Chapter 10 The Two-Moms Idea #2
They could all hear Honor laughing from the next room; they hadn’t known she was there, listening to them.
When Honor joined them, they were relieved to see how composed and confident she was—and what a well-spoken teenager she was.
“Esther is aware of trying to offset her impulsiveness—she’s looking for a little guy who’s the epitome of deliberation,” Honor told them.
Even the youngest Winslow daughter knew that a deliberate little guy would touch a chord in the hearts of her mother and father.
If something was missing in Honor, it wasn’t her heart.
“He should also be fair-minded, Honor,” Thomas told her.
“Fair-minded most of all, Daddy,” Honor answered him.
Most of all, maybe, the townspeople of Pennacook hated the unanimity of the Winslows, who were in agreement about the name for Honor’s child.
If Esther had a girl, the baby would be another Esther.
The Winslows were smart enough to know there would be no keeping the two-moms idea a secret from the townspeople of Pennacook; the ladies of the town would be among the first to know, or those ladies would presume they knew.
This prompted Thomas Winslow to a tirade worthy of Dr. Larch.
Even if Honor went to Palestine for a whole year, and she came back to Pennacook with her child, the terrible ladies of the town would somehow know whose baby it was.
When Esther was pregnant, when she was really showing, she might as well show herself to the entire town; she might as well give birth to her baby in Pennacook Hospital.
“We tell the truth, we have nothing to hide—we simply tell the townspeople of Pennacook whose baby it is, and whose child,” Thomas Winslow told his family.
The Winslows were even in agreement about the townsfolk.
You knew what they said about you was nothing they would say to your face; you knew their anti-Semitism wasn’t always the silent kind, but they would never speak of Esther’s Jewishness to Esther or the Winslows.
And what if Esther had a baby boy? Thomas Winslow was partial to the name James.
All the Winslow women loved the pet name Jimmy.
The Winslows were unanimous again. A baby boy would be both a Jimmy and a James.
Then what were the Winslows worried about?
Even the townspeople of Pennacook could tell the Winslows were worrying about something.
And where did the Jewish one go? the townsfolk were wondering.
The Jew didn’t hang around as long as those earlier orphans, the ladies of the town thought to themselves.
(Not even the Winslows had learned that Esther would make looking after Honor a lifetime’s work, or that—in Esther’s mind—taking care of Honor included looking after Honor’s child.)
It was Honor who gave voice to the troubling question the Winslows were worrying about.
“How old do you think my child should be when we tell him or her the whole story?” Honor asked.
Heads nodded in assent to the pertinence of the question.
All the Winslows knew the answer—Honor, too.
We should tell your child before some kid in school blabs the whole story, Faith felt like saying, but she didn’t say it.
The birth-mom story should come from us, together with all we know about the father!
Hope struggled not to say. We tell your kid before one of the ladies from the town says something about it! Prudence refrained from screaming.
“Your child hears everything from us first—from all of us, Honor,” Constance assured her daughter.
“Right you are, Connie—from all of us!” Thomas cried.
Given where Esther was, and where she was going, there was no doubt the baby’s father would be Jewish.
The Winslows all knew the day would come when Honor’s child would wonder if he or she should be Jewish.
Esther had already told Honor what to say to her child.
“For your own sake and mine, you should not be Jewish, but you better stand up for Jews,” Honor Winslow would tell her child.
Of this the Winslows were most certain: Esther’s baby would stand up for Jews.
There would be more things to worry about, the Druckers wanted the Winslows to know.
The way things were going in Europe, and in Mandatory Palestine, Esther’s timeline might be at risk.
Neither the Druckers nor the Rosenthals were thinking about Esther’s plans to get pregnant.
Esther’s travel plans were what worried them.
They didn’t doubt that Esther would somehow manage to leave Austria and arrive at the port of Haifa or Jaffa.
It was a time when many Jews were getting out of Europe and finding their way to Palestine.
But how did Esther imagine she was going to get from one of those far-off Mediterranean ports to the United States?
Wouldn’t she have to land at a port or two in Europe before she sailed across the Atlantic?
Even if Esther got all the way to London—and, from there, found her way to the U.S.
