Chapter 20 Not Like Donna Reed
Relationships, real or what-if, haunt you—not only what happens between two people, but also what might have happened.
James Winslow fell in love with Fr?ulein Eissler.
At the same time, Jimmy and his roommates were in a complicated relationship with Dagmar, the widow manager of the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik.
Sharing a German shepherd wasn’t the only complicated part.
It wasn’t helpful how Claude asked Dagmar if she’d ever thought of “just doing it with a younger man—maybe even having his child.” At first, Dagmar didn’t realize Claude was asking on Jimmy’s behalf.
Claude was a small, awkward French boy; he’d not appeared to be aroused by her before.
It made no sense to Dagmar that Claude wanted to knock her up.
When she asked him to clarify things, he sent her down a different but no less confusing path.
“I was asking for Jimmy—he’s the one with an urgent need to knock someone up,” Claude told her in his offhand, witless way.
This made more sense to Dagmar, who was aware of how Jimmy looked at her. All of this went over Jimmy’s head.
“Dagmar’s flirting with you, Jimmy. You get it, don’t you?” Jolanda asked him, one night at the café. He’d noticed that Dagmar had been behaving strangely, but he hadn’t picked up on the flirting part. Claude only then confessed what he’d told Dagmar.
“You told Dagmar I want to knock her up?” Jimmy asked Claude.
“I expressed it as a need, not a want,” Claude insisted.
Jimmy thought it was strange when Dagmar said to him, out of the blue, “I do everything except children, Jimmy. You can have fun not having children, you know,” the widow manager had said—somewhat ambiguously, he thought. Dagmar was not as aloof as usual; he’d noticed this much.
James Winslow wondered if the foreignness inside him—a foreignness that was in him, a part of who he was—made him deaf and blind to Dagmar’s flirting with him.
Or was it because Dagmar was his mom’s age, and Jimmy was afraid of finding out what it would be like to sleep with an older woman?
(Was he so conventional, and such a New Hampshire boy, that Jimmy imagined he was supposed to sleep with someone his own age first?) He was attracted to the widow manager, who reminded him of his mother; this alone was complicated enough.
And didn’t Dagmar live with her mom, and her mom’s old schnauzer?
He pictured the two widows in a small apartment, somewhere near a Stra?enbahn stop.
At night, you could hear the streetcars on the rails.
The aged male schnauzer was sensitive to the screech the Stra?enbahn made when it stopped.
The screeching, throughout the night, made the old dog bark—his balls retracting with every woof.
Jimmy found Dagmar desirable, but he tried to suppress his attraction to her by picturing the possible horrors of a sleepover at her place.
He was determined not to meet Dagmar’s mother, or her mother’s dog.
Besides, Jimmy and his roommates were committed to sleeping with Hard Rain.
“If you sleep with Dagmar, just don’t come home smelling like a dog with balls,” was the way Jolanda put it.
Claude just shook his head insanely, the same way Hard Rain did.
It never occurred to Jimmy that resisting Dagmar was good practice for resisting Chantal, if it ever came to that. “Would it be characteristic of your mom, or not—to have Chantal just show up unannounced in Vienna?” Annelies had asked Jimmy.
“I don’t know,” he’d admitted.
Jimmy’s beloved grandfather sent him a black-and-white postcard—a forbidding one, from a long-ago production of King Lear.
The stage direction reads: ENTER LEAR, WITH CORDELIA IN HIS ARMS—ACT 5, SCENE 3.
In a world of bad moments between parents and their children, a howling father holding his dead daughter is one of the worst, but Jimmy knew that Thomas Winslow didn’t know about his fourth daughter’s manipulations.
The histrionic English teacher (like his hero, Charles Dickens) was being sentimental about Christmas.
All Thomas had written on the postcard was: “Christmas won’t be the same without you, my dear boy!
” Thomas wasn’t referring to Honor Winslow’s plot in progress; to have Jimmy knock up Chantal Beaudette was the farthest thing from Thomas Winslow’s mind.
Jimmy knew King Lear wasn’t a reference to knocking up anyone.
Honor Winslow was harassing the local Pennacook draft board.
She crammed her message on a plain postcard, one without a picture.
“If you don’t knock up someone in Europe, we’ll shoot you in the patella when you come home.
Or we can cut off the index finger of your dominant hand—also known as your trigger finger.
It would be easier and more fun to just fool around with Chantal, honey. ” There was no room for “Love, Mom.”
