Chapter 13 To Take a Chance on Love,Not #2
As his grandfather had feared, James Winslow would be a struggling student at Pennacook Academy.
The boy could hold his own in history class and in English; he was still a slow reader, but a conscientious one.
Thomas noticed that young James’s written work was meticulously rewritten, not to mention overpunctuated to a fault.
Thomas blamed himself for his grandson’s obsessive rewriting.
In an academically demanding school, there was never enough time to rewrite everything.
Jimmy Winslow would fall behind in math, and in all the sciences.
He would fail to grasp a foreign language, too—not for want of trying.
His granddad had recommended Spanish. (Thomas’s colleagues at the academy told him Spanish was the easiest foreign language.) Yet young James had taken to heart where his biological mom and dad came from.
When he was just starting prep school, Jimmy Winslow was already dreaming about going to Vienna; he imagined taking a junior year abroad in his university years.
The only foreign language James Winslow wanted to learn was German.
Of course Thomas admired his grandson’s perseverance.
Charles Dickens was the dear boy’s hero; young James saw for himself how his hero had rewritten the ending of Great Expectations.
Unfortunately, three years of the same foreign language was a graduation requirement at Pennacook Academy; three years of math were also required.
James Winslow would need five years to pass three years of German, and it took him five years to pass three years of math.
It was a small humiliation for Jimmy, not to graduate with the class of 1960—when his best friend, Arnaud Beaudette, would.
All the Beaudettes were there, Aunt Chantal included.
Because he was in love with her, young James tried not to stare at Chantal, but the boy was aware of how she watched him; Chantal was wise to be worried about him.
Coach Ted was wise, too. After the graduation ceremony, people were milling around, but Coach Ted took Jimmy aside.
“It doesn’t matter when you graduate, Jimmy.
All that matters is to get where you’re going,” Coach Ted told the boy.
“Besides, a fifth year won’t be all bad.
It just means you have another year of wrestling ahead of you,” the coach said.
Being a fifth-year wrestler in prep school was of some consolation to James Winslow, who would never win a New England championship.
Like Little Mountain, Jimmy was in the running for a title a few times; in the championship tournament, he placed fourth once and third twice.
He was a rewriter as a wrestler, too; he was what Coach Ted called methodical.
Ted had taught him to be technical—to be defensive from the start, to be a counterpuncher.
Jimmy’s first moves weren’t fast enough, or sufficiently explosive.
James Winslow won wrestling matches by countering the first moves of his more athletic appointments.
To finish fourth in New England wasn’t bad—to take third twice was in the category of pretty good.
But Jimmy wasn’t much of an athlete; his superior hand strength was his only natural advantage.
He indeed had Esther’s hands; he could control his opponents’ wrists and ride their ankles.
He would beat some better athletes with his hand control and his methodical technique, but Coach Ted didn’t mislead him.
Beyond the schoolboy level, the coach was frank about Jimmy’s future prospects as a wrestler.
Not bad or pretty good wouldn’t cut the mustard at the next level, Ted told the boy.
At Arnaud’s graduation, Coach Ted encouraged James Winslow to start thinking about actually being the writer the boy wanted to become.
“When you move on from here, Jimmy, and you will, stick to the writing—stick to being a writer, in the way a wrestler would keep wrestling,” Ted said.
“Here comes someone you should talk to, Jimmy. Listen to Chantal.” It wasn’t lost on James Winslow that the people who were worried about him had talked to one another.
He knew it was Chantal’s turn to take him aside.
Unlike all the other Beaudette girls, Chantal started college before she had a baby.
As far as Arnaud and Jimmy knew, Chantal had never had a boyfriend.
As the Winslows had observed, the townspeople of Pennacook were not as accustomed to French Canadians as people were in northern New Hampshire.
Most French Canadians in Pennacook didn’t speak French; it would just make them stick out more.
Chantal Beaudette wanted to stick out more than she already did.
