The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  Yet, he couldn’t deny it, he’d have enjoyed reading about himself. It would shake them up—all those gray sideburned gents of razor resolution. He could not divorce his memory of their sharply resolved photographs and fine tuned f-stop pusses in the magazines from their fuzzier, more edgeless presences in real life. (He had met some of them in real life, but it was always their pictures in Fortune he carried in his head.) And their biographies—all the high echelon raided, that cadre of the corporate kidnapped swooped down upon like God-marked Greeks; feisty, prodigy tigers, up-shirt-sleeved and magnate tough; and the others: the white-haired wooed, and your pluggers, too, your up-from-the-ground-floor loyalists, and Chairmen of the Board Emeriti who still carried menial memories in their skulls. And the familied inheritors. (Though these you seldom saw: class, class.) Or, even rarer, the holders of the original patents who chaired their own board. What would such men make of him?

  What would they make of his having entered the Wharton School of Business on the G.I. Bill in 1946 under the impression that he would learn to type, take shorthand, master the procedures of bookkeeping, of proper business letters—he’d set his sights on an office job, the idea of 9-to-5 as romantic to him and even mystical (the notion of yoga rhythm and routine) as it was antithetical to those who wanted more, who, having learned to kill, could never return to an only ordinary life—to discover instead that economics was a science, money an art form? Or of the remarkable telegram he’d received in his junior year at Wharton, the only telegram he’d ever gotten that wasn’t sung? He knew as he ripped it open that it could not be bad news, his parents having died in an automobile accident while he was still in the army. (Not even a telegram then. Basic training in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Not even, when it came down to it, informed. His sister out of town when it happened, when he called—routinely—that weekend and there had been no answer. And no answer the next weekend either, or the next. And, returning on furlough to Chicago before being sent overseas, no answer at the door. And his key didn’t even fit it anymore, as though basic training had given not only him a different shape but by God everything a different shape, his clothes, even his keys. “Hey, what’s going on?” he’d asked a neighbor. “God, didn’t you know? Didn’t they tell you?” “Tell me what?” “They were killed. Dead a month. Didn’t the Red Cross get in touch with you?” And angered—for the first time in his life really pissed, roaring into the long-distance telephone to his commanding officer: “What the hell is it with you people? I want my compassionate leave or I’ll go A.W.O. fucking L. It isn’t the time off. It’s the principle!” Answering his neighbor’s questions from across the hall, making his answers his argument: “I didn’t fucking know. You didn’t goddamnit tell me. The Red no damn good Cross didn’t get in touch with me.” Wanting, see, his books balanced even then, not looking for something for nothing, only for justice, the principle of the thing. And still no more notion of what he was about than a babe. They gave him the leave. Leave piled on leave while Truman brooded and made his decision to drop the atomic bomb and the war ended, and then getting the government to approve his matriculation at the Wharton School of Business, arguing that if the army had not given him compassionate leave he might have seen active duty, might have been wounded. Unwounded, undisabled, they were getting off cheap.)

  He would never forget the telegram, had an image to this day of the uneven lengths of yellow strips of capital letters pasted on the yellow Western Union blank, like a message from kidnappers:

  WOULD LIKE SEE YOU BEFORE I DIE. WOULD LIKE DISCUSS AMENDS. REPARATIONS. HAVE BECOME RELIGIOUS IN OLD AGE. WISH TO DO RIGHT BY GOD BY DOING RIGHT BY YOU. HAVE CERTAIN THINGS SPEAK YOU ABOUT. DONT THINK I UNAWARE YOUR EXCELLENT PROGRESS AT WHARTON. BEEN GETTING WONDERFUL REPORTS FROM PROFESSORS. MUCH ENCOURAGED WHAT I HEAR ABOUT YOU SINCE STOPPED PESTERING ADVISER ABOUT SHORTHAND AND TYPEWRITER INSTRUCTION. PLEASE VISIT ME HARKNESS PAVILION SUITE 1407. FARE POCKET MONEY FOLLOW. YOUR GODFATHER JULIUS FINSBERG.

