On the train, which lurched past pillars and gum machines, I would stand on my tiptoes, trying to get hold of a subway strap.
“What if it happens that money was what they wanted in the first place?”
But Simone was much better at arguing than I; she enjoyed it for its own sake, and not even the end of a long day, a crowded train, or an upcoming midterm could stop her. What might do it, I knew, was to say, “What about the Prague Trials?” but since I did not actually know what they were, I decided not to try it. Besides, she was the only one in her family not born in France, she lived on the twelfth floor of a doorman building on Central Park West, she spelled her last name, Frydman, with a “y,” had an uncle who was a Communist representative in the French Chamber of Deputies, and her father, who was always taking business trips to Switzerland, could be found listed in the telephone book this way: Frydman Lucien…Imprt-Exprt. What he imported or exported I had no idea; altogether, it was a family of mystery. Once she told me that her father would have to stay in Milan for a few days because they had relatives there who were beginning to feel insulted.
“Milan, Italy?” I said. “How come you have relatives in Italy?”
“Oh, you know. Typical Yid story. They were hiding in a convent and now they’re very rich.”
It was not typical of anyone I knew, so that this sense of their glamour and mystery only deepened. In a way, what I found most mysterious and glamorous of all was that Simone lived in Manhattan, on a street whose name alone, I believed, existed solely for the purpose of certain Hollywood movies when it was necessary to show, through the flash of an awning and a lobby, or a doorman with a whistle at a cab, the backdrop of lives carried on in the ridiculous luxury of obvious make-believe.
This possible movie aspect of Simone occurred to me constantly when I talked to her or listened to her arguing, and made me feel that, in some way I did not understand, she was leading a secret life. If it was true about Simone, who was at least partially my friend, what about all the other girls in school whom I hardly even knew? I began to look for clues of secret lives in the way people braided their long hair or knotted their sandals and, gaining nothing from this but more confusion, turned to other sources.
“Why do you always wear black?” says the schoolmaster in The Seagull to Masha, a girl whose father is not rich, but manages anyway for her to be living in the middle of a big estate where there are plays at night.
“I am in mourning for my life,” Masha says, and continues to complain in this way, without ever really offering any decent explanation.
In my French class, a girl named Lucy Sperling told everyone that she had gone through her closet and thrown out all of her clothes except the ones that were black.
“My mother may kill me,” she said, “but I’m only going to wear black from now on.”
So Lucy Sperling was in mourning for her life. Why? You could never have known it from looking at her. It was another case of secret lives.
The guidance counselor, who was still intent on finding out mine, though it was obvious I didn’t have one, said, “How do you spend your time after school? Do you ever do any baby-sitting, for example?”
“Sometimes,” I said. From time to time, in my own building, I would baby-sit for people going out for Chinese food and the movies. After hysterical last-minute preparations, they would leave their bathed, whiny children, Marjorie Morningstar with a bookmark in it, and a blaring television. Out of boredom and disapproval, I had, for the most part, stopped doing it.
“The Marshaks always want one of our girls as their baby-sitter. Last year we gave them Erica Jaffe, but she graduated, and after that they went to Greece. Do you know who Ted Marshak is? Shall I give them your phone number?”
Did I know who Ted Marshak was? Was there any way I couldn’t? Aside from Kahlil Gibran and Jean Cocteau, he was one of the few writers anyone in school considered worth bothering about. What he was most famous for was a single very long poem called Knives. It was about a random knife murderer who takes joy from his work, but is then caught and imprisoned. He escapes from prison by making a knife out of something in his cell, and ends up by being in a traveling circus or carnival where he is known as “The Human Knife.” The book, in paperback, was carried around as a badge, and its beginning lines were memorized and quoted by everyone:
Knives!
Flashing highglint into soft
flesh And blood-
Slash
I cruise/
sluice through yr rivernights (my gore store)
No
end
end
red
en
Ded
“Ted Marshak, the poet?” I said.
