Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “He did?” Stephanie had responded, eager to know more. “What did he say?”

  “Only that you were one of his best students—and with such an ear for poetry! But I’m sure he’ll understand if I say you’re under the weather.”

  “But he might not believe I’m sick and think I was trying to avoid him or something,” Stephanie protested—forgetting that this was precisely what she’d intended. “I guess I can come down for a while.”

  Now that the time for her appearance had arrived, however, she seemed unsure of how to greet her teacher in the alien environment of her home. Fortunately, Hal intuitively took up the line that Jessie had employed.

  “How’s my brilliant student?” he queried enthusiastically as Stephanie slunk into the room. “I’ve got to tell you that the essay you turned in today, ‘Why Macbeth Is So Insecure,’ is a real eyeopener. I never thought to compare Macbeth to an unpopular kid, or Lady Macbeth to the stereotypical bully. I don’t think I’ll ever read the play again without taking into account middle-school group dynamics.” He turned to the others with an expression of genuine pleasure. “It’s what makes teaching so rewarding—not so much helping the students as having the students help me see things I never saw before. I’m always surprised at what I can learn from fresh minds like this.” He nodded toward Stephanie, who blushed violently with pleasure.

  Jeffrey, meanwhile, oblivious to the company, had run ahead down the stairs, sat down at the table, and poured himself a glass of milk. He was now mixing in the Hershey’s syrup, rattling the spoon loudly against the glass.

  “Jeffrey, would you please mix your chocolate milk more quietly,” said Carla in an angry whisper. “It’s very vulgar to stir so loudly.”

  “It doesn’t get mixed well if I don’t stir hard,” complained Jeffrey. “The chocolate stays on the bottom.”

  “Well, perhaps you should mix it in the kitchen next time,” suggested Carla in an absurd effort to get the last word, “at least when we have guests.”

  Jessie now motioned the rest of the group to the table, making a good deal of fuss arranging the seating. In the end, Hal was placed at her right hand, next to Carla and opposite Margot. It was a felicitous arrangement for Hal, who could look at Margot without any appearance of strain—though with the result that, in the course of the meal, he would sometimes forget to put food in his mouth or, when he did (at Jessie’s urging), forget to chew it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Once everyone WAS SEATED, JESSIE TOOK HER PLACE AT the head of the table but did not sit down. She had placed two candlesticks near her setting. She took a scarf out of her pocket, draped it over her head, and lit the candles. Then she somberly sang the blessing. Everyone was surprised. The Goodmans celebrated the Sabbath on a rather erratic basis and found the seriousness with which Jessie performed the ritual now to be out of character. The whole thing was embarrassing—although even Mark had to admit that it was also strangely beautiful.

  “I’ve never seen you so into it,” said Margot as her mother took the scarf off her head and sat down. “Even when Grandpa was alive you hardly took it seriously.”

  “I wasn’t thinking so much about it then,” said Jessie. “Lately, I’ve been more tuned in, what with Stephanie’s bat mitzvah coming up—and other things.” She nodded toward Hal. “I wanted Mr. Pearson to have a traditional Shabbos dinner.”

  “Actually, I’m not Jewish,” said Hal with amusement, “though family lore has it that my great-grandmother was. It would explain my taste for lox, brisket, and chopped liver. But that might only be a function of growing up in northeast Philly, where most of my friends were either Jewish or Italian—I’m also partial to manicotti and pasta fazool. But my best friend, Gabe Stern, was an Orthodox Jew, so I’ve certainly had my share of Shabbos dinners. Gabe now works as a research scientist at the NIH, and I just got an invitation to his son’s bar mitzvah. I remember Gabe chanting from the Torah at thirteen, and I’m looking forward to hearing his boy do it now.”

  “You’re looking forward to the food, too,” noted Mark, who liked to call himself a culinary Jew.

  “I confess that I am,” agreed Hal.

  “I know, I know.” Jessie waved her hand with a touch of irritation. “You were always crazy for my cooking.”

