Chapter 23 The Last Faculty Meeting #4
“That’s what Hope means, Prudence. Those girls will fit in fine, Jimmy,” Faith told him. It seemed fitting he was a backseat passenger—he was just along for the ride, Jimmy was thinking.
James Winslow would be a single parent, but his child would have no lack of mothers. “I’m actually looking forward to being a father,” he said from the backseat. Given all the help he would have, Jimmy knew he had no excuse not to be a good father.
“Your mom knows you’ve been writing to Esther, Jimmy,” Hope said.
“Esther and Honor are always writing each other,” Prudence told him.
“There’s a recent letter to you from Esther—as recent as your letter to me from Amsterdam,” Faith said.
There was no keeping anything from those Winslow girls, or from Esther, Jimmy was thinking.
He knew there would be no keeping anything from Mieke or Jolanda.
This was a good idea for someone who wanted to be a writer and a father.
There were hugs and kisses from his mom when Jimmy came home to the Winslow household.
Honor was so happy to hear Mieke was pregnant, she was slow to give him Esther’s letter.
“It’s a thin one,” was all Honor said, when she handed it over.
“Notwithstanding what Annelies told you, it’s too late for you to be Jewish—you didn’t grow up afraid, Jimmy,” Esther had written him.
“Aren’t all of Esther’s letters thin ones?” Faith asked Honor.
“In my experience, if I ask Esther questions, her answers are short,” Honor said, looking at Jimmy.
“On the subject of Jewishness, or what’s going on in Israel, Esther keeps it very short!” Hope cried.
“Esther is protecting us from her Jewish business—that’s who she is,” Honor said.
“Esther isn’t just your nanny, Honor—she’s a nanny to all of us!” Prudence put in.
“In this case, I didn’t ask Esther a question—it was something my German tutor said,” Jimmy told them, handing Esther’s letter to his mom. Naturally, all those Winslow girls read Esther’s letter; it didn’t take long.
“Annelies was Jimmy’s Jewish German tutor,” Honor explained.
“Annelies is the one named for Anne Frank,” Prudence put in.
“Did you like her, Jimmy?” Hope asked him.
“I had a crush on her, but Annelies discouraged that,” he said.
“Very professional—good for Annelies!” Prudence shouted. Honor changed the subject to what mattered most at the moment: moving ahead.
“Do you have photos of Mieke to show us, Jimmy?” his mom asked.
As he remembered, Jolanda was the one who’d taken most of the photos—yet she also had managed to be prominent in many of the photographs.
It seemed disloyal to Jolanda to say Mieke was the pretty one, so Jimmy didn’t say it; he just showed the photos to his mother and his aunts.
“Is Mieke the pretty one?” Faith was the first to ask him.
“Yes, that’s Mieke,” Jimmy said, pointing to her in one of the photos.
“The tall one was your roommate, right?” Hope had asked him.
“Yes, that’s Jolanda,” Jimmy said, pointing to the tall Jolanda.
“Jolanda is pretty is her own way,” Prudence said.
“Yes, she is,” was all Jimmy could say.
“Mieke is going to have a good-looking kid,” his mom said.
The way those Winslow girls hovered over Mieke’s photos, assuring themselves of the good looks of Jimmy’s child, served as an ill omen to the writer James Winslow would become; he hoped this hovering over the imagined beauty of Mieke’s baby didn’t constitute the writing on the wall.
Good looks did not ensure a child’s well-being.
Jimmy’s sudden fear for his child’s safety served as a harbinger of the father he would become—his fear was not only a portent of his literary imagination.
“You’re going to like Mieke and Jolanda—they’re a lot of fun,” Jimmy said.
This did not appear to go over well with his mom and his aunts.
Maybe the urgency in their desire for him to knock up someone did not take into consideration that the knocking up itself could be fun. Once more, Honor changed the subject.
“You better prepare yourself to see your grandparents, Jimmy,” his mom said. “Mommy is completely unresponsive, but Daddy is sadder. He knows what’s happening, he understands it all, but he can’t speak—and you know how that man could talk.”
Yes, Grandpa Tommy certainly could talk—especially about Dickens, Jimmy was remembering. “And Dickens overpunctuates!” Thomas Winslow had exclaimed. Jimmy even remembered his granddaddy saying that Dickens’s punctuation was “a form of stage direction.” The man could talk.
“Fuck Dickens’s punctuation, Daddy!” Honor had shouted to her father. (Jimmy remembered this, too.)
“I’ll read to Grandpa from the novel I’m writing—The Dickens Man,” he told them. This went over about as well as his describing how fun Mieke and Jolanda were.
