Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  When the bell rang, indicating that they should move on to the next class, Tyler’s dad edged up to Jessie and glanced at her schedule.

  “I see we’re taking all the same classes,” he said happily. He had been ostracized in middle school for being overweight and, ever since, had made a point of establishing solidarity wherever he could. At work, he was said to be a great guy, no one guessing that his warmth and good cheer were developed to counteract the self-loathing generated in the seventh grade.

  “I went to this school, so I know my way around,” said Tyler’s dad.

  “How nice,” said Jessie.

  “Not really. I was miserable, but it helps me to think that I got through it without a major suicidal or homicidal episode. I tell Tyler all the time, this is the low point; it’ll only get better from here.”

  Jessie followed Tyler’s dad down the hall to the next classroom, which turned out to be something called cultural geography. The teacher, a very decrepit-looking man who had perhaps spent too much time with maps and atlases, explained to them the importance of the current unit on latitude and longitude, all the while twirling the globe on his desk as though trying to place them in a trance. Tyler’s dad said that he thought he had had the man for seventh-grade geography (it wasn’t cultural geography then)—though it might have been someone who looked like him.

  Math followed, where a very small woman with flyaway hair explained a system involving various problems and projects by which their children could gain extra credit. The assumption seemed to be that everyone would fail the tests and need to have their grades buoyed. Some of the parents were furiously scribbling notes on the fine points of this system while others were staring out the window.

  Next was health, where a very young woman with bleached blond hair, a short skirt, and high vinyl boots explained how the children would become thoroughly versed in sexual reproduction. “They’ve had bits and pieces in elementary school and in fifth and sixth grade, but now it’s the whole shebang,” said the teacher, straightening the seam of her skirt and pushing a strand of hair seductively behind her ear.

  Finally came language arts, and Jessie followed Tyler’s dad into a classroom more inviting than the others. It was covered almost entirely with a colorful array of material. Facsimile pages from the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays were prominently displayed near the blackboard, and other Shakespeare-related memorabilia—pictures of Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I, and Ben Jonson, as well as posters from film versions of the plays—scattered the walls. The impression, as Jessie saw it, was artfully designed to catch the fleeting attention of the restless seventh grader. She settled into a chair toward the front, where she could view the instructor at close range. He had been riffling through papers in a file cabinet near the window, his back to the class, so that when he turned around, the surprise of his appearance caused her to let out a gasp.

  “Are you all right?” The teacher looked solicitously in her direction.

  She nodded weakly, continuing to stare. He was about thirty-five, of middle height, dressed in jeans and a sweater, his hair slightly disheveled, as though the idea of combing it had not interested him long enough to be fully accomplished. But it was his face that captured her. It was, she noted at once, his face. The head was well-shaped with clearly defined features; the eyes had a gentle penetrating quality that one might call intellectual but were also playful, even mischievous; the hair was fine and beginning to recede, making the forehead appear even more prominent. It was not quite the face on the frontispiece of the first folio—she glanced over to where a copy of that document was taped to the wall next to the blackboard—they had never gotten him quite right there, she thought.

  “My name’s Hal Pearson,” said the young man, smiling at the group, and appearing, or so Jessie thought, to give her a particularly warm glance. “I’m your kids’ English teacher. You can e-mail me if you have practical questions about grading and curriculum—no need to waste our time with that here. Instead, I thought we’d spend the next half hour doing the sort of thing we do in this class. I’ve already discussed four of Shakespeare’s sonnets with the parents before you. They were full of ideas—just like their kids. You’re my last class, so I thought I’d end with sonnet number one-thirty, one of my favorites.” He handed a pile of papers to the parent at the corner desk to be passed out to the others, though for some reason he handed Jessie her sheet individually.

  “As you may know,” said Hal, “Shakespeare’s sonnets are wonderful, highly personal documents. It’s not too clear when they were written; most estimates date them from around 1593 to 1600.”

  “Fifteen ninety-seven,” said Jessie under her breath.

