“Gee, Ben,” Lorenz said, “that’s a hell of a thing to say. I mean, why do you want to talk like that? Die, lie with us? I mean, what kind of crap is that supposed to be? You’ll dance on our graves.”
“Like Fred Astaire,” Ben said.
“Come on, what’s this horseshit?” Oscar said.
“I have no place to go,” Ben wailed. “I understood your questions about business. I know my name isn’t Finsberg. I know you’re troubled by the prime rates, what your dad did. His putting you under an obligation to me. You don’t have to worry about that. — I’d buy the plot. — I’d pay whatever…You guys are in my will. My sister is. I’m closer to you. My parents are under the ground in Chicago. I’ve known you longer. I could make it a condition of my will. I wouldn’t do that. Why do I say a thing like that? You’ll get the money anyway. I swear to you. I just thought—”
“Don’t be so damned morbid,” Gus-Ira said irritably. “What’s this talk about dying? What’s this horseshit about burials?”
“I want you to promise,” Ben said. “What about it?”
“Once you’re dead what difference does it make?” Noël said. “I don’t see what difference it makes. I mean, I don’t care. They can burn me for all I care. Maybe I’ll give my body to science. What are you worried about? Once you’re—”
“What about it?” Ben demanded.
“Well, it’s just that this isn’t the time,” Moss said quietly.
“For Christ’s sake,” Patty said, “the Finsberg plot’s big as a fucking football field. Lie with me.”
“Patty,” LaVerne said.
“He lies with me,” Patty said. “That’s a good idea. I want that,” Patty said. “Lie with me. Ben lies with me. You got that? You got that, you sons of bitches?” she screamed at her brothers. She took Ben’s hand. He said something she couldn’t make out. “What? What’s that?”
“I said,” he said, “I want to talk business. I’m no businessman, but I know all there is to know. I want you to know, too. I’m talking to you, Noël. I’m talking to Cole and Gus-Ira and Oscar and Sigmund-Rudolf and Moss and Lorenz. You, Jerome, I’m talking to you. Because I see what it is here. Lotte’s dead — Estelle. I see what it is here. The men have the votes.”
“The votes,” Sigmund-Rudolf said, “oh, please.”
“The men have the votes,” Ben said. “I’m answerable to the corporation. All right. You want to know about business? You want to be filled in, I’ll fill you in. The economy. All right. The energy crisis…There isn’t enough.”
“Come on, Ben,” Lorenz said.
“I’m talking energy,” Ben said. “There isn’t enough. There isn’t enough in the world to run the world. There never was. How could there be? The world is a miracle, history’s and the universe’s long shot. It runs uphill. It’s a miracle. Drive up and down in it as I do. Look close at it. See its moving parts, its cranes and car parks and theater districts. It can’t be. It could never have happened. It’s a miracle. I see it but I don’t believe it. The housing projects, for God’s sake, the trolley tracks and side streets, all the equipment on runways, all the crap on docks. Refineries, containers for oil, water tanks on their high tees like immense golf balls. The complicated ports with their forklift trucks and winches. All the hawsers, tackle, sheets, and guys. All the braided, complex cable. All the gantry, all the plinth. The jacks and struts all the. The planet’s rigging like knots in shoes. The joists and girders, trivets, chocks. Oh, oh, the unleavened world. Groan and groan against the gravity in stuff. How’s business? How’s dead weight? Archimedes, thou shouldst be living at this hour! How do we handle the barbell earth? With levers and pulleys and derricks and hoists. With bucket brigades of Egyptian Jews tossing up pyramids stone by stone. How’s business? They’re not hiring in Stonehenge, they’re laying them off in the Easter Isles. How’s industry? Very heavy.
“Where shall we get the churches, how shall we have the money for the schools and the symphonies and stadia, for the sweet water and railroads, all the civilized up-front vigorish that attracts industry and pulls the big money?
