Chapter 9 A Preexisting Idea
Fifteen years later, the Winslows were still learning from Esther Nacht. The Winslows would continue to feel safe, if a little bruised, in Esther’s hands. Honor was fourteen, almost fifteen now—the same age Esther was when the Jewish one had joined the Winslow family.
Prudence, who’d been only eleven when she first met Esther, was twenty-six now.
She was finishing her master’s in organic chemistry and applying to medical school.
A young man had proposed to her. She was too busy to get married, Prudence told him—this was after she’d asked Esther how she should reject him.
“For starters, just say you’re too busy—but if he keeps proposing, you’ll have to hurt his feelings more,” Esther advised Prudence.
Hope had been thirteen when Esther moved in with the Winslows; she was a year and a half younger than Esther.
Faith was only a few months older than Esther; through high school, they would be in the same grade together.
Now Hope was twenty-eight and Faith was thirty; they were married and starting families of their own.
Faith had a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and Hope was expecting.
“If Esther were staying around, I would have a bunch more kids,” Faith told everyone.
“Me, too!” Hope said. Esther had found the time to look after Faith’s little ones—to give Faith and her husband an occasional night off. Esther volunteered to be on hand when Hope had her newborn.
If Esther had stayed around looking after Honor, Prudence joked that she could have married the guy who proposed to her and also gone to med school.
This was Prudence’s way of saying she shared her older sisters’ esteem for Esther.
Even the townspeople of Pennacook knew enough to know that Prudence would never have married that guy.
He was beneath the Winslows’ standards in terms of higher education.
In 1934, James Winslow wasn’t even born.
He wouldn’t be a student abroad for almost thirty years.
Sooner than that, Thomas and Constance Winslow would realize that their grandchild Jimmy was already a preexisting idea.
But in 1934, when Esther first told the Winslows she was going to Vienna, Honor Winslow and Esther just seemed unusually dedicated to each other.
After all, Esther had moved on (and come back) before.
“Esther and I have made a pact—she’ll be back when the time is right,” Honor told her mother, with Esther’s capacity for self-determination.
“My goodness—a pact,” was all Constance could say. At fifteen, her fourth daughter was as articulate and confident as Esther had been at that age. Constance couldn’t help wondering what those kindred spirits were cooking up. The bond between Honor and Esther seemed inseparable.
Whenever the Winslows were feeling anxious about Esther’s consuming interest in the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel—Esther was obsessed with the Jewish Diaspora—they would seek reassurance from Daniel and Naomi Rosenthal.
The Rosenthals weren’t so young anymore, and although they’d decided not to have children, for the past fifteen years, they had served as a surrogate Jewish family for Esther.
For those Jewish boys who were students at the academy, Daniel and Naomi Rosenthal had provided a home away from home.
Most of the Jewish students at Pennacook came from New York, and there were some from Boston.
The nearest synagogue to Pennacook was in Portsmouth; Temple of Israel had set up shop in the former Methodist Church on State Street.
A Conservative Jewish congregation, Temple of Israel wasn’t relaxed enough for those nonobservant Jewish boys from Boston and New York.
Maybe no synagogue could be nonobservant enough for Esther Nacht—or for the Rosenthals.
In the Puddle Dock area near the waterfront, there were a couple of kosher butcher shops, a Jewish bakery, and some Jewish grocery stores. The food was of more interest to Esther than the synagogue; the food was also of more interest to the Pennacook Academy Jews, including the Rosenthals.
Esther wanted to learn Hebrew—to really learn it, to actually speak it. The Rosenthals knew the Hebrew school at Temple of Israel wouldn’t work for Esther. “It’s just a joke for Esther to go to Hebrew school—it’s like a Jewish Sunday school,” Naomi Rosenthal explained to the Winslows.
“The way Esther will learn to speak Hebrew is in Jerusalem,” Daniel Rosenthal told Thomas and Constance. This was when the Winslows knew Esther really would be going to the Land of Israel—first to Vienna, then to Jerusalem. True to her word, Esther kept her Jewish business to herself.
As for learning German, Esther didn’t need to wait until she got to Vienna.
French was not the only foreign language taught in the Pennacook public high school.
The Pennacook Academy boys could choose to study French, Spanish, or German.
Isaac Drucker, the senior member of the Pennacook German Department, was a Viennese Jew.
Like Esther’s parents, Isaac had emigrated from Austria with his wife, Bluma, before World War I.
