The Franchiser (6 page)

He was the brother these brothers and sisters had never had. He had a sense even then that they loved him, and when they knew each other better he understood that Julius had talked him up at dinnertime, the godbrother in Chicago they had never seen, had kept them informed of bits of gossip learned about himself in rare letters exchanged with his own father, Julius’s ex-partner. They’d known, for example, that he’d been drafted, knew where he took his basic training, were quite up to date in fact with his comings and goings, even things about his studies at Wharton.

“How could you know stuff like that?” he asked Patty, La Verne, and Maxene. “My father was already dead when I entered college.”

“Your sister,” Cole said.

“That’s right,” said Oscar. “Father corresponded with your sister after your parents were killed in the auto wreck.”

“I don’t understand,” Ben said. “What
about
my sister? I mean, I know how he wanted a son or a daughter. Why didn’t he take an interest in my sister?”

“That’s easy,” Ethel said, “Dad wasn’t your sister’s godfather.”

“It wasn’t the same,” Lorenz said. “Do you think it was the same, Jerome?”

“No,” said Jerome.

“Neither do we,” said Irving and Noël.

“He used to tell us,” Ethel said, “he didn’t give a shit about your sister.”

“Didn’t you resent me?”

“Not for a minute,” Gertrude said.

“I know
I
didn’t,” Kitty told him. “When I learned you’d been a serviceman, I hung up a little blue star for you in my bedroom window. This was after you’d already been discharged.”

“There was a Wharton Business School pennant above my dresser,” Lorenz said.

“We wanted what Father wanted,” said Helen.

“A change,” said Sigmund-Rudolf.

“That’s it,” said Mary.

“A different face like,” Moss said.

“You’re one of us now,” Gus-Ira said.

“All for one and one for all,” said Lotte.

They took him up.

The Finsbergs were a close-knit family, and since no car ever built could possibly have held them all, after the war Julius had purchased one of the first new city buses that came off the assembly line. On one side of the bus was a picture of a redbud and, on the other, sprigs of mistletoe. On the rear there was an immense scissor-tailed flycatcher, the representations painted against a background of blue, white, olive, green, wine, and a sort of reddish mud. These were the official emblems and colors of the state of Oklahoma, the show Julius liked to think had paid for it. They kept the bus in the driveway of their large house in Riverdale. Julius had never learned to drive and none of the children was old enough. Only the hoofer—Estelle—could drive it, but now that Julius was dead she no longer had the heart.

One day during the week of mourning Estelle came up to Ben. “After this is over,” she said, “the children would like to go on a trip. They thought you might take them in the bus.”

“I don’t think I can drive a bus.”

“Why not? It’s the same principle as the deuce and a half. You were in the motor pool.”

“You know about the motor pool?”

Ben took them to Jersey.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Ethel said.

“Mother never took us
this
far,” Cole said.

“We never left the Bronx,” said La Verne.

“Oh, Ben,” said Lotte, “it’s really marvelous. It’s like a picnic. Let’s have a picnic. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“I’d like some ice cream,” said Oscar. “Ben, may we stop for ice cream? Please, let’s.”

“Yes, Ben, yes,” said the others happily. “Oh, Ben, please,” they said.

“Ice cream would be just the thing,” Lorenz said seriously. “We could buy our cones and eat them in the bus.”

For all that he knew how they liked him, he was not really sure where he stood with them. Though they told him they looked on him as one of the family—wasn’t he in Daddy’s will?—the fact was that he had become a sort of factotum to the Finsbergs. He had gone with Estelle to help pick out the casket and had ended up making nearly all the decisions and arrangements for the funeral. (He soon discovered that except for the enormous
immediate
family Julius had propagated, there was no other, no surviving brother or sister, no cousin or uncle or aunt. Estelle herself was as bereft of relations as Julius.) Now he had become the children’s chauffeur. He felt in camp-counselor nexus to them and the truth was they frightened him a little. Being left the prime interest rate was very complicated and he was unsure of what his guarantors would and would not stand for.

So he took what had been their request for ice cream as a kind of polite command.

“Ice cream, ice cream,” they chanted.

“All right,” Ben said.

