The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  He opened his eyes. “Am I on the right track?” he asked softly. “Will you leave here singing? Humming the tune?

  “What I’m looking for is the argument priests used to give, maybe still do, about how long a time eternity takes. Like if a birdie were to carry one grain of sand in its beak from a beach and fly across the ocean with it and then go back for another grain and shlep it overseas and lay it down by the first and then go back for a third and so on and so forth, and have to do that on all the beaches in the world, one grain at a time, and the same with deserts and all the sand traps in all the golf courses on earth, including miniature, and all the hourglasses and kids’ sandboxes and throw in, too, every grotty piece of sand in tennis shoes from picnics at the beach and the gritty leftovers in all the crotches of jockstraps and bathing suits from all the summer vacations in history and all the winters in Miami and other resorts—and when the birdie did all that, that would be only a fraction of a fraction of just the first second of what’s left of eternity! All right, listen: And say that the heat in Hell at the time our feathered friend makes his first trip is already the boiling point of water, and that it gets one degree hotter every time not just that the goddamn bird completes a trip but every time he flaps his fucking wings, and the pain and hotness of that heat at the end of all those trips would be to ultimate pain only what putting a pair of mittens on the coldest day in the coldest winter in the world would be to the ultimate comfort of your hands. And you could have been any one of those grains of sand, or any one of those seconds of eternity, or any one of those B.T.U. ’s!

  “Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulations celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out—all the cousins in from the coast. Wiped out. Rare, yes—who says not?—certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you’ve been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by the earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor—all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.’s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that’s what happens, you see—there’s low motility and torn tails—that’s what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well—am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn’t lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you’d ever make it to this planet!

  “So! Still! Against all the odds in the universe you made happy landings! What do you think? Ain’t that delightful? Wait, there’s more. You have not only your existence but your edge, your advantage and privilege. You do, Ben, you do. No? Everybody does. They give congressmen the frank. Golden-agers go cheap to the movies. You work on the railroads they give you a pass. You clerk in a store it’s the 20 percent discount. You’re a dentist your kid’s home free with the orthodontics. Benny, Benny, we got so much edge we could cut diamonds!”

  “I have none of these things, Godfather.”

  “Oh, listen to him. Everybody gets something wholesale. Everybody.”

  The nurse came and gave his godfather some pills.

  “I have the G.I. Bill,” Ben said thoughtfully. “They pay my tuition at Wharton.”

  “There you go,” his godfather said, smiling, swallowing.

  Ben nodded.

  He was, of course, a little disappointed. Had it been his godfather’s intention to bring him from Philadelphia just to demonstrate how fortunate he was to be alive? The telegram had spoken of amends, reparations. Having seen the hospital apartment in which the man was to die, he had begun to grasp how much money his godfather had. The taxi had brought him up Broadway. He passed the enormous hoardings, wide as storefronts, read the huge advertisements for plays, musicals, the logos for each familiar, though he rarely went to the theater. (He had seen, he supposed, the emblems and clever trademarks, individual as flags, in magazine ads or above the passengers’ heads on buses in Philadelphia.) But seeing the bright spectacular posters for the plays like a special issue of stamps stuck across Broadway’s complicated packages as he viewed them from his deep, wide seat in the back of the cab, had been very exciting. Why, the musicals alone, he thought now, and tried to recall as many as he could. Arms and the Girl, The Consul, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Great to Be Alive, and Lost in the Stars. Miss Liberty, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, Texas, Li’l Darlin’, Where’s Charley? They played songs from all these on the radio; he’d whistled them. Nanette Fabray was in one of the shows. Pearl Bailey was. Bambi Lynn, Vivienne Segal. Pinza and Mary Martin. Ray Bolger and Byron Palmer and Doretta Morrow. Kenny Delmar. And how many of these stars wore costumes his godfather had supplied? And that was just the musicals. The circus was in town. Could the man have dressed circus performers? Why not? And the Ice Show—Howdy, Mr. Ice of 1950. And there was a Gilbert and Sullivan festival on and the ballet. Even if he supplied just a tenth of the costumes…God, he thought, if you added them all up and threw in the dramas and all that was going on in Greenwich Village, there were enough people in Manhattan alone wearing costumes—and think of the costume changes!—to dress a small city. That was the kind of action his godfather had. Gee!

  “Uugh, agh! Uuch. Awgrh.”

  “The tent, Godfather?”

  “The bedpan! Get help. Hurry, boy. Where are you going? That’s the guest bedroom. No, that’s the linen closet. Not in there, for God’s sake, that’s the bar! There, that’s right.”

  He grabbed a resident—the man wore a stethoscope over his turtleneck—and rushed with him and a nurse back to his godfather’s suite. He remained outside.

  The nurse and resident came out in a few minutes. Ben looked at them.

  “You didn’t tell me you were Ben,” the resident said.

  “How’s the weather in Philly?” the nurse asked.

