Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Hal meanwhile had regained his balance. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” he asked in a light tone that could not mask his obvious pleasure. “Don’t tell me that you dropped by for a quick comma review.”

  “No,” said Margot quickly, “I mastered punctuation on the job, where I discovered that a misplaced comma could cost my client thousands in bail.”

  “Maybe you can be a guest speaker in my class. You can explain how the comma can literally affect life and liberty. These kids like to see the practical aspects of what they learn.”

  “I’d say they do pretty well with the philosophical aspects,” said Margot. “You certainly got a high-level discussion out of a rather pedestrian topic.”

  “There, I agree with you. I never stop being surprised by the wealth of analogies that students bring to bear on their experience. We talk about adolescence as the period of raging hormones. To me, it’s more like the period of raging metaphor.”

  “Nice thought,” said Margot. “You oughta be a teacher.”

  Hal smiled.

  “But I’m here on other business. I need a favor.” The phrasing slipped out; it wasn’t the way she imagined the conversation going at all.

  “At your service,” said Hal, meaning it. He had thought to have effectively squashed the romantic in himself. Burned in love at some point in the distant past, he had had only casual relationships since. Usually they started as friendships, then dipped into something vaguely sexual, coming out on the other end as friendship again. He had begun to feel that this was the natural way of things in the modern world, romance having given way to comfort and convenience.

  But Margot Kaplan had an entirely different effect on him. She brought the romantic impulse, long dormant, to the surface. He wished he could be assigned some difficult, even dangerous, task to perform on her behalf.

  “‘Come, bid me do anything for thee,’” he said, borrowing the lines that Benedict spoke to Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and making a broad, facetious bow as he said them.

  Margot’s look suggested that quoting Shakespeare might not be the best tack to take with her right now. Her tone grew more severe: “Then abandon this harebrained scheme of going to Venice with my mother.”

  Hal’s expression changed. “That, I’m afraid, I cannot do,” he replied. “It’s something that involves more than just me. Your mother wants to go—she’s counting on it. And I could never sleep at night if I let her down.”

  “So you’re saying you’re doing all this for her!”

  “Not entirely. I grant that she’s sparked my curiosity. But I wouldn’t take the trip, and I’d cancel in a minute, if her heart weren’t set on going.”

  “She’s an old woman. You’ve gotten her worked up over a delusion.”

  “But is it harmful? Your mother is full of knowledgeable detail about the period and the city, not to mention the Bard. If nothing else, it would be a shame for her not to see Venice again.”

  “Again? You actually believe that she lived there in another life?”

  “I don’t believe or disbelieve,” said Hal. “I suspend my disbelief.”

  “But digging around under the floorboards of some old house, searching for ridiculous artifacts?”

  “Lost sonnets.”

  “Whatever—it’s creepy. I can’t condone it.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Hal. “As I said, I could never bring myself to disappoint your mother. I don’t think you could either, if you were in my position. So the least you can do is tell her it’s okay—that you won’t be angry at her for going.”

  Margot considered this. “Does she think I’m angry?”

  “Yes—and she’s a little afraid of you. More of you than of your sister.”

  “And do you think I’m scary?”

  “No,” he said carefully, “scary isn’t the word I’d use.”

  “What word would you use?”

  “Formidable, maybe.”

  “So you’re saying that you want me, formidable woman that I am, to give you and my mother my blessing for this trip?”

  “Yes,” said Hal, “your blessing would be nice.”

  “Well, then,” said Margot, taking a breath, and then speaking with uncharacteristic recklessness: “I’ll do one better. I’ll go along.”

  Hal stared at her.

  “She’ll need me there for support and to keep an eye on things,” she continued hurriedly, “and I have a week coming to me at the firm, so I’ll have no problem taking off.” She paused and seemed to get better hold of herself, her voice assuming its more familiar sarcastic tone. “I was looking for a vacation spot, anyway,” she added. “I always wanted to see Venice, and it will be nice to have a native show me around.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  They had GONE: JESSIE, HAL, AND MARGOT FROM PHILADELPHIA Airport that afternoon, Anish Patel and his colleague out of JFK.

  Although Carla was initially disappointed that Margot had failed in her mission to talk Hal Pearson out of the trip, she was somewhat mollified by Margot’s decision to go along. She had great confidence in her sister. Margot Kaplan might not be lucky in love, but she was successful in everything else. She was a woman of eminent rationality and will—someone you could count on to act effectively in a crisis, and whom one crossed at one’s peril.

  Now at seven P.M., Carla imagined that her mother and sister were somewhere over the Atlantic, winging their way to the Gritti Palace, one of the foremost luxury hotels in Venice. The hotel had been chosen by Anish, who said that his grant permitted him to travel in style and that, having lived in squalor for so many years during his childhood, he was not about to stint now, especially when the luxury was paid for by someone else.

  Margot had promised to call as soon as they arrived, which would probably be in a few hours. Meanwhile, there was nothing Carla could do, which placed her in a state of welcome calm. She could concentrate for the time being on the last lap of the bat mitzvah, which was rounding the corner at breakneck speed.

