Chapter 23 The Last Faculty Meeting
At twenty-three, James Winslow was a daydreaming boy.
All fiction writers are daydreamers. What Jimmy knew of the passage of time came from those nineteenth-century novels he loved.
As Irmgard had told him, the passage of time was the only way to see in the future.
As he learned from the novel he was writing, a novelist’s job was imagining the future.
Jimmy knew he would be writing a death scene for the character based on his grandfather.
James Winslow didn’t remember or care how many times he changed trains from Vienna’s Westbahnhof to Amsterdam Centraal.
Fourteen hours on a train amounted to uninterrupted writing and reading to a young writer.
For the first time, he was reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—the novel that had made Mieke want to be a novelist, she’d told him.
Long ago, his grandfather had recommended the book to him.
Novels in translation were neglected by English teachers, Thomas Winslow once told him.
Jimmy had written to his grandfather, but Thomas wasn’t writing back—not the way he used to.
“All families with children who have children are complicated in their own way,” Jimmy had begun his letter to Thomas.
“Guess what I’m reading, Grandpa?” he asked him, but there’d been no reply.
Didn’t Jimmy’s grandfather get the joke?
There’d been jokes in the Winslow family about the opening sentence of Anna Karenina long before Jimmy started reading the novel.
How those Winslow sisters made fun of that opening sentence!
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy begins the novel, but how those Winslow daughters had disagreed.
“We’re a happy family, but we’re not like any other family!” Faith said.
“We Winslow girls aren’t even like one another!” Hope maintained.
“Yeah—each of us is happy in her own way!” Honor cried.
“What makes you happy, Honor, wouldn’t work for anybody!
” was how Prudence put it, making everyone laugh—Thomas and Constance included.
Jimmy remembered that well. He recently wrote to his mom about it.
He’d told her how Grandpa Tommy wasn’t writing letters like he used to, but Honor Winslow hadn’t written back.
Naturally, mailing letters internationally was slow; even airmail took forever.
Jimmy gave Irmgard his forwarding address and gave her money for postage.
He made sure Irmgard knew the names of his grandfather, his mother, and now Esther.
On the train to Amsterdam, he put an unopened letter from Esther in a safe place—her eagerly anticipated letter was Jimmy’s bookmark in Anna Karenina.
“Dear James Winslow,” Esther’s answer to Jimmy’s first letter began.
“Blame me for the make-believe inside you. I never wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t get to grow up Jewish.
I was too busy making up my life to be a writer.
Your grandfather was the only father I knew.
My mother didn’t live long enough to be a mother.
I didn’t want to be someone my mother didn’t get to be.
I’m just trying to be the best Jew I can be.
You bet your ass there’s a foreignness inside me!
I’m told you managed to learn a little German,” she went on.
“Ich wünsche Dir alles Gute,” she ended her letter.
(“I wish you all the best.”) This time, she signed her first name—just Esther.
Her return address was a new one, now in Jerusalem—as before, in care of someone else.
For now, Jimmy thought, Esther’s letter was a suitable bookmark for Anna Karenina, which was almost certainly a novel of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, and desire—or so Jimmy imagined.
He’d read only the first part, when Vronsky gets his first look at Anna, and Anna sees the railway worker killed when he accidentally falls in front of a train.
The accident did not bode well for Anna’s future, James Winslow was thinking; Anna should be wary of trains, he thought.
Jimmy wished Irmgard would be wary of dogs with balls when she and Siegfried were walking with Hard Rain, but Irmgard had been dismissive of the dogs-with-balls business.
“No one likes dogs with balls, Jimmy, but castrated males hate dogs with balls more than Hard Rain does,” Irmgard had said.
“Hard Rain knows what to do when horny males try to hump her. No one likes being humped by a beagle with balls—I know the feeling.” He couldn’t wait to tell Claude and Jolanda how Irmgard felt about males in general.
“Dear Esther,” Jimmy wrote on the train.
“I confirm that there’s mostly make-believe and foreignness inside me, too.
