Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“We were,” said Moss, Gertrude, and Jerome.

“We were backstage.”

“Mom was in her seventh month.”

“She went into labor.”

“It was the excitement.”

“Father told her to be careful.”

“It was only her seventh month.”

“He didn’t want to take any chances.”

“But a musical! ”

“You couldn’t keep Mother away from a musical .”

“She’d been a dancer.”

“There was hoofer in her blood.”

“She said it was certain there’d be a doctor in the house.”

“Something’s fishy.”

“We got swaddling cloths from Wardrobe.”

“Plaid.”

“ ‘Make sure there’s plenty,’ Father told the wardrobe mistress, ‘it’s sure to be triplets.’ ”

“We all thought so.”

“She’d never been bigger.”

“It was a boy.”

“Just one.”

“He passed during ‘Almost Like Being in Love.’ ”

Gus-Ira recited the lyrics. “ ‘…For I’m all aglow and alive,’ ” he finished melancholically.

“The i rony,” said Cole softly.

“It stopped the show,” Mary said.

“And baby brother,” said Gertrude and Kitty.

“Fritz-Alan Jay,” Lotte said.

The twins and triplets sighed.

“That’s when Pop first started to take an interest in you.”

Ben Flesh shuddered. He recalled the moment he had taken the Colonel’s hand in his mouth. It was strange. He didn’t understand it, but he knew he had just changed in some obscure, important way. He hadn’t known about Fritz-Alan Jay, hadn’t realized till they’d just now casually mentioned it the nature of his surrogacy, its true measure. Why, I’m not their godcousin at all. Despite the difference in our ages, that I’ve turned thirty and almost half of them are still in their teens, I have been their baby godbrother, dead in infancy, alive for those few minutes only between the solo that stopped the show and the hawking of the orange drink in the outer lobby. The idea altered him. He felt emboldened. He turned from the kids and addressed the Colonel. “ Is there?”

“What’s that?”

“ Is there a secret recipe?”

“The secret recipe’s a secret,” the Colonel bristled. “I see what you-all up to now. You taken me out here to divulge my ingredients. Never, sir. Never.”

“I’ll have a bucket analyzed.”

“Haw.”

“I can do that. I don’t even need a bucket. A breast will do. I’ll have the white meat analyzed and the dark will come right along with it.”

“It’s patented. You’d have to own one my franchises to sell my chicken. I’d sue your wings off you you sold chicken to go to come to taste within a country mile like mine. I’d enjoin your gizzard and injunct your drumsticks.”

“Haw!”

“Don’t argue, Ben,” Mary said. “If you want the franchise we’ll get it for you. Won’t we, brothers, won’t we, sisters?”

“Aye,” they said.

“Haw!” Ben said. He roared it at them, at gravid Gertrude, rooted by weight; at Kitty the bed-wetter; at xenophobic Irving, whose hatred boiled his spittle; at LaVerne, who stepped absent-mindedly into her lungs, putting on her organs like a drunk getting into a girdle in a routine; at Gus-Ira, who broke out when he bit off a hangnail; and Ethel, who wore her heart in her brassiere, and at all the rest of that wormy diked, Maginot geneticized, clay-foot crew — their father’s theatrical costumes made flesh, a wardrobe of beings, appearance shining on them like spotlight.

“What’s wrong, Ben? Are you upset?”

“Haw!”

“We’ll co-sign.”

“Don’t fret, Ben.”

“ Haw! ”

“We’ll be responsible.”

“When I say,” Ben said.

“What, Ben?”

“When I say. When I say the prime rate is prime, when I say the interest is interesting, when I say.”

“Haw,” their guest said. “Haw.”

Ben looked at him. The man had removed his glasses. He touched a corner of his mustache like a villain in melodrama and, as they all watched, began to peel it back from his face like a Band-Aid of hair.

“What?” Ben said. “What’s this?”

“I ain’t him,” the man said. “Haw! Haw and hee hee!”