  Many things had been done. She and Mr. O’Hare had prepared a checklist and reviewed it together to their mutual satisfaction.

  1. The caterer—all wrapped up. Even if there were a world shortfall in soy products, Moishe assured them he had his black-market sources. Not to worry.

  2. The band—confirmed for an evening of authentic klezmer tunes. This was the band that Mark had heard coming home from work on Philadelphia’s public radio station. The members were ethnomusicology students at the University of Pennsylvania and turned out not to be Jewish—a fact that pleased Mark, since it assured that the ethnic temperature of the event would be maintained on a refined, academic level.

  3. Griffin (aka the entertainment motivator)—on track, now that a small snag had been ironed out. It seemed that Uncle Sid, who had made a miraculous recovery, had wanted a song by Artie Shaw that no one ever heard of to accompany his candle-lighting. Griffin had pronounced that if he didn’t know the song, it didn’t’t exist, a pronouncement that incensed Sid and made him want it all the more. Fortunately, Stephanie’s friend Zack, at twelve already an accomplished computer hacker, managed to locate the song on Kazaa on the Internet and duly burned a copy. This was passed on to Griffin, who conveniently forgot that the song didn’t’t exist and agreed to play it when Sid came up to light his candle. Ergo, problem solved, short of a lawsuit from the Artie Shaw estate for unlicensed performance. But Mr. O’Hare said not to worry on this score: He once knew a girl who dated Artie Shaw (though in a rare deviation from the norm, didn’t marry him), and was sure that he could parlay that connection to their benefit if absolutely necessary.

  4. The photographer and videographer—getting along well. While planning his Godfather-with-Fiddler-overtones production, Cass Sunshine had decided that the photographs should resemble Hollywood stills (a new concept that he thought had great marketing potential). The Bennington photographer would certainly have balked at this directive, but the middle-aged photographer saw no probl
em with it, so long as he got paid on time.

  5. The flowers—done. Bennet had gone back to the drawing board and created a just-picked-look centerpiece that was acceptable to Mark and Carla. Of course, as had been predicted, the price of said unpretentious arrangement had knocked the breath out of them.

  6. The guest list—finalized! The cancerous growth of invitations had finally been staunched at 200 and now, with RSVPs in, had settled at a reasonable 150. The unexpected shortfall had come from two factors. Number one: A Florida friend of Carla’s’s mother-in-law had suddenly gotten it into her head that the almanac augured a snowstorm for the bat mitzvah weekend, and had scared some of the others, who were terrified by the word “accumulation” (i.e., that they might be stranded up north for an indefinite period to battle the cold and their children). Number two: A popular nurse at Mark’s hospital happened to have her baby shower fall on the day of the bat mitzvah. This obliged many of the nurses to choose between a cozy, familiar event and a possibly uncomfortable, unfamiliar one, with more opting for the former than the latter.

  The checklist reassured Carla that the celebratory component of the event was under control.

  Less so, the religious aspect—or at least one crucial part of it. Stephanie was fine with her Torah and haftorah portions, the scriptural readings that made up the bulk of her ceremonial performance. The cantor had reported with gratitude that Stephanie actually had a lovely singing voice and an admirable sense of phrasing. The mumble and screech of many bar mitzvah children as they rushed headlong through their portions was the real strain of the cantor’s job.

  The problem lay with the D’var Torah, which is to say, Stephanie’s speech. This was the section of the service when the bar mitzvah child was expected to demonstrate something more than pure rote learning. The D’var Torah was a commentary on the Torah portion, a kind of minisermon, and the one moment in the service when the formalized trappings of the event could be put aside for a glimpse of the child as an individual.

  The D’var Torah requirement made sense on a theoretical level. On a practical one, however, it did not. To expect a newly minted thirteen-year-old to write a formal speech of any kind, no less one on a passage from the Bible difficult to fathom even by scholars rigorously trained in theological discourse, and then to expect said thirteen-year-old to perform it for a disparate group of relatives and friends who were itching to get their hands on the hot hors d’oeuvres whose odors were wafting in from the other room, was asking a lot.

  The Education Committee at the synagogue, having weathered the process themselves with their own children, had done what they could to facilitate matters. They offered the following guidelines to aid the bar and bat mitzvah child in the preparation of the D’var Torah:

  1. Summarize your biblical portion in one or two paragraphs. Keep this simple: No need to enumerate, for example, the number of goats in the entourage or to recite the genealogy accompanying a given character.

  2. Relate some point in the passage to some aspect of your own life. For example: “Abraham’s worship of idols reminds me of the time when I wanted to play Nintendo and didn’t want to do my homework. Just as Abraham eventually realized there was one God, I eventually learned that doing my homework was more important than Nintendo” (Alan Goldberg’s D’var Torah, September 1999). Please notice the parallel structure. Idols are to Nintendo as homework is to one God. Ask your parents to help you outline your portion so that you can see the logical structure more clearly and better organize the lesson you want to discuss.