  He could hear his godfather calling his name. “I’d better go in,” Ben said.

  The man was sitting, his pillows fluffed up behind him.

  “You seem more comfortable,” Ben said.

  “Never mind about that,” he said irritably. “I’m a goner. There’s something we have to straighten out.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Here’s the long and short of it,” my godfather said. “I palmed a deuce.”

  “Sir?”

  “I palmed a deuce. You don’t spend the whole of your working life in the theatrical costume business without picking something up. You know how many magicians’ costumes I’ve turned out over the years? Let me count the ways. Sure, and the magician needing his costume immediately, five minutes after the phone call from his agent. Having to be in Chicago, the Catskills, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. It was always rush rush rush with magicians, and they hang over your shoulder while you work. Magicians! Well, it has to be that way, I suppose. Magicians have special requirements. They have to be there to tell the tailor everything. Well, wouldn’t they?”

  “I guess so. I never thought about it.”

  “Wake up, for God’s sake!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So, well, anyway, there was this magician and one time I, you know, he was hanging around waiting for his costume to be ready and I, I asked him to teach me to palm a deuce.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Do I have to draw a picture for you? When we cut, your father and I, to see who’d buy out who and low man had to pay the other guy the three thousand bucks—You see, I wanted the business. If your old man had cut a queen or a jack or even a ten I wouldn’t feel so bad, because probably I could have bea
t him without the palm. But he cut a four. A fair four. I had to cheat. Son of a bitch. It’s been on my conscience for years. Then, your father, he had to go and make me your godfather because he felt he’d stuck me with the business. What a sap. Well, who was the sap? Because I didn’t have any kids of my own then, see? I wasn’t even married. So it meant a lot to me, being your godfather. But I couldn’t face you. What I’d done to you, you know? It was as if I’d taken the bread out of your mouth, my own godson and I’d taken the bread out of his mouth. You’ve got a sister. You don’t see her here, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Because she was never my goddaughter and I don’t give a shit what happens to her. You follow?”

  “I think.”

  “Because I was a sport in those days. What the hell, I wasn’t married, I had no responsibilities.” He lowered his voice. “I used to go backstage with some of our customers. You follow?”

  “I think—”

  “So naturally I fell in with this show-biz crowd. Hoofers, singers. And spent less and less time in the shop. I’d tell your dad I was making contacts for us, for our business, and in a way I was. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “Well, I—”

  “That’s when they took me to Tin Pan Alley.”

  “Tin Pan Alley?”

  “And there was this kid in Tin Pan Alley. He was always hanging around.”

  “I see.”

  “And whistling. You follow?”

  “I don’t—”

  “And everywhere I’d go in Tin Pan Alley there’d be this whistling kid, whistling tunes, Ben, the most beautiful tunes you ever heard. My God, what a whistler he was!”

  “I follow.”

  “What?”

  “I see.”

  “That whistler’s name was Jerome Kern!”

  “My God!”

  “He had a friend. A hummer. And, Ben, if it was possible, the hummer hummed even more beautiful than the whistler whistled.”

  “He was—?”

  “Richard Rodgers.”

  “Wow!”

  “And through Kern and Rodgers I got to know another character in Tin Pan Alley. A piano player. I’d listen to him play these incredible songs on his piano and I swear to you I had to catch my breath. It was like I was a sailor boy listening to the sirens.”

  “Cole Porter,” Ben said.

  “You better believe it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So you see? I knew. I had my ear to the ground of Tin Pan Alley and I knew there was going to be a—what do you call it?—a renaissance in the American musical theater. And I saw new beautiful costumes in my sleep and I knew that the theatrical costume business was going to be the talk of the town. That’s when I asked the magician to teach me to palm the deuce. That’s it, that’s the story.”

  “Gee.”

  “Your father never knew.”

  “I’m glad. He would have eaten his heart out.”

  “He would have eaten his heart out.”

  Ben nodded.

  “So,” his godfather said after a while, “we’ve got business. I’m dying and I want to put things right.”

  “You don’t owe me—”

  “Never mind. This is something I’m doing for myself. You ain’t got nothing to do with it. Never mind what I don’t owe you.”

  I sat in my dining-room chair with my feet by the spittoon of pee and waited for him to go on.

  “I’m a very wealthy man. Well, look around, you can see I’m going out first class.”

  “Please, Godfather.”

  “Facts are facts, Ben.”

  “All right.”

  “I said ‘That’s the story,’ but I left something out. After your father and I dissolved the partnership I married a girl from Tin Pan Alley.”

  “Yes?”

  “She was a hoofer, but really a trained ballet dancer. She had this incredible pelvis, Ben. Well, you can imagine what twenty years of plié would do to a girl with a fantastic pelvis to begin with. To make a long story short, Ben, Estelle turned out to be very fecund.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ben, that woman had babies like a mosquito lays eggs. There are eighteen, Ben.”

