“Oh, look,” said little ten-year-old Sigmund-Rudolf, pointing to the logo on the wide mirror behind the counter, “see the funny man. That’s Simple Simon.”
“Yes,” said Kitty, who was eleven, “and the man in the chef’s hat, he must be the pieman. Is he, Ben? Is he?”
People were staring at the strange group.
“Yes,” Ben said. “Come on, kids, why don’t we finish our cones in the bus like Lorenz said we should?”
They got back into the bus and Ben drove on. They turned off Route 4 and onto Route 17.
“Gosh, Ben,” Oscar said, “look. There’s that same ice-cream parlor. We must be going in circles. Are we lost?” he asked worriedly.
“Are we, Ben?” Patty said.
“No,” Ben said, “that’s just another Howard Johnson’s.”
On the Hamburg Turnpike Gertrude spotted a third and outside Paterson Jerome saw a fourth.
After that they decided that the first one to see the next orange roof and little turquoise tower of a Howard Johnson’s would be the winner and would get a wish. Ben zigzagged through the New Jersey countryside. It was getting late and he started to look for signs to the George Washington Bridge.
He followed Saddle River Road, left it, and came to Route 23. Just after they passed “Two Guys,” Lotte, who was sitting right behind the driver’s seat, jumped up. “I see one, I see one!” she shrieked.
“Where?” screamed Noël.
“Where, where?” Irving shouted.
Ben almost lost control of the bus.
“There. Right there,” Lotte yelled.
“She’s right,” the kids agreed.
“Oh, Ben,” she called in his ear, “I get a wish, I get a wish.”
“Gosh,” they all said as they passed by Howard Johnson’s. “Will you just look at that?” “Golly,” said some of the twins. “Boy,” chorused Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene.
“I get my wish,” Lotte said. “I wish—”
“Don’t tell your wish or it won’t come true,” Ben said.
“But, Ben, I have to. Otherwise it can’t come true.”
“I don’t figure that,” Ben said.
“Well, remember how you told us that Howard Johnson’s was a — what did you say? — a chain?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I wish that you would use your prime interest rate to buy one.”
“But why?” Ben said. “Why are you all so excited about a restaurant? You can have ice cream whenever you want.”
“It isn’t the ice cream,” Jerome said.
“Of course not,” said Noël.
“It isn’t the ice cream, silly,” Helen said.
“No,” said Cole and Ethel.
“Well, what is it then?”
“Don’t you see?” Irving asked. “Don’t you understand?”
“What? Don’t I see what? What don’t I understand?”
“That those places,” Lorenz said,
“they’re—” said Jerome and Mary,
“—all the SAME,” said Sigmund-Rudolf and Gertrude and Moss.
“Just—” Gus-Ira said
“—like us!” said they all.
“And that, Buster, is the true story of how I got into the franchise business,” Ben told the hitchhiker.
“What?” He’d been sleeping.
“I was telling you how the pig got its curly tail. Oh, these origins, my pupick pasts and golden bough beginnings. Sleep, kid, sleep. I was only muttering my mythics and metamythics, godfairies spitting in my cradle, spraying spell, hacking their juicy oysters of fate in my puss.”
He had said “chain.” He had assumed that a man named Howard Johnson made ice creams, an ice-cream scientist, someone with a visionary sweet tooth, a chemist of fruits and candies, a larky alchemist who reduced the tangerine and the mango, the maple and marzipan to their essences, who could, if he wished, divide the flavor of the tomato and the sweet potato from themselves, a tinkerer in nature who might reproduce the savor of gold, the taste of cigarette smoke. He knew there was a Ford, thought there was probably a Buick and a Studebaker. He believed in the existence of a Mr. Westinghouse. Remington, Maytag, Amana, and the Smith brothers were real to him as film stars or the leaders of his country. He could believe, that is, in the existence of millionaires, men with a good thing going, who knew their way around a patent and held on like hell. Indeed, this was one of the things that had determined him to study shorthand and typing and bookkeeping at the Wharton School.He had no good thing of his own and had believed that the best thing for him would be to place himself in the service of those who had. One of the things he could not imagine once he came to understand the inevitability of death — this would have been at around two and a half — was how he would be able to support himself when his father died. He had no skill with the pencil or the needle, and though he tried — summer vacations, Christmas holidays — to apprentice himself to the designer and even the cutter and tailor in his dad’s costume business in Chicago, smaller than even the partnership in New York before its dissolution — they made tutus, leotards for ballet academies, costumes for high-school musicals, and had a tiny share of the public-school graduation-gown market — he was, boss’s son or no boss’s son, always rebuffed, reduced to running errands, delivering merchandise. They had no patience with him. Schmerler, his father’s tailor, thought he was a pain in the ass. “Gay avec,” he’d tell him, “you’re an American. What do you want? Look at my eyeglasses, thick as a slice of bread. Lift them, they weigh a pound. They break pieces off my nose and tear my ears. This is something an American boy should want? Unheard of. Go to the cutter. Ask him to shake hands. Count his fingers.” And one time when he’d been after Schmerler to show him how to use the Singer — he thought there was a Singer — the man had turned on him angrily. “Did you ever? What’s the matter, you got your eye on your own little place in Latvia? Go away, leave me alone, study bubble-gum cards, learn what the different cars look like, do their dances, eat hot dogs at the ball park, drink Coca-Cola, and make a taste in your mouth for beer.” And, when he insisted, Schmerler had handed him a sewing needle. “Stick me,” he said. He held up the forefinger of his left hand.
“What?”
“Stick me here.”
“What for? No.”
“Baby. Pants pisher.” He grabbed the needle from the boy and plunged it into his finger. He drew no blood. “You see? Nothing’s there. The blood’s all gone. My blood knows I’m a tailor. It left for other parts. The finger’s cold, the hand. There’s no more circulation. I wear fur gloves in the summer on the Sixty-third Street beach.” Then he drew the boy to him. “You know what, Benny? I only wish my kids loved me a tenth what you love Dad.”
But it wasn’t what Schmerler thought, and though he loved his father well enough, it was something else entirely which drove him to seek information about the business. It was his knowledge that his father would die. It wasn’t to his father that Ben went, but always to Schmerler or to Kraft, the cutter, or to Mrs. Lenzla, the designer. In the shop he avoided his father as much as possible for fear that he might blurt out why it was so important for him to learn the business, accusing the man of his death, slapping his face with it. And this lonely fear persisted. He simply could not imagine how he would support himself. Even in high school, where he did well, working hard in the hope that something would come up, some talent he had not known about might emerge, articulating itself like a print in the photographer’s bath — the fear of his future persisted. He made good grades, was often on the Honor Roll. He went out for the drama club, won a good part in the school play, was accepted in the chorus, made the football team, worked for the paper, was given a by-line, each success frightful to him, taking no encouragement from any of them because all it meant was that he was equally good in all things, that he had no one calling, and then, realizing this, going the other way, not working hard at all, actually hoping to fail, but still discouraged because though his grades went down they went down uniformly and he was benched the same day that his by-line was taken away and his column assigned to someone else, and within a week to the day that the choral director, Mr. Sansoni, shifted him from the tenor section to the baritone, where his voice might be swallowed up in the greater number.