The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

“I know I didn’t,” Kitty told him. “When I learned you’d been a serviceman, I hung up a little blue star for you in my bedroom window. This was after you’d already been discharged.”

  “There was a Wharton Business School pennant above my dresser,” Lorenz said.

  “We wanted what Father wanted,” said Helen.

  “A change,” said Sigmund-Rudolf.

  “That’s it,” said Mary.

  “A different face like,” Moss said.

  “You’re one of us now,” Gus-Ira said.

  “All for one and one for all,” said Lotte.

  They took him up.

  The Finsbergs were a close-knit family, and since no car ever built could possibly have held them all, after the war Julius had purchased one of the first new city buses that came off the assembly line. On one side of the bus was a picture of a redbud and, on the other, sprigs of mistletoe. On the rear there was an immense scissor-tailed flycatcher, the representations painted against a background of blue, white, olive, green, wine, and a sort of reddish mud. These were the official emblems and colors of the state of Oklahoma, the show Julius liked to think had paid for it. They kept the bus in the driveway of their large house in Riverdale. Julius had never learned to drive and none of the children was old enough. Only the hoofer—Estelle—could drive it, but now that Julius was dead she no longer had the heart.

  One day during the week of mourning Estelle came up to Ben. “After this is over,” she said, “the children would like to go on a trip. They thought you might take them in the bus.”

  “I don’t think I can drive a bus.”

  “Why not? It’s the same principle as the deuce and a half. You were in the motor pool.”

  “You know about the motor pool?”

  Ben took them to Jersey.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Ethel said.

  “Mother never took us this far,” Cole said.

  “We never left the Bronx,” said La Verne.

  “Oh, Ben,” said Lotte, “it’s really marvelous. It’s like a picnic. Let’s have a picnic. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “I’d like some ice cream,” said Oscar. “Ben, may we stop for ice cream? Please, let’s.”

  “Yes, Ben, yes,” said the others happily. “Oh, Ben, please,” they said.

  “Ice cream would be just the thing,” Lorenz said seriously. “We could buy our cones and eat them in the bus.”

  For all that he knew how they liked him, he was not really sure where he stood with them. Though they told him they looked on him as one of the family—wasn’t he in Daddy’s will?—the fact was that he had become a sort of factotum to the Finsbergs. He had gone with Estelle to help pick out the casket and had ended up making nearly all the decisions and arrangements for the funeral. (He soon discovered that except for the enormous immediate family Julius had propagated, there was no other, no surviving brother or sister, no cousin or uncle or aunt. Estelle herself was as bereft of relations as Julius.) Now he had become the children’s chauffeur. He felt in camp-counselor nexus to them and the truth was they frightened him a little. Being left the prime interest rate was very complicated and he was unsure of what his guarantors would and would not stand for.

  So he took what had been their request for ice cream as a kind of polite command.

  “Ice cream, ice cream,” they chanted.

  “All right,” Ben said.

  He drove west on Route 4 and within five minutes he spotted the bright-orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s. He stopped the bus and the twins and triplets jumped out excitedly. “Oh, isn’t this grand?” they said when they were inside and ordering their cones. They had never seen so many flavors.

  “Look, Ben,” Mary said, “it says they have twenty-eight flavors.” The triplets all ordered triple scoops and the twins double. They ordered all the flavors and each had a lick of every flavor. They bought Ben a single scoop of vanilla.

  “Oh, look,” said little ten-year-old Sigmund-Rudolf, pointing to the logo on the wide mirror behind the counter, “see the funny man. That’s Simple Simon.”

  “Yes,” said Kitty, who was eleven, “and the man in the chef’s hat, he must be the pieman. Is he, Ben? Is he?”

  People were staring at the strange group.

  “Yes,” Ben said. “Come on, kids, why don’t we finish our cones in the bus like Lorenz said we should?”

  They got back into the bus and Ben drove on. They turned off Route 4 and onto Route 17.

