Erty Seidel

The Marionette

The marionette hung from the wall in the small, derelict shop. her pink dress tattered and stained by countless years of abandonment. Her lipstick, once a bright red that would be the envy of many a woman, had faded and been worn away by time to a dull grey. It had been ten years since the my grandfather had passed away, and now only cracks of light shone through the boarded-up windows into the neglected toy shop. Of course, I had loved coming here when I was young. Little trains that whistled and hooted as they ran along their miniature-gauge tracks were my favorite. My grandfather had all sorts of puppets and wind up toys, but his prize possession, the one thing he swore he would never sell, was a marionette that he had brought from France when he had come to America. He kept it on a shelf, high above the store, where people were permitted to look upon it and ask of its history. When someone inquired into it’s selling price, my grandfather would launch into a well-rehearsed story of how he brought it to America, and why he was not going to sell it.

He told of how his father had owned a toy shop in France, right on the Seine with a beautiful view of the waterways. His father had been making toys and magic tricks for years for the Parisian youth, and was well loved by them (and well respected by his more grown-up friends.) His wife had died some years ago, and he had been keeping himself and his son, my grandfather, alive on the money from the shop. One December evening, however, he collapsed on the floor of the toy shop as he was cleaning up, and died of a heart attack when he was barely fifty-five.

By this time, the customer in the store had usually either lost attention or is gripping to the story like a gondolier to his money. My grandfather took this into account, and decided how much time and energy he was going to invest in the rest of this story. More often than not, however, he continued on with a sigh.

“My world was turned upside down,” he said. I always liked it when he said this because it meant that he was going to continue on and finish the story. He continued. The marionette that the customer has so unwarily inquired about was his father’s last project – a resemblance of his wife as she had been when they had met. In his will, he left the entire shop to my grandfather, who picked up the work and made toys as best as he could. However, times got tough in Paris, and he was forced to sell the shop and the toys inside to a businessman who cheated him out of quite a lot of money. He took what he could, just some clothes and that one marionette, and shipped over to America, where he set up a toy shop on a loan and has worked ever since. He kept the marionette as a monument to his mother and father, a memory of France and all that he had done there.

The toy shop lies empty now, as kids forgo the old mechanical workings and opt for imported plastic toys that often don’t even move of their own accord. My father became a lawyer, but I dream of one day opening up the shop and becoming a toymaker myself. Everyone has to make a living somehow.