Chapter 13 To Take a Chance on Love,Not #3
As Thomas Winslow would point out to young James, the screenplay of The Third Man was written by Graham Greene—a novelist. Jimmy just nodded.
Until now, he’d thought of Arnaud’s aunt Chantal as his foremost fixation on an older woman—not imagining there might be older women like Valli in Vienna.
As for Coach Ted’s advice that Jimmy should “stick to the writing,” Thomas Winslow was already worried about his grandson’s single-mindedness.
The boy was always writing fiction; young James was making up stories when he should have been doing his schoolwork.
As a budding storyteller, James Winslow seemed to be living in a parallel universe.
Jimmy was a daydreamer; he was more in touch with the world of make-believe than he was with reality.
In Thomas’s opinion, his grandson needed no encouragement to immerse himself in his writing.
James Winslow would be twenty before he graduated from prep school; his writing was partly to blame. (And to think his grandmother once thought Jimmy would be an old kindergartner.)
Meanwhile, Honor Winslow was driving Coach Ted crazy; she kept asking Ted to tell her what the worst wrestling injuries were.
Naturally, the coach thought he was dealing with another anxious wrestling mother; Ted just tried to reassure her.
“In wrestling, if you get injured, your injuries are usually the kind that heal,” the coach told her.
“But what are the worst ones, the kind that don’t heal—not completely?” Honor had insisted.
Thomas Winslow wasn’t worried about his grandson’s wrestling injuries; the writing worried him more.
In writing, Thomas was thinking, if you don’t make it as a novelist, maybe you never heal.
Why would Thomas think twice about Honor’s obsession with the worst wrestling injuries that might befall her dear child?
Honor was just being a good mother, expressing her worst fears—or so Thomas thought.
What’s more, Jimmy had made his birth mother proud; he’d already demonstrated his readiness to stand up for Jews.
Honor hadn’t hesitated to tell Esther the whole story.
The starting 115-pounder on the academy wrestling team was one of Pennacook’s nonobservant Jews from New York.
Jonah Feldstein was one grade below his teammates Jimmy and Arnaud, but Jonah was arguably more sophisticated than both of them.
For such a small boy, he had the savvy of a big city about him.
An air of self-assurance radiated from little Jonah; this was what got him in trouble, along with the yarmulke.
Neither Arnaud nor Jimmy had ever seen Jonah wear the skullcap; he was not an Orthodox Jew, and he wasn’t on his way to a synagogue.
It was a Sunday, and Jonah went to the only convenience store in downtown Pennacook that was open on a Sunday.
“Cover your head,” the Talmud says, “in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you.” Jonah wasn’t devout; he was not inclined to be prayerful.
But Jonah was praying that his older sister, Sarah, wasn’t pregnant.
It was out of respect for Sarah that Jonah was wearing a yarmulke—to send her his blessings.
The academy students were cautioned to stay away from Morrison’s; the convenience store was a hangout for local ruffians.
Morrison’s was in the Mill Street part of Pennacook, across the river from the town’s textile mill.
If academy students ventured there, they were advised not to be alone.
Jonah was alone in his yarmulke when he encountered the Duval brothers—no one could tell those two thugs apart.
Marcel and Marceau were not twins, but they were inseparable.
They not only looked alike; they exhibited the same bullying behavior.
Jonah was leaving Morrison’s store when the brothers accosted him on the Mill Street sidewalk.
“Hey, Jew boy—you don’t belong here,” one of the brothers began.
“No Yids allowed,” either Marcel or Marceau said.
“You can’t wear your kike hat here,” one of the Duvals told Jonah, reaching for the yarmulke. That’s how it started. Jonah wouldn’t have been beaten up as badly if he hadn’t taken down the Duval brother who grabbed him by the yarmulke.
In wrestling terms, the 115-pounder got the first takedown, but he lost the match to the two bigger Duval brothers on the Mill Street sidewalk.
The Pennacook police seemed to think it was sufficient to give the Duval brothers a warning.
It was inaccurate of the police to call the beating up of Jonah Feldstein a first-time offense for those brothers; Marcel and Marceau had roughed up other academy students before.
