The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin Read Free Book Online Page A

years. And I don’t think he had voluntarily surrendered his right to an individual son or individual daughter even then. But he was sixty now. It was his body that abandoned Julius Finsberg, not Julius Finsberg his body.
    “My father had named him my godfather, yet it wasn’t until he knew he was dying that I heard from him. Nobody gives nothing for nothing. I was to be the individual son he had wanted all his life, so that when he died his eleventh-hour sponsorship of me became his last bid to recover the ordinary. In a way I was more godson to him—I the benefactor, you see, he the beneficiary—than he godfather to me.
    “I went to his funeral. It was end of term and I had to ask my professors’ permission to put off my exams. I said my godfather had died. I told the truth. I admitted he was a man I barely knew. They would not recognize the connection. I told them I was in his will. I explained how he had left me the prime interest rate. This was the Wharton School of Business. This they could understand. They comforted me and told me I could take my exams whenever I felt sufficiently recovered.
    “I went to the chapel where my godfather was laid out and approached the mourners’ bench. I introduced myself and offered my condolences. This was the first time I had even seen the mother, the hoofer, the first time I had ever seen—what’s the term I’m looking for?—the children? The triplets and twins? My godcousins? Godbrothers and godsisters? The siblings? No, this was a sibship . A Sixth Fleet of family. I think I backed off when I saw them. I know I rubbed my eyes. There were eighteen of them. Eighteen. Yes. Only seven years separated the oldest from the youngest. There were eighteen, nine boys and nine girls. Identical triplets, identical twins. But not just discretely identical, the part in each set identical to the other part or parts of the set, but identical to each other set, too, somehow equal to and collateral with the whole. Each girl slightly favoring the father and each boy the mother, so that even their sexual differences seemed to cancel out the very notion of difference, and they looked, the boys and the girls, like one person. Exactly like, because of the subtle distinctions in their sizes and ages—sixteen years old to ten—a single person caught between two opposing mirrors, each subsequent reflection a shade smaller in perspective.
    “It was astonishing. Though I didn’t understand this at the time, I have come to realize that my godfather had indeed been set in his ways, so stubborn in them in fact, so much the immutable bachelor at fifty-three and four and five, and so on, that his very sperm, his verygenes had become like a single minting of dimes, say. Granted strength he could have fucked from now till doomsday and not produced a child unlike the eighteen he had already produced.
    “As I came to know them, I saw that their gestures were the same, their mannerisms and tics, their voices. When they spoke together the prayers for the dead, it was like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
    “They knew about me. They knew who I was. They loved their father and they loved me. Indeed, they had been told by the old man to look upon me as a sort of stepbrother, and because I was as different from them as they were like each other, they seized upon me, for all the difference in our ages, as small children might attach themselves to an au pair .
    “ ‘Look at his brown hair,’ they said. Their own was black. ‘Look how fair his complexion.’ Theirs was dark. ‘See how straight he stands.’ They had a tendency to slouch. Their mother I had not much to do with, but the Finsberg children would not let me out of their sight.”
    He was the brother these brothers and sisters had never had. He had a sense even then that they loved him, and when they knew each other better he understood that Julius had talked him up at dinnertime, the godbrother in Chicago they had never seen, had kept them informed