Jane Austen in Boca

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  The news that Florida Atlantic had closed its doors to them was therefore a disappointment. Norman was told by the dean’s secretary that the quota had been filled two weeks earlier, and that there was no possibility of further auditing by seniors during spring term. They might, if they chose, put themselves on the waiting list for fall; that term had already filled its quota as well, but the waiting list was shorter. Norman had tried to explain that his friend Stan Jacobs wouldn’t be teaching then, but the secretary wouldn’t budge. That was the policy, period, she said.

  He brought the news to his friends at dinner that night in the Boca Festa dining room, and May was instantly the most vocal in her response. “Quotas!” she declared huffily. “I thought they went out in the 1960s! It’s disgraceful to think they won’t let us in when we’re willing to pay money just like everyone else.”

  “It’s a matter of a few rotten apples spoiling things for everyone,” explained Norman. “At least that’s what the secretary told me.

  “But: that’s discrimination,” proclaimed Lila, taking up the cudgel from May. “It’s a case of age discrimination, pure and simple. We can sue. Hy’s daughter is a lawyer and can maybe help us out.”

  “Carol told me about a sit-in they had at Adam’s school,” added May. “The mothers were against selling soda in the cafeteria. They would have won, only the children held a demonstration, too, in favor, and the mothers caved in. We could try something like that.”

  “May the firebrand,” said Flo. “You’ll storm the president’s office. But I’m afraid you’d be dusting and straightening up in no time.”

  “Flo, this is serious. They can’t keep us from taking the course.”

  “It’s a private university,” explained Flo, who knew about these things from her days at the University of Chicago. “They can keep out whomever they want—within reason.”

  “But it’s not within reason,” declared May. “And it’s Stan’s class. He has the right to let us in.”

  “He’s an employee of the university,” Flo responded. “He can’t very well make his own rules. If he admits us, he could get in trouble and lose his position.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” said May in a more subdued tone. “I suppose we just have to accept it—and be sure to sign up early for next spring,” she added, sighing.

  At that moment, Stan Jacobs, a pile of papers in one hand, entered the dining room and walked briskly toward them.

  “We were just talking about our unfortunate fate at the hands of your employers,” said Norman.

  “I heard,” said Stan. He leaned over and kissed May on the cheek, nodded to Lila, and then turned to Flo. He seemed unsure how to greet her. They hadn’t met face-to-face since the encounter at the pod pool. For a moment, she thought he was going to reach over and shake her hand, but he eventually nodded instead. “I’m appalled,” he continued, “though I admit I understand the principle involved. Our people can be quite disruptive. I once had a woman from Boca Lago quarrel with me for twenty minutes, claiming that William Wordsworth was Jewish and had written a treatise on fairy tales. She said that her daughter, who was working on a degree in comparative literature, had said so. She wouldn’t let it go, so I finally called the daughter. She’d been talking about Bruno Bettelheim. The woman refused to apologize; she said William Wordsworth and Bruno Bettelheim sounded a lot alike, and that it was a natural mistake. A good deal of class time was wasted, as you can imagine.”

  May suggested that they might try instituting an interview process to weed out the troublemakers.

  “That,” laughed Norman, “would be sure to create more trouble. Can you imagine your friend Pixie Solomon handling a rejection notice?”

  “Dorothy Meltzer was just telling me,” added Lila, “that when her son was rejected from MIT, she drove all the way to Boston and gave the admissions officer what-for.”

