Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Good luck with the family,” he said, his eyes flicking down to her mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  “See you Tuesday?”

  “Okay.” She turned and walked down the block.

  The lights were on in her house. The first person she saw was Miriam, walking out the door. Seeing her, Miriam charged down the block, grabbed Masha’s arm, and pulled her toward the house, her mouth a tense red slash.

  “What happened? Mommy was like dead all Shabbos, she could barely talk.”

  “I told her. I missed the train,” Masha said.

  “Yeah, but … were you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw you with a guy just there.”

  “You were spying?”

  “I caught sight of you. I was waiting for you to say goodbye. Forgive me for not screaming your name in the street.”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “A friend? From where? Where did you get a friend like that? What’s going on with you? I know something is going on!”

  Masha tore loose of her sister and walked into the house. In the living room, the whole family was looking up at her, a nest of bafflement and reproach. She backed away from them, mute, like a hunted thing, and ran up the stairs.

  She sat on the bed and took in her room. Everything was as she had left it yesterday morning, yet it seemed acutely not the same. Her chest of drawers, the forest-green rug, the green-and-blue curtains, Yehudis and Suri’s tidily made beds, her hairbrush on the bedside table with a snarl of black hair in it—it was all so … alien. It seemed as if this were a room she was visiting for the first time in years. Something had changed, forever, in a single day. Loss swept through her.

  Her mother’s knock was soft. “You want something to eat?” Pearl asked.

  “No, thanks, Mommy.”

  “You must be so tired.” Pearl hugged her.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” said Masha.

  “It’s over now,” said Pearl. Masha held her mother, gripped the flesh of her arms, put her head against her soft breast, searching for the comfort she had always found here. But a protective case was forming around my beloved, like a magic spell that repelled everything familiar. Her little tear-stained face seemed so strained, so thin, it broke my heart.

  Pearl stroked her head. “I am so glad to see you, sweetheart. You rest now. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Pearl shut the door gently. Masha began to undress, removing first the left shoe, then the right, as she had been taught to do. She was so tired all of a sudden. The door opened. It was Estie.

  “Where were you, Masha? You ran away!”

  “If I ran away, how come I’m here?”

  “Hashem’s gonna be so mad at you.”

  “Why? I didn’t do anything. I stayed put. He would have been mad if I’da got on the train.”

  “I got in trouble too,” said Estie, one gangly leg up on Masha’s bed.

  “What else is new? Okay,” said Masha. “Scram. I’m tired.”

  “Mashie. Could I sleep wit’ you?”

  “No way.”

  “Please?”

  Masha sighed. “Just lie down with me five minutes.” The little girl nestled up to her sister under the blankets, wrapping her small hand in a black lasso of Masha’s hair, and gave her neck a long, satisfied sniff. “Don’t cry, Mashie,” Estie said.

  “I’m not crying, stupid,” Masha whispered.

  “You was,” said Estie drowsily. Masha held the girl’s warm body close. Within seconds the two wild daughters of Pearl and Mordecai Edelman were fast asleep.

  25

  I was summoned to the library. The count was writing a letter at a round table.

  “Sit down, Gebeck,” he said. I sat. He slid a piece of paper, a quill, and a bottle of ink toward me. “Write your name,” he said. I began to write Jacob, but turned it into Johann, then Gebeck. He took the paper and squinted at it.

  “Do you normally write in Hebrew?” he asked.

  “That’s what I learned,” I said. “But I do write some French.”

  “Your handwriting will improve,” he said with a shrug. “Now. I have an undertaking for you. I wrote a little journal of my travels in Italy last year. I would like you to write me out a fair copy.” I peeked up at him, confused. “Just copy what is in my journal into this clean notebook. Practice your handwriting first. Write out my first two paragraphs on this scrap piece of paper. There.” He left me then.

  Half an hour later I was asleep, my head on the table. I was still feeble from my time in jail. Solange led me to the settee and drew a blanket over me. I slept there for several hours. When I woke, I found a tray with soup and bread, water, and hot coffee on the library table. I ate my meal, careful not to spill a drop of soup. Refreshed, I spent the next two hours improving my script, copying out French I barely understood.

