Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (17 page)

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Authors: Paula Marantz Cohen

BOOK: Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan
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A
fter Cass
LEFT, CARLA PREPARED TO RUN OVER TO THE geriatric center, where she wanted to discuss the videographer's options with Mr. O'Hare.
O'Hare's knowledge of the mechanics of the bat mitzvah had become veritably encyclopedic in the past few weeks. He now had definite opinions on such things as the timing between the dancing of the hora and the serving of the matzo ball soup, not to mention the niceties of whether Mark's father, Charles Goodman, should perform the
Motzi
alone, or whether a male relative from the Kaplan side should perhaps be brought in as well, to balance things out. “Families can get testy that way,” said O'Hare. “What about that Uncle Sid you mentioned? Is he mobile? Does he have his faculties? Maybe he might do the wine prayer in a pinch.”
Carla agreed that there was wisdom in this advice. Perhaps, she said, O'Hare might want to consider a career in bar mitzvah planning; he seemed to have a flair for it.
Before she left for the geriatric center, however, Carla went to check on her mother. Jessie had not been puttering around the kitchen or straightening up the den, which was her usual occupation at this hour, and Carla wondered if perhaps she was feeling under the weather and had gone upstairs to lie down. She found
Jessie in her bedroom, not napping but watching a videotape on the small TV on her night table. This was strange, since Carla didn't recall having rented anything in the past week.
“What are you watching, Mom?” she asked curiously. The tape was clearly not one of the musicals or '40s melodramas that her mother tended to favor.
“It's a tape of
The Merchant of Venice
,” said Jessie in a rather supercilious tone, “with that famous English actor, what's his name?—I think he's dead now.”
“Laurence Olivier?” Carla glanced at the screen, where Olivier was indeed recognizable in a frock coat talking to two other men in frock coats in what was unmistakably Shakespearean language.
“It was made for English television,” Jessie explained. “They have higher-class taste over there.”
“I see,” said Carla, unused to being lectured by her mother on British taste.
“This one is set in a different period,” continued Jessie. “You see the costumes aren't what you'd expect.” She gestured to the frock coats. “But it's the play all the same. And I have to admit that this what's-his-name does a lot with the Jewish moneylender part. I don't like the daughter, though—but then I'm prejudiced.”
Carla, ignoring this critical evaluation, asked, “Where, might I ask, did you get this copy of
The Merchant of Venice
?”
“Oh”—Jessie faltered a moment—“from the new video store up the way.” (In point of fact, Hal had gotten the tape for her from the new video store, and she planned to return it to him at their lunch tomorrow.)
“Are you telling me you drove all the way down Route 73 to that new store, Videos Unlimited?” Carla knew that Jessie was a fearful driver, not inclined to venture anywhere that she hadn't been before.
“And why not?” said Jessie, growing huffy. “I'm not helpless, you know.”
“Okay, okay,” said Carla, assuming that her mother's imagined
fling with Shakespeare had emboldened her as a driver. “My mistake. I just thought you didn't like to drive out that far, that's all.”
“Shh!” said Jessie suddenly. “This is the part I wanted to hear.”
It was Shylock embarking on the famous speech that explained why he was seeking revenge against the Christian who owed him money. Carla and Jessie sat without speaking as Olivier took flight, the lines rendering him at once noble and pitiful.
“‘Hath not a Jew eyes?'” intoned Olivier, his voice rising to an epic lament. “‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?—fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.'”
“Powerful,” murmured Carla.
“Yes,” sighed Jessie, turning off the TV and standing up, “he did himself credit there. The rest—feh!—but that speech was something. But enough with the Shakespeare already,” she pronounced, to Carla's relief. “It's time I started dinner.”
“
T
his is
AMAZING STUFF!”
Hal Pearson was sitting in a corner of the roof dining room at the Yale Club in New York City with his old college friend Anish Patel. Anish had been Hal's roommate at Yale and was now an assistant professor of English there. His exclamation was in response to a paper Hal had e-mailed him the night before.