  Fare followed, pocket money followed, and he had an impression of sequence, of something suddenly organizing his life, as if somewhere someone had tripped a switch to trigger a mechanism that gave a fillip to events, like a parade, say, at its headwaters, its side street or suburban sources, the horses sorted, the bands and floats and marchers suddenly geometrized by some arbitrary imposition of order, a signal, a whistle.

  He recognized Julius Finsberg’s name, knew him to be his god father, though he could not recall ever having seen the man, and knew that till then, till the time of the telegram, the office had been ceremonial only, a sinecure from the days when Finsberg and his father had been partners in a small theatrical costume business in New York, a business just large enough to support one family but not two. It was when Ben was a small boy that the partnership dissolved, amicably as it happened, Julius buying out Al, though it could just as easily have been the other way around. They had, Ben remembered his father telling him, cut cards, the low man having to pay the high. At the time—this was the Depression—his father had considered that he’d won, the three thousand dollars being more than enough to give him a new lease on life in Chicago, though it was not long afterward that he’d begun to brood.

  “Who’d have thought,” he’d said, so often that Ben had the speech by heart, “that Cole Porter would come up with all those hit tunes, that Gershwin and Gus Kahn and Irving Berlin and Hammerstein and that other guy, what’s his name, Rodgersenhart, had it in them, that they’d set America’s toes to tapping, that Ethel Merman and Astaire would catch on like that, or that Helen Morgan would sing her way into America’s heartstrings? The Golden Age of Costumes and I sold out my share in what today is the biggest costume business in the country for a mess of pottage! I don’t blame Julius. He didn’t know. I’m not holding him responsible for my bad timing. To tell you the truth, it was only after he gave me the three thousand that I made him your godfather—you were already six. I felt guilty sticking him with the business. Well, what’s done is done. After all we’re not starving. I’ve got a nice shop, but when I think what might have been…” From then on his father ate his heart out whenever he heard—he would permit no radio in the house, no phonograph—someone whistling a popular show tune.

  When he was called to New York in the spring of 1950 Ben was twenty-three years old. He went directly from Penn Station to the Harkness Pavilion. It was still early morning. He politely inquired of the head nurse on the fourteenth floor whether Mr. Finsberg was receiving visitors.

  “No. Mr. Finsberg is very ill. His condition is grave.”

  “Oh,” Ben said.

  “Are you a member of the family?”

  “Not the immediate family. Mr. Finsberg is my godfather.”

  “You’re Ben?”

  “You know my name?”

  “Go in. It’s 1407. Well, you’d know that from the telegram, wouldn’t you?”

  “You know about the telegram?”

  “Did you get your pocket money?”

  “It’s in my pocket. You know about my pocket money?”

  “We shouldn’t delay, Ben. Your godfather is a very sick man.”

  They entered the room, Ben feeling a little guilty. Here was someone about to change his life perhaps. If the man had been behindhand in his attentions, Ben had been equally remiss. Their mutual indifference to each other made him feel, if the relationship existed, a sort of godson out-of-wedlock.

  The old man lay diminished beneath a giant cellophane wrap, the oxygen tent. Ben could hear the frightful crinkle of his respiration. He sounded as if he were on fire.

  “He’s sleeping,” the nurse whispered.

  “I can come back.”

  “No, no. There might not be time.”

  “What does he have?” Ben whispered.

  “Everything,” the nurse said.

  “I’ll come back later,” he whispered.

  “I won’t hear of it,” she whispered back. She went to an enormous cylinder of oxygen and turned some handles. Immediate
ly his godfather began to gasp for breath.

  “Uugh—kagh—” his godfather skirled. The tent collapsed.

  “What are you doing?” Ben demanded.

  “Mr. Finsberg,” the nurse said, “your godson’s arrived.”

  “Uugh—Ben? Uurgh. Ben’s here? Arghh. Uughh. Okk.” She turned the oxygen back on and Ben watched the bubble reconstitute itself. “Ben. Is that you, godson?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And then the executives would really hear something, poring over Fortune’s profile in their Lear jets or in their all but empty first-class cabins as they sipped captain’s compliments. Would learn—as he’d learned—that there were more ways to the woods than one, that inheritance or self-creation were not the only alternatives in the busy world of finance, that there were all sorts of success stories, qualitative distinctions, that the world was a fairyland still. That he, Ben Flesh, the owner of franchises from one end of the country to the other, was where he was today because—

  “Sit down, please, Ben. What I have to say will take some time. As I am old, as I am dying—”

  “Oh no, sir, you’re—”

  “As I am dying, I have to conserve my energies. Seeing you stand is a drain on those energies; watching you tire tires me. Please, godson. Please sit down.”

