Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  "I'm very attached to it," young Dan said.

  "Yes, I can see that--then by all means you must hang on to that name!" Mr. Leary said with genuine enthusiasm. (He felt awful; he'd not meant to insult the boy.)

  "I think Daniel Baciagalupo is a good name for a writer," the determined fifteen-year-old told his teacher. "If I write good books, won't readers go to the trouble of remembering my name?"

  "Of course they will, Danny!" Mr. Leary cried. "I'm sorry about the nom-de-plume business--it was truly insensitive of me."

  "That's okay--I know you're just trying to help me," the boy told him.

  "We should be hearing some word from Exeter any day now," Mr. Leary said anxiously; he was desperate to change the subject from the pen-name faux pas.

  "I hope so," Danny Baciagalupo said seriously. A more thoughtful expression had returned to young Dan's face; he'd stopped scowling.

  Mr. Leary, who was agitated that he'd overstepped his bounds, knew that the boy went to work at Vicino di Napoli almost every afternoon after school; the well-meaning English teacher let Danny go on his way.

  As he often did after school, Mr. Leary did some errands in the neighborhood. He still lived in the area of Northeastern University, where he'd gone to graduate school and met his wife; he took the subway to the Haymarket station every morning, and he took it home again, but he did his shopping (what little there was of it) in the North End. He'd taught at the Michelangelo for so long, virtually everyone in the neighborhood knew him; he'd taught either them or their children. Simply because they teased him--after all, he was Irish--didn't mean that they didn't like Mr. Leary, whose eccentricities amused them.

  The afternoon of his ill-conceived "bold suggestion," Mr. Leary paused in the garden at St. Leonard Church, once again fretting at the absence of an 's--obviously, to the old English teacher, the church should have been named St. Leonard's. Mr. Leary did his confessing at St. Stephen's, which had a proper's. He simply liked St. Stephen's better; it was more like a Catholic church anywhere. St. Leonard was somehow more Italian--even that familiar prayer in the garden of the church was translated into Italian. "Ora sono qui. Preghiamo insieme. Dio ti aiuta." ("Now I'm here. Let's pray together. God will help you.")

  Mr. Leary prayed that God would help Daniel Baciagalupo get a full scholarship to Exeter. And there was another thing he'd never liked about St. Leonard, Mr. Leary thought, as he was leaving the garden. He hadn't gone inside the church; there was a plaster saint inside, San Peregrine, with his right leg bandaged. Mr. Leary found the statue vulgar.

  And there was something else he preferred about St. Stephen's, the old Irishman was musing--how the church was across from the Prado, where the old men gathered to play checkers in the good weather. Mr. Leary occasionally stopped to play checkers with them. A few of those old guys were really good, but the ones who hadn't learned English irritated Mr. Leary; not learning English was either not American enough or too Italian to suit him.

  A former pupil (a fireman now) called to the old teacher outside the fire station on the corner of Hanover and Charter streets, and Mr. Leary stopped to chat with the robust fellow. In no particular order, Mr. Leary then refilled a prescription at Barone's Pharmacy; in the same location, he paused at Tosti's, the record store, where he occasionally bought a new album. The one Italian "indulgence" that Mr. Leary loved was opera--well, to be fair, he also loved the way they served the espresso at the Caffe Vittoria, and the Sicilian meat loaf Danny Baciagalupo's dad made at Vicino di Napoli.

  Mr. Leary made a small purchase at the Modern, a pastry shop on Hanover. He bought some cannoli to take home for his breakfast--the pastry cylinders were filled with sweetened ricotta cheese, nuts, and candied fruits. Mr. Leary had to confess to loving those Italian indulgences, too.

  He didn't like to look up Hanover Street in the direction of Scollay Square, though he walked in that direction to take the subway home from the Haymarket station every school day. South of the Haymarket was the Casino Theatre, and in the near vicinity of the Scollay Square subway station was the Old Howard. At both establishments, Mr. Leary tried to see the new striptease shows on the nights they opened--before the censors saw the shows and inevitably "trimmed" them. His regular attendance at these striptease joints made Mr. Leary feel ashamed, although his wife had died long ago. His wife probably wouldn't have cared that he went to see the strippers--or she would have minded this indulgence less than if he'd remarried, which he hadn't. Yet Mr. Leary had seen a few of these strippers perform so many times, in a way he occasionally felt that he was married to them. He had memorized the mole (if it was a mole) on Peaches, the so-called Queen of Shake. Lois Dufee--whose name, Mr. Leary believed, was incorrectly spelled--was six feet four and had peroxide-blond hair. Sally Rand danced with balloons, and there was another dancer who used feathers. Precisely what he saw these and other strippers do was the usual subject of what he confessed at St. Stephen's--that and the repeated acknowledgment that he didn't miss his wife, not anymore. He'd once missed her, but--like his wife herself--the missing-her part had left him.