  “Give or take a year or two.” Hal nodded in Jessie’s direction. “We see language and imagery from the plays of that period, which would put Shakespeare in his midthirties at the time—quite young, which is odd, given several allusions that would seem to suggest an older man.”

  “Made himself out a man of the world,” muttered Jessie.

  Hal paused and looked curiously in her direction, then continued: “The sonnets are written to two people, the first group of a hundred twenty-six to a young man, probably a nobleman, with whom Shakespeare was infatuated.”

  Jessie let out a slight snort, and Hal nodded with apparent understanding: “I realize that this idea may strike some of you as unseemly, and of course we don’t know to what extent the sonnets express a consummated relationship. Nonetheless, the idea of love transcending the particularity of gender seems very central to the great creative spirit that we associate with the Bard.”

  Jessie made a face but said nothing.

  “Most of the remaining twenty-seven sonnets seem to be written to a woman,” Hal continued. “We refer to her as the Dark Lady, because it appears she had dark hair and eyes. While the young man is associated with a more refined and even spiritual passion, the Dark Lady is associated with something more sensual and earthly.”

  “Spite,” muttered Jessie with particular vehemence.

  Hal seemed momentarily startled by her comment but then continued briskly, motioning to the Xeroxed sheet. “This sonnet is typical of the sonnets written to the Dark Lady,” he explained, “and is more straightforward than most. So I thought it might be a good one to share tonight. Let me read the sonnet to you and then get your response.”

  He cleared his throat and read aloud in a strong, sonorous voice:

  My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

  Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

  If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

  If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

  I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

  But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

  And in some perfumes is there more delight

  Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

  I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

  That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

  I grant I never saw a goddess go;

  My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

  And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

  As any she belied with false compare.

  “So,” he said, looking expectantly around the room at the parents, who had settled into surprising attentiveness. Some had laughed during the reading, which seemed to have pleased him enormously. “What do you think? How would you feel if the sonnet were written to you?” His eyes panned the women in the room.

  “I’d be insulted,” said a carefully made-up woman whose hair was streaked a color not found in nature. She straightened slightly as she spoke, as if she had decided to take the poem as a personal affront. “He says she has bad hair and bad breath. It seems very rude to put that in a love poem.”

  Hal nodded. “Good point,” he said. “Anyone else?”

  The man behind the woman who had just spoken shifted in his seat, then finally burst out, “That’s w
hat’s wrong with you women!” he exclaimed. “You have no sense of humor. He’s having a little fun, what’s the harm?”

  Hal nodded encouragingly again.

  “He admires her inner beauty,” said another woman with long gray hair and a peasant blouse. “He doesn’t care that she doesn’t look like a fashion model.”

  “Yes,” said a large woman in a pantsuit. “But it’s also buying into society’s standards. He’s saying he loves her, but he’s also pointing out where she falls short. Men do that all the time. I love you, but why don’t you lose twenty pounds? That sort of thing.”

  Several women in the room nodded.

  “I think”—it was Tyler’s dad, speaking for perhaps the only time ever in a middle-school classroom—“Shakespeare wants to say that the lady isn’t cookie-cutter and so he can’t use the standard expressions that poets use to describe their loves. Her eyes aren’t as bright as fire; her lips aren’t as red as—?”

  “Coral,” said the large woman in the pantsuit helpfully.

  “Right, coral. That’s what we’ve been taught to say. He doesn’t buy into it.”

  Hal, who had been nodding vigorously during all these comments, now exclaimed in a tone of unfettered enthusiasm: “This is great! This is fantastic! In just a few minutes, you’ve managed to open up the sonnet and show the full range of what’s going on in this poem.”

  Jessie raised her hand.

  “Yes,” said Hal, nodding encouragingly in her direction.

  Jessie spoke rapidly and with obvious emotion: “I knew what he was up to. Very sly. Write a nice poem, but get a few digs in. And that one’s not the worst of them. There are a lot more that are worse: how his false eyes do dote, how she’s telling him lies, being loose with the men, that sort of thing. But always it’s, ‘Don’t you see how much I love you?’ ‘Don’t you see it’s because I’m jealous?’ What does he care if he writes slander that will last maybe a thousand years?”

