Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“And this way with all of them — the fast-food franchises, the goods and services, the Roto-Rooter and Burger King. This my edge as much as the prime rate: that if you want somebody who’ll work like a dog you get a dog. And no one in the business with better employee relations, no one with as good an efficiency record. Because we’re talking business , you see, small shopkeep and the bourgeois heart. Certainly. Yes.”

“Yes,” Gus-Ira said.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s late. I’m wearing you out. I’ve worn myself out. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

But Gertrude died. Even with some of the Finsbergs gone, dead, or returned to their homes in other parts of the country, the Riverdale house was still quite full: the twins’ and triplets’ wives and husbands and their small children crowding the huge home. Ben offered to stay in a motel, but the others wouldn’t hear of it. They doubled up, rented cots from Abbey Rents. Ben himself sleeping with his godcousins’ small sons and daughters in Julius’s and Estelle’s old room, the big bedroom lined with Porta-cribs and rented cots and looking oddly like some specially outfitted casualty ward.

One of the wives said she’d heard Gertrude say she felt sort of grotty and that she thought she’d take a shower, but the bathrooms were occupied, all but the maid’s, which had a deep tub but no shower. They found her in the morning. She had drowned. From her position — her belly to the bottom of the tub — and from a discrete kneecap-shaped dent in the Cashmere Bouquet, they determined that she had evidently dropped the soap and was searching for it on her hands and knees in the cloudy water. Apparently she’d struck the bar with her knee, slipped, and gone under. With her heavy marrowless bones she’d been unable to raise herself.

“She couldn’t swim of course,” Cole said.

“Well, she had wonderful form, but she couldn’t float,” Ethel said.

“She never took baths,” Irving said.

“Doctor’s orders,” Lorenz said.

“Just sponged herself off in the shower,” said LaVerne.

“Why couldn’t she wait till a shower was free?”

“She was always impatient.”

“She was a damned fool,” Cole said. “You know, you have an affliction like that, a frame like the Petrified Forest, you take a bath you’re just asking for it.”

“She died,” Ethel said, “a gangster’s death.”

“A gangster’s death? Oh no, darling, she was just a little careless is all. Don’t say she died a gangster’s death,” Ben said.

“A gangster’s death, yes,” Ethel said, “like some hoodlum in a cement kimono, a lead coffin, steel galoshes. Oh no,” she sobbed, “it’s awful, it’s so grotesque.”

“There are no ludicrous deaths,” Ben said.

“There are,” she cried. “Oh, Ben, there are. We die them.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Irving said. “Why do you talk like that? Are you trying to jinx us? I think we should bury Gertrude and get the hell out of here before anything else happens. It’s been some week.”

They looked at racially prejudiced Irving. They seemed to agree with him. Even Ben agreed. Gertrude was cremated and it took three men to carry her ashes.

“Slag,” the funeral director said. “I never saw anything like it. The woman was slag.”

They left New York after the funeral. Ben went back to his Travel Inn site. Where there was a message from Lorenz.

Bad weather in St. Louis had caused Irving’s flight to be diverted to Chicago. Bad weather in Chicago had caused it to be diverted to Detroit. The weather in Detroit was beautiful but Irving, out of sorts from his tiring journey, died there in a race riot of his own devising.

Ethel had a simple, or limited, mastectomy. They got all the cancer but accidentally cut off her heart.

Cole complained of headache one morning and was dead that afternoon. The autopsy revealed that his brain was crawling with termites.

Sigmund-Rudolf called.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Ben said.

“Listen to me, Ben, it’s—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

…important.”

“I don’t want to hear it. No,” Ben said, “I’m hanging up. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Ben, listen, will you?” Sigmund-Rudolf said.

“I don’t want—”

“There are only a few of us left.”

“…to hear it! I’m not listening to this!”

“There are only a few of us left and the prime rate is going up and down like a Yo-Yo. Father couldn’t have anticipated when he wrote his will that so many of us would die.”

“I won’t hear this,” Ben said. “I don’t want to hear about one more death. I won’t listen. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Nobody’s dead, Ben. I mean nobody else. Gus-Ira, Lorenz, Oscar. Myself. La Verne, Patty, and Mary. Maxene. We’re still alive, Ben. Nothing’s happened to us.”

“Nobody else has died?”

“No. I’m trying to tell you.”

“Gus-Ira and Lorenz? Oscar? Patty? La Verne and Mary? Maxene? You? You’re all well? ”

“We’re fine. I’m trying to tell you.”

“That’s all right then.”

“Sure. It’s just that Father couldn’t have known. When he stipulated that we’d guarantee your loans — There were eighteen of us. Ten are gone. Listen, Ben, you’re welcome to live in Riverdale. Everyone’s agreed on that. God knows, none of the rest of us wants the place, but that other stuff, the prime interest thing, we can’t go along with that anymore. We’d be spreading ourselves too thin. You’re on your own, Ben. I mean, I know you’ve never stuck us for a penny, but with so many gone, with conditions the way they are, the risk is too great. We can’t hold your paper, Ben. You understand, don’t you? Don’t you, Ben?”

“I don’t want to hear it!”

In Ringgold, Georgia, the prime rate was 7½ percent. Elsewhere it was 8 percent, 8¼, 7¼, 9. Ben had never seen anything like it, the economy heavily fronted, arbitrarily banded, whorled with high pressure and low, laid out like yesterday’s weather on the meteorological map in today’s paper. All climate’s swayback boundaries like wavy strokes of chocolate on scrunched layer cake, the jigsaw arrangements of contested territory. Freak, unseasonable economy.

He needed additional funds. The strike, cost overruns, forced him to take out a second loan. He wanted more, but all Modell Sanford would let him have was an extra $125,000. He offered his ice-cream interests, his Dairy Queen and Baskin-Robbins and Mister Softee, as collateral. (They were already into him for his Western Auto and his Taco Bell. Indeed, almost all his franchises were pledged, hostage to the success of the motel.)

Sanford had asked to see the list again, his portfolio of franchises.

“The One Hour Martinizing,” the banker said, “the One Hour Martinizing and the ice-cream parlors, and we’ll shake hands, part friends, and have us a deal.”

“Not the dry cleaners,” Ben had said.

“Well, heck,” Modell Sanford said, “I don’t see why you’d stick at that. I don’t figure you have you more than twenty, twenty-five thousand tied up in that place.”

“Sentimental. The One Hour Martinizing is of sentimental value to me.”

“Yeah, but lookee, friend, you’re about fifty thousand shy.”

“But you’d have the motel,” Ben said. Modell was dubious. “All right,” Ben said, “here’s what we’ll do. Keep the ice creams, forget about the dry cleaners, and I’ll put up my Cinema I, Cinema II.”

Modell Sanford looked at him.

“Mr. Ben, that’s funky. Them theaters is worth ’bout a quarter million. They your biggest asset. You a serious businessman. Why’d you want to make a deal like that?”