The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene started to sniffle. Instantly the others took it up. The Colonel looked at Ben, but he was as confused as Colonel Sanders. The sound was alarming. It was as if they stood together in the flu ward of a hospital. Then the sniffles became sobs, wails, a declension of grief.

  “Hey,” Colonel Sanders said, “what’s wrong with you fellers? What’s that caterwauling? You boys fairies?”

  “Tell him, Ben,” Ethel blubbered.

  “Ben doesn’t know,” Noël grieved.

  “He doesn’t, he doesn’t,” the rest moaned. They wrung their hands.

  “What is it?” Ben asked.

  “It’s fishy,” Colonel Sanders said.

  Gradually the crying subsided. Oscar pulled himself together. “He reminded us.”

  “Reminded you?”

  “Mother gave birth one last time,” Lotte said.

  “In ’47,” said Helen.

  “March it was,” Sigmund-Rudolf said.

  “Opening night.”

  “Brigadoon.”

  “Mother was so excited.”

  “We all were,” Kitty said. “Sigmund-Rudolf and I couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time, but we all were.”

  “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 irony,” 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 Doppelgängster. You’re a Doppelgängster 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.)

  The boy swung the sign around to where Ben wanted it. Now he was canted toward the crowd like a man about to be spilled from a cannon. He grasped the rim of the bucket for support—he would look like Kilroy, he thought—and began his address.

  “My fellow New Yorkers,” he said. “There was once a countryman who had a place back in the hills with his wife and small babe. One day a neighbor who lived miles off where the trail from the county road left off at the beginning of the big woods came to him with a letter addressed to the countryman in care of the neighbor that the neighbor said had been left with him the day before. There was a notation on the envelope that read ‘Please Forward,’ but it was the neighbor’s impression that the postmaster had written both the ‘in care of’ and the notation to forward as well as the neighbor’s name, for if the countryman looked he would see that his name, the countryman’s, and his name, the neighbor’s, had been written in two different hands, and that it was a known fact that the postmaster was a shirker. Then he explained that his, the neighbor’s, wife had been poorly and could not be left alone and so he, the neighbor, had had to wait until a day when his young ’uns would be home from school before he could bring the letter that had been left in his charge. This was a Saturday and he had left as early as he could.

  “ ‘I’m sorry your wife is poorly,’ the countryman said, ‘and I thank you for the trouble you took to bring me my message, for I know that the spot where the trail from the county road leaves off at the start of the big woods is a long way to my place back in the hills where I live with my wife and small babe.’ “ ‘You we’come,’ the neighbor said and the countryman invited the neighbor to set a spell while his woman made some lemonade for the neighbor to drink after his hot and dusty trip. ‘Thank you kindly,’ his neighbor said, ‘for the truth is, I am sorely parched.’

  “ ‘You we’come,’ the countryman said and told his wife to bring the lemonade. Then they both, the countryman and the neighbor, sat down on the porch swing. The neighbor could see that the countryman was a mite uneasy, though he tried to hide it by carefully matching his push on the swing with his own, the neighbor’s, push.

  “ ‘Excuse me,’ the neighbor said, ‘I misremembered myself and have plumb forgot to give you the letter.’

  “ ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ the countryman said, but from the relief on his, the countryman’s, face, he, the neighbor, could see that it, the letter, had in fact been on his, the countryman’s, mind.

  “The neighbor excused himself and asked if he could go on back to the outhouse as he had ‘business.’

  “ ‘Surely you may,’ the countryman said.

  “ ‘Thank you kindly.’

  “ ‘You we’come.’

  “Now the neighbor had no ‘business,’ having done it, his business, in the big woods after starting out with the letter for his, the neighbor’s, neighbor, the countryman. All he wanted was to give the countryman time to read it, the letter, and when he figured that he had had enough, time, to read the letter, it, he, the neighbor, came back outside and returned to where he had left him, the countryman, sitting, on the porch, the porch.

  “Now when he returned, what was his surprise to see that there were tears in his eyes. He didn’t want to ask him about it and he knew it so he told him.

