Chapter 13 To Take a Chance on Love,Not #4
It turned out that Jonah Feldstein had not only seen The Seventh Seal; he’d seen other Bergman films. (Of course he had; Jonah lived in New York, where there was more than one movie theater like the Franklin.) But Jonah and Jimmy agreed that seeing The Seventh Seal was one of the experiences that had “formed” them.
Death would forever have a human face—the moonlike face of Bengt Ekerot, a Swedish actor.
The two boys disagreed about Dickens. Jonah accepted that Great Expectations had been formative for Jimmy; in turn, young James conceded that the portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist was anti-Semitic.
Where the two boys bonded, incontrovertibly, was with The Diary of a Young Girl.
The boys hadn’t yet met when they each read Anne Frank’s diary.
For Jonah, The Diary of a Young Girl was the Great Expectations in his life.
It was the book that made him want to be a writer—not a diarist, but a novelist, a storyteller.
For young James Winslow, The Diary of a Young Girl was the first book that made him cry that wasn’t a novel; it affected him emotionally, like the nineteenth-century novels he loved.
Anne Frank’s diary was first published in English in 1952, when Jimmy was eleven and Jonah only nine.
Both the Winslow and Feldstein families thought those boys were too young to read it then.
The Winslows allowed Jimmy to read The Diary of a Young Girl the summer before he started at Pennacook Academy, when he was fifteen—Anne Frank’s age when she wrote her last diary entry.
(She died at Bergen-Belsen three months short of turning sixteen.) Jonah read the book around the same time, when he was still in middle school; he was only thirteen—the same age Anne Frank had been when she was given her diary.
Both in their lives before and after wrestling, Jonah and Jimmy would suddenly remember and recite passages from Anne Frank’s diary—with disturbing spontaneity, depending on the passage.
As young writers, both boys liked reminding each other of one of the earliest diary entries—“it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.” A long time after the two friends were schoolboys, whenever Jonah and Jimmy were drinking beer together, they would interject a solemn toast to each other—two lines Anne added as a comment in her diary in 1942.
“I’m terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we’ll be shot.
That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect.
” (The short version of Anne’s comment was reverently repeated as a refrain by those two friends—just “a fairly dismal prospect.”)
But before those two ever met—the summer Jimmy was just fifteen, when he first read The Diary of a Young Girl—the boy was already reciting the passages he’d memorized to his mother.
There was a diary entry from October 1942 that young James casually repeated to Honor one night when they were doing the dishes.
“Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves.” Honor had been taken aback; at first she’d thought that Jimmy was just making conversation.
When Honor wrote Esther, telling her how much Jimmy revered Anne Frank, she cited some of her son’s favorite quotations. Esther wrote back, asking Honor to share her own list of favorites with Jimmy—beginning with “there are no greater enemies on earth than the Germans and the Jews.”
Honor wasn’t surprised that Esther liked the last line of a January 1944 diary entry. “If only I had a girlfriend!”
Young James felt a closeness to his birth mother when Esther quoted a long passage from Anne Frank’s April 1944 entry.
“In the eyes of the world, we’re doomed, but if, after all this suffering, there are still Jews left, the Jewish people will be held up as an example.
Who knows, maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness, and that’s the reason, the only reason, we have to suffer.
We can never be just Dutch, or just English, or whatever, we will always be Jews as well.
And we’ll have to keep on being Jews, but then, we’ll want to be. ”
Like Esther, Jimmy was also moved by Anne Frank’s final diary entry in August 1944—her desire to “keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if… if only there were no other people in the world.”
Thomas and Constance Winslow would keep to themselves their thoughts about the end of Anne’s diary—“if only there were no other people in the world.” To those two, who knew Esther so well, this sounded more like Esther than Anne.
And why had Esther stopped sending photos?
the senior Winslows wondered. Was she trying to disappear?
For a fifth-year student at Pennacook Academy, there were few photographs of James Winslow in his school yearbooks—not a single photo of his struggles with German, no record of his falling behind in other courses.
There was not one photo of Jimmy writing, which the Winslow family would best remember the boy doing—his head bent over a desk or a table, just writing away.
Of course there were wrestling photos of James Winslow in those five yearbooks, including photos of Jimmy in competition as a wrestler and in posed photos of the academy wrestling team—where Jimmy was seated or standing alongside the lightweights.
The singlets the schoolboys wore were not the low-cut kind that Moshe Kleinberg and other international wrestlers wore.
Thomas Winslow wondered why the wrestlers in New England wore tights under their singlets; their legs were covered.
Was it a matter of American propriety that the wrestlers weren’t as exposed, or did they simply prefer to wear more clothes?
Constance wondered. This wasn’t a question for Coach Ted—not really a wrestling question, Thomas decided.