—how pregnant would she be by the time she got to Pennacook?
She wouldn’t want to be too pregnant—not with such a long ocean voyage ahead of her.
If Esther got pregnant in late June or early July of 1940—if she sailed from Haifa or Jaffa at the end of that summer, or in the fall of 1940—she would certainly be showing when she was in Pennacook for Christmas.
Then Esther’s baby would be born in March of 1941.
Even if all that went according to plan, how would Esther get back to Mandatory Palestine in the spring of 1941?
“Esther will have to make herself indispensable to the Yishuv, even if this means making herself of use to the British,” Isaac Drucker told the Winslows.
Yishuv means “settlement” in Hebrew, Bluma explained, but Isaac meant it in the Zionist way. The Yishuv was the Jewish population in Mandatory Palestine, the community of Jews who immigrated to the Land of Israel.
At the moment, how Esther might make herself indispensable to the Jewish population in Palestine was not explained to the Winslows.
As for the part about Esther making herself of use to the British, Constance knew how her Tommy felt about them.
Diehard Yankee that he was, Thomas Winslow distrusted the British more than he did the people of Maine.
Thinking of Maine, Thomas was reminded of his ongoing (if intermittent) correspondence with Dr. Larch—how Larch had written that Esther was clearly motivated to be “of use.” She was making herself of use to Bernard and Joanna Morgenstern in Vienna.
Those two outlawed Social Democrats were helping other Austrian Jews and socialists in exile in Czechoslovakia.
They wrote the Druckers about their high esteem for Esther; she was a willing and crafty courier, of both verbal messages and documents.
With her American passport, Esther could get away with pretending to be a tourist. For how long was the question.
It was noted in Esther’s passport that she’d been born in Vienna.
At the border crossing between Brno and Vienna, the guards would one day realize they’d seen her—again and again.
They must have known Nacht was an Ashkenazi Jewish name.
On her way back from Brno, Esther made sure she wasn’t followed from the Bahnhof in Vienna. She knew better than to lead someone to the Morgensterns. “You’ll know when you’re being followed,” Joanna Morgenstern assured Esther.
“That’s the day you’ll be on your way to Haifa or Jaffa,” Bernard Morgenstern told her. But before she was followed from the Bahnhof in Vienna, Esther had a more pressing reason to get out of Austria.
“Esther has met someone, and he’s in trouble—his name is Moshe Kleinberg,” Honor told her sisters and her parents.
Moshe is the Hebrew name for Moses, Honor explained—and Kleinberg (in German) means “Little Mountain.” “When Esther writes me, she calls him Moses Little Mountain—just to be funny,” Honor elaborated.
“It’s not funny that Mr. Little Mountain is in trouble, is it?” Thomas Winslow asked his fourth and youngest daughter.
“Are you saying Esther has met someone in the romantic way?” Faith was the first to ask Honor.
“Does Little Mountain have father potential?” was the way Hope asked the same question.
“The Little Mountain man sure sounds like he might be small enough!” Prudence cried.
“Girls, girls—let Honor tell the story in her own way!” Constance cried. Like Esther, Honor could keep her mom business to herself.
“All I care about is the trouble,” Thomas told them.
Born in Vienna in 1906, Moshe Kleinberg was a year younger than Esther.
When he was sixteen, his mother died and his father met a woman in Munich.
Moshe wanted to move in with his aunt Reva, his mom’s sister, but his father made him move to Munich.
“That boy should have moved in with me—he wanted to, and I wanted him!” a distraught Reva, who would never marry, told the Morgensterns.
Esther met Reva at the Morgensterns’. Before Esther met Moses Little Mountain, she’d heard all about him.
At seventeen, Moshe joined a Munich sports club—part of a German sports association.
Since he was small, the fact that wrestling had different weight classes might have appealed to him.
Esther didn’t know or care why Moshe chose Greco-Roman wrestling instead of freestyle.
She couldn’t be bothered to know what Moshe’s actual weight class was.
She’d mastered German, but Esther would never make the move from pounds to kilograms. She didn’t know or care if Moshe weighed in at sixty or sixty-two kilograms. She didn’t trouble herself with kilograms.