“It ain’t in me. I couldn’t have made the world. I couldn’t have imagined it. My God, I can barely live in it.
“Though it may be a franchiser, I think, who’ll save us. Kiss off the neighborhood grocers and corner druggists and little shoemakers. A franchiser. Yes. Speaking some Esperanto of simple need, answering appetite with convenience foods. Some Howard Johnson yet to be.
“But I don’t know. There isn’t enough energy to drive my body. How can there be enough to run Akron?”
“Oh, Ben.”
“But I may lie with you? You heard her, Cole; you’re a witness, Lorenz. I may tuck in with Patty. I have her word.”
“You have her word,” one of them said.
“What’s all this shit about dying?” Ben said. “For God’s sake, cheer up, we’re going to an unveiling.”
They did not withdraw their pledge, their father’s pledge, to guarantee the prime rate. Though he had to pledge not to test them — in truth, he had rarely done so, except at the beginning — and when he left Riverdale nothing had really changed. Though he knew he had been given warning, was on notice, posted ground, thin ice. The boys had the votes.
2
He resumed his tour, his businessman’s Grand Rounds. From Oklahoma City he went to Amarillo, Texas, from Amarillo to Gallup, New Mexico, and then to Albuquerque. He did Salt Lake City and Elko, Nevada (where he made a two-hundred-mile dogleg to Boise to trade in his car for a ’75), and pushed on, Cadillac West, to Sacramento, California. Up through Oregon he traveled — Eugene, Portland — and climbing Washington — Seattle, Bellingham. Resting there, breathless, slouching along the broken coastline’s broken jaw like the underedge of a key. It was now high summer.
Never, having told the Finsbergs that he was no businessman, was he one more consummately. At a time when the country was dragging the river for its economy, when inflation and stagflation and depression were general, he calmly carried on his shuttle finance.
Nor am I talking merely about money now. For if I told the Finsbergs that I was no businessman, at least one of the things I meant was that it was money I had never properly understood. By which I mean coveted in sums large enough to make a difference. By which I mean rich. By which I mean so many things: seeking the tax shelters like lost caves, Northwest Passage, the hidden, swift currents, all those fiscal Gulf Streams that warm the cold places and make fools of the latitudes, topsy-turvying climate with the palm trees of Dublin and Vancouver’s moderated winters. Swiss banking my currency, anonymating it behind the peculiar laws of foreign government. Hedging against inflation with diamonds, gold, pictures, land. Seeking hobby farms or going where the subsidies were, the depletion allowances, all loophole’s vested, venerable kickbacks. Though I am not disparaging, have never disparaged, the value of money and understand full well, understand with the best of them — the richest and poorest — that peculiar sensation of loss and even insult concomitant with — not picking up checks; that’s never bothered me; no, nor getting stuck with the bad end of an unequal division, paying for wine I didn’t drink, splitting down the middle the cost of appetizers or desserts I never ordered, the lion’s share of the food going to the couple I am with (I am alone) but paying anyway, dollar for dollar, as if what is being paid for is a wedding gift one goes in on with a pal or a present for a secretary in the office, say, who’s going to Europe for the first time; and not even purchase, springing for an admired but overpriced jacket or shirt, yet feeling anyway because I do admire it, that I have gotten the best of it somehow, have only given money and gotten goods, fabric — the leakage of money: the terrible disruption of sensibility if, in a taxi, in the dark I have mistaken a ten for a five or a five for a single. Or breaking a fifty or even a twenty, disturbing the high, powerful round numbers of currency, and feeling actually wounded, or at least unpleasantly moved, irritated, insulted, as I say, suffering inordinately, as if from a paper cut or a chip of live cigarette dropped on my skin. Mourning like God my lost black-sheep bucks. Getting nothing for something’s what’s terrible. Misplacing change or not being able to account for twelve dollars which I knew I had. Oh awful, awful. Ruined, wiped out. A hole in my substance.