Jane Austen in Scarsdale

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Anne expressed admiration for this surprising fact, which allowed for a detour into the question he had been summoned to answer on national television on behalf of his secretary. It had involved the origin of chicory, learned when he was handling a case involving export law for the Jamaica Trade Association.

  “The woman won seventy-five thousand dollars because of me,” said Furman, “and quit her job. I haven’t found a good secretary since.” He ruminated for a moment on this. He had married her successor and she had soaked him for half his net worth.

  “I know a lot,” continued Harry proudly, not taking into account that he apparently didn’t know how not to be a sucker. “I’m actually a lot better with facts than with people,” he confessed, engaging in what Anne took to be something vaguely akin to insight.

  She saw this as her cue to return to the initial subject. “Real estate law,” she prompted.

  “Shoot!” Harry settled back in his chair, his arms on the armrests, as though he were still a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  “This is the situation,” explained Anne. “I rent an apartment in Murray Hill that I’ve been subletting for the past few months to someone who appears unwilling to vacate the premises now that I want to move back. I went over the other day and she’d changed the locks.”

  “Is your name on the lease?” asked Harry promptly.

  It IS.

  “Then there’s no problem.” “But the locks?”

  “Iron bars do not a tenant make,” pronounced Harry pithily “Let me handle it.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand that also served to prompt the waiter to pour the wine.

  “I have to tell you, though,” said Anne sheepishly, “I don’t have the money to pay you for your help. Our family is pretty much wiped out in the way of financial assets. I’ve been using my savings to pay off the debts. It’s not a pretty picture, and if I lose my apartment, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  Though it might have been a stretch to call Harry Furman compassionate, he certainly wasn’t cruel. As he saw it, the chance to expound on his involvement with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was payment enough. Anne even figured that if she wanted to, she probably could have gotten him to agree to come to Career Day at this moment.

  “Honey, this sort of thing is a mere bag of shells to me,” boasted Harry. “A damsel in distress deserves a little help from an expert. Give me the address, the landlord’s name, and the name of the individual currently in residence, and I’ll have it worked out for you in a jiffy. I do this sort of thing in my sleep.”

  Anne felt a welling of gratitude that did not, however, resemble attraction, since she was not inspired by Harry’s halfhearted attempt to get her to go back to his Park Avenue duplex after dinner. All in all, he seemed relieved at her refusal. The evening had been quite pleasant, and he could now retire to his apartment, put on his pajamas, and watch Saturday Night Live without anyone to distract him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  POETRY DAY AT FENIMORE WAS HELD ON OCTOBER 31 AND BILLED as a special Halloween event, a prelude to trick-or-treating that night. It was one of the paradoxes of high-school kids that they oscillated wildly between adult and childish pastimes. Even if they were drawn to tawdry, illicit activities like drug taking and promiscuous sex, they still enjoyed simple, innocent ones like wearing cheesy costumes and collecting candy from their neighbors.

  For Poetry Day, students had been instructed to dress up as their favorite poet, though the notion that they had a favorite poet involved a certain poetic license in itself. As in the past, many of the less inhibited boys wore tights and came as Shakespeare—this year, one even wore a codpiece made from a plastic container. Among the girls, there were at least a dozen Sylvia Plaths in shirtwaists and headbands. (The Bell Jar had been assigned in eleventh-grade English and the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sylvia had been shown by the substitute during the week when the regular teacher was sick, conveniently timed so as to coincide with the end of the Plath unit.) A few Emily Dickinsons were represented by starched pinafores and white pancake makeup. There were also the rock enthusiasts who insisted that the Beatles were great poets and made a racket in the hall with their electric guitars, until the instruments were confiscated by Mr. Tortoni, the assistant principal.

  The lazier or more inhibited students favored a more minimalist presentation. They simply held a sheet of paper with the first lines of a poem by their chosen poet scribbled on it.

  Both the honors and the AP English classes had been assigned Peter Jacobson’s poems, and as Anne had predicted, one student even decided to dress up as Peter. He came wearing a black turtleneck and holding a sheet of notebook paper with the first lines of Peter’s poem, “The Poet Stutters at Death.” Holding the paper aloft, he waved his pen and furrowed his brow as though trying to think of the lines to follow: “I read as she lies writhing in the bed; / She shakes her head; / And its like death has passed a verdict on the lines I read.” Anne privately thought it might be better, with lines like this, to crumple up the paper and start again.

  Peter visited the creative writing class in the morning, when he held what the teacher grandly termed “a master workshop.” Dana Mosser, a gifted creative writer who wanted to go to Wes-leyan, happened to be in this class. Her poems so impressed Peter that he quickly agreed to write a supporting letter to offset her poor math SAT.

  He also found something to like in the work of the other students in the class, even those who had taken the course only because it was supposed to be an easy A and fit into their schedules. These types seemed torn between liking poetry and disdaining it.

  “It’s all bullshit,” said one student, “but it’s fun. ‘Cause you can’t be wrong.” Not being wrong was apparently a nice change of pace.