In the context of contemporary academic life, Anish was an odd bird. He was a literary conservative at a time when most rising academics were liberals, and an ethnic minority who not only didn't champion contemporary ethnic literature but believed that the literary canon effectively ended with Dr. Johnson.
Anish could buck the multicultural trend because his background placed him technically out of bounds. Born into the lower castes of Indian society in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Calcutta, he had applied himself to his studies with a tenacity and vigor that had earned him scholarships to Andover and Yale. In the end, despite being the descendent of a people who had suffered the yoke of imperialist oppression, he had become a rabid Anglophile—in Hal's words, “more jingoist than Kipling.”
“Personally, I don't care what the politically correct types think,” Anish often declared to Hal, “I like the great old books
and I don't take their authors to task for prejudices and limitations they had no way of recognizing. I'm fed up with you guys who insist that the geniuses of the past should share your enlightened views. You conveniently ignore the fact that it takes time—and great writing—to prepare the way for enlightened views.”
As Anish's words suggested, Hal's tastes in literature and in politics were more ecumenical than his friend's, and they often became embroiled in heated debates in which Hal argued that a particular author (say, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or Vladimir Nabokov—not to mention Philip Roth or Toni Morrison) belonged in the pantheon of literary greats, while Anish argued that said author was an overhyped piece of garbage. What they shared, however—and what kept the friendship strong—was a mutual devotion to Shakespeare. They never quarreled about that, and it was the reason why they were meeting at the Yale Club today.
Anish was thumbing excitedly through the sheaf of pages that Hal had e-mailed him. The two men had often shared ideas during college and graduate school, though they had ultimately taken different career paths. Anish had accepted a professorial position at Yale, while Hal had gone on to teach the great unwashed—i.e., the middle-schoolers of Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Anish said he didn't understand Hal's choice. He had seen dirt and ignorance enough in Calcutta, and couldn't imagine wanting to see more of it in the New Jersey suburbs. He was pleased to have a wood-paneled office, a few prissy graduate students to advise, and plenty of time to peruse the quartos and folios of his beloved bard in Yale's Beinecke Library. Hal, for his part, said he didn't care about wood paneling. He wanted to bring Shakespeare “to the people”—and Cherry Hill middle-schoolers seemed as good a sample of that group as you were likely to find anywhere. Besides, he happened to be one of those rare adults who liked kids. He thought they were amusing and interesting—something that Anish found impossible to comprehend.
But in the present instance, such differences were forgotten.
Anish was excitedly turning over the pages in his hands while Hal looked on with pleasure.
“It's amazing!” Anish exclaimed again. “It'll turn Shakespeare scholarship on its head. The journal will never hear the end of it.”
“The journal” was the
Shakespeare Biannual Review
, an academic journal that no one read but that was highly respected in certain circles, albeit very small ones. Anish was its editor.
“The idea that we can trace Jessica's betrayal of her father in
The Merchant of Venice
to a real woman of Hebrew persuasion who rejected Shakespeare's advances sheds light on the entire development of his career,” Anish continued enthusiastically. “It makes
The Merchant
, as you say”—he flipped through the article and read from one of the pages—“‘a nodal point in the canon, from which the other plays spring rather in the manner of a theme and variations. ' All Shakespeare scholarship will have to be revised in the face of it.” (In making his case, Hal had adopted the academic tone of the world he had left behind.)
“It
is
good, isn't it?” agreed Hal exultantly. The more he had mulled over Jessie's story, the more interesting and exciting the implications seemed to be.
“It's sensational! Altogether without precedent!” Anish exclaimed, then paused and gave his friend a penetrating look. “I assume you have sources to support your ideas?” His voice had suddenly taken on a concerned note. “You didn't just make the whole thing up, did you? If you did, it's an impressive leap of imagination, I grant you, but no use to us.”
“No,” said Hal slowly. “I didn't make it up. But the source is unorthodox.”
“Unorthodox is all right,” said Anish hopefully. “We're none of us High Church here, are we?”
