Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  “Normally I would charge thirty sous, but from you, chère madame, I ask only twenty-five.” She seemed disgruntled by this offer of a bargain and snorted. An involuntary smile twisted her mouth as she dropped the coins into my hand, careful not to touch me. Imagine, a Jew giving anyone a bargain! She took the knife, turned swiftly, and waddled off, eager to forget about the whole incident. I began to make order in my knife drawer again, basking in my pathetic triumph, when I glimpsed the blue-green silk of a fine dress and caught the dark, insistent scent of gardenia perfume.

  “Do you have any snuffboxes?” The voice was musical, playful.

  “Oui, mademoiselle,” I answered, opening the highest drawer in my box and removing three painted snuffboxes.

  “Madame,” she corrected me.

  “Excuse me,” I said, my eyes flicking up to her face. She was young, maybe twenty, with a long, mournful Spanish face, small chocolate eyes. Her neck was speckled with a scatter of tiny birthmarks. Her features weren’t nearly as pretty as she was. She took one of the snuffboxes and turned it in her narrow fingertips.

  “How much for this one?” she asked.

  “Thirty-two sous,” I said.

  “How can you possibly make a living like this?” she asked, replacing the snuffbox and setting a small, strong hand on top of my peddler’s box. “You are a Jew, am I right?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “My master has a job for you if you would like it,” she said. “You’ll make more in a morning than if you sold this whole box of junk.”

  “Who is your master?” I asked.

  “The Comte de Villars—this is his house,” she said, gesturing to the mansion behind her, enclosed by a high wall. “It’s only a few little errands. You can leave your peddler’s box in the coach house; it will be safe. And then, after you are done, come to the kitchen, we’ll feed you some soup and bread.” She had a light, sunny way of talking that made everything she described seem enticing.

  “What will he pay?”

  “One louis,” she said. My father often didn’t make that much in a month. I imagined the suspicion that would spread over the old man’s face when I brought home the golden coin.

  “I can’t accept that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I am sorry, madame.”

  “I think it’s quite generous!” she said.

  “It’s too generous. It’s … absurd,” I said, looking down at my box.

  “Absurd!” She laughed. “Are you angry with me? All right. Don’t be so upset. Good Lord. What is not absurd, for a morning’s work making deliveries?”

  “Forty sous,” I answered softly.

  “My name is Solange,” she said. “What are you called?”

  “Jacob Cerf,” I answered.

  She led me into the carriage house, a well-swept, tidy room with a gleaming crimson carriage standing at its center, a family crest with two golden lions rampant decorating the door. A larger carriage was parked to one side, covered in a tarp. I dragged the leather yoke of my box over my head and set it down. Now Solange disappeared for a few moments and returned carrying several filled leather pouches, accompanied by addressed letters.

  I made the deliveries. Though the shopkeepers looked at me curiously when I arrived, asking, “From the Comte de Villars?” and peeked into the pouches, when they counted the coins inside they were happy enough. I guessed that it had been some time since my employer had paid his bills.

  When I returned, Solange was waiting for me outside the great house. She walked me into the kitchen and instructed the cook to serve me soup, cold meat, and bread. The cook was not happy, but she did what she was told, setting the plates down hard before me. I was very hungry, but I didn’t dare eat in a gentile’s house, for fear of breaking our dietary laws. I sat stupidly before the tempting meal, hands in my lap, nearly weeping with embarrassment.

  “You think there’s something wrong with it?” laughed the cook.

  “Never mind,” said Solange. “Maybe you will be hungry tomorrow. Come back, we have work for you.” I returned to the count’s house the next morning. After that, every day but the Sabbath, Solange found errands for me to execute: dropping a coat off at the tailor’s to be mended, buying a skein of thread, a few buttons, or buckles for a pair of shoes. Solange always gave me considerably more money than I needed for my messages, but I brought back the correct change every time. I wasn’t a thief.

