Chapter 23 The Last Faculty Meeting #5
In reading the opening pages of The Dickens Man to Grandpa Tommy, Jimmy emphasized that Teacher Tom’s classroom was an emotional battlefield; low comedy and pathos were at play.
A student’s roommate had committed suicide; he’d hanged himself in the dormitory shower room after leaving a note on his pillow.
“I’m in the shower,” he wrote his roommate.
The parents of one of Teacher Tom’s students were divorcing.
They were sleeping with the same woman—she’d been the student’s favorite teacher when he was in elementary school.
During one school vacation, he’d accepted a job as her house sitter when she was gallivanting with a girlfriend around the Caribbean.
He’d masturbated with his head in her underwear.
The Dickens Man read aloud to the troubled boy—imitating Mr. Sleary’s lisp in his plea for the circus artists in Hard Times.
“Don’t be croth with uth poor vagabondth.
People must be amuthed. They can’t be alwayth a learning, nor yet can they be alwayth a working, they ain’t made for it.
You mutht have uth, Thquire. Do the withe thing and the kind thing, too, and make the betht of uth; not the wortht! ”
In the room at The Meadow that Thomas and Constance Winslow shared, there were standing curtains on casters.
The comatose Connie lay facing her husband, where he could see her—except when the nurse’s aide, Alma, rolled the standing curtains closed.
This was done for Connie’s privacy, when Alma needed to attend to cleaning her.
Although Connie was comatose, the nurse’s aide also rolled the curtains closed when she attended to cleaning Tommy.
“After urination and defecation, they need privacy,” Alma told Jimmy.
Alma was a tireless supporter of privacy and personal hygiene.
With the peeing and pooping going on, there were interruptions to the narrative momentum of Jimmy’s heartfelt reading of The Dickens Man—not to mention the behind-the-curtains exhalations, gasps, and rigorous holding of breath by Aunt Faith and Aunt Hope, whose criticism was expressed by breathing.
Once or twice, Hope had laughed; her girlish giggles prompted a thumbs-up from Grandpa Tommy’s left thumb.
Dickens’s readers, Jimmy understood, were encouraged to love or hate his characters—as Dickens did.
“Look at Orlick—you’re supposed to hate him,” Teacher Tom tells his students.
In Great Expectations, Orlick is as dangerous as a mistreated dog.
Dickens has little sympathy for the social circumstances underlying Orlick’s villainy.
Orlick is a bad one, plain and simple—he means to kill.
“Look at Joe—you have to love him,” Tom tells the boys.
Joe is proud, honest, hardworking, uncomplaining, and manifesting endless goodwill despite the clamorous lack of appreciation surrounding him.
Joe is a good one, plain and simple—he means no one any harm.
“Dickens believed in good and evil. He believed there were truly good people and truly bad ones, like you do. You boys are incapable of indifference,” Teacher Tom tells his students.
“You love or hate, like Dickens does. I know you do.”
Yet, in Great Expectations, Dickens shows more fear of Jaggers than loathing for him—as if Jaggers is too dangerous to despise.
“When I was a teenager, I thought Jaggers was always washing his hands and digging with his penknife under his fingernails because of how morally reprehensible (how morally dirty) his clients were,” Teacher Tom tells his students.
“It was a case of a lawyer trying to rid his body of the contamination contracted by his proximity to the criminal element. I think now that this is only partially why Jaggers can never be clean. I am far more certain that the filth Jaggers accumulates in his work is dirt from the law itself—it is his own profession’s crud that clings to him! ” Tom tells the boys.
Jimmy read on and on. It was hard not to address his reading to his grandfather’s left hand, instead of to the dying man’s disfigured face.
Jimmy continued with the “permanent contamination of Jaggers,” how the lawyer’s home is as businesslike as his office—how the presence of his housekeeper, Molly, “casts the aura of a prison over Jaggers’s dinner table.
” Molly is a murderess, spared the gallows not because she was innocent but because Jaggers got her off.
It would break Jimmy’s heart to get another thumbs-up from his devoted grandpa’s left hand.
In Great Expectations, Magwitch was Jimmy’s hero—the convict who risks his life to see how his creation has turned out.
It’s just like Dickens that Magwitch will be spared the answer.
The convict’s creation hasn’t turned out very well.
