Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

He called Irving.

“Yes,” he said, “in St. Louis…Oh, I don’t know, about an hour ago…No, at the Chase-Park…Because I don’t like to impose…All right, come on, Irving, what ‘offended,’ what ‘hurt’? You know my habits. The truth is, I hate making beds. Sometimes I shoot right in the sheets. Why should Frances lean over my laundry?…No, certainly not. Your sister isn’t with me…No. No…Call the desk. See if I’m registered with anyone. Come over, search the room. As a matter of fact, that’s a good idea. Bring Fran. I’ll take you both to dinner at the Tenderloin Room. You’ll cut up my meat for me…Yeah. Hah hah, yourself…No, Chicago. I’m going on to Kansas City…Yeah, right, Irving, it’s a surprise audit on the One Hour Martinizing. I got word you been skimming the first six minutes on me…So tell me, Irving, how’s business?…What? The niggers again?…All the way out to Overland? Irving, I already closed up the Delmar location. You wanted west county, I gave you west county. What is it, you Daniel Boone, you got a manifest destiny? Irving, darling, the niggers are going to push you into the sea…Into the Pacific, yes. What good is a dry-cleaning service in the ocean? Saltwater’s bad for the material…No, I’m not making jokes at your expense…I appreciate it’s a sickness with you…Really, have dinner with me. Yeah, I understand. Right. Sure…Certainly I understand. You don’t like to come into the inner city…Irving, give Frances a kiss, I’ll see you both at the plant in the morning. Bring the books.”

He loved the shop, the smells of the naphthas and benzenes, the ammonias, all the alkalis and fats, all the solvents and gritty lavas, the silken detergents and ultimate soaps, like the smells, he decided, of flesh itself, of release, the disparate chemistries of pore and sweat — a sweat shop — the strange woolly-smelling acids that collected in armpits and atmosphered pubic hair, the nameless combustion of urine and gabardine mixing together to create all the body’s petty suggestive alimentary toxins. The sexuality of it. The men’s garments one kind, the women’s another, confused, deflected, masked by residual powders, by the oily invisible resins of deodorant and perfume, by the concocted flower and the imagined fruit — by all fabricated flavor. And hanging in the air, too — where would they go? — dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays, divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.

“Irving, add water, We’ll make a man.”

His godcousin looked up from the presser. “What color?”

“Hello, Ben,” Frances said. She was her husband’s countergirl.

“Frances, how are you?” Ben leaned across the counter and kissed her. “Did you bring the books?” he asked Irving.

“Please, Ben,” Irving said, “not in front of the shvartzeh .”

“Irving, she’s your wife .”

“I know, I know,” he said, “it’s a sickness.”

Frances was black. Marrying her had been a sort of experiment in social vaccination. He had reasoned that if polio, measles, and smallpox could be defrayed by actually contracting them, then perhaps he might be able to cure his racial prejudice by marrying a black woman. The blacks he knew in New York — Irving, still living in Riverdale, had attended Columbia University, where he majored in anthropology, and commuted to and from the campus in rolled-window, locked-door cabs — were, except for their color, indistinguishable from most of the whites he knew. They spoke with New York accents, something the anthropologist could never really get over. It was his idea to leave the city to seek a bride. Afraid to go South, where, at the time of his contemplated courtship, the prohibitions against miscegenation were either still on the books or, if technically legal, enforced by the vaudevilles of Klansmen, he chose St. Louis, neutral territory, a place where blacks still sounded like blacks, where, though their civil liberties were underwritten by law and municipal ordinance, they still lived in ghettos and did the dirty work when they could find it.

In the days when his tortured godcousin, then an M.A. candidate in anthropology — a subject he studied for the same reason he would choose a bride — had first hit upon the idea for his cure, Ben had again and again been subjected to Irving’s rhetoric, speeches that might, with certain alterations, have been memorized from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner .

“I know what I’m doing, Ben, I’m not going into this thing with my eyes closed. I know what people will think. Oh, my friends will be very ‘polite’ of course. They’ll come to the wedding and bring gifts. They’ll drink our health and say, ‘It’s marvelous what Irving’s done. What courage! What courage on both their parts!’ But they’ll never get used to it. They’ll never adapt. There’ll be unintended snubs, invitations not sent, embarrassing silences when me and the jigaboo run into them on the street, pregnant pauses, or, even worse, circumlocutions. They won’t really know how to handle it. We’ll make them uncomfortable. And some of my ‘good’ friends — oh, they’ll mean well, I suppose — will try to warn me of the dangers and consequences. ‘All right,’ they’ll say, ‘so you want to run off and be an idealist. Terrific. Wonderful. Hurrah for Martin Luther Finsberg, but aren’t you forgetting something? What about the children? What will they have to pay for your idealism?’ They’ll reason that if I want to marry dark meat that’s my business, that I’m free, white, and twenty-one, but it’s unfair to our little nignogs.”

Flesh had given him his job, had made him manager of the franchise in St. Louis. He was the only one of the Finsbergs still connected with any of the franchises.

Ben moved behind the counter and plunged in and out of the ranks of garments suspended from the conveyor in their polyethylene bags like FBI silhouettes, police-force torso targets. “Out of my way, Hart, Schaffner and Marx. Watch it, you Brooks brothers. I’m coming through, Kuppenheimer. Straighten up, chest out, tummy in, Hickey. How many times do I have to tell you? Lookin’ good there, Freeman. Ah, madam. Itchy-kitchy Gucci, Pucci.”

The girls at the creaser and topper machines laughed. Flesh walked up to the Suzy, an adjustable dress form on which men’s and ladies’ garments could be hung for special attention — spot cleaning, alterations. Nothing was hanging on it at the moment. “Shameless,” Flesh said and gave it a feel. The shirt folder rocked with laughter. She was a huge black woman in a short skirt and, because of the heat, a man’s ribbed undershirt. Ben looked at the woman and pointed to her chest. “Hey, that’s cute, sweetheart. You got some tits on you, momma.”

“Christ, Ben,” Irving whispered, “don’t talk like that. These girls carry switchblades and razors.”

“She don’t mind,” Flesh said, not bothering to lower his voice. “You mind — what’s your name?”

“Gloria.”

“You mind, Gloria?”

“Naw,” she said.

“See? Gloria doesn’t mind.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Irving whispered, “they have no morals.”

“Irving,” Ben said.

“I know, I know,” Irving said softly.

“The books,” Ben said.

“I want you to see them, Ben, but there’s something I’d like to discuss with you first.”

“Something wrong with the books? I’ll catch you out in a minute. I went to Wharton. I speed-read double-entry wise.”

“No, of course not. The books are perfect. This is something else. I was going to write you.”

“Because if there was something funny about the books I wouldn’t laugh, Irving.”

“The books are fine. Look, can we go over by the sign?” Irving moved toward the front of the store. Ben followed. “Listen,” Irving said, “there’s something I have to…What are you doing?”