  Carla and Margot looked at each other. “Maybe you should explain to Mr. Pearson what you mean,” said Carla.

  The request for an explanation had to wait, however, as Jessie was concentrating on scooping the chopped liver from the large serving bowl and putting it onto the individual plates.

  “I hope you still like my chopped liver,” she said as she gave Hal an extra-large portion.

  “I like chopped liver, so I’m sure I will.” He smiled, trying to make sense of this comment. Had Stephanie perhaps brought the chopped liver in on Ethnic Foods Day?

  Jeffrey had already begun eating. “Grandma’s chopped liver is awesome,” he pronounced between mouthfuls.

  “Jeffrey likes everything Grandma makes,” explained Stephanie with some scorn. “He even liked her venison stew.”

  “My Aunt Ruchel made an excellent chopped liver back then,” said Jessie. “But everyone said mine was better. Even Kit Marlowe liked it. And he was finicky.”

  Hal raised an eyebrow.

  “Ah, I forgot the garnish!” She rushed back into the kitchen.

  Everyone was silent for a moment until Stephanie kicked Jeffrey for putting his elbow on her fork, and a fracas ensued that forced Carla to switch places with him.

  “So,” said Hal, turning to Mark when things had settled down. “I hear you’re a doctor. A noble profession.”

  “Not so noble anymore,” said Mark sadly. “The HMOs have sucked the nobility out of us. They’re a blight on the profession.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Margot, inspired to take the other side, as she often did, for the sheer sport. “Doctors got away with murder before they came along. Personally, I like to know what I’m paying for and whether I’m getting my money’s worth.”

  “You’re being a fool,” said Mark, growing red in the face. “Medicine can’t be reduced to a ledger book. What the hell am I supposed to do with the poor schlub who comes in with hepatitis C and his company’s HMO doesn’t happen to have a prescription plan? Pay for the Interferon myself? And what about the young woman who takes a cruise to the islands and turns up with some bacterial infection that her insurance doesn’t happen to have on its list of treatable maladies? Ship her off to a leper colony?”

  “There are bound to be glitches,” said Margot, as though Mark were simply trying to complicate the issue. “They’ll get ironed out in time.”

  “Meanwhile, let’s hope you don’t contract a rare parasite,” said Mark, glaring at his sister-in-law, as though the thought of her, at that moment, with such a thing was not altogether displeasing.

  “I suppose there needs to be a mutual process of correction,” noted Hal diplomatically, “both sides recognizing room for error and abuse. But I do sense that what we’re gaining by reining in the doctors, we’re losing through the greed of the HMOs. And the biggest problem is putting a price tag on those incalculable aspects of human life.”

  “Well stated!” exclaimed Mark. “Human beings are not just a collection of parts. You can’t just go in for a tune-up.”

  “I think you’re being hypocritical,” said Margot, warming to the argument. “As a specialist you’re already treating the body like it’s on an assembly line. But when someone else wants to do it, you complain.”

  “Progress requires some specialization,” acknowledged Mark, “but it doesn’t mean that we have to ignore the whole for the parts.”

  “I agree there,” said Hal, as though this were something to which he’d given some thought. “Our modern bureaucracy—that social assembly line—doesn’t know how to link part and whole, form and content, or understand the complex links between private and public life. That’s where the poetic sensibility comes into pl
ay. It reminds us of these connections and carries the imprint of the soul.”

  “Very eloquent,” said Margot. “Sounds like one of the English papers that I wrote in college at two in the morning.”

  “I’m sure you got an A,” said Hal. “You seem to be very sharp.”

  “But lacking in soul. It’s always been my weak point.”

  “Remediable,” said Hal. “Nothing that a dose of Shakespeare wouldn’t cure.”

  “So Shakespeare is your all-purpose remedy? A kind of moral castor oil.”

  “Better tasting than that.”

  “Maybe you need to have your patients read some Shakespeare when they come to your office,” Margot suggested to Mark. “‘To be or not to be? Whether ’tis better to have a tube placed up the rectum and live a long life, or to forgo that indignity and shuffle off the mortal coil.’”