  “It wouldn’t be pretty,” agreed Stan. “The university is trying in its way to do the right thing by limiting the number of seniors in classes. I’m just sorry that you can’t take my course this term. I know you were counting on it”—he looked affectionately at May—”and it would have made me teach better”—he looked at Flo. “Anyway, after I talked to the dean, who said there’d be no exceptions to the rule, I came up with an alternative. I wanted to get your reaction before I did anything. If you’re agreeable, I’ll speak to the activities committee and the club president and get these things put up.” He laid the papers he’d been holding on the table. They read, in a nice graphic presentation that had obviously taken him some time to produce on his Macintosh: “ ‘Jane Austen and Her Adaptors,’ a course offered by Stan Jacobs, Professor Emeritus, Florida Atlantic University, open to all Boca Festa members, admission gratis.” This was followed by a paragraph in smaller print: “The class will engage in a close reading of Jane Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice. We will discuss how Austen’s romantic, domestic plotline has been adapted to bestselling novels, television soap operas, films, and facets of our daily lives. All interested are welcome. Please contact Stan Jacobs at (561) 456-9355 for more information.”

  Lila clapped her hands, and May leaned over and kissed Stan on the cheek. Norman said he was flattered that his friend would teach a course geared specifically to them. Flo remained silent. She felt touched and chastened. She recalled the vituperative force of her reaction the other day. It occurred to her that for someone like Stan Jacobs, an expression of affection of the kind he had attempted was understandably difficult and awkward. No doubt he would never want to approach her that way again. Still, the course was a gesture of reconciliation and friendship. She smiled, catching his sideways glance as he picked up the flyers.

  “I look forward to taking the class,” she said. “But didn’t Austen have some Jewish blood? Something about missing a good potato knish while her family was vacationing in Bath?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  WORD OF STAN JACOBS’S COURSE SPREAD QUICKLY, AND INTEREST turned out to be greater than expected. The idea of having a genuine professor, not (as was more usual in the case of Boca Festa cultural events) an amateur enthusiast, leading the discussion was part of the draw. So was the fact that Stan was related by marriage to Norman Grafstein, who was generally known to be linked to May Newman, a club member. This gave added romantic spice and connected the course in an appealing personal way to the club. Finally, most people had seen the Greer Garson/ Laurence Olivier film version of Pride and Prejudice, and therefore were either inclined to want to read the book or were convinced that having seen the film, reading the book would be unnecessary.

  The course had originally been planned for the small lounge off the card room, which held about ten comfortably. But with an enrollment closing on twenty, it was moved to the Fairways pod 9 clubhouse, near Lila and Flo’s apartments, where there was still a stock of folding chairs in the cabana near the pod pool, left over from the Levinsons’ fiftieth-anniversary reaffirmation-of-vows ceremony. For the course, the chairs were arranged in front of a small table where Stan would sit—he had nixed the idea of a lectern as too formal—and Lila and May had set up a refreshment table in the back. May had made her chocolate truffles and Lila her “surprise” punch (orange juice, ginger ale, lemon sherbet; the surprise: a dash of Manischewitz wine). Rudy Salzburg, who had seen marketing possibilities attached to launching Boca Festa as a cultural center for the area (the Paris of Southeast Florida), had worked out a deal with the local bookstore and arranged to stock discounted copies of Pride and Prejudice in the pro shop in a prominent display alongside the Bollé sunglasses and Vuitton tennis bags.

  Everyone arrived at the first class with a copy of the book in hand, though how many had actually opened it remained a question. Lila and May had both dutifully read through chapter 23, as assigned, and had found the reading easier than expected.

  “Once you get used to the Old English,” noted Lila, “it reads very fast.”

  May said with her usual a
stuteness that the tone of the book put her in mind of Flo. “I didn’t know they were sarcastic back then,” she commented, “but I guess being sarcastic isn’t necessarily modern.” Flo told her to raise the point with Stan in class—it had possibilities for interesting discussion.

  Norman had read a page or two but said he would wait to be inspired by Stan’s lecture. Of the group, only Flo had read the book before. Reading it again, she was struck by certain resonances with her own case that she preferred not to think upon too deeply.

  Stan began the class by giving some social background on the period and some details about Jane Austen’s life.

