Chapter 15 Over the Phone
“Oh, Tommy—a foundling for the child of a foundling!” Constance told him, bursting into tears.
Thomas was crying, too. They were good grandparents, who only sought to protect their grandson; yet their Jimmy’s belief in his intrinsic foreignness was unshakeable.
He was determined to see himself as an orphan.
All Thomas and Constance could do for the boy was to give him an orphan’s story with a happy ending.
While young James was immersed in his summer reading, Honor Winslow was worrying about her son’s unpacked steamer trunk.
No one in the Winslow family had ever packed for a year abroad.
Jimmy’s mom was exasperated with him; he demonstrated no interest in selecting his winter clothes, nor the ability to do so.
Honor had written Esther and asked her about winters in Austria.
“His clothes for winter in New Hampshire will work,” was all Esther wrote back.
Esther had more to say about the wrestling gym in Vienna.
The Greco-Roman wrestlers Esther knew from the club in Haifa recommended a gym, Turnhalle Leopold, on W?hringer Stra?e.
Esther asked Fr?ulein Eissler about the gym.
As it turned out, Leopold Spiegel, who owned the gym and coached a Greco-Roman team there, was a friend of Fr?ulein Eissler’s.
“Leo is a former Greco-Roman wrestler, a little guy,” Fr?ulein Eissler wrote to Esther.
Fr?ulein Eissler knew the differences between Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling and she knew Jimmy Winslow was a freestyle wrestler, not a Greco guy.
There were no holds allowed below the waist in Greco-Roman wrestling.
Freestyle wrestlers are catch-as-catch-can guys; the Greco guys like body locks and arm drags and upper-body throws.
Freestyle wrestlers were welcome at Turnhalle Leopold, but there wasn’t a team for them.
There were only four freestyle wrestlers who worked out regularly, two Israelis and two Soviets.
Only one Israeli and one Soviet were in James Winslow’s weight class.
“Leo tells me those two workout partners will be good enough,” Fr?ulein Eissler wrote to Esther.
The Greco-Roman wrestlers Esther knew from the club in Haifa spoke of Leopold Spiegel in reverential tones.
Spiegel means “mirror” in German. Leo was called Kleiner Spiegel (“Little Mirror”) because he imitated the moves his opponents made.
Then Leo did what they did better. The little guy was a suplay master.
You didn’t go chest to chest with him, or he would throw you on your head.
Fr?ulein Eissler knew the two Israeli wrestlers. “A couple of Haganah graybeards,” Esther called them. Fr?ulein Eissler said the Israeli wrestlers were in their late thirties now.
Jimmy Winslow asked Coach Ted if he thought the graybeards were too old to be wrestling. “If the Israelis are European-trained, they could still be pretty tough,” Ted said.
According to Fr?ulein Eissler, the Soviet wrestlers were in medical school in Vienna.
“Two former Red Army wrestlers, likely working for the KGB,” was all Esther said about the Soviets.
Fr?ulein Eissler added that the Russians were older than the average med student, but she confirmed they were in medical school.
As Coach Ted would tell Jimmy, if the Soviets had wrestled for the Red Army team—as CSKA Moscow, a Russian sports club, was referred to in the West—the Soviets were probably pretty tough. To young James Winslow, his wrestling workout partners in Vienna just sounded old.
That summer of 1963, Arnaud Beaudette was back home in Pennacook.
He and Jimmy hung out together, trying to be best friends again.
As always, Arnaud was more resolute and unwavering about his plans than Jimmy ever was.
Having graduated college, Arnaud would soon be headed to Fort Benning, Georgia—to the U.S.
Army Officer Candidate School. “OCS is the way to go, Jimmy—it’s better to be an officer,” Arnaud said.
“You’re going to Vienna, Jimmy—maybe it’s better if you knock up a European girl,” Arnaud’s aunt Chantal had told young James.
Now he felt embarrassed and ashamed; he couldn’t tell Arnaud the truth, but the prospect of knocking up a European girl was far more appealing to him than the very idea of officer candidate school.
Jimmy tried to engage Arnaud in other areas of conversation.
He told his friend that he had a Jewish German tutor, just to see what Arnaud would say.
Arnaud disappointed him. “That’s exactly what the Nazis deserve, after what they did!
