Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “Later?”

  “I invited him to come for Shabbos dinner one night. He seemed very pleased by the idea. I dropped a hint about Margot, so that may have had something to do with it. And I promised to make my chopped liver. He loves my chopped liver—he may not remember, but he does.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “There’s no REASON WHY YOU CAN’T DO MORE WITH YOUR practice,” Carla explained to her husband one evening soon after her visit to Dr. Samuels. “I’m not talking about anything too pushy or obvious. You just need to be more savvy about the business aspects and get the word out that you know your field and care about your patients.”

  Carla had been thinking this over in light of Dr. Samuels’s success. Psychiatry was a languishing field—in worse straits even than gastroenterology—but Samuels had refused to languish. She felt Mark could take a lesson from him.

  “I heard that Drexel University has co-op students who will work for a term or two at reasonable pay,” she suggested. The idea had come to her after Margot had noted that a Drexel student, an English major doing an internship in the DA’s office, was finding inconsistencies in her cases that the regular staff would never have noticed. “These kids watch the crime shows on TV, so they ask all kinds of questions they don’t teach in law school. Like when they had the lab analyze dirt under Mr. Giannini’s fingernails for mud from the Schuylkill River—not the sort of thing he’d acquire at the family barbecue, his alleged alibi when the body was being disposed of. Now, that’s straight out of CSI. Let me tell you, I wish I had one of these media-savvy kids working for me.” It had occurred to Carla that a student well versed in the slicker medical dramas might be helpful to Mark as well.

  “You could hire someone to analyze the weaknesses in the practice,” she suggested to him now, “evaluate office efficiency and cash flow, for example, or put some promotional materials together. Ever since Katie Couric had her colonoscopy on TV, intestines have been big news. You’ve got loads of ideas on colon care that would be worth publicizing. I’m convinced that if you want to make the practice work, you need to take the initiative in this.”

  Mark, though lacking the enthusiasm Carla would have ideally wished, said he was game to try anything; things couldn’t get any worse. And so, she went ahead and called the Drexel co-op office. The harried placement officer, used to employers with a very vague sense of what they needed, reached into a grab-bag of miscellaneous students and sent over three, each from a different major, to interview for the job.

  The first student, a film and video major with aspirations to be the next Andy Warhol, did not seem like a good candidate. Although he claimed to want to make a documentary film on the medical field, his black fingernails and multiply pierced eyebrows, not to mention his observation that “blood always makes for good visuals,” caused Carla to suspect that the documentary he would make might not be suitable for Action News.

  The second candidate, a finance major, did not fit the bill either. He seemed horror-struck when Carla explained how the medical profession had become beholden to the insurance companies. “So you’re saying your husband went to school for, like, fifty years and now they won’t let him make a living? It’s sick. I’m sorry, but trying to squeeze out a few more pennies here and there isn’t what I consider challenging work. My advice to Dr. Goodman is to go work for the insurance companies; that’s where the money is.” As for this student’s own aspirations—he was headed for Wall Street, where capitalism could proceed unimpeded.

  The third candidate, fortunately, was more promising. A stylishly attired black woman named Yvette, majoring in communications, she seemed to have some very good ideas about what might be done to put Mark and his practice on the area’s GI map.

  “You need to be more proactive,” said Yvette authoritatively. “I mean, no one’s going to care about getting colon cancer unless you scare them about it. And your husband needs a serious makeover. He’s got a nice-enough personality and he’s not bad-looking,” she observed with clinical objectivity, “but I’d totally rehaul his look. Change the suit—where did he get it, Men’s Wearhouse?” [He had.] “Get a more colorful tie, maybe a bow tie—we’ll have to see if that works for him. And the haircut, please!—he looks like someone from one of those eighties shows. The point is to make him a spokesperson for his field, which means he has to look credible but hip.” She waved her hand in the air. “So that’s the cosmetic aspect,” she concluded. “Then there’s outreach. We need to put together a list of the health editors at the local papers and TV stations. I’ll write a press release and have my boyfriend, Jeron, who’s in media arts, make a video that shows Dr. Goodman talking about some hot issue in the field. We can brainstorm about what that is. But first he has to change the hair. I won’t take the job if he doesn’t.”