  He looked around for a chair. Only then did it strike him how curious a place it was. Except for Julius Finsberg’s hospital bed and the oxygen and two hat racks of the medical on either side of his bed, they might have been in a first-class apartment. It was not like a hospital room at all. From his position he could see something of the other rooms in the suite, none of them having the least thing to do with the practice of medicine. There was a living room with a sofa and easy chairs. There were coffee tables and lamps. At the far end of the billiard room was a gaming table with slots for poker chips at each corner. There were oil paintings on the walls and he could see, off the hall, two guest bedrooms, an open bathroom with decanters of bath salts and oils on a ledge beneath the vanity. He could see a kitchen with an automatic dishwasher, a refrigerator with a tap for ice water.

  His godfather lay in the dining room. Near his bed a table was set for eight, the crystal and silver and china beautiful against the thick white tablecloth. Napkins were folded like tiny crowns beside each place setting. He removed one of the chairs from the dining-room table and drew it beside his godfather’s bed. He sat at the man’s right beside a stanchion that supported an I.V. upside down in its collar, trying to ignore the clear tubing that led from the bottle of dextrose and was attached by a sort of needle, not unlike those used to pump up basketballs, to his godfather’s wrist. The hand, like a loaf on a breadboard, was taped to a wide brown splint. His other arm, he saw, was receiving plasma, and a catheter ran from beneath the bedclothes to a spittoon. This he noticed only after he had sat down. The spittoon was between his shoes and every once in a while he heard a tiny splash.

  “I am privileged,” his godfather began, “as most men are.” It was difficult to hear him, the voice muffled as it was by the great tent and working against the hiss and boil of the oxygen. (Nor was it easy, really, to see him, his face a smear behind the clouded plastic, like features masked by exploded bubble gum.) “You can hardly live in the world and not come under the influence of some advantage. Like golfers, all of us have our little handicap, however measly. So thank your lucky stars, Ben. It itches.” He paused and lifted his dextrose hand, bringing the board up parallel with his nose and rubbing it. “Ouch. Son of a bitch. I think I’ve got a splinter. Nurse. Nurse!” he called. A middle-aged woman in a tweed suit came from the hall.

  “My godfather wants the nurse,” Ben said.

  “I’m the nurse,” the woman said and went up to the old man.

  “Just hold on while I sterilize this sewing needle with this match.”

  She turned off the oxygen and his godfather gasped. Terrified, Ben watched the old man thrash about, rolling first on one needle, then the other.

  “Uugh—ach—hurry—hurry!”

  The nurse burned the needle till it glowed red, wiped the carbon off with Kleenex. She turned the oxygen back on and stuck her head in under the tent with his godfather.

  “Gracious,” she said as she tried to get at his godfather’s splinter, “there’s hardly light to see. I shall have to speak to the window washer again. I asked him just yesterday to wash off your tent. You heard me, Mr. Finsberg. You heard me, didn’t you? There, that’s got it.”

  She came out from beneath the tent.

  “Do you?” his godfather said. Some blood was coming from the side of his nose.

  “Do I what?” Ben asked.

  “Thank your lucky stars?”

  “Well no, sir, not literally.”

  “I’m not speaking literally. I was in the theatrical costume business, I’m speaking figuratively.”

  “Here,” the nurse said, “will you look at that? You could pick your teeth with it.” She held up the splinter. “Should I keep this to show Mrs. Finsberg?”

  “No,” his godfather said. “Give it to the boy.”

  The nurse handed Ben the splinter. He took it and slipped it into his wallet with his pocket money and return ticket.

