The Franchiser (4 page)

“Uugh, agh! Uuch. Awgrh.”

“The tent, Godfather?”

“The bedpan! Get help. Hurry, boy. Where are you going? That’s the guest bedroom. No, that’s the linen closet. Not in there, for God’s sake, that’s the bar! There, that’s right.”

He grabbed a resident—the man wore a stethoscope over his turtleneck—and rushed with him and a nurse back to his godfather’s suite. He remained outside.

The nurse and resident came out in a few minutes. Ben looked at them.

“You didn’t tell me you were Ben,” the resident said.

“How’s the weather in Philly?” the nurse asked.

He could hear his godfather calling his name. “I’d better go in,” Ben said.

The man was sitting, his pillows fluffed up behind him.

“You seem more comfortable,” Ben said.

“Never mind about that,” he said irritably. “I’m a goner. There’s something we have to straighten out.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Here’s the long and short of it,” my godfather said. “I palmed a deuce.”

“Sir?”

“I palmed a deuce. You don’t spend the whole of your working life in the theatrical costume business without picking
some
thing up. You know how many magicians’ costumes I’ve turned out over the years? Let me count the ways. Sure, and the magician needing his costume immediately, five minutes after the phone call from his agent. Having to be in Chicago, the Catskills, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. It was always rush rush rush with magicians, and they hang over your shoulder while you work. Magicians! Well, it
has
to be that way, I suppose. Magicians have special requirements. They have to be there to tell the tailor everything. Well, wouldn’t they?”

“I guess so. I never thought about it.”

“Wake
up
, for God’s sake!”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, well, anyway, there was this magician and one time I, you know, he was hanging around waiting for his costume to be ready and I, I asked him to teach me to palm a deuce.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Do I have to draw a picture for you? When we cut, your father and I, to see who’d buy out who and low man had to pay the other guy the three thousand bucks—You see, I
wanted
the business. If your old man had cut a queen or a jack or even a ten I wouldn’t feel so bad, because probably I could have beat him without the palm. But he cut a
four. A fair four
. I
had
to cheat. Son of a bitch. It’s been on my conscience for years. Then, your father, he had to go and make me your godfather because he felt he’d stuck me with the business. What a sap. Well, who was the sap? Because I didn’t have any kids of my own then, see? I wasn’t even married. So it meant a lot to me, being your godfather. But I couldn’t face you. What I’d done to you, you know? It was as if I’d taken the bread out of your mouth, my own godson and I’d taken the bread out of his mouth. You’ve got a sister. You don’t see
her
here, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Because she was never my goddaughter and I don’t give a shit what happens to her. You follow?”

“I think.”

“Because I was a sport in those days. What the hell, I wasn’t married,
I
had no responsibilities.” He lowered his voice. “I used to go backstage with some of our customers. You follow?”

“I think—”

“So naturally I fell in with this show-biz crowd. Hoofers, singers. And spent less and less time in the shop. I’d tell your dad I was making contacts for us, for our business, and in a way I was. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Well, I—”

“That’s when they took me to Tin Pan Alley.”

“Tin Pan Alley?”

“And there was this kid in Tin Pan Alley. He was always hanging around.”

“I see.”

“And whistling. You follow?”

“I don’t—”

“And everywhere I’d go in Tin Pan Alley there’d be this whistling kid, whistling tunes, Ben, the most beautiful tunes you ever heard. My
God
, what a whistler he was!”

“I follow.”

“What?”

“I see.”

“That whistler’s name was Jerome Kern!”

“My God!”

“He had a friend. A hummer. And, Ben, if it was possible, the hummer hummed even more beautiful than the whistler whistled.”

“He was—?”

“Richard Rodgers.”

“Wow!”

“And through Kern and Rodgers I got to know another character in Tin Pan Alley. A piano player. I’d listen to him play these incredible songs on his piano and I swear to you I had to catch my breath. It was like I was a sailor boy listening to the sirens.”

“Cole Porter,” Ben said.

“You better believe it.”

“Jesus.”

