Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  They could hear Carmella as the heavy woman rose dripping from the bathtub. "I know boys Danny's age--they need some privacy!" she said.

  Yes, young Dan thought--not fully understanding that he would soon need more privacy from his dad and Carmella. After all, Danny was almost a teenager. While they wouldn't live together for long in the cold-water flat on Charter Street with the big bathtub in the small kitchen and an absurdly small water closet (with just a curtain, instead of a door)--the so-called WC contained only a toilet and a diminutive sink with a mirror above it--the apartment they would move into wasn't much larger, or half private enough for a teenage Daniel Baciagalupo, though it did have hot water. It would be another walk-up on what would one day be called Wesley Place--an alley that ran alongside the Caffe Vittoria--and in addition to having two bedrooms, there was a full-size bathroom with both a tub and a shower (and an actual door), and the kitchen was large enough for a table with six chairs.

  Still, the bedrooms were next to each other; in the North End, there was nothing they could afford that was at all comparable to the spaciousness of the second floor of the cookhouse in Twisted River. And Danny was already too old to overhear his father and Carmella trying to keep their lovemaking quiet--certainly after the boy, with his excitable imagination, had heard and seen his dad and Injun Jane doing it.

  The cook and Carmella, with young Dan increasingly aware of himself as the surrogate Angel, had an acceptable living arrangement, but it was not one that would last. It would soon be time for the teenager to create a little distance between himself and his dad--and, as he grew older, Danny was made more uncomfortable by another problem.

  If he had once suffered from a presexual state of arousal, first inspired by Jane and then by Six-Pack Pam, the teenager could find no relief from his deepening desire for Carmella Del Popolo--his dad's "Injun replacement," as Ketchum called her. Danny's attraction to Carmella was a more troubling problem than the privacy issues.

  "You need to get away," Ketchum would write to young Dan, although the boy truly liked his life in the North End. In fact, he loved it, especially in comparison to the life he'd had in Twisted River--at the Paris Manufacturing Company School, in particular.

  The Michelangelo School thought little of the education Danny Baciagalupo had received among those Phillips Brook bums--those West Dummer dolts, as Ketchum called them. The authorities at the Mickey made Danny repeat a grade; he was a year older than most of his classmates. By seventh grade, when the would-be writer first mentioned Ketchum's Exeter idea to his English teacher, Mr. Leary, the Irishman already considered Danny Baciagalupo to be among his very best students. By the time the boy was taking eighth-grade English, Danny was far and away Mr. Leary's teacher's pet.

  Several of Mr. Leary's former pupils had gone on to attend Boston Latin. A few had attended Roxbury Latin--in the old Irishman's opinion, a somewhat snooty Anglo school. Two boys Mr. Leary had taught had gone to Milton, and one to Andover, but no one from Mr. Leary's English classes had ever gone to Exeter; it was farther afield from Boston than those other good schools, and Mr. Leary knew it was a very good school. Might it have been a feather in Mr. Leary's cap if Daniel Baciagalupo were accepted at Exeter?

  Mr. Leary felt bedeviled by most of the other seventh-and eighth-grade boys at the Mickey. It was notable that Danny didn't join in the teasing his teacher took, because teasing--and other, harsher forms of harassment--reminded the boy of his Paris school experience.

  Mr. Leary was red-faced from drink; he had a potato-shaped nose, the veritable image of the alleged staple of his countrymen's diet. Wild white tufts of hair, like fur, stuck out above his ears, but Mr. Leary was otherwise bald--with a pronounced dent in the top of his head. He looked like a partially defeathered owl. "As a child," Mr. Leary told all his students, "I was hit on the head by an unabridged dictionary, which doubtless gave me my abundant love of words."

  Both the seventh-and eighth-grade boys called him "O," for Mr. Leary had dropped the O' from his name. These badly behaved boys wrote no end of O's on the blackboard when Mr. Leary was out of the classroom. They called to him, "O!"--but only when his back was turned.

  Why this tormented the former Mr. O'Leary so, Danny didn't understand, nor did Daniel Baciagalupo think it was any big deal for his teacher to have dropped the O' from his name. (Just look at Angel Pope, and everything he had dropped. Did the Italian kids think that only the Irish occasionally tried to make less of their ethnicity?)

