Last Night in Twisted River (34 page)

He thought his next letter to Ketchum might begin, “There’s so much to worry about, I can’t seem to stop myself from doing it. And you’d laugh at me, Ketchum, because I’ve even been praying!” But the cook didn’t begin that letter. He felt strangely exhausted, and he’d shot the whole morning doing almost nothing—just starting his pizza dough and limping to the bookstore and back. It was already time to go shopping. Avellino wasn’t open for lunch—just dinner. Tony Angel shopped at midday; his staff showed up in the early afternoon.

As for worrying, the cook wasn’t alone; Danny worried a lot, too. And neither of them was as worried as Ketchum, even though it was almost June—way past mud season in southern Vermont, and they’d been mud-free for several weeks in northern New Hampshire. Ketchum had been known to feel almost exhilarated in those first few weeks after mud season had passed. But not now, and truly not since the cook had come back to Vermont from Iowa with his son and grandson. Ketchum didn’t like them to be anywhere near New Hampshire—particularly not his old friend with the new and hard-to-get-used-to name.

The funny thing was that the cook, for all his worrying, didn’t give the slightest thought to that. So much time had passed; it had been sixteen years since he’d moved out of Boston, and twenty-nine since his last, eventful night in Twisted River. Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, who was now Tony Angel, wasn’t as worried about an angry old cowboy in Coos County as he was about other things.

The cook
should
have been more worried about Carl, because Ketchum was right. Vermont was next door to New Hampshire—too close for comfort. And the deputy sheriff, who was sixty-six, had retired; he had lots of time on his hands, and that cowboy was still looking for the little cripple who’d stolen his Injun Jane.

CHAPTER 8

DEAD DOG; REMEMBERING MAO’S

F
ROM THE FAMOUS WRITER’S “COMPOUND”
—
AS THE PUTNEY
locals (and the writer’s own father) were inclined to call it—Hickory Ridge Road climbed for over a mile, the road both crossing the brook and running parallel to the water. The so-called back road from Putney to Westminster West was dirt, and at a point less than midway between Danny Angel’s property in Putney and his best friend’s house in Westminster West, there was quite a pretty farm, with horses, at the end of a long, steep driveway. In the warm weather—after he’d opened his swimming pool in May, and before he winterized the pool every October—Danny called his friend in Westminster West and told him when he was starting out on a run. It was four or five miles, maybe six or seven; Danny was such a daydreamer that he didn’t keep track of the distance of his runs anymore.

The pretty farm at the end of the long, uphill driveway seemed to focus the writer’s reveries, because an older woman with snow-white hair (and the body of a dancer in her twenties) lived there. Danny had had an affair with her some years ago—her name was Barrett. She wasn’t married, and hadn’t been at the time; there was no scandal attached to their relationship. Nevertheless, in the writer’s imagination—at about the two-mile mark of his run—Danny always foresaw his own murder at the place where this woman’s steep driveway met the road. He would be running on the road, just a half-second past her driveway, and Barrett would come gliding down the hill, her car coasting in neutral, with the engine off, so that by the time he heard her tires scattering the loose gravel on the road, it would be too late for him to get out of the almost-silent car’s path.

A spectacular way for a storyteller to die, Danny had imagined—a vehicular homicide, with the famous novelist’s ex-lover at the wheel of the murder weapon!

That Barrett had no such designs on ending the writer’s life didn’t matter; it would have been a good story. In fact, she’d had many affairs, and (in Danny’s estimation) Barrett harbored no homicidal feelings for her ex-lovers; the writer doubted that Barrett would go out of her way to run over any of them. She was exclusively focused on caring for her horses and maintaining her youthful physique.

When there was a conceivably interesting movie playing at the Latchis in Brattleboro, Danny would often ask Barrett to see the film with him, and they would have dinner at Avellino. That Barrett was much closer in age to Danny’s dad than she was to Danny had provided the cook with grounds for complaining to his writer son. Nowadays, Danny frequently found it necessary to remind his father that he and Barrett were “just friends.”

Danny could run five or six miles at a pace of seven minutes per mile, usually running the last mile in closer to six minutes. At forty-one, he’d had no injuries and was still slight of build; at five feet seven, he weighed only 145 pounds. (His dad was a little smaller, and perhaps the limp made him seem shorter than he was.) Because of the occasional bad dog on the back road to Westminster West, Danny ran with a couple of sawed-off squash racquets—just the handles. If a dog attacked him when he was running, Danny would stick one of the racquet handles in the dog’s face—until the dog chomped on it. Then, with the other sawed-off handle, he would hit the dog—usually on the bridge of the nose.

