Last Night in Twisted River (32 page)

Of course there’d been more money suddenly, and the cook had worried—he
still
worried—about what effect it might have on young Joe. Daniel was old enough (thirty-six) when the bestseller business found him to not be affected by either the fame or the good fortune. But when Joe was only thirteen, the boy woke up one morning with a famous father. Couldn’t this have made an unwelcome mark on any kid that age? And then there were the women Daniel went through—both before and after he was famous.

The writer had been living with one of his former Windham College students when he, Tony, and Joe moved to Iowa City. The girl with a boy’s name—“It’s Franky, with a
y,”
she liked to say with a pout—hadn’t made the move with them.

Thank God for that, the cook thought at the time. Franky was a feral-looking little thing, a virtual wild animal.

“She wasn’t my student when I began to sleep with her,” Danny had argued with his dad. No, but Franky had been one of his writing students only a year or two before; she was one of many Windham College students who never seemed to leave Putney. They went to Windham, they graduated, or they quit school but continued to hang around—they wouldn’t leave.

The girl had dropped in on her former teacher one day, and she’d simply stayed.

“What does Franky do all day?” his dad had asked Danny.

“She’s trying to be a writer,” Danny said. “Franky likes hanging around, and she’s nice to Joe
—he
likes her.”

Franky did some housecleaning, and a little cooking—if you could call it that, the cook thought. The wild girl was barefoot most of the time—even in that drafty old farmhouse in the winter months, when Daniel heated the whole place with a couple of woodstoves. (Putney was the kind of town that worshipped woodstoves, Tony Angel had observed; there was even an
alternative
to heating in that town! The cook simply hated the place.)

Franky was a dirty-blonde with lank hair and a slouchy posture. She wore funny old-fashioned dresses of the kind the cook remembered Nunzi wearing, except Franky never wore a bra, and her underarms—what the cook saw of them—were unshaven. And Franky couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three when she’d lived with Daniel and little Joe. Daniel had just turned thirty when they went to Iowa.

There’d been more young women in the writer’s life in Iowa City, one of his workshop students among them, and while there was no one special now—nor had there been anyone long-lasting since Danny Angel became famous—Joe, by the time he was a teenager, had seen his dad with numerous young women. (And three or four notably older women, the cook was remembering; two of those ladies were among Daniel’s foreign publishers.)

The Putney property was a virtual compound these days. The writer had turned the old farmhouse into his guesthouse; he’d built a new house for himself and Joe, and there was a separate building where Danny did his writing. His “writing shack,” Daniel called it. Some
shack
! Tony Angel thought. The building was small, but it had a half-bathroom in it; there was also a phone, a TV, and a small fridge.

Danny may have liked living in the country, but he wasn’t exactly reclusive—hence the guesthouse. In his life as a writer, he’d gotten to know a number of city people, and they came to visit him—the occasional women included. Had Joe’s exposure to his famous father’s casual relationships with women made the teenager something of a playboy at prep school? Tony Angel wondered. He worried about his grandson—as much as, if not more than, the boy’s dad did. Yes, the eighteen-year-old’s drinking would bear watching, the cook knew. Joe had the mischievous insouciance of a boy who liked to party.

With the war in Vietnam, they would lower the drinking age in many states to eighteen, the logic being that if they could send mere boys off to die at that age, shouldn’t the kids at least be allowed to drink? After the war was over, the drinking age would go back up to twenty-one again—but not until 1984—though nowadays, Tony knew, many kids Joe’s age had fake I.D.’s. The cook saw them all the time at Avellino; he knew his grandson had one.

It was how Joe was more than fast with girls that
really
worried Tony Angel. Going too fast too soon with girls could get you in as much trouble as drinking, the former Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, knew. It had gotten the cook in trouble, in his opinion—and Daniel, too.