  But Mr. Leary's foremost reason for finding Daniel Baciagalupo such an excellent student was that the boy loved to write, and he wrote and wrote. In the seventh and eighth grade at the Mickey, Mr. Leary had never seen anything quite like it. The boy seemed possessed--or at least obsessed.

  True, it would not infrequently disturb Mr. Leary to read what young Dan would write about, but his stories--many of them farfetched, most of them violent, and all of them with an undue amount of sexual content, totally inappropriate for a teenager--were invariably well-written and clear. The kid simply had a gift for storytelling; Mr. Leary just wanted to help him master the grammar, and all the rest of the mechanics of writing. At Exeter, Mr. Leary had heard, they were sticklers for grammar. They made a nuts-and-bolts business out of writing there--you had to write every day, about something.

  When Mr. Leary wrote to the admissions people at Exeter, he made no mention of the subject matter of young Dan's creative writing. Exeter was not much interested in so-called creative writing, anyway; the essay, Mr. Leary assumed, was all-important there. And the Michelangelo School, where Daniel Baciagalupo was such an exceptional student, was in a neighborhood of Italo-Americans. (Mr. Leary was careful not to use the immigrant word, though this was very much his meaning.) These people were prone to laziness and exaggeration, Mr. Leary wanted Exeter to know. The Baciagalupo boy was "unlike the rest."

  To listen to most of these Italians, Mr. Leary suggested, you would get the impression that they had all lived with rats (and other appalling conditions) in the steerage class of the ships that brought them to America--all of them orphans, or otherwise landing on the docks alone, and with no more than a few miserable lira to their names. And while many of the teenage girls were beautiful, they would all become hopelessly fat as women; this was because of the pasta and their unrestrained appetites. The latter, Mr. Leary suspected, were not limited to overeating. Truth be told, these Italians were not as industrious as those hardworking earlier immigrants--the Irish--and while Mr. Leary didn't exactly say these things to the admissions people at Exeter, he imparted no small amount of his prejudices while singing in praise of Daniel Baciagalupo's talents and character, not to mention citing the "difficulties" the boy had faced and overcome "at home."

  There was a single parent--"a rather uncommunicative cook," as Mr. Leary described him. This cook lived with a woman Mr. Leary would describe as "a widow who has suffered multiple tragedies"--to wit, if ever there were a worthy candidate for the enviable position of a full-scholarship student at Exeter, Daniel Baciagalupo was his name! Cleverly, Mr. Leary was not only aware of his prejudices; he wanted to be sure that Exeter was aware of his prejudices, too. He intended to make the North End of Boston sound like a place Danny needed to be rescued from. Mr. Leary wanted someone from Exeter to come see the Michelangelo School--even if this meant seeing how disrespected Mr. Leary was there. For surely if a scholarship person met Daniel Baciagalupo in the company of those badly behaved boys at the Mickey--and, just as important, saw the would-be writer in the context of that noisy neighborhood restaurant where both the boy's father and the tragic widow worked--well, it would simply be obvious how Danny Baciagalupo stood out. The boy did stand out, but young Dan would have stood out anywhere--not only in the North End--though Mr. Leary didn't say this. As it would turn out, he said enough.

  His letter had its desired effect. "Get a load of this guy!" (meaning Mr. Leary with his abundant prejudices) the first person in the admissions office at Exeter must have said. The
letter was passed on to another reader, and to another; a lot of people at Exeter probably read that letter, among them the very "scholarship person" Mr. Leary had in mind all along.

  And that person doubtless said, "I have to see this"--meaning not only the Mickey, and Mr. Leary, but also the underprivileged circumstances of Daniel Baciagalupo's Italo-American life.

  There was much more that Mr. Leary didn't say. What need was there for Exeter to know about the boy's outrageous imagination? What had happened to the father in that one story? He'd been lamed (forever crippled) by a bear--the bear had eaten one of the father's feet--but the maimed man had somehow managed to beat back the bear with a frying pan! This same maimed man lost his wife in a square-dancing accident. There'd been a square dance outdoors, on a dock; the dock had collapsed, and all the dancers were drowned. The man who'd lost his foot to the bear had been spared because he couldn't dance! (He was just watching from afar, if Mr. Leary remembered the story correctly--it was all preposterous stuff, but well-written, very well-written.)

