Chapter 14 Like You
A further thought that Thomas Winslow would keep to himself concerned the Jonah for whom Jonah Feldstein was named—the Hebrew prophet in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), and in the Book of Jonah in the Christian Old Testament.
This is the same Jonah who is swallowed by a huge fish.
Jonah spends three days and nights in the fish’s belly, praying.
Then God tells the fish to vomit Jonah out.
When Jonah Feldstein was losing a wrestling match, the boy looked like someone who’d been swallowed by a fish and vomited out.
Or so Thomas thought; he knew better than to say this, except to his wife.
“Don’t tell the Feldsteins, Tommy—they’ll think you’re anti-Semitic,” Constance told him.
Thomas doubted that anyone would think he was anti-Semitic for imagining Jonah Feldstein as the Jonah in the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles, but Thomas didn’t say anything to Coach Ted about it. Being swallowed by a fish and vomited out weren’t wrestling techniques, Thomas decided.
Whatever Esther was up to, in her secretive way, she’d been trained as a nurse.
Honor wrote Esther about the “usefulness” of a certain kind of wrestling injury for her dear James; an injury requiring open meniscal surgery would be “desirable,” Honor wrote.
Greco-Roman wrestlers weren’t as prone to knee surgeries, Esther wrote back.
Esther knew some Greco-Roman guys in the Haifa wrestling club who’d had the “Smillie surgery” (as she called it).
“We’ll keep our boy out of a war,” Esther assured Honor.
“Nearer the time, let’s hope we find a better option than Smillie.
” To Honor, there was no better option than Smillie.
That surgery did real damage; in a loving mother’s mind, that surgery had 4-F written all over it.
James Winslow knew his mom and Chantal Beaudette were seeing more of each other, just the two of them, but why would the boy think twice about it?
Arnaud told Jimmy that his aunt Chantal admired Jimmy’s mom.
Maybe Honor Winslow was a beacon of independence for a young woman like Chantal, who’d stayed aloof from anything resembling a relationship.
(Chantal’s closeness to his mother made Jimmy more conscious of the doomed nature of his infatuation with Arnaud’s alluring aunt.)
And why would Coach Ted think twice when Honor Winslow asked him if the worst wrestling injuries happened in a match—not in practice?
Ted told her it made no difference. If you were wrestling, you could get injured—in a match or in practice.
In a match, a referee might stop a situation that looked “potentially dangerous,” Coach Ted explained.
In practice, no ref was watching. Ted thought Honor looked somehow relieved to know this; there was no fathoming what went on in the minds of wrestlers’ mothers, the coach knew.
It didn’t occur to Coach Ted that Honor Winslow wanted Jimmy to get one of the worst wrestling injuries—meaning one of the best ones.
Now that Jimmy was a student at UNH, he was no longer competing as a wrestler. Honor had imagined he was less likely to be injured, because Jimmy was just working out with the Pennacook Academy wrestlers. Honor was indeed relieved to know that he was no less likely to be injured in practice.
James wondered why his mom and Chantal Beaudette still attended the academy wrestling matches. Jimmy was just helping with the coaching. He definitely knew those two women weren’t there to watch him wrestle.
The way his mother explained it to Jimmy was that Jonah Feldstein was still competing as a wrestler.
“Jonah is your new best friend, Jimmy, and I just love that little boy!” Honor declared.
James Winslow was certainly aware of how much his mom loved hugging Jonah.
“Jonah’s so small, he reminds me of hugging you when you were little,” Jimmy’s mother told him.
Why wouldn’t this seem plausible to Jimmy?
When Jonah got injured one day, Honor and Chantal were watching the match, but those two were also talking.
Coach Ted and Jimmy were sitting beside each other; before Jonah screamed, they both saw the injury coming.
“That does it,” Ted said. “A twisting force on a loaded leg—that’ll do it, Jimmy,” the coach told him.
It was a twisting knee injury. Jonah’s leg was rotated when the boy’s weight was stuck on the mat on that same foot—a sickening injury to see, but Jimmy’s mom and Chantal kept talking till Jonah screamed.