Despite Carmella’s best efforts, Tony knew all about her catching her niece Josie with Daniel; the cook was sure that his son had banged more than one of those DiMattia girls, and even a Saetta and a Calogero or two! But young Joe had at least seen, if not actually overheard, his father in a few more
adult
relationships than whatever foolishness Daniel had been up to with his kissing cousins. And his grandfather knew that Joe had spent more than a few nights in the
girls’
dorms at NMH. (It was a wonder the boy hadn’t been caught and kicked out of school; now, in the spring term of his senior year, maybe he
would
be!) There were things Joe’s dad didn’t know, but his grandfather did.

In his frantic last night in Twisted River, the cook had prayed—for the first and only time, until now. Please, God, give me
time
, Tony Angel had prayed, long ago—seeing his twelve-year-old’s small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. (Daniel had been waiting in the passenger seat, as if he’d never lost faith that his father would safely return from leaving Injun Jane’s body at Carl’s.)

For all the talking the cook and Ketchum did about Danny Angel’s novels—not only about what was in them but, more important, what the writer seemed to be purposely leaving out—the one thing the men noticed without fail was how much the books were about what Danny
feared
. Maybe the imagination does that, Tony thought, as he peeked under the damp towels covering his pizza dough; the dough hadn’t risen enough for him to punch it down. Danny Angel’s novels had much to do with what the writer feared
might
happen. The stories often indulged the nightmarish—namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril—in part,
because
they were young!

Tony Angel wasn’t much of a reader anymore—though he’d bought innumerable novels (on his son’s and Ketchum’s recommendations) at The Book Cellar. He’d read a lot of first chapters and had just stopped. Something about Ketchum’s relationship with Rosie had kicked the reading right out of the cook. The
only
novels he actually finished—and he read every word—were his son’s. Tony wasn’t like Ketchum, who’d read (or heard) everything.

The cook knew his son’s worst fears: Daniel was absolutely terrified of something happening to his loved ones; he simply
obsessed
about that subject. That was where the writer’s fearful imagination came from—childhood terrors. The writer Danny Angel seemed driven to imagine the worst things that could happen in any given situation. In a way, as a writer—that is to say, in his
imagination—
the cook’s son (at forty-one) was still a child.

IN HIS QUIET KITCHEN
, in his cherished Avellino, the cook prayed that he be allowed to live a little longer; he wanted to help his grandson survive being a teenager. Maybe boys aren’t out of the woods until their late twenties, Tony considered—after all, Daniel had been twenty-two when he married Katie. (Certainly that had been taking a risk!) What if Joe had to be
thirty
before he was safe? And if anything did happen to Joe, the cook prayed he would still be alive to look after Daniel; he knew how much help his son would need then.

Tony Angel looked at the silent radio; he almost turned it on, just to help him banish these morbid thoughts. He considered writing a letter to Ketchum instead of turning on the radio, but he didn’t do either of these things; he just kept praying. It seemed that the praying had come to him out of nowhere, and he wished he could stop doing it.

There in his kitchen, next to his cookbooks, were various editions of Danny Angel’s novels, which the cook kept in chronological order. There was no more revered place for those novels than among his dad’s cookbooks, Danny knew. But it didn’t calm the cook down to look at his famous son’s books.

After
Family Life in Coos County
, the cook knew that Daniel had published
The Mickey
, but was that in 1972 or ’73? The first novel had been dedicated to Mr. Leary, but the second one should have been, given its subject matter. As he’d more or less promised, however, Danny had dedicated his second novel to his dad. “For my father, Dominic Baciagalupo,” the dedication read, which was a little confusing, because the author’s name was Danny Angel—and Dominic was already called Tony, or
Mr
. Angel.

“Isn’t that sort of like letting the nom-de-plume cat out of the nom-de-plume bag?” Ketchum had complained, but it had turned out for the better. When Danny became famous for his fourth novel, the issue of him writing under a nom de plume had long been defused. Almost everyone in the literary world knew that Danny Angel was a nom de plume, but very few people remembered what his real name was—or they didn’t care. (Mr. Leary had been right to suggest that there were easier names to remember than Baciagalupo, and how many people—even in the literary world—know what John Le Carré’s real name is?)