  “Eighteen?”

  “Four sets of triplets, three sets of twins.”

  I could have been one of the triplets, he thought. I could have been one of the twins.

  “I’m rich, Ben, but blood is thicker than water.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m rich, yes, but after estate taxes, and—My wife gets about a million outright; the rest is left in trust for my children.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “That this was a deathbed confession. That now you feel better.”

  “Is that what you think? No, boy. You’re provided for. I had to provide for my godson. What they’re getting is money, but it won’t come to even a quarter million apiece. I’m leaving you something more valuable.”

  He went to the Wharton School of Business. What, he wondered—he multiplied by eighteen, he added a million—was more valuable than five and a half million dollars?

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Well, yes, I—”

  “I’m leaving you the prime interest rate.”

  “The what?”

  “You go to Wharton. The prime rate. The rate of interest a bank charges its best customers. I’ve made out my will. It’s all there. Loans from my bank at the prime rate, whatever it is on the day of my death, and no matter how high it climbs afterward, the loan or loans outstanding never at any time to exceed the value of the money left to any one of my surviving children, the principal and interest to be guaranteed by them on a pro-rated basis up to and until your first bankruptcy. The only restrictive stipulation I’m putting on you is that whatever monies you borrow have to be invested in businesses. No shows. I’ve seen too many angels bust their wings backing the wrong shows. The kids know all about it and they agree. Ben, Godson, that’s your edge. There’s your advantage. The world is all before you, kid. Not money but the use of money! I know you can’t take it all in right now, but let me tell you, it’s the best thing I could have done for you.”

  As a matter of fact he did take it all in. It was like a letter of credit. This was the postwar world. Opportunity flourished everywhere. He went to Wharton. He would graduate in a year. Academically at least he would know the ropes. A foundation was being laid here. His eyes were wet with grief for his godfather and with a sense of the significance the man’s gesture meant for himself. Slowly he raised himself from the chair in which he was sitting and slowly gathered pieces of the plastic tent in his hand and bent down and leaned in, pulling it over his head as he would a sweater. He kissed his godfather, Julius Finsberg. The old man’s eyes were wet. Ben felt a draft. It was the oxygen.

  “Listen, you son of a bitch,” his godfather said, “you study hard at Wharton. You’re just godblood. I don’t want you sticking my kids with a bankruptcy from some half-assed investment. Study hard. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  Then his godfather said something Ben had difficulty understanding.

  “What’s that, Godfather?” he asked gently.

  “I said,” his godfather said, “that in that case you have a friend at Chase Manhattan.” And then he died. The prime rate was 1.45 percent on commercial paper on four-to-six-month loans.

  Let Forbes and Fortune put that in their pipes and smoke it!

  So much, he thought, for those who think I was never innocent, who believe I drive hard bargains, force others to the wall with my bruiser’s gift for what is only business. So much for those who think I always looked older than my age and attribute my tastes to an instinct in me for more and more again and then something extra for the house and afterward a little left over that I must scrounge and have. Who think there was never a time when people had to take my knots out. My father wormed my hooks, too. Listen, what do yo
u think? I razzed Sis and touched her things in the hamper. Mom and Pop died together on a highway I have changed the look of forever. A partnership was dissolved by intrigue, and fate worked like a robin in the intriguer’s head to build a conscience there like a little nest. What bloodlines! I was adopted posthumously and made the one whole number in a family of fractions, of thirds and halves.

  Why do they say me when they mean Nate? How easily I gave in to him on the extra televisions. He’s the liquidator, I’m the one who builds and builds. I practically founded this country, for God’s sake. Show a little respect, please.

  He imagined Nate in his suite, protected by a sleeping Mopiani in the vast deserted lobby.

  It was almost dawn. He had to make arrangements in the morning about the TV’s. He would be out of Harrisburg by lunchtime, catch a bite at a plaza on the turnpike with the comers and the goers. Damn shame he hadn’t slept. It was a going period for him. (He was not unlike Mopiani, actually. He had his rounds, too, his stations.) It was better than two hundred miles to Youngstown. He wouldn’t be there till six-thirty, six at the inside. It would be better not to rush, do his business leisurely and stay over in Harrisburg another night, get a fresh start the day after.

  3

  Mornings, seven o’clock, seven-thirty, were different. Something alien in mornings, foreign. There were cities—Harrisburg, Syracuse, Peoria, Memphis—which seemed, if you saw them only on spring or summer mornings, as if they were located in distant lands. It had to do with the light, the dewy texture of wide and empty streets, the long caravan of store windows, his view of the mannequins unobstructed, their stolid stances and postures, their frozen forms like royalty asleep a hundred years in fairy tales, struck where they stood motionless in their spelled styles like figures on medals, the disjunctions all the more striking for the clothes they wore from seasons yet to be. That was foreign. Though he’d never been out of the country, not even to Canada.