“I should say not,” said Hal. “You're Hindu and I'm a Methodist, which leaves Church of England more or less beside the point.”
“Not that there's anything wrong with the Church of England,”
Anish noted. “But I assume some sort of evidence stands behind this.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Hal tentatively, “the source hardly counts as a source at all.”
Anish frowned more deeply. “A source that is not a source—sounds mysterious.”
“Yes,” admitted Hal, “I suppose it is.”
“Don't tell me you are going to present me with three caskets and ask me to solve riddles in the manner of poor Portia's lover. I could never understand what Shakespeare saw in that selfish bastard Bassanio—”
“And now you know why,” Hal jumped in enthusiastically. “Shakespeare created him to get back at his beloved and her father, Jews who had turned their backs on him. It was Bassanio, as I argue”—he pointed to his paper—“who was Shakespeare's own alter-ego—a figure of self-loathing thinly disguised as a leading man. Not that elements of Shakespeare aren't present in the character of Shylock as well, as I explain here on page nine.”
“Yes, yes, very ingenious,” said Anish impatiently. “The characters are predictably overdetermined, all stemming from the traumatic rejection by the Jewish woman—that's clear enough. But how do you come by it—that's the question?”
“I'd rather hold off on any further explanation,” said Hal in a tone Anish knew meant the case was closed. “I'm not sure I'm in a position to reveal my source—and you'd probably be inclined to discount it anyway. The point is whether the theory makes sense.”
“It holds together wonderfully,” said Anish, “but without hard evidence, what's the point? You might as well write a novel. I realize that for many in our field the distinction is inconsequential. They write theories and say they're as good as facts, then they hogtie the facts and make them serve the theories. Their rationale: Since we can't know anything for certain, who cares what the particular proportion of truth to fiction happens to be? But we at
Shakespeare Biannual
hold to that unfashionable thing known as
truth. Which is only to say, we don't publish anything without footnotes.”
“I know that,” said Hal. “I hope in time to collect the evidence and provide you with the footnotes you need.”
“That's what I like to hear,” said Anish, appearing to relax and smiling fondly at his friend. “Add the footnotes to this”—he slapped the paper with his hand—“and you make an invaluable contribution to Shakespeare studies and a name for yourself.”
“I'm not interested in making a name for myself.” Hal shrugged. “But I do want to follow this thing through as far as I can.”
“Of course you do. You are pursuing important scholarship here that is bound to make a difference—”
“Let me clarify,” said Hal, interrupting his friend. “The thesis I gave you is not the result of laborious research. It was more or less handed to me.”
“An elaborate theory about Shakespeare's Dark Lady simply fell in your lap?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“As you said, the difficulty now lies in the proof.”
“But you believe the proof can be had?”
“I do.”
“Am I to assume from what you have written here that it involves a visit to Venice?”
“You are correct.”
“And the unearthing of the lost sonnets to the Dark Lady?”
“Yes.”
“And you have some idea where they can be located?”
“Not I, but my source may be able to locate them.”
“A source that is not a source?”
“Correct again.”
“Perhaps I can be of help.” Anish considered. “I have access to a substantial grant for locating and studying old manuscripts. It's the sort of thing they give out freely at Yale. Money, you know,
flows copiously here; you have only to stand still and allow the waters to lap over you. I suppose it would be nice to divert the tide to my poor cousins in Calcutta”—he paused to consider this novel idea for a moment, then gave it up—“but these are literary funds, you know, not intended for humanitarian purposes. Such things must be kept distinct or we might as well all run off and join the Peace Corps. But we can certainly use the money for your project, which fits the grant outline to the letter.”
“Absolutely!” exclaimed Hal. “A grant for locating and studying rare manuscripts sounds like just what we need!”
“I'll get on to it tomorrow and take care of the paperwork and logistics,” said Anish. “We can travel during your winter break when I'm between semesters. Meanwhile, arrange things on your end. Hopefully, all of us—your dubious source included—can be off to Venice in December.”

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