“It’s Magwitch who enlivens the novel’s dramatic beginning—an escaped convict, he frightens a small boy into providing food for his stomach and a file for his leg-iron,” Teacher Tom tells his students.
As Jimmy read to his bedridden grandfather, when Magwitch returns to London a hunted man, he also enlivens the novel’s dramatic ending.
Magwitch as effectively destroys Pip’s expectations as he has created them.
“You think you have troubles,” Tom tells the most troubled, near-suicidal boys.
“Be glad you’re not Pip, who discovers his benefactor has all along been Abel Magwitch—the escaped convict.
And don’t feel too sorry for Pip—you should feel sorrier for Magwitch!
” Teacher Tom tells his students. “Don’t tell me you’re homesick,” the Dickens Man tells the homesick boys.
“Look at Magwitch. He provides us with the missing link in the story of Miss Havisham’s jilting.
Magwitch is our means for knowing who Estella is, and where she comes from, but don’t tell me Magwitch is just a plot device!
” As Jimmy read to the dying man, Pip can never rid himself—or Estella, by association—of Magwitch’s prison “taint.”
That was as far as Jimmy got in his first reading of The Dickens Man to his grandfather.
Grandpa Tommy had emitted a gassy, liquid sound.
There then emanated an overpowering odor from the dying man’s diaper.
The standing curtains on casters were rolled aside, as if the sound and the odor summoned Alma.
There were tears on the cheeks of the nurse’s aide, and Jimmy could see that his aunts were crying; they’d all been listening to The Dickens Man.
Not many writers have such a gratifying audience response to their first novels.
As for his devoted Grandpa Tommy, there was another thumbs-up from the man’s left hand—another heartbreaker.
Tears were streaming down Thomas Winslow’s cheeks.
Despite his half-frozen face, Jimmy’s grandfather was crying uncontrollably from both eyes.
“Don’t worry, Jimmy,” Alma told him. “Post-stroke patients are emotionally labile—they’ll frequently cry over the smallest trigger.
Their emotions are fast to appear, with little or no filtering.
” This didn’t fully explain to the young author why the nurse’s aide and his aunts were all sobbing.
Jimmy hoped that The Dickens Man amounted to more than the smallest trigger for Grandpa Tommy.
And Alma’s vocabulary confused Jimmy; he didn’t know the word labile, meaning emotionally unstable or liable to change.
Jimmy thought labile was related to labia.
Poor Alma. She thought Jimmy looked suddenly stricken, not realizing he was trying to imagine his unfortunate grandfather as emotionally vaginal, as if post-stroke patients were somehow vulnerable to resembling the inner or outer folds of the vulva.
“What do post-stroke patients have to do with vaginas, or with just the labia, maybe?” Jimmy asked the nurse’s aide.
The question was sufficient to stop Jimmy’s aunts from sobbing.
Faith and Hope were aghast; they were now the stricken-looking ones.
Jimmy’s grandfather was the only one who realized this was a language problem, having nothing to do with strokes or vaginas.
The fast thumbs-down from Grandpa Tommy’s left hand seized everyone’s attention.
As Faith and Hope would later tell Jimmy in the car when they were driving away from The Meadow, if their dear daddy could have laughed, he surely would have.
“Don’t you know what labile means, Jimmy?
” Faith was first to ask in Thomas and Constance’s room.
Alma seemed to be experimenting with the stricken look and Hope had burst out laughing.
The Winslow sisters and Jimmy did their best to assure Alma that the labile-labia confusion was just one of those language or vocabulary misunderstandings.
“Blame it on Latin!” Hope had cried. She said labile, labia, vulva, and vagina all came from the Latin. This got a thumbs-up from you-know-who.
Back in the Winslow household, Prudence and Honor were anxious to hear how Jimmy’s reading from The Dickens Man had been received. “It was all thumbs-up until Jimmy told a vagina joke to Alma,” Faith said first.
“Poor Alma!” Prudence exclaimed, while Hope howled with laughter.
“No vagina jokes to nurse’s aides, Jimmy,” his mom intoned to him.
After the labia business was explained to death, Faith and Hope told Honor and Prudence how the opening pages of The Dickens Man made them cry—even Alma.
“It’s not like Alma to cry!” Honor declared.
“I want you to read The Dickens Man to me, Jimmy,” she told him.
“I’ll read the novel myself—I hate being read to,” Prudence stated.