The Franchiser Read Online Free PDF Page B

man. Well, look around, you can see I’m going out first class.”
    “Please, Godfather.”
    “Facts are facts, Ben.”
    “All right.”
    “I said ‘That’s the story,’ but I left something out. After your father and I dissolved the partnership I married a girl from Tin Pan Alley.”
    “Yes?”
    “She was a hoofer, but really a trained ballet dancer. She had this incredible pelvis, Ben. Well, you can imagine what twenty years of plié would do to a girl with a fantastic pelvis to begin with. To make a long story short, Ben, Estelle turned out to be very fecund.”
    “Oh?”
    “Ben, that woman had babies like a mosquito lays eggs. There are eighteen, Ben.”
    “ Eighteen? ”
    “Four sets of triplets, three sets of twins.”
    I could have been one of the triplets, he thought. I could have been one of the twins.
    “I’m rich, Ben, but blood is thicker than water.”
    “Oh.”
    “I’m rich, yes, but after estate taxes, and—My wife gets about a million outright; the rest is left in trust for my children.”
    “I see.”
    “What do you see?”
    “That this was a deathbed confession. That now you feel better.”
    “Is that what you think? No, boy. You’re provided for. I had to provide for my godson. What they’re getting is money, but it won’t come to even a quarter million apiece. I’m leaving you something more valuable.”
    He went to the Wharton School of Business. What, he wondered—he multiplied by eighteen, he added a million—was more valuable than five and a half million dollars?
    “Don’t you want to know?”
    “Well, yes, I—”
    “I’m leaving you the prime interest rate.”
    “The what?”
    “You go to Wharton. The prime rate. The rate of interest a bank charges its best customers. I’ve made out my will. It’s all there. Loans from my bank at the prime rate, whatever it is on the day of my death, and no matter how high it climbs afterward, the loan or loans outstanding never at any time to exceed the value of the money left to any one of my surviving children, the principal and interest to be guaranteed by them on a pro-rated basis up to and until your first bankruptcy. The only restrictive stipulation I’m putting on you is that whatever monies you borrow have to be invested in businesses. No shows. I’ve seen too many angels bust their wings backing the wrong shows. The kids know all about it and they agree. Ben, Godson, that’s your edge. There’s your advantage. The world is all before you, kid. Not money but the use of money! I know you can’t take it all in right now, but let me tell you, it’s the best thing I could have done for you.”
    As a matter of fact he did take it all in. It was like a letter of credit. This was the postwar world. Opportunity flourished everywhere. He went to Wharton. He would graduate in a year. Academically at least he would know the ropes. A foundation was being laid here. His eyes were wet with grief for his godfather and with a sense of the significance the man’s gesture meant for himself. Slowly he raised himself from the chair in which he was sitting and slowly gathered pieces of the plastic tent in his hand and bent down and leaned in, pulling it over his head as he would a sweater. He kissed his godfather, Julius Finsberg. The old man’s eyes were wet. Ben felt a draft. It was the oxygen.
    “Listen, you son of a bitch,” his godfather said, “you study hard at Wharton. You’re just godblood. I don’t want you sticking my kids with a bankruptcy from some half-assed investment. Study hard. Promise me.”
    “I promise,” he said.
    Then his godfather said something Ben had difficulty understanding.
    “What’s that, Godfather?” he asked gently.
    “I said,” his godfather said, “that in that case you have a friend at Chase Manhattan.” And then he died. The prime rate was 1.45 percent on commercial paper on four-to-six-month loans.
    Let Forbes and Fortune put that in their pipes and smoke it!
    So much, he thought,