The Franchiser (11 page)

“My height?” the Colonel said.

“Sir?”

“My height. People like their avunculars stubbly little Santas. Eb Scrooge’s old boss—what’s his name—he was a shorty. All of ’em, squatty, florid little fellers. Only your father figure is supposed to be tall. Well, you know what my real significance is, Jack? It ain’t the finger-lickin’-good routine. I mean to go down as the first avuncular in U.S. history to break the height barrier, bust six two. One day I’m comin’ out the closet altogether entire, speak the King’s English, iambic pentameter. That’s what I’m
really
after. Oh, I ain’t fixin’ to put out the twinkle in my eye or extinguish the roses in my cheeks—just very manly, very deliberate and
distingué
. Stand up straight, unhunch my shoulders, give my backbone its head, let America see what’s been hid from it too long—that a man can be lovable, turn out a good product, and
tall
all at the same time.”

“I never realized,” Ben told him, “what an idealist you are.”

“Shucks,” said the Colonel. “Schucks, pshaw, and…” He drew Ben toward him conspiratorially, looked both ways when they were nose to nose.

“—and?”

“—and pshit!”

They went to lunch at La Caravelle. “Unless you prefer Clos Normand,” the Colonel had said.

“I’ve never been to either.”

“
I
know. Le Perigord.” Then changed his mind. “No, that’s all the way east.” Decisively. “Caravelle.”

It was the largest of intimate rooms, and there was, for Flesh, the sense that, remove the tables and cloak room—he thought like this, the franchiser vision, his blueprint imagination—lift the rugs and install the proper equipment, and one would have a gentlemen’s barber shop of the sort found in the basements of immense commercial travelers’ hotels.

Ben Flesh examined the table linen while Colonel Sanders looked over the wine list and bantered with the
sommelier
in French. He lifted the bread basket—it was cunningly made bread, baked to look like slabs of wicker—and tore into the most delicious roll he had ever eaten. He offered the Colonel one but the man shook his head.

“Flours the palate,” he said. “Tarts up the old wine cellar. Well, Ben,” he said, “it’s Ben, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What you up to, Ben? Why you bothering me?”

“We’re in the same line of work.”

“We are, are we? Well, you sure don’t dress for it. You dress like a lawyer or a cardiologist. You a lawyer or a cardiologist, Ben?”

“No, sir, I’m a franchiser.”

“Franchiser, eh? What sort franchises you sell? What’s your product?”

“I buy franchises.”

Colonel Sanders looked at him suspiciously. “You’re a damn liar, son. If you bought franchises you’d see the contract calls you the ‘franchisee.’ ”

“That’s always sounded like a cross between a Frenchman and Chinaman. I call myself a franchiser.”

“An’ you want to talk to me ’bout a Colonel Sanders—Well, that’ll have to wait. I don’t believe in business lunches. Here’s the wine. They do a wonderful half liter of Château Pomme hereabouts. That all right with you? It’s a ’53 white. The red’s better, of course, but it stains my beard.”

The
sommelier
poured an inch of wine in the Colonel’s glass. The chicken king rinsed, nodded judiciously, and the
sommelier
filled Ben’s glass.

Sanders ordered for them both. Ben was to have
cassoulet
, the Colonel a cold
bouillabaisse
and some cold asparagus.

“How’s your
cassoulet?
” he asked.

“It’s wonderful. I never knew beans—these
are
beans?—could be so good.”

The Colonel took a fork and poked around in the stewy mound on Flesh’s plate. “Yes, sir, beans, pork sausage, and—son of a bitch!” he roared, “that’s
duck!
Son, don’t eat that. Where’s that son bitch
garçon?
You see where that peckerhead got off to?” He shouted for the waiter.

Ben winced.

“Who you shamed for, skippy?” the Colonel demanded. “That’s
duck
they give you. You squeamish for these people? Publishers, bud. Publishers, agents, editors, and starving writers. Expense accounts. Credit cards. Why, we the onliest folks in this restaurant showing them cash. Waiter!”

“Sir?”

The Colonel harpooned a piece of tanned flesh from Ben’s plate. “
C’est le canard! Ce n’est pas l’oie! Cochon! Merde!
”

“It’s delicious,” Ben said.

“It’s fuckin’
duck!
” Sanders roared. “It’s s’posed to be
goose!
”

The waiter tried to take Ben’s plate, but Ben held on. “I like duck actually,” he said.

“Fah! Leave it be then. He
likes
duck. Let ’em eat duck. Boy,” he said, when the waiter had gone, “you are surely a disappointment to me. Okay. Now we’ve had our scene, let’s aid digestion with some good conversation. What’s your pet peeve?”