Danny didn’t play squash. His friend in Westminster West was the squash player. When Armando DeSimone broke one of his racquets, he gave it to Danny, who sawed off the racquet head and kept the handle. Armando had grown up in the North End about a decade before Danny and his dad moved there; like the cook, Armando still drove to his beloved Boston, periodically, to shop. Armando and Danny enjoyed cooking for each other. They’d been colleagues in the English department at Windham, and when the college folded, Armando took a job teaching at the Putney School. His wife, Mary, had been Joe’s English and history teacher at the Grammar School.

When Danny Angel became rich and famous, he lost a few of the old friends he’d had, but not the DeSimones. Armando had read all but the first of Danny Angel’s novels in manuscript. For five out of six novels, he’d been Danny’s earliest reader. You don’t lose a friend like that.

Armando had built a squash court in an old barn on his Westminster West property; he talked about building a swimming pool next, but in the meantime he and Mary swam in Danny’s pool. Nearly every afternoon, when it wasn’t raining, the writer would run to the DeSimones’ house in Westminster West; then Armando and Mary would drive Danny back to Putney, and they’d all swim in the pool. Danny would make drinks for them and serve the drinks at the pool after they swam.

Danny had stopped drinking sixteen years ago—long enough so that he had no problem having alcohol in his house, or fixing drinks for his friends. And he wouldn’t dream of having a dinner party and
not
serving wine, though he could remember that when he’d first stopped drinking, he was unable to be around people who were drinking anything alcoholic. At the time, in Iowa City, that had been a problem.

As for the writer’s second life in Iowa City, with his dad and little Joe—well, that had been a peaceful interlude, for the most part, except for the unwelcome reminders of Danny’s earlier time in that town with Katie. In retrospect, Danny thought, those last three years in Iowa—in the early seventies, when Joe had been in the second, third, and fourth grades, and the greatest danger the boy faced was what might happen to him on his
bicycle
—seemed almost blissful. Iowa City had been
safe
in those years.

Joe was seven when he’d gone back to Iowa with his dad and grandfather, and was still only ten when they’d returned to Vermont. Maybe those ages were the safest ages, the writer was imagining as he ran; possibly, Iowa City had had nothing to do with it.

—

CHILDHOOD, AND HOW IT FORMS YOU
—moreover, how your child hood is relived in your life as an adult—that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed as he ran. From the age of twelve, he had become afraid for his father; the cook was still a hunted man. Like his dad, but for different reasons, Danny had been a young father—in reality, he’d also been a single parent (even before Katie left him). Now, at forty-one, Danny was more afraid for young Joe than he was for his dad.

Maybe it was more than the Katie Callahan gene that put Joe at risk; nor did Danny necessarily believe that the source of the wildness in his son was the boy’s free-spirited grandmother, that daring woman who’d courted disaster on the late-winter ice of Twisted River. No, when Danny looked at young Joe at eighteen, it was
himself
at that dangerous age he saw. From all they’d read into (and had misread in) Danny Angel’s novels, the cook and Ketchum couldn’t have fathomed the perilous configuration of the various bullets Danny had dodged—not only in his life with Katie, but long before her.

It hadn’t been Josie DiMattia who’d sexually initiated Danny at the age of fifteen, before he went off to Exeter; furthermore, Carmella may have caught them at it, but Josie wasn’t the one who got pregnant. Ketchum had indeed driven Danny to that orphanage with the obliging midwife in Maine, but with the
oldest
DiMattia girl, Teresa. (Perhaps Teresa had given so many condoms to her younger sisters that she’d forgotten to save some for herself.) And neither Teresa nor Danny’s equally older cousin Elena Calogero had provided Danny with his
first
sexual experience—though the boy was much more attracted to those older girls than he was to any girl his own age, including Josie, who’d been only a
little
older. There’d also been an older Saetta cousin, Giuseppina, who’d seduced young Dan, but Giuseppina wasn’t his first seducer.

No, indeed—that instructive and most formative experience had been with the boy’s aunt Filomena, his mother’s youngest sister, when Danny had been only fourteen. Had Filomena been in her late twenties, or might she already have turned thirty when the assignations with her young nephew began? Danny was wondering as he approached the final two miles of his run.

It was still May; the blackflies were bad, but not at the pace he was running, which he began to pick up. As he ran, he could hear his heart and his own breathing, though these elevated functions didn’t seem to Danny as loud or urgent as the beating of his heart or his gasps for breath whenever the boy had been with his insane aunt Filomena. What had she been thinking? It was Danny’s dad she’d adored, and the cook wouldn’t look at her. Had the way her nephew doted on her—Danny couldn’t take his eyes off her—seemed a sufficient consolation prize to Filomena?

She’d been only the second woman in the Saetta and Calogero clans to attend college, but Filomena had shared another distinction with her older sister Rosie—namely, a certain lawlessness with men. Filomena might have been only a preteen—at most, thirteen or fourteen—when Rosie had been sent away to the north country. She’d loved Rosie, and had looked up to her—only to see her disgraced, and displayed as a bad example to the younger girls in the family. Filomena had been sent to Sacred Heart, an all-girls’ Catholic school near the Paul Revere House on North Square. She’d been kept as safe from boys as was humanly
and
spiritually possible.