” Arnaud said. Arnaud was laughing; he must have thought it would be funny to have a Jewish German teacher.
James Winslow would change the subject to Arnaud’s aunt Chantal. “What do you suppose Chantal really wants—what do you think her hopes and expectations are?” he asked Arnaud.
To Jimmy’s surprise, Arnaud kept laughing. “Chantal imagines herself married to a Frenchman and living in Paris—only the two of them, no kids!” he said. “Just imagine a Frenchman in Paris being happy with only Chantal!”
Young James knew how many babies’ butts Chantal had wiped in the Beaudette household.
No kids for Chantal made sense to Jimmy, who could imagine being happy with only Chantal—even in Pennacook.
This wasn’t a conversation Jimmy could pursue with Arnaud.
(Or with Chantal.) From such a watershed moment—the recognition that his best friend in childhood and adolescence was lost to him—young James sought solace in the packing of his steamer trunk.
Whether or not Chantal Beaudette had big breasts, or only a onesie, she was no dummy.
“You and Arnaud are very different young men, Jimmy—you’re not the boys you were,” Chantal said.
“What would be the point of your telling Arnaud you want to be a novelist like Charles Dickens? Arnaud doesn’t read novels anymore! ”
An unexpected bond between Chantal Beaudette and Jimmy was their mutual interest in male circumcision, which Constance Winslow would see for herself in the Pennacook Public Library.
She’d expected her grandson to be curious about the subject one day; between nakedness in shower rooms, or when wrestlers weigh in, Constance knew Jimmy would have seen uncircumcised penises.
Then there was the day when Chantal and Jimmy asked for the same issue of the same medical journal; as Constance had foreseen, it was only a matter of time before they discovered their mutual interest in circumcision history.
In 1941, 75 percent of boys born in urban hospitals in the U.S.
were circumcised. In 1942–43, following the Battle of Guadalcanal, there was mass circumcision of U.S.
soldiers in the Pacific—due to “an outbreak of phimosis and paraphimosis.” (The soldiers’ foreskins were so tight they cut off circulation to the tips of their penises.) After the war, former military circumcisers promoted circumcision to the masses—in both medical and popular journals.
And after U.S. troops landed in South Korea, in 1950—during the subsequent U.S.
occupation, boyhood circumcision became a near-universal practice in South Korea.
By 1955, the rate of routine circumcision in Australia peaked at 90 percent.
Given Jimmy’s and Chantal’s interest in penis cutting, Constance again succumbed to the subject.
Both Chantal Beaudette and Constance Winslow would notice that after World War II, there was scant mention of the Italian and German soldiers, who had uncut penises.
Jimmy had exhibited no interest in uncut penises until that day in the Pennacook Public Library when Chantal said: “Frenchmen, Jimmy—the ones in France who are your age and mine—are uncut.” Constance hadn’t known this; she would have been embarrassed to ask Chantal which issue of what journal told her about uncut Frenchmen.
Jimmy remembered thinking there might one day be a lucky guy in France.
As for the steamer trunk, James Winslow wouldn’t remember later if it was shipped ahead of him to Vienna, or if it traveled with him on the ship that sailed from New York Harbor to Europe.
As a writer in the making, Jimmy was more alert in his imagination than he was attentive to the details of his own life.
He would remember little of getting to Vienna, but he’d already imagined himself being there—a foreigner in a foreign city.
The students at the Institute for European Studies sailed on the Queen Elizabeth, a virtual hotel.
There were German classes onboard. For the most part, James Winslow was relieved to find that though his German wasn’t very good, almost no one knew any German at all.
They showed movies on the ship, too. All Jimmy would remember of his transatlantic voyage was Tony Richardson’s film of Tom Jones—Jimmy thought it was wonderful.
The boy wouldn’t remember where the Queen Elizabeth first docked in Europe—maybe Cherbourg.
Somehow the IES students crossed the English Channel.
Jimmy remembered nothing of London, or whether the IES students were taken to Oxford or Cambridge—it was one or the other.
And did they go to Scotland—to Edinburgh, maybe?
James Winslow would have no idea. There were lots of lectures wherever the IES students went.
(The lectures made Jimmy feel like a tourist; he tuned them out.)