“I’m stuffed. I just want coffee.”
The Colonel took a Bull Durham pouch from a pocket inside his jacket and, opening it, pulled out two Russian cigarettes and offered one to Ben. “Light the holler.”
“They’re strong.”
“Shh,” Colonel Sanders said. “Quieten down. Let’s just set.”
Over their coffee, through the thin smoke of their Sobranies, Flesh studied the man.
“Can’t get over it, can you?”
“Get over—?”
“Me. My cheeks are thinner in person. The cartoon features? Air-brushed. My flush? Pancake powder. A character actor would spot it in a minute. ‘Number five,’ he’d say. Yes and you know my best feature, kid? My lap. We built everything up from that foundation. Oh, my footlight being, my proscenium presence. You shocked, sonny? No no, kid. Roosevelt never stood and Lenin and Trotsky turned a mustache and a beard into history. French barbers made the Commie revolution. Image. You got about as much image as a shoe salesman. You could buy up all the franchises in the world, but you ain’t got the face for a billboard. Jesus, son, you haven’t the face for nothing your own. You’re growing dim. You’re fading on me. Get into the disappearing-ink trade, that’s my advice. What you up to? Why’d you come for me?”
“I was drawn,” he said. “I am hypnotized by a trademark.”
They stopped at the Colonel’s suite in the Pierre. Flesh waited in the living room while Sanders changed.
“There, that’s better,” the chicken prince said coming out of his dressing room. “Had to get out of that damn suit. ’Nother ten minutes inside that thing I’d feel like a great big damn sideline, like I was rolled in lime.” He had changed to a light-brown pin-stripe and there was a Windsor knot in his tie. “How you like that? How I look?”
“Fine,” Ben said.
“Yeah. Want to walk up to the Frick, or we could do the Metropolitan? It’s two years since I’ve seen the Rembrandts.”
“I thought we might go up to Riverdale.”
“That a sanatorium?” The Colonel laughed. “That’s some sanatorium and you got kin there. Old folks with long bony fingers. You powerful attracted to the aged, a lad your years.”
“No no,” Ben said. “It’s this residential section in the Bronx. You’ll like it.”
The twins and triplets were there. It was variously their Easter break, spring vacation, or Spring Clean-Up Week. Whether by accident or design, things had so worked out for the Finsberg stock that though they attended prep schools, colleges, universities, and graduate schools in different parts of the country, their vacations not only overlapped but actually meshed. It was as if Fieldston School, where all of them had attended high school and where Kitty and Sigmund-Rudolf were now seniors, was the Greenwich Mean Time of the academic year, its openings and ends of term and all holidays in between somehow a determinant chronometric pulse that radiated out to the two small liberal-arts colleges, three large state universities, and one important graduate school where the other twins and triplets were enrolled.
They looked more alike than ever. Audrey Hepburn’s boyish cut in Roman Holiday, though now two or three years past its universal modishness, was still popular with and suitable to the girls, and something in the genes of the boys — men now, some of them — had permanently waved their fine black hair so that it lay on their heads like loose bathing caps or visible turbulence. And, relaxed in sneakers and jeans on their holidays, in their white shirts loose over their trousers, the tall, rather powerfully built though flat-chested girls and young women were strikingly like their slim, somewhat stunted brothers. Also, they were of an age, seventeen the youngest, twenty-three the oldest, where all had reached their full height — five foot, ten inches. The girls’ low rich voices were identical in pitch to the slightly highish timbre of the young men’s.
“I’d like you to meet my godcousins,” Ben said to the Colonel. “Lotte, Ethel, and Mary; Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene; Gertrude, Kitty, and Helen, say hello. This is Cole, Oscar, Sigmund-Rudolf, Jerome, Lorenz, Noël, Irving, Gus-Ira, and Moss.”
“Jesus,” Colonel Sanders said.
“Gosh, Ben,” said Gus-Ira, “except for the suit, he looks just like Colonel Sanders.”
“He is Colonel Sanders,” Ben said.
“Is this a show?” the Colonel asked. “What are they?”
“They’re my guarantors, Colonel. They help with my businesses.”
“Are we going to have chicken from the Colonel, Ben?” young Sigmund-Rudolf asked.
“Are we, Ben?” chimed in Ethel, Cole, Noël, and LaVerne.
Sanders was a little nervous. “Hey,” he said, “hold up. You ain’t spuk to my people. You just don’t go up to the Colonel his own self and get you a franchise. There’s channels. How I know Riverdale is zoned for chicken?”
“Jeepers,” said Jerome, “were you thinking of putting it up in Riverdale, Ben? That’s a swell idea. The closest carry-out place is Fordham Road.”
“And that’s just chinks,” Patty said.
“They’re cold before you get them home,” Irving said angrily.
“Cold chinks. Yech,” Kitty said.
“Yech,” they all said, for they had identical tastebuds.
“Hold on,” Colonel Sanders objected.
“You know what I’m wondering?” Helen said.
“What’s that, Helen?” Ben asked. He knew them all, had never since he’d first met them and learned their names at their father’s funeral years before confused them. Not even Estelle, now a troubled woman of close to fifty, could keep them straight, but Ben knew, had always known, because he went instinctively beyond externals, penetrating even the subtle externals of twin and triplet character to something marked in them, as certain of their differences as a geologist of landscape, of fault, strata, and where the ice age stopped, hunching the mineral deposits, informed-guessing at the ores and oil fields, water-witching what was — forget age, forget sex, forget names even — the single distinctions, one from another, that they bore — their infirmities, their mortalities, distinct to him and strident as the graffiti of factions.
Each had told him — and he’d never forgotten; something perhaps in the pitch of the confession — his, her peculiar symptom. The Finsbergs, for all their money and education and charm, for all the chic victory of their urban good looks, for all their style and chipper well-heeled spirits, their flush wardrobes and Parisian French, their skill on skis, and their slope bright wools sharp as flares, for all their American blessings, were freaks, and carried in their bloodstreams and pee, in their saliva and fundament and the tracings of their flesh, all the freak’s ruined genetics, his terrible telegony and dark diathetics. It was Julius, set in his ways, throwing himself like an ocean into Estelle’s coves and kyles, till all that was left of his genes and chromosomes was the sheath, the thread of self like disappearing Cheshire garments resolved at last to their stitching. Obsessive, worn-out, he had made hemophiliacs of the self-contained and self-centered. Julius’s progeny — that queer wall of solidarity and appearance, that franchise of flesh — were husks, the chalices in which poisoners chucked their drops and powders.
“Pick me up,” little Gertrude had said to him when she was only eleven, “try to lift me.”
“Why? What for?”
“I bet you can’t,” she said.
“Of course I can.”
“Then prove it. Try to pick me up.”
He moved behind her, put his arms around her slender waist, and strained backward. He couldn’t budge her. Gertrude laughed. “Come on, it’s a trick,” he said. “What is it?”