Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “He’s not taking my money,” said Jessie calmly. “His friend has a grant that’s covering everything.”

  “His friend? It must be some sort of kidnapping racket,” said Margot, turning to Carla. Then, to her mother: “Who’s his friend?”

  “His friend is a professor of Renaissance literature at Yale,” Jessie sniffed. “Professor Patel is not kidnapping anyone. He happens to have research money that can pay for the trip. If we find them, he can write about them for his journal.”

  “Find them?”

  “The lost sonnets. The ones Will wrote me for my birthday, after the mean ones and before that nasty play.”

  Carla and Margot looked at each other. “So Mr. Pearson and the alleged Yale professor think you can lead them to some lost sonnets in Venice,” Margot said. “Do I have this right?”

  “Yes,” said Jessie. “And I must say it’s rather sad that people as important as Hal and Professor Patel take me seriously when my own family doesn’t.”

  Her daughters were silent for a moment. Then Carla spoke: “I’m sorry, Mom, if we’ve been neglectful or—dismissive—of your ideas. But put yourself in our shoes. It’s not reasonable to believe in what you’re saying. Mr. Pearson and this professor, if he is one, perhaps have their reasons for wanting to. They’ve made the study of Shakespeare their life’s work. Perhaps they’re willing to grasp at straws. But it’s hard for us. And to have you trekking off to Venice less than two weeks before the bat mitzvah, at your age, with some men you barely know, well, we can’t very well support it.”

  “I’m sorry, Carla,” said Jessie, pulling herself up into a posture not unlike the one Margot took in court after putting forward a risky line of defense that she was determined to stand behind. “I’m sorry, but I don’t care what you think. I’m going to Venice with Hal and his friend, and that’s the end of the story.” With this, she got up from the table and went upstairs to bed.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Can you BELIEVE THAT MOM IS GOING TO VENICE NEXT week?” Carla asked Mark as they stood in the florist shop in the upscale strip mall. It was not the same upscale strip mall in which the stationery shop was located, but a similar one—upscale strip malls being as plentiful in Cherry Hill as cherries and hills were scarce.

  Mark, realizing that Carla was asking a rhetorical question—a common tendency when she was tense—did not reply, allowing her to vent on the subject.

  “Mother hasn’t been out of the country since she and Dad went to Paris on an ABC tour when we were in high school, and then she said she liked Epcot better. So now, all of a sudden, she decides to go to Venice to dig around some old building that’s probably sinking into a canal? I just can’t wrap my brain around it!” Carla’s voice had taken on the quasihysterical note that Mark hadn’t heard since Jeffrey was high on chocolate milk.

  “Margot’s going to try to talk Mr. Pearson out of it,” he reassured her.

  “That’s true,” said Carla, taking a breath. Margot’s powers of persuasion were legendary in the family and, indeed, in the entire Delaware Valley, where she was known to have persuaded juries to acquit individuals where motive, opportunity, and evidence seemed to argue forcefully against them. Certainly Margot would be able to nip this thing in the bud if she applied herself.

  And yet Jessie could be stubborn. She was, after all, Margot’s mother, and had a bit of the same stuff in her. And there was that Hal Pearson to contend with. Who knew what kind of steely heart might lie beneath the seemingly gentle, teacherly facade.

  “But what if she doesn’t convince him? What if Mom insists on going anyway?” Carla wailed.

  “If Margot doesn’t convince her, so what?” Mark shrugged. “Then—big deal—she’ll go.”

  This had essentially been Dr. Samuels’s take on the matter. Carla had made an emergency visit to Samuels after lying awake for three nights running, thinking of her mother with a bunch of goofy Shakespeareans in search of her sixteenth-century roots.

  “She wants to go to Venice, let her go,” Samuels had pronounced after Carla filled him in on the situation. “Why shouldn’t she see the world at her age? Venice is a beautiful city. St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace. Sylvia and I spent hours in the Academia. The Bellinis and Titians knocked our socks off. And talk about good food. We didn’t eat for a week when we got back.”

  “But she’s not going for sightseeing or food,” protested Carla. “She’s going, she says, to find some sonnets that Shakespeare wrote to her and that she stashed under the floor of her room in 1597.”