“So you see? I knew. I had my ear to the ground of Tin Pan Alley and I knew there was going to be a—what do you call it?—a renaissance in the American musical theater. And I saw new beautiful costumes in my sleep and I knew that the theatrical costume business was going to be the talk of the town. That’s when I asked the magician to teach me to palm the deuce. That’s it, that’s the story.”

“Gee.”

“Your father never knew.”

“I’m glad. He would have eaten his heart out.”

“He would have eaten his heart out.”

Ben nodded.

“So,” his godfather said after a while, “we’ve got business. I’m dying and I want to put things right.”

“You don’t owe me—”

“Never mind. This is something I’m doing for myself. You ain’t got nothing to do with it. Never mind what I don’t owe you.”

I sat in my dining-room chair with my feet by the spittoon of pee and waited for him to go on.

“I’m a very wealthy man. Well, look around, you can see I’m going out first class.”

“Please, Godfather.”

“Facts are facts, Ben.”

“All right.”

“I said ‘That’s the story,’ but I left something out. After your father and I dissolved the partnership I married a girl from Tin Pan Alley.”

“Yes?”

“She was a hoofer, but really a trained ballet dancer. She had this incredible pelvis, Ben. Well, you can imagine what twenty years of plié would do to a girl with a fantastic pelvis to begin with. To make a long story short, Ben, Estelle turned out to be very fecund.”

“Oh?”

“Ben, that woman had babies like a mosquito lays eggs. There are eighteen, Ben.”

“
Eighteen?
”

“Four sets of triplets, three sets of twins.”

I could have been one of the triplets, he thought. I could have been one of the twins.

“I’m rich, Ben, but blood is thicker than water.”

“Oh.”

“I’m rich, yes, but after estate taxes, and—My wife gets about a million outright; the rest is left in trust for my children.”

“I see.”

“What do you see?”

“That this was a deathbed confession. That now you feel better.”

“Is that what you think? No, boy. You’re provided for. I
had
to provide for my godson. What they’re getting is money, but it won’t come to even a quarter million apiece. I’m leaving you something more valuable.”

He went to the Wharton School of Business. What, he wondered—he multiplied by eighteen, he added a million—was more valuable than five and a half million dollars?

“Don’t you want to know?”

“Well, yes, I—”

“I’m leaving you the prime interest rate.”

“The what?”

“You go to Wharton. The prime rate. The rate of interest a bank charges its best customers. I’ve made out my will. It’s all there. Loans from my bank at the prime rate, whatever it is on the day of my death, and no matter how high it climbs afterward, the loan or loans outstanding never at any time to exceed the value of the money left to any one of my surviving children, the principal and interest to be guaranteed by them on a pro-rated basis up to and until your first bankruptcy. The only restrictive stipulation I’m putting on you is that whatever monies you borrow have to be invested in businesses. No shows. I’ve seen too many angels bust their wings backing the wrong shows. The kids know all about it and they agree. Ben, Godson,
that’s
your edge. There’s your advantage. The world is all before you, kid. Not money but the use of money! I know you can’t take it all in right now, but let me tell you, it’s the best thing I could have done for you.”

As a matter of fact he
did
take it all in. It was like a letter of credit. This was the postwar world. Opportunity flourished everywhere. He went to Wharton. He would graduate in a year. Academically at least he would know the ropes. A foundation was being laid here. His eyes were wet with grief for his godfather and with a sense of the significance the man’s gesture meant for himself. Slowly he raised himself from the chair in which he was sitting and slowly gathered pieces of the plastic tent in his hand and bent down and leaned in, pulling it over his head as he would a sweater. He kissed his godfather, Julius Finsberg. The old man’s eyes were wet. Ben felt a draft. It was the oxygen.

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” his godfather said, “you study hard at Wharton. You’re just godblood. I don’t want you sticking my kids with a bankruptcy from some half-assed investment. Study hard. Promise me.”

“I promise,” he said.

Then his godfather said something Ben had difficulty understanding.

“What’s that, Godfather?” he asked gently.

“I said,” his godfather said, “that in that case you have a friend at Chase Manhattan.” And then he died. The prime rate was 1.45 percent on commercial paper on four-to-six-month loans.

