Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“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.

“Ben,” his father would say, outside his son’s locked bedroom, “it’s only a cold. Don’t be such a hypochondriac. What are you frightened of?”

Pretending sleep, he wouldn’t answer.

And no reason at Wharton to suppose that the household names of ordinary American life were not living, breathing people, actual as himself, only luckier, better off. There had been classes where when the professor called the roll it was like hearing the listings on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Bendix.”

“Present.”

“Boeing.”

“ Here, sir.”

“Braniff.”

“Here.”

“Burroughs.”

“Yo.”

Carling. Crane. Culligan. Disney. Dow. Du Pont. Elgin. Fedders.

“Flesh.”

Firestone nudged him.

“What? What is it?”

“He called your name.”

“What? Oh. Yes. Here, sir. Yes, sir. Present.”

So there was no lack of contact. Yet — this was before his godfather’s telegram, before, in fact, he came to accept that he would not pick up shorthand — he never actually thought of them as contacts, not in the sense that others used the term. He could not get over the idea that certain men had certain things going for them, that it was in their nature, even in the nature of duty itself, perhaps, to perpetuate it through brothers, sons, some primogenitary circle of the inner that closed upon itself and made a wall. If he had any expectations they were not great so much as marginal. Perhaps Goodrich might write a letter for him someday, open a door — if he could prove himself — to a branch manager or personnel director of one of the more remote plants. All he wanted was what he never believed he could have. All he wanted was a job. Enough money to pay his rent, purchase his food, buy his clothes, to save against the day when he might have enough to make a down payment on an automobile.