The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “Well,” Gus-Ira said, “at least we all feel lousy. We’ve discussed it. Identical lousy.”

  “Nonsense,” Ben said, wanting them, he discovered, as much like the old them as they wanted it themselves. “You’ve still your Finsberg esprit de corps.”

  “We’ve gone back to jungle,” Mary said. “Nature has reclaimed us and green crap pushes up through the cracks in our sidewalk.”

  “I came eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said. He was asking for an explanation.

  “Another thing,” Jerome said.

  “The clothes,” Helen said.

  “We don’t even have” Jerome said

  “our figures,” Maxene said.

  “I don’t think Ben wants to—” Lorenz said.

  “A size here, a size there,” LaVerne said.

  “It makes a difference”

  “in the styles.”

  “That’s when we first noticed,” Kitty said.

  “Because,” Helen said, “oh, not that we always dressed alike, but when we did—”

  “When we were kids and still all living together,” Mary said.

  “Yes, then,” Helen said, “but afterward, too. On special occasions.”

  “Yes. Well,” Noël said.

  “Because there is something in color,” Patty said, “because there is something in color related to size, implicit in pattern demanding its shape. How would a curly tail look on a rabbit, do you suppose? Or the stripes of a tiger on the fur of an ape?”

  “Hey,” Ben said.

  “We grew—” LaVerne giggled, “apart.”

  “Stop it,” Oscar said.

  “Right,” said Moss.

  “You don’t fool us, sisters,” Gus-Ira said.

  “Bastards,” Cole said.

  “Yes, well, what do you expect?” LaVerne asked.

  “Lotte broke the fucking set,” Noël said angrily. “That’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Ah,” Ben said.

  “So cut out the sizes crap,” Sigmund-Rudolf said. “Cool it about the Dress Code.”

  “They want one of us to die,” Noël said. “They think that would change things, even the score in the Magic Kingdom.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Gertrude said. “That’s not what we mean. It isn’t.”

  “It isn’t,” the girls said.

  “We grew apart,” LaVerne said again.

  “Only Ben. Only you’re the same, Ben,” Ethel said.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I’m not the same.”

  “You are,” Oscar said.

  “I’m sick,” Ben said.

  “Sitting down,” Noël said, “it’s an invisible disease.”

  Ben looked at Noël sharply. “You are silly,” he said. “Gertrude’s right, it isn’t what they mean.” He was speaking to all of them.

  “Nobody wants anybody dead,” Mary said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “How do you live, Ben?” Gus-Ira asked. He supposed it was Gus-Ira. He was straining to keep them separate.

  “You know how I live.”

  “No. How do you live? Where do you go?”

  “You know how I live. You know where I go.”

  “We’ve grown apart,” LaVerne said.

  “This one’s in Texas, that one’s in Maine,” Cole said. “And once a year, twice, you check in, drop a card, touch base. We get a call, meet for dinner, have a few.”

  “It was better,” Sigmund-Rudolf said, “when you were still getting it from the sisters.”

  “I never minded that,” Oscar said. “That wasn’t important.”

  “No,” Helen said.

  “I came eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said.

  “How do you live? Where do you go?”

  “I live along my itinerary,” Ben said.

  “Joey,” Kitty sang softly, “Joey, Joey.”

  “Yes,” Ben Flesh said, “sure. My life like a Triptik from the AAA. Here today and gone tomorrow. What is all this? Why are you behaving so? You know about me. I love you, for God’s sake. What is all this?”

  “The showdown. Only the showdown.”

  “The little stuff, Ben. Tell us the little stuff.”

  “Outdoorsman,” Jerome said, “give us the inside dope.”

  “Only what your life is like. Do you take a paper? What do you do about laundry? Is there Sarasota in you? Some winter quarters of your heart, hey?”