  Carla felt that Yvette knew what she was talking about. The next day, she took Mark to the trendy Louis Christian Wayne Robert Salon and Spa on Route 70 for a haircut that at first embarrassed him to death but that he quickly became rather vain about. Yvette, now satisfied with the hair (they could improve it with mousse for the video, she said), came onboard and proceeded to begin work on “outreach.”

  Meanwhile, Carla had finally informed Mark and the children about the full extent of Jessie’s fantasy life. She had hesitated to do so out of concern that her family would find her mother’s condition off-putting or frightening. It was one thing to have a grandma with memory lapses and confusion, another to have one who believed she was the reincarnation of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.

  But the Goodman family reacted with surprising equanimity. They seemed to feel that Elizabethan delusions were no big deal and, if anything, a nice change of pace.

  Stephanie, for one, had already gleaned something of the matter in the course of her study sessions with her grandmother. After the initial reading of Romeo and Juliet, Jessie’s abilities with the text had picked up to an astonishing degree. She was now correcting Stephanie on errors of pronunciation and launching forth with explanations about archaic words and phrases. “When the character says ‘Anon,’” Jessie elucidated, for example, “it means something like ‘Be there in a jiffy’ or ‘On the double.’” Stephanie also noted that her grandmother sometimes used phrases that echoed the language of the plays—as in “Prithee, Stephanie dear, I do like your hair today!” or “By my troth, that’s a nice necklace!” Stephanie found these remarks weird, though no weirder than when her best friend, Elaine, dyed her hair orange—and with the definite advantage of making Jessie an excellent resource for English homework.

  Jeffrey responded to the news of his grandmother’s delusions even more enthusiastically. Given that his sense of the line between fact and fiction was extremely weak, he thought it was “really neat” that Grandma believed she had lived back then. As he saw it, they had swords and armor in Shakespeare’s time, and maybe she could bring back some souvenirs.

  Mark, driven to a crazed state of his own while calculating his new malpractice insurance, noted that Jessie’s condition had its benefits. “I’d sure as hell like to go back in time to when the medical profession got some respect,” he grumbled to Carla. “Maybe your mother can ask her boyfriend to write a play about the tragedy of modern medicine.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Who else IS COMING TO DINNER?” MARGOT LOOKED SUSPICIOUSLY at the extra place setting as she walked into the Goodman dining room one Friday evening several weeks later. “Carla!” Margot spoke her sister’s name accusingly.

  Margot knew that Carla was determined to find her a “decent” man—decent being someone other than the (usually married) captains of industry or (multiply divorced) Eurotrash that Margot tended to go out with. Margot felt it her duty to be outraged by her sister’s matchmaking, though, secretly, she would have been deeply disappointed if Carla ever stopped making the effort.

  “I didn’t invite this one,” said Carla now. “And it’s not about you for a change,” she half-lied. “It’s someone Mom met
who she seems to think is interesting. We’re hoping that maybe he can shed light on her condition.”

  “A psychiatrist?” asked Margot.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Who then?”

  At this moment, the doorbell rang and Jessie, looking flushed and excited, poked her head out of the kitchen and waved an oven mitt toward the door. “Would somebody get that? It must be Will—I mean Mr. Pearson.”

  Carla went to the door and opened it. Hal Pearson, dressed in a rather shabby suit but with his hair fully combed, was standing in the doorway, holding a bouquet of flowers. “Is this the Kaplan-Goodman residence?” he asked. “Home of the fascinating Jessica Kaplan and her brilliant granddaughter, Stephanie Goodman?”