  Eventually, I convinced myself it was acceptable to eat the soup and bread they offered me, as long as I ate no meat. Each day when I was finished I came back to the kitchen and sat at the long wooden table, sipping soup, tearing at the fine white bread. I spent the rest of the day selling my wares, then put the money I had made from the Jew’s box into the tin my mother kept above the stove, for food and other household expenses. The count’s money I pocketed, thinking that one day I would put it to use and show my father that I was a savvy businessman.

  One chilly afternoon, when I had finished the count’s errands and sat gratefully spooning pea-and-mint potage into my mouth, I heard the cook whisper to Solange, “Look how handsome.” My throat closed up with embarrassment and I had to leave before I had finished my soup, which I regretted later as I lay hungry in my bed.

  After five weeks, Solange said, “Would you like to meet the master of the house?”

  She asked me to strap my box back on. I did so. She led me down a long parquet corridor and up a marble staircase, along a strip of Persian carpet, pistachio-green walls trimmed with gold, light spilling through high windows.

  “I have brought you what you wanted,” I heard Solange say proudly, standing before me, partially blocking the room I faced. Her silk skirts were so wide, set on an armature the shape of an oblong hen cage, that she could not enter straight through the doorway, but had to turn sideways and sidle through it. She stood half in the room, half out, her face turned toward her master, elbows resting on the wide frame that held up her dress.

  “My dear Solange,” said a high, youthful voice, “you never disappoint me.” Solange slipped into the room fully now, and gestured for me to follow. The count was sitting down. He was younger than I expected, maybe thirty. His short, plump legs were encased in tight apricot silk britches; as he crossed them, they made the sound of two palms sliding across each other. His neck was fat, his nose wide, his lips fleshy. He had the eyes of a basset hound. My first impression was that this man had too much face.

  He looked up at me with interest. “Come in, young sir,” he said, taking a pinch of snuff from an enamel snuffbox, laying it into the hollow between two tendons where his wrist met his thumb bone. He then leaned over, blocked one nostril, and sniffed.

  “It might be quite impossible, you know,” said Solange.

  “Of course,” said the count, sniffing. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  Standing dumb a few feet from the door, I ogled the room: the count’s study was both intimate and grand, with gilt-edged chairs, marigold silk walls, a pale blue desk on bowed and spindly legs, four sleek paintings of neat-headed horses in profile set against emerald fields, and one of a fleshy nude reclining on a red silk divan. I turned my eyes from the painted figure, the first naked woman I had seen in my life; my gaze landed heavily on an identical red divan, before which Solange stood in her red-and-white-striped dress. Her young face was serious; she stared into the middle distance, thinking. The blood-red silk covering of the divan was embossed with little pelicans and glowed richly in the cool morning light filtering through a tall window. On the opposite side of the room, among various other luscious pictures, a narrow painting of a raggedy Jewish peddler boy framed with swirls of gold hung in the center of the wall. His clothes, though more or less in imitation of the fashion of the day, were shabby and patched; his three-cornered hat shone with wear. His Jew’s box hung heavily from his thin neck. In an instant I saw my mistake: it was a mirror. I took in my black, shabby, shapeless coat, red vest, baggy black trousers, the ped
dler’s box with its many drawers dangling from my neck. Seeing myself as if for the first time, in this magnificent gilded room, I was filled with disappointment and disgust. I felt my face grow hot.

  The count cleared his throat. “May I call you Jacob?”

  I nodded.

  “Solange is right, you are a Jew?”

  “Yes, monsieur,” I whispered.

  “In that case,” he said, jumping from his chair and standing, his back swayed, padded behind jutting out, “I have a proposal for you. Solange has been telling me that you are a very reliable young man. Really extremely reliable and … agreeable. As a man, quite apart from your … heritage. I know that you have been trained from an early age to think you cannot really mix with people like us, to fear us and to pity us, I have a feeling. Is that right?”

  Fear constricted my throat.

