“There’s a museum in the Getto Nuovo,” suggested Felicity. “It has some interesting artifacts dating back several centuries.”
Everyone gamely trooped back to the other ghetto and into the small museum that Felicity had mentioned. They began to look at the items in the display cases along the walls, artifacts from the ghetto’s history. Most of what was preserved was from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though a few scrolls and candlesticks, and one magnificent menorah, dated from an earlier period.
The museum curator, a young Italian woman with excellent English (she’d gotten her Ph.D. in art history at Stanford), explained that the menorah was from the sixteenth century, or perhaps earlier.
“Maybe it looks familiar,” said Jessie.
Hal asked the young curator if she knew when the building in the other ghetto, where the Lubavitchers had their restaurant, had been renovated.
“Six or seven years ago,” responded the woman.
“No letters or papers found there, I suppose?” asked Hal.
“I’m sure we would have heard if there were,” said the woman.
They all stood looking around, not sure what to do. Finally Jessie spoke: “Do you think we could go back to the hotel now? I’m feeling a little tired. I’d like to lie down for a while before Saul drops by.”
Margot took her mother’s hand and led her down the stairs and out the door of the museum. She didn’t wait for Hal. She sensed he wanted to be alone.
Chapter Forty-two
It was ODD. THE MEMORIES THAT HAD ONCE BEEN SO PRESSING on Jessie’s consciousness had begun to fade. First, it seemed that she was only tired and less interested in the subject of that other life. Then, as she and Margot took the vaporetto back to the hotel, she began, quite simply, to forget. It was as though her mind were a delicate archaeological excavation: Some strange shift in the terrain had opened up a crevasse where one could glimpse something extraordinary about the past. Now another shift had begun to cover over what had been briefly revealed.
“You know I’m not a literary person,” Jessie said to Margot as they took the elevator up to their room. “What do I know from William Shakespeare?”
“You knew quite a bit an hour ago,” said Margot, feeling angry and frustrated. She had, in a short period—dating from exactly when, she couldn’t say—come to feel invested in this cockamamie scheme. What had originally seemed like an absurd delusion now seemed like a wondrous fairy tale. She wanted to shake her mother and say, “Don’t you remember—you’re the Dark Lady of the sonnets, the model for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice!”
Margot had also noted Hal Pearson’s expression as he looked up at her from the Lubavitcher pamphlet. The sense of loss was palpable in his eyes. She suspected that it was not just the loss of the sonnets that pained him; it was also the loss of someone who had had at her fingertips knowledge of a vanished world and a cherished author.
Anish was also disappointed. He could imagine his report on the aborted expedition to the grant committee: “Site of lost sonnets converted into glatt kosher restaurant; reincarnated Dark Lady suffers amnesia; no manuscript found.”
But Anish was by nature resourceful when it came to burrowing in the mines of academe. If there were to be no sonnets, that didn’t mean they couldn’t dig up something else of interest for the Shakespeare Biannual. Thus, he and Felicity went off to explore the archives in the doge’s palace.
Hal, meanwhile, had decided neither to go with Anish and Felicity nor to return to the hotel with Margot and Jessie. He remained behind, after everyone had gone, and then walked out of the ghetto, without thinking about where he was going. He walked in a kind of daze, taking no note of the time, until he suddenly realized that it was getting late and he turned around and walked back. When he arrived again at the ghetto, it was night, and the tourists had left the area. The glatt kosher restaurant was closed—locked and dark.
But Hal, for some reason, stepped up to the door of the building and knocked loudly. He didn’t expect anyone to answer. He simply wanted to knock on the door that he still believed had once been knocked on by the greatest writer in the English language.
Surprisingly, his knock was answered. The door opened, and an old woman in a black shawl, obviously the caretaker or the concierge for the building when it was not in use, stood before him.
“Excuse me,” he said slowly, sensing that this person was not fluent in English. “I have a friend who lived in this building once, a long time ago. Would you mind if I come in?”
