Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

He shifted in his chair. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. I’ve already been to dinner once. It would look a bit strange to have me again, especially since you haven’t told them.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll tell them tonight,” Jessie sighed.

  “Good,” said Hal. “Anish says he’ll have the tickets for us by next week. He’ll be bringing along a colleague who knows the ins and outs of the city going back to the doges, so you’ll have plenty of help in finding your way.”

  “I won’t need any help,” said Jessie. “I know that city like the back of my hand.”

  “Well, a lot may have changed since the 1590s. Flooding and earthquakes; all sorts of rebuilding and renovation. There’s no telling if your house is still standing.”

  Jessie looked at Hal and became quiet for a moment. “You know,” she finally said, “it’s like I’m preparing to go on the stage for a performance, but it’s one that happened a long time ago. Will always said the best actors always looked forward and never back. That’s why it didn’t upset them if they missed a line; they were thinking about what was coming next.”

  “You don’t have to go back, you know,” noted Hal, catching the implicit meaning in what she said. “Sometimes I think maybe you shouldn’t. Feel free to cancel, if you have any doubts at all. Anish can always use the tickets to take some graduate students over. He has plenty of other work he can do in Venice.”

  Hal was speaking truthfully. He had grown very fond of Jessie, and he often felt himself siding with her daughters—wanting her to simply give up on the whole harebrained scheme, to try to forget whatever she thought she remembered, and to move forward rather than back in her life.

  “But I must go back,” countered Jessie with vehemence. “It’s not just to find my birthday sonnets. It’s more than that—or maybe something entirely different. All I know is that it’s a trip I need to make. You mustn’t try to talk me out of it,” she said, clearly upset at the prospect that he might.

  “If it’s what you want, I won’t try to talk you out of it,” said Hal reassuringly.

  Jessie sighed and patted his hand. “Such a sweet and loyal boy. Don’t worry, I’ll do what you said and tell the girls tonight.” She paused and gave Hal a look. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up the phone and ask Margot out.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “You haven’t COMPLAINED LATELY, SO I TAKE IT MOM’S better,” said Margot, who had come over for Friday dinner and was helping Carla take the good dishes out of the breakfront and set the table. Jessie could be heard in the kitchen humming “Now I See Thy Looks Were Feigned.” “By the way, what’s that song she’s singing?”

  Carla ignored the second question and addressed herself to the first. “She seems to be better,” she responded with some deliberation. “She makes fewer odd references, but then she’s talking less in general. She’s keeping herself busy, though. When I’m at Mark’s office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she’s always out when I call.”

  “What does she do the rest of the week?” asked Margot.

  “Oh, the usual. Putters around the house. Cooks and sews. Watches some TV.”

  “So she only goes out on Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

  “Come to think of it, yes. At least for the past few weeks, it’s been that way. Goes to the mall, she says—not that she ever buys anything. But you know how she likes to look for bargains and compare prices. And I suppose she doesn’t like being home alone.”

  “I suppose,” said Margot, who, as an experienced trial lawyer, had a tendency to look for patterns and be suspicious about them. Not that she could think of anything to be suspicious about in the case of Jessie’s outings.

  Carla had moved on to tell Margot about the windfall of the bat mitzvah dress that now rendered Margot’s help in this area unnecessary.

  “But I can at least do her makeup,” said Margot. She seemed disappointed at losing the chance to shop with Stephanie for the dress—a typical example of the naiveté of the childless, Carla thought.

  Carla had invited several guests for dinner that evening. Along with Margot, there was her friend Jill Rosenberg and her husband, Adam, a dentist, as well as her supervisor and friend from the Golden Pond Geriatric Center, Susie Wilson. Jill and Susie were superficially opposing types. Susie was in the martyr mold: a visionary Saint Joan willing to be burned at the stake for her beliefs. Jill was more like the hostess at an awards ceremony, determined that the lighting flatter everyone’s makeup. Carla thought there were virtues and limitations to both approaches. Margot, she thought, would be a helpful bridge between them. Were the three women ever to consolidate their skills, they would truly be a force to be reckoned with. As it was, their combined presence would make for a diverting evening.