Let
Forbes
and
Fortune
put that in their pipes and smoke it!

So much, he thought, for those who think I was never innocent, who believe I drive hard bargains, force others to the wall with my bruiser’s gift for what is only business. So much for those who think I always looked older than my age and attribute my tastes to an instinct in me for more and more again and then something extra for the house and afterward a little left over that I must scrounge and have. Who think there was never a time when people had to take my knots out. My father wormed
my
hooks, too. Listen, what do you think? I razzed Sis and touched her things in the hamper. Mom and Pop died together on a highway I have changed the look of forever. A partnership was dissolved by intrigue, and fate worked like a robin in the intriguer’s head to build a conscience there like a little nest. What bloodlines! I was adopted posthumously and made the one whole number in a family of fractions, of thirds and halves.

Why do they say me when they mean Nate? How easily I gave in to him on the extra televisions. He’s the liquidator, I’m the one who builds and builds. I practically founded this country, for God’s sake. Show a little respect, please.

He imagined Nate in his suite, protected by a sleeping Mopiani in the vast deserted lobby.

It was almost dawn. He had to make arrangements in the morning about the TV’s. He would be out of Harrisburg by lunchtime, catch a bite at a plaza on the turnpike with the comers and the goers. Damn shame he hadn’t slept. It was a going period for him. (He was not unlike Mopiani, actually. He had his rounds, too, his stations.) It was better than two hundred miles to Youngstown. He wouldn’t be there till six-thirty, six at the inside. It would be better not to rush, do his business leisurely and stay over in Harrisburg another night, get a fresh start the day after.

3

Mornings, seven o’clock, seven-thirty, were different. Something alien in mornings, foreign. There were cities—Harrisburg, Syracuse, Peoria, Memphis—which seemed, if you saw them only on spring or summer mornings, as if they were located in distant lands. It had to do with the light, the dewy texture of wide and empty streets, the long caravan of store windows, his view of the mannequins unobstructed, their stolid stances and postures, their frozen forms like royalty asleep a hundred years in fairy tales, struck where they stood motionless in their spelled styles like figures on medals, the disjunctions all the more striking for the clothes they wore from seasons yet to be. That was foreign. Though he’d never been out of the country, not even to Canada.

Or the long narrow galaxy of traffic lights, a stately green aisle of procession, Ben passive in the open-windowed Cadillac behind the wheel, drawn at thirty miles an hour, pulled up the main street like a man on a float, music from the stereo all around his head like water splashing a bobber for apples.

He loved his country—it was America again—at such times, would take up arms to defend it, defend the lifeless, vulnerable models in the windows of the department stores, their smiling paradigm condition. Loved the blonde, tall, wide-eyed smashers and their men, vapid, handsome, white-trousered and superior, goyish, gayish, delicious, their painted smiling lips like ledges for pipes.

“Some of my best friends are mannequins,” he said. “Fellas, girls, it was up to me I’d give you the vote and take it away from real people. Send you to Congress to make good rules. Aiee, aiee,” he said, “I’m a happy man to see such health, such attention paid to grooming.”

He stopped for a hitchhiker and bought the kid breakfast at a plaza. The boy was about nineteen, Levi’d, his denim work shirt covered by a denim vest of a brand called Fresh Produce. He’d seen an ad on Nate’s color TV in Harrisburg.

“That was an odd place to hitch a ride,” he told the kid when they were back on the turnpike.

“No, I look for out-of-state plates. That time of day salesmen come by to get back on the highway.”

“Clever,” Ben said approvingly. “I like to know such things. Other people’s tricks of the trade, the shortcuts and gimmicks they live by, that’s always interesting to me. Cops wear clip-on neckties so they won’t be strangled in fights. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“That’s an interesting thing, isn’t it?”

“Cops aren’t my bag.”

“You’re not into cops.”

“No.”

“There’s where you make your mistake. A boy your age. You should be into everything.”

“I got time.”

“Sure. I’m in franchises. I have about a dozen now. But I’ve had more and I’ve had less. I’m like a producer with several shows running on Broadway at the same time. My businesses take me from place to place. My home is these United States.”