Last Night in Twisted River (6 page)

To Annunziata, it seemed like such a sweet and innocent offer; she laughed and gave her son a hug. But young Dom couldn’t imagine anyone “more suitable” for Rosie than himself—he had been faking the
pretend
part. He would have married Rosie for real; the difference in their ages, or that they were vaguely related, was no stumbling block for him.

As for Rosie, it didn’t matter that the sixteen-year-old’s proposal, which was both sweet and
not
-so-innocent, was unrealistic—and probably illegal, even in northern New Hampshire. What affected the poor girl, who was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy, was that the lout who’d knocked her up had
not
offered to marry her—not even under what had amounted to considerable duress.

Given the predilections of the male members of both the Saetta and Calogero families, this “duress” took the form of multiple threats of castration ending with death by drowning. Whether it was Naples or Palermo the lout sailed back to was not made clear, but no marriage proposal was ever forthcoming. Dominic’s spontaneous and heartfelt offer was the first time
anyone
had proposed to Rosie; overcome, she burst into tears at the kitchen table before Dominic could poach the shrimp in his marinara sauce. Sobbing, the distraught young woman went to bed without her dinner.

In the night, Annunziata awoke to the confusing sounds of Rosie’s miscarriage—“confusing” because, at that moment, Nunzi didn’t know if the loss of the baby was a blessing or a curse. Dominic Baciagalupo lay in his bed, listening to his second or once-removed cousin crying. The toilet kept flushing, the bathtub was filling—there must have been blood—and, over it all, came the sympathetic crooning of his mother’s most consoling voice. “Rosie, maybe it’s better this way. Now you don’t need to quit your job—not even temporarily! Now we don’t have to come up with a husband for you—not a real one
or
the imaginary kind! Listen to me, Rosie—it wasn’t a baby, not yet.”

But Dominic lay wondering, What have I done? Even an
imaginary
marriage to Rosie gave the boy a nearly constant erection. (Well, he was sixteen years old—no wonder!) When he heard that Rosie had stopped crying, young Dom held his breath. “Did Dominic hear me—did I wake him up, do you think?” the boy heard the girl ask his mother.

“Well, he sleeps like the dead,” Nunzi said, “but you did make quite a ruckus—understandably, of course.”

“He must have heard me!” the girl cried. “I have to talk to him!” she said. Dominic could hear her step out of the tub. There was the vigorous rubbing of a towel, and the sound of her bare feet on the bathroom floor.

“
I
can explain to Dom in the morning,” his mother was saying, but his not-really-a-cousin’s bare feet were already padding down the hall to the spare room.

“No! I have something to tell him!” Rosie called. Dominic could hear a drawer open; a coat hanger fell in her closet. Then the girl was in his room—she just opened his door, without knocking, and lay down on the bed beside him. He could feel her wet hair touch his face.

“I heard you,” he told her.

“I’m going to be fine,” Rosie began. “I’ll have a baby, some other day.”

“Does it hurt?” he asked her. He kept his face turned away from her on the pillow, because he had brushed his teeth too long ago—he was afraid his breath was bad.

“I didn’t think I wanted the baby until I lost it,” Rosie was saying. He couldn’t think of what to say, but she went on. “What you said to me, Dominic, was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me—I’ll never forget it.”

“I would marry you, you know—I wasn’t just saying it,” the boy said.

She hugged him and kissed his ear. She was on top of the covers, and he was under them, but he could still feel her body pressing against his back. “I’ll never have a nicer offer—I know it,” his not-really-a-cousin said.

“Maybe we could get married when I’m a little older,” Dominic suggested.

“Maybe we
will
!” the girl cried, hugging him again.

Did she mean it, the sixteen-year-old wondered, or was she just being nice?

From the bathroom, where Annunziata was draining and scrubbing the tub, their voices were audible but indistinct. What surprised Nunzi was that Dominic was talking; the boy rarely spoke. His voice was still changing—it was getting lower. But from the moment Annunziata had heard Rosie say, “Maybe we
will
!”—well, Dominic began to talk and talk, and the girl’s interjections grew fainter but lengthier. What they said was indecipherable, but they were whispering as breathlessly as lovers.

As she went on compulsively cleaning the bathtub, Annunziata no longer wondered if the miscarriage had been a blessing or a curse; the miscarriage was no longer the point. It was Rosie Calogero herself—was
she
a blessing or a curse? What had Nunzi been thinking? She’d opened her house to a pretty, intelligent (and clearly
emotional)
young woman—one who’d been rejected by her lover and banished from home by her family—without realizing what an irresistible temptation the twenty-three-year-old would be for a lonely boy coming of age.