  Carla had to admit that her mother was right: Hal Pearson had some charm. And he wasn’t bad-looking, either. She stepped aside so that he was directly facing Margot, who was standing behind her.

  Margot looked at Hal. He had a gentle, pleasant face of the kind that she normally wouldn’t look at twice. Still, she did look.

  Hal, for his part, stood stock-still. The sight of Margot took his breath away.

  “I’m Carla Goodman.” Carla proceeded briskly with the introductions. “And this is my sister, Margot Kaplan. Margot, this is Hal Pearson, Stephanie’s English teacher.”

  Mark now appeared in the doorway behind Hal. Generally, he didn’t get home from work until seven or eight P.M., but he had promised Jessie he would leave the office early to be on time for her dinner. He looked surprisingly cheerful given the probable headaches of the day and the fact that the work left behind would have to be completed tomorrow. It had now been almost a month since Yvette had begun to assist him in promoting the practice. Perhaps, Carla thought, seeing Mark in such good spirits, something had come of her efforts.

  She gave him a questioning look and he mouthed tell you later while stepping forward to shake Hal’s hand energetically.

  “So you’re Jessie’s latest find,” he said almost boisterously. “She’s been raving about you since Back-to-School Night.”

  “She met him at Back-to-School Night?” whispered Margot to her sister. “Next she’ll be bringing home stray dogs.”

  “Margot!” Carla hissed. “Be nice!”

  “Why doesn’t everyone sit down in the living room and have a drink,” suggested Mark, embracing the role of host with enthusiasm. Carla hadn’t seen him in this mode for several years—and she was reminded that he had been a fairly gregarious and fun-loving person before the trials of medicine began to wear him down.

  “We have wine and beer—or I can mix you something,” he offered.

  “Beer would be fine,” said Hal.

  “Gin and tonic with a twist of lime,” said Margot archly.

  “There’s some eggplant dip and crackers in the living room,” said Carla, leading the way. She turned to Hal. “You eat eggplant, I hope? Nightshade vegetable, you know.” Carla’s knowledge of food allergies and aversions had increased dramatically since working at the Golden Pond Geriatric Center. Not that her own family were slackers in this area. Just last night, Jessie had prepared a spaghetti dinner in which the pasta had to be carefully partitioned from the meat sauce owing to Stephanie’s problem with tomatoes (except, for some reason, when it appeared on pizza).

  “I eat everything,” responded Hal, glancing at Margot, as though hoping to gain points for this. He had gotten over being stunned by her appearance, though his eyes continued to be drawn in her direction. “I’m from northeast Philly, Feltonville—we’re not picky about what we eat out there. It’s a matter of grabbing what’s on the table before someone else gets it.”

  “You can say that again!” exclaimed Mark. “I hail from the Great Northeast, too. Oxford Circle. Hey, did you used to hang out at the Country Club Diner on Cottman Avenue? I think I remember seeing you there.”

  “Sure. I was addicted to their cheesecake.”

  “Me too! My dad worked at the Wanamaker’s on Cottman and the Boulevard, furniture department.”

  “Probably went a hundred times,” said Hal, equally pleased by these connections. “I remember when my folks bought me my desk there. They said they didn’t want me doing my homework on the kitchen table like they did. My dad supervised the old Sears warehouse on Roosevelt Boulevard that closed down about ten years ago. He said Sears was fine for appliances, but for a desk, we had to go to Wanamaker’s.”

  Both men laughed. “I used to walk by that warehouse all the time,” said Mark gleefully. “Where’d you go to high school?”

  “Masterman,” said Hal, referring to one of the city’s elite public schools.

  “Desk paid off, then. I went to Central!” It was another public school that required a test for admission.

  “Two talented and gifted young men,” noted Carla. “Anyway, I’m glad you eat everything, Hal,” she continued, changing the subject. “Jessie’s been working on a special meal for you all day. You seem to have made quite an impression on her.”

  “And vice versa,” said Hal. “Your mother”—he looked at Carla and then let his gaze linger a moment on Margot—“seems to know a lot about Shakespeare.”

