The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin Page B

mother,” he told an old woman who held her arms out to Luis. He climbed down from the stage and began to move people around like a chess master playing several games at once. He pulled them to him in pairs, holding them by their wrists as if he would force them to shake, like a peacemaker, he thought, like love’s policeman.
    “Fred Astaire sent me,” he whispered. “I’m this social traffic cop.” He moved among them and started them dancing like a spinner of plates on sticks in nightclubs. “Good,” he said, “good, good.”
    He scrambled back up on the stage, powdering his tuxedo trousers with paw prints of dust. He loosened his tie. “Caveat emptor,” he crooned. “This is only the fabulous introductory offer. It’s going to cost you. What, you think it’s cheap to throw the sheets over modern times while the owners are away? You think illusion is free, buddies? This shipboard ideal we make here, this Queen Mary ambience? I got a shine on my shoes it cost me two dollars. You want to see real stars, go to the country, look up, get a stiff neck. Ours have six points and you can reach out and touch them on the walls—convenience, convenience—like the astronomy decor in airplanes. Come, come, we’ll lie together in the time machine. When 1933 comes we’ll Carioca down Main Street, everybody do the Varsity Drag. We’ll Beer-Barrel Polka in the high-rent district and nobody leaves till he does the Continental!”
    He explained the rates to them. The music was “Fascinating Rhythm.” He told them it would cost them thirty dollars an hour and that they had to sign up for a minimum of twenty-five hours. Calmly he explained that it was cheaper than psychoanalysis. They were dancing now. The song was “But Beautiful,” then “Dancing in the Dark.” If they thought the thirty an hour was stiff, he said, they should understand that a lot of the fee went into outings and galas like this one and that, if they chose, they could take up to ten of their hours with a private instructor, with Luis or Al, with Miss Jenny, Miss Hope, or Miss Clara.
    “These aren’t bimbos,” he said while the stereo played “Dream.” “These are accredited people. Most of my people trained with Alex Moore’s International Society of Dance Instructors. Al and Miss Clara are two-time winners of the New York Daily News Harvest Moon Ball, the third jewel in dancing’s triple crown.”
    The song was “Flat Foot Floogie” and several dropped out. They chewed his sandwiches and he made them a solemn promise. It was a tradition in ballroom instruction that an hour was only fifty minutes. Fred had authorized him to throw back the missing ten minutes into each hour. Did they have any idea, he wondered, how much of a leg up—he laughed delicately at his joke—that would give them on the Arthur Murray people? That was four hours and ten minutes of additional instruction. If they applied themselves they would run the Arthur Murray people off the floor. It was better than a hundred-and-twenty-dollar rebate. He didn’t understand how Fred could do it, but there it was. They danced to “Happy Days Are Here Again” and ate egg rolls from Don the Beachcomber. They moved over fallen hors d’oeuvres, stepping on the soft crusts and squashing them like bugs. Bits of pork and rice, of shrimp, chunks of chicken exploded like delicious gut under their weight. Dark sauces thick as blood stained the dance floor. He told them about “Recreation, companionship, instruction, and therapy.” That was their motto, he said. He told them they must understand that there was nothing authoritarian in the word “instruction.” If others he could name didn’t, the Fred Astaire people believed in freedom of individual expression. He saw, he said, in the movements of his black friend, a potential for the strong, masculine rhythms of Chassidic dancing. If that’s where the man’s talents lay he knew a rabbi in Skokie—They were dancing now with their