  “Margot, you look stunning,” said Jill as she entered the house, her eyes darting with lightning speed from Margot’s shoes to her hair. The ability to appraise the physical packaging of another woman in a nanosecond may well have survival benefits for the evolution of the species. Certain women, of which Jill was one, had perfected it to a high degree.

  Jill herself was wearing a wildly flapping silk ensemble with multiple bangles, and Adam, an outfit clearly picked out by his wife—the sweater had a garish cheerfulness at odds with his lethargic disposition. Even at this early stage in the evening, he looked as though he wanted to take a nap.

  “We were so excited to hear that Mark’s practice is going so well. I hope he can get an associate,” said Jill. “Adam got a whole new lease on life when he got his two years ago, didn’t you, dear?”

  Adam nodded soporifically. For his present state to represent a new lease was to make his former one akin to being six feet under.

  Susie came in next, looking harried. She was a handsome but disheveled-looking woman, always struggling with some new crisis involving care for the elderly. At the moment, she was worried about cuts in funding for the nonprofit Golden Pond Geriatric Center. Lately, government money had decreased and a promised stipend from headquarters had not materialized. This meant that the Center might have to reduce the number of beds, a prospect that would essentially mean throwing ten debilitated eighty-five-year-olds into the street. It was the sort of thing that kept Susie lying awake nights.

  When she explained the problem to the assembled group, Jill became incensed. “How dare they?” she exclaimed. “I’m a taxpayer and have the right to expect that the elderly in my community are properly cared for.”

  “It’s politics, that’s all,” said Susie wearily.

  “I’m going to call your boss and give him a piece of my mind,” said Jill. Calling and giving someone a piece of her mind was one of Jill’s favorite occupations.

  Carla, who knew Jill’s ability to make adult men cower in fear, saw this as an opportunity for the Center. “Why don’t you drop by the facility with me on Monday?” she suggested. “You can have a look around and get a sense of the problems a funding cut would cause.”

  “Excellent idea.” Jill nodded.

  Carla knew that, when activated, her friend was a formidable force for good. Otherwise, she tended to spend her day getting manicures, shopping for the perfect push-up bra, and nagging her son Josh. Not that Carla faulted Jill for this. The mix of narcissism and altruism in her friend’s nature was part of her charm and made her a kind of mascot for the richly contradictory nature of suburban life.

  “Feel free to take a look,” said Susie, not sure what to make of Jill’s on-the-spot devotion to her cause, but prepared to take any help she could get. “If you’re really serious, I’ll send you a prospectus on the company and some background articles on adult care that might be helpful.”

  “Please do,” said Jill, who was already looking forward to browbeating the CEO of Golden Pond, Inc.

  At this moment, Mark strode buoyantly into the house. He had begun to exude the cheerful bonhomie and mild pomposity that characterized successful physicians a few decades back, but that one rarely saw nowadays. He had grown fa
r more affable and interested in others in the wake of his own success, and now, given that there was only one other man present, took to questioning the soporific Adam Rosenberg.

  He began asking about a new dental bonding technique he had read about, and Adam, to everyone’s surprise, perked up. Dental innovation happened to be Adam’s passion, but since no one ever cared about the subject, he never had the opportunity to expound on it.

  Mark’s question also opened the floodgates to Adam’s view of the field in general. “Used to be you could relax and make a good living with a dental degree,” he observed crankily. “Now you have the cut-rate clinics stealing your patients and the insurance refusing to pay for the specialty dental work.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Mark. “But I’ve been doing some creative marketing. You have to tie innovation to a public information campaign—get the word out so people know what’s available.”

  Adam nodded, and Jill piped in to the effect that the doctors and dentists on Long Island, where she had grown up, had a good grasp of promotion. “Remember the ads that Ronnie Feldman put on the back of the phone books?”

