Chapter 23 The Last Faculty Meeting #6
The ending of his novel was all-important to the writer James Winslow would become.
When you tell a story to a dying man, you better know where you’re going—you better know how your story ends.
The dying man knows his ending. Jimmy had imagined the end of The Dickens Man, but he’d not written it.
He imagined the ending more exactly when he was reading to his grandfather.
He could see the students Teacher Tom had saved—they came to a place like The Meadow to pay their respects to the dying Dickens Man.
“I have a medical question for Prudence, not about Granddaddy, but my fictional character is also dying—at the end of the novel,” Jimmy began.
There ensued a Winslow-sister hullabaloo about dying in real life—as opposed to portrayals of death in novels. Jimmy’s medical question for the doctor in the house was passed over in the emotion of the moment.
“Your fictional character shouldn’t die in the same way as Daddy,” Faith said matter-of-factly to Jimmy.
“And don’t read your character’s death scene to Daddy, no matter how your Dickens Man dies,” his mother told him.
“Daddy is hanging on your every word, Jimmy—slow the story down, put off the dying, don’t ever get to the ending,” Hope advised him.
“I’m a long way from writing the ending. I’ve written less than half the story,” Jimmy admitted to them.
“You should be writing ahead, except when you’re reading to Daddy,” Faith said.
“First you read as much as you’ve written to me, all at once—then you write your ass off, Jimmy!” his mom ordered him.
“Daddy is nobody’s fool, Jimmy. When you slow the story down, he’ll know you’re stalling because you haven’t written the rest,” Hope had said.
“What’s your medical question, Jimmy?” Prudence asserted herself.
“Might someone like Grandpa Tommy be able to write?” Jimmy asked.
Jimmy knew his grandfather could move the fingers of his left hand, and the post-stroke patient understood everything.
That he couldn’t speak didn’t preclude his ability to write with his left hand, or did it?
If paper on a clipboard were positioned in a way that Grandpa Tommy could reach it, might he be able to write his thoughts?
A character like his grandfather—provided the stroke hadn’t robbed him of his ability to form sentences in his mind—might be able to hold a pen and write. Yes?
Faith, not Prudence, was the first to answer Jimmy’s medical question. “Daddy is right-handed, Jimmy—he was proud of his handwriting. Daddy wouldn’t want us to see his left-handed writing,” Faith said.
“A fictional character could be left-handed, Faith,” Hope pointed out.
“Daddy doesn’t want to articulate his thoughts in writing, Jimmy. In his condition, a thumbs-up or down is all he wants to say,” his mom said.
“Speaking as a doctor,” Prudence interrupted, “your fictional character can conceivably use his left hand to write; his cognition could be intact, and he can articulate his thoughts in writing. If his cognition far exceeds his ability to communicate, he could be frustrated over his inability to make his thoughts known. He can grunt and flail his hand, he can pantomime holding a pen—he can be a whole lot angrier than Daddy is, Jimmy,” Prudence said.
This was all Jimmy needed to know; he would write his ending.
In his future novels, Jimmy knew, there would be more loved ones dying.
Prudence, his doctor aunt, would be his first reader.
The dying details mattered in an ending.
The Dickens Man was discouraged to see that not all his students had been saved.
The grown men in need of rescue were too old to be saved by Dickens; their formative years were behind them.
Teacher Tom understood that Dickens’s best characters were redeemable.
It hurt him to realize that students were more redeemable than adults.
He wrote, with his left hand, what his stroke didn’t let him say.
Teacher Tom hoped to scare his former students who still needed saving; it was too late to inspire them.
Jimmy believed Grandpa Tommy would approve of the passage the Dickens Man reads to the pathetic adults among his former students—from Great Expectations, when Pip imagines a night cold enough to kill a man lying out on the marshes: “I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.” Jimmy remembered how his grandfather had admired this passage.
Real life, Jimmy and his grandfather knew, wasn’t plotted like a novel.
When Constance Winslow died, unresponsive as she was, her dear Tommy was the first to notice; he interrupted Jimmy’s reading by pointing with the index finger of his left hand to the space between the curtains.
Alma came as soon as Jimmy called her name; the tears on his Grandpa Tommy’s cheeks indicated to Jimmy that Grandma Connie was gone.
If Thomas Winslow could have spoken, Jimmy knew what the crying man would say.
Jimmy said it for him. “Right you are, Connie!” Jimmy cried.
It was the exuberance of the thumbs-up from his grandfather that let Jimmy know the man who loved him and Dickens was ready to pack it in.
The everything-he’d-written reading to his mother—“all at once,” as she’d directed—was attended by Faith and Hope.
The three sisters’ tears were interspersed with their laughter—a gratifying response to a first novel.
What remained of his reading at The Meadow would be short-lived.
After Constance Winslow’s passing, her bed was removed, but Alma was still listening behind the curtains.
Jimmy didn’t want The Dickens Man to be a burden to his grandfather, who just wanted to die.
Upon finishing a short reading, Jimmy waited for Alma to slip away—to dry her tears unseen.
When he bent over Grandpa Tommy, their foreheads almost touched.
“I’ll stop now, Grandpa,” Jimmy whispered, hoping Alma was out of hearing.
“I just wanted you to know I can do this thing—I can be a writer,” Jimmy said.
The strength in his grandfather’s left hand surprised him.
The dying man seized his grandson’s neck in a wrestler’s collar tie, holding him cheek to cheek.
This was how Alma would find them—as if they were frozen in time, or they wanted to be.
After that—as Alma would say she’d seen before—Thomas Winslow refused feedings and resisted all care. With his strong left hand, he would pull out his tubes. Jimmy’s grandpa, the good teacher who had inspired The Dickens Man, died within days of his dear Connie.