The woman did not seem to mind. She was so old that perhaps the notion of minding anything had fled. She led Hal up the stairs to the second floor and then into a small alcove that had not been visible to them when they had visited the rest of the building earlier in the day. The room felt more like a cave than a house. It was perhaps the one area that had not undergone renovation.
“You are the caretaker?” asked Hal.
The woman’s head moved slightly under her shawl.
“How long have you lived here?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Sempre.”
“And have you ever”—he wasn’t quite sure what it was he wanted to ask, but he spoke the words that came to mind—“have you ever—found anything?”
She did not seem surprised by the question but went to a drawer and took out a small metal box. She opened it carefully. Inside was a locket. It was very old and very tarnished, but, to Hal, it resembled the locket that Margot had worn the night before. He took it in his hand.
“Aperto,” said the woman, reaching out and pressing the little latch so that the locket opened on its hinge. Inside was inscribed in tiny scroll script the following words: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”
“Inglese,” said the old woman proudly, “antico.” Then she kissed the locket gently and replaced it in the box.
Chapter Forty-three
When Hal RETURNED TO THE HOTEL, IT WAS LATE, BUT Anish was waiting for him in the bar, looking surprisingly awake and excited.
“I was worried you might have thrown yourself into the canal,” said Anish. “After all, it’s pretty disappointing to see ‘this insubstantial pageant shot to hell, with not a frigging rack left behind’—to very loosely paraphrase the Bard.”
“Maybe a rack,” murmured Hal.
“Then again, maybe a rack!” said Anish gleefully, oblivious to Hal’s comment because so clearly intent on imparting something of his own. “Actually, I haven’t been waiting up for you out of concern for your well-being. I know your capacity to survive painful experiences. Remember that girl in English 89 who put you through the ringer, quoting Keats every bloody minute of the way? And remember the time you broke the record for cheeseburger consumption at the Yankee Doodle in New Haven, a feat that you paid for by retching your guts out half the night? If you survived those ordeals, you could survive anything. No, I stayed up because I wanted to relay a nugget that I thought you might find of interest. Felicity, dear, industrious soul that she is, had the brainstorm of looking through the archival records in the doge’s palace for reference to an Avram Rodrigues. And wouldn’t you know it? Her experience hunting the hare of historical minutiae panned out. After much sifting, we did find an A. Rodrigues in the trade record for the year of 1595, listed as responsible for bringing a considerable amount of English wool into the country.”
“That would have been the year that Jessie said she and her father went to London at Shakespeare’s instigation,” noted Hal.
“Bingo!” exclaimed Anish. “It does fit nicely with her story. Not enough in itself to substantiate anything, but Felicity plans to do more digging into the matter of English involvement in Venetian trade in the 1590s. She has some grant money of her own, you know. Who knows what she may turn up?”
“Did you tell Jessie?” asked Hal. He was wondering if he should mention the locket and perhaps bring Jessie to see it tomorrow.
“I did, but I’m afraid she didn’t seem much i
nterested. She told us she was glad that we didn’t think the trip was a waste of time but that it had all begun to blur for her. She wanted to go back to her room and take a nap, so she’d be fresh for her gentleman caller.”
“Oh well,” said Hal.
“Yes,” said Anish, “I believe your source is now definitively not a source, though she gave us a good run for our money when she was.”
“‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own,’ murmured Hal. It was from Prospero’s speech at the end of The Tempest, when he broke his magic staff, and it seemed to fit the mood of the moment.
“Precisely.” Anish nodded. “But you know, I can’t say I care. There’s something to be said for falling back on our own subjective powers. I’m excited by what Felicity may turn up on the English wool, but I’ve gained more than that,” he observed thoughtfully. “A new perspective on the plays. The idea of Jessica and Miranda emanating from the same essential source—it’s a compelling one. Nothing objective there, of course; no hard data to support it. But it’s got me thinking about the limitations of hard data. I’m even considering striking out in a new direction. My mind’s been opened. I may even go back and read James Joyce with a fresh eye.”