  “No!” said Adam, with surprising vehemence—he had never disagreed with his wife in public before. “Phone book advertising is tacky!”

  “There are better ways,” agreed Mark, translating this into a gentler vocabulary. “In the health-related fields you need to be subtle or you lose your credibility. For dentists, I’d say, maybe host a tooth-whitening seminar. Or a luncheon for area ENT docs, potential referring sources, on the importance of good bridgework to sinus health.”

  “Nice idea,” said Adam, taking out a pencil. “Let me jot that down.”

  “I wish you could come up with some PR ideas for me,” said Susie Wilson dejectedly. “I’m in a field that just doesn’t lend itself to sexy promotional literature or video spots. Shakespeare said it best: The end is ‘second childishness—Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.’ We’ve got the ‘sans’ stuff at the center in spades, but who wants to look? Maybe if people read more they’d understand.”

  “Please don’t talk to me about Shakespeare,” said Carla—anything related to the Bard had a tendency to give her a headache.

  “I don’t know that reading is the answer,” said Margot, considering Susie’s point more objectively. “I just think most people would rather not think about such things. Life is hard enough without concentrating on what’s going to happen when we get older.”

  “But that’s exactly the point,” declared Susie. “It’s in facing mortality that we can see our lives in some perspective. How can I cry about my big butt or even my bastard of an ex-husband when I see Mrs. Carmine, once the most beautiful woman in Brooklyn (or so her daughter told me), incapable of going to the bathroom by herself, much less recognizing her darling grandson? It breaks my heart but it also makes it stronger.”

  “So we need to require everyone to spend time working at the Golden Pond Geriatric Center?” asked Carla.

  “That seems a bit extreme,” noted Margot. Such work would not have agreed with her.

  “Then I still maintain that reading is the next best thing,” argued Susie. She herself had majored in English at Smith and had appeared destined for a career as a society hostess—that is, until her husband’s infidelities had propelled her into the workplace and the discovery of a calling in geriatric care. “It’s the human condition, in the end, that we have to deal with,” she continued, “and literature teaches about that.”

  “That was the argument that Jessie’s friend Mr. Pearson made,” said Carla, glancing at Margot. “He’s Stephanie’s English teacher,” she clarified for the other guests.

  “And he majored in English at Yale,” interjected Jessie to everyone’s surprise. She had just brought out the appetizers—liver knishes, one of her specialties.

  “I didn’t know Mr. Pearson went to Yale,” said Carla. “I don’t remember him mentioning it when he came to dinner.”

  “Oh, we talked a bit in the kitchen when he was helping to clear the table,” said Jessie quickly.

  “You’d think he’d do more than teach middle school with a Yale degree,” said Margot.

  “And what’s wrong with teaching middle school?” demanded Susie. “I say it’s a noble choice of career. If we had more good teachers for kids at that age, the world would be a better place.”

  “Granted,” acknowledged Margot. “It’s just that a Yale degree is a commodity that generally brings with it a big job and a big salary.”

  “All the more reason to applaud the fellow for bypassing those rewards,” insisted Susie.

  Her point struck home. There was, Margot felt—though she had tried not to feel it—something admirable about Hal Pearson that seemed to place her in the wrong, a position she didn’t enjoy occupying. This was, if she were to be perfectly honest about it, part of her irritation with him.

  “It’s a sign of heroism not to care about money,” continued Susie.

  “Think of Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. She didn’t care about money; that’s why James made her the heroine.”

  “And look what happened to her,” pointed out Margot, who had read that novel in college and identified with the strong-willed heroine while being exasperated with her for her disastrous taste in men. “She threw away her inheritance by falling for a bastard.” It occurred to her as she said this that she had fallen for quite a number of bastards herself.

  “We showed the film version of that book at the geriatric center the other night,” noted Carla, hoping to divert the conversation to a lighter subject, “the one with Nicole Kidman. But the sex scene was much too explicit. Mr. O’Hare liked it, of course, but it shocked some of the others. It wasn’t in the original, was it?”