“He’s much more than a poet—they’re extremely interesting people, the Marshaks. Erica Jaffe loved them. They live in Manhattan, though. Will the traveling bother you?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I take the subway all the time,” and being very careful to avoid Simone, I ran all the way down the hill. I was preparing for a brand-new decadence and the beginning of a secret life.
This is one of the places where the Marshaks lived: a gracious penthouse apartment splashed with all the moonlike winks rising off the New York skyline, vast, pale, painting-filled walls, rosy, expectant twilights echoing with the tinkle of laughter—muted laughter—due naturally to brilliant and witty jokes that were just being tossed off, and in the bathroom a glass-enclosed shower.
“I don’t think they will,” said Mrs. Marshak, “but just in case the kids get hungry, there’s some celery in the fridge.”
Except for the difference in coloring, Mrs. Marshak looked like a stalk of celery herself. Nothing moved in her face or her body as she talked, and even doing that, her mouth seemed to barely open. With her straight blond hair and loose, boyish boniness, she looked like a girl getting married in the Sunday Times. But most particularly what she looked like was a woman I had once seen in the elevator in Bonwit Teller’s. This woman, just as straight-limbed and angular-featured, was, it occurred to me when I saw her, what was called “horsey.” Whether this meant someone who rode horses or someone who looked like a horse, or even a person who because of too much horse-riding in the family had developed into this strange and specific but recognized mutation, I did not know. As it happened, the woman in the store was English. She was holding the hand of a handsome little boy of about four or five whom she had dressed in short pants and a blazer, and as they entered the elevator, she said to him in a clear, brisk English voice, “Caps off in lifts.”
“The baby-sitter’s here, Ted,” Mrs. Marshak called out, still slouching calmly in exactly the same spot. She had obviously just put on eye makeup and sprayed herself with some perfume, but I was sure that this made very little difference in her appearance. Prettier than the English woman in the elevator, she had the kind of good looks that would in no way be changed by standing in front of a mirror with bottles and brushes, and would probably look the same—expensive and clear-skinned—even if she wore dungarees. “Ted,” she said again, and her voice was not nagging, not even impatient. “Sascha, Pietro.”
From somewhere in the back, children’s voices screamed, and soon, with a naked child on either side of him, out came a short, round-faced man with a head of wild, outstanding black curls. He was practically naked himself: no shirt on at all, and there, as he came walking along, was just putting on his pants. Staring at his fly, which he was zipping, he said, “What happened to Erica Jaffe?”
“I don’t know her,” I said, “but I think she graduated.”
He looked up from his fly and said, “You don’t look like her.”
“I’m not her sister. Why should I?”
“All the girls from your school look alike,” and turning around, he walked away, leaving his expressionless, long-limbed wife and two tiny, shrieking children.
“Their pajamas,” I said to Mrs. Marshak. “Don’t you want me to help them put on their pajamas?”
“Pajamas?” She was moving a thin, horsey finger just enough to flick at a cockroach. “They might be in the basement. I don’t know if Ted brought up the wash.”
Wash? Cockroaches? Fly-zipping? By this time I realized there would not be any glass-enclosed shower; as far as I could see, there was hardly even any furniture. I followed the children into their bedroom and, opening the top drawer of an outsized bureau that looked as if it, too, might have done time in the basement, I fished out an undershirt.
“Whose is this?” I said as the two of them rolled giggling on the splintery floor. I looked at Pietro, the older one, and then at Sascha, a round-faced little girl with wild blond curls; when she leaned back in her crib, flushed and overtired, she looked like a confused, unkempt grandmother. “Whose is it?” I said, and as I held up the little shirt, a huge roach came crawling out of it,
“Roachie, roachie, richie roachie,” Pietro sang out. “Wanna see my dump truck?”
I saw the dump truck, found some more underwear, and just as I was getting ready to read them a story or sing them a song, my usual baby-sitting routine, Ted Marshak, dressed snappily now in a suit and tie—there was even a flower stuck in his lapel—came in saying, “Sunny? You found their underwear?”