  “All you have to do to write poetry is find two things that have nothing to do with each other and say they do,” said another student. “My heart is like a dripping faucet—that’s one I came up with the other day.”

  “Not bad,” said Peter.

  He was particularly taken with a very long poem by a student who had spent half his high school career in detention. It was titled “I Hate It”:

  When my mom comes in and straightens my room. I hate it.

  When they give me lots of pennies for change. I hate it.

  When they make me run the track in gym. I hate it.

  When they want me to turn my homework in. I hate it.

  When I drink so much I have to pee. I hate it.

  When moron girls call me a dweeb. I hate it . . .

  “You should consider sending that to one of the poetry journals,” Peter counseled.

  Afterward, he told Anne that she was right about the sixteen-year-old imagination—it was fresh and original. Ultimately, he said, he liked what the high-school students wrote more than what he’d seen in his MFA program.

  After lunch, there was an assembly devoted to the puppet production of Much Ado About Nothing. It was, to Anne’s surprise, a great success. Many students, who normally would have violently resisted watching a Shakespeare play, seemed to find it more palatable when performed by puppets, and she overheard one boy leaving the assembly observe that “the Beatrice puppet was really hot.” Even Peter said that he thought the performance had a macabre charm.

  After the puppet show, Peter was taken to address the AP English class. The students in this class, who had just wrapped up three weeks on modern poetry, seemed to feel that they could now get the inside track on this whole poetry racket.

  “Who are the ten greatest poets of all time?” demanded a spokesman for the class.

  Anne thought Peter would see this as a simplistic exercise, but instead, he seemed pleased to wield the scepter of judgment and launched enthusiastically into the countdown:

  “One: Shakespeare.” (“Shakespeare rules!” yelled the boy with the plastic codpiece, as though he were being personally honored.)

  “Two: Milton. He wrote Paradise Lost. The greatest action-
adventure poem in English. The hero is Satan—but it’s still a very spiritual poem.” (The students took down this anomaly in their notebooks.)

  “Three: John Donne. He makes sex seem really spiritual, and God seem really sexy.” (The students nodded, as though this made sense to them.)

  “Four: William Wordsworth. Big on nature, but there’s more going on than just flowers and trees.

  “Five: Walt Whitman—great American poet, sort of started the gay pride movement.

  “Six: Emily Dickinson. A nutcase, but brilliant.

  “Seven: William Butler Yeats. An Irish poet—I’m partial to that, since I’m Irish on my mother’s side. He’s got some neat mystical stuff going.

  “Eight: Robert Frost. You read his poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ in third grade. He wrote lots more that are just as good.

  “Nine: Gwendolyn Brooks—a woman of color who didn’t preach about it.

  “Ten: Don Riggs. You probably never heard of him. He lives in Philadelphia and writes for small literary journals and online magazines. Look him up on the Internet. He’s a genius.”

  “Don’t you belong on the list, Mr. Jacobson?” shouted one admiring student.

  “No,” said Peter. “To be honest, I’m not very good.” Anne felt almost inclined to like Peter’s poetry in the face of such refreshing candor.

  “What about T. S. Eliot?” asked another student. They had just read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in AP English.

  “Overrated,” declared Peter.

  “Wallace Stevens?” They had also read “The Idea of Order at Key West.”

  “I don’t understand him,” Peter pronounced frankly. The class shifted pleasantly at being reinforced in their own view.

  “Don’t you think Sylvia Plath belongs in the top ten?” asked one girl belligerently. She headed up the Multicultural Club and the Gay-Straight Alliance.

  “No,” said Peter. “She’s like me. One subject, beats it to death. She got famous from killing herself. It’s a possible recipe for fame—but of course you can never be sure it’ll work.”

  Despite a few students like the Plath advocate who were disappointed that Peter hadn’t put their favorites in the top ten (A. E. Housman! Kurt Cobain! The guy who wrote the limericks!), most thought he was really cool.

  “I hope you haven’t ruined T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens for them,” murmured Anne as the class was leaving.

  “I hope I have,” said Peter.

  “You seem to be in a very good mood, for you,” observed Anne. Peter’s involvement with the ailing Rachel had definitely raised his spirits, transferring his emotional focus from someone dead to someone merely convalescing. He and Rachel were slowly working their way through The Norton Anthology of Poetry. By the time Rachel was fully recovered, Anne surmised, she would be well versed in poetry (at least in the poetry Peter liked) and would have greatly improved her vocabulary.

  As the final event of Poetry Day, Anne had arranged for Peter to give an evening reading that would be open to the community. She planned to use the occasion to thank him formally for his bequest to the school arts program with the hope of inspiring others to do the same. “Most people just don’t think of making that kind of contribution,” she explained to Vince, “so we have to model for them.”

  “Good point,” agreed Vince. “But my guess is that this guy had more in mind than helping the school.” He gave Anne an insinuating look. Vince tended to suspect, based on his own example, that men did most things for moderately impure motives. “Is this Peter Jacobson your latest conquest?” he asked knowingly.