Annunziata got off her knees in the bathroom and went down the hall to the kitchen, noting that the door to her son’s bedroom was partially open and the whispering went on and on. In the kitchen, Nunzi took a pinch of salt and threw it over her shoulder. She resisted the impulse to intrude on the two of them, but—first stepping back into the hall—she raised her voice.

“My goodness, Rosie, you must forgive me,” Annunziata announced. “I never even asked you if you wanted to
go back to Boston
!” Nunzi had tried to make this not appear to be
her
idea; she’d attempted a neutral or indifferent tone, as if she were speaking strictly out of consideration for what Rosie herself wanted to do. But the murmuring from Dominic’s bedroom was broken by a sudden, shared intake of breath.

Rosie felt the boy gasp against her chest the second she was aware of her own gasp. It was as if they had rehearsed the answer, so perfectly in unison was their response. “No!” Annunziata heard her son
and
Rosie cry; they were a chorus.

Definitely not a blessing, Nunzi was thinking, when she heard Rosie say, “I want to stay here, with you and Dominic. I want to teach at the school. I don’t
ever want
to go back to Boston!” (I can’t blame her for
that
, Annunziata realized; she knew the feeling.)

“I want Rosie to stay!” Nunzi heard her son call out.

Well, of
course
you do! Annunziata thought. But what would the repercussions of the difference in their ages be? And what would happen if and when the country went to war, and all the young men went? (But
not
her beloved Kiss of the Wolf—not with a limp like that, Nunzi knew.)

ROSIE CALOGERO KEPT
her job and did it well. The young cook also kept his job and did it well—well enough that the breakfast place started serving lunch, too. In a short time, Dominic Baciagalupo became a much better cook than his mom. And whatever the young cook made for lunch, he brought the best of it home for dinner; he fed his mother and his not-really-a-cousin very well. On occasion, mother and son would still cook together, but on most culinary matters, Annunziata yielded to Dominic.

He made meat loaf with Worcestershire sauce and provolone, and served it warm with his multipurpose marinara sauce—or cold, with applesauce. He did breaded chicken cutlets
alla parmigiana;
in Boston, his mother had told him, she’d made
veal
Parmesan, but in Berlin he couldn’t get good veal. (He substituted pork for veal—it was almost as good.) Dominic made eggplant Parmesan, too—the sizable contingent of French Canadians in Berlin knew what
aubergine
was. And Dom did a leg of lamb with lemon and garlic and olive oil; the olive oil came from a shop Nunzi knew in Boston, and Dominic used it to rub roast chicken or baste turkey, both of which he stuffed with cornbread and sausage and sage. He did steaks under the broiler, or he grilled the steaks, which he served with white beans or roasted potatoes. But he didn’t much care for potatoes, and he loathed rice. He served most of his main dishes with pasta, which he did very simply—with olive oil and garlic, and sometimes with peas or asparagus. He cooked carrots in olive oil with black Sicilian olives, and more garlic. And although he detested baked beans, Dominic would serve them; there were lumbermen and mill workers, mostly old-timers who’d lost their teeth, who ate little else. (“The baked beans and pea soup crowd,” Nunzi called them disparagingly.)

Occasionally, Annunziata could get fennel, which she and Dom cooked in a sweet tomato sauce with sardines; the sardines came in cans from another shop Nunzi knew in Boston, and mother and son mashed them to a paste in garlic and olive oil, and served them with pasta topped with bread crumbs, and browned in the oven. Dominic made his own pizza dough. He served meatless pizzas every Friday night—in lieu of fish, which neither the young cook nor his mom trusted was fresh enough in the north country. Shrimp, frozen in chunks of ice the size of cinder blocks, arrived unthawed in trains from the coast; hence Dominic trusted the shrimp. And the pizzas made more use of his beloved marinara sauce. The ricotta, Romano, Parmesan, and provolone cheese all came from Boston—as did the black Sicilian olives. The cook, who was still learning his craft, chopped a lot of parsley and put it on everything—even on the ubiquitous pea soup. (Parsley was “pure chlorophyll,” his mother had told him; it offset garlic and freshened your breath.)

Dominic kept his desserts simple, and—to Nunzi’s vexation—there was nothing remotely Sicilian about them: apple pie, and blueberry cobbler or johnnycake. In Coos County, you could always get apples and blueberries, and Dominic was good with dough.