He drove west on Route 4 and within five minutes he spotted the bright-orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s. He stopped the bus and the twins and triplets jumped out excitedly. “Oh, isn’t this grand?” they said when they were inside and ordering their cones. They had never seen so many flavors.

“Look, Ben,” Mary said, “it says they have twenty-eight flavors.” The triplets all ordered triple scoops and the twins double. They ordered all the flavors and each had a lick of every flavor. They bought Ben a single scoop of vanilla.

“Oh, look,” said little ten-year-old Sigmund-Rudolf, pointing to the logo on the wide mirror behind the counter, “see the funny man. That’s Simple Simon.”

“Yes,” said Kitty, who was eleven, “and the man in the chef’s hat, he must be the pieman. Is he, Ben?
Is
he?”

People were staring at the strange group.

“Yes,” Ben said. “Come on, kids, why don’t we finish our cones in the bus like Lorenz said we should?”

They got back into the bus and Ben drove on. They turned off Route 4 and onto Route 17.

“Gosh, Ben,” Oscar said, “look. There’s that same ice-cream parlor. We must be going in circles. Are we lost?” he asked worriedly.

“Are we, Ben?” Patty said.

“No,” Ben said, “that’s just another Howard Johnson’s.”

On the Hamburg Turnpike Gertrude spotted a third and outside Paterson Jerome saw a fourth.

After that they decided that the first one to see the next orange roof and little turquoise tower of a Howard Johnson’s would be the winner and would get a wish. Ben zigzagged through the New Jersey countryside. It was getting late and he started to look for signs to the George Washington Bridge.

He followed Saddle River Road, left it, and came to Route 23. Just after they passed “Two Guys,” Lotte, who was sitting right behind the driver’s seat, jumped up. “
I
see one,
I
see one!” she shrieked.

“Where?” screamed Noël.

“Where, where?” Irving shouted.

Ben almost lost control of the bus.

“There. Right there,” Lotte yelled.

“She’s right,” the kids agreed.

“Oh, Ben,” she called in his ear, “I get a wish, I get a wish.”

“Gosh,” they all said as they passed by Howard Johnson’s. “Will you just
look
at that?” “Golly,” said some of the twins. “Boy,” chorused Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene.

“I get my wish,” Lotte said. “I wish—”

“Don’t tell your wish or it won’t come true,” Ben said.

“But, Ben, I have to. Otherwise it
can’t
come true.”

“I don’t figure that,” Ben said.

“Well, remember how you told us that Howard Johnson’s was a—what did you say?—a
chain?
”

“Yes.”

“Well, I wish that you would use your prime interest rate to buy one.”

“But why?” Ben said. “Why are you all so excited about a restaurant? You can have ice cream whenever you want.”

“It isn’t the ice cream,” Jerome said.

“Of course not,” said Noël.

“It isn’t the ice cream, silly,” Helen said.

“No,” said Cole and Ethel.

“Well, what is it then?”

“Don’t you see?” Irving asked. “Don’t you under
stand?
”

“What? Don’t I see what?
What
don’t I understand?”

“That those places,” Lorenz said,

“they’re—” said Jerome and Mary,

“—all the
SAME
,” said Sigmund-Rudolf and Gertrude and Moss.

“Just—” Gus-Ira said

“—like
us!
” said they all.

“And that, Buster, is the true story of how I got into the franchise business,” Ben told the hitchhiker.

“What?” He’d been sleeping.

“I was telling you how the pig got its curly tail. Oh, these origins, my
pupick
pasts and golden bough beginnings. Sleep, kid, sleep. I was only muttering my mythics and metamythics, godfairies spitting in my cradle, spraying spell, hacking their juicy oysters of fate in my puss.”