  “Gosh, Ben,” Oscar said, “look. There’s that same ice-cream parlor. We must be going in circles. Are we lost?” he asked worriedly.

  “Are we, Ben?” Patty said.

  “No,” Ben said, “that’s just another Howard Johnson’s.”

  On the Hamburg Turnpike Gertrude spotted a third and outside Paterson Jerome saw a fourth.

  After that they decided that the first one to see the next orange roof and little turquoise tower of a Howard Johnson’s would be the winner and would get a wish. Ben zigzagged through the New Jersey countryside. It was getting late and he started to look for signs to the George Washington Bridge.

  He followed Saddle River Road, left it, and came to Route 23. Just after they passed “Two Guys,” Lotte, who was sitting right behind the driver’s seat, jumped up. “I see one, I see one!” she shrieked.

  “Where?” screamed Noël.

  “Where, where?” Irving shouted.

  Ben almost lost control of the bus.

  “There. Right there,” Lotte yelled.

  “She’s right,” the kids agreed.

  “Oh, Ben,” she called in his ear, “I get a wish, I get a wish.”

  “Gosh,” they all said as they passed by Howard Johnson’s. “Will you just look at that?” “Golly,” said some of the twins. “Boy,” chorused Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene.

  “I get my wish,” Lotte said. “I wish—”

  “Don’t tell your wish or it won’t come true,” Ben said.

  “But, Ben, I have to. Otherwise it can’t come true.”

  “I don’t figure that,” Ben said.

  “Well, remember how you told us that Howard Johnson’s was a—what did you say?—a chain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I wish that you would use your prime interest rate to buy one.”

  “But why?” Ben said. “Why are you all so excited about a restaurant? You can have ice cream whenever you want.”

  “It isn’t the ice cream,” Jerome said.

  “Of course not,” said Noël.

  “It isn’t the ice cream, silly,” Helen said.

  “No,” said Cole and Ethel.

  “Well, what is it then?”

  “Don’t you see?” Irving asked. “Don’t you understand?”

  “What? Don’t I see what? What don’t I understand?”

  “That those places,” Lorenz said,

  “they’re—” said Jerome and Mary,

  “—all the SAME,” said Sigmund-Rudolf and Gertrude and Moss.

  “Just—” Gus-Ira said

  “—like us!” said they all.

  “And that, Buster, is the true story of how I got into the franchise business,” Ben told the hitchhiker.

  “What?” He’d been sleeping.

  “I was telling you how the pig got its curly tail. Oh, these origins, my pupick pasts and golden bough beginnings. Sleep, kid, sleep. I was only muttering my mythics and metamythics, godfairies spitting in my cradle, spraying spell, hacking their juicy oysters of fate in my puss.”

  He had said “chain.” He had assumed that a man named Howard Johnson made ice creams, an ice-cream scientist, someone with a visionary sweet tooth, a chemist of fruits and candies, a larky alchemist who reduced the tangerine and the mango, the maple and marzipan to their essences, who could, if he wished, divide the flavor of the tomato and the sweet potato from themselves, a tinkerer in nature who might reproduce the savor of gold, the taste of cigarette smoke. He knew there was a Ford, thought there was probably a Buick and a
Studebaker. He believed in the existence of a Mr. Westinghouse. Remington, Maytag, Amana, and the Smith brothers were real to him as film stars or the leaders of his country. He could believe, that is, in the existence of millionaires, men with a good thing going, who knew their way around a patent and held on like hell. Indeed, this was one of the things that had determined him to study shorthand and typing and bookkeeping at the Wharton School.He had no good thing of his own and had believed that the best thing for him would be to place himself in the service of those who had. One of the things he could not imagine once he came to understand the inevitability of death—this would have been at around two and a half—was how he would be able to support himself when his father died. He had no skill with the pencil or the needle, and though he tried—summer vacations, Christmas holidays—to apprentice himself to the designer and even the cutter and tailor in his dad’s costume business in Chicago, smaller than even the partnership in New York before its dissolution—they made tutus, leotards for ballet academies, costumes for high-school musicals, and had a tiny share of the public-school graduation-gown market—he was, boss’s son or no boss’s son, always rebuffed, reduced to running errands, delivering merchandise. They had no patience with him. Schmerler, his father’s tailor, thought he was a pain in the ass. “Gay avec,” he’d tell him, “you’re an American. What do you want? Look at my eyeglasses, thick as a slice of bread. Lift them, they weigh a pound. They break pieces off my nose and tear my ears. This is something an American boy should want? Unheard of. Go to the cutter. Ask him to shake hands. Count his fingers.” And one time when he’d been after Schmerler to show him how to use the Singer—he thought there was a Singer—the man had turned on him angrily. “Did you ever? What’s the matter, you got your eye on your own little place in Latvia? Go away, leave me alone, study bubble-gum cards, learn what the different cars look like, do their dances, eat hot dogs at the ball park, drink Coca-Cola, and make a taste in your mouth for beer.” And, when he insisted, Schmerler had handed him a sewing needle. “Stick me,” he said. He held up the forefinger of his left hand.

