The Franchiser Read Online Free PDF Page A

got so much edge we could cut diamonds!”
    “I have none of these things, Godfather.”
    “Oh, listen to him. Everybody gets some thing wholesale. Every body.”
    The nurse came and gave his godfather some pills.
    “I have the G.I. Bill,” Ben said thoughtfully. “They pay my tuition at Wharton.”
    “There you go,” his godfather said, smiling, swallowing.
    Ben nodded.
    He was, of course, a little disappointed. Had it been his godfather’s intention to bring him from Philadelphia just to demonstrate how fortunate he was to be alive? The telegram had spoken of amends, reparations. Having seen the hospital apartment in which the man was to die, he had begun to grasp how much money his godfather had. The taxi had brought him up Broadway. He passed the enormous hoardings, wide as storefronts, read the huge advertisements for plays, musicals, the logos for each familiar, though he rarely went to the theater. (He had seen, he supposed, the emblems and clever trademarks, individual as flags, in magazine ads or above the passengers’ heads on buses in Philadelphia.) But seeing the bright spectacular posters for the plays like a special issue of stamps stuck across Broadway’s complicated packages as he viewed them from his deep, wide seat in the back of the cab, had been very exciting. Why, the musicals alone, he thought now, and tried to recall as many as he could. Arms and the Girl, The Consul, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Great to Be Alive , and Lost in the Stars. Miss Liberty, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, Texas, Li’l Darlin’, Where’s Charley? They played songs from all these on the radio; he’d whistled them. Nanette Fabray was in one of the shows. Pearl Bailey was. Bambi Lynn, Vivienne Segal. Pinza and Mary Martin. Ray Bolger and Byron Palmer and Doretta Morrow. Kenny Delmar. And how many of these stars wore costumes his godfather had supplied? And that was just the musicals. The circus was in town. Could the man have dressed circus performers? Why not? And the Ice Show— Howdy, Mr. Ice of 1950 . And there was a Gilbert and Sullivan festival on and the ballet. Even if he supplied just a tenth of the costumes…God, he thought, if you added them all up and threw in the dramas and all that was going on in Greenwich Village, there were enough people in Manhattan alone wearing costumes—and think of the costume changes!—to dress a small city. That was the kind of action his godfather had. Gee!
    “Uugh, agh! Uuch. Awgrh.”
    “The tent, Godfather?”
    “The bedpan! Get help. Hurry, boy. Where are you going? That’s the guest bedroom. No, that’s the linen closet. Not in there, for God’s sake, that’s the bar! There, that’s right.”
    He grabbed a resident—the man wore a stethoscope over his turtleneck—and rushed with him and a nurse back to his godfather’s suite. He remained outside.
    The nurse and resident came out in a few minutes. Ben looked at them.
    “You didn’t tell me you were Ben,” the resident said.
    “How’s the weather in Philly?” the nurse asked.
    He could hear his godfather calling his name. “I’d better go in,” Ben said.
    The man was sitting, his pillows fluffed up behind him.
    “You seem more comfortable,” Ben said.
    “Never mind about that,” he said irritably. “I’m a goner. There’s something we have to straighten out.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “Here’s the long and short of it,” my godfather said. “I palmed a deuce.”
    “Sir?”
    “I palmed a deuce. You don’t spend the whole of your working life in the theatrical costume business without picking some thing up. You know how many magicians’ costumes I’ve turned out over the years? Let me count the ways. Sure, and the magician needing his costume immediately, five minutes after the phone call from his agent. Having to be in Chicago, the Catskills, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. It was always rush rush rush with magicians, and they hang over your shoulder while you work. Magicians! Well, it has to be