The Franchiser (2 page)
“Hangers. You need hangers?”
“Richmond sells me hangers.”
“And not television? Richmond don’t make you take their televisions?”
“I’m not a sharecropper, Nathan. It ain’t a company store.”
“The shipping is your responsibility.”
“I haven’t bought anything yet. I haven’t seen the color.”
“Turn it on, turn it on.”
“What? Here? In the Presidential suite, sky-high, where the reception’s like a page from
National Geographic
, the test pattern like an engraving? No. We’ll go to—309. We’ll watch with interference. I want to see the ghosts, the squiggle Mopiani’s walkie-talkie makes on the screen—the Number 12 bus going by, rush hour, all the city’s tricky electric shit. I want you to take your worst shot. Then,
then
the shipping’s my responsibility.”
We went to 309. Nate had to get Mopiani to hunt up a key, to scrounge around in the hotel’s cellar for an hour looking for a way to turn the juice on in that part of the building. He had to fetch five more sets from rooms I selected at random and fix plugs he’d taken from lamps to the wires he’d cut behind the TV sets that ran through the walls to the master antenna. The whole thing must have taken four hours. Then we shoved plugs into every socket, stuffing them full, caulking, tuck-pointing the electric slots tight. Putting on different channels, spinning a roulette of network and U.H.F. Channel 6’s closed circuit, the camera panning from a barometer to a dial that showed the speed and direction of the wind, to a clock that told time, to another that gave the temperature, to ads on signs. I guess the Nittney-Lyon was still paid up for the service. It was in black and white but almost the only thing I watched with any interest. On other sets grave Cronkite spilled the beans, Chancellor’s glasses reflected light, Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner sat connected at the shoulder like Siamese twins. After a while Nate left and took his palace guard with him, and I watched the wind speed and direction, the barometer and temperature, keeping my eye peeled for the slightest change.
Nate returned in an hour. “Satisfied?”
I nodded. He put out his hand and I took it. “At last,” I said, “the Nate Lace Special.”
“Listen, I never once went back on a handshake.”
“I know that, Nate.”
“That’s why I jerked my hand back from you before. It wasn’t nothing personal.”
“I know that.”
“I got a handshake it stands up in court.”
“Yes.”
“Your feelings shouldn’t be hurt.”
“My feelings feel fine.”
“Just so you know.”
“You’re colorful, Nate.”
“Well—”
“No. You are. You’re colorful. You got more color than all the TV’s. Me too.”
“I never thought of you as colorful.”
“No, I didn’t used to be. Now I’m colorful too. Partner. Idiosyncratic, Technicolor partner.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Our vaudeville styles, pal. Our personalities like hard acts to follow.”
He was looking at me. “The twenty-five thousand. We’ll arrange an arrangement.”
“Right. I have to organize the sets and figure a way to get them fixed and work it out for a truck to take them to my Travel Inn. Is it all right if I stay here tonight?”
“Yeah, sure. The place is empty. With you I figure I’ve already doubled the occupancy rate.”
“Hey, Nate?”
“What?”
“Do me a favor. I’ll give Mopiani the keys. Get on the walkie-talkie and ask him to put my Cadillac in the garage.”
“You and your cars. If you flew you wouldn’t have to worry about parking.”
Forbes
would not have heard of him,
Fortune
wouldn’t. There would be no color photographs of him, sharp as holograph, in high-backed executive leathers, his hand a fist on wide mahogany plateaus of desk, his collar white as an admiral’s against his dark, timeless suits. There would be no tall columns of beautifully justified print apposite full-page ads for spanking new business machines with their queer space-age vintages, their coded analogues to the minting of postage, say, or money—the TermiNet 1200, the Reliant 700, Canon’s L1610, the NCR 399—numbers like license plates on federal limousines or the markings on aircraft.
Though he actually used some of this stuff. G.E. had an answer for his costly data volume traffic; Kodak had found a practical alternative to his paper filing. He had discussed his microform housing needs with Ring King Visibles. He had come into the clean, bright world of Kalvar. A special card turned even a telephone booth into a WATS line. Still,
Fortune
would do no profile.
Signature
, the Diners Club magazine, had never shown an interest; T.W.A.’s
Ambassador
hadn’t. There was no color portrait of him next even to the mail-order double knits and shoes.
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. Immediately 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.”
