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with me.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Let’s hear it for the breakfast.”
    “For the breakfast. Thank you.”
    “And the lessons I taught you about life.”
    “What were those?”
    “What, you forgot?”
    “You didn’t say much.”
    “You weren’t paying attention. What about those twenty-five miles? They were the first lesson. The second was that opportunity strikes once. I want you to know something. Never forget this. You blew it, you fucked up. I was prepared, such was my mood, to make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins franchise in the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. If you knew shit about locations you’d know that that’s the flagship of the chain in Kansas City, the crème de la crème, we’re making it a flavor. I want you to know I trusted you. I would have given you ice-cream lessons. And here’s the part I hope eats your heart out. I still trust you. I am an equal-opportunity employer, your putzship, and all there was to it was for you to say the word. Not saying the word cost you about $30,000 a year. In the neighborhood of. I want you to know that the word was yes. I want you to know that the word is always ‘yes.’ ”
    “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