The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (10 page)

The Merchant of Venice

Portia

The quality of mercy

Shylock

I am a Jew

I notice that for the third time today I am sharing a class with Emily Creitzer. At her seat she looks down into her already opened textbook, clearly having lost the ebullience of the Latin class just last period.

The late bell rings. Mr. Schneider says, “Find a seat,” and we realize we are to insert ourselves among the regular students in the handful of open desks available. I can feel the trepidation of my fellow eighth graders, something I felt myself this morning, but now I confidently find a chair. The others follow suit, except for Suzanne, who seems frozen before a firing squad. Out of the familiarity of always being in a huddled group at Prayer Ridge, she seems at a loss.

“Repeat: find a seat,” says Mr. Schneider, amused but not unkind. Giggling in the class. Suzanne, red-faced, sits in the only chair now available, having to walk to the front.

“Who's Portia?” Half of the regular students raise their hands. “Who's a Jew?” Laughter as the remaining regular students raise their hands. “Shuffle! Jews here.” He indicates the desks on the right side of the room. “Gentiles here.” Some of the students look confused. “If you're not a Jew, you're a Gentile.”

They trade seats, clearly an exciting change of pace.

“Mr. Johnson.”

The boy called upon stands and recites.

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, heal'd by the same means—”

“Go back.”

The boy frowns, befuddled.

“Miss Fitzgerald.” Mr. Schneider is looking at another Jew. “What did he miss?”

“Subject to the same diseases.”

“Aw!” Johnson, who wears a football jersey, smacks his forehead with the palm of his right hand. Titters in the class. I've seen him play, the tight end Eric Johnson, going to a couple of games with my father to keep him company. He begins again, reciting in a singsong monotone, this time getting through to the end: “And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

“You skipped a few lines but we'll get back to that,” says Mr. Schneider. “What's it mean?”

The class is silent, perhaps unaware they were expected to comprehend the words as well as memorize them.

“I don't know,” Johnson shrugs. “He's a Jew.”

“A Christian wouldn't ask for a pound of flesh,” calls out Bradley's cheerleader, sitting smack in the middle of the class. Another cheerleader sits next to her.

“That's not what Shylock is saying,” says Mr. Schneider. “I wanna know what Shylock is saying with the speech.”

“That Christians and Jews are the same,” says Cheerleader No. 2.

“Correctamundo!” says Mr. Schneider, and the class chuckles.

“I know what he's sayin,” says Cheerleader No. 1. “I'm sayin I disagree.”

“He's sayin he's doin what the Christians taught him, and now they'll understand it cuz it's bein done to them,” says a girl from the Gentile side. I'm surprised to see Emily Creitzer with her face down, trying not to be called upon. Didn't she do the assignment?

“Exactly! Now. What's Portia got to say about all this pound of flesh business?”

A moment of hesitation from the Gentile side, then a boy raises his hand.

“Mr. James.”

The boy stands.

“
The quality of mercy is not strain'd, /
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes—”

The boy is stuck. After a more than acceptable silence, Mr. Schneider calls for help. “Gentiles?”

Most of the Gentiles, but not Emily, say in unison: “
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest
!
”

“'Tis mightiest in the mightiest!” The James boy goes on. “It becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown—” His eyes scanning the ceiling for the next word. When the silence goes on too long, Mr. Schneider glances at Emily, a vague smile on his face.

“Miss Creitzer.”

Emily looks up, eyes wide.

“I'm sure
you
can recite ‘the quality of mercy.'”

Emily stands. She looks down at her desk.

“
The quality of mercy is not strain'd, /
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven—”

“Stop muttering, Miss Creitzer, we need to
hear
it.”

Emily takes a breath, looks up, and speaks.

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway;

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God's

When mercy seasons justice.

There is a silence. I cannot take my eyes off Emily. Even through her fright, she has given her words meaning, seeming to actually
understand
what Shakespeare is saying, what
she
is saying, so we understand.

“In contemporary English?”

Emily stares wildly.

“What have you just said?”

“It has to do with. She's asking—”

“Who?”

“Portia. Portia's asking the merchant to not. To have compassion,
leniency,
not to hurt Antonio—”

“‘Hurt'?”

“To shave off the pound of flesh, she's asking the merchant—”

“And the merchant is?”

Emily seems utterly confused. Mr. Schneider sighs. “Is the merchant a Gentile?”

“The Jew! The Jew! Portia is asking the Jew if he will please be gentle with Antonio—”

“Who's Antonio?”

“The debtor. Antonio is the debtor who borrowed three thousand ducats from Shylock, the Jew—”

“What's a ducat?”

Emily frantically searches Mr. Schneider's face for the answer, then looks down at her desk shaking. The random snickers from the students don't surprise me, but the smile on Mr. Schneider's face is unsettling.

“I don't know. Money.”

Mr. Schneider turns to the rest of the class. As if for the thousandth time: “What do we do when we come to a word we don't know?”

In unison: “Look it up.”

“The gold ducat was currency, a coin used throughout Europe from the twelfth century up until just before the Great War. At the end of its usage it was worth a little more than two dollars, the silver ducat about half that amount. Continue.”

“So. So Antonio was wealthy with ships but he didn't have cash, and his friend Bassanio needed three thousand ducats to travel to Belmont and woo Portia. So Antonio borrowed from Shylock, and Shylock hated Antonio for being a Christian and for making fun of him being a Jew so he said if Antonio didn't pay back the debt on time he would exact a pound of his flesh and Antonio said okay so Bassanio wooed Portia but when it came time to pay back the debt Antonio's ships were at sea so he couldn't pay and Shylock who was even madder because his daughter eloped with a Christian and some of Shylock's money so Shylock comes to collect the pound of flesh and Portia dresses up like a learn'ed lawyer man and says ‘the quality of mercy' asking Shylock to save Antonio's life which Shylock refuses until Portia points out that Shylock can only take Antonio's flesh not his blood so they win.”