  “How crowded is the universe,” his godfather said and moved the plasma arm vaguely. “How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap. Consider, Ben. You could have been a pencil or the metal band that holds the eraser to the wood, the wire of lead that runs through it. The black N in ‘Number 2’ stamped along one of its six sides. Or one of its six sides. Or the thin paint on another. You might have been a vowel on a typewriter or a number on a telephone dial or a consonant in books. There are thousands of languages, millions of typewriters, billions of books. You might have been the oxygen I breathe or the air stirred by this sentence. It is a miracle that one is not one of these things, a miracle that one is not a thing at all, that one is animal rather than mineral or vegetable, and a higher animal rather than a lower. You could have been a dot on a die in a child’s Monopoly set. There are twenty-one dots on each die, forty-two in a pair. Good God, Ben, think of all the dice in the world. End to end they’d stretch to the sun. Then there are the rich, the blooded with their red heritage like a thoroughbred’s silks. You might have been a stitch in those silks, a stitch in any of the trillions of vestments, pennants, gloves, blankets, and flags that have existed till now. Let me ask you something. How many people live? Consider the size of their wardrobe over the years. A button you could be, a pocket in pants, a figure on print.

  “—I was discussing the rich. There are many wealthy. More than you think. I’m not just talking beneficiaries either, next of kin, in-laws, distant cousins, the King’s mishpocheh, the Emperor’s. But the rich man himself, the wage earner, the founder. Fly in an airplane in a straight line across one state. You couldn’t count the mansions or limousines, you couldn’t count the swimming pools. So many, Ben. You’re not one of them, and not one of the family, and still you exist. I am talking the long shot of existence, the odds no gambler in the world would take, that you would ever come to life as a person, a boy called Ben Flesh.”

  He was very excited. He raised himself on the boards taped to his arms and leaned toward me, speaking so close to the oxygen tent that with each word he seemed about to take some of it into his mouth.

  “Think of the last of their lines. How many do you suppose have been the last of their lines? Queers, say, or the imperfectly pelvic’d or ball-torn or so wondrously ugly they could never make out and didn’t have the courage or the will to rape? Whatever the reason the last of their lines, end of the road, everybody out. How many? Forty million? Fifty? I don’t have the statistics.—I’m reminded of those rich men again; you could have been the paper for a stock or a bond; you could have been change in somebody’s pocket or a lost dollar nobody found.—But at least fifty million. So great a number, yet you managed to be born, you made it anyway, you wormed your way. And if you happen to be white, that’s a
miracle squared. Are you following my argument? White people are a minority, you know. As land is to sea, white is to black, to yellow and mongrel Pak. So we keep compounding the miracle like the interest rate on money never touched.

  “It’s incredible really. Amazing. Who could believe it? You weren’t aborted, you didn’t end up in a scum bag. You survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio, mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD. God bless you, boy, you’re a testament to the impossible! And not just that, but you aren’t broken or damaged, there are no birth defects; you’ve your full complement of fingers, your fair share of toes. Your brains are present and accounted for. You’re literate, you do sums.

  The Dean’s list at Wharton. I know, I know. And even without parents you’ve got clothes, shelter, sex, what to eat—you know, the drives, the hydramatics of being, four on the floor and more where that came from. Yes, and you get the point of jokes and have a favorite movie and maybe even the room where you stay is done up in your best color. My God, lad, you’re a fucking celebration!

  “And over and beyond everything, your inventory of good fortune like leaves on trees, there’s still some advantage left over. Nurse, Nurse!”

  The woman ran back into the room.

  “What is it, Mr. Finsberg? Is something the matter?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I wanted you to see this phenomenon.” He poked his plasma board at the tent and pointed me out.

  “You’ll tear the tent, sir.”

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. I thought he had passed out. But in a moment he began to speak again.

  “The wars,” he said breathlessly, his eyes still shut. “You were drafted. But you lived to tell the tale. In my own lifetime, just in my own country, there’s been the Spanish-American, the First War and Second, plus a little showing the flag here and a little more there. And maneuvers going on all the time. Even as we talk, maneuvers going on, war games, and if plenty buy it in the line of duty, a lot more buy it and it’s only an accident. In car wrecks on highways, your own parents, for example—and may I belatedly say how sorry I am? Al was my partner and Rose my friend, and I miss them dearly, the both. And the houses burned down that you weren’t in—all the chance crap, all the hazard, actuarial rough stuff.”