Both Bluma and Isaac had been teachers in Vienna, but there were no women on the Pennacook faculty.
The Druckers were an endearing couple on the academy campus, beloved by the students and faculty alike. The Jewish boys loved to hear Bluma bemoan her fate: “a female tutor marooned on an island of pubescent boys!” Bluma said (in English, German, and Yiddish). Isaac laughed along with the boys.
As a couple, the Rosenthals would agree that Naomi was the dramatic one.
Naomi told Bluma about Esther—a Viennese-born Jew who grew up in an orphanage in Maine, her mother murdered by anti-Semites in Portland!
(This was what Esther told everyone she met about herself; her story didn’t need Naomi’s dramatizing.) The Rosenthals knew that Esther’s story would resonate with the Druckers.
It was a sore point with Bluma that the Druckers’ only child had given them no grandchildren.
She would be the one to teach Esther German.
“At last, I have a student—one without a penis!” Bluma rejoiced, just in English; only Isaac and Naomi were there to hear her.
Isaac saw fit to explain to Naomi that the word for penis was the same in German.
Naomi already knew this, but she pretended to be surprised.
Bluma refrained from reciting a bunch of Yiddish vulgarisms for penis. (Probably Naomi knew them all.)
One warm day, when the Rosenthals went with Esther and the academy’s Jewish boys to Temple of Israel in Portsmouth, the Rosenthals allowed the teenagers to take a walk—provided they stayed together and returned to the synagogue at a designated time.
They were walking on Marcy Street, near the river. The Jewish boys were teaching Esther the etymology for penis, just the words with Yiddish roots. Of course Esther knew the schlong word—from the Yiddish word shlang, meaning a hose or a snake or a penis.
“Ew!” Esther said. In the distance, she saw a navy guy; he was headed their way.
The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (called the Portsmouth Navy Yard) was on Seavey’s Island, in the middle of the Piscataqua River—between Portsmouth and Kittery, on the southern boundary of Maine.
Both Kittery and Seavey’s Island belonged to Maine—hence the Portsmouth Navy Yard was considered part of Kittery.
The weird geography made no sense to the Jewish boys from New York and Boston.
“It should be called the Kittery Navy Yard,” one of the Jewish boys had reasoned.
“Or Seavey’s Island should be part of New Hampshire,” another boy from New York or Boston asserted.
“Tell me more Yiddish words for penis,” Esther urged them. She didn’t care about the boring boundary dispute.
“There’s a shvantz and a schmeckel,” one of the boys said, as the sailor was getting closer.
“A shtickl is a small one,” a boy explained to Esther.
“A petzl is a dirty one,” another boy told her.
“Yuck!” Esther said. “Don’t tell me there’s no Yiddish word for female genitalia—don’t lie to me,” Esther was saying, when the sailor was close enough for them to see his short-sleeved shirt and his tattooed arms.
“You have a shmoonda or a shmoochky!” one of the Jewish boys cried.
“Nobody’s getting in my shmoonda or my shmoochky until I say so,” Esther told the Jewish boys. With all the boys laughing around her, she felt safe to speak to the navy guy. “Excuse me—did you get your tattoos around here?” Esther asked him.
“I got tattooed in New York—I don’t know any tattoo shops in Kittery or Portsmouth,” the sailor answered. On one forearm was the U.S. Navy eagle, clutching an anchor in its talons. On his other forearm, a bleeding heart was pierced with a dagger; the name Alice was dripping blood.
“Are you still seeing Alice?” Esther asked him.
“Every now and then,” the sailor said with a shrug. Right now, the Jewish boys could see, the sailor had eyes only for Esther.
“Nobody’s getting in my shmoonda or my shmoochky until I say so,” Esther told the navy guy—just to see if she could say it right.
The U.S. Navy’s oldest shipyard, the Portsmouth Navy Yard had been around since 1800. They started building submarines in 1917; they would be building them for years.
“Are you on a submarine?” one of the Jewish boys asked the sailor—just to change the subject from Esther’s shmoonda (or her shmoochky).
“Not right now,” the navy guy answered him, walking on.
“I’m in no hurry for my tattoo—I can wait,” Esther told the Jewish boys, as they were walking back to the synagogue. She meant that her Jewishness came first—her learning German and Hebrew, her going to Vienna and Jerusalem. Esther’s Jewish identity took precedence over her Jane Eyre tattoo.