He had said “chain.” He had assumed that a man named Howard Johnson made ice creams, an ice-cream scientist, someone with a visionary sweet tooth, a chemist of fruits and candies, a larky alchemist who reduced the tangerine and the mango, the maple and marzipan to their essences, who could, if he wished, divide the flavor of the tomato and the sweet potato from themselves, a tinkerer in nature who might reproduce the savor of gold, the taste of cigarette smoke. He knew there was a Ford, thought there was probably a Buick and a Studebaker. He believed in the existence of a Mr. Westinghouse. Remington, Maytag, Amana, and the Smith brothers were real to him as film stars or the leaders of his country. He could believe, that is, in the existence of millionaires, men with a good thing going, who knew their way around a patent and held on like hell. Indeed, this was one of the things that had determined him to study shorthand and typing and bookkeeping at the Wharton School.He had no good thing of his own and had believed that the best thing for him would be to place himself in the service of those who had. One of the things he could not imagine once he came to understand the inevitability of death—this would have been at around two and a half—was how he would be able to support himself when his father died. He had no skill with the pencil or the needle, and though he tried—summer vacations, Christmas holidays—to apprentice himself to the designer and even the cutter and tailor in his dad’s costume business in Chicago, smaller than even the partnership in New York before its dissolution—they made tutus, leotards for ballet academies, costumes for high-school musicals, and had a tiny share of the public-school graduation-gown market—he was, boss’s son or no boss’s son, always rebuffed, reduced to running errands, delivering merchandise. They had no patience with him. Schmerler, his father’s tailor, thought he was a pain in the ass. “
Gay avec
,” he’d tell him, “you’re an American. What do you want? Look at my eyeglasses, thick as a slice of bread. Lift them, they weigh a pound. They break pieces off my nose and tear my ears. This is something an American boy should want? Unheard of. Go to the cutter. Ask him to shake hands. Count his fingers.” And one time when he’d been after Schmerler to show him how to use the Singer—he thought there was a Singer—the man had turned on him angrily. “Did you ever? What’s the matter, you got your eye on your own little place in Latvia? Go away, leave me alone, study bubble-gum cards, learn what the different cars look like, do their dances, eat hot dogs at the ball park, drink Coca-Cola, and make a taste in your mouth for beer.” And, when he insisted, Schmerler had handed him a sewing needle. “Stick me,” he said. He held up the forefinger of his left hand.

“What?”

“Stick me here.”

“What for? No.”

“Baby. Pants pisher.” He grabbed the needle from the boy and plunged it into his finger. He drew no blood. “You see? Nothing’s there. The blood’s all gone. My blood knows I’m a tailor. It left for other parts. The finger’s cold, the hand. There’s no more circulation. I wear fur gloves in the summer on the Sixty-third Street beach.” Then he drew the boy to him. “You know what, Benny? I only wish my kids loved me a tenth what you love Dad.”

But it wasn’t what Schmerler thought, and though he loved his father well enough, it was something else entirely which drove him to seek information about the business. It was his knowledge that his father would die. It wasn’t to his father that Ben went, but always to Schmerler or to Kraft, the cutter, or to Mrs. Lenzla, the designer. In the shop he avoided his father as much as possible for fear that he might blurt out why it was so important for him to learn the business, accusing the man of his death, slapping his face with it. And this lonely fear persisted. He simply could not imagine how he would support himself. Even in high school, where he did well, working hard in the hope that something would come up, some talent he had not known about might emerge, articulating itself like a print in the photographer’s bath—the fear of his future persisted. He made good grades, was often on the Honor Roll. He went out for the drama club, won a good part in the school play, was accepted in the chorus, made the football team, worked for the paper, was given a by-line, each success frightful to him, taking no encouragement from any of them because all it meant was that he was equally good in all things, that he had no one calling, and then, realizing this, going the other way, not working hard at all, actually hoping to fail, but still discouraged because though his grades went down they went down uniformly and he was benched the same day that his by-line was taken away and his column assigned to someone else, and within a week to the day that the choral director, Mr. Sansoni, shifted him from the tenor section to the baritone, where his voice might be swallowed up in the greater number.

So he knew he had no calling, no one thing among his talents that he did better than any other one thing, and nothing at all that he did better than others. And worrying constantly about his father’s health, though the man was in good health, had no complaints. To the point where, if Ben got sick, even if it was just a cold, he withdrew to his room, locked it, used bedpans rather than risk encountering his dad in the apartment for fear of giving the man his cold, avoiding as well his mother and sister in case he should pass it on to them, who might pass it on to his father. Waiting until they had left the apartment and only then going to the kitchen, taking his food from cans, which he could then dispose of, from boxes of crackers and cookies—holding the box, he would spill however many he wanted onto the floor and then pick them up—his liquids from paper cups.