Chapter 11 An Old Testament Girl #2
All Honor would say was ventured as cautiously as her mother might have said it. “I just want to have a child—I’ll be a good mom to an Esther or a Jimmy,” Honor told her family, with noticeable uncertainty.
It was the Winslows’ public certainty (not to mention Esther’s) that confounded the townspeople of Pennacook. The publicness of their certainty was most confounding to the ladies of the town. For two months and counting, Esther took her baby bump all over town.
“It’s my baby, but he or she will be Honor’s child,” Esther liked to say for starters.
“If he’s a boy, he’ll be a James or a Jimmy, but if she’s a girl, she’ll be an Esther—like me!
” Esther always added. There were no rings on her long fingers.
Not only did Esther make it clear that she wasn’t married; she expressed her doubts that she would ever marry.
“Marriage and motherhood aren’t in the cards for me—I don’t want to be a wife or a mother,” Esther frankly said.
“I just want to see what being pregnant and giving birth is like—I just want to try it,” she added.
To the townspeople of Pennacook, particularly the ladies of the town, Esther was a brazen hussy, but she was unashamed.
As all the Winslows knew, she came naturally to being radical.
The Rosenthals were reminded of when Esther had gone to synagogue, just to try it—not because she would ever be an observant Jew, or necessarily go to synagogue again.
And no one knew Esther as well as the Druckers did.
As they understood, marriage and motherhood were not among the reasons Esther felt compelled to move to Jerusalem—to make the Land of Israel her permanent home.
What made Isaac and Bluma stand apart from the townspeople of Pennacook went beyond the Druckers’ Jewishness.
As Isaac and Bluma were smart enough to know, what Esther did with her vagina was strictly Esther’s business.
Or as Esther would say to anyone, “I’m not making a career of breastfeeding—I’m just trying it! ”
That late December of 1940, and the first two months of 1941, when Esther wasn’t with the Winslows, she was visiting the Beaudettes.
During Esther’s Pennacook years, Josephine and Antoine had been a second mom and dad for her, and those Beaudette girls were a lot of fun.
To an orphan like Esther, it was a wonderful thing to have too many sisters to count.
Beaudette girls were “too well-endowed for their own good,” Constance Winslow had said, as if those girls’ breasts had precipitated their renowned procreation.
And Thomas and Constance couldn’t help upholding their love of higher education; the senior Winslows mainly wished those Beaudette girls would go to college before they had babies.
When the townspeople of Pennacook condemned the Beaudettes for overbreeding, Thomas and Constance would stand with the Beaudettes.
All the Winslow daughters had loved those Beaudette girls, and the Beaudettes were nice to everyone.
It wasn’t lost on Thomas Winslow why the Beaudettes and the pregnant Jewish one were the best of friends.
To the ladies of the town, the Beaudettes were typical French-Canadian Catholics who had too many children.
Esther was an unmarried Jew who was having a baby for someone else!
“The townspeople of Pennacook don’t like anyone who’s different, Tommy,” Constance told her husband.
“Right you are, Connie. Attagirl, Esther! Way to go, all you Beaudettes!” Thomas said.
Honor Winslow knew she was always welcome to visit the Beaudettes.
She hadn’t held a baby in a while—except the way you hold a baby when you’re a nurse.
The way mothers held their babies was different, Honor knew.
That winter of 1941, Faith’s two children were ten and eight.
Hope had only one kid, who was already six.
Honor knew those Beaudette girls always had babies around.
“I held you not long after you were born,” Josephine Beaudette told Honor. “I’d baked a blueberry pie for your family—not knowing Esther was a pro at baking blueberry pies, and she was only fourteen!” Josephine said, laughing. Esther didn’t laugh.
“I learned to bake a blueberry pie in the kitchen of the dining hall at St. Cloud’s, where I also learned to read—and to hold a baby,” Esther began, but her voice trailed away.
Honor hugged Esther first. Honor knew the story, as did all the Beaudettes, who hugged Esther, too.
As much as Esther loved Dr. Larch, she’d not wanted to have her baby at the orphanage, where the way those babies cried when they needed to be held was different.
Those babies’ mothers had left them, taking their breast milk away.
In the old days, not all of those crying babies would survive.
Now that there was baby formula, made from evaporated milk, newborn babies who weren’t breastfed thrived.