  “So she wants to make it into a scavenger hunt; what’s the harm?”

  Samuels’s nonchalance had calmed Carla for a time, but as her mother’s trip approached, she became agitated again. Fortunately, the chores attached to the bat mitzvah were a distraction. Now, for example, she had to put her worrying aside and concentrate on the flowers for the centerpieces.

  Flowers had not been part of the bat mitzvah equation until four weeks ago, when the caterer called to say the magenta tablecloths were out of stock and they would have to go with something called “scarlet sunset,” a similar color, though a tad brighter. “What are the flowers going to be?” he asked. “You probably want to take it down a notch; scarlet sunset makes a bold statement and you don’t want to compete.”

  Carla said that she hadn’t thought about flowers. Were they really necessary?

  “Necessary, I don’t know,” said Moishe in the tone of a philosopher. “If you went with necessary, you’d have paper plates and baked beans.” (The desirability of paper plates and baked beans flitted momentarily through Carla’s head.) “Without a centerpiece,” Moishe continued, feeling inclined to take the argument further, “the tables look naked. Besides, lots of the guests don’t really want to look at each other. Put some irises and some baby’s breath in there—or some balloons, if you want to go in that direction—it’s much better than staring straight across at some farbis-sener you haven’t seen in thirty years. Helps the digestion, if nothing else.”

  Carla had put the question to Mr. O’Hare, who had become her sounding board and touchstone for almost everything regarding the bat mitzvah. O’Hare agreed with Moishe on the importance of a centerpiece and came down strongly on the side of flowers.

  “Flowers are alive,” he said. “Balloons are goddamn synthetic. Your daughter’s not a cheap plastic balloon; she’s a delicate flower, growing and blossoming. Use your head; flowers are the way to go, goddammit.”

  Mr. O’Hare had a way of making things seem crystal clear.

  Once the necessity of floral centerpieces had been established, Carla made an appointment with the premier Cherry Hill florist, Bennet, who had trained on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, known as the Cordon Bleu of floral design. Bennet wore a striped T-shirt and a small kerchief knotted around his neck, a look Carla thought might be some sort of tribute to Audrey Hepburn.

  His eyes widened in theatrical disbelief when he heard that the bat mitzvah was only seven weeks away. “Don’t you know that flowers take time?” he exclaimed, as if hair and makeup were somehow involved.

  Nonetheless, he called jubilantly two days later: They were in luck! (Carla had at first thought they had won the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.) A wedding scheduled for the same date as the bat mitzvah had been suddenly canceled when the groom was indicted for insider trading. “Sad for them, marvelous for you,” said Bennet succinctly, encapsulating the lessons of Darwinian struggle embedded in this floral transaction.

  He promised to have a sample centerpiece ready for their inspection in a month or so. That time having collapsed, Carla and Mark were presently waiting in the fetid atmosphere of the florist shop to view his handiwork.

  Bennet now appeared, looking agitated. “The lilies are so difficult this time of year,” he pronounced. (Carla imagined the flowers throwing tantrums and Bennet having to administer Valium.) He ushered them into the back of the shop. In a small alcove on a table in the center sat a large, scary-l
ooking constellation of twigs, leaves, and waxy, angular forms in unnatural colors that Carla supposed must be flowers, though they resembled none that she had ever seen before.

  “There she is!” said Bennet, as though the display were a debutante making an appearance at a cotillion ball. “Isn’t she exquisite?”

  Carla and Mark stared at the arrangement. “This,” said Mark in an authoritative tone (ever since his practice had begun to improve, he had become more forceful in his manner), “is not what we want!”

  Bennet drew back huffily. “You don’t like her?” he said in disbelief.

  “No!” said Mark. He turned to Carla for clarification.

  “It’s not that we don’t like—her,” said Carla, always the diplomat. “It’s that we’re going for a simpler look. Maybe some wildflowers,” she said, making a stab at describing the opposite of what stood before them. “Nothing so—modern.”