  “It’s a surprise to all of us,” said Margot rather dryly. “My mother has the heart of an angel and enormous common sense—at least she used to—but she hasn’t got a literary bone in her body. I don’t think I’ve seen her read a book in her life, except maybe a cookbook.”

  “Perhaps you’ve underestimated her,” said Hal gently. “Or perhaps she’s been doing more reading lately. It’s amazing what great literature can do to expand the mind.”

  “She has been helping Stephanie with her Shakespeare assignments,” noted Mark. Despite his underlying affection for Margot, he enjoyed putting her in the wrong—especially since it was a position she was so unused to occupying.

  “So you’re of the literature-as-psychedelic-drug school of pedagogy,” said Margot, ignoring Mark’s comment and continuing to address herself to Hal.

  “I suppose I am,” responded Hal, taking up the idea with a certain relish. “Dostoyevsky, for example, seems to me to be a mind-altering drug. I remember that I actually crawled under my bed to read him in college. It was cramped and dusty, but that seemed the right setting.”

  “Hmm,” said Margot, obviously not prepared to be charmed by this anecdote. She too had been an English major in college, but of the pragmatic sort that reduced the literary work to an intellectual formula. She had gone on to transfer this skill to the analysis of legal evidence with great success.

  “So you think Mom started reading literature and her eyes were opened?” she said, continuing her interrogation. Something about the understated certainty that Hal brought to the discussion irritated her.

  “I wouldn’t presume to say what’s going on with your mother.” Hal shrugged. “I can only report that she seemed to have a lot to say on the subject of Shakespeare. It wasn’t terribly coherent, I grant you, but that only proves that she was wrestling with new ideas and trying to work things out for herself. I have to admit that I find that early stage of discovery—when things don’t quite make sense—the most exciting.”

  “A lover of incoherence!” declared Margot. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t get very far in the legal profession.”

  “I don’t know,” said Hal, smiling. “Incoherence seems to me a valuable legal strategy, to be employed when all other forms of argument fail.”

  “Touché!” exclaimed Mark.

  “Perhaps we should let Mom speak for herself,” interrupted Carla, sensing that her sister was getting agitated and wanting to bring things back to the original subject. “You see,” she proceeded, addressing Hal earnestly, “our mother has recently had some odd ideas about Shakespeare and, well, it might be best if she tells you how she—uh—stumbled on them.”

  Before she could say more, Jessie came out of the kitchen to greet Hal. “I’m glad you could make it,” she said, touching his arm and smiling. “I can’t tell you w
hat it means to have you here.”

  “I’m honored to be invited,” said Hal, smiling back.

  There was a moment of silence as everyone registered an emotional charge to the encounter and didn’t know what to make of it. “Well, dinner is ready,” Jessie announced finally, breaking the silence. “Tell the children to come down.”

  Mark shouted a few times up the stairs. The kids were engaged in their usual evening activities. Jeffrey was watching a rerun of Seinfeld (he could recite every episode practically verbatim, and had recently informed Mark’s cousin Dolores that her name rhymed with a certain part of the female anatomy). Stephanie was on the computer, doing her homework and instant-messaging her friends. These two activities had become so symbiotically entangled that no parent that Carla knew had figured out the means of disentangling them. Efforts to get Stephanie off the computer inevitably resulted in her screaming that she was doing her homework, even as the little box with her screen name—“hotgirl22”—continually popped up on the book-report-in-progress.

  Stephanie had initially been mortified at the prospect of having her English teacher to dinner and announced that she would remain sequestered in her room for the duration of his visit. Jessie, however, could be shrewd when she wanted. She had simply shrugged her shoulders at her granddaughter’s Garbo-like pronouncement and said that she would tell Mr. Pearson that Stephanie wasn’t feeling well—though he would no doubt be disappointed, since he had spoken so highly of her at Back-to-School Night.