  “In Austen’s time, middle-class women had almost no opportunity for a paid occupation,” he explained. “They were dependent for their support on fathers, brothers, or husbands. Property was inherited through the male line, and the home in which a woman grew up often had to be turned over lock, stock, and barrel to the closest male blood relation when her father died. So you see why having five girls was such a problem for the Bennets,” he continued. “When Mr. Bennet died, all the property, down to the furniture, would automatically pass to their distant cousin, Mr. Collins.”

  When he described these circumstances to his undergraduates, Stan was used to getting a reaction of astonishment and sympathy for the women of the period. Here, however, the situation produced less shock and more identification.

  “It reminds me of how my mother felt when Grandpa Abe left the bakery to his cousin Leo, who didn’t know white from rye,” said Gert Kaufman. “The business went down the drain in six months.”

  “When I married Saul, I had to move out of a nice house and into a dump,” offered Fran Levy in a mild non sequitur. Stan discovered that, generally speaking, the group held to a very loose line of reasoning, but that, if he concentrated, there was always a logical filament connecting one comment to the next.

  “I had four sisters, too,” noted Pixie Solomon. “My mother didn’t stop shvitzing until we all were married. I feel for that Mrs. Bennet.”

  “What do you think Jane Austen thought about her?” Stan interceded hopefully, though he could feel the class getting away from him.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Pixie Solomon in an offended tone. She was clearly not ready to take a metaperspective on the action. “What has she got to do with it? I say that woman Bennet had her work cut out for her, marrying five daughters and with a husband always hiding away in the den.”

  “Herb was like that with the children,” noted Dorothy Meltzer, whose deeply tanned visage was decorated with several Band-Aids marking the removal of the latest basal-cell skin cancer. She wore these as proudly as a German officer sported his saber scars. “He went into the den with a sandwich whenever Melissa and I would start screaming. Even now, when there’s noise, he can’t digest.”

  Several women nodded. They, too, had known men to hide in the den with a sandwich. Mrs. Bennet had their sympathy.

  “But don’t you think that Jane Austen wants us to see her as a very silly woman whose values are mixed up?” urged Stan, trying to steer the conversation in a direction more in keeping with the book’s aim and tone. “What, for example, do you make of this description of her on page three?” Everyone dutifully picked up her copy of the book to follow along. Stan read the passage slowly, to make sure that they grasped the full force of Austen’s satire on the subject of Mrs. Bennet: “ ‘She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.’ “ Stan looked at the group inquiringly.

  “That’s a nasty description,” said Pixie. “That Jane Austen doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “She didn’t marry or have children, did she?” queried Dorothy Meltzer. “So how would she know what it’s like to have five daughters that need to get settled if you’re going to have any peace of mind? I can’t tell you what I went through waiting for my Sheila to find someone.”

  “And now it’s waiting for the grandchildren,” proffered Lily Posner. “I lie awake at night wondering what they’re doing. Every time I call, they’re out to dinner. Why aren’t they home shtupping? Janet is thirty-six years old. They say the eggs start turning into raisins by the time they’re thirty-five.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dorothy reassuringly “My Sheila had a healthy boy at thirty-seven, a difficult pregnancy, yes, half the time in bed, but everything turned out fine, knock wood.”

  “I think it was very nice of the cousin—what was his name? Cutler?—to offer to marry one of the girls,” offered Lila.

  “Collins,” corrected Stan. “Mr. Collins. Elaborate a bit on that, will you, Lila?”

  “Well,” Lila continued, clearly pleased that her comment had elicited the request for more, “it wasn’t his fault that the law gave him the property. He tried to do right by the family.”

  “I understand Elizabeth turning him down,” added May. “He wasn’t her type. But he should have asked one of the younger girls. Mary, for example, would have been right for him.”

  There was general agreement that Mr. Collins and Mary Bennet would have been a good match.

  “And Charlotte?” continued Stan. “Do you think she was right to accept him?”

  “What choice did she have?” observed Lila. “And she did get her own room, which is important.”

