The Franchiser (5 page)

“You’ve got Idaho plates.”

“I buy my machines in Boise. I get a new one every year. You think we need the air conditioning?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll set the thermostat for seventy.” Ben thought the boy was laughing. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing. I was thinking. A drifter in swell threads and a late-model car.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t have the threads and I ain’t got the car.”

“Otherwise we’re the same,” Ben said.

“I haven’t got a dozen businesses.”

“I’ll give you a job. I’ll make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins in Kansas City.”

“Sure you will.”

“Sure I will.”

“My mom said never take ice cream from strangers,” the kid said. He tried to pass it off as a joke but I could see he was uneasy. Probably he thought I was a fairy. I understand. An aging guy in a Cadillac, a breakfast buyer. Only the knowledge that he could take me kept him from telling me to stop and let him out. He made moves in his mind. He was thinking he could push in the cigar lighter and burn me if I tried something. He was thinking karate chop, the advantage of surprise. Break my arm with the armrest, he was thinking. Get me with his backpack that he held in his lap, that when he wore it in the city where I picked him up it made him look like an astronaut. Actually a kid like this, probably on spring vacation, going to see his girlfriend in South Bend, Indiana, or toying with the idea of dropping out maybe, what good to me was he? Every day I try to be ordinary, routine as the next guy. I drop my diction like an accompanist. Sing, sing your key, I’ll pick you up. But the kid? His assumptions soured the air and I turned on the radio.

“You’re not Baskin-Robbins material,” I told him and could almost smell his relief as I ignored him. And I did what I always do when I’m with healthy good-looking people. I saw myself from his viewpoint, saw my gnashing jaws, a thing I do when I drive and which dentists have pointed out to me, saw my ugly Indian-nickel features, my long coarse sideburns, my pot which seems larger than it is because I have no ass. I felt his physical smugness and could have shot holes in his Frisbee.

“What’s with you? You into meditation?” Ben asked.

“Meditation?”

“It’s twenty-five miles since we spoke.”

“I was listening to the music.”

I turned the radio off and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. “I’ve got to pee,” I said and pulled the keys from the ignition. That was to make him think I was afraid of him and set him at his ease. Even so he could have misinterpreted me, thought the pee a stratagem to get him to pee and thus expose himself to me. I went deeper into the woods than necessary, almost hiding. When I got back he was gone. I drove off. He was hitching about two hundred yards up the road. He spotted me and made to go off into the woods. That made me mad and I stopped. I opened the door and signaled him closer. He looked miserable, shamefaced, but he stood his ground.

“Hey, you,” I said.

“I ain’t riding with you.”

“Never mind you ain’t riding with me. You haven’t thanked me for the ride you already rode with me.”

“Thank you.”

“Let’s hear it for the breakfast.”

“For the breakfast. Thank you.”

“And the lessons I taught you about life.”

“What were those?”

“What, you forgot?”

“You didn’t say much.”

“You weren’t paying attention. What about those twenty-five miles? They were the first lesson. The second was that opportunity strikes once. I want you to know something. Never forget this. You blew it, you fucked up. I was prepared, such was my mood, to make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins franchise in the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. If you knew shit about locations you’d know that that’s the flagship of the chain in Kansas City, the crème de la crème, we’re making it a flavor. I want you to know I trusted you. I would have given you ice-cream lessons. And here’s the part I hope eats your heart out. I
still
trust you. I am an equal-opportunity employer, your putzship, and all there was to it was for you to say the word. Not saying the word cost you about $30,000 a year. In the neighborhood of. I want you to know that the word was yes. I want you to know that the word is always ‘yes.’ ”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe what? What don’t you believe?”

“That you’d give a job like that to a stranger.”

“Of course I wouldn’t give a job like that to a stranger. Who mentioned strangers? It was what you said about salesmen having to come up that street. I figured you for a kid with a head on his shoulders.”

He came a little closer.