As Danny Angel picked up the pace in his long run, he considered that this might have been why his aunt Filomena had been more interested in him, a boy, than she appeared to be interested in
men
. (Her sacred sister’s widower excluded—yet Filomena must have known that the cook was a closed door to her, an unfulfilled fantasy, whereas Danny, who had not yet started to shave, had his father’s long eyelashes and his mother’s fair, almost fragile skin.) And it must have made an impression on Filomena that, at fourteen, the boy worshipped his small, pretty aunt. According to Danny’s dad, Filomena’s eyes weren’t the same
lethal blue
as Rosie’s, but his aunt’s eyes, and all the rest of her, were dangerous enough to do Danny some long-lasting harm. For one thing, Filomena managed to make
all
girls Danny’s age uninteresting to him—that is, until he met Katie.

The cook and Ketchum had jumped to the conclusion that young Daniel had seen something of his mother in Katie. What the boy had seen, perhaps, was that combination of a repressed girlhood in an angry young woman of wanton self-destructiveness; Katie had been a younger, more political version of his aunt Filomena. The difference between them was that Filomena had been devoted to the boy, and her sexual efforts to outdo the mere girls in Danny’s life were entirely successful. Denied any demonstrable expression of her sexuality as a girl, Filomena (in her late twenties, and well into her thirties) was a woman possessed. By the time Danny met her, Katie Callahan was almost indifferent to sex; that she’d had a lot of sex didn’t mean that she actually
liked
it. By the time Danny met her, Katie already thought of sex as a way of
negotiating
.

In Danny’s prep-school years, his aunt Filomena would book a room at the Exeter Inn almost every weekend. The boy’s trysts in that musty brick building were the unparalleled pleasures of his life at Exeter, and a contributing reason why he spent so few of his Exeter weekends at home in the North End. Carmella and the cook always worked hardest at Vicino di Napoli on Friday and Saturday nights, while the boy banged his youthful aunt—often in a Colonial four-poster bed, beneath a gauzy-white canopy. (He was a runner; runners have stamina.) With Filomena’s considerable and licentious assistance, Danny had achieved an adult independence—from both his actual and his Exeter families.

How could the boy possibly have had any interest in Exeter’s dances with various girls’ schools? How could a closely chaperoned and chaste hug on the dance floor ever compete with the ardent, sweat-slicked contact he’d maintained with Filomena on an almost weekly basis—not only throughout his Exeter years but including Danny’s first two years of college in Durham?

And all the while, those Calogeros and Saettas took pity on “poor” Filomena; pretty as she was, she struck them as an eternal wallflower, both a maiden aunt and a spinster-in-the-making. Little did they know that, for seven hungry years, the woman was indulging the ceaseless sexual appetites of a teenage boy on his way to becoming a young man. In those seven years that his aunt Filomena dominated Danny’s sexual life, she more than made up for lost time. That she was a teacher at Sacred Heart—in the same Catholic and all-girls’ environment where the
younger
Filomena had been held down—was a perfect disguise.

All those other Calogeros, and the Saettas, thought of Filomena as “pathetic”—those were his father’s very words for her, Danny remembered, as he ran harder and harder. Outwardly, Filomena had seemed the picture of propriety and Catholic repression, but—oh!—not when she shed her clothes!

“Let’s just say I keep them busy at confession,” she told her spellbound nephew, for whom Filomena had set a standard; the young women who followed Filomena in Danny’s life couldn’t match his aunt’s erotic performance.

Filomena was in her mid-to late thirties—too old to have a baby, in her estimation—when the issue of Danny going to Vietnam (or not) was raised. She might have been happier with Ketchum’s solution; if Danny had lost a finger or two, he might have stayed with his aunt a little longer. Filomena was insane, but she was no fool; she knew she wouldn’t get to keep her beloved young Dan forever. She liked the sound of Katie Callahan’s idea better than she ever warmed to Ketchum’s plan—after all, in her own odd way, Filomena loved her nephew, and she had not met Katie.

Had Filomena met that most vulgar young woman, she might have opted for Ketchum’s Browning knife instead, but ultimately that decision wasn’t hers. Filomena felt fortunate to have captured such a vital young man’s almost complete attention for the seven years she’d held him in her thrall. Danny’s dalliances with those DiMattia girls, or several of his kissing cousins, didn’t bother her. Filomena knew that Danny would always come back to her, with renewed vigor. Those clumsy sluts couldn’t hold a candle to her—not in the boy’s fond estimation, anyway. Nor would Katie ever become the
younger
Filomena Danny may have desired—or, once upon a time, wished her to be.