door and put a bullet in his brain.
Whoever, whatever, he is now, though he’s only partially solidified as a self-created being, if he accepts their offer, he will liquefy and eventually vaporize. He will become an invisible, odourless gas, and the best thing he can do to make sense of what he has done to himself is light a match, like one of those self-immolating Vietnamese monks protesting the war in Vietnam.
Fife stands and sets his glass on the coffee table, leaving his half-smoked cigar lying in the large antique pewter plate they’re using as an ashtray. Well, you’ve given me a lot to think on, he says. There’s that Tidewater accent again, he notes, too late to curb it. Of course I’ll need to discuss your offer first with Alicia, he says. This concerns her life as much as it does mine. It’s too late to change our plans to complete the purchase of the Vermont property, he says. Not without forfeiting the deposit. But it’s a good investment, regardless of what we decide, and would make a nice little summer place for someone, if not for us. How soon do you need to know my—our—decision? I was planning on staying in Vermont for a week to get the renovations on the house started.
Benjamin says he should take his time, as it’s the biggest decision