His parents had met at an estate auction, and it had been love at first sight. Both were passionate antique furniture dealers.
Up until he entered college, he preferred to be called Chip Arroyo. His father had wanted to name him Hepplewhite, and his mother’s choice was Chippendale, so you can see who won that argument.
If you guess that he’d not been pleased about his name growing up, you would not be wrong. Through his teenage years he suffered all manner of jokes and nasty derision for bearing the odd moniker.
Perhaps the most demeaning, since it played well from both male and female perspectives, was his constantly being commanded to bare his body. Both boys and girls would shake dollar bills at him and offer up jeering encouragements. Sometimes as he sat brooding over the latest incident of peer abuse, he wished he might have the nerve to take them up on their taunts to strip. Who knows what he might do with all that money, he sighed.
But, as mentioned, once Chip entered college, from day one when his first professor called out his name in a kind of awed wonder, Chip sensed that there was indeed something positively special about his name. His intuition about its unique nature was further bolstered as classmates turned toward him in equal wonder, and when one of his teachers asked him about the origin of his name, Chip, in telling the story, realized that his parents’ debate was an interesting tale to tell.
When Chippendale informed his parents that he was not likely to follow their path into the antique furniture world, they both had been disappointed.
“But Chippendale,” said Mrs. Arroyo, always calling her son by his full first name, “the name I gave you was meant to be perfect for someone dealing in antique furniture.”
“Yes, Chip,” said Mr. Arroyo – choosing the nickname because he never got over losing the naming argument – “surely you must see that your name suggests a calling.”
In a kindly manner, and most apologetically, for he was a good son, Chippendale reiterated his belief that he had some other, although as yet non-specific, goal.
And this is what college is for. Some people go in knowing exactly the discipline they will pursue. But for most of us, our undergraduate years are a time to look into the myriad opportunities available.
Such was the case with Chippendale. At first, he declared himself an art major. For reasons that he could understand, he was drawn to sculpture, specifically woodworking. In this medium, it was easy to see that fate was indeed playing a part.
But when he took an anthropology class with a world-renowned professor of archaeology, the pursuit of site digs and unearthing objects hinting at the nature of past generations steered him into a change of majors. And here too, in his interest in exploring antique artifacts, he could see glimmers of a kind of calling which his parents had bestowed upon him.
This second major, however, proved not to have a strong enough hold upon Chippendale’s heart. It was in a required English literature course that the budding scholar discovered the direction he would follow for the rest of his life.
On the list of options, a Victorian novels course taught by Professor Duncan Shimamoto caught young Chippendale’s eye. He’d loved Dickens as a child. His mother had read him most of the novels when he was in elementary school. According to the syllabus, they would read Great Expectations. With the kind of warm feeling that someone might feel when returning home after a long absence, Chippendale enrolled in the course.
He enjoyed Dickens, as he knew he would, but the extensive syllabus exposed him to numerous other authors, including American ex-patriot Henry James. James drew him like the proverbial magnet, and although he could not say precisely why, Chippendale knew he was on the path to something that was meant to be, as though his life was some brilliant necklace of beads being slowly strung.
The James novel was The Turn of the Screw. Technically a novella, Chippendale, mesmerized by James’s style, read the book in one sitting. Yes, he thought, coming out of his trance after the story’s end, James is the man to whom I will dedicate my life.
And with that, his course was set. After earning his BA in English, Chippendale applied for the Ph.D. program at U.C. Berkeley. At the time, Berkeley was, and still is, the top-rated English literature graduate program in the U.S. If you jumped through the necessary hoops, you would earn an M.A. on the way to the Ph.D. Fail to master the preliminary work, and you would be sent packing with a terminal M.A.
Chippendale breezed through all those requirements leading to the dissertation stage. This redoubled his gut feeling that this was what he was always meant to do with his life.
His capstone seminar was one on Henry James. Of course. And it was in researching and writing this seminal paper meant to steer you toward your dissertation topic, that Chippendale had his aha! moment.
The epiphany came late one night when he was once again poring through The Portrait of a Lady. It suddenly dawned on him that James, a master of intricate detail, went to extraordinary lengths to describe interiors. Living rooms dining rooms, bedrooms, salons, foyers, studies, offices, libraries, – in short, every interior to which he turned his gaze became a kind of verbal photograph of that space.
And in most particular, Chippendale noticed, James focused his attention to all manner of furniture, including tables, sofas, and everything else with which a room might be appointed, including, of course, chairs.
Another bead was strung.
But to what end?
Going through The Portrait of a Lady once more, the answer suddenly blazed before him. James took such great care with these details because they were signs indicating the interiority of his characters. Their living spaces were markers of their character.
Discovering this was the beginning of Chippendale Arroyo’s journey into the hallowed halls of professional academia. His dissertation was hailed as one of the most original pieces of Henry James research in the latter half of the 20th Century. The prestigious Cambridge Press seized upon it with the kind of fervor seldom seen in the realm of literary criticism publication.
And what placed the cherry of originality on top was the last chapter dealing with speculation about James’s knowledge of the Chinese art of Feng Shui. Among its characteristics, Chippendale incorporates aspects of Chinese furniture. Whether James had studied feng shui, Chippendale could not determine, but there was not a doubt that the more an interior followed the principles of feng shui, the more positively directed the force of the character who inhabited that space. James’s devotion to the description of Chippendale furnishings itself convinced the young scholar that even if James was not familiar with the Chinese energy system, at least he did intuit and incorporate the spirit of it, in the same way he would know that acoustics varied from opera house to opera house, the voices of the singers enhanced or impeded depending upon the direction and flow of sound.
When Chippendale Arroyo attended the Modern Language Association’s annual hiring frenzy, it was not universities he’d applied to with whom he interviewed. On the contrary, his calendar was jam-packed with interviews sought of him by numerous prestigious schools.
Finally, Chippendale decided upon Yale University. In an interesting side note, he and fellow Yale Professor Harold Bloom, both huge fans of Harry Potter, co-wrote a book on J.K. Rowling’s popular series, Chippendale contributing his ideas about interiority given Rowling’s exacting attention to describing living spaces and the energy characters might derive from them and thus exhibit through their purpose and actions.
And when the day that he had gradually begun to suspect would come to pass arrived, Chippendale sat back happily behind his venerable Chippendale desk, called up his parents, and announced, “Mom and Dad, I’ve achieved the height of my calling. I’ve been appointed department chair.”
Lanning Lee 