“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 of bits of gossip learned about himself in rare letters exchanged with his own father, Julius’s ex-partner. They’d known, for example, that he’d been drafted, knew where he took his basic training, were quite up to date in fact with his comings and goings, even things about his studies at Wharton.
“How could you know stuff like that?” he asked Patty, La Verne, and Maxene. “My father was already dead when I entered college.”
“Your sister,” Cole said.
“That’s right,” said Oscar. “Father corresponded with your sister after your parents were killed in the auto wreck.”
“I don’t understand,” Ben said. “What about my sister? I mean, I know how he wanted a son or a daughter. Why didn’t he take an interest in my sister?”
“That’s easy,” Ethel said, “Dad wasn’t your sister’s godfather.”
“It wasn’t the same,” Lorenz said. “Do you think it was the same, Jerome?”
“No,” said Jerome.
“Neither do we,” said Irving and Noël.
“He used to tell us,” Ethel said, “he didn’t give a shit about your sister.”
“Didn’t you resent me?”
“Not for a minute,” Gertrude said.
“I know I didn’t,” Kitty told him. “When I learned you’d been a serviceman, I hung up a little blue star for you in my bedroom window. This was after you’d already been discharged.”
“There was a Wharton Business School pennant above my dresser,” Lorenz said.
“We wanted what Father wanted,” said Helen.
“A change,” said Sigmund-Rudolf.
“That’s it,” said Mary.
“A different face like,” Moss said.
“You’re one of us now,” Gus-Ira said.
“All for one and one for all,” said Lotte.
They took him up.
The Finsbergs were a close-knit family, and since no car ever built could possibly have held them all, after the war Julius had purchased one of the first new city buses that came off the assembly line. On one side of the bus was a picture of a redbud and, on the other, sprigs of mistletoe. On the rear there was an immense scissor-tailed flycatcher, the representations painted against a background of blue, white, olive, green, wine, and a sort of reddish mud. These were the official emblems and colors of the state of Oklahoma, the show Julius liked to think had paid for it. They kept the bus in the driveway of their large house in Riverdale. Julius had never learned to drive and none of the children was old enough. Only the hoofer — Estelle — could drive it, but now that Julius was dead she no longer had the heart.
One day during the week of mourning Estelle came up to Ben. “After this is over,” she said, “the children would like to go on a trip. They thought you might take them in the bus.”
“I don’t think I can drive a bus.”
“Why not? It’s the same principle as the deuce and a half. You were in the motor pool.”
“You know about the motor pool?”
Ben took them to Jersey.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Ethel said.
“Mother never took us this far,” Cole said.
“We never left the Bronx,” said La Verne.
“Oh, Ben,” said Lotte, “it’s really marvelous. It’s like a picnic. Let’s have a picnic. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“I’d like some ice cream,” said Oscar. “Ben, may we stop for ice cream? Please, let’s.”
“Yes, Ben, yes,” said the others happily. “Oh, Ben, please,” they said.
“Ice cream would be just the thing,” Lorenz said seriously. “We could buy our cones and eat them in the bus.”
For all that he knew how they liked him, he was not really sure where he stood with them. Though they told him they looked on him as one of the family — wasn’t he in Daddy’s will? — the fact was that he had become a sort of factotum to the Finsbergs. He had gone with Estelle to help pick out the casket and had ended up making nearly all the decisions and arrangements for the funeral. (He soon discovered that except for the enormous immediate family Julius had propagated, there was no other, no surviving brother or sister, no cousin or uncle or aunt. Estelle herself was as bereft of relations as Julius.) Now he had become the children’s chauffeur. He felt in camp-counselor nexus to them and the truth was they frightened him a little. Being left the prime interest rate was very complicated and he was unsure of what his guarantors would and would not stand for.
So he took what had been their request for ice cream as a kind of polite command.
“Ice cream, ice cream,” they chanted.
“All right,” Ben said.
He drove west on Route 4 and within five minutes he spotted the bright-orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s. He stopped the bus and the twins and triplets jumped out excitedly. “Oh, isn’t this grand?” they said when they were inside and ordering their cones. They had never seen so many flavors.
“Look, Ben,” Mary said, “it says they have twenty-eight flavors.” The triplets all ordered triple scoops and the twins double. They ordered all the flavors and each had a lick of every flavor. They bought Ben a single scoop of vanilla.