  “You may be right,” he continued. “Your people are amazingly loyal to their traditions. But … I want to make you a proposition, something for you to think about. A new future. I need a second valet. I would like to offer you the position. In order to take it you will have to leave your family and your previous life, and in exchange I will pay you handsomely. Three louis a week. You will live here, and in my other houses whenever we go there. You will accompany me on all my personal outings and help me in all of my affairs. You will be treated absolutely without prejudice, if you choose to join my household. You will see the world.” He said this last with a grand gesture, opening both his arms and widening his eyes. His manner was so foreign to me—I didn’t know how to read it. He was slightly ridiculous, with his tubby dancer’s posture, his splayed feet, his enthusiasm—and yet he was encased in such finery, and spoke such beautiful French.

  I felt perplexed and embarrassed—for the count as well as for myself. I turned to Solange, who was now looking at me expectantly.

  “Please excuse me, monsieur,” I said. Then I backed out of the room and escaped down the hall, my wares skidding and crashing about inside my Jew’s box. I rushed down the marble stairs, through the kitchen, out the door, and away from that great house.

  I returned to my old life, determined never to set foot in the count’s voluptuous home again. The master had asked too quickly.

  5

  Now I must describe the nauseating experience of my first ride in a horseless carriage. I clung to the shoulder seam of Leslie’s chemise, terrified by the spinning landscape to either side of me—blurred buildings, other carriages careening by us, pulled magically it seemed, their thick wheels spinning on the black road. With each passing behemoth I imagined the flash of metal as the great thing capsized and swirled toward us. I tried to close my eyes, but my lids seemed glued open. Unable to bear the view, I focused on Leslie’s hand clamped to the steering wheel. With my new, hyperlucid vision, I noticed the crosshatched weave of his skin. He had dry, rawboned knuckles, swollen veins: a worker’s hand. I stared at the fascinating map of his epidermis until I was able to calm myself and forget my frantic body.

  Leslie tilted the rearview mirror down so he could see what Stevie was up to in the backseat. The boy was wan, his hair the color of putty. He was holding a rubber dog bone, running his fingers back and forth over its nubbly surface. Leslie wondered if it was unsanitary to let the boy play with something the dog had slobbered over. He hated taking things away from the child. He had had so much taken away already. Deafness was not so very bad. Not as bad as blindness. Yet, maybe worse. Not to hear words. Was that worse? Were you set further apart? Were we really word people, or picture people? When he thought about it, blindness made Leslie panic more. Yet a blind man could sound normal on the phone. He could order lumber or a pizza, he could call a girl for a date. A deaf man sounded like an idiot. His little boy. He was so small, small for five, smaller than a lot of dogs, even, Leslie mused as he pulled up to the Sunshine Center for the Hearing Impaired. There were a lot of deaf kids, he thought. Deafness still happened. Why it had happened to Stevie, though, was the thing that tormented him. He realized that bad things had to happen to somebody, but his father’s suicide seemed enough for his personal allotment of blows. He took the boy in his arms, then remembered the teacher’s admonishment to allow him his independence. He put him down, gently removing the dog toy from his grip. The boy whimpered, held the bone close to his chest. Leslie tightened his fingers around the toy. He felt Stevie’s body go rigid. Immediately Leslie let go of the rubber bone, but it was too late; hoarse shrieks were pumping out of the child, who was huddled over the bone, his body stiff.

  “Okay, okay you can have it,” Leslie said, rubbing Stevie’s back, trying to relax his muscles. “Look at me, Stevie.” He knelt down and took the boy’s face in his hands. Stevie’s mouth was downturned like a clown’s, eyes clamped shut. He began shrieking in short animal bursts. His fingers had frozen around the dog toy.

  “Calm down,” Leslie said in a level voice, looking the boy in the face. He tried signing: “It’s okay. Look,” he signed. “It’s okay. You can keep the toy.” Finally, he scooped the sobbing boy up in his arms and walked him to the school.

  Stepping into Stevie’s classroom made Leslie feel like a giant. The top of his head brushed the ceiling. The children came up to his kneecaps. Ms. Parr, the teacher, wasn’t too tall either, yet she surprised him every time he saw her with the extreme breadth of her hips. She wore her long fuzzy hair parted in the middle, had droopy eyes with thick straight lashes. A tiny mouth. And she smelled of wood fires, at all times of year. Leslie found Ms. Parr disturbingly, inexplicably attractive.