  As was the count’s intention, the act of copying his language made me more fluent in French. By the end of the day I had begun to understand a bit more of what I read. By the end of the month I was reading easily. The journal was, for the most part, an exhaustive description of the count’s pursuit, seduction, and abandonment of various ladies of the Italian nobility. It seemed to me that he would not be very welcome in that country, should he ever wish to return.

  It took me two months to make the fair copy of the Comte de Villars’s Italian journal. During that time I also learned from Le Jumeau how to:

  • Lay a table in three different geometric formations: chevron, oval, and rectangle, according to the design of the house steward.

  • Serve all meals, both formal and quotidian.

  • Address each servant according to his or her rank, and my betters according to theirs.

  • Deliver a message.

  • Open a door.

  • Close a door.

  • Bow while walking backward.

  • Shine shoes.

  • Brush hats.

  • Dress a count.

  • Shave a count.

  I perfected the deadened aristocratic expression required of a servant, a chilly look they called “morgue” in those days. As I studied Le Jumeau, the count continued to study me: he might appear at any time—when I was eating, sleeping, praying, washing. I had to enunciate every blessing I said over food and drink so that he could copy it down in his little red book. I spoke out my prayers like lines in a play. The effect of all this was to make my religious habits seem more and more like performance. Whatever real feeling I had invested in my daily rituals was being sapped.

  My first Friday in the Hôtel de Villars, at sunset, I lit a candle in my room and said the Shabbat prayer, then ate what dainties I had set aside during the week as a Shabbat feast. However, I was unable to devote twenty-four hours to prayer, joy, and rest, as we are prescribed to do. Close to midnight, the count arrived home from the theater and called for me to undress him. Saturday morning, Le Jumeau barked at me to light the stove, shine the shoes. Sunday morning was the servants’ only time off, so that we could attend Mass, which I did not do, of course. Neither did Le Jumeau, by the way; he was busy with the comely cook, Clothilde, who had, I learned by way of the scullery maid, abandoned her husband and children to live with the irresistible valet. Now that I was installed beside the count, they shared a bedroom off the kitchen.

  One morning I was performing the ritual washing of hands when the door opened. The count strode into my room, reached down, took the basin, jerked the window open, and threw the water into the courtyard. Then he turned on me, his broad, fleshy mouth turned down in an exaggerated grimace, his face red.

  “Enough,” he said. “I have been patient with you, Gebeck. But now you need to wake up. Meet me in the library in half an hour. Have some bread and coffee. Forget about my breakfast. Le Jumeau will bring it to me later.”

  I reported to the library at the prescribed time, badly shaken. The count’s mood had softened.

  “I am sorry to
be harsh. There is a reason for my behavior. One day I believe you will be grateful for what I am about to give you. Now your French is strong enough. Never mind your duties today.” He had opened the glass door of a high bookcase and was selecting various leather-bound volumes, setting them on the table. He chose one from the pile and opened it before me. “I will return in an hour or so. You can ask me anything you like then. I am no professor, but I have been taught well, by brutal teachers with great minds: the Jesuits. Your only obligation for the next few months is to educate yourself.” I was overwhelmed by confusion, fear, and a rising sense of privilege. When I answered, my voice barely emerged from my throat.

  “Merci, Monsieur le Comte.”

  And so began my enlightenment.

  He started me on Aristotle. I felt I was drowning. I had no comprehension, nothing to cling to, no reference for this mode of thinking. The count walked me through the great ideas of classical civilization as patiently as if I were his own son. My education had been thus far exclusively religious, including only the Torah, the Talmud, and, through Gimpel, heretical whiffs of the Zohar and the Tanya. There was much wisdom in these books, but it was all predicated on faith, and tainted, for me, by the nightmare of Hodel. Logic and empirical reasoning was a relief, like a gust of fresh air after being locked in a closet. To my surprise—and the count’s too, I think—I showed an aptitude for philosophy, and developed a love of language, learning adequate Latin and fairly good French, even some English. The count loved a well-turned phrase. Pleasing my master had become very important to me. I had never managed to impress my own father much. He regarded me as a dud, serious about neither selling nor studying; married me off to the first lunatic with a dowry that went on the market. What would he say now, if he saw his chump of a son in a powdered wig, speaking the language of Cicero?