“No,” I said. “Stay where you are. You’re all washed up in the ice-cream business. You won’t ever understand this next part, but it’s the truth, real as my Cadillac. I’m a benefactee. A benefactee benefacts. That’s the tradition. That’s fitting. I went to Wharton. Books must balance. You could have gotten me off the hook but you blew it. You want a ride? You are no longer in the running upward-mobilitywise, but it’s starting to rain and if you want a ride I’ll give you one.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“In the back seat,” Ben told him. “I don’t care for your dirty aspersions. You’re too suspicious to hitchhike.”

When they were on their way Ben told him about his cousins. He knew what the young man didn’t, that the boy was entitled to the story. Since he had disinherited him, obligations had been created. Legally the kid was entitled to nothing, but Ben felt bad about this. The boy, a guest in his Cadillac, was already out $30,000. Ben owed him something.

“This is the true story,” he began, “of Julius and Estelle Finsberg’s children, my godcousins, or ‘How I Got to Play the Palace.’

“Julius Finsberg was a bachelor almost all his life. He didn’t marry until he was past fifty. He was, at that age, settled, a man of habits deep as grain. As I reconstruct it, nothing ever happened to him. He was that rare being in our go-getting country, a man whose life had never been touched by our public events, whose convictions had never been nudged, shoved neither north by northwest by war nor south by southeast by peace. He would already have been thirty-eight in the First War, too old by a whisker for conscription. And forty-nine in 1929, the prime of life for a man in a small sedentary theatrical costume business, a business almost impossible to wipe out in a Depression, for everyone knows there’s no business like show business and the show must go on. He was a paradigm for a man. I mean, he might have served as a model for the uncontingent life, a man who would probably have got by in any century. And that’s significant, too. Born in one century, he died in another. We think of such men as respectable, responsible. They are the average from whom we get our notions of tone, our ideas of stability. Consider, for example, the year of Finsberg’s birth—1880. By the time he came to awareness photography was an established fact, trains, electric light, the telephone, automobiles. Even radio and aviation were in the air. He lived, that is, in conjunction with the incipiency of things, taking for granted all those objects and ideas that developed as he developed, in neck-and-neck relation to the world, so that he moved, or seemed to, as it moved, creating in him alphas of stability and settlement and an imagination which could take anything the world could dish out. He died in 1950 at threescore and ten, as if God Himself were an actuary.

“I said nothing ever happened to him, but that isn’t the same as saying he took no initiatives. He did. Falling in love in his fifties was an initiative. It must have seemed the oddest event in his life. Yet even then he lived with the incipiency of things. The love songs whistled and hummed and played on the pianos of Tin Pan Alley came into existence even as he overheard them, so living still in his Johnny-on-the-spot connection to the world, to the lyrics and melodies of songs not yet even copyrighted. And this is the point. Such a man, a man for whom there have been no surprises, when such a man is surprised, the surprise has got to be devastating. It gives him the tidal wave and sets him apart from himself, defying all his Geneva conventions. He’d been my father’s partner. My father spoke well of him. When Julius fell in love my father could not understand that Julius’s old loyalties and habits and routines were sabotaged, and never detected Julius Finsberg’s scorched-earth policy against the character and personality of Julius Finsberg. Julius’s love—a girl much younger, a hoofer—giving him ambitions, big ambitions, big ideas. So he cheated my father and went into business for himself. And this was part of his stability and honor, too, your man of fifty being no fool, understanding as well as any detached gossip that he could make no dowry of a body already almost used up, knowing he would have to offer such a girl door prizes of wealth, loss leaders of power and connection.

“Only there
are
no smooth revolutions. The habits and orthodoxies of a lifetime are not overturned in a minute. It was all very well to will my father harm, but another thing altogether to alter his flesh’s bone structure, its overbite and fingerprint and timbre.