  “I take all the papers,” Ben said quietly. “I buy magazines from the newsstand. I watch the local eyewitness news at ten. Everywhere they have blue flu I know about it. Where garbage isn’t collected. There’s something for you, if you want to know. There’s no garbage in my life. Except what collects in the car. The torn road map and the Fudgicle wrapper, the silver from chewing gum. But by and large I’m garbageless. I miss it, you know? The maid comes in and makes up the room. The Cokes come from machines in the hall and the dirty dishes go back to Room Service. Mail’s a problem. I use the phone. I don’t vote. Not even an absentee ballot. I could never meet anybody’s residency requirements. The franchiser disenfranchised. I file my taxes, of course. I use my accountant’s business address as my domicile. This? Is this what you mean? What you want? I have neurologists in twenty states, internists in a dozen, dentists in four. (One of my suitcases is just medical records.) There’s same-day service, so laundry’s no problem. Dry cleaning isn’t. But my bowels don’t know what time it is and buying clothes can be tough if there have to be alterations. Where do they deliver, what happens if the fit’s no good? Nah, there ain’t no winter quarters. Am I getting warm?”

  “Riverdale,” one of them said.

  “What?”

  “Riverdale. You could have used Riverdale. As your domicile.”

  “As easily Riverdale as your accountant’s business address.”

  “I was never asked. Nobody asked me.”

  “Oh, Ben,” Patty said.

  “Well, it’s not the point really,” Lorenz said.

  “What’s the point, Lorenz?” Ben asked.

  “Did we have to ask you? Is that where you were standing? On ceremonies like a station of your itinerary?” Mary said.

  The girls fussed over him. One took his hand. Another hugged him, a third kissed his cheek. But Ben was more interested in what the brothers were doing. There seemed just then to be a conspiracy of tolerance among them, the soft ticking glances of a deferred cruelty. These looks darted from each to each like a basketball passed around a circle. Maybe it was what one of them had said it was, the showdown. It seemed a theatrical term, but it was a theatrical family. He nodded to the girls, acknowledged their concern for his feelings, but moved carefully away from them and toward the brothers.

  Ben and the family were in the big living room. There were theatrical posters behind framed, glare-proof glass, the musical comedies and dramas that Julius had dressed. “I did come eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said. Then it occurred to him how far they must have come. As LaVerne had said, they’d grown apart, as Cole, this one’s in Texas, that one’s in Maine. The Finsbergs had long ago taken their show on the road. There were second companies, third, eighth, and eleventh all over the country by now. Only two of the women and three of the men still lived in New York. Helen had moved to London last year. They must have traveled a greater distance than the circumference of the earth to get here. Thousands had been spent on air fares. “What’s the occasion?” he asked.

  “The occasion?”

  “Why are we here?”

  “Didn’t you know?” Ethel said.

  “It’s the unveiling.”

  “The unveiling.”

  “Of Estelle’s stone.”

  “And Lotte’s.”

  “But they died years ago, at least Lotte—Isn’t the unveiling usually on the first anniversary of the—”

  “Yes,” Helen said. “But there was that business of the suicide.”

  “The girls were very angry,” Gus-Ira said.

  “Angry?”

  “The b
oys, too,” Mary said. “You were furious, Sigmund-Rudolf.”

  “Angry? Furious?”

  “Water under the bridge,” Sigmund-Rudolf said.

  “Angry? Furious?”

  “He doesn’t understand,” Patty said.

  “Of course not. How could he?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Ben said. “I don’t think I do.”

  “We were identical, Ben,” Noël said.

  “Identical,” said Maxene. “Human MIRV’s blooming from a single shaft.”

  “As like as grapes on a cluster.”

  “Identical.”

  “Who gave the lie to snowflakes.”

  “To fingerprints.”

  “To keys on pianos.”

  “If one of us boys had died, only another of us could have made the identification.”

  “We would ask, ‘Are you here, Gus-Ira?’ ‘Are you here, Cole?’ ”

  “Calling the roll.”

  “Subtracting from nine.”

  “That’s how we’d work it.”