  “Herb always lets me decorate the house however I want,” noted Dorothy. “One thing, when your husband doesn’t want to get involved, you get to pick out the wallpaper. I tell my friends whose husbands are always saying they like this color and not that color that at least with Herb, you know, whatever you do, he’ll accept it. So he naps a lot. It’s a small price to pay.”

  “You take the good with the bad,” noted Pixie Solomon philosophically

  “I do feel sorry for Charlotte,” offered May. “She had so much to offer that I don’t think Mr. Collins could appreciate.”

  “She had her friends,” said Lila. “What more did she need?”

  “And what’s your impression of Elizabeth Bennet?” asked Stan, hoping to take advantage of what seemed like a tenuous return to the events of the novel. “Do you like her?”

  “Too sarcastic for my taste,” noted Dorothy. “I can’t say I’d be friends with her.”

  “I like her,” countered May. “She sees things everyone else doesn’t, but it doesn’t keep her from joining in.”

  “I agree with Dorothy,” said Pixie. “She’s stuck-up. Very snooty.”

  “No,” said Lila, who clearly had begun to enjoy the discussion and fancy herself something of a literary critic. “It’s the rich one, Darcy, that’s stuck up. He’s proud, she’s prejudiced. There’s the title: Pride and Prejudice.” She looked expectantly to Stan for approval at this feat of analysis.

  Stan nodded at Lila, but before he could respond, Dorothy shouted: “No! She’s the proud one, and he’s the prejudiced one. He’s the one who looks down on her for not having enough money. That’s like Christians looking down on Jews, or whites looking down on blacks.”

  Pinkus Lotman, who had taken a course at his synagogue on the roots of anti-Semitism, now felt himself in his element, which he hadn’t during the discussion of domestic relationships. “Prejudice,” he intoned in a slow and pompous tone of voice, “is when one individual or group of individuals labels another individual or group of individuals based on generalized qualities assumed to apply to all. We say,” he continued, and Stan feared that once begun he might never relinquish the floor, “that Jews have big noses and are cheapskates because of certain unflattering generalizations that have emerged over many years based on fears and the positions held by Jews in the societies in which they find themselves. These stereotypes breed prejudice, which in turn—”

  Pixie Solomon, who had no interest in Pinkus’s definitions, interrupted. “She’s the prejudiced one because she thinks he’s a b
ad person based on a few not-so-nice things he says, but she doesn’t really know him. She pre-judges.” Pixie gave the group a significant look.

  “I agree with Pixie,” said May “She’s judged him incorrectly, and his pride gets in the way of appreciating her.”

  “No,” insisted Dorothy, still attached to her theory and determined to make it prevail, “her pride gets in the way of seeing him, and his prejudice against her family gets in the way of seeing her.”

  “And he’s right,” proffered Milt Tarkoff, until then silent but now finding an obvious point of identification. “You don’t marry a woman, you marry her family”

  “Well,” said Stan, “I think you all have a point about this pride and prejudice thing. It’s certainly been subject to different interpretations over the years, so you follow in a long tradition of debate. I wonder what you think, Flo,” he said, looking over to where she was sitting in what she had hoped was unobtrusive silence toward the back of the room. His voice, far from being sarcastic or challenging, sounded genuinely interested in her opinion.

  She paused, thinking how she would put it. It was a question to which she had actually given some thought already, though she hadn’t expected to have to air her conclusions in public.

  “I think the two ideas go together,” she said slowly now, keeping her eyes on Stan, who seemed engrossed in her response, “and that both characters suffer from both defects. When you’re too proud, you generally don’t see things—good things—in people because your pride blinds you to them. That makes you prejudiced, because, then, you’re likely to jump to conclusions about what these people are like based on insufficient information. Darcy and Elizabeth both suffer, in different ways, from this problem, but they’re both intelligent and sensitive enough to learn from their mistakes. I don’t want to give away the plot, though.” She stopped, embarrassed, since Stan was listening to her more intently than her words seemed to warrant.