The Franchiser (3 page)

He looked around for a chair. Only then did it strike him how curious a place it was. Except for Julius Finsberg’s hospital bed and the oxygen and two hat racks of the medical on either side of his bed, they might have been in a first-class apartment. It was not like a hospital room at all. From his position he could see something of the other rooms in the suite, none of them having the least thing to do with the practice of medicine. There was a living room with a sofa and easy chairs. There were coffee tables and lamps. At the far end of the billiard room was a gaming table with slots for poker chips at each corner. There were oil paintings on the walls and he could see, off the hall, two guest bedrooms, an open bathroom with decanters of bath salts and oils on a ledge beneath the vanity. He could see a kitchen with an automatic dishwasher, a refrigerator with a tap for ice water.

His godfather lay in the dining room. Near his bed a table was set for eight, the crystal and silver and china beautiful against the thick white tablecloth. Napkins were folded like tiny crowns beside each place setting. He removed one of the chairs from the dining-room table and drew it beside his godfather’s bed. He sat at the man’s right beside a stanchion that supported an I.V. upside down in its collar, trying to ignore the clear tubing that led from the bottle of dextrose and was attached by a sort of needle, not unlike those used to pump up basketballs, to his godfather’s wrist. The hand, like a loaf on a breadboard, was taped to a wide brown splint. His other arm, he saw, was receiving plasma, and a catheter ran from beneath the bedclothes to a spittoon. This he noticed only after he had sat down. The spittoon was between his shoes and every once in a while he heard a tiny splash.

“I am privileged,” his godfather began, “as most men are.” It was difficult to hear him, the voice muffled as it was by the great tent and working against the hiss and boil of the oxygen. (Nor was it easy, really, to see him, his face a smear behind the clouded plastic, like features masked by exploded bubble gum.) “You can hardly live in the world and not come under the influence of
some
advantage. Like golfers, all of us have our little handicap, however measly. So thank your lucky stars, Ben. It itches.” He paused and lifted his dextrose hand, bringing the board up parallel with his nose and rubbing it. “Ouch. Son of a bitch. I think I’ve got a splinter. Nurse. Nurse!” he called. A middle-aged woman in a tweed suit came from the hall.

“My godfather wants the nurse,” Ben said.

“I’m the nurse,” the woman said and went up to the old man.

“Just hold on while I sterilize this sewing needle with this match.”

She turned off the oxygen and his godfather gasped. Terrified, Ben watched the old man thrash about, rolling first on one needle, then the other.

“Uugh—ach—hurry—
hurry!
”

The nurse burned the needle till it glowed red, wiped the carbon off with Kleenex. She turned the oxygen back on and stuck her head in under the tent with his godfather.

“Gracious,” she said as she tried to get at his godfather’s splinter, “there’s hardly light to see. I shall have to speak to the window washer again. I asked him just yesterday to wash off your tent. You heard me, Mr. Finsberg. You heard me, didn’t you? There, that’s got it.”

She came out from beneath the tent.

“Do you?” his godfather said. Some blood was coming from the side of his nose.

“Do I what?” Ben asked.

“Thank your lucky stars?”

“Well no, sir, not literally.”

“I’m not speaking literally. I was in the theatrical costume business, I’m speaking figuratively.”

“Here,” the nurse said, “will you look at that? You could pick your teeth with it.” She held up the splinter. “Should I keep this to show Mrs. Finsberg?”

“No,” his godfather said. “Give it to the boy.”

The nurse handed Ben the splinter. He took it and slipped it into his wallet with his pocket money and return ticket.