Hal nodded. “It’s the gift I receive from my students every day. They’re constantly seeing literature and life with fresh eyes: uncovering patterns and relationships that never occurred to me.”
“Then I suppose I can finally understand why you do what you do,” said Anish. “Not that I’d ever want to do it myself.” He paused and gave Hal an inquiring look. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“No,” said Hal. He had decided to keep the discovery of the locket to himself. If the record of English wool was a material fact, the locket seemed part of the baseless fabric, best left to melt into air.
After the meeting with Anish, Hal wandered out onto the veranda of the hotel, where, at a corner table overlooking the canal, sat Margot. He had somehow felt she would be there and experienced a leap of joy at seeing his intuition confirmed. She was wearing a coat over a flimsy white garment that might have been her nightgown; she still had the locket around her neck. It was, he saw now, amazingly similar to the one he had seen—or thought he had seen—just an hour or so ago.
“So where were you?” she said. It was a genuine question, not mocking but irritable. It was the sort of tone, Hal noted with secret pleasure, that a wife might use with a husband who had come home later than expected.
“I’ve been wandering around the city,” he said, “and thinking.”
“Did Anish tell you about the English wool?” she asked.
“He did.”
“It’s promising, I think.”
Hal smiled to himself but didn’t ask her what she meant by “promising.”
“But you know,” she continued softly, “my mother’s more or less forgotten everything. On the way home from the ghetto it all began to go, and after she met her friend Saul for a drink—and, I should add, a very long subsequent dinner—it disappeared from her head entirely.”
“I know,” said Hal. “Anish told me. It makes sense, though. It takes a lot of concentration to love someone. You can’t have too much getting in the way.”
“Sometimes you have to throw out the clutter to see what’s there to love,” said Margot.
She looked at him then, and he looked back, but they didn’t say anything. Finally she got up. “Mom and I are taking an early fight home tomorrow. She wants to get back to be with Stephanie for the few days before the bat mitzvah. So I changed the tickets. We’ll be taking the motoscafi to the airport at five A.M., so I better get some sleep.” She stood there for a moment, her nightgown fluttering in the chill Venetian breeze.
And then she was gone.
Chapter Forty-four
On the MORNING OF THE BAT MITZVAH, STEPHANIE ROSE early to review her haftorah portion. Hearing the sweet voice emanating from her daughter’s bedroom, Carla momentarily forgot to worry about her D’var Torah. Of course, a few minutes later, she remembered and began worrying again.
The issue of the D’var Torah had not been resolved—at least not to Carla’s satisfaction. Stephanie had prepared a draft of the speech for her meeting with the rabbi the week before, but Carla had not had a chance to review it. She had been in a state of distraction when she dropped Stephanie off for her appointment with the rabbi and rushed to the airport to meet her mother and sister’s flight from Venice. Then, after depositing Margot at her apartment in Center City and Jessie at home, she had returned to the synagogue to find her daughter waiting placidly in front of the temple door.
“So how did it go?” asked Carla.
Stephanie seemed extremely pleased with herself. “He liked it,” she said.
“Really?” said Carla. She couldn’t imagine what her daughter had finally written, after resisting every possible idea that she and Mark had offered on the subject. “I’m sure it’s very good,” she said, trying to keep the note of doubt out of her voice. “When we get home, I’ll take a look and we can polish it up.”
“No,” said Stephanie. “I like it the way it is and so did Rabbi Newman. I don’t want you to read it. You’ll hear it at the bat mitzvah.”
“Honey,” said Carla, “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
But Stephanie was adamant, and Carla, worn down by the events of the past few months, eventually gave up trying to change her mind. Nonetheless, she remained in a state of trepidation about what her daughter was going to say. That Rabbi Newman liked the speech did not in itself seem a powerful recommendation. Rabbi Newman was very green. No doubt he was easily pleased, or at least willing to accept anything that did not seem utterly off the wall or flagrantly heretical. What did he care if the child appeared simpleminded? She was not his child. But Carla was Stephanie’s mother. She knew that Stephanie was a bright girl, and, furthermore, that relatives and friends, who had traveled long distances at great expense, would be judging her daughter—and herself, as the one principally responsible for shaping her. For Carla, the stakes were higher.
