Other People's Lives (24 page)

“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 and 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!”

“I know I'm not like Erica Jaffe and I know you don't like me, but if it gets you so angry to be with people like that, I don't see why you do it.”

Mrs. Marshak began dumping everything in her purse onto the table and, frantically counting out change, she said, “Are you ever free in the afternoons? After school? Because sometimes I like to go bird-watching.”

“You don't have to walk me to the subway, Mr. Marshak,” I said.

He was standing at the side window, the one that almost looked out onto Central Park, and without turning around, he said, “Octagonal.”

“What?”

“Octagonal. The paving stones along Central Park West are octagonal. You didn't know that, did you?”

The next week I did get a call from Mrs. Marshak. Just as she had said, she was asking me to come after school; she wanted to go bird-watching. “Ted's out on the Coast,” she said. “Big Sur, he's not sure when he'll be back.”

Since this meant I would be going in the same direction as Simone, I decided I might as well tell her. She was standing outside her locker, finishing up an argument with her lockermate about socialized medicine.

“My father does
not
rob anyone,” the lockermate was saying. “He sometimes works in a clinic and he even makes housecalls after dinner.”

“You can never justify what your father does. He dares to take money for what are simply the givens of human existence.”

“Simone,” I said, “I'm going to be in your neighborhood this afternoon. I'm baby-sitting for Ted Marshak, and they live right around the corner from you.”

“Oh, I know that building,” Simone said. “It's a slum. I baby-sit for someone there, too. Anita Selden—she's divorced and she's very boring. She keeps all her old love letters in one corner of her drawer and all her divorce stuff in the other, and all she ever has in her diary is what she says to her analyst.”

“In her diary? What does she say?”

“She has these fat twin boys, and she keeps worrying that they'll have buck teeth. And now she has a new one. She's afraid that they're stupid and they won't get into any private school.”

“Are they stupid?”

“Oh,
you
know. Bourgeois. Trivial. Like her.”

In the Marshaks' apartment, a confusing variety of cartoon animals were quacking and meowing their way across the TV set. They fell down cliffs and pounced on each other while Sascha slept on the floor and Pietro played with his dump truck. Only Mrs. Marshak, field glasses around her neck, stared at the screen and laughed as if she would not be able to tear herself away.