He was still a young man, still in his early thirties. I was still innocent, my character, which is not shaped, as psychologists would have it, in the formative first five or six years or we are back to Calvinism, infant damnation, the loss of the will, but, as I truly believe, in the thirties and forties, still unformed but just beginning to happen, thicken, as chocolate pudding thickens, begins its first resisting circle in the stirrer’s slowed spoon. So I was still a young man, not yet me, not yet myself.

“My pet peeve? I don’t know. Deliberate cruelty, I guess.”

“ ‘Deliberate cruelty,’ ” he said. “Forget the duck. My mistake. You bring your goose with you. You are goose equipped. Deliberate cruelty. Your pet peeve is deliberate cruelty? Ben, if you’re tellin’ the truth you’d better do yourself some more window shopping or you’ve bought yourself an ulcer for sure. Deliberate cruelty, hell. What other kind is there? No, lad. No, son. Get something refreshing you don’t have to rub shoulders with it in the street every day, it ain’t there like wallpaper, the last thing you see when you turn the light off at night, the first thing you see in the morning. Now
I
got a pet peeve a man can be proud of. You say, ‘What’s that?’ ”

“What’s that?”

“Well, it so happens I like baseball. Always have. Now we don’t have no franchise in the South, not yet, even though some our best ballplayers come from down there. Oh, Louisville, where I live, we got us a good minor-league club, but you can’t get very excited about a minor-league team you know there’s a
major
- league team about. You follow me?”

“Minor-league baseball is your pet peeve.”

“Shit. That ain’t no pet peeve, that’d be a petty peeve. Hell no.”

“That there are no major-league clubs in the Southland.”

“ ‘The
Southland
’ Kid, you ain’t even trying.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well hell, what kind of half-ass pet peeve would it be if any Tom, Dick, or Harry could get it first off? It’s okay. I’ll tell you. In my line I travel a lot, get to places where the TV and radio pull in the big games. I mean the Yankees and Red Sox, the Cubs, Cincinnati,
Dee
troit and Philly, the Senators, Cards. Well, I mean now I’ve made a study and ever’ one them broadcast busters they go crazy somebody fouls one off into the stands.” He began to mimic the announcer. “ ‘Oh. There’s a scramble among the fans. A kid’s chasing. Hey, he’s got it! Sign that youngster up. Well, there’s a young lad who’s going home with a souvenir he’ll never forget.’ If they’d just get through
one
game without they say something like that. That’s
my
pet peeve. Who you envy?”

“Envy?”

“With me it’s song writers. All their experiences. Whoosh. Good Lord, those fellers are always sittin’ on top of the world or they down in the dumps below sea level. Sailors with girls in every port got the same opportunities. And the same apparatus. More maybe, but they cain’t even hum, let along sing the poetry part. Dumb-ass tars.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

Yes, lyricists and composers figured in his life, in his godblood.

“You want dessert? They do a lovely flan.”

“I’m stuffed. I just want coffee.”

The Colonel took a Bull Durham pouch from a pocket inside his jacket and, opening it, pulled out two Russian cigarettes and offered one to Ben. “Light the holler.”

“They’re strong.”

“Shh,” Colonel Sanders said. “Quieten down. Let’s just set.”

Over their coffee, through the thin smoke of their Sobranies, Flesh studied the man.

“Can’t get over it, can you?”

“Get over—?”

“Me. My cheeks are thinner in person. The cartoon features? Air-brushed. My flush? Pancake powder. A character actor would spot it in a minute. ‘Number five,’ he’d say. Yes and you know my best feature, kid? My lap. We built everything up from that foundation. Oh, my footlight being, my proscenium presence. You shocked, sonny? No no, kid. Roosevelt never stood and Lenin and Trotsky turned a mustache and a beard into history. French barbers made the Commie revolution. Image. You got about as much image as a shoe salesman. You could buy up all the franchises in the world, but you ain’t got the face for a billboard. Jesus, son, you haven’t the face for nothing your own. You’re growing dim. You’re fading on me. Get into the disappearing-ink trade, that’s
my
advice. What you up to? Why’d you come for me?”

“I was drawn,” he said. “I am hypnotized by a trademark.”

They stopped at the Colonel’s suite in the Pierre. Flesh waited in the living room while Sanders changed.

“There, that’s better,” the chicken prince said coming out of his dressing room. “Had to get out of that damn suit. ’Nother ten minutes inside that thing I’d feel like a great big damn sideline, like I was rolled in lime.” He had changed to a light-brown pin-stripe and there was a Windsor knot in his tie. “How you like that? How I look?”

“Fine,” Ben said.

“Yeah. Want to walk up to the Frick, or we could do the Metropolitan? It’s two years since I’ve seen the Rembrandts.”

“I thought we might go up to Riverdale.”

