Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

Each had told him — and he’d never forgotten; something perhaps in the pitch of the confession — his, her peculiar symptom. The Finsbergs, for all their money and education and charm, for all the chic victory of their urban good looks, for all their style and chipper well-heeled spirits, their flush wardrobes and Parisian French, their skill on skis, and their slope bright wools sharp as flares, for all their American blessings, were freaks, and carried in their bloodstreams and pee, in their saliva and fundament and the tracings of their flesh, all the freak’s ruined genetics, his terrible telegony and dark diathetics. It was Julius, set in his ways, throwing himself like an ocean into Estelle’s coves and kyles, till all that was left of his genes and chromosomes was the sheath, the thread of self like disappearing Cheshire garments resolved at last to their stitching. Obsessive, worn-out, he had made hemophiliacs of the self-contained and self-centered. Julius’s progeny — that queer wall of solidarity and appearance, that franchise of flesh — were husks, the chalices in which poisoners chucked their drops and powders.

“Pick me up,” little Gertrude had said to him when she was only eleven, “try to lift me.”

“Why? What for?”

“I bet you can’t,” she said.

“Of course I can.”

“Then prove it. Try to pick me up.”

He moved behind her, put his arms around her slender waist, and strained backward. He couldn’t budge her. Gertrude laughed. “Come on, it’s a trick,” he said. “What is it?”

“It isn’t a trick. Go on, you get another turn.”

“It’s a trick. Well…Okay.” He stood in front of her, bent down suddenly, and wrapped his arms tightly just under her buttocks and clasped her to him. Using all his strength, he managed to raise her one inch above the floor. He held her up for no more than two seconds and then dropped her. She dragged him down with her as she fell.

“It’s a trick. What is it?” He was short of breath.

“I haven’t any bone marrow,” Gertrude said. “My bones are all filled with this like iron.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t be X-rayed,” she said. “My bones show up as dark tools, like carpenters’ things and plumbers’.”

And La Verne’s organs lined the side of her body, her liver and lungs and kidneys outside her rib cage. Ethel’s heart was in her right breast. Cole had a tendency to suffer from the same disorders as plants and had a premonition that he would be killed by Dutch elm blight. Mary could not menstruate and Gus-Ira was a nail biter allergic to his own parings. When he bit them he broke out in a terrible brocade of rash. Lorenz’s temperature was a constant 102.5, and Patty, who had perfect pitch, could not hear loud noises. Kitty would still be a bed wetter at thirty and Lotte, the one he’d kissed years before beside the bus, enjoyed perfect health until her twenties, when she began to come down with all the childhood diseases — measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, adenoids, and colic. Noël had cradle cap. Helen was a mean drunk.

“I’m racially prejudiced,” Irving, one of the sweetest of the family, told him.

“You, Irving? Racially prejudiced? You’re one of the most reasonable people I know.”

“I’m racially prejudiced. It’s like a disease.”

“All of us have a little prejudice. I guess we fear what we don’t understand. We roll our windows up when we drive through Harlem. We lock our doors.”

“I’m racially prejudiced,” Irving said calmly. “I hate the niggers. I hate the way they smell. I can’t stand the moons on their fingernails. I want to gag when I see their woolly hair. Their purple blubber-lips make my skin crawl. They’re lazy and drunk and want our women. The bucks have dicks as big as the Ritz and the women swell our welfare rolls. I’m racially prejudiced. I wish genocide were legal. I think we should drop A-bombs on their storefront churches and fire their barbecue stands. I’m racially prejudiced. It’s a disease.”

And Maxene’s hair had begun to thin when she reached puberty — she wore wigs cunningly woven from her brothers’ clippings and trims — and Moss’s beautiful eyes could not see certain kinds of metal. And one of the boys, Oscar, had things wrong with him in the gray social areas of illness. He was at once an alcoholic and a compulsive speeder.

Jerome was chronically constipated.

“I don’t move my bowels more than twice a month. Two dozen times a year.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“The doctors don’t understand. They give me enemas. I’m not compacted. The stools are normal. My breath is sweet. The tongue’s a good color. They think it’s something to do with metabolism, that my body doesn’t create as much fecal matter as other people’s do. It’s something to do with the metabolism.”

It was something to do with the metabolism with all of them, some queer short circuit in the glands and blood, the odd death duties of the freak. Human lemons, Detroit could recall them. Like, he thought, giants’ and giantesses’ niggardly life spans, fat men’s, as if there were a strange democracy of displacement in nature, that if you took up more room than others you could have it less long. And though he never mistook one twin for another, never confused a triplet, had perfect pitch for their shell-game life, knowing at all times which pea was under what shell, he never forgot that they were freaks. They were almost all the family he had, as he, in an odd way, was almost all the family they had, and though he loved them they frightened him, troubled him with their niggered woodpiled chemistry.

“What I’m wondering,” Helen said, “is…”

“I know,” Lorenz said.

“We do too,” said Cole and Kitty.

“Whether we get to find out the secret recipe,” Gus-Ira said quietly.

The Colonel stared at them. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, “but it’s fishy. Now if they’s one thing a fried-chicken guy like me can’t stand it’s something fishy. I ’us studying on the scupture in the Central Park and this feller”—he pointed to Ben—“come up and started fussin’ me. I thought I’d be nice, do like we do down home. Next I know we in some taxi car driving thoo all New York City, people everwhere, tall buildins, projects, folks in skull caps, over bridges and past the whole rickety racket of this Lord forlorn squashed-together mess. Then we turn a corner and — whoosh — we in the open, we in country. Green lawns, trees, gret big ol’ houses, and I think to myself, Why it’s like — what do you call it— Brigadoon , as if…”

Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene started to sniffle. Instantly the others took it up. The Colonel looked at Ben, but he was as confused as Colonel Sanders. The sound was alarming. It was as if they stood together in the flu ward of a hospital. Then the sniffles became sobs, wails, a declension of grief.

“Hey,” Colonel Sanders said, “what’s wrong with you fellers? What’s that caterwauling? You boys fairies?”

“Tell him, Ben,” Ethel blubbered.

“Ben doesn’t know,” Noël grieved.

“He doesn’t, he doesn’t,” the rest moaned. They wrung their hands.

“What is it?” Ben asked.

“It’s fishy,” Colonel Sanders said.

Gradually the crying subsided. Oscar pulled himself together. “He reminded us.”

“Reminded you?”

“Mother gave birth one last time,” Lotte said.

“In ’47,” said Helen.

“March it was,” Sigmund-Rudolf said.

“Opening night.”

“ Brigadoon .”

“Mother was so excited.”

“We all were,” Kitty said. “Sigmund-Rudolf and I couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time, but we all were.”