Claude found a photo in one of the newspapers in the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik—a U.S.
helicopter strike against Viet Cong guerrillas in the Mekong Delta.
In the aerial photograph, a U.S. serviceman is watching ground movements of enemy troops below.
By 1963, almost sixteen thousand American military personnel were deployed in South Vietnam.
Jolanda found a photo in another newspaper—of firebombs falling in a village on the outskirts of Hue.
In the foreground of the photo, houseboats glide down the Perfume River; the incendiary bombs cause clouds of smoke to darken the lighter gray of the sky.
There were other napalm pictures in the news.
“Your baby would have a whole bunch of moms around, honey!” Jimmy’s mother wrote on a napalm-bombing picture postcard.
“Chantal just showing up in Vienna would be like a napalm bomb,” Jolanda said to Jimmy and Claude.
“No, no, no—poor Chantal!” Claude moaned.
“You should forget about the Chantal Vorschlag—I’m not knocking up Chantal,” Jimmy told them.
The three roommates tried to move on from the firebombing situation, but they couldn’t escape the constant evidence of the mutilations of war in the Schwindgasse apartment—Siegfried’s slaughtered armies, his toy soldiers’ scattered body parts.
“Immigrate to France—no one wants children in Paris!” Claude cried.
“Straight Dutch girls carry condoms, Jimmy,” Jolanda said.
Yet this kind of carnage was what would come of Jimmy’s not knocking up Chantal—or of his not allowing his mother and aunts to mutilate him.
The three roommates had discussed the pros and cons of a bullet in the patella versus an amputated index finger.
Jimmy’s trigger finger was also the index finger on his writing hand; he preferred being shot in the knee, he told Claude and Jolanda.
They weren’t writers; they said they could do without an index finger on their dominant hand.
Napalm was in the news and in the mail. Jimmy was unnerved by what Irmgard said one evening. He was writing in his bedroom; he’d not accompanied Claude and Jolanda to their complicated café.
“Death,” he heard Irmgard say. From his writing desk, at the balcony window, Jimmy could see her inimitable shape pressed against the frosted glass.
He’d not heard of a film called Tod, but Death didn’t sound like an American movie, either.
“It’s almost over, if you’re interested,” Irmgard told him, moving away from Jimmy’s bedroom door.
Jimmy found Irmgard on her usual sofa in the living room, watching Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which had been dubbed into German like everything else.
The German title was Das siebente Siegel—not Tod.
Death himself was the main character, in Irmgard’s estimation and Jimmy’s, and Tod was what Irmgard called the film—even if Bergman and the Germans didn’t.
Jimmy curled up with her on the sofa for the final chess game.
(He’d read the screenplay so many times in English, he didn’t need to understand Swedish or the incessant German dubbing.)
“It is your move, Antonius Block,” Death tells the knight, but we can see the alarm in the knight’s eyes. Block wants the juggler, with his young wife and their child, to escape Death.
“Nothing escapes you—or does it?” the knight asks Death.
“Nothing escapes me. No one escapes from me,” Death replies. (Death’s answer sounds a lot longer in German.)
Then the knight pretends to be clumsy; he knocks over the chess pieces with the hem of his coat.
Of course Block tells Death that he’s forgotten where the pieces go, but Death hasn’t forgotten.
“You can’t get away that easily,” Death tells the knight, laughing.
In this one instance, the knight distracts Death—the juggler, with his young wife and their child, will get away.
Antonius Block, with his wife and the rest of his companions, will die.
“God, You who are somewhere, who must be somewhere, have mercy upon us,” the knight prays—his last words. While the end credits rolled, Irmgard went on holding Jimmy on top of her—his head held fast between her breasts.
“Speaking of death, how’s it going with your mother’s plan? Are you going or not going to Vietnam?” Irmgard asked him. “Not going sounds smarter to any mother, Jimmy,” Irmgard said.
That was when James Winslow knew he was wrong to judge his mother for committing herself, and including Chantal, to save him from a wrongheaded war.
The war had more wrong with it than Honor Winslow’s unconventional proposal.
Just then, Jolanda and Claude came back from the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik, finding Jimmy transfixed in Irmgard’s embrace—her legs wrapped around his waist, her heels digging into the backs of his thighs.
“It’s not what you think,” he tried to tell his roommates, but his voice was muffled—speaking, as he was, between Irmgard’s breasts.