Chapter 23 The Last Faculty Meeting #3
Perhaps because he was expecting a child, something had changed in James Winslow.
On the plane back to America, he made a major revision in the novel based on his beloved grandfather.
The saintly English teacher is not a confirmed bachelor; he isn’t an asexual like Honor Winslow, Jimmy’s mom.
Teacher Tom, the eponymous Dickens Man, is a family man.
He wants his students who are lonely and depressed to be as happy as his own children.
The homophobic faculty wives and students don’t think this English teacher is a nonpracticing homosexual.
James Winslow understood where this revision came from; he knew he was already thinking protectively, like a father.
And with this thought, Jimmy felt more empathy for his mom; her overprotectiveness of him was more understandable.
The Dickens Man still seeks out and saves those lost boys; Teacher Tom finds the Dickens novel that will lift their spirits.
Jimmy realized he was making the main character of The Dickens Man more normal—to make him safer—and this thought led Jimmy to a darker place.
He remembered a story Grandpa Tommy told him—a story Dr. Larch had confided to the Winslows.
When Larch told the rabbi in Portland that Esther didn’t believe in God, the rabbi declined to judge Esther’s beliefs.
The rabbi said Esther deserved to know how much her mother was afraid for her. “Fear is love,” the rabbi had said.
As James Winslow now understood, even parents who aren’t normal want their children to be.
Aren’t normal children safer? he thought.
This led Jimmy to fear for his own child.
Given the landmark loss of Jimmy’s virginity, and how out of it he was at the time, Jimmy doubted his own child would be normal—not to mention Mieke’s contribution, and Jolanda’s.
And with this thought, Jimmy also realized that the more you fear for a child, the more you must love it.
Jimmy never doubted that Mieke and Jolanda would feel the same way.
If their child was a gay boy, they would be more afraid for him, they would love him more.
It would be the same with a lesbian girl; the more fear they felt for her, the more they would love her.
All this on the plane back to America, where being a father would save James Winslow from a misbegotten war.
By the time he landed in New York, and before he boarded his connecting flight to Boston, Jimmy knew there must be something wrong with his grandfather.
There was a fear-is-love thing going on; those Winslow daughters were protecting him from what had happened to Grandpa Tommy, or so Jimmy thought.
He just knew someone would meet his plane in Boston.
Faith and Hope liked to drive, and Hope had a station wagon.
His mom and Prudence might be at work. Nurses and doctors were always working, Jimmy thought.
At the baggage carousel in Boston, Faith saw him before he saw her. As usual, she spoke first. “Hope has the station wagon—we knew you’d have a lot of stuff,” she told him. “Plenty of room for you and Prudence in the backseat, Jimmy,” Faith said. He hadn’t expected three of them.
“Prudence isn’t working?” Jimmy asked his aunt.
“You need to hear it from the doctor, Jimmy. Hope and I can interpret for you, when Prudence goes overboard with the medical jargon,” Faith said.
At some point, Thomas Winslow began to have “spells”; he tried to keep these episodes to himself, not wanting to worry Constance.
Initially, the spells abated in an hour or two.
He suddenly developed an acute shortness of breath, weakness, and lightheadedness; he felt a rapid, irregular pounding of his heart.
There were moments, Prudence told Jimmy, when Grandpa Tommy looked alarmed; once or twice, someone in the family noticed that he seemed unsteady when he made his way to a seat.
But he seemed fine when he was sitting down.
These episodes ended as abruptly as they’d started, leaving Thomas completely recovered.
“Are you all right, Tommy?” the Winslow daughters had all heard Connie ask when he made a hasty exit—often into the bathroom.
“No more locking the bathroom door, you two,” Prudence told them.
“At their age, people die in bathrooms while the rest of the family is trying to break down the door, Jimmy,” Faith informed him.
Jimmy knew Grandpa Tommy always thought of Dickens.
In 1870, Charles Dickens had died of a paralytic stroke; at death, his eyes were closed but a tear was observed on his right cheek. Dickens was fifty-eight.
Hope interjected something while she was driving.
Connie had known enough to be worried about Tommy, because he kept saying how unjust it was that he should live so long—while someone as important and productive as Dickens had died when he was so young.
“Daddy must have known he had heart palpitations, like Dickens,” Hope told Jimmy.