I know you correspond with Grandpa Tommy.
I’m worried about him. I correspond with him, too, but he doesn’t write me back the way he used to.
I wonder, have you noticed a decline in the way he writes to you?
” This time, when he signed his name, he wrote, “Love, Jimmy.”
In one of the notebooks where he wrote his novel, James Winslow did the math on Grandpa Tommy and Grandma Connie.
They were the same age, born in 1880—an easy number for Jimmy to remember because he’d been born in 1941, when his grandparents were sixty-one.
And there wasn’t anyone in the Winslow family who hadn’t heard the story that Prudence was ten when Constance Winslow was “starting to show.” At the time, Hope was twelve and Faith fourteen.
In 1919, when Honor Winslow was born, Thomas and Constance were thirty-nine—in those days, Jimmy knew, this was old to be having a child.
In the fall of 1963, when Jimmy went to Vienna, his grandparents were eighty-three.
Those two were long-distance walkers; they were still slim and fit and walked everywhere.
They were as alert as they’d always been; they showed no signs of needing The Meadow, the town’s much-maligned retirement home—also dubbed The Last Faculty Meeting by the academy’s retired teachers and staff who were residents there.
This name somewhat consoled those who were still teaching at Pennacook Academy—their wives, less so.
In 1964, when James Winslow would come home from his year abroad, Jimmy’s grandparents would be eighty-four.
“Dear Aunt Faith,” Jimmy wrote to the eldest of his aunts.
He knew those Winslow girls weren’t reticent to speak, and Faith usually spoke first; she didn’t mince words.
He explained why he was worried about Grandpa Tommy.
He’d written to his mom, and to Esther, he told Faith.
“When I left for Vienna, I saw no hint of The Meadow on the horizon,” he wrote to her.
Jimmy had two letters to mail in Amsterdam, and no idea how long he might be there.
He made no mention of his efforts to knock up Mieke in his letters to Esther or Faith.
He didn’t want to jinx Mieke’s being pregnant.
Jimmy just hoped, for Mieke’s sake, there would be no more knocking up to do.
When he arrived in Amsterdam Centraal, Amsterdam’s central station, he saw Jolanda from afar.
She was waving her arms, and she was taller than anyone around her.
“Hey, Sperm Man, way to go—you knocked up my girlfriend!” Jolanda yelled.
The way people looked at him, Jimmy knew that many Netherlanders understood English.
In the taxi to his hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal—one of the high-walled canals that ran through the red-light district—Jolanda explained that the walls were ramparts to control flooding.
The red-light district was called de Wallen, for the ramparts.
There were no ramparts to control her parents, she explained.
“My dad is a pussy-whipped lawyer, my mom is the pussy-whipper,” Jolanda told him.
After he checked in and left his bags at the hotel, Jolanda took him for a walk in de Wallen.
The prostitutes who were not with customers were visible in their windows or doorways.
They didn’t like it when women looked at them, Jolanda had observed, but she knew how to look at the prostitutes discreetly.
Jolanda whispered her favorites to Jimmy, but a few of them were with customers.
Jimmy didn’t dare say who two of his favorites were, but he often liked the ones Jolanda liked.
“It’s okay to look, Jimmy, but don’t go back and visit with one of them.
You’re here to get married, remember!” Jolanda told him.
“Mieke is already acting like a bride who’s expecting—she won’t even have sex with me until after the ceremony, when you get your marriage certificate.
Two unvisited vaginas till then. Now there’s a title, Jimmy!
Two Unvisited Vaginas!” Jolanda cried. The way the prostitutes in their doorways looked at her, Jimmy guessed they understood English.
Jolanda regretted how she drew the women’s attention; she’d meant no disrespect to them.
Jimmy tried to imagine Two Unvisited Vaginas as a marriage novel.
He realized only later what Jolanda was worried about, when she’d walked back to his hotel with him.
Her parents were meeting Jimmy for breakfast, when Jolanda would be back in Amsterdam Centraal; she was meeting Claude and Chantal’s train from Paris.