“Is it a novel about your grandfather, Jimmy?” Faith asked first.
“The main character is a teacher loosely based on Granddaddy—he teaches Dickens, but he uses Dickens in a lifesaving way,” Jimmy said.
There wasn’t a Winslow who didn’t know that Thomas never intended to “burden” his grandson with the outdated desire to be a novelist like Charles Dickens.
“A dinosaur of an ambition,” was what Thomas Winslow called it.
Thomas regretted how he’d inspired his beloved grandson to become a nineteenth-century novelist; he’d only hoped to enlighten the struggling boy as a reader.
“How ‘loosely based,’ Jimmy?” Faith was first to ask.
“How does Dickens save lives?” Prudence (the doctor) wanted to know.
“I don’t recall Daddy as a magnet for suicidal students!” Hope cried.
“Daddy had some depressed students. Maybe Dickens helped them,” Jimmy’s mom said to her sisters.
“I think ‘loosely based’ means not exactly,” Jimmy said.
As a first-time fiction writer, he was learning he would be criticized for writing about real people—whether he did it exactly or inexactly.
“Granddaddy will let me know if I got Dickens right. It won’t matter to him if he is or he isn’t like the Dickens Man,” Jimmy told them.
Or so Jimmy hoped, his mom and his aunts imagined. To their thinking, he was being presumptuous—he was taking a liberty with sacred family property merely to title a novel The Dickens Man.
“We’ll take you to The Meadow tomorrow, Jimmy,” Faith told him.
“I’ll drive—I could drive there blindfolded,” Hope said.
“I can’t take two days off in a row,” Dr. Prudence informed them.
“I’m working,” was all Jimmy’s mom said, not looking at him.
“We’ll tell you everything,” Hope assured Honor and Prudence.
Jimmy had pictured Grandpa Tommy as his only audience.
As fiction writers learn, your whole family reads you, looking for themselves.
They’re angry if they find themselves, disappointed if they don’t.
Whose aunts are these? Jimmy’s aunts would wonder when they read Jimmy’s novel.
Whose mother is this? Honor Winslow asked herself when she read it.
Neither James Winslow’s classmates nor his wrestling teammates saw themselves among the lonely, depressed, and suicidal students Teacher Tom saves in The Dickens Man.
These students in need of rescuing were figments of Jimmy’s imagination.
Those lost boys, Jimmy knew, were potential versions of his most insecure self.
If Arnaud or Chantal Beaudette hadn’t been there, what might have happened to Jimmy?
More germane to Jimmy’s survival at the academy, what if Coach Ted or Jonah Feldstein or Grandpa Tommy hadn’t been there?
How lonely and depressed might Jimmy have been if he’d never read Charles Dickens?
In David Copperfield—remembering his life as a reader in his attic room, in the Chatham of his childhood—Dickens wrote, “I have been Tom Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature).
” James Winslow didn’t doubt Grandpa Tommy would understand.
Jimmy imagined he might have been hopeless had he not read Great Expectations.
The Chatham of Dickens’s childhood is reborn in Great Expectations—in the churchyard graves he could see from his attic room, in the black convict hulk, “like a wicked Noah’s ark.
” Dickens saw it offshore on the boating trips he took on the Medway to the Thames, when he saw his first convicts.
Thomas Winslow would recognize the model Jimmy used to illustrate the landscape of Pennacook—its two rivers, its two communities, the stark differences between the academy and the town.
The academy was the ruling class of Pennacook.
James Winslow, the writer, would scorn the townspeople of Pennacook—as they had scorned the Winslow family.
The landscape of Great Expectations owes much to Chatham’s landscape—the foggy marshes, the river mist, even the nearby house where Miss Havisham lives.
On walks from Gravesend to Rochester, Dickens and his father paused in Kent and viewed the mansion atop the two-mile slope called Gad’s Hill.
His father said if Charles was hardworking, he might get to live there one day.
Given his family’s circumstances, his father’s money problems, this must have been hard for young Charles to believe.
Yet Dickens did get to live there—for the last dozen or so years of his life.
He wrote Great Expectations there; he died there.
Truthful exaggeration was real to Dickens.
As Jimmy’s grandfather had told him, “For readers who find Dickens’s imagination farfetched, they should look at his life.” Impoverishment forced the family to move away from the Chatham of Dickens’s childhood.
“I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it,” Dickens wrote.
Self-pity had no place in his novels. “His weapons were those of caricature and burlesque,” his biographer Edgar Johnson writes, “of melodrama and unrestrained sentiment.”