  “Funny,” said Hal.

  “Not such a bad idea,” ruminated Mark. “They could read Shakespeare while sitting on the can. The prep’s the worst part. It would help take their mind off things.”

  Hal nodded. “And Shakespeare has quite a lot of material dealing with that end of the human anatomy. Very big on flatulence—I use that to hook the thirteen-year-old boys in my classes.”

  “I’m sure you have those seventh-graders on the edge of their seats,” observed Margot.

  “Margot!” whispered Carla, not wanting her to cast aspersions against Hal in front of Stephanie. Stephanie, however, was not listening, but glaring at Jeffrey across the table for hogging the breadsticks.

  Jessie now came in from the kitchen with the garnish: parsley and cherry tomatoes that she laid on the side of each plate of chopped liver with great care.

  “Lovely,” said Hal, looking appreciatively at his plate.

  “Nice presentation,” agreed Mark, whose mood, uncharacteristically good to begin with, seemed to be improving steadily in the presence of an articulate ally. Normally, he was left to battle with Margot on his own, and since arguing was her profession, he inevitably lost.

  “Mom,” said Carla, feeling it was time to move past the amenities and broach the subject they had been skirting all evening, “you were going to explain to Mr. Pearson about your, uh, knowledge of Shakespeare. I think this might be a good time.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Jessie settled BACK IN HER CHAIR. “LET’S SEE,” SHE SAID, “where to begin?” She looked around the table and, having satisfied herself that everyone was enjoying the chopped liver, continued: “So I met him during that trip he took to Venice. Not Venice, Florida”—she looked over at Carla and Margot—“your father and I spent a few weeks there after we were married—very nice but not the same thing. I’m talking Venice, Italy. It was 1594 or five.”

  “You mean 1954,” Hal corrected politely.

  “No, 1594,” said Jessie. “As I explained to Carla, it was another life. I know it’s hard to believe. When Wanda Pinsky thought she was Ava Gardner, do you think I believed her? Not for a minute. For one thing, Ava Gardner was still alive, and for another, I knew that Wanda was crazy for Frank Sinatra, and what with that husband of hers, it was no wonder she let her imagination run away with her. My case is different. I remember—places, people, details even from the plays—and I was never one for literature. I told him so when he wrote me all those sonnets.” She paused and continued wistfully: “I remember the disappointment, the heartbreak, the tsuris. As Will said: ‘The course of true love didn’t go so smooth.’”

  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Hal.

  “Yes, the one with a lot of meshuggener people running around in a forest with fairies casting spells and mixing everything up.”

  Mark and Carla had been rolling their eyes during this exchange and Margot had placed her head in her hands. The children seemed to be largely oblivious; Jeffrey was eating a second portion of chopped liver, and Stephanie was applying lipstick with the help of a pocket mirror. Hal, however, was paying close attention and now spoke with surprising seriousness.

  “So you believe that in an earlier life you existed as the lover of William Shakespeare—the mysterious Dark Lady of the sonnets?”

  Jessie nodded. “Not so mysterious. But I was the Dark Lady. I looked just like Margot—and he wasn’t used to that sort of thing.”

  Hal turned and looked at Margot, who rolled her eyes again, but couldn’t help blushing.

  “The English women were very horsy and fair-skinned, and of course there weren’t many Jews; they were all chased out a hundred years or so before. Italy wasn’t much better. But Venice was a port, you see, so they needed the business. Poppa was a good businessman. They respected him. All that about his being such a devil in the play was made up. Will wanted to get back at me, that’s all.”

  Hal had taken a file card from his breast pocket and begun jotting this down.

  “What in the Lord’s name are you doing?” whispered Margot.

  “I’m taking some notes.”

  She looked at him disapprovingly. “I hope you’re not planning to write a book and turn our mother into a laughingstock.”