  “Ah!” said Bennet, with the air of an artist with an illumination. “You want the natural, just-picked look; the ran-out-to-the-meadow-found-some-daisies look; the wandering-through-the-English-countryside-and-gathered-these-in-my-apron look.”

  “Yes,” said Carla, “something along those lines.”

  “I understand,” said Bennet, gazing at his monstrous creation wistfully. “The insider trader and his bride loved this one. But to each his own. I’ll whip you up a new sample for tomorrow. But keep in mind,” he sniffed with artistic disdain, “the just-picked look is one of our most labor-intensive arrangements. It won’t cost you any less.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Margot decided THAT THE BEST WAY TO TALK HAL Pearson out of the Venice trip was to attack him with the full arsenal of her persuasive skills while garbed in a tight sweater. To this end, she prepared to surprise him in his classroom directly after school.

  On a Monday afternoon, Margot left her office early and drove from downtown Philadelphia to Cherry Hill. Carla, who had acted in the manner of an undercover detective planning a stakeout, had informed her sister that middle-school classes ended at 2:58 P.M.—a time that neatly encapsulated the nature of middle school itself, where the sense of counting minutes was combined with the sense of their unutterable dullness. Carla had ascertained that the first round of buses would have departed by 3:16, but that teachers were obliged to remain in the school until the second (or late) bus left. Thus, if Margot left her office at 2:17, she would, barring a jackknifed tractor-trailer on Route 70, arrive at just the right moment to catch poor, unsuspecting Hal Pearson alone in his classroom, in a perfect position to be browbeaten.

  As Margot entered the school at the designated time, having parked her BMW in the spot marked Assistant Vice Principal, the corridors had the desolate look of a recently abandoned war zone. The pungent odor of adolescent sweat permeated the air, making it necessary for her to hold her breath for a few seconds to become acclimated. As she passed various rooms on the way to Hal’s—she had gotten the precise location from Carla in a detailed map e-mailed to her the night before—she saw disheveled teachers erasing the boards, picking up stray papers on the floor, and shoving books into their briefcases in preparation for going home. The general feeling was one of lassitude and exhaustion—except as she approached Hal Pearson’s room, where she could hear lively voices in conversation.

  Carla had failed to interrogate Stephanie on the subject of Hal’s after-school activity. Teachers had a policy that they would be briefly available at the end of the day for consultation—but the policy was a perfunctory one, students being generally disinclined to consult them. In Hal’s case, however, they did, owing perhaps to the genuine pleasure he seemed to take in their presence. Children of middle-school age, not unlike people of any age, tend to be sensitive to the response of others and will be grateful and forthcoming to anyone who appears to like them. This simple but much-ignored rule of behavior could, if properly applied, transform the education of adolescents. Of course, it would require the difficult feat of liking a group of individuals who display very few obviously likable characteristics.

  Hal Pearson was one of those rare souls who could see the freshness and wonder that lay beneath his students’ surly, inarticulate facade. As a result, there was always a motley collection of young people milling about in his classroom after school. Today there were three who had draped themselves loosely over the desks and chairs.

  Margot paused at the door, waiting for an opportune moment to announce her presence. She wondered at first if the students were there for some sort of club, and if Hal was their faculty adviser. But the absence of a clear agenda made this seem unlikely. It then occurred to her that perhaps the students were being punished for bad behavior or late homework. But the benign atmosphere belied this theory as well.

  “So what is it you guys want to discuss?” Margot heard Hal ask. His tone threw her. Had she, during her own extensive academic career, ever heard a tone of such genuine goodwill expressed by a teacher toward a group of students? If so, she could not recall it.

  “Commas,” said a girl in low, very wide-leg jeans, a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt, and multiple piercings in ears, nose, and eyebrows. She looked like someone who, even at the age of thirteen, you wouldn’t want to tangle with in a dark alley.

  “Ah yes, the uses and abuses of the virgule,” said Hal. “That’s French for comma—you never know when you might want to impress the French. What don’t you understand about commas?”

  “Everything,” said a large boy in a football jacket. “They say they taught us to use them somewhere back in, like, the third grade, but I must have been absent.”

  “Yeah,” said the girl, “they always say they taught you stuff. That’s how they get out of teaching it.”

