“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t believe what? What don’t you believe?”
“That you’d give a job like that to a stranger.”
“Of course I wouldn’t give a job like that to a stranger. Who mentioned strangers? It was what you said about salesmen having to come up that street. I figured you for a kid with a head on his shoulders.”
He came a little closer.
“No,” I said. “Stay where you are. You’re all washed up in the ice-cream business. You won’t ever understand this next part, but it’s the truth, real as my Cadillac. I’m a benefactee. A benefactee benefacts. That’s the tradition. That’s fitting. I went to Wharton. Books must balance. You could have gotten me off the hook but you blew it. You want a ride? You are no longer in the running upward-mobilitywise, but it’s starting to rain and if you want a ride I’ll give you one.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“In the back seat,” Ben told him. “I don’t care for your dirty aspersions. You’re too suspicious to hitchhike.”
When they were on their way Ben told him about his cousins. He knew what the young man didn’t, that the boy was entitled to the story. Since he had disinherited him, obligations had been created. Legally the kid was entitled to nothing, but Ben felt bad about this. The boy, a guest in his Cadillac, was already out $30,000. Ben owed him something.
“This is the true story,” he began, “of Julius and Estelle Finsberg’s children, my godcousins, or ‘How I Got to Play the Palace.’
“Julius Finsberg was a bachelor almost all his life. He didn’t marry until he was past fifty. He was, at that age, settled, a man of habits deep as grain. As I reconstruct it, nothing ever happened to him. He was that rare being in our go-getting country, a man whose life had never been touched by our public events, whose convictions had never been nudged, shoved neither north by northwest by war nor south by southeast by peace. He would already have been thirty-eight in the First War, too old by a whisker for conscription. And forty-nine in 1929, the prime of life for a man in a small sedentary theatrical costume business, a business almost impossible to wipe out in a Depression, for everyone knows there’s no business like show business and the show must go on. He was a paradigm for a man. I mean, he might have served as a model for the uncontingent life, a man who would probably have got by in any century. And that’s significant, too. Born in one century, he died in another. We think of such men as respectable, responsible. They are the average from whom we get our notions of tone, our ideas of stability. Consider, for example, the year of Finsberg’s birth—1880. By the time he came to awareness photography was an established fact, trains, electric light, the telephone, automobiles. Even radio and aviation were in the air. He lived, that is, in conjunction with the incipiency of things, taking for granted all those objects and ideas that developed as he developed, in neck-and-neck relation to the world, so that he moved, or seemed to, as it moved, creating in him alphas of stability and settlement and an imagination which could take anything the world could dish out. He died in 1950 at threescore and ten, as if God Himself were an actuary.
“I said nothing ever happened to him, but that isn’t the same as saying he took no initiatives. He did. Falling in love in his fifties was an initiative. It must have seemed the oddest event in his life. Yet even then he lived with the incipiency of things. The love songs whistled and hummed and played on the pianos of Tin Pan Alley came into existence even as he overheard them, so living still in his Johnny-on-the-spot connection to the world, to the lyrics and melodies of songs not yet even copyrighted. And this is the point. Such a man, a man for whom there have been no surprises, when such a man is surprised, the surprise has got to be devastating. It gives him the tidal wave and sets him apart from himself, defying all his Geneva conventions. He’d been my father’s partner. My father spoke well of him. When Julius fell in love my father could not understand that Julius’s old loyalties and habits and routines were sabotaged, and never detected Julius Finsberg’s scorched-earth policy against the character and personality of Julius Finsberg. Julius’s love — a girl much younger, a hoofer — giving him ambitions, big ambitions, big ideas. So he cheated my father and went into business for himself. And this was part of his stability and honor, too, your man of fifty being no fool, understanding as well as any detached gossip that he could make no dowry of a body already almost used up, knowing he would have to offer such a girl door prizes of wealth, loss leaders of power and connection.
“Only there are no smooth revolutions. The habits and orthodoxies of a lifetime are not overturned in a minute. It was all very well to will my father harm, but another thing altogether to alter his flesh’s bone structure, its overbite and fingerprint and timbre.
“This is what happened. When he married his hoofer — it took him three years; he was fifty-three — he married self-consciously and slowly. Not only did he intend to take a wife, but to take a mother, to have sons, daughters, earnests to what I have called his orthodoxy, pawns to his respectability, and so I imagine that he fucked to conceive, willing his sperm home, body English on the tip of his prick, bobbing, weaving, dancing his gism up the hoofer’s alley like a bowler. She had triplets — daughters. But Julius wanted a son — a man wants a son; it was Julius who designed the costume for the male lead in Carousel, who, working from Hammerstein’s ‘My Boy Bill’ lyric, invented the big leather belt worn over the loops of the trousers like a rope, the woodsman’s checked shirt and cowboy’s bandanna, inventing all that tender denim swagger, symbols not of masculinity but of responsible tenor fatherhood — and again he fucked to conceive, his concentration in orgasm complete, all encompassing. He had twin boys and now had sons as well as daughters, but triplets, twins, embarrassments finally to a man his age. Where was the single son or individual daughter he had yearned for to make his normal life normal again? So again he took his hoofer to bed and again fucked only to conceive. Triplets. By this time he should have suspected, accepted. But he had been a bachelor for fifty-three years. He was set in his ways. He was passionate to father not crowds but an individual.
“Every time in the first seven years of his marriage he took the hoofer to bed he impregnated her, and every time she yielded triplets or twins. Triplets alternating with twins in the hoofer’s seven fat years. And I don’t think he had voluntarily surrendered his right to an individual son or individual daughter even then. But he was sixty now. It was his body that abandoned Julius Finsberg, not Julius Finsberg his body.
“My father had named him my godfather, yet it wasn’t until he knew he was dying that I heard from him. Nobody gives nothing for nothing. I was to be the individual son he had wanted all his life, so that when he died his eleventh-hour sponsorship of me became his last bid to recover the ordinary. In a way I was more godson to him — I the benefactor, you see, he the beneficiary — than he godfather to me.
“I went to his funeral. It was end of term and I had to ask my professors’ permission to put off my exams. I said my godfather had died. I told the truth. I admitted he was a man I barely knew. They would not recognize the connection. I told them I was in his will. I explained how he had left me the prime interest rate. This was the Wharton School of Business. This they could understand. They comforted me and told me I could take my exams whenever I felt sufficiently recovered.
“I went to the chapel where my godfather was laid out and approached the mourners’ bench. I introduced myself and offered my condolences. This was the first time I had even seen the mother, the hoofer, the first time I had ever seen — what’s the term I’m looking for? — the children? The triplets and twins? My godcousins? Godbrothers and godsisters? The siblings? No, this was a sibship. A Sixth Fleet of family. I think I backed off when I saw them. I know I rubbed my eyes. There were eighteen of them. Eighteen. Yes. Only seven years separated the oldest from the youngest. There were eighteen, nine boys and nine girls. Identical triplets, identical twins. But not just discretely identical, the part in each set identical to the other part or parts of the set, but identical to each other set, too, somehow equal to and collateral with the whole. Each girl slightly favoring the father and each boy the mother, so that even their sexual differences seemed to cancel out the very notion of difference, and they looked, the boys and the girls, like one person. Exactly like, because of the subtle distinctions in their sizes and ages — sixteen years old to ten — a single person caught between two opposing mirrors, each subsequent reflection a shade smaller in perspective.