Nevertheless, Esther’s pregnancy gave her bad dreams of the way those abandoned babies had cried.
James Winslow would be born at the New England Hospital for Women and Children on March 2, 1941.
It was a time when many American baby boys were circumcised—to prevent, or make more treatable, some sexually transmitted diseases and urinary tract infections.
As Constance Winslow would unwillingly discover, there was a litany of dubious reasons.
Honor Winslow had beseeched her mother to stock up the Pennacook Public Library with medical journals.
Esther was uncharacteristically more specific.
“In the area of medical history, Connie, we’re looking for a timeline of circumcision—the pros and cons,” as Esther put it.
Constance Winslow’s master’s degree in library and information sciences was put to the test. Thus did the Pennacook Public Library become a trove of penis-cutting history.
To Constance’s dismay, her sacred library was where Honor and Esther argued about the benefits and cruelties of circumcision; they seldom agreed.
In 1855, the English physician Jonathan Hutchinson published an article claiming circumcision prevented syphilis—based on his studies of venereal-disease cases among Jewish and non-Jewish men.
“Bullshit,” Esther said.
Honor had argued that venereal diseases could thrive under a foreskin. “Not in the library—no talking about foreskins here,” Constance told them.
Those two also disagreed about the relevance of clitoridectomies to male circumcision. In the late 1850s, clitoridectomies were introduced as a treatment for hysteria, epilepsy, masturbation, and other so-called nervous diseases in women. Honor maintained that male circumcision was different.
They did agree on one point, at least. In the 1850s, James Copland popularized the idea of circumcision as a way to discourage boys from masturbating. “There’s nothing wrong with beating off!” Honor cried, while Esther nodded her head like someone crazy.
In an 1860 article in Lancet, Athol Johnson said circumcision was a cure for masturbation in boys.
Asshole Johnson, both Honor and Esther called him.
“Not in the library,” Constance repeated.
Somehow curing boys of masturbation by circumcision would become medical dogma in Britain for a century—in the U.S. , for 150 years.
In 1865, William Acton referred to the foreskin as a “source of serious mischief.”
“I think the foreskin is the most sensitive part,” Esther said.
Honor didn’t know how she felt about this.
Constance knew it was not library talk. In 1870, Lewis Sayre, a New York orthopedic surgeon, introduced circumcision as a cure for paralysis, epilepsy, and masturbation. “There are no words,” Esther said.
As for universal circumcision as a preventive health measure, there would be more hysteria by the 1890s, when physicians linked the foreskin to insomnia, chronic indigestion, asthma, bedwetting, erectile dysfunction, skin cancer, and insanity. Honor Winslow knew all this was truly insane.
Esther championed Eugen Levit, a Jewish doctor in Vienna; in 1874, he published a pamphlet urging Jews to abolish circumcision and replace it with an uninjurious rite.
Esther quoted a London doctor, Herbert Snow, who, in 1890, deplored the spread of circumcision—calling it a “barbarity.” Circumcision history was not on Esther’s side, though.
By 1900, Honor Winslow was winning the argument.
E. Harding Freeland published an article in Lancet, declaring male circumcision would reduce the incidence of syphilis by 49 percent.
In 1914, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Abraham Wolbarst, a Jewish doctor in New York, enraged Esther by urging universal male circumcision as preventive of syphilis, cancer, and masturbation.
“The ‘and masturbation’ ruins everything else he says,” as Esther put it.
In 1932, the same Dr. Wolbarst claimed that smegma under the foreskin caused cancer of the penis, but Esther had stopped reading what he wrote.
Earlier, in 1928, a U.S. doctor (Thomas Bolling Gay) recommended routine infant circumcision to prevent phimosis.
Honor was horrified that boys could suffer from a foreskin that was too tight to pull back.
Nor was Honor’s foremost belief in male circumcision—to make sexually transmitted diseases more treatable—eased by Esther’s labeling.
“Your penile hygiene fixation,” Esther called it.
“What did your Dr. Larch do about it?” Honor asked Esther.
At St. Cloud’s, Esther remembered the nurses checking the baby boys to see how their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision.
In those days, all the boys born at St. Cloud’s were circumcised—because Dr. Larch had experienced some difficulty treating uncircumcised soldiers “for this and for that” in World War I. Esther just gave up arguing.