Chapter 24 The Passage of Time
The townspeople of Pennacook knew that Alma, the nurse’s aide, had shepherded many endings at The Meadow.
Alma tended to downplay the Winslows’ back-to-back deaths.
She was a woman who said she’d seen everything before; yet Alma’s high esteem for Thomas and Constance Winslow’s love story had a humbling effect on the townsfolk.
The ladies of the town were conspicuously silent.
Did those ladies wonder if their husbands would have pulled out their tubes to die within days of their wives?
Was it due to their regard for Alma, who had a history of experience with the dying, that the townspeople of Pennacook exhibited more respect for Thomas and Constance Winslow in death than they’d shown for them when those two were alive?
Bouquets of flowers came to the Front Street house.
It was Alma who became a catalyst for a rare rift among the Winslow daughters—or if rift is too strong a word, at least a difference of opinion.
Alma herself was the opposite of a troublemaker.
The Winslow sisters loved her and had the utmost respect for her.
Constance had first met Alma at the library.
An unmarried Mexican American around Faith’s or Hope’s age, Alma Vásquez had already been a reader as a young woman.
“I loved reading novels, but my nursing studies came first. I also had to learn English and emigrate from Mexico,” Alma told Constance when they met.
“Now I want to read novels again—this time in English.” Constance guessed that Alma was in her late twenties or early thirties.
The library had a book club—all women, older than Alma.
The book club wouldn’t work out for Alma.
She was too well-spoken and a better reader than the ladies of the town, and there were almost no Mexicans in New Hampshire.
Alma’s brown skin and coal-black hair set her apart; she was statuesque with chiseled features and a jutting bosom, and she was single.
Alma preferred to talk about the novels she read with Constance.
But no one had ever read a novel aloud to Alma, not until she heard Jimmy Winslow read from The Dickens Man.
Given Alma’s devotion to their beloved departed parents, the Winslow sisters were welcoming to Alma when she first dropped by the Front Street house to ask Jimmy how The Dickens Man was coming along.
What Alma really wanted was for Jimmy to read to her, but she was shy if his mom and one or more of his aunts were around.
When the doorbell rang in the Front Street house, the Winslow sisters raced one another to the door.
The third time Alma dropped by, she got up the nerve to say what she wanted.
It helped that Honor Winslow was alone when she answered the door. Alma and Honor had their nursing in common. “Jimmy is probably writing in his room, but I’ll go get him for you,” Honor said.
“I want him to read to me, if that isn’t strange,” Alma blurted out. She explained to Jimmy’s mom that she’d loved listening to him read from The Dickens Man. “Now I associate the novel with his voice. I want to hear it, not read it,” Alma said.
“It isn’t strange. I like listening to Jimmy read, too,” Honor told her.
Jimmy’s mom found him writing in his room.
Jimmy said reading to Alma was strange. “It isn’t strange.
It would only be strange if you read to her in your pajamas, Jimmy,” his mother said.
He often wrote in his pajamas, but he put on jeans and a T-shirt to read to Alma.
Jimmy read to her in what was called the reading room of the Front Street house.
Thomas and Constance used to sit there when they were reading their respective books—usually not talking to each other.
The TV was in what was called the living room—or the family room, after Faith and Hope had children.
That day, when Faith and Hope dropped by, they could overhear Jimmy reading aloud.
“Who is Jimmy reading to?” Faith asked Honor.
“Or is Jimmy writing out loud in the reading room?” Hope asked. When Honor explained about Alma, Faith and Hope were shocked.
“Alma must be my age—she’s almost sixty!” Faith exclaimed.
“Even if Alma is only my age, she’s still too old for Jimmy!” Hope said. She was fifty-seven.
“Jimmy is just reading to Alma. They’re not having sex,” Honor explained.
She was laughing, which outraged her older sisters more.
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing if they were having sex—or if they do have sex one day,” Honor whispered.
Faith and Hope just stared. “I mean that Jimmy’s not really married—he’s going to have sex with someone, one day.
If he does it with a woman Alma’s age, she won’t get pregnant, will she?
It would be the best thing for this family if Jimmy doesn’t knock up someone else! ” Honor declared.
That was when Prudence got home; she and Honor still lived in the Front Street house. Faith and Hope told Prudence that Jimmy and Alma were “starting something” in the reading room, where “there was more than reading going on.”