“That a sanatorium?” The Colonel laughed. “That’s some sanatorium and you got kin there. Old folks with long bony fingers. You powerful attracted to the aged, a lad your years.”

“No no,” Ben said. “It’s this residential section in the Bronx. You’ll like it.”

The twins and triplets were there. It was variously their Easter break, spring vacation, or Spring Clean-Up Week. Whether by accident or design, things had so worked out for the Finsberg stock that though they attended prep schools, colleges, universities, and graduate schools in different parts of the country, their vacations not only overlapped but actually meshed. It was as if Fieldston School, where all of them had attended high school and where Kitty and Sigmund-Rudolf were now seniors, was the Greenwich Mean Time of the academic year, its openings and ends of term and all holidays in between somehow a determinant chronometric pulse that radiated out to the two small liberal-arts colleges, three large state universities, and one important graduate school where the other twins and triplets were enrolled.

They looked more alike than ever. Audrey Hepburn’s boyish cut in
Roman Holiday
, though now two or three years past its universal modishness, was still popular with and suitable to the girls, and something in the genes of the boys—men now, some of them—had permanently waved their fine black hair so that it lay on their heads like loose bathing caps or visible turbulence. And, relaxed in sneakers and jeans on their holidays, in their white shirts loose over their trousers, the tall, rather powerfully built though flat-chested girls and young women were strikingly like their slim, somewhat stunted brothers. Also, they were of an age, seventeen the youngest, twenty-three the oldest, where all had reached their full height—five foot, ten inches. The girls’ low rich voices were identical in pitch to the slightly highish timbre of the young men’s.

“I’d like you to meet my godcousins,” Ben said to the Colonel. “Lotte, Ethel, and Mary; Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene; Gertrude, Kitty, and Helen, say hello. This is Cole, Oscar, Sigmund-Rudolf, Jerome, Lorenz, Noël, Irving, Gus-Ira, and Moss.”

“Jesus,” Colonel Sanders said.

“Gosh, Ben,” said Gus-Ira, “except for the suit, he looks just like Colonel Sanders.”

“He
is
Colonel Sanders,” Ben said.

“Is this a show?” the Colonel asked. “What are they?”

“They’re my guarantors, Colonel. They help with my businesses.”

“Are we going to have chicken from the Colonel, Ben?” young Sigmund-Rudolf asked.

“Are we, Ben?” chimed in Ethel, Cole, Noël, and LaVerne.

Sanders was a little nervous. “Hey,” he said, “hold up. You ain’t spuk to my people. You just don’t go up to the Colonel his own self and get you a franchise. There’s channels. How I know Riverdale is zoned for chicken?”

“Jeepers,” said Jerome, “were you thinking of putting it up in
Riverdale
, Ben? That’s a
swell
idea. The closest carry-out place is Fordham Road.”

“And that’s just chinks,” Patty said.

“They’re cold before you get them home,” Irving said angrily.

“Cold chinks. Yech,” Kitty said.

“Yech,” they all said, for they had identical tastebuds.

“Hold on,” Colonel Sanders objected.

“You know what I’m wondering?” Helen said.

“What’s that, Helen?” Ben asked. He knew them all, had never since he’d first met them and learned their names at their father’s funeral years before confused them. Not even Estelle, now a troubled woman of close to fifty, could keep them straight, but Ben knew, had always known, because he went instinctively beyond externals, penetrating even the subtle externals of twin and triplet character to something marked in them, as certain of their differences as a geologist of landscape, of fault, strata, and where the ice age stopped, hunching the mineral deposits, informed-guessing at the ores and oil fields, water-witching what was—forget age, forget sex, forget names even—the single distinctions, one from another, that they bore—their infirmities, their mortalities, distinct to him and strident as the graffiti of factions.

Each had told him—and he’d never forgotten; something perhaps in the pitch of the confession—his, her peculiar symptom. The Finsbergs, for all their money and education and charm, for all the chic victory of their urban good looks, for all their style and chipper well-heeled spirits, their flush wardrobes and Parisian French, their skill on skis, and their slope bright wools sharp as flares, for all their American blessings, were freaks, and carried in their bloodstreams and pee, in their saliva and fundament and the tracings of their flesh, all the freak’s ruined genetics, his terrible telegony and dark diathetics. It was Julius, set in his ways, throwing himself like an ocean into Estelle’s coves and kyles, till all that was left of his genes and chromosomes was the sheath, the thread of self like disappearing Cheshire garments resolved at last to their stitching. Obsessive, worn-out, he had made hemophiliacs of the self-contained and self-centered. Julius’s progeny—that queer wall of solidarity and appearance, that franchise of flesh—were husks, the chalices in which poisoners chucked their drops and powders.