The Franchiser (12 page)

“Pick me up,” little Gertrude had said to him when she was only eleven, “try to lift me.”

“Why? What for?”

“I bet you can’t,” she said.

“Of course I can.”

“Then prove it. Try to pick me up.”

He moved behind her, put his arms around her slender waist, and strained backward. He couldn’t budge her. Gertrude laughed. “Come on, it’s a trick,” he said. “What is it?”

“It isn’t a trick. Go on, you get another turn.”

“It’s a trick. Well…Okay.” He stood in front of her, bent down suddenly, and wrapped his arms tightly just under her buttocks and clasped her to him. Using all his strength, he managed to raise her one inch above the floor. He held her up for no more than two seconds and then dropped her. She dragged him down with her as she fell.

“It’s a trick. What is it?” He was short of breath.

“I haven’t any bone marrow,” Gertrude said. “My bones are all filled with this like iron.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t be X-rayed,” she said. “My bones show up as dark tools, like carpenters’ things and plumbers’.”

And La Verne’s organs lined the side of her body, her liver and lungs and kidneys outside her rib cage. Ethel’s heart was in her right breast. Cole had a tendency to suffer from the same disorders as plants and had a premonition that he would be killed by Dutch elm blight. Mary could not menstruate and Gus-Ira was a nail biter allergic to his own parings. When he bit them he broke out in a terrible brocade of rash. Lorenz’s temperature was a constant 102.5, and Patty, who had perfect pitch, could not hear loud noises. Kitty would still be a bed wetter at thirty and Lotte, the one he’d kissed years before beside the bus, enjoyed perfect health until her twenties, when she began to come down with all the childhood diseases—measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, adenoids, and colic. Noël had cradle cap. Helen was a mean drunk.

“I’m racially prejudiced,” Irving, one of the sweetest of the family, told him.

“You, Irving? Racially prejudiced? You’re one of the most reasonable people I know.”

“I’m racially prejudiced. It’s like a disease.”

“All of us have a little prejudice. I guess we fear what we don’t understand. We roll our windows up when we drive through Harlem. We lock our doors.”

“I’m racially prejudiced,” Irving said calmly. “I hate the niggers. I hate the way they smell. I can’t stand the moons on their fingernails. I want to gag when I see their woolly hair. Their purple blubber-lips make my skin crawl. They’re lazy and drunk and want our women. The bucks have dicks as big as the Ritz and the women swell our welfare rolls. I’m racially prejudiced. I wish genocide were legal. I think we should drop A-bombs on their storefront churches and fire their barbecue stands. I’m racially prejudiced. It’s a disease.”

And Maxene’s hair had begun to thin when she reached puberty—she wore wigs cunningly woven from her brothers’ clippings and trims—and Moss’s beautiful eyes could not see certain kinds of metal. And one of the boys, Oscar, had things wrong with him in the gray social areas of illness. He was at once an alcoholic and a compulsive speeder.

Jerome was chronically constipated.

“I don’t move my bowels more than twice a month. Two dozen times a year.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“The doctors don’t understand. They give me enemas. I’m not compacted. The stools are normal. My breath is sweet. The tongue’s a good color. They think it’s something to do with metabolism, that my body doesn’t create as much fecal matter as other people’s do. It’s something to do with the metabolism.”

It was something to do with the metabolism with all of them, some queer short circuit in the glands and blood, the odd death duties of the freak. Human lemons, Detroit could recall them. Like, he thought, giants’ and giantesses’ niggardly life spans, fat men’s, as if there were a strange democracy of displacement in nature, that if you took up more room than others you could have it less long. And though he never mistook one twin for another, never confused a triplet, had perfect pitch for their shell-game life, knowing at all times which pea was under what shell, he never forgot that they were freaks. They were almost all the family he had, as he, in an odd way, was almost all the family
they
had, and though he loved them they frightened him, troubled him with their niggered woodpiled chemistry.

“What I’m wondering,” Helen said, “is…”

“I know,” Lorenz said.

“We do too,” said Cole and Kitty.

“Whether we get to find out the secret recipe,” Gus-Ira said quietly.

The Colonel stared at them. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, “but it’s fishy. Now if they’s one thing a fried-chicken guy like me can’t stand it’s something fishy. I ’us studying on the scupture in the Central Park and this feller”—he pointed to Ben—“come up and started fussin’ me. I thought I’d be nice, do like we do down home. Next I know we in some taxi car driving thoo all New York City, people everwhere, tall buildins, projects, folks in skull caps, over bridges and past the whole rickety racket of this Lord forlorn squashed-together mess. Then we turn a corner and—whoosh—we in the open, we in country. Green lawns, trees, gret big ol’ houses, and I think to myself, Why it’s like—what do you call it—
Brigadoon
, as if…”

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
i
rony,” 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 Doppel
gäng
ster. You’re a Doppel
gäng
ster 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.)