“This is what happened. When he married his hoofer—it took him three years; he was fifty-three—he married self-consciously and slowly. Not only did he intend to take a wife, but to take a mother, to have sons, daughters, earnests to what I have called his orthodoxy, pawns to his respectability, and so I imagine that he fucked to conceive, willing his sperm home, body English on the tip of his prick, bobbing, weaving, dancing his gism up the hoofer’s alley like a bowler. She had triplets—daughters. But Julius wanted a son—a man wants a son; it was Julius who designed the costume for the male lead in
Carousel
, who, working from Hammerstein’s ‘My Boy Bill’ lyric, invented the big leather belt worn over the loops of the trousers like a rope, the woodsman’s checked shirt and cowboy’s bandanna, inventing all that tender denim swagger, symbols not of masculinity but of responsible tenor fatherhood—and again he fucked to conceive, his concentration in orgasm complete, all encompassing. He had twin boys and now had sons as well as daughters, but triplets, twins, embarrassments finally to a man his age. Where was the single son or individual daughter he had yearned for to make his normal life normal again? So again he took his hoofer to bed and again fucked only to conceive. Triplets. By this time he should have suspected, accepted. But he had been a bachelor for fifty-three years. He was set in his ways. He was passionate to father not crowds but an individual.

“Every time in the first seven years of his marriage he took the hoofer to bed he impregnated her, and every time she yielded triplets or twins. Triplets alternating with twins in the hoofer’s seven fat years. And I don’t think he had voluntarily surrendered his right to an individual son or individual daughter even then. But he was sixty now. It was his body that abandoned Julius Finsberg, not Julius Finsberg his body.

“My father had named him my godfather, yet it wasn’t until he knew he was dying that I heard from him. Nobody gives nothing for nothing. I was to be the individual son he had wanted all his life, so that when he died his eleventh-hour sponsorship of me became his last bid to recover the ordinary. In a way I was more godson to him—I the benefactor, you see, he the beneficiary—than he godfather to me.

“I went to his funeral. It was end of term and I had to ask my professors’ permission to put off my exams. I said my godfather had died. I told the truth. I admitted he was a man I barely knew. They would not recognize the connection. I told them I was in his will. I explained how he had left me the prime interest rate. This was the Wharton School of Business. This they could understand. They comforted me and told me I could take my exams whenever I felt sufficiently recovered.

“I went to the chapel where my godfather was laid out and approached the mourners’ bench. I introduced myself and offered my condolences. This was the first time I had even seen the mother, the hoofer, the first time I had ever seen—what’s the term I’m looking for?—the children? The triplets and twins? My godcousins? Godbrothers and godsisters? The siblings? No, this was a
sibship
. A Sixth Fleet of family. I think I backed off when I saw them. I
know
I rubbed my eyes. There were eighteen of them. Eighteen. Yes. Only seven years separated the oldest from the youngest. There were eighteen, nine boys and nine girls. Identical triplets, identical twins. But not just discretely identical, the part in each set identical to the other part or parts of the set, but identical to each other set, too, somehow equal to and collateral with the whole. Each girl slightly favoring the father and each boy the mother, so that even their sexual differences seemed to cancel out the very notion of difference, and they looked, the boys and the girls, like one person. Exactly like, because of the subtle distinctions in their sizes and ages—sixteen years old to ten—a single person caught between two opposing mirrors, each subsequent reflection a shade smaller in perspective.

“It was astonishing. Though I didn’t understand this at the time, I have come to realize that my godfather had indeed been set in his ways, so stubborn in them in fact, so much the immutable bachelor at fifty-three and four and five, and so on, that his very sperm, his
verygenes
had become like a single minting of dimes, say. Granted strength he could have fucked from now till doomsday and not produced a child unlike the eighteen he had already produced.

“As I came to know them, I saw that their gestures were the same, their mannerisms and tics, their voices. When they spoke together the prayers for the dead, it was like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

“They knew about me. They knew who I was. They loved their father and they loved me. Indeed, they had been told by the old man to look upon me as a sort of stepbrother, and because I was as different from them as they were like each other, they seized upon me, for all the difference in our ages, as small children might attach themselves to an
au pair
.

“ ‘Look at his brown hair,’ they said. Their own was black. ‘Look how fair his complexion.’ Theirs was dark. ‘See how straight he stands.’ They had a tendency to slouch. Their mother I had not much to do with, but the Finsberg children would not let me out of their sight.”