Moshe Kleinberg was fifty-five in 1961, when he was a referee at the Sixth Maccabiah Games in Israel.
Esther sent a photo of his referee certificate.
This was prompted by Jimmy’s wrestling photos, which Honor had been sending to Esther.
“Except for how short he is, Jimmy looks more like me,” was all Esther had written about the photo of Moshe’s referee certificate.
Honor was glad to get a look at Moses Little Mountain’s cauliflower ears, and she was delighted to show them to Jimmy.
Diligent nurse that she was, Honor drained and attended to her son’s cauliflower ears each time he got one.
“Little Mountain’s ears look like animal droppings,” Faith said, staring with disgust at his referee certificate.
“I’ve seen some stuff in the kids’ diapers that looks like this guy’s ears,” Hope told everyone.
“We should call Little Mountain ‘Dog-Turd Ears,’ ” was what Prudence had to say about it.
His two moms had made him who he was, James Winslow firmly believed; he saw nothing of himself in his father’s referee certificate. (It was like a passport photo; you couldn’t see how short Moses Little Mountain was.)
There was a foreignness inside him, Jimmy believed, and it didn’t just come from Esther’s decision to move to her Jewish homeland. The two-moms idea was part of Jimmy’s intrinsic foreignness, or so the boy believed.
Why wouldn’t James Winslow believe that giving birth to a child and being a mother were two separate choices?
And Jimmy understood what was the same about his two moms: they would never be committed to a lifelong partner.
Of course young James thought this lack of commitment to a partner was natural.
Why wouldn’t Jimmy believe this was also part of his intrinsic foreignness?
James Winslow would love foreign films, as if films with subtitles were natural.
It didn’t hurt that he saw these films with Arnaud’s aunt Chantal.
During his last semester of high school, Jimmy was alone with Chantal when she took him to the Franklin to see Godard’s Breathless—a crime drama with a doomed love story.
In February 1961, Chantal was twenty-one and Jimmy nineteen; they had all the makings of their own doomed love story.
Not that Chantal ever encouraged young James to imagine that their seeing foreign films together even remotely resembled a love story.
(Jean-Luc Godard and the film’s story writer, Francois Truffaut, were French, and Chantal took her French very seriously.)
That same school year, Thomas Winslow had given his grandson a book—Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. It’s enough to say that Jimmy Winslow was sufficiently informed of love and doom before his twentieth birthday.
James Winslow had just turned twenty-one in March 1962, his freshman year at the University of New Hampshire—what should have been Chantal’s junior year abroad.
This time Jimmy called Chantal and invited her to the Franklin, where Truffaut’s Jules et Jim was playing.
“It’s probably another doomed love story,” he said.
“I know what it is, Jimmy,” Chantal told him.
It was more of a doomed love story than young James had heretofore imagined.
At the end of the movie, when Catherine asks Jim to get in her car, saying she has something to tell him, she also tells Jules to watch them.
Jules watches Catherine drive the car off a ruined bridge into a river—killing herself and Jim.
Then there’s just Jules, attending to their cremation.
Chantal sobbed throughout the film, holding Jimmy’s hand during the car scene. Young James realized she’d seen the movie already, maybe by herself or with a date—it didn’t matter. Jimmy didn’t know what to say, so he just started speaking for the sake of saying something.
“This was almost like a date,” Jimmy began. “You cried, you held my hand…. I don’t really know what I’m saying,” he admitted.
“No, this wasn’t at all like a date, Jimmy,” Chantal told him rather crossly.
“You weren’t pawing my breasts while I pushed you away, you weren’t sticking your tongue down my throat while I tried to bite it off,” Chantal said, with a certainty similar to the way Jeanne Moreau drives her car off the bridge.
“Oh,” was all Jimmy could say. That same year, in 1962, Moshe Kleinberg died of prostate cancer at the age of fifty-six.
Esther wrote to Prudence, since she was the doctor in the family.
Prudence told Jimmy not to worry about it; she said she would keep an eye on his prostate.
Jimmy didn’t know how to mourn someone he’d never known; there were characters in novels he had mourned, but he’d known those characters.
When his father died, James Winslow was reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the second time—in freshman English at UNH. He had already read some Shakespeare at Pennacook Academy. “To be, or not to be, that is the question,” Hamlet muses to himself.
Jimmy wasn’t fooling around when he said to Chantal: “To take, or not to take, a chance on love—that’s the question!”
“That’s just awkward, Jimmy,” Chantal told him. But Jimmy sincerely wondered if he would ever take a chance on love.
Like the only mother Jimmy knew and loved—like his birth mom, too, from what he’d heard about Esther—young James Winslow had grounds to doubt he would fall in love. He believed that Moses Little Mountain, his departed birth father, would not have blamed him for having doubts.