  “I could have identified you,” Ben said.

  “Identical.”

  “Homogenized as milk.”

  “Of course we were angry.”

  “Certainly we were furious.”

  “Because”

  “when Lotte took”

  “her life”

  “it was like saying”

  “we”

  “all would.”

  “We shoved her in the plot.”

  “And left her grave unmarked.”

  “We were so mad.”

  “Then when Mama died and we returned for the funeral”

  “we saw that we’d changed,”

  “grown apart.”

  “It was silly to stay angry. We were different now anyway. What Lotte did,”

  “there was no guarantee”

  “that we’d do”

  “too.”

  “And besides”

  “we hadn’t,”

  “had we?”

  “So we counted Lotte’s death”

  “starting from then”

  “and waited a year”

  “and counted Mama’s death starting from”

  “the anniversary”

  “of Lotte’s.”

  “And waited a year.”

  “A double stone ceremony.”

  “Because that was only fitting.”

  “Because Mama herself always did everything”

  “by twos or threes.”

  “I didn’t know any of this,” Ben said.

  “Well, there you are,” Oscar said.

  “Sure,” said Jerome.

  “How could you?” one of the boys and one of the girls asked.

  “I was your godcousin,” Ben said. “I was closer to you than I am to my own sister.”

  “Good old Ben,” one of the girls and one of the boys said. They looked at him.

  Of course, he thought, if they had grown apart from each other, then how much further must they have grown apart from him? It was like his eighteen hundred miles compared to their trip around the world. So that’s what it was, a question of family. That’s why the girls had let him sleep with them, why it made no difference finally to the boys. He recalled Julius’s last words to him. He wasn’t one of them.

  “So, Ben,” Jerome said, “how’s business?”

  “What?”

  “Business. How’s business? What do you make of the economy?”

  “The economy?”

  “We’d like to hear your side of things, get your viewpoint.”

  “We would, Ben,” Sigmund-Rudolf said. And, oddly, those who weren’t already sitting hurried to take seats. Only Ben was standing.

  “Give us the lowdown.”

  “The view from the field.”

  “We want to hear just what you think. Would you mind?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Just how bad do you think it really is?”

  “How much worse—”

  “Hush. Let Ben tell it.”

  “Go ahead, Ben.”

  “Yes, Ben. Go ahead. Tell us. How’s business?”

  And he told them.

  What did he tell them? What could he tell them? That after all these years, after his years at Wharton and his time on the road, after all the deals he had done, the profits turned like revolving doors, and his negotiations with banks, writing and reading letters of intent, contracts, after paying due bills and collecting debts, after picking his people and selecting his locations, and learning his several dozen trades and making what had come to be, starting from scratch, from the G.I. Bill and the serendipitous fillip of his godfather’s fortunate deathbed shove, his money, that—well, that he knew nothing of business, that he was no businessman but only another consumer, like them, he supposed, like anyone. A franchiser. A fellow who had chewed such and such a hamburger—McDonald’s, Burger King, A & W, Big Boy—at such and such a lunchtime, who licked such and such an ice cream—Howard Johnson’s, Baskin-Robbins, Carvel, Mister Softee—during such and such a heat spell or when this or that drive for something sweet had struck him, gratuitous as pain or melancholy, who sought out this or that gasoline station—Shell, Texaco, Sunoco, Gulf—when the gas gauge on one or another of his Cadillacs had been more or less on Empty (as his stomach had been more or less on Empty, as his sweet tooth), who lay down in such and so a motel—Best Western, Holiday Inn, Ramada, Travelodge—when his body had been empty of energy and his spirit of all will save the will to rest, squinting through the dusk and darkness at the sign shining above the Interstates. Who came to sell, almost always, what he had already first used, tried, bought himself—not excepting the Jacuzzi Whirlpool, not excepting the stereo tape deck in his automobile, not excepting the One Hour Martinizing that cleaned his lonely laundry, not excepting the Robo-Wash that bruised the dirt from his car—and all of it testimonial to nothing finally but his needs, to need itself. So they were asking the wrong fellow. He was no businessman. They were asking the wrong fellow. He was not in trade. Or if he was, then it was only because he did business as some people painted pictures—by the numbers. It was already there, all of it, all of them. “The greeting card,” he said, “was invented for me. There’s no franchise,” he pointed out, “called Flesh’s.”