“No,” she said, “the baby-sitter.”
“The baby-sitter?” He looked me straight up and down in a way I was unused to, and kept squinting and frowning at me as if I were a person too stupid to realize that she had been waiting for hours on what would turn out to be the wrong line. “Where the hell is Erica Jaffe? I don’t know how they could even have sent you here.”
“I don’t know how you could have named your daughter Sascha. It’s a boy’s name, and it’s Russian, and it’s not even a real name. It’s just the nickname they use for Alexander.”
“So Little Miss Underwear-Finder speaks Russian, too!”
“No,” I said, “I just know it from Russian novels.”
“Russian novels!” He made it sound as if I had said Cracker Jack boxtops. “I suppose your idea of plays is Chekhov. Or Ibsen. And poetry—God knows what! Wallace Stevens!”
“I never heard of him,” I said.
From the door, Mrs. Marshak called out, “Good night, niblets.” She did not go in to kiss her children or even look at them; she did not tell me, “We’ll be back around twelve, but if anything goes wrong, here’s the number where you can reach us”; she did not say, “Pietro likes the little light on at night,” or, “If Sascha gets up, you can give her some orange juice.” Just “Good night, niblets”—a name for goldfish or maybe hamsters. Why didn’t she come right out with it: let them eat roaches.
I said, “Good-by, Mrs. Marshak. Have a good time.”
“Oh, please—call me Sunny. It makes me feel so old.”
“A good time!” Ted Marshak said. “Russian novels! I don’t believe it.”
I couldn’t believe it either: here I was, two minutes in the home of America’s famous, exciting, enigmatic, wandering poet-playwright, and already I had managed to make such a terrible impression that my secret life—just barely begun—was practically over. I began to walk slowly through the long halls and dim rooms of the apartment: broken light switches, crayoned walls, torn beach chairs, overflowing garbage bags, dirty plates and glasses on the floor, and no books anywhere. I was walking numbly in this way when the phone rang.
“Hi, baby, let’s have the knife.”
“You have the wrong number,” I said.
“Sunny? You hiding that bastard? He tell you how much he owes me from that crap game last week? Come on, now, put him on! Gimme the knife.”
“This isn’t Sunny, it’s the baby-sitter. The Marshaks aren’t home. Can I take a message?”
“Message? Yeah, tell him Al Carpentier called.” Al Carpentier! So “the knife” was Ted (Knives) Marshak, and Al Carpentier would have to be Alvin Carpentier, the playwright, as treasured, enigmatic, and wandering as Ted Marshak himself. I looked around for some paper to write down the message, though I knew there was no chance I would forget it, and right near the phone, in a raffia basket that had one rotting apple in it, I saw some.
Dear Mother, Daddy and Grandma B,
Well, we’re all settled now finally, and it’s good to be back in New York. Sorry I haven’t written for a while, but I’ve been busy with the house etc. I hope we’ll be able to see you sometime soon but it depends on Ted’s plans etc. He says thanks for everything. I was truly sad to hear that you had to have Prince put to sleep. What did you tell Aunt Elinor? A white lie, I hope.
Last week we went to a party and guess who was there? The King of Morocco and Ed Sullivan! Also there were some
Here the letter stopped; she had not finished it, probably having gotten sidetracked by an etc. Underneath it were two things: a snapshot and what was apparently the last page of a long letter:
…though I doubt it would be similar. After all, it’s so long ago that Kate was in Greece.
Love to you from Daddy, Grandma B and all the Bradburys.
As ever,
Mother
Dear Pietro and Sascha,
Here is a picture of Aunt Betty in Uncle Bob’s new boat. You can’t see Uncle Bob because he is in the cabin. When you come up to visit he will be glad to give you a ride.
Love,
Grandma
What kind of world did these pajama-less children come out of?
