Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

The doctor said it must have been the bacteria he picked up in the morgue that caused the blood poisoning he rubbed into his head like shampoo and killed him.

The Finsbergs were inconsolable. In their sorrow they closed their decimated ranks and turned once more to Ben.

“We don’t” Lorenz said,

“understand,” said Ethel.

“We were always” Sigmund-Rudolf said,

“musical comedy sort of”

“people,” said Patty, La Verne, and Maxene.

Ben nodded.

It had all happened so quickly — five deaths within thirty-six hours — that even Ben could not absorb it. He asked the people at Riverside Chapel to stall, to prepare the bodies for burial, of course, but to keep them in a sort of holding pattern before they were interred. He did not tell the twins and triplets that he was waiting for all the returns to come in, an official body count.

“Mr. Flesh,” said Weinman, the Director at Riverside, “what can I say at a time like this? You and the family have my deepest sympathy.”

“Thank you,” Ben said.

They were in the coffin room, a sort of display area for caskets not unlike an automobile showroom. The coffins, open toward one end, looked oddly like kayaks. Ben wanted identical caskets for the twins and triplets — cherry walnut, the best.

“We don’t have them,” Weinman said. “Something like this, so unusual, we just don’t have that many in stock. There’s the floor sample and the two in the basement, and that’s it. I suppose I could call Musicant in Lodi, New Jersey, he might have one, but he’s the only other funeral home in this part of the country that handles this particular item.”

“We need five,” Ben said, “maybe more. The floor sample, the two in the basement is three.”

“I’ll call Gutterman-Musicant, but if they won’t give me a wholesale price, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to absorb the cost, plus, of course, our legitimate profit.”

A young man was walking among the caskets. He was red-eyed, unshaved. He looked as if he had a cold. One of Riverside’s salesmen walked along silently beside him. The man stopped beside a dark walnut coffin. “This one?” he asked, his voice breaking.

The salesman, who wore a bright plaid-patterned suit, glanced at the coffin, at the young man in blue jeans. “The price is at the foot.”

“Thirty-five hundred dollars? So much?”

“It’s walnut. There are no nails. As I explained, the price is inclusive. You get the preparation of the body, you get the use of our chapel. The cheap coffins are down this way.” The salesman moved off.

“This one is beautiful. It’s like a, like a bed. Like a berth the porter makes up on a sleeper. It’s beautiful. My mother loved beautiful things. Me you can burn up, but my mother — thirty-five hundred dollars.” He looked toward the salesman, who was standing beside a stained pine box. The young man went toward him.

“Take the walnut,” Ben Flesh said thickly.

The boy turned around. He looked at Ben. “It’s thirty-five hundred dollars,” he said.

“I own the franchise,” he said. “Sons don’t have taste like yours today. We’re discontinuing the model. I just told my funeral director, Mr. Weinman.”

“Look, I don’t want to bargain,” the boy said.

“Who’s bargaining? It’s a sin to give a discount on a coffin. It’s against our religion. I just told you. Take it. It’s free.”

“I can’t…”

“You can’t?” Ben roared. “You can’t ? You can’t, get out. Your mother loved beautiful things and you can’t? It looks like a bed made up on a sleeper, and you can’t? You can’t ? You can’t give Mom a ride in the dirt? You can’t ?” He turned to the salesman. “Burn it. Burn it! He don’t want it, burn it. I told you yesterday we were discontinuing. He don’t want it for nothing, everything all inclusive, the preparations, the chapel, the flowers, the death certificate in triplicate, the notice in the Times , the hearse and limo, burn the goddamned thing.”

“The flowers,” the salesman said, “the notice in the Times , the cars are — All that’s—”

“All inclusive,” Flesh said, “all inclusive is all inclusive, all death’s party favors. Burn it ,” he shouted.

“No,” the boy said, “if you’re going to burn it…I mean, if you’re really going to burn it—”

“All right, then,” Flesh said. “Fix him up.”

“Hey, listen,” the boy said, “thank you. I mean, well, thank you. I…”

“Look, please, we’re doing inventory here.” He turned to the salesman. “Take him. Write up the papers. ”

The young man came up to Flesh and extended his hand. “Hey…” he said.

Ben took his hand but couldn’t feel it. “Listen, what can I say at a time like this?” Flesh said. “You and the family have my deepest sympathy.” Weinman looked at him. “Look,” Flesh told him, “about the cherry walnut — it makes no difference. Just so they’re identical. They grew apart, but they died together. Identical boxes. That’s a must.” He turned to go, then looked back at Weinman. “You make them look real, you understand? Real . It takes make-up, all right use make-up. They know the smell. These are boys and girls grew up backstage. Make-up wouldn’t dishonor them. They wouldn’t faint from pancake powder. All their lives they lived behind the costumes of their faces. But real . No waxworks. You’ll do your best, yes, Weinman?”

There were no more deaths. All the returns were in. At the graveside he thought about this. Three of the girls were dead. (He included poor, bored Lotte, who had childhood diseases as an adult, and who, in her suicide, had died of her peculiar symptoms, too — tantrum.) Three of the boys. The two houses were in equilibrium again. The checks and balances. No one had the votes now, and he was safe. And ashamed of his safety.

In their grief — their noses and eyes swollen with tears and floating behind faces puffed with sorrow like people pouting into balloons (for they had identical emotions as well as identical taste buds, identical hearts, tempers, sympathies, sensibilities) — they were as alike as ever, differing more from their dead sibs than from each other. Weinman’s people had done a good job. The look of waxworks had been unavoidable, but cosmetics suited them, death’s rouges and greasepaints, its eyeliners and facials — all its landscape gardening, all its prom night adjustments. They might have been Finsberg chorus girls and boys seen close. Fleshed out in their morticianed skin, identical as skulls.

The rabbi, the same man, now grown old, who had officiated at Julius’s funeral twenty-five years before, and then at Lotte’s and at Estelle’s, said the prayers.

Then Ben stepped forward.

“One died of tantrum, her grownup’s colic, and one of pissed beds, and another angrily tight. One of constipation and one of freak eyesight and one massaged poison into his cradle cap.” He thought he knew what they were thinking. How they wept as much from contemplation as from loss. How Gertrude thought of her gravid bones and La Verne of her organs strapped like holsters to her rib cage, how Oscar brooded over his terminal compulsive speeding and Sigmund-Rudolf about his epicenity. How Mary wondered what to make of her inability to menstruate and Ethel of her heart in its casket of tit. Each mourning for each and for his own doom. As he was moved by his multiple sclerosis, his own flawed scaffolding of nerves. Everyone carried his mortality like a birthmark and was a good host to his death. You could not “catch” anything and were from the beginning yourself already caught. As if Lorenz or Cole, Patty, Mary, or himself carried from birth the very diseases they would die of. Everything was congenital. Handsomeness to suicide. “There are,” he said, “no ludicrous ways to die. There are no ludicrous deaths,” and, weeping, they all held each other as they made their way from the graveside like refugees, like people blinded by tear gas, and stumbling difficult country.