  “Okay,” said Hal carefully, “there’s something in that, too.” He was obviously used to the incoherence of his students and unwilling to dismiss what he didn’t understand. He therefore nodded to Jessie before turning to address the group as a whole: “I sense that you all bring your life experiences to bear in the way you interpret the sonnet, which is exactly the point. It’s a very rich piece of work and open to a variety of readings. It reflects how complicated and contradictory Shakespeare’s feelings for the lady probably were, as opposed to the purer emotion he felt for the young man.”

  “What are you talking about?” interrupted Jessie sharply.

  “Pardon?” said Hal, stopping short.

  “Don’t give me that about the young man. A pure concoction. The young man wasn’t the point.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “Of course not! It was spite, pure and simple.”

  “Spite toward the young man?” Hal asked, puzzled.

  “Stop with the young man already. No, it’s all about making the lady jealous.”

  Hal cocked his head as though he had missed something, then continued in a patient voice. “Okay,” he said slowly. “But I don’t know if we have much support for that reading. Given that there are no more than twenty-seven sonnets addressed to the lady and a hundred and twenty-six to the young man, it would seem that the man occupied the more central place in the poet’s affections.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Jessie again. “He wrote a lot more than that to the lady.”

  “He did?”

  “Of course!”

  The class seemed to be following this exchange with interest. They had never heard anyone quarrel about poetry before.

  “Are you—a literary critic?” Hal asked.

  “Lord no,” said Jessie. “But I should know what he wrote.”

  “You should?” he seemed puzzled for a moment, then, as though a light went on: “An amateur enthusiast!”

  The bell rang at this point and the rest of the parents left the room. Jessie remained in her seat, smiling at Hal. He smiled back. Anyone who took an interest in Shakespeare, however eccentric, was a source of pleasure to him.

  “You look the same, you know,” said Jessie, tilting her head to one side and nodding in obvious pleasure, “and I see you’ve chosen to give up the mustache.” She glanced over at the picture from the frontispiece. “A wise move, if I may say so.”

  “You think I look like—William Shakespeare?” said Hal, also glancing at the picture and trying to mask his satisfaction. It was a thought that had occurred to him before, though no one else had ever mentioned it.

  “Oh, that picture’s not really like him,” said Jessie dismissively. “They got the shape of the face all wrong and made the eyes too droopy. No, you’re the image of him—down to that.” She pointed to a small mole on his forehead.

  Hal flinched, looking surprised and a bit frightened. “You are—?” He seemed suddenly to notice that Jessie was not the right age to be a parent of one of his students.

  “Jessica Kaplan, Stephanie Goodman’s grandmother,” she explained, continuing to hold her head to one side and smile. “Her parents couldn’t make it tonight. They sent me instead.”

  “Stephanie has wonderful insights into poetry,” said Hal, pleased to be reminded of one of his best students, but shifting uneasily under Jessie’s gaze. “I suppose she gets that from you.”

  “Oh, no, I was never one for poetry. Some things rubbed off; they were bound to—but it wasn’t really in my nature to think like that.” She paused and her voice became dreamy. “You said your name was Hal Pearson. Hal was one of his favorite characters and a nickname for his son, Hamnet—he couldn’t very well call him Ham, could he? You see how these things come back.”

  “Excuse me?” said Hal.

  “Never mind.” Jessie waved her hand, but continued staring at Hal and smiling. “Margot must be about your age. Margot’s my daughter. Not Carla, Stephanie’s mother; she’s already married to a nice doctor. This is my other one. She looks just like I did; at least, they say so.”

  Hal seemed more and more bewildered.

  “Well,” said Jessie, sighing and assuming a brisker tone, “I have to go now. I promised not to keep Carla waiting.”

