“I still don’t see—”
“Well, hell, I’m no Simon Legree, but I didn’t have much desire to hang around Jackson, Mississippi, all weekend until business hours on Monday, so I asked my manager — his name was Paul — I asked Paul if he couldn’t meet me at the plant after the party on Saturday. That way we could do our business and I could be out of there and back on the road, drive all day Sunday and make my next call Monday morning in Atlanta.”
“But he expected you Friday. I mean, Saturday was his day off. He didn’t know you were going to have trouble with your car. He’d told his wife—”
“Wait. I didn’t care about that. Neither did he. He was willing to meet me after the party.”
“Then—”
“The kid’s birthday wasn’t for two weeks yet. Thursday or Friday or something of the week following the next one.”
“Mothers often…They don’t always make the party on the exact day that—”
“They were starting their vacation on Sunday.”
“Sunday?”
“The Sunday following the party.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“They were driving to relatives who had a cabin on a lake in Door County, Wisconsin. Paul told me that. I remember his saying that.”
“I still—”
“His wife could have given the birthday party after they came back. It would have been closer to the actual birthday. Paul told me that, too.”
“Really, Ben—”
“She wanted the kid to have the presents.”
“So?”
“So he’d have things to play with in the car!”
Patty was silent. “That’s selfish,” she said finally.
“It’s wondrous selfish.”
He closed his eyes. “Ben,” Patty said, “you mustn’t fall asleep. We really would be in trouble if we fell asleep. We really could get killed up here.”
“I know a man who,” Ben said, “I knew a woman that…There was this fellow that…”
“Ben—”
“…had franchises. — Yeah? — Yes. He bought and sold franchises. He had maybe twenty, twenty-five franchises in his career. He was this small businessman with lots of small businesses. He had a hand in making America look like America. — I don’t get it, what about him? — Him? Not much. He knew these Finsbergs. — The freaks? — Yes. — But what about him? — He once heard about a farm woman who got up every morning at six-thirty to watch Sunrise Semester. She watched programs about American history, Italian literature, about Freud, art history, archaeology, the history of journalism. She watched it all. The French Symbolist poets. Whatever. She thought the professors were preachers. — Preachers? — Because they always held a book! She was
wondrous ignorant. He didn’t know her, he’d only heard about her, but he had it on good authority, so you can be sure there really was such a woman so marvelous ignorant, so spectacular naïve. — Does it count if he never met her? — It has to. — Why? — Because he has to use everything he’s got. Because otherwise… — What otherwise? — Never mind, don’t get personal. — I was only asking. — I know, and I’d help you out if I could. It’s what they all say, of course, but I really would. I’d tell you about his lousy life expectancy. I’d tell you about his sister. — What about his sister? — Well, this guy, this franchiser, had a sister, has a sister. — Yes? — She lives in Maine. Outside Waterville. Her husband works for Colby College as a professional fund raiser. — That’s nice. That must be interesting work. — He has no franchises in Maine. They don’t see each other much. The sister’s barren and, he gathers, the guy, the franchiser, that it’s sort of, well, made her, well, very unhappy. I know what you’re going to say, that they could adopt, but for a long time they didn’t really want kids and now that they do, when they did, it was too late. She’s in her fifties. His sister is in her fifties. The agencies don’t like to give women that age…The husband wasn’t doing too good. It was during the Vietnam war. The kids were acting up, trashing buildings, rioting. People didn’t want to give money to a school where kids behaved like that. — But they all behaved like that back then. — People don’t like to give their money away. The husband wasn’t doing too good, too well. Colby’s kind of a small place. No government contracts. No state support. It depends upon alumni gifts. — Yes? — The husband wasn’t doing too well. I don’t remember now how he got into fund raising. Yes I do. He used to be a social worker. That’s the ironic part. He used to be a social worker in Chicago, where the franchiser’s sister lived. — This is an awfully long story. — Not so long. Hang in there. He’d been a social worker. With the agencies. ADC. HEW. HUD. All those letters. He had an in with the adoption agencies. He could have had all the kids he wanted. He could have picked them up in the Delivery Room. But they didn’t want kids back then. At least the sister didn’t. She was jealous, well, envious, of her brother. She thought he lived kind of an exciting life. He had all these franchises and he was always on the go. He didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t an exciting life, but that’s what she thought. She wanted to live an exciting life, too. On a social worker’s salary. They don’t make much, you know. — I’ve heard that. — So she worked, too. She saved. They went to Europe on their vacations. To Hawaii. After they’d been to Europe about a half dozen times, after they’d been to Hawaii, she got it in her mind that she really ought to go to school. That if she were educated, maybe then her life would be more exciting. She put herself through college. She was already in her thirties. She majored in — get this — Oriental Studies. Learned Japanese. Took an M.A. in Japanese. So she had this M.A. and would have gone on for the Ph.D. but their savings were all used up and anyway her adviser didn’t think she was good enough for the doctorate. They gave her what they called a ‘terminal M.A.’ Funny name. — I still think it’s a long story. — She was very disappointed and figured she was all washed up in the life-can-be-interesting department. This is when her husband heard about this fund-raising position in Maine. He’d been giving away money and food stamps and stuff all his professional life and he figured that if he was good enough to give it away, then he was good enough to collect it, too. So he asked his wife about it and she was anxious to get out of Chicago anyway because by now all the people she knew that she’d gone to graduate school with had either earned their Ph.D.’s or were writing their dissertations and she felt sort of funny about being around them. You know? — Sure. — But by this time it really was too late for them to adopt, even if she had had the energy. Which she didn’t, hadn’t. For she was worn down to the nub with all that trying to make her life interesting. — I see. — Yes. So he was very serious about the job and when the people at Colby thought there just might be a position for the franchiser’s sister in the Comp. Lit. department, that really reinforced their decision to go. — Did she get the job? — The sister? Yes. She taught Japanese literature in translation. — Well then. — She was a lousy Japanese-literature-in-translation teacher. After three years they decided to drop her. She was pretty good in Japanese itself, but they didn’t offer a course in that. Well, they had some friends in the college but mostly they were what her husband brought in, his colleagues, people in the Bursar’s Office, in Admissions, not the faculty itself. That crowd. — Oh.—And just about when the guy was running out of ways to write up proposals and get grants from the government, Vietnam came along and the kids acted up and the alums had a good excuse to stop giving. To make a long story short… — You said it wasn’t long. — I had to say that. It was a white lie. To make a long story short, it looked like the guy was going to lose his job. — Really? — Yeah. — Well, what about the franchiser? — Oh, him. Well, he waited until the last minute. — And? — He gave his brother-in-law $100,000 for Colby College so they would keep him on.”