The Franchiser Read Free Page A

goddamnit tell me. The Red no damn good Cross didn’t get in touch with me.” Wanting, see, his books balanced even then, not looking for something for nothing, only for justice, the principle of the thing. And still no more notion of what he was about than a babe. They gave him the leave. Leave piled on leave while Truman brooded and made his decision to drop the atomic bomb and the war ended, and then getting the government to approve his matriculation at the Wharton School of Business, arguing that if the army had not given him compassionate leave he might have seen active duty, might have been wounded. Unwounded, undisabled, they were getting off cheap.)
    He would never forget the telegram, had an image to this day of the uneven lengths of yellow strips of capital letters pasted on the yellow Western Union blank, like a message from kidnappers:
    WOULD LIKE SEE YOU BEFORE I DIE. WOULD LIKE DISCUSS AMENDS. REPARATIONS. HAVE BECOME RELIGIOUS IN OLD AGE. WISH TO DO RIGHT BY GOD BY DOING RIGHT BY YOU. HAVE CERTAIN THINGS SPEAK YOU ABOUT. DONT THINK I UNAWARE YOUR EXCELLENT PROGRESS AT WHARTON. BEEN GETTING WONDERFUL REPORTS FROM PROFESSORS. MUCH ENCOURAGED WHAT I HEAR ABOUT YOU SINCE STOPPED PESTERING ADVISER ABOUT SHORTHAND AND TYPEWRITER INSTRUCTION. PLEASE VISIT ME HARKNESS PAVILION SUITE 1407. FARE POCKET MONEY FOLLOW. YOUR GODFATHER JULIUS FINSBERG.
    Fare followed, pocket money followed, and he had an impression of sequence, of something suddenly organizing his life, as if somewhere someone had tripped a switch to trigger a mechanism that gave a fillip to events, like a parade, say, at its headwaters, its side street or suburban sources, the horses sorted, the bands and floats and marchers suddenly geometrized by some arbitrary imposition of order, a signal, a whistle.
    He recognized Julius Finsberg’s name, knew him to be his god father, though he could not recall ever having seen the man, and knew that till then, till the time of the telegram, the office had been ceremonial only, a sinecure from the days when Finsberg and his father had been partners in a small theatrical costume business in New York, a business just large enough to support one family but not two. It was when Ben was a small boy that the partnership dissolved, amicably as it happened, Julius buying out Al, though it could just as easily have been the other way around. They had, Ben remembered his father telling him, cut cards, the low man having to pay the high. At the time—this was the Depression—his father had considered that he’d won, the three thousand dollars being more than enough to give him a new lease on life in Chicago, though it was not long afterward that he’d begun to brood.
    “Who’d have thought,” he’d said, so often that Ben had the speech by heart, “that Cole Porter would come up with all those hit tunes, that Gershwin and Gus Kahn and Irving Berlin and Hammerstein and that other guy, what’s his name, Rodgersenhart, had it in them, that they’d set America’s toes to tapping, that Ethel Merman and Astaire would catch on like that, or that Helen Morgan would sing her way into America’s heartstrings? The Golden Age of Costumes and I sold out my share in what today is the biggest costume business in the country for a mess of pottage! I don’t blame Julius. He didn’t know. I’m not holding him responsible for my bad timing. To tell you the truth, it was only after he gave me the three thousand that I made him your godfather—you were already six. I felt guilty sticking him with the business. Well, what’s done is done. After all we’re not starving. I’ve got a nice shop, but when I think what might have been…” From then on his father ate his heart out whenever he heard—he would permit no radio in the house, no phonograph—someone whistling a popular show tune.
    When he was called to New York in the spring of 1950 Ben was twenty-three years old. He went directly from Penn Station to the Harkness