  “Skip it, Godcousin,” Cole said. “How’s business? When’s the economy going to turn around? What about the prime rate? What’s with the energy crisis?”

  “Oh,” Ben Flesh said, “the economy, the prime rate, the energy crisis.”

  “Are you businessman enough to tell us something about that stuff at least?”

  “That stuff, yes. But not because I’m businessman enough. The economy is spooked. There’s a curse on free enterprise. The prime rate grows big as shoe sizes in large men’s closets. Ten, ten and a half. Eleven.”

  “You don’t see it coming down?”

  “Like a belt buckled by someone troubled by his weight. On a diet. Off it. This hole one month”—he touched his belt—“this one”—he moved his finger toward the buckle—“the next. It makes no difference. I don’t understand the prime rate. But it makes no difference. I don’t think so.”

  “You were left the prime rate.”

  And that, he saw, was what frightened them. “Yes.”

  “That was your inheritance.”

  “Yes. I know. Yes. I don’t understand about it. It’s only a decision. Thinking makes it so. It doesn’t mean much. Hard money, soft. I don’t know. It’s only an attitude. Don’t you think so?” He was very tired. If they were going to the unveiling he wished they’d go. He too. That would be something to see. Lotte’s stone. Estelle’s. He had to ask them something.

  “When I die,” he said.

  “What?”

  Hadn’t they heard him? He had probably spoken too softly. “I say,” he said, “when I die—I know we haven’t talked about this—To tell you the truth, I haven’t even thought about it—When I die, could I be bu
ried with the Finsbergs? In your plot? I have no place to go. I mean,” he said, “it’d be a hell of a thing if I had to be stowed in my accountant’s office.—You know? I’d like it, I’d like it stipulated that I could lie with you people.”

  “Gee, Ben,” Lorenz said, “that’s a hell of a thing to say. I mean, why do you want to talk like that? Die, lie with us? I mean, what kind of crap is that supposed to be? You’ll dance on our graves.”

  “Like Fred Astaire,” Ben said.

  “Come on, what’s this horseshit?” Oscar said.

  “I have no place to go,” Ben wailed. “I understood your questions about business. I know my name isn’t Finsberg. I know you’re troubled by the prime rates, what your dad did. His putting you under an obligation to me. You don’t have to worry about that.—I’d buy the plot.—I’d pay whatever…You guys are in my will. My sister is. I’m closer to you. My parents are under the ground in Chicago. I’ve known you longer. I could make it a condition of my will. I wouldn’t do that. Why do I say a thing like that? You’ll get the money anyway. I swear to you. I just thought—”

  “Don’t be so damned morbid,” Gus-Ira said irritably. “What’s this talk about dying? What’s this horseshit about burials?”

  “I want you to promise,” Ben said. “What about it?”

  “Once you’re dead what difference does it make?” Noël said. “I don’t see what difference it makes. I mean, I don’t care. They can burn me for all I care. Maybe I’ll give my body to science. What are you worried about? Once you’re—”

  “What about it?” Ben demanded.

  “Well, it’s just that this isn’t the time,” Moss said quietly.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Patty said, “the Finsberg plot’s big as a fucking football field. Lie with me.”

  “Patty,” LaVerne said.

  “He lies with me,” Patty said. “That’s a good idea. I want that,” Patty said. “Lie with me. Ben lies with me. You got that? You got that, you sons of bitches?” she screamed at her brothers. She took Ben’s hand. He said something she couldn’t make out. “What? What’s that?”