B my name is Betty and my husband’s name is Bob. We come from Boston and we sell boats
I tried to imagine what it would be like when some kindergarten teacher in the nearby public school would look down the list in her rollbook and find between, say, Leventhal, Wendy, and Negron, Miguel, this: Marshak, Sascha. The teacher was young—maybe it was even her first year: she had matching accessories and a bow in her hair. “Sash-a?” she would say to herself stupidly, wondering. “Sas-ka?” feeling entirely puzzled.
I looked out the living-room window, from which, if you strained very hard, you could see Central Park, and there, past the trees and the snow, was a certain Sascha Marshak, riding in a troika, racing through the avenues of a large estate. Her cheeks were burning, the strains of waltz music made it impossible for her to sit still, but if you looked closely, you could see that everything she was wearing was all black: unknown to all those around her, she was in mourning for her life. Then there was another Sascha Marshak—this one a middle-aged man with rimless glasses and a stern, square, steely face; he had just been thrown off a Central Committee and was sitting grimly in a Prague Trial. On purpose, he had taken special care to wear absolutely nothing that was black.
I was still shoveling this unfortunate Comrade Marshak into an icy grave somewhere between Prague and Siberia when I heard a child’s uneven footsteps and a sleepy baby’s voice crying, “Daddy, Daddy.” It was Sascha. Her feet had gotten caught in the strap of what looked like field glasses, and dragging them behind her, stumbling, she opened the door of what I had thought was a closet. “Daddy,” she called into the empty, darkened room. “Daddy working?” I put on the light: it was Ted Marshak’s study and I couldn’t get back to it fast enough.
CHEMISTRY/SET
by Theodore Marshak
CHAPTER I
The chill fall air gnawed like a knife. This knife which was air and was wind, which was weather and was darkness, which was all the elements, was all his life. He trudged through the darkling Milwaukee streets, his schoolbooks weighing down his arms and knew with a strained heaviness in all his body what awaited him. Past Perlmutter’s grocery lined with uncrated produce that were the unopened suitcases of his sorrows, past Tony Di Suvero leaning razor-sharp against his barber pole, there it was. TABAK’S. TABAK’S HARDWARE. Wrenches. Screwdrivers. Pliers. Hammers. Tabak’s Hardware! What was Tabak if not hard?
“Murray? You home?”
Murray Tabak. Him. Home?
Home? It occurred to me that home was just where the Marshaks might be any minute. I rushed into the living room a
nd picked up the book I had brought with me: Dick Diver was in the middle of effecting a miraculous cure on a woman who couldn’t even see him. I thought about her rash, but couldn’t concentrate.
When the Marshaks did get home, both looking puffy-faced, and neither of them snappy, I immediately said, “You got a phone call from Al Carpentier.”
“Stupid bastard. What did he want?”
“He said that you should call him back.”
“Ted plays pool with him sometimes,” Sunny said, but the expression on her face was so rapt and far away that I began to wonder if she had just met Ed Sullivan or possibly the King of Morocco.
“Call him back! Call him back! Him and that wife of his—bitch walks around with a scissors between her legs. Do you know what they want of me? Do you know what they want?”
“He just said that you should call him back,” I said, thinking that he was embarrassed about the money.
“Do you have any idea of what people want of me? Do you have any idea of what they expect? Do you know what this is?” He pulled the flower, now obviously fake, out of his lapel and pointed it at me.
“Ted,” Mrs. Marshak said. “It’s late. Pay her, she’s only the baby-sitter.”
“This squirts water. This is what they want. Ted Marshak, enfant terrible, prove it! Show us your tricks!”
“Ted, please, I’ll find the money. Just walk her to the subway.”
“Show us your tricks! Do something shocking! Say something scandalous! That’s what we came for.”
“If you really do squirt water at anyone, that’s ridiculous,” I said. “If you don’t respect them, what’s the point of doing what you think they want?”
“There’s nothing she doesn’t know, is there? Underwear, Russian novels, anything else? Jesus Christ! Smartass Jewish girls!”
Other People's Lives Page 18