“Daddy had developed paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, Jimmy—the attacks became more frequent and lasted longer,” Prudence continued.
In the rearview mirror, Jimmy saw Faith close her eyes and grimace at the medical babble, but Prudence was determined for Jimmy to see the situation they’d kept from him.
In atrial fibrillation, the small chambers of the heart no longer pump blood into the large chambers; the small chambers just “fibrillate” (they “quiver,” as Prudence put it).
The blood still gets into the larger chambers, but the “electrical signals” are disrupted.
Because the heart is pumping so quickly, there’s no time for any significant amount of blood to fill the chambers, and almost no blood is being pumped out.
This was what caused Thomas Winslow’s lightheadedness, his fatigue, and the shortness of breath—his rapid, uncoordinated heartbeat.
“Cut to the killer, Prudence,” Faith interrupted. “Jimmy has jet lag, and he’s been trying to knock up a Dutch girl. He doesn’t need to know how the heart is supposed to work,” Faith told her younger sister.
Prudence doggedly persisted. If the small chambers are no longer “pumping purposefully,” she said, the blood in the chambers stagnates.
The stagnant blood forms clots. “When an episode ends, and the small chambers start to pump again, the clots fly out—sending a massive number of emboli to the brain, causing a stroke. Brain tissue dies, Jimmy—that’s what it means to have a stroke,” Prudence said.
There was no interrupting her—medical details were a doctor’s business.
Thomas Winslow had been in the bathroom—he was probably feeling poorly, in the middle of an episode.
Then the episode passed; he felt better, only to be hit with what Prudence called “a shower of emboli.” His left middle cerebral artery was occluded, killing off Broca’s area—the “speech region of the brain,” as Prudence put it.
Thomas collapsed. Constance must have heard him fall; she rushed into the bathroom.
“Mommy tripped over him. The left side of Daddy’s face was already paralyzed—the left side of his mouth was askew and drooling,” Prudence continued.
“Daddy can’t speak, Jimmy, and he has paralysis on the right side of his body.
But he can hear—he understands everything.
When Mommy fell, she hit her head on the bathtub—she was unconscious—but she also fractured her hip,” Prudence said.
Faith and Hope had stopped interrupting.
Thomas’s atrial fibrillation might have been manageable, but the stroke damage was permanent.
He was conscious but unable to speak; he couldn’t use the right side of his body.
He was fed through a tube because he couldn’t swallow.
Thomas Winslow was bedridden and incontinent—unimaginably, he was unable to communicate, except with his left hand.
Connie was in worse shape. Her hip would normally need surgery, but given her age and the head injury, the surgery was risky; the Winslow daughters decided to let her slip away.
She’d also sustained what Prudence called a “brain bleed,” which wouldn’t kill her immediately but kept her comatose.
Constance was being fed through a tube, too.
“Mommy could last up to a month,” Prudence told Jimmy.
Thomas was torturously aware of his own and his dear wife’s situation—they were now in the intensive-care part of The Meadow.
“They were hospitalized for two weeks, Jimmy—before they were transferred to The Meadow,” Faith said. She now felt free to interrupt. There were no more medical details, Jimmy guessed.
“Daddy could die at any time, in the next few years or imminently, but Mommy will almost certainly predecease him, Jimmy,” Hope said.
“I just got your letter, Jimmy—not that there was time to answer it,” Faith told him. “We’ve been taking turns, answering your letters to Daddy—not that we managed to fool you.”
“It was mostly your mom who answered your letters to Daddy, Jimmy,” Hope had told him.
“It was all of us, correcting one another—that’s why we fucked it up! There was no way all of us could sound like Daddy!” Prudence exclaimed.
“Remain calm—we’ll take Jimmy to The Meadow tomorrow. Now I just want to know how it’s going with knocking up the Dutch girl,” Faith said.
“It’s the first thing your mom will ask you, Jimmy. Is the Dutch girl knocked up, or isn’t she?” Hope asked him.
“If she isn’t, you should still be doing it, Jimmy,” Prudence said.
“Mieke is pregnant. She and her girlfriend—my roommate Jolanda—are behaving like they’re both expecting,” Jimmy told them.
“Those girls sound wonderful!” Hope cried.
“Sure as shit, those girls sound like us!” Prudence put in.