  Anne knew she was supposed to laugh and explain that Peter was devoted to her cousin. But a feeling of sadness made it impossible for her to speak. What did that mean: “your latest conquest”? What conquest would ever mean anything to her again? The one conquest that mattered had been made—and lost— long ago.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THERE WAS AN ENORMOUS TURNOUT FOR PETER JACOBSON’S READING that evening, as many people had predictably confused the Pitzer Prize with the Pulitzer Prize, or possibly with the Pritzker Prize, a major architectural award. As Anne looked out over the sea of faces, she saw Ben and Kirsten in the audience, further casualties, she suspected, of the Pitzer-Pulitzer confusion.

  The final settlement on the house was about to be completed, and she knew that the Cutlers expected to move in by the middle of November. She had not yet dislodged Carlotta from her New York apartment, but Harry Furman had assured her that he would solve the problem soon—not to worry. Meanwhile, Ben had begun planning the Scarsdale renovation. An architect and a contractor had been by and spoken briefly with Winnie. And someone had already begun repaving the driveway. “Benjamin said he would hate to have us liable for an accident if someone blew out a tire or worse in one of those potholes,” Winnie explained. “Very considerate of him, if I may say so.” Winnie had assumed the line that Ben was more of a benefactor than a usurper and had refused to dwell on past history. Anne found this surprising, if not downright odd, but also rather comforting. It made the whole transaction much easier.

  After Vince introduced Peter (stumbling predictably over the titles of the more arcane poetry journals in which his poems had appeared), Anne presented him with a certificate in acknowledgment for his generous bequest. As she was about to leave the stage, Peter clasped her hand and kept her beside him as he spoke feelingly into the microphone:

  “Everyone really ought to thank this woman here,” he declared, gripping her hand tightly, even as she tried to extract it from his grasp so she could sit down. “She is the person responsible for my being here today. Anne Ehrlich, as anyone who has ever met her knows, is a woman of unparalleled intelligence, taste, and compassion. She is devoted to enriching and supporting the lives of students, and a model of dedication and service to her community. We all owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.”

  There was loud applause, and Anne felt like ducking under a chair. She was unaccustomed to being in the spotlight, and as her eyes grazed the audience, she saw that Ben Cutler was looking at her, his face particularly somber. She imagined that Peter’s effusive tribute had sounded an ironic note in his ears.

  Once the poetry reading began, she relaxed and prepared herself for a long evening. From her experience, poets commonly forgot that poetry is a distinctive taste and that most people liked to encounter it, if at all, in very small doses. Lengthy dronings of even the most brilliant verse were liable to make even the most enlightened audience restless, irritable, and unwilling to attend a poetry reading again.

  Surprisingly, however, Peter turned out to be an exception in this regard. He had the sense to keep his reading short and to provide charming if rather morbid asides and anecdotes that helped the poems go down more easily. “This one was written at the deathbed of a loved one,” he said by way of introducing a poem entitled “Frosted Death”: “We had just shared a bowl of Frosted Flakes, and I was struck by how the sweetness of that cereal, with its childhood associations, was linked with the sense of being immortal. As you can see, this poem conflates that youthful lack of worry with a mature awareness of mortality.” This was just the sort of thing that the Westchester community could handle.

  He read about a dozen poems, including one about eating snow, one about getting a bloody nose in grade school, one about watching a nurse try to find a vein for an IV in his dying girlfriend’s wasted arm, and one comparing the smell of hospitals with the smell of gummy bears. The alternation between the humorous and the macabre kept the audience alert, both amused and moved. His last poem, “Burying the Dead: Falling in Love Again,” which Anne assumed to be about Rachel, produced a wave of tearful delight. Everyone likes happy endings, and the female members of the audience were particularly pleased that such a handsome young man, and so talented (a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all), was on the road to recovery.

  After the reading, Anne saw Ben and Kirsten approach and prepared to greet them, even as painful thou
ghts crowded her head. She wondered, for example, when they planned to get married and whether they would have the wedding at the house. Winnie had always said how much she wanted to have Anne marry under a tent in the backyard, the way her mother had. “That was a beautiful wedding,” Winnie liked to reminisce, “even if she did marry a fool.”

  Anne wished that she didn’t think of such things. But with her grandmother remaining in the house, she would have to get used to seeing Ben and Kirsten together. It might be better for her to rehearse the probable scenarios in advance rather than have them sprung on her without preparation.

  “Your boyfriend is quite the bard,” said Ben, breaking her reverie and nodding toward Peter, who was standing nearby, being gushed over by several female members of the audience. Their admiration seemed to boil down to his writing poetry while being so handsome.

  Anne looked at Ben, surprised. He had made the understandable mistake of thinking that Peter was her boyfriend, but what struck her was the sourness of his tone. She looked at him quizzically, and was about to correct the error, when Kirsten declared energetically, “Well, I personally liked his poetry. I thought it was very heartfelt.”

  This remark appeared to provoke Ben. “Very heartfelt!” he exclaimed with irritation. “Now, there’s a recommendation. When are people going to realize that you can feel deeply and still write crap?”