Yet nothing could be done. Stephanie had dug in her heels, and Carla, recalling the admonitions of Dr. Samuels, decided to back off and let things take their course.
At eleven A.M. on the day of the bat mitzvah, she took Stephanie to the local beauty salon for the bat mitzvah coiffure. This was de rigueur. Having one’s hair done professionally was as important a mark of initiation for the adolescent female as the religious ceremony itself. The hair had to be teased and twisted into some kind of serpentine style that screamed “special occasion.” Stephanie had made an earlier pilgrimage to the crafts store, and bought an array of sparkles and small silk flowers for insertion into the lacquered hairdo. The hairdresser, a blasé, gum-chewing young woman named Angela, was, as a result of her Cherry Hill clientele, an expert on the bat mitzvah coiffure. She looked at Stephanie with a serious gaze, cocking her head to one side and popping her gum.
“I recommend an upsweep with a few tendrils and maybe a few of these sparkles,” she concluded after some deliberation. “My thinking is, trash the flowers. You want to look fun, but also sort of spiritual. The flowers are too, you know, prom queen.”
Stephanie listened and nodded. She put the flowers back in her purse (perhaps to be resurrected for the seventh-grade dance) and gave herself over to Angela’s ministrations.
The final result was, Carla had to admit, decidedly fetching. Her daughter had an excellent face: the striking Lubenthal features softened by less intimidating contributions from the Kaplan and Goodman sides of the family. It helped as well that Stephanie seemed to like the way she looked, turning her head this way and that and smiling with pleasure. It occurred to Carla that the greatest beauty enhancement to an adolescent girl was a smile.
They returned home for a light lunch of smoked turkey and hard-boiled eggs that Jessie had prepared, in between ironing her new dress and creaming her face and hands. Car
la had never seen her mother so concerned about her appearance. She put it down to the fact that Saul Millman would be attending the bat mitzvah.
Jessie had talked to Saul every night since her return. Although he had continued with his tour of Italy and had not returned to the States until yesterday, he had called like clockwork, calculating the time difference with great care so as not to disturb what he called Jessie’s “beauty sleep.” The bat mitzvah would be the first time they would see each other since meeting for drinks and dinner at the Gritti Palace the week before.
When Margot had called from Venice to report that Jessie’s delusions had vanished, Carla had been surprised to hear a note of disappointment in her sister’s voice. “But it’s wonderful news!” exclaimed Carla. “It means we have her back again.”
“I suppose,” said Margot. “But to think that she no longer wants to talk about Shakespeare and the lost sonnets.”
“Are you crazy?” said Carla.
“I suppose I am,” Margot sighed.
“Mass hysteria; group delusion; folie à deux. I read about that stuff in my abnormal psych course in college. But I never thought that my rational sister would be party to it.”
Margot said that she had surprised herself as well. “It’s odd, but the trip changed me somehow. I feel sad about not finding the sonnets but glad to be coming home. You know, I’ve actually been thinking that maybe I should move out of the Rittenhouse apartment and nearer to you and Mom in Cherry Hill.”
“What?” said Carla. “Don’t tell me you’re having the delusions now!” She had always supposed that Margot would want to move to New York or possibly Paris—but to Cherry Hill, never!
“I feel somehow drawn to the place,” continued Margot. She spoke in her usual facetious tone, but her sister, who knew her better than anyone, discerned an underlying seriousness. “Maybe it’s the way Mom felt for a while about the ghetto in Venice. Places like Cherry Hill are probably scattered all over the world, where ‘our people’ feel instinctively at home. In any case, I have the oddest feeling that I’m going to end up living in Cherry Hill, or its facsimile, sooner or later.”
Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan Page 23