We all erupt in outrageous laughter. Emily is utterly confused, apparently unaware of how long it has been since she has taken a breath.

Last spring, I was flipping through Benja's old seventh-grade yearbook. She was always protective of the current volume, not allowing any unauthorized personnel to handle it, and I was definitely unauthorized, but as soon as the new issue came out twelve months later, she could be oddly cavalier about the previous year's once-sacred tome. I noticed my seventh-grade earth science teacher Mr. Reilly had signed her book. “To a sweet girl and good student.” I remarked upon it.

“
Everyone
liked Mr. Reilly.” She continued looking into her mirror, pinning up her hair in curls for the night.

I didn't say anything, and though my eyes remained on his picture, I could tell in the silence she had looked up.

“Except. He did have a habit a pickin on kids that kids already picked on. At the time I thought it was kinda funny. We all liked him better for it. But now. I don't know. I guess he was kind of a jerk.”

I turned to my sister, sticking a bobby pin in, not looking at me. It was the closest we ever came to addressing our very different social standings.

“Thus,” Mr. Schneider picks up, “Portia's speech is about?”

Poor Emily had thought the torture was over, having started to sit, but now she is snapped back on her feet. “Excuse me?”

“What is Portia asking of Shylock?”

“Leniency.” He stares at her. Her voice quieter, pleading: “Leniency?”

Mr. Schneider continues to stare, and Emily seems close to bursting into tears. Then the teacher laughs incredulously. “Miss Creitzer! What is the speech about?”

Emily is a deer in headlights. Mr. Schneider sighs.

“What's the first line of the speech?”

“The quality of mercy is not—”

“The quality of what?”

“Mercy.”

“Of
what
?”

“
Mercy.
”

“Of
what
?”

“
Mercy! Mercy! Mercy
!
”

Emily's entire body is shaking. The class is silent. Mr. Schneider appears momentarily uncomfortable.

“They're killin Jews!”

All turn to Cheerleader No. 2.

“In Germany! The Axis!”

“And where did you hear that, Miss Hanson?”

“I heard. My mother said—”

“There is a segregation of German Jews from German Gentiles. That's all we know for certain. Anything else is conjecture.” Everyone stares at Mr. Schneider. He laughs. “I'm
not
supporting the Axis! What I'm saying is we can't just blanket assume one hundred percent of
everything
going on in Germany is wrong. Who here would want colored kids coming to this school?”

No one raises a hand.

“Then I think we can all understand the concept and necessity of separation. Miss Hanson. You are a Jew.”

She stands and recites. Letter perfect. Mr. Schneider smiles at the cute cheerleader. “Excellent.”

Miss Hanson turns pink and sits. In what appears to be an afterthought, Mr. Schneider turns to Emily, who finally felt it was safe to sit as Miss Hanson had begun her speech. “Excellent, Miss Creitzer.” Then he turns to the class at large. “How's about a little riddle?”

“Yes!”

“What has four legs and one arm?”

No one knows.

“A very happy tiger.”

A roar of laughter, and the bell.

“Read page 185, Sonnet 52!” A few students line up to get Mr. Schneider's John Hancock in their yearbooks.

I have the hang of it now and get to my last class downstairs and on the other side of the school three minutes early. After the late bell rings, Mr. Porter, a tall, bulky man in his fifties, pulls down a map. Taped over it is a nineteenth-century political cartoon. The immediate foreground image is what appears to be a combination Sambo/ape creature leisurely lying back with his legs crossed, mindless eyes in the clouds. Everyone laughs. On closer inspection, we see a hardworking white farmer chopping wood, another pushing a plow as he comes home to his family. In the other corner, a sketch of the U.S. Capitol Building with this etched into it:

FREEDOM

AND

NO WORK.

and the headline over the entire drawing:

THE FREEDMAN'S BUREAU!

AN AGENCY TO KEEP THE NEGRO IN IDLENESS

AT THE EXPENSE OF THE WHITE MAN.

TWICE VETOED BY THE PRESIDENT, AND MADE A LAW BY CONGRESS

SUPPORT CONGRESS & YOU SUPPORT THE NEGRO

SUSTAIN THE PRESIDENT & YOU SUPPORT THE WHITE MAN.

“Welcome to Reconstruction,” says Mr. Porter, and the class cracks up again.

From there on out, things are less entertaining with the instructor lecturing and writing notes on the board that the students copy. He quickly skims over Reconstruction, which he intermittently refers to as the “Hard Times”—the postwar decade and a half reconfiguring the Confederacy which meant, among other things, some former slaves and free coloreds were elected to government seats—and moves on to the Gilded Age, which he seems markedly more enthusiastic about. He speaks of economic prosperity and of America's new wealth and capitalist leadership in the world, of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Morgan, the better students shaking their hands to bring life back to them before resuming the rapid note taking, and near the end of the hour a sudden thought crosses Mr. Porter's mind. “Who coined the term ‘Gilded Age'?”

Silence. Students search their notes but the answer is not there. Tentatively, I raise my hand.

“Ah! An eighth-grade visitor thinks he has the answer. Mr. . . . ?”

“Randall.”

“Mr. Randall!”

“Well, Evans. Randall Evans.”