Chantal was a French major at the University of New Hampshire.
She’d hoped to have a junior year abroad in Paris, where she could learn to speak French the way natives did.
But she had to change her plans. She wasn’t going to Paris, but instead was staying home to help her mom; Josephine Beaudette was too old and tired to be looking after all her grandkids.
Chantal was commuting every day to the University of New Hampshire.
She said it took only twenty minutes—“at the speed limit, maybe half an hour”—to drive from Pennacook to Durham, but James Winslow certainly knew enough to know that Durham wasn’t Paris.
(Arnaud had told Jimmy that his aunt wasn’t just majoring in French; Chantal was on course to get a master’s degree so she could teach French at a college or university.)
Yet at Arnaud’s graduation from the academy, Chantal was focused on Jimmy’s future.
“There are two novelists in the English Department at UNH,” Chantal told Jimmy.
“You can show your writing to other writers. That’s what matters the most to you, right?
” she asked him. “It doesn’t matter that UNH doesn’t have a wrestling team, Jimmy.
No more weighing in for you,” Chantal told him.
“If you want to keep wrestling, you can find a workout partner in the academy wrestling room, where you can help Ted with the coaching, too,” Chantal said.
“We can commute to Durham together, sometimes,” she added.
James Winslow had a history of driving to Durham with Chantal—a fond memory of his and Arnaud’s formative adolescence.
When those boys were growing up in Pennacook, before Chantal was old enough to have a driver’s license, the only movies they saw were the current American films; the local movie theater didn’t show any foreign films. But Durham was a college town; the Franklin Theatre was more of an art house.
The Franklin not only showed the acclaimed foreign films but also revived some great older movies.
When they were younger, Arnaud and Jimmy saw a couple of classic Westerns at the local movie theater in Pennacook.
They saw High Noon twice in 1952, when Jimmy was eleven; they saw Shane three times the year after.
As Chantal would remember, Arnaud and Jimmy were only eleven and twelve when the Winslow girls snuck those boys and Chantal into the Pennacook movie theater to see From Here to Eternity—a little too young, in Chantal’s opinion, though she herself was only fourteen.
She still remembered all the explaining she had to do, because Arnaud and Jimmy were way too young to understand the adultery part—not to mention the prostitution part.
Chantal’s dismay at those kids seeing From Here to Eternity was on her mind three years later, in 1956, when she drove those two teenagers to Durham, where the Franklin Theatre was showing a Carol Reed revival, The Third Man.
The boys were fourteen and fifteen when Chantal took them to see the wet sewers under postwar Vienna, where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) pays for his terrible crimes.
Harry Lime is crippling or killing children with diluted penicillin.
If Arnaud and Jimmy had recovered from their exposure to adultery and prostitution, surely those boys wouldn’t flinch from film noir when they were older—or so Chantal thought.
But she could see that the melancholic music (Anton Karas on a zither) made both boys anxious from the start.
Chantal saw that a doomed love story might adversely affect young James or Arnaud, who’d not yet been on a date with a girl.
And she should have known that those two teenagers would be smitten with the character of Anna (Alida Valli), Harry Lime’s lover.
At the end of the film, as Anna leaves the cemetery where Harry Lime has been buried, she gives the cold shoulder to Holly (Joseph Cotten).
His heart is breaking—he is hopelessly in love with Anna.
Holly is a hack fiction writer; he writes Westerns.
Anna is a sophisticated European, and Holly is a na?ve American, James Winslow was thinking; he was just trying to imagine himself meeting an older woman like Valli in Vienna.
Chantal saw that both boys were heartbroken; they were expecting Anna and Holly to end up together.
“Don’t you see?” she asked the boys, as they were leaving the Franklin.
“She was in love with Harry! Holly is just so out of it, and Anna has seen everything!” Chantal told them.
Compared to adultery and prostitution, Chantal was thinking, maybe pessimism, fatalism, and menace are harder for boys to understand.