  “ ‘From my brother.’

  “ ‘Oh?’

  “ ‘He says Paw is dying. I must be off. Enjoy your lemonade.’

  He kissed his wife and small babe and solemnly shook his neighbor’s hand, but the neighbor, feeling he had badly served his neighbor the countryman by delaying the twenty-four hours before he brought the letter, and fearing, too, that it might already be too late and wishing to make amends, rose and offered to go back with him and take him to the city where he knew the countryman’s father lived and was now dying or already dead.

  “ ‘Take me? How you fixin’ to do that?’

  “ ‘In my pickup.’

  “ ‘You got a pickup?’

  “ ‘I live where the trail from the start of the big woods leaves off at the start of the county road. I do.’

  “ ‘Thank you.’

  “ ‘You we’come.’

  “And he was good as his word, that he had a pickup and that he would drive them, himself, the neighbor, and the countryman, to the city, where his, the countryman’s, Paw was dying or already dead.

  “They drove all day and all night and the morning of the next day and the miles flew by and they were already close to the city where his, etc., etc., was dying or already dead, when the pickup sputtered and steamed and gave out.

  “The countryman was heartbroken. ‘I am sure sorely sorry,’ he said. ‘I would not have had that to happen for anything. Why to think,’ he, the countryman, said, ‘and all you wanted was to he’p a neighbor, me, a countryman, up to his eyes in it, shit, trouble, and your pickup is all busted and won’t never to run again and lick up the miles like they ’us on’y just steps. I am sorely sorry and when this is all over I will save and save till I get enough, money, to buy you another one, a pickup. And now I must be on my way to my Paw’s sick side. Thank you.’ And he was already out his side of the pickup before he, the neighbor, could properly say, ‘You we’come.’

  “ ‘Ho’d up,’ he called, ‘ho’d up.’

  “The countryman looked back and, seeing it was his neighbor calling, stopped in his tracks in the road.

  “ ‘What?’

  “ ‘It ain’t busted,’ he said.

  “ ‘It ain’t?’

  “ ‘I to’d you.’

  “ ‘Why don’t it to go then?’

  “ ‘ ’Cause we worked her too hard. The radiator boiled over. All we need is to get us some water and pour it in the radiator and she’ll go again good as new.’

  “There was a stream close by the road and the neighbor, who kept a five-gallon gas can in the back of his pickup for just such emergencies, took the can and filled it at the stream and carried it back and poured its contents into the radiator and, after waiting a few more minutes for the engine to cool, started the pickup smooth as anything and they were on their, the neighbor’s and the countryman’s, way again as if nothing, the pickup sputtering and steaming
and giving out, had ever happened. But the neighbor noticed that there was an odd expression on the countryman’s face. It was a troubled expression, but not the same sort of troubled expression he had seen when he had first returned from the outhouse where he had gone to pretend to do a business he had already done in the big woods on the way to his, the countryman’s, place back in the hills, in order to give him time to read the letter he, the neighbor of the countryman, had brought him, the neighbor of the neighbor. A naturally polite man, he did not want to trouble this already troubled man with his curiosity but he must have seen this because he too was a polite man and knew that that was on his mind and he decided finally to introduce the subject as much for his satisfaction as for his.

  “ ‘If,’ he said, ‘a wheel was to bust, what would to happen then?’

  “ ‘If a wheel was to bust? Why, I’d just get a new wheel and stick ’er on.’

  “The countryman nodded.

  “ ‘What about if that thing you poured that ’ere water in from that stream was to crack and couldn’t to hold no water—what then?’

  “ ‘The radiator?’

  “ ‘That what you call ’er?’

  “ ‘The radiator, yes, sir.’

  “ ‘What would to happen?’

  “ ‘Well then, I guess I’d have to have them solder the crack or have them to put in a new radiator.’

  “ ‘Them?’

  “ ‘The mechanics.’

  “ ‘I see. Thank you.’

  “ ‘You we’come.’

  “ ‘Suppose the engine itself?’

  “ ‘Same thing.’