“Maybe I’m the first Jew the Duvals have beaten up—maybe that’s what the cops mean by the first time,” Jonah told his teammates.
This was only one aspect of Jonah’s worldliness among his wrestling teammates.
The Jewish boy from New York was not only acutely aware of anti-Semitism; he was used to it.
Marcel and Marceau weren’t the only boys in the Duval family.
The Duvals had boys the way the Beaudettes had girls.
At an early age, those Beaudette girls were told to keep their distance from the Duval boys.
It didn’t help that both families lived in the Mill Street part of town.
It was Jimmy’s idea that Arnaud should rough up Marcel and Marceau in the way those Duval brothers had beaten up Jonah Feldstein.
Arnaud took some teammates with him; they were mostly wrestlers in the upper weight classes, but Jimmy Winslow went with them.
The way it worked was straightforward. All the wrestlers restrained Marcel or Marceau while Arnaud beat the crap out of the other brother; then it was Marcel or Marceau’s turn to be beaten up by Arnaud.
The Pennacook police gave Arnaud Beaudette and Jimmy Winslow a warning; this time, it was accurate of the police to call the beating up of the Duval brothers a first-time offense for Arnaud and Jimmy.
For no clear reason, the police didn’t mention the other wrestlers.
(They were boarding students, but this was no reason to absolve them.)
The Disciplinary Committee at Pennacook Academy gave all the wrestlers involved a warning, with one faculty member going so far as to refer to them as “vigilantes.” Warnings were all that came of it, but the Feldsteins in New York were appreciative of Jimmy and Arnaud’s vigilantism.
After one Thanksgiving break, Sarah Feldstein drove Jonah back to Pennacook Academy.
She was a college student somewhere in the Boston area.
Jonah led Sarah all around the academy campus until they found Arnaud and Jimmy.
“My sister wants to give you a hug and kiss,” Jonah said matter-of-factly when he found them; Jonah looked away when Sarah hugged and kissed them.
Arnaud and Jimmy had never been hugged and kissed the way the dark and smoldering Sarah hugged and kissed them.
More older-women material—this was the way James Winslow (the writer) would one day think of it.
In his fifth year at Pennacook Academy, young James and Jonah Feldstein were best friends. With Arnaud away in college, Jonah was the one Jimmy hung out with. Jonah confided to Jimmy that he had a crush on Arnaud’s aunt Chantal, too.
As for Chantal, she was true to her word—she went to all of Jimmy’s wrestling matches at the academy.
She continued to drive him to the Franklin Theatre in Durham, even after he had his driver’s license.
Certainly the highlight of those foreign films he had seen with her and Arnaud was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
Chantal had a lot of explaining to do on this one; she began with the story of the medieval knight returning to Sweden from the Crusades, the easy part for those boys to understand.
On a winter night in New Hampshire in 1958, the Black Death—a bubonic plague in the middle of the fourteenth century—was harder for those boys to grasp.
How the knight meets the personification of Death and the high stakes of the chess game between them were perfectly clear to Jimmy and Arnaud, as was the knight’s encounter with the caravan of actors—and how the knight distracts Death long enough for the young couple to escape with their child.
Both boys understood how this “one meaningful deed” stands as an act of redemption for the knight.
The going got harder for Chantal when she tried to address how “the silence of God” is such a big deal to the knight. Chantal realized that God’s silence was the norm for Arnaud and Jimmy; those boys weren’t remotely religious.
Then Chantal got bogged down with the biblical quotation (Revelation 8:1) that begins the film and is repeated near the end. She skipped “the seventh seal” part and hurried her delivery of “there was a silence in heaven for about half an hour,” which made both boys laugh.
“There was silence for only half an hour?” Arnaud asked, dissolving into uncontrollable laughter.
“I thought there was always silence in heaven,” James Winslow said more seriously to Chantal, who decided not to mention the final scene in the film—the knight and his companions in a Dance of Death.
She would spare the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old a reminder of the universality of death, Chantal (who was only nineteen) decided.
No Danse Macabre, no Totentanz, for Arnaud and Jimmy.
Not even the townspeople of Pennacook were as preoccupied with the inevitability of death as people were in the late Middle Ages, Chantal was thinking.