Danny, not surprisingly, had defended his decision to Ketchum by saying that he doubted the deputy sheriff was very active in the literary world; even the logger had to acknowledge that the cowboy wasn’t a reader. Besides, very few people read
The Mickey
when it was originally published. When his fourth novel made Danny famous, and readers went back to the earlier books, that was when everyone read
The Mickey
.

A secondary but major character in
The Mickey
is a repressed Irishman who teaches English at the Michelangelo School; the novel focuses on the main character’s last encounter with his former English teacher at a striptease show in the Old Howard. To the cook, it seemed a slight coincidence to build a whole book around—the mutual shame and embarrassment of the former student (now an Exeter boy, with a bunch of his Exeter friends) and the character who was clearly modeled on Mr. Leary. Probably, the episode at the Old Howard had actually happened—or so the novelist’s father believed.

The third novel came along in ’75, just after they’d all moved back to Vermont from Iowa. The cook would wonder if his was the only family to have mistakenly assumed that “kissing cousins” meant cousins who were sexually interested in, or involved with, one another. Danny’s third novel was called
Kissing Kin
. (Originally, so-called kissing kin meant
any
distant kin who were familiar enough to be greeted with a kiss; it
didn’t
mean what Danny’s dad had always thought.)

The cook was relieved that his son’s third book
wasn’t
dedicated to Danny’s cousins in the Saetta and Calogero families, because the irony of such a dedication might not have been appreciated by the male members of those families. The story concerns a young boy’s sexual initiation in the North End; he is seduced by an older cousin who works as a waitress in the same restaurant where the boy has a part-time job as a busboy. The older cousin in the novel was clearly modeled, the cook knew, on that slut Elena Calogero—better said, the physical description of the character was true to Elena. Yet both Carmella and the cook were pretty sure that Daniel’s first sexual experience had been with Carmella’s niece Josie DiMattia.

The novel might have been pure fantasy, or wishful thinking, the cook supposed. But there were details that particularly bothered the writer’s dad—for example, how the older cousin breaks off the relationship with the young boy when he’s going off to boarding school. The waitress tells the kid that all along, she
wanted
to be fucking the boy’s father—not the boy. (Little is written about the character of the dad; he’s rather distantly described as the “new cook” in the restaurant where his son is a busboy.) The rejected boy goes off to school hating his father, because he imagines that the older cousin will eventually seduce his dad.

Surely this couldn’t be true—this was outrageous! Tony Angel was thinking, as he searched in the book for that passage where the train is pulling out of North Station, and the boy is looking out the window of the train at his father on the station platform. The boy suddenly can’t bear to look at his dad; his attention shifts to his stepmother. “I knew that the next time I saw her she would probably have put on a few more pounds,” Danny Angel wrote.

“How could you write that about Carmella?” the cook had yelled at his writer son when he’d first read that hurtful sentence.

“It’s not Carmella, Dad,” Daniel said. (Okay—maybe the character of the stepmother in
Kissing Kin
wasn’t Carmella, but Danny Angel dedicated the novel to her.)

“I suppose it’s just tough luck being in a writer’s family,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I mean, we get mad if Danny writes about us, or someone we know, but we also get mad at him for
not
writing about us, or for not really writing about himself—his
true
self, I mean. Not to mention that he made his damn ex-wife a better person than she ever was!”

All that was true, the cook thought. Somehow what struck him about Daniel’s fiction was that it was both autobiographical and
not
autobiographical at the same time. (Danny disagreed, of course. After his schoolboy attempts at fiction writing, which he’d shown only to Mr. Leary—and those stories were nothing but a confusing mix of memoir and fantasy, both exaggerated, and nearly as “confusing” to Danny as they were to the late Michael Leary—the young novelist had not
really
been autobiographical at all, not in his opinion.)