  “What?”

  “Stick me here.”

  “What for? No.”

  “Baby. Pants pisher.” He grabbed the needle from the boy and plunged it into his finger. He drew no blood. “You see? Nothing’s there. The blood’s all gone. My blood knows I’m a tailor. It left for other parts. The finger’s cold, the hand. There’s no more circulation. I wear fur gloves in the summer on the Sixty-third Street beach.” Then he drew the boy to him. “You know what, Benny? I only wish my kids loved me a tenth what you love Dad.”

  But it wasn’t what Schmerler thought, and though he loved his father well enough, it was something else entirely which drove him to seek information about the business. It was his knowledge that his father would die. It wasn’t to his father that Ben went, but always to Schmerler or to Kraft, the cutter, or to Mrs. Lenzla, the designer. In the shop he avoided his father as much as possible for fear that he might blurt out why it was so important for him to learn the business, accusing the man of his death, slapping his face with it. And this lonely fear persisted. He simply could not imagine how he would support himself. Even in high school, where he did well, working hard in the hope that something would come up, some talent he had not known about might emerge, articulating itself like a print in the photographer’s bath—the fear of his future persisted. He made good grades, was often on the Honor Roll. He went out for the drama club, won a good part in the school play, was accepted in the chorus, made the football team, worked for the paper, was given a by-line, each success frightful to him, taking no encouragement from any of them because all it meant was that he was equally good in all things, that he had no one calling, and then, realizing this, going the other way, not working hard at all, actually hoping to fail, but still discouraged because though his grades went down they went down uniformly and he was benched the same day that his by-line was taken away and his column assigned to someone else, and within a week to the day that the choral director, Mr. Sansoni, shifted him from the tenor section to the baritone, where his voice might be swallowed up in the greater number.

  So he knew he had no calling, no one thing among his talents that he did better than any other one thing, and nothing at all that he did better than others. And worrying constantly about his father’s health, though the man was in good health, had no complaints. To the point where, if Ben got sick, even if it was just a cold, he withdrew to his room, locked it, used bedpans rather than risk encountering his dad in the apartment for fear of giving the man his cold, avoiding as well his mother and sister in case he should pass it on to them, who might pass it on to his father. Waiting until they had left the apartment and only then going to the kitchen, taking his food from cans, which he could then dispose of, from boxes of crackers and cookies—holding the box, he would spill however many he wanted onto the floor and then pick them up—his liquids from paper cups.

  “Ben,” his father would say, outside his son’s locked bedroom, “it’s only a cold. Don’t be such a hypochondriac. What are you frightened of?”

  Pretending sleep, he wouldn’t answer.

  And no reason at Wharton to suppose that the household names of ordinary American life were not living, breathing people, actual as himself, only luckier, better off. There had been classes where when the professor called the roll it was like hearing the listings on the New York Stock Exchange.