“How crowded is the universe,” his godfather said and moved the plasma arm vaguely. “How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap. Consider, Ben. You could have been a pencil or the metal band that holds the eraser to the wood, the wire of lead that runs through it. The black
N
in ‘Number 2’ stamped along one of its six sides. Or one of its six sides. Or the thin paint on another. You might have been a vowel on a typewriter or a number on a telephone dial or a consonant in books. There are thousands of languages, millions of typewriters, billions of books. You might have been the oxygen I breathe or the air stirred by this sentence. It is a miracle that one is not one of these things, a miracle that one is not a thing at all, that one is animal rather than mineral or vegetable, and a higher animal rather than a lower. You could have been a dot on a die in a child’s Monopoly set. There are twenty-one dots on each die, forty-two in a pair. Good God, Ben, think of all the dice in the world. End to end they’d stretch to the sun. Then there are the rich, the blooded with their red heritage like a thoroughbred’s silks. You might have been a stitch in those silks, a stitch in any of the trillions of vestments, pennants, gloves, blankets, and flags that have existed till now. Let me ask you something. How many people live? Consider the size of their wardrobe over the years. A button you could be, a pocket in pants, a figure on print.

“—I was discussing the rich. There are many wealthy. More than you think. I’m not just talking beneficiaries either, next of kin, in-laws, distant cousins, the King’s
mishpocheh
, the Emperor’s. But the rich man himself, the wage earner, the
founder
. Fly in an airplane in a straight line across one state. You couldn’t
count
the mansions or limousines, you couldn’t
count
the swimming pools. So many, Ben. You’re not one of them, and not one of the family, and
still
you exist. I am talking the long shot of existence, the odds no gambler in the world would take, that you would ever come to life as a person, a boy called Ben Flesh.”

He was very excited. He raised himself on the boards taped to his arms and leaned toward me, speaking so close to the oxygen tent that with each word he seemed about to take some of it into his mouth.

“Think of the last of their lines. How many do you suppose have been the last of their lines? Queers, say, or the imperfectly pelvic’d or ball-torn or so wondrously ugly they could never make out and didn’t have the courage or the will to rape? Whatever the reason the last of their lines, end of the road, everybody out. How many? Forty million? Fifty? I don’t have the statistics.—I’m reminded of those rich men again; you could have been the paper for a stock or a bond; you could have been change in somebody’s pocket or a lost dollar nobody found.—But at
least
fifty million. So great a number, yet you managed to be born, you made it anyway, you wormed your way. And if you happen to be white, that’s a miracle squared. Are you following my argument? White people are a minority, you know. As land is to sea, white is to black, to yellow and mongrel Pak. So we keep compounding the miracle like the interest rate on money never touched.

“It’s incredible really. Amazing. Who could believe it? You weren’t aborted, you didn’t end up in a scum bag. You survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio, mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD. God bless you, boy, you’re a testament to the impossible! And not just that, but you aren’t broken or damaged, there are no birth defects; you’ve your full complement of fingers, your fair share of toes. Your brains are present and accounted for. You’re literate, you do sums.

The Dean’s list at Wharton. I know, I know. And even without parents you’ve got clothes, shelter, sex, what to eat—you know, the drives, the hydramatics of being, four on the floor and more where that came from. Yes, and you get the point of jokes and have a favorite movie and maybe even the room where you stay is done up in your best color. My God, lad, you’re a fucking celebration!

“And over and beyond everything, your inventory of good fortune like leaves on trees, there’s still some advantage left over. Nurse,
Nurse!
”

The woman ran back into the room.

“What is it, Mr. Finsberg? Is something the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I wanted you to see this phenomenon.” He poked his plasma board at the tent and pointed me out.

“You’ll tear the tent, sir.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. I thought he had passed out. But in a moment he began to speak again.

“The wars,” he said breathlessly, his eyes still shut. “You were drafted. But you lived to tell the tale. In my own lifetime, just in my own country, there’s been the Spanish-American, the First War and Second, plus a little showing the flag here and a little more there. And maneuvers going on all the time. Even as we talk, maneuvers going on, war games, and if plenty buy it in the line of duty, a lot more buy it and it’s only an accident. In car wrecks on highways, your own parents, for example—and may I belatedly say how sorry I am? Al was my partner and Rose my friend, and I miss them dearly, the both. And the houses burned down that you weren’t in—all the chance crap, all the hazard, actuarial rough stuff.”

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
some
thing wholesale.
Every
body.”

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!