  The count was determined to rid me of my superstitions. He bathed me in Locke, lathered me in Voltaire, and powdered me with Diderot. The Jews were, my master contended, sealed off from civilization. Steeped in ancient custom, with a superiority complex supported by our holy text, we were permanent primitives forever linked by a pseudo-historical umbilical cord to an imagined, heroic past. Worst of all our crimes was the mothering of Christianity, which the count detested as the religion of slaves. My master imagined me up a utopia where Jews, Muhammadans, and Christians alike lived for themselves and one another, not in fear of divine retribution, not ensnared by an intricate net of laws, but free. It was a dizzying prospect, frightening and seductive.

  26

  Two weeks had passed since Derbhan Nevsky had visited the Bridget Mooney School of Acting, and he had used the time well. He had moved in on his old aquaintance, Ross Coe, the richest man he knew outside the entertainment industry. Nevsky had met Ross at the Carmel Yacht Club in the nineties. Nevsky represented a star who was deeply involved in the sailing world, and he spent a lot of time on boats because of it. He was amazed, at the time, at all that untapped money flying around, so close to Hollywood yet untouched by its itchy fingers. Sailing folk were, as a rule, conservative types who had their money tied up in bonds and property. They weren’t big risk takers. Yet Nevsky had always been convinced that, with the right approach, they could be bled and not even feel it. When he met Ross Coe, who had just had a nose job, the first of many plastic surgeries he was to suffer over the years for reasons only his psychiatrist understood, Derbhan recognized a man who could be led deep into uncharted waters. Coe was young, rich, bored out of his mind, and had some very strange predilections. Most people found him repulsive. Nevsky saw him as an opportunity waiting to happen—he just couldn’t figure out how to activate him at the time. Plus, luck was streaming in from all sides back then—he didn’t really need any more of it. But now that the gods had turned on him and he had been washed up on the shores of New York with nothing but his wits and the clothes on his back, he had to make friends with the natives. So, on instinct, he called Ross Coe, guessing he’d be bored enough and odd enough to want Derbhan Nevsky back in his life. He was right.

  The parties at the Coes’ were filled with older men in bright-colored trousers, occasional women in their thirties and forties with ebbing looks and a hungry gleam in their eye, ready to snag any billionaire with most of his teeth in. Nevsky navigated his way through these grizzly affairs with his characteristic energy, limbs jerking this way and that, his shirt and jeans blindingly white, skin tanned as a well-cooked sausage. He flirted with the women and cajoled the men, made connections with people who had never heard of him before, who just thought of him as a veteran man in entertainment starting up a new company. He gradually became indispensable to the Coes, who were always desperate to entertain but lacked any real social magnetism, apart from their money, of which they had an enormous amount. The other reason they were a difficult sell socially was that Mrs. Coe, formerly Orschler, came from an old Nazi family. Her mother was the first cousin of Herta Schneider, Eva Braun’s best friend. When in her cups, Mrs. Coe had an alarming tendency to get nostalgic about the lovely Eva and her flawless skin, her generosity with the staff, and the sad fate that awaited her in that damn bunker. These musings did nothing to endear her to the Jewish element in the Hamptons, nor, in fact, any thinking people, and so the Coes were socially marooned when Nevsky came into their lives, forced to cruise nearby towns looking for likely acquaintances. The Coes were both allergic to solitude, especially the type that involved spending time alone with each other, and needed to be entertaining constantly in order to feel well in themselves—or, perhaps, in order to feel at all. Nevsky relieved them of the nightly burden of having nothing to say over dinner, he regaled them with stories about Hollywood personalities, he got them all excited about the company they were going to start together, made them feel part of it. In short, he breathed new life into their stale and decadent existence. Consequently, Ross Coe asked Nevsky if he’d like to come live in the guesthouse until the company was up and running. Nevsky pretended to think about it for a couple of days, and then he arrived with a large suitcase. He was, he felt, on his way. He had been punished enough.