“But—”

“I ain’t him. I’m not he. I’m Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I own airport limousine services in three states.”

“You’re not the chicken prince?”

“I’m Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” Roger Foster said.

“Then what — But why — You look—”

“Certainly. I look . There’s a basic resemblance. I enhance it. I’m a Doppelgänger. Just like these guys.” He indicated the twins and triplets.

“Does this mean you can’t get the franchise, Ben?” Gus-Ira said.

“When I say,” Ben said weakly.

“The mustache was too much trouble to trim,” Mr. Foster said.

“Frankly, I don’t see how he does it. The goatee is real. The basic resemblance was there. All I had to do was get the eyeglasses, grow the beard, and work something out with the mustache. The rest — I told you in the restaurant. ‘A character actor would spot it in a minute.’ ”

“But why?”

“But why. Are you any different? Are you any different with your borrowed businesses? So I put the Kentucky Fried Chicken suit on once in a while. What the hell? It’s fun. Mistaken identity is a barrel of laughs, kid. You saw. The folks in the park. The tourists wanted to take my picture. I was a sight for sore eyes. As all celebrity is. I enhance the resemblance. I enhance my life. I enhance everybody’s life. Where’s the harm in a Doppelgänger just so long as he’s a nice man?” Roger Foster asked.

“A Doppelgänger,” Ben said.

“Sho. Sure. But you — You’re something else. You’re a Doppel gäng ster. You’re a Doppel gäng ster with your franchises and your big Doppelgängster Ring in Riverdale.”

“No,” Ben said. “What I do—”

“What you do. It’s a U.S.A. nightclub performance. You do John Wayne and Ed Sullivan. You do Cagney and Bogart. Liberace you do. Sinatra, Vaughn Monroe. Tell me something. Which is the real Howard Johnson’s? Which is the real Holiday Inn or Chicken from the Colonel?”

It was the late summer of 1960. The prime rate on four-to-six-month paper was 3.85 percent.

He stood looking down on the crowd below from the big revolving bucket reared back from true like a chariot overturning or spinning like a ride in an amusement park. From his vantage point — from theirs, only his shoulders, neck, and head visible, he must have seemed a gravedigger, a man immobilized in a torture barrel, someone locked in quicksand, a living bust of a man, something, to judge from their hoots and catcalls, that evoked reprisal, scorn, some Salem quality of the publicly shamed — he could see out over the shopping center to the welted lines of parked cars in the big lot like the hashmarks of giant fishbones. He saw the low flat roofs of shoestores, jewelers, men’s shops, dress shops, bakeries, a Western Auto, a cafeteria, a Woolworth’s, record shops and greeting card, a pharmacy, a Kroger’s, an optometrist’s, the immense decks of discount stores, each tar or asphalt roof pocked with vents and utility hatches, studded as domino. He called for his manager to turn off the sign, but the angle was difficult, leaving him, when it stopped, uphill of his audience.

“Hey, Sigmund-Rudolf,” he called, “swing me around. Another 180 degrees should do it.”

Sigmund-Rudolf was to manage the place during his summer vacation. He had practiced stopping the sign on a dime. His error was deliberate, just high spirits. (Ben didn’t mind, was glad Sigmund-Rudolf found it in his heart to be playful, for Sigmund-Rudolf’s disease, his bad seed, was perhaps the most humiliating. He had been saddled not with homosexuality — at nineteen he was one of the more virile boys and had as hearty a heterosexual appetite as any Finsberg — but with the symptoms of effeminacy; its starchless wrists and mincing tiptoe, its Cockney lisps, and something in the muscles of his face which widened his eyes and rolled them up to mock rue and exaggerated his frowns and put lemons in his lips — all the citrics of plangent faggotry, his lack of physical control programmed: the sissy coordinates of his every gesture, his muscles hamstrung with epicenity, girlishness, like a cripple of vaudevillized femininity or an unevenly strung marionette.)