The Franchiser Read Free

admiral’s against his dark, timeless suits. There would be no tall columns of beautifully justified print apposite full-page ads for spanking new business machines with their queer space-age vintages, their coded analogues to the minting of postage, say, or money—the TermiNet 1200, the Reliant 700, Canon’s L1610, the NCR 399—numbers like license plates on federal limousines or the markings on aircraft.
    Though he actually used some of this stuff. G.E. had an answer for his costly data volume traffic; Kodak had found a practical alternative to his paper filing. He had discussed his microform housing needs with Ring King Visibles. He had come into the clean, bright world of Kalvar. A special card turned even a telephone booth into a WATS line. Still, Fortune would do no profile. Signature , the Diners Club magazine, had never shown an interest; T.W.A.’s Ambassador hadn’t. There was no color portrait of him next even to the mail-order double knits and shoes.
    Yet, he couldn’t deny it, he’d have enjoyed reading about himself. It would shake them up—all those gray sideburned gents of razor resolution. He could not divorce his memory of their sharply resolved photographs and fine tuned f-stop pusses in the magazines from their fuzzier, more edgeless presences in real life. (He had met some of them in real life, but it was always their pictures in Fortune he carried in his head.) And their biographies—all the high echelon raided, that cadre of the corporate kidnapped swooped down upon like God-marked Greeks; feisty, prodigy tigers, up-shirt-sleeved and magnate tough; and the others: the white-haired wooed, and your pluggers, too, your up-from-the-ground-floor loyalists, and Chairmen of the Board Emeriti who still carried menial memories in their skulls. And the familied inheritors. (Though these you seldom saw: class, class .) Or, even rarer, the holders of the original patents who chaired their own board. What would such men make of him?
    What would they make of his having entered the Wharton School of Business on the G.I. Bill in 1946 under the impression that he would learn to type, take shorthand, master the procedures of bookkeeping, of proper business letters—he’d set his sights on an office job, the idea of 9-to-5 as romantic to him and even mystical (the notion of yoga rhythm and routine) as it was antithetical to those who wanted more, who, having learned to kill, could never return to an only ordinary life—to discover instead that economics was a science, money an art form? Or of the remarkable telegram he’d received in his junior year at Wharton, the only telegram he’d ever gotten that wasn’t sung? He knew as he ripped it open that it could not be bad news, his parents having died in an automobile accident while he was still in the army. (Not even a telegram then . Basic training in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Not even, when it came down to it, informed. His sister out of town when it happened, when he called—routinely—that weekend and there had been no answer. And no answer the next weekend either, or the next. And, returning on furlough to Chicago before being sent overseas, no answer at the door. And his key didn’t even fit it anymore, as though basic training had given not only him a different shape but by God everything a different shape, his clothes, even his keys. “Hey, what’s going on?” he’d asked a neighbor. “God, didn’t you know? Didn’t they tell you?” “Tell me what?” “They were killed. Dead a month. Didn’t the Red Cross get in touch with you?” And angered—for the first time in his life really pissed, roaring into the long-distance telephone to his commanding officer: “What the hell is it with you people? I want my compassionate leave or I’ll go A.W.O. fucking L. It isn’t the time off. It’s the principle!” Answering his neighbor’s questions from across the hall, making his answers his argument: “I didn’t fucking know. You didn’t