His breakfasts were even more basic—eggs and bacon, pancakes and French toast, corn muffins and blueberry muffins and scones. In those days, he would make banana bread only when the bananas had turned brown; it was wasteful to use good bananas, his mother had told him.

There was a turkey farm in the Androscoggin Valley, roughly between Berlin and Milan, and the cook made turkey hash with peppers and onions—and a minimal amount of potatoes. “Corned beef isn’t fit for hash—it must be Irish!” Annunziata had lectured to him.

That alcoholic asshole Uncle Umberto, who would drink himself to death before the war was over, never ate a meal cooked by his not-really-a-nephew. The veteran lumberman could scarcely tolerate being a foreman to the ever-increasing numbers of female mill workers, and the women refused to tolerate Umberto at all, which only served to exacerbate the troubled foreman’s drinking. (Minor character or not, Umberto would haunt Dominic’s memory, where the not-really-an-uncle played a major role. How had Dominic’s father been Umberto’s friend? And did Umberto dislike Nunzi because she wouldn’t sleep with him? Given his mother’s banishment from Boston, and her situation in Berlin, Dominic would often torture himself with the thought that Umberto had wrongly imagined Nunzi might be rather easily seduced.) And one winter month, some years ahead of Asshole Umberto’s demise, Annunziata Saetta caught the same flu all the schoolchildren had; Nunzi died before the United States had officially entered the war.

What were Rosie Calogero and young Dom to do? They were twenty-four and seventeen, respectively; they couldn’t very well live together in the same house, not after Dominic’s mother died. Nor could they tolerate living apart—hence the not-quite-cousins had a quandary on their hands. Not even Nunzi could tell them what to do, not anymore; the young woman and noticeably younger man only did what they thought poor Annunziata would have wanted, and maybe she would have.

Young Dom simply lied about his age. He and his (not-really-a) cousin Rosie Calogero were married in mud season, 1941—just before the first big log drives of that year on the Androscoggin, north of Berlin. They were a successful, if not prosperous, young cook and a successful, though not prosperous, schoolteacher. At least their work wasn’t transient, and what need did they have to be prosperous? They were both (in their different ways) young and in love, and they wanted only one child—just one—and, in March 1942, they would have him.

Young Dan was born in Berlin—“just before mud season,” as his father always put it (mud season being more definitive than the calendar)—and almost immediately upon his birth, the boy’s hardworking parents moved away from the mill town. To the cook’s sensibilities, the stench of the paper mill was a constant insult. It seemed plausible to believe that one day the war would be over, and when it was, Berlin would grow bigger—beyond all recognition, except for the smell. But in 1942, the town was already too big and too fetid—and too full of mixed memories—for Dominic Baciagalupo. And Rosie’s prior experience in the North End had made her wary of moving back to Boston, although both the Saetta and Calogero families entreated the young cousins to come “home.”

Children know when they are not loved unconditionally. Dominic was aware that his mother had felt she was spurned. And while Rosie never appeared to resent the circumstances that had compelled her to marry a mere
boy
, she truly resented how her family had banished her to Berlin in the first place.

The entreaties by the Saetta and Calogero families fell on deaf ears. Who were they to say all was forgiven? Apparently, it was okay with them that the cousins were married, and that they had a child; but what Dominic and Rosie remembered was how it had
not
been okay for either a Saetta or a Calogero to be pregnant and
un
married.

“Let them find someone else to forgive,” was how Rosie put it. Dominic, knowing how Nunzi had felt, agreed. Boston was a bridge that had been burned behind them; more to the point, the young couple felt confident that
they
hadn’t burned it.

Surely moral condemnation wasn’t new to New England, not in 1942; and while most people might have chosen Boston over Twisted River, the decisions made by many young married couples are circumstantial. To the newly formed Baciagalupo family, Twisted River may have seemed remote and raw-looking, but there was no paper mill. The sawmill and logging-camp settlement had never kept a cook through a single mud season, and there was no school—not in a town largely inhabited by itinerants. There was, however, the potential for a school in the smaller but more permanent-seeming settlement on Phillips Brook—namely, Paris (formerly, West Dummer), which was only a few miles on the log-hauler road from the visibly scruffier settlement in Twisted River, where the logging company had heretofore refused to invest in a permanent cookhouse. According to the company, the portable, makeshift kitchen and the dining wanigans would have to do. That this made Twisted River look more like a logging camp than an actual town failed to discourage Dominic and Rosie Baciagalupo, to whom Twisted River beckoned as an opportunity—albeit a rough one.