“Let the trainer immobilize Jonah’s knee before we move him,” Coach Ted told Jimmy. Once Jonah’s knee was immobilized, but before they moved him, Jimmy’s mom was out on the mat, hugging Jonah like she was Jonah’s mother.
“Your mom was imagining you were injured, Jimmy,” Chantal told him later.
There was a half-truth to this cover-up, young James Winslow would realize—long after the fact of Jonah Feldstein’s knee injury. (The whole truth was that Honor Winslow wished her son was the one with the twisting knee injury.)
In his post-op state of mind, Jonah Feldstein wouldn’t remember how his orthopedic surgeon described the “injury mechanism” that led to Jonah’s meniscectomy—his Smillie surgery. (Jonah just said that Coach Ted’s description of the injury was easier to understand.)
James Winslow wasn’t paying attention when his mom described the strategy of Jonah’s surgery.
“Beginning with the anterior horn, the surgeon cuts the body of the meniscus from the capsule and displaces it in the middle of the knee,” Honor Winslow recited to her son.
“Lastly, the posterior horn is cut free and the entire meniscus is removed.” (She didn’t tell Jimmy that Jonah was lucky; Jonah’s meniscus didn’t break, which would have led to more invasive surgery.) “They’ll put Jonah in a cast—this allows scar tissue to fill the void left from the meniscectomy,” was how Jimmy’s mom explained it.
Honor knew when her son wasn’t really listening.
Budding writer that he was, the word void didn’t get Jimmy’s attention.
When Jonah’s cast came off and the stitches were removed, James Winslow would remember the fuss his mother made.
There was quite a scar on Jonah’s knee from the incision made by the scalpel.
Honor Winslow was impatient for the scar to heal sufficiently for her to start massaging it.
Jimmy couldn’t watch the way his mom massaged Jonah’s scar.
Honor would bear down with her index finger; the muscles of her forearm were tensed as she followed the scar made by the scalpel.
“You should do this yourself, Jonah—you can’t overdo it,” the good nurse told the boy.
“The more you massage it, the less it will stand out.”
“I don’t care if the scar stands out—it’s on my leg. It’s not like everyone will see it,” Jonah said. He was wincing in a way that made Jimmy think you could definitely overdo the massaging of a scar. (Jimmy had no doubt that his mom was overdoing it.)
Jonah Feldstein wasn’t worrying about the adverse side effects of his Smillie surgery.
He’d been warned that he might not be able to run, Jonah told Jimmy.
“We’re going to be writers, Jonah—the only injuries we have to avoid are writing injuries,” Jimmy told his new best friend.
Honor could hear those two boys laughing.
You won’t get reclassified 4-F for writing injuries, Honor Winslow was thinking.
She’d already written Esther about a more pressing problem.
Her dear James had studied German for five years, but Jimmy’s German was a struggle.
He spoke the language hesitantly, in a faltering voice; when spoken to, he strained to understand.
James Winslow would take two more years of German at the University of New Hampshire, enough to satisfy the university’s requirement for a foreign language.
The year abroad in Vienna was what Jimmy and his mom worried about.
At the time, the study-abroad program was called the Institute for European Studies.
IES accepted James Winslow to their program in Vienna.
They assured him that he’d had more German than many of their students; Jimmy would be in an advanced German class.
Jimmy felt somewhat reassured, but not his mother.
Honor had already written Esther, asking if she knew any German tutors.
“Don’t worry! A young Jewish woman will watch over our boy—she’s a guard dog!” Esther wrote back. This worried Honor more.
James Winslow would be twenty-two when he went to Vienna. His mom didn’t think he needed a young Jewish woman guarding him. “Jimmy just needs a German tutor,” Honor wrote to Esther.
“This woman knows Vienna—she’s an Israeli, but she knows German,” Esther wrote. Now the Rosenthals were worried, too.
“An Israeli isn’t in Vienna to be a German tutor,” Daniel Rosenthal told Honor.
Yes, of course there was an Israeli Embassy in Vienna, but there were also some serious Nazi hunters around.
As Naomi Rosenthal pointed out, Simon Wiesenthal opened the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna in 1961.
Wiesenthal had survived the Nazi death camps and his documentation of Holocaust crimes assisted Mossad agents in the capture of Nazi war criminals.