Read Online Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan by Paula Marantz Cohen - Free Book Online Page B

Shakespeare. Stop looking around please and listen!”
    Margot responded sheepishly. “Sorry,” she said, banishing the
ascot from her consciousness and giving Carla her full attention. “So tell me again what’s going on.”
    â€œOkay—remember how I mentioned she’d been acting strangely lately? Well, now it’s a full-blown delusion, very elaborate and detailed. She actually thinks she had an affair with William Shakespeare in another life—‘Will,’ she calls him, if you can believe it. She thinks she was the so-called Dark Lady of his sonnets.”
    â€œThat’s pretty amazing,” said Margot. “I wonder where she picked up that story.”
    â€œI haven’t a clue. But, believe me, this is no small-time fantasy. She has loads of background material. More than I ever learned in my Shakespeare course at BU. Maybe she’s been reading on the sly—which seems unlikely, since you know she was never one for books. Or maybe she has all this stored memory based on movies—like you suggested last time—or things she heard in the past. You know how they say that sometimes people who have strokes or mental trauma can suddenly speak languages they never learned, just because they heard them spoken once or twice? It could be something like that.”
    â€œCould be,” said Margot, chewing her lip.
    â€œBut I can’t imagine what triggered it,” continued Carla. “She didn’t hit her head or anything, and there’s no evidence of a stroke—Mark ruled that out. Dad’s death, of course, was painful—you remember how blue she was for a while—but I wouldn’t call it traumatic. Anyway, it’s been over two years since he died.”
    â€œIf it’s Dad’s death that’s behind it, it is strange,” mused Margot. “Not that they didn’t have a good life together. But given that she married Dad on the rebound …”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œShe told me about it once when I was going out with that Harvard guy who was supposedly related to the Kennedys. He turned out to be sleeping with three girls in my dorm—which at least verified his pedigree. I got kind of sad when I found out, though, as
you can imagine, it was mostly my pride that was hurt. But Mom seemed to take it worse than I did. She said she’d been in love with someone once—a Saul something-or-other—and he two-timed her with one of her friends. That’s what made her decide to accept Dad so quickly—not, she said, that she ever regretted it. But obviously that other relationship made an impression. It must have happened at least thirty years before the time she mentioned it to me.”
    â€œSo mom has an authentic secret history as well as an imaginary one,” mused Carla.
    â€œYes—and maybe the latter is some odd manifestation of the former. You know: repressed desire, secret longing, that sort of thing.”
    â€œCome on,” said Carla. “I’m the psychology major. Mom’s a doll, but complicated she’s not. Repressed desire—give me a break!”
    â€œI don’t know,” considered Margot, “I think you’re just used to seeing her in a certain way. I’ll tell you what: Let me probe the situation a bit. I’ll speak to her and see if she gives me the same story. If there’s consistency to it, that at least tells us something about the tenacity of the delusion. It might help us get at the precipitating cause.”
    Carla nodded. She found her sister’s detached and logical approach to the situation reassuring. Not for nothing was Margot Philadelphia magazine’s choice for the best criminal lawyer in the Delaware Valley, with a list of mobsters a mile long waiting for her to defend them.
    â€œThen we can decide whether to do anything,” continued Margot.
    â€œI’ve read there are