  There was even a friend of this same fictional family who'd been brain-damaged by a corrupt cop. The victim was an unlikely lumberjack--"unlikely," in Mr. Leary's opinion, because the lumberjack was described as a great reader. Even more improbable, he'd been so badly beaten by the cop that he'd forgotten how to read! And the women in Daniel Baciagalupo's stories--Lord have mercy, thought Mr. Leary.

  There was a native woman from a local Indian tribe--the story about the maimed man was set in the boondocks of northern New Hampshire and featured a dance hall where there was no dancing. (Come on, Mr. Leary had thought when he'd read the story--what would be the point of that?) But the story had been well-written, as always, and the Indian woman weighed three or four hundred pounds, and her hair hung below her waist; this caused a retarded boy (the child of the father who'd been attacked by the bear) to mistake the Indian for another bear! The unfortunate retard actually thought that the same bear had returned to eat the rest of his dad, when in truth the Indian woman was having sex with the cripple--in what Mr. Leary could only imagine must have been the superior position.

  But when the teacher had said this to Danny ("I gather the Indian woman was in the--ah, well--superior position"), the Baciagalupo boy looked uncomprehending. The young writer had not understood.

  "No, she was just on top," Danny had answered Mr. Leary. The teacher had smiled adoringly. In Mr. Leary's eyes, Daniel Baciagalupo was a genius-in-progress; the wonder boy could do no wrong.

  Yet what had happened to the overweight Indian woman was horrendous. The retarded boy had killed her; he'd hit her with the exact same frying pan his father had used as a weapon against the bear! Young Baciagalupo's powers of description were perhaps at their best when he rendered the reposeful posture of the naked, dead Indian woman. The thoughtful father had quickly covered her exposed crotch with a pillow--perhaps to spare his damaged son any further misunderstanding. But the retarded boy had already seen more than his limited intelligence could stand. For years, he would be haunted by the sight of the slain woman's huge breasts--how they had lifelessly slumped into the hollows of her armpits. How did the kid keep coming up with details like those? Mr. Leary would wonder. (Mr. Leary would be haunted by the naked, dead Indian woman, too.)

  But why say anything to Exeter about those questionable elements of the boy's imagination, which had even upset Mr. Leary? Those extreme details were mere indulgences the more mature writer would one day outgrow. For example, the woman who wore a man's wool-flannel shirt, without a bra; she had raped the retarded boy, after she'd consumed an entire six-pack of beer! Why did Exeter need to know about her? (Mr. Leary wished he could forget her.) Or the woman in one of the cold-water tenement buildings on Charter Street, near the bathhouse and the Copps Hill Burying Ground--as Mr. Leary remembered her, she had pretty big breasts, too. This was another Baciagalupo story, and the woman on Charter Street was referred to as the stepmother of the retarded boy--the same boy from that earlier story, but he was no longer called retarded. (In the new story, the boy was described as "just plain damaged.")

  The father with the eaten foot had confusing dreams--both of the bear and of the slain Indian woman. Given the voluptuousness of the damaged boy's stepmother, Mr. Leary suspected the father of having a preternatural attraction to overweight women; naturally, it was entirely possible that the young writer found big women alluring. (Mr. Leary was beginning to feel the unwelcome allure of such women himself.)

  And the stepmother was Italian, thus inviting Mr. Leary's prejudices to come into play; he looked for signs of laziness and exaggeration in the woman, finding (to his enormous satisfaction) a perfect example of the aforementioned "unrestrained appetites" Mr. Leary had long held Italian women accountable for. The woman overbathed herself.

  She was so eccentrically devoted to her baths that an oversize bathtub was the centerpiece of the cold-water flat's undersize kitchen, where four pasta pots were constantly simmering--her bathwater was heated on the gas stove. The placement of the bathtub created quite a privacy problem for the indulgent woman's damaged stepson, who had bored a hole in his bedroom door, which opened into the kitchen.

  What further damage was done to the boy by spying on his naked stepmother--well, Mr. Leary could only imagine! And, to talk about young Baciagalupo's inventiveness with details, when the voluptuary shaved her armpits, she left a small, spade-shaped patch of hair (in one armpit) purposely unshaven, "like an elf's meticulously trimmed goatee," young Dan had written.