  “Bendix.”

  “Present.”

  “Boeing.”

  “ Here, sir.”

  “Braniff.”

  “Here.”

  “Burroughs.”

  “Yo.”

  Carling. Crane. Culligan. Disney. Dow. Du Pont. Elgin. Fedders.

  “Flesh.”

  Firestone nudged him.

  “What? What is it?”

  “He called your name.”

  “What? Oh. Yes. Here, sir. Yes, sir. Present.”

  So there was no lack of contact. Yet—this was before his godfather’s telegram, before, in fact, he came to accept that he would not pick up shorthand—he never actually thought of them as contacts, not in the sense that others used the term. He could not get over the idea that certain men had certain things going for them, that it was in their nature, even in the nature of duty itself, perhaps, to perpetuate it through brothers, sons, some primogenitary circle of the inner that closed upon itself and made a wall. If he had any expectations they were not great so much as marginal. Perhaps Goodrich might write a letter for him someday, open a door—if he could prove himself—to a branch manager or personnel director of one of the more remote plants. All he wanted was what he never believed he could have. All he wanted was a job. Enough money to pay his rent, purchase his food, buy his clothes, to save against the day when he might have enough to make a down payment on an automobile.

  So of course he believed in a man named Howard Johnson, and what the twins and triplets had suggested seemed as naive to him as anything he’d ever heard.

  It was Lotte, the girl who made the wish, who had looked into it, who found out that for $40,000—this was 1951—he could purchase a Howard Johnson franchise from the headquarters in Boston.

  “What? He sells his name? His name?”

  “Oh, there are rules, Ben. You have to buy everything direct from the company.”

  “The eggs?”

  “No, I don’t guess you have to buy the eggs, but the fried clams, the ice cream, the syrups and cones. And you can’t serve after midnight unless you’re on the turnpike or something. There are all kinds of procedures you have to follow.”

  “He sells his name?”

  “Ben, you graduated from the top business school in the country. Didn’t you learn anything?”

  “I made Dean’s list seven times. They didn’t give Shorthand, they didn’t give Franchises.”

  “ Oh, Ben.”

  Lotte was seventeen. They were standing in the driveway of the house in Riverdale
beside the bus.

  “He sells his name” was all Ben could say. “His name. Do other people do this, do you know?”

  “Oh yes, Ben, lots. Lots do.”

  He was excited because he knew that he had something going for him now. He would discover which men’s names were for sale and he would buy them and have that going for him. He would have them at the rate banks gave their favored customers and he would have that going for him, too. He was very excited. He had never been so excited. They stood in the driveway on the left-hand side of the bus and Ben took Lotte in his arms and kissed her beside the sprigs of mistletoe, the painted, official flower of the state of Oklahoma.

  4

  It was something like the beginning of his fiscal year. His dealings with Nate, his brief stay in Youngstown, his drive with the kid he’d dropped in Chicago, all that was outside of time.

  He’d gone to Youngstown to discuss the purchase of the Westinghouse affiliate there. He dealt with Strip and Girded, Cramer’s lawyers. He’d known them for years.

  He’d misunderstood. It was a television station.

  Not radio?

  No, TV.

  I’ll be damned, television. Well, how much?

  Two and a half million was the asking price.

  He’d thought it was radio.

  Television.

  How could he have gotten something like that mixed up?

  Strip didn’t know. Girded asked why he hadn’t called first or written a letter. These things had to be cleared with the FCC. It could take years.

  He’d thought it was radio. Well, it was good to see them again anyway. They were his lawyers, too. Did they remember when they’d handled the 7-11 deal for him?

  Oh yes.

  Well.

  He really should have called.

  “It’s all right. I’m on my way to Chicago anyway.”

  “Chicago!”

  His Fred Astaire Dance Studio.

  “Oh yes.” How was he feeling? Strip wanted to know.

  “Fine.”

  That was good, Girded said.

  “What are you looking down? Your shoes match. Fine means fine. F-I-N-E.”