“Alma is too old to get pregnant, isn’t she?” Honor asked Prudence, who was Alma’s doctor and knew exactly how old she was. Prudence was also discreet.
“Alma is older than I am,” Prudence told Honor. “Alma is younger than you two,” she told Faith and Hope. Alma was fifty-six, they now knew. “It’s highly unlikely that Alma will get pregnant, and if she did, she and I would know what to do,” Prudence said to her sisters, while Jimmy read on.
That day, when Jimmy was reading to Alma from The Dickens Man, it never occurred to them to have sex with each other.
They learned that Jimmy’s mom wished they would have sex only when Honor took Alma aside and asked her to prevent the budding author from knocking up a younger woman.
Faith and Hope cornered Jimmy when he was writing in his room.
They told him that his having sex with Alma was “an inevitable perversion”—what his reading to her would surely “lead to.” But his aunts had a more major message to get across—one that wasn’t about Alma.
“You must have noticed, Jimmy—there’s an opaqueness to your mom when it comes to sexual matters,” Faith said first.
“It’s okay that she’s asexual, it’s totally fine, but your mom is sexually opaque in other ways, Jimmy. It feels like there’s a hole in her—like there’s something not there, sexually speaking,” Hope said.
“We don’t mind if Honor isn’t normal, Jimmy—Prudence doesn’t have an entirely normal sex life,” Faith started to say, but Hope interrupted her.
“Prudence had a boyfriend who wanted to marry her, Faith,” Hope jumped in, “but Prudence went to med school instead. Okay, so Prudence has a thing for arm’s-length relationships—at least she has relationships, Jimmy,” Hope said.
“I’m sick of hearing how your mom and Esther were ‘kindred spirits,’ Jimmy. Big deal! Esther did everything for your mom. It’s as if your mom didn’t get to be a teenager or a young adult,” Faith told him.
“It’s fine that your mom wanted you to knock up any girl you could—okay, so she’s a somewhat overprotective mother,” Hope said. “But you’re a young adult now, and you’re going to be a father—you can’t let someone who’s never had sex manage your sex life, Jimmy,” Hope told him.
Jimmy was, as he often was, speechless. When it came to his sex life, he worried that no one would ever be as exciting as Jolanda and Mieke—specifically, the way those two had managed Jimmy’s first sexual experience.
And although Jimmy didn’t like the way Faith and Hope talked about his mother, he felt there was a vagueness Honor shared with Esther.
His mom and Esther lived in the background, like peripheral characters in a novel.
Alma Vásquez said it would be “better” if Jimmy read to her in his room.
They were in his bedroom when Alma told him what she meant by better.
“Your mom thinks we should have sex, Jimmy, but I have more in common with your mom than she knows,” Alma began.
She’d left Mexico, where she didn’t want to become a nun, nor did she ever want to have sex—not to mention (worst of all) be married with children.
“Sound familiar?” she asked Jimmy. Alma thought it would be easier—in the sense of “more acceptable”—to live alone as a Mexican American woman in a small New England town.
“Faith and Hope think it’s an ‘inevitable perversion’ if we have sex, and my mother wants us to have sex,” Jimmy repeated to Alma, like a poem he’d learned by rote in childhood.
“If you keep reading to me in your bedroom, Jimmy, we can pretend we’re having sex,” Alma told him. “We’ll make your mom happy, and your aunts will have the satisfaction that comes with being right,” Alma said.
In a Winslow-sister talkathon, where Jimmy was present but didn’t say a word, Faith and Hope were fearful that the townspeople of Pennacook would hear of the shameful relationship.
They were concerned that Alma’s reputation would be compromised, but Prudence disagreed.
“Maybe if the town knew Alma had a younger boyfriend, some older men in the town—mostly married men—would stop making improper advances.” Faith and Hope were shocked to hear of such repugnant behavior, but Honor wasn’t.
As a single mom, she was familiar with wayward advances from some older, married men in Pennacook.
Jimmy couldn’t wait to tell Alma, who decided he should occasionally read to her in her rooming house, which was adjacent to the textile mill in town.
The millworkers would notice Jimmy’s visits and tell their wives, or the landlady of the rooming house would surely say something to the ladies of the town.
“This will enhance, not compromise, my reputation, Jimmy—the older men who pester me will be embarrassed to know I’m seeing a younger man. They’ll be ashamed to compete with you and they’ll leave me alone,” Alma said.