  "In which armpit?" Mr. Leary had asked the beginning writer.

  "The left one," Danny answered, without a moment's hesitation.

  "Why the left one, and not the right?" the English teacher asked.

  The Baciagalupo boy looked thoughtful, as if he were trying to remember a rather complicated sequence of events. "She's right-handed," Danny answered. "She's not as skillful with the razor when she's shaving with her left hand. She shaves her right armpit with her left hand," he explained to his teacher.

  "Those are good details, too," Mr. Leary told him. "I think you should put those details in the story."

  "Okay, I will," young Dan said; he liked Mr. Leary, and did his best to protect his English teacher from the torments of the other boys.

  The other boys didn't bother Danny. Sure, there were bullies at the Mickey, but they weren't as tough as those Paris Manufacturing Company thugs. If some bully in the North End gave Danny Baciagalupo any trouble, young Dan just told his older cousins. The bully would get the shit kicked out of him by a Calogero or a Saetta; the older cousins could have kicked the shit out of those West Dummer dolts, too.

  Danny didn't show his writing to anyone but Mr. Leary. Of course the boy wrote rather long letters to Ketchum, but those letters weren't fiction; no one in his right mind would make up a story and try to pass it off on Ketchum. Besides, it was for pouring out his heart that young Dan needed Ketchum. Many of the letters to Ketchum began, "You know how much I love my dad, I really do, but ..." and so on.

  Like father, like son: The cook had kept things from his son, and Danny (in grades seven and eight, especially) was of an age to keep things back. He would be thirteen when he began grade seven and first met Mr. Leary; the Baciagalupo boy would be fifteen when he graduated from eighth grade. He was both fourteen and fifteen when he showed his English teacher the stories he made up with ever-increasing compulsion.

  Despite Mr. Leary's misgivings about the subject matter--meaning the sexual content, chiefly--the wise old owl of an Irishman never said an unpraiseworthy word to his favorite pupil. The Baciagalupo boy was going to be a writer; in Mr. Leary's mind, there was no doubt about it.

  The English teacher kept his fingers crossed about Exeter; if the boy was accepted, Mr. Leary hoped the school would be so rigorous that it might save young Baciagalupo from the more unsavory aspects of his imagination. At Exeter, maybe the mechanics of writing would be so thoroughly demanding and time-consuming that Danny would become a m
ore intellectual writer. (Meaning what, exactly? Not quite such a creative one?)

  Mr. Leary himself was not entirely sure what he meant by the mystifying thought that becoming a more intellectual writer might make Danny a less creative one--if that was what Mr. Leary thought--but the teacher's intentions were good. Mr. Leary wanted all the best for the Baciagalupo boy, and while he would never criticize a word young Dan had written, the old English teacher ventured out on a limb in making a bold suggestion. (Well, it wasn't that bold a suggestion; it merely seemed bold to Mr. Leary.) This happened to be in that almost-mud-season time of Danny's eighth-grade year--in March 1957, when Danny had just turned fifteen, and the boy and his teacher were waiting to hear from Exeter. That Mr. Leary made the aforementioned "bold suggestion" would (years later) prompt Daniel Baciagalupo to write his own version of Ketchum's periodic claim.

  "All the shit seems to happen in mud season!" Ketchum regularly complained, in seeming refutation of the fact that the cook and his beloved cousin Rosie were married in mud season, and young Dan had been born just before it. (Of course, there was no actual mud season in Boston.)

  "Danny?" Mr. Leary asked tentatively--almost as if he weren't sure of the boy's name. "Down the road, as a writer, you might want to consider a nom de plume."

  "A what?" the fifteen-year-old asked.

  "A pen name. Some writers choose their own names, instead of publishing under their given names. It's called a nom de plume in French," the boy's teacher explained. Mr. Leary felt his heart rise to his throat, because young Baciagalupo suddenly looked as if he'd been slapped.

  "You mean lose the Baciagalupo," Danny said.

  "It's just that there are easier names to say, and remember," Mr. Leary told his favorite pupil. "I thought that, since your father changed his name--and the widow Del Popolo hasn't become a Baciagalupo, has she?--well, I merely imagined that you might not be so terribly attached to the Baciagalupo name yourself."