  It was scene night at the Bridget Mooney School of Acting. Nevsky was seated on a metal chair in the second row, behind Bridget. The girl who wouldn’t shake his hand came onstage, followed by a lanky young Southern guy. They were doing a scene from Orpheus Descending. The actor playing Val the drifter was relaxed, intense, a pro. The girl playing Carol Cutrere was kind of unbelievable. She played the part with no feminine mannerisms, yet she was intensely erotic. Her sexuality ran like dark sap through the scene. Her words, spoken with swaybacked diphthongs, sounded odd for the Southern Carol, yet every word she said sounded true. There was a moment—Nevsky had never seen anything like it—when Carol was begging Val to take a drive with her, and the girl put her hand on his arm. The man reacted as if he had been burned; the girl put her hand to her mouth, tears came to her eyes. When she said the lines “I’m an exhibitionist! I want to be noticed, seen, heard, felt! I want them to know I’m alive!” the words, filled with fury and pathos, seemed ripped from her soul. Nevsky got chills. This girl connected with an audience like a live electric wire.

  Masha sat collapsed in the metal folding chair beside Hugh, knees together, feet pidgeon-toed, hands in her lap, waiting for the critique from Bridget and the class. She was still trying to make sense of what had happened. She had touched him; she remembered that part. She had touched him! The skin of her palm hurt when she did it, an ache she could still feel. She was forbidden to touch him, and yet she had done it. This was why she was not allowed to act. It had been inevitable. She couldn’t hear what Bridget was saying. The other students were talking, but she couldn’t focus. When Hugh stood up from his chair, she took her cue and followed him offstage.

  “Are you all right?” he asked in his warm voice. She nodded, tears in her eyes.

  “You want me to take you home?”

  “I think if I just sit for a while …,” she said. Then she went into th
e bathroom and soaped her hands for a long time.

  The minute Masha and Hugh left the stage, Bridget turned to Nevsky, twisting in her seat.

  “Don’t say anything to her until I speak to you,” she said.

  Back in Bridget’s office, Bridget held fast: she wouldn’t allow Nevsky to send Masha out on auditions for three months. She needed that time to work with her. In addition, she asked that Nevsky take on another student. Nevsky chose frazzle-haired Shelley, whose scene had come after Masha’s. Shelley was funny. She could do well on TV, he thought. Nevsky wanted Hugh too, but he already had an agent. Just as well; he never got along as well with the guys.

  When Masha was on her way out of class that night, Nevsky slipped her his card.

  “Bridget won’t let me send you out till later, but I want you to have this. I would love to represent you, when you’re ready,” he said.

  The next day, Masha’s chest began to hurt again. She couldn’t sit up or laugh without pain. Pearl took care of her, kept her in bed. I never left her side, buzzing loyally around her as she swatted me away. Masha was very sad during that period. She kept thinking about walking down Sixth Avenue with the snow in her eyes, what it was like to be alone like that, and free.

  She had to go to a cardiologist. She lay back as a nurse smeared her naked chest with lubricant, then fixed little suckers to her skin. Wires attached to the suckers made a picture of her heart, the nurse explained. Afterward, the young doctor came in and sat down.

  “Well, we’ve done an EKG and an echocardiogram, and we can’t find anything wrong.”

  “How can there not be anything wrong?” asked Pearl. “She can barely move!”

  “Have a look at the echo from the hospital, when Masha was diagnosed with pericarditis,” said the shiny young man, clipping two X-rays up on a light board. “Here’s the one from the hospital. You can see the fluid around the heart, right? This little sort of dense sac? But in the one we took today, it’s clear.”