Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (25 page)

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Authors: Paula Marantz Cohen

BOOK: Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan
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ut somehow
THE SPIRIT OF THE EXPEDITION HAD CHANGED. As Jessie moved toward the Gam Gam restaurant, her face had lost all its eager intensity. She might have been walking through the Cherry Hill mall for all the excitement she showed.
Entering the restaurant dampened their spirits still further. They realized immediately that it had undergone a thorough renovation.
“Shit!” exclaimed Hal, in a rare show of temper.
“No hidden sonnets here, I'm afraid,” said Margot, trying to sound flip, though there was a catch in her throat.
But Jessie looked strangely unfazed. “Oh, well,” she said, “let's take a peek anyway. It's been a long time, after all.”
They walked around the restaurant where several tourists were busily eating blintzes with sour cream. The manager, a young man with a black hat and
pais
, turned out to be from Brooklyn. He was a member of the Lubavitchers, a Hasidic sect that had become a presence in the ghetto and even held services in some of the synagogues. After passing out Lubavitch pamphlets along with the menus, he seemed pleased to show them around.
They climbed the steps to the upper floors of the building.
“This was where I slept,” Jessie said matter-of-factly when they
arrived at the third floor. “I believe my bed was over there. But you see they've changed everything. They've put in new floors—much easier to clean, I should think.”
“So I don't suppose we could pull up this—what is it, linoleum or something?—to look for the sonnets.” Margot turned to Hal.
“I don't believe we could,” said Hal. He seemed to be perusing the pamphlet, but Margot could see that he was upset and trying to get a handle on himself.
Everyone seemed at a loss as to what to do next. “I don't suppose you're hungry?” asked Hal, turning to Jessie. She shook her head. The salad at the little restaurant on the canal had been enough for her.
“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.
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.
W
hen 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 interested. 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.

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