  3. Thank those involved in the making of this sacred and joyous event. Keep this to the basic groups: Mom and Dad, Grandpa and Grandma, siblings, rabbi, and cantor. An influential teacher or relative can also be added, but if you start naming your friends, you’ll never get to your party.

  4. Explain your intentions for charity (tzadakah): i.e., where you will donate a portion of your bar or bat mitzvah gift money. Please note that a charity is a nonprofit organization for the public good. It does not include such organizations as the National Football League, the fines accumulated for your overdue video rentals, or Abercrombie and Fitch.

  Uncomplicated as this template might seem, it did not, unfortunately, solve the problem. Fits of rage and frustration ensued as children were asked to summarize the densely irrational biblical passage, to extract a lesson that was not utterly unrelated to it, to thank an abhorred sibling, and to negotiate how much money from their bar mitzvah stash would go to the Jewish Federation or the American Cancer Society (groups that to the child seemed to have been designed to cheat them out of the little money that would be left them once Mom and Dad had put the rest away into the alleged college fund).

  Most children had the whole thing flogged out of them through threat and bribe, though not without scenes, biblical in size and intensity.

  Stephanie was no exception.

  Her portion involved Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. Mark had thought this a great windfall. “I can’t tell you how lucky you are!” he exclaimed. “My portion had to do with hygiene. There was a whole section about menstrual fluid—not the kind of thing a thirteen-year-old boy finds inspiring, at least not in front of his elderly relatives. Your passage is great. The seven fat kine and the seven lean kine—kine are cattle, by the way.”

  “Duh,” said Stephanie.

  “Joseph and the pharaoh—man, are you lucky!” Mark waxed on. Joseph’s story had always held a place in his affections. As a boy, he had fantasized about being like Joseph and interpreting the dream of a pharaoh, who in his imagination looked a lot like Mr. Rooney, his junior-high-school principal.

  “The story is dumb,” said Stephanie sulkily. “Joseph has all these bad things happen to him, then he interprets the pharaoh’s dream and everything is fine. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Maybe it means that life can surprise you,” noted Mark. “You can be down in the dumps one minute and things can suddenly change and put you on top of the world.”

  “I think that’s a dumb moral,” said Stephanie. “Everyone knows sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen. Who cares? I’m not going to write that.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Carla reassuringly. “Daddy’s only trying to give you some ideas.”

  “Think about something else in the story, then,” suggested Mark. “Maybe you want to talk about pharaoh’s dream. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Lean and fat kine, fertility and famine. Joseph was a problem solver. You always liked to solve problems. Think of how good you are at Scrabble.”

  “Scrabble isn’t a problem, it’s a game,” said Stephanie.

  “You know what I mean—figuring things out, putting things together, that sort of thing.”

  “No,” pronounced Stephanie. “Joseph wasn’t problem solving. He was just lucky. Everyone knows that dreams can’t tell the future.”

  “But this is the Bible,” Carla pointed out. “All sorts of magical things happen.”

  “Well, if it’s magical, there’s no lesson to take out of it. God just made it happen. He wanted Joseph to be right. Can’t I say that?”

  “No,” said Carla, who had begun to realize that her daughter actually had the argumentative abilities of a Talmudic scholar with regard to not doing what was expected. “You have to find a lesson.”

  The problem was duly brought before the rabbi a few days later in the pre–bat mitzvah interview. Rabbi Barry Newman was a very young man who had lately been catapulted into the position of senior rabbi when that personage, in the throes of a midlife crisis, had suddenly resigned to lead a congregation in Australia.

  Newman, who had actually been hired a month earlier as assistant rabbi and had expected to spend years doing relatively nothing, had at first not known what to make of his sudden elevation to eminence and responsibility. During his first few Sabbath services, he had gazed out at the prosperous doctors and lawyers in the congregation, wondering what in the world he could say that they would
want to hear. Fortunately, the cogs of the synagogue wheel had ground forward, carrying him along. He had met with the board for a pep talk, consulted some sermon crib sheets on the Internet, and been generally buoyed by a reflexive attitude of respect from congregants who had never noticed him before. He was working on counteracting his callow appearance with the growth of a small beard and the cultivation of a furrowed brow, and the general consensus was that he was “coming along nicely.”

  “Okay, what have we here?” said the rabbi to Stephanie now, lowering his voice and trying to sound rabbinical.

  “Joseph interprets the pharaoh’s dream,” said Stephanie glumly.

  “And what do you think of Joseph’s interpretation of the pharaoh’s dream?” asked the rabbi. He had discovered that by asking questions that piggybacked on his respondent’s previous statement he eventually arrived somewhere.

  “Not much,” said Stephanie.

  “Okay,” said the rabbi, holding, if falteringly, to his method, “why not much?”

  “Because dreams can’t tell the future,” Stephanie reiterated. “My dreams are always about things that don’t happen. Like being in Disney World with my friends or getting a real Kate Spade bag for my birthday.”

  “Hmm,” said the young rabbi, taking this in. “Dreams can’t tell the future in your experience, but in Joseph’s they do. What do you make of that?”

  “I make of it that it’s a story and not real life,” said Stephanie with dry clarity.