  “Not at all. I simply find her ideas worth recording. She has a well-defined grasp of time and place, and an impressive sense of how Shakespeare fit into her world. We do know that the playwright Christopher Marlowe may have gone to Venice when it was thought he was killed in a duel—the death staged for political reasons. And there has been speculation that Shakespeare may have visited him there. We know that some of his plays were set in Italy, including of course The Merchant of Venice, probably written soon after the sonnets. It revolves around the Jewish character of Shylock, who lends the Christian merchant Antonio money to finance his young friend’s courtship.”

  “Up to that point,” said Jessie, nodding as Hal provided this background, “there was some truth. We had no problem with that much of it. Poppa did lend the young man money—though he hardly charged any interest and didn’t even expect to get the money back. It had happened before, and he chalked it up. To think that Will took such advantage!”

  Hal elucidated for the company: “In the play, Shylock lends money to the Christian merchant under the agreement that if the merchant doesn’t pay it back by the determined date, then he will take a pound of the merchant’s flesh as compensation.”

  “Neat!” exclaimed Jeffrey. “A pound of flesh—from where?”

  “Excellent question, young man. That question would become a point of some contention later in the play. For when Antonio loses his ships at sea and cannot pay back the debt on time, as promised, Shylock attempts to execute the agreement. That’s when you have the famous scene in the courtroom in which the girl, Portia, for whom the loan was taken out in the first place, disguises herself as a lawyer and turns the tables on Shylock. She finds a loophole—that you can’t take a pound of flesh without also drawing blood, and that blood is not part of the agreement. As a result, Shylock is forced to give up all his money to the merchant and, as an added punishment, has to convert to Christianity on top of it all.”

  “No fair!” protested Jeffrey.

  Jessie patted Jeffrey’s hand approvingly. “Absolutely right, sweetheart, but of course the whole plot was to make us look bad. That, and the other part with the daughter.”

  “Yes,” continued Hal, taking her cue to continue the story. “Shylock in the play has a daughter who runs off with a Christian, one of Antonio’s friends. Her name”—he paused—“was Jessica.”

  Everyone stopped eating for a moment and looked at Jessie.

  “At least he could have changed my name,” she said irritably. “I understand he was angry because I’d broken off with him, but to put the name out there like that—it was a low blow. He was always saying that his poetry would live for a thousand years. So there you have it, Jessica abandons her father—sells the ring. There was a ring that Poppa gave to Momma that passed to me—I’d never have sold it for the world, no less for a monkey.”

  “In the play, Jessica sells her m
other’s ring for a monkey.”

  Jessie continued, incensed: “He was a genius, I grant you—how else do you take such spite and turn it into something that lasts? But it’s spite all the same.” She had begun to grow teary-eyed.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hal.

  “Thank you,” she sniffed, drying her eyes with her napkin. “You can’t know it, of course, that you’re him come back, but I’m sure you’ve had feelings now and then—they’re like shadows that pass inside your brain. They only start to get stronger later.”

  Hal looked at Jessie quizzically. Jeffrey, who was taken with the idea of having once been someone else, looked toward his grandmother and exclaimed stridently: “Who was I, Grandma? Say I was James Bond, please!”

  “James Bond is a fictional character,” corrected Stephanie superciliously. “He never existed.”

  “There were books about him,” objected Jeffrey. “They based the movies on books.”

  “Yes,” said Stephanie, with strained patience. “Just because they were based on books, doesn’t mean that the characters were real. The characters in the books were made up.”

  Hal intervened. “Well-expressed clarification, Stephanie. But Jeffrey’s view is also understandable. Nowadays, we tend to associate movies with made-up stories and books with historical fact. But it’s true, Jeffrey, that some books are based on real life and some are made up. And Ian Fleming made up the Bond character.”

  “I knew that,” said Jeffrey defensively. “But I can come back as Ian Fleming.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Hal. “Fleming lived a very exciting life.”

  Jeffrey stuck out his tongue at Stephanie to indicate he had won, while she simply took out her lip gloss and began reapplying it.

  Jessie, diverted from her recitation, had gone into the kitchen to bring in the next course, leaving the rest of them to talk freely.