  “Hello, Stevie,” she said as Leslie tried to set the boy down. Stevie, his chest still shuddering with emotion, clung to the fabric of Leslie’s trousers like a little monkey. Ms. Parr knelt down and gestured a request to him with nimble sign language. Stevie shook his head, clasping the dog toy. Ms. Parr stood and said to Leslie, still signing, “Hi, Mr. Senzatimore, how are you?” She looked directly up at him as she asked the question, earnestly waiting for an answer. She came up to his armpit. Leslie suddenly felt desiccated, as though his sternum and the backs of his eyes were stuffed with cotton wool.

  “Do you have any water?” he croaked.

  Ms. Parr hesitated a split second. “Sure, there’s a water fountain over there.” Leslie walked to the Lilliputian water fountain, his son clamped to his calf, knelt down and drank his fill. He then sat down at the miniature art table to wait for Stevie to calm down. Drawing always soothed him. Leslie put a red pencil in the little hand and watched the line, so pure and clear, arc across the page. A boat. In moments the boy was absorbed.

  When Leslie was about to leave, Ms. Parr gestured to him to join her in a corner of the room. He felt afraid. Maybe Stevie was no longer wanted in the school. Too emotional. In need of special care.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked, folding his arms and slumping to reduce the distance between their two heads.

  “Fine, it’s just that Stevie’s mommy has asked me to come and spend a little extra tutoring time with him at your house, a couple of times a week after school?” Ms. Parr said, enunciating her words with care.

  “Oh, right,” said Leslie, his washed-out blue eyes scanning the room. This was the first he was hearing about this arrangement. Deirdre always seemed to be hiring more people to be with Stevie. “Great,” he added.

  “Anyway,” she said, her mouth chewing the words, as if he too were hearing impaired. “I had said I could do Tuesday and Thursday but I realize I would have to say Monday and Friday, because of a conflict on Tuesday afternoons? I was going to ask her when she came today. Unless Thursday is better, but I think it’s probably not ideal to do one day after another? Stevie might get frustrated.” Leslie couldn’t take his eyes off the woman’s interrogatory mouth. “So will you ask Deirdre if that’s okay?” she asked, gazing up at him expectantly.

  “Just say it one more time.”

  “Monday and Friday, is that okay?” Ms. Parr said, smiling. “I could start this coming Monday.”


  “Yes, I can handle that,” he said.

  “Or I can just text her,” said Ms. Parr, walking away and squatting to help with a little girl’s puzzle. Leslie walked out into the cold sunshine.

  Leslie was on his way to the hospital, to visit the old man he’d saved from the fire last night. He wouldn’t normally visit someone he’d rescued, it made it all too personal—but he knew this man’s family: his son, Chuck, had been Leslie’s best friend growing up, until he drunk-drove his father’s Mercury off a bridge in Freeport, senior year of high school. Leslie felt he should sit down with the man for a few minutes. As he drove, he went over the find—his second ever of a living victim: the apartment had been choked with black smoke. Blinded, Leslie felt his way through the bedroom on all fours, the hiss of the air tank in his ears with every breath. As he patted his gloved hand across the bed, he touched a slender arm, and the thrill of a find went through him. He grabbed for the body, lifted. It was light as a girl’s, limp. It seemed like evil magic when he got to the window and saw the face like a rotten apple, slack jaw, sunken eyes. Leslie was ashamed by his disappointment. Still, he had saved him.

  A violent, jangling rhythm erupted in the car, sending me flying in frantic loops, bumping against the cloth ceiling. I felt I was screaming, but no sound came out. With a push of a button, Leslie stopped the cacophony.

  “Hello?” he called into the air. A plaintive, disembodied voice answered him.

  “It’s Evie, my whole—my whole—there’s a leak in my kitchen, there’s water coming down everywhere. Down the wall.”

  “So call a plumber.”

  “It’s not a plumbing situation, necessarily. Come on, Les, just look at it and tell me who I have to call.”

  Leslie sighed and started a U-turn. “Be right over.”