  She pulled herself up from the desk but without taking her eyes from Hal’s face. “You’ll come to Shabbos dinner some night soon,” she said, as if stating an established fact. “We can talk more then. I’ll check with the doctor for some dates when he can get home on time. His schedule is hectic, and sometimes he stops at the tavern, but I’m sure we can work something out.” She reached out to pat Hal’s arm in a gesture of affection and support. “Don’t worry, it’ll be worth your while. You can meet Margot, and I’ll make the chopped liver you like.”

  Hal looked confused and seemed about to formulate a question, but Jessie had already turned to go. As she walked to the door, she glanced at the sonnet that she was still holding in her hand and muttered irritably under her breath: “Only twenty-seven to the Dark Lady—ridiculous!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Carla PULLED UP IN FRONT OF THE SCHOOL AFTER her appointment with Dr. Samuels, she could see that her mother was engaged in conversation with a large man in a Rutgers sweatshirt. They were both holding sheets of paper and appeared to be talking animatedly. As she opened the door, she could hear Jessie saying in the same pleasant, instructional tone she used to show Stephanie how to baste a chicken: “The last two lines are really all you need. They tell you what the poem’s about. I used to go straight to them to get the point.”

  The man nodded. “Thanks for the tip. Never had much experience with poetry. ‘Casey at the Bat’ was about as far as I ever got.”

  “It’s another language.” Jessie nodded sympathetically. “It’s a matter of being exposed.”

  “Our kids are lucky that way,” said the man.

  Jessie nodded again. “Back then, there were fewer opportunities. Most were no better than cannon fodder.”

  “S
ure,” said the man, figuring that Jessie was talking about her own youth. “World War Two, Korea—”

  “And the War of the Roses.”

  “Yup,” said the man, a bit confusedly. “Fortunately, I didn’t have to go to war, but that didn’t help me much. Teachers managed to make Shakespeare seem like a bad case of the flu. It helps to have one with a little enthusiasm like this Mr. Pearson—brings the stuff to life.”

  “Yes,” said Jessie, “it’s a nice touch to have him come back as an English teacher. And seventh grade. He used to say their minds were useless by the time they turned sixteen.”

  The man nodded, but seemed relieved as Carla motioned to her mother to get in the car.

  “So how was Back-to-School Night?” she asked, noting that Jessie’s face was flushed. “I see you’ve managed to make friends.”

  “Yes, everyone was nice, though I can’t say that Stephanie’s teachers are very inspiring. With the exception of Mr. Pearson. It was wonderful seeing him again after all this time. Gave me quite a shock at first. But once I got used to it, it made sense.”

  Carla swallowed. “What made sense?”

  “Will coming back like that. As a teacher—he always had a streak of that in him, always trying to get me to read. Then, of course, there’s the practical side of it. He can talk up the plays, point out the good lines, get the word out.”

  “Did you—discuss all this with him?” asked Carla slowly.

  “Not in so many words. It was clear he didn’t have a clue. He’s too young. It only comes back later, once the curtain is about to fall.”

  Carla was silent. It suddenly occurred to her that her mother’s fantasies might be a way of helping her face death. “But you did speak to Mr. Pearson,” she finally continued. “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh, the sonnets mostly. I set him straight about a few things. He had them all wrong, gave far too much credit to that sniveling Pembroke who wore his breeches too tight and was always hanging around trying to get things dedicated to him—as if Will cared a jot about him. I’m not saying that there weren’t some episodes in that line—he and Kit Marlowe talked a lot about ‘the varieties of love’ and so forth—but everyone knew that it was me he was trying to make jealous. Then, when I wouldn’t listen, he wrote the Venice play and broke my heart.” Jessie paused. “He was the love of my life, you know. No offense to your father—it was another life. Of course, there was someone who might have given them both a run for their money … .” She paused again, as if realizing she were veering off on another line of thought, then continued in a more matter-of-fact tone: “Anyway, I didn’t tell Mr. Pearson any of that. I didn’t want to keep you waiting. Besides, we’ll have more time later.”