  “God no,” said Margot, laughing. “The whole point of Henry James is to leave the sex out.”

  “It depends on how you read him,” amended Susie. “For me, James is very sexy. He incites the imagination.”

  “My problem,” said Mark, happily taking the philistine view, “was that Henry James always put me to sleep before my imagination had a chance to kick in. I’ll never forget feeling screwed by The Turn of the Screw in college. That was an ordeal that may have driven me into medicine.”

  “Then I suppose we have Henry James to thank for an excellent physician,” said Margot dryly.

  While this conversation was transpiring, Jessie got up from the table and began clearing away the appetizer plates and bringing out the main course (a succulent veal chop with a very nice rice pilaf). With the exception of urging everyone to have seconds of everything, she remained quiet for the rest of the evening.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  After the GUESTS LEFT, MARGOT AND CARLA DEBRIEFED AS they cleared the dining room table. “Mom was good, don’t you think?” asked Carla.

  “Good, I don’t know,” replied Margot, appearing to consider the question. “She didn’t say anything odd, if that’s what you mean. But she was kind of quiet.”

  Before they could continue their analysis of their mother, Jessie herself came out of the kitchen. She stood near the door for a moment, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, and then proceeded to sit down at the head of the table and fold her hands. “Can I have a word with you girls before Margot leaves?” she asked.

  Her daughters sat down on either side. “You were kind of quiet tonight,” said Margot, seeing that her mother, though clearly wanting to speak, seemed at a loss for words. “It was a great dinner, but you didn’t seem to be involved.”

  “Except when you reminded us that Hal Pearson went to Yale. That was a surprise,” added Carla with amusement.

  Jessie cleared her throat at this. “Which brings me to what I have to tell you. I have an announcement.”

  “There you are!” said Margot to Carla. “I knew there was something up her sleeve. She’s been acting very sly and secretive lately.”

  Jessie ignored this and continued. “I want yo
u to know that I’ve been meeting Hal Pearson for lunch for the past few weeks. Tuesdays and Thursdays,” she clarified, “when Carla was at the office.”

  The sisters looked at Jessie, stupefied. “You’ve been meeting Stephanie’s English teacher for lunch!” exclaimed Carla. “What is this, Harold and Maude? The man’s forty years younger than you are, for God’s sake. It’s perverse!”

  “Carla,” said Jessie with exasperation, “I have not been meeting Mr. Pearson that way. What do you take me for?”

  Both women relaxed perceptibly. “Okay,” said Margot, the first to take the measure of the situation. “Obviously you’ve been meeting that man to discuss your delusions about Shakespeare. He’s probably been encouraging them. I think that’s highly irresponsible, if not outright criminal. I thought he was odd, but I didn’t think he would exploit the fantasies of an elderly woman behind her family’s back.”

  “He’s not exploiting,” protested Jessie. “He’s interested in what happened, and he’s helped me put it all together very nicely. I owe a great deal to him.”

  “Yeah, you owe him a ticket to the loony bin along with you,” said Margot angrily.

  Carla cut in at this point. She, too, was appalled that her mother would sneak around behind her back, but she could not feel as outraged as Margot. She felt partly responsible for leaving her mother alone two days a week. “Mom, I realize you were lonely, but you could have asked me to stay home. It’s not absolutely necessary that I help Mark at the office, especially now that things are going so well.”

  “It has nothing to do with you staying home,” said Jessie in an irritable tone. “I needed to talk to Hal about what I remembered. And then, of course, we had to make plans.”

  “Plans?” said Carla with trepidation.

  “For the trip. That’s why I felt I had to finally speak to you. We’re going to Venice in three weeks. Just a short trip—four days. It’s all I’ll need. But I can’t tell you what it will mean for me to go back.”

  “Okay, now I get it,” exclaimed Margot, growing more irate. “The man’s a fortune hunter. He wants to bilk you of your savings. You take him on a nice trip to Venice to explore your roots, and he gets to go along.”