  “They probably did teach it,” said another boy wearing headphones, “only you were in the bathroom or something.”

  The girl glared at him. “So are you saying you learned it?”

  “No, but that’s ’cause I wasn’t listening,” said the headphoned boy.

  “Enough with the origin of your ignorance,” said Hal. “If we try to arrive at first causes we’ll never accomplish anything. I’ll explain commas if you want to listen. If not, you can just hang out.”

  “I’ll listen,” said the girl with the piercings.

  “Gimme what you got on commas,” said the husky boy.

  “Okay, let’s start by seeing what you know,” said Hal. “When do you use a comma?”

  “When you pause,” said the girl. “‘I saw him—pause—walking down the street.’”

  “I wouldn’t pause there,” said the husky boy.

  Hal nodded. “Not everyone would pause there.”

  “I thought a comma was supposed to mark a pause.”

  “Yes,” said Hal. “But you can’t decide to put in a comma just because you happen to pause. It has to be a generally agreed-on pause.”

  “So how do you know where a generally agreed-on pause is?”

  “That’s where the rules come in,” said Hal with an air of triumph. “Rules generalize about things—like pausing. Which doesn’t mean you might not pause somewhere else occasionally. It’s just that you don’t put in a comma unless the general pause rule holds.”

  “Sort of like a traffic light,” said the boy with the headphones, who, though his ears were covered, appeared to be following the conversation closely.

  Hal threw the boy a Jolly Rancher. “Excellent analogy, Spencer.”

  “But you would pause if, say, a rabbit ran across the road,” said the girl, “even if there wasn’t a traffic light. In that case, there’d be no comma.”

  “Right you are, Monica,” said Hal, throwing another Jolly Rancher to the girl.

  “Sometimes you have to stop at a traffic light even if there’s no traffic coming in the other direction. Is that like using a comma even if you don’t actually need to pause?” said the boy in the headphones, warming to the exercise.

  Hal threw a third Jolly Rancher. “Fine extended analog
y.”

  “I wouldn’t stop if there wasn’t traffic,” said the husky boy. “I’d run the light.”

  “And you’d get a ticket,” said the girl. “You’d get an F on the paper.”

  Hal threw both of them a Jolly Rancher. “One for you too, Greg, for your interesting insight into social transgression.” He then looked out at the group with an expression of pure joy. “You guys blow me away,” he said. “You gotta all go into philosophy. Promise me you’ll take Intro Logic with Mr. Muller next year.”

  “Mr. Muller is a dick,” said the headphoned boy.

  “Perhaps he is,” said Hal in a noncommittal tone, “but with your gift for the subject, it wouldn’t matter.” The students appeared to consider this for a moment. It had never occurred to them to separate the subject matter from the teacher. “But we haven’t gotten into the rules of commas yet,” Hal continued. “Where to put the traffic lights—that’s the hard part.”

  “I like the analogy part better,” said the husky boy.

  “You gotta blend abstract thinking with concrete,” said Hal, “or all you’ve got is bullshit.”

  “Good point,” said the headphones. “Hit us with the comma rules.”

  Hal took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and was about to put some examples on the board when he happened to look toward the door.

  “Margot Kaplan!” said Hal, shocked into stating the obvious.

  The students looked over. Noting Margot’s appearance and Hal’s flustered manner, they picked up their backpacks and filed out of the room. Hal gave a distracted wave and muttered, “To be continued.”

  “You seem to have them in the palm of your hand,” said Margot, walking into the room with a certain tentativeness. She had originally imagined striding forward and cowing him with a few sharp words. But the scene she had just witnessed had a humbling effect. Her own memories of middle school were of teachers who were always either castigating kids for not doing what they should or patting them on the head for regurgitating what had been taught to them by rote. The idea of lazing around for an impromptu philosophical discussion of comma usage was not within the parameters of her experience. That sort of learning—of knowledge examined and savored—was something she had known only in college and law school, and then only on very rare occasions. To see such a thing done with pleasure and affection in a seventh-grade classroom was, to borrow from Stephanie’s vocabulary, awesome.