  It was a relatively new habit of Mr. Leary's--since he had written to Exeter--that, before he finally left the North End every school day afternoon, he would stop back at the Michelangelo and see if there was anything in his mailbox. He was thinking to himself that he had a new confession to make at St. Stephen's--for it weighed on him like a sin that he'd proposed a nom de plume to the Baciagalupo boy--when he sorted through the mail, which had arrived late in the day. Yet what a good name for a writer Daniel Leary would have been! the old Irishman was thinking. Then he saw the pearl-gray envelope with the crimson lettering, and what very classy lettering it was!

  Phillips Exeter Academy

  Do you finally believe? Mr. Leary thought to himself. No prayer in a churchyard was ever wasted--even in that ultra-Italian garden at St. Leonard. "God will help you--Dio ti aiuta," the crafty old Irishman said aloud, in English and Italian (just to be on the safe side, before he opened the envelope and read the letter from the scholarship person at Exeter).

  Mr. Carlisle was coming to Boston. He wanted to visit the Michelangelo School and meet Mr. Leary. Mr. Carlisle very much looked forward to meeting Daniel Baciagalupo--and the boy's father, the cook, and the boy's stepmother, too. Mr. Leary realized that he may have overstepped his bounds, once more, by referring to the widow Del Popolo as Danny's "stepmother;" to the English teacher's knowledge, the cook and the curvy waitress weren't married.

  Naturally, Mr. Leary had overstepped himself in a few other areas as well. While young Dan had told his English teacher that his dad was reluctant to let the boy leave home and go away to school--and Carmella Del Popolo had actually cried at the very idea--Mr. Leary had already submitted his favorite student's transcripts to the venerable academy. He'd even persuaded a couple of other teachers at the Mickey to write recommendations for young Baciagalupo. Mr. Leary had virtually applied for admission on behalf of Daniel Baciagalupo--all without telling the boy's father what he was up to! Now, in Mr. Carlisle's letter, there were references to the family's need to submit financial statements--something the rather remote cook might be opposed to, it occurred to Mr. Leary, who was hoping he had not overstepped his bounds (again) to the degree that he'd utterly failed with the pen-name plan. The nom de plume had been an embarrassing mistake.

  Oh, my, Mr. Leary was thinking--time to pray more! But he courageously took the Exeter letter in hand, together with his little parcel of pastries from the Modern, and he once more sallied forth on Hanover Street--this time not to the garden in the churchyard at St. Leonard but to Vicino di Napoli, where he knew he would find the Baciagalupo boy together with the "rather remote" cook, as Mr. Leary thought of Danny's dad, and that overweight woman the widow Del Popolo.

  The voluptuous waitress had once come to a teacher's conference with Mr. Leary; her late son, Angelu, had been an open and friendly presence in Mr. Leary's seventh-grade English class. Angelu had never been among those
badly behaved boys who tormented Mr. Leary for dropping the O' from his given name. The Del Popolo boy had been quite a good reader, too--though he was easily distracted, as Mr. Leary had told his mother. Then Angelu had dropped out of school, and gone to work in that godforsaken north country, where the lad had drowned like his father before him. (Quite a convincing argument for staying in school, if Mr. Leary had ever heard one!)

  But ever since that teacher's conference with the widow Del Popolo, Mr. Leary had suffered the occasional dreams about her; probably every man who'd met that woman suffered those dreams, the old English teacher imagined. Nevertheless, her name had more than once come up in his confessions at St. Stephen's. (If Carmella Del Popolo had ever been a stripper at either the Casino Theatre or the Old Howard, they would have packed the place every night!)

  With the Exeter letter returned to its envelope, and in his haste to beat a path to the little Italian restaurant, which had become (Mr. Leary knew) one of the most popular eating places in the North End, the owlish Irishman failed to notice the giant white O' that one of those badly behaved boys at the Mickey had rubbed with chalk onto the back of the teacher's navy-blue trench coat. Mr. Leary had not worn the trench coat on his earlier errands in the neighborhood, but now he donned the coat, unseeing; thus he went on his eager but anxious way, marked from behind with a chalk-white O' as identifiable (from a block away) as a bull's-eye.

  WHEN IT WAS MUD SEASON in Coos County in 1967, Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer, was living in Iowa City, Iowa; they had a real spring in Iowa, no mud seasons there. But Danny, who was twenty-five with a two-year-old son--his wife had just left him--was very much in a mud-season frame of mind. He was also writing, at this moment, and trying to remember precisely what they had been talking about in Vicino di Napoli when Mr. Leary, with the letter from Exeter in his jacket, knocked fervently on the door, which was locked. (The staff was finishing its midafternoon meal.)

  "It's the Irishman! Let him een-a!" cried old Polcari.

  One of the young waitresses opened the door for Mr. Leary--Danny's cousin Elena Calogero. She was in her late teens or early twenties, as was the other young waitress assisting Carmella, Teresa DiMattia. Carmella's maiden name had been DiMattia. As the widow Del Popolo was fond of saying, she was a "twice-displaced Neapolitan"--the first time because she'd come as a child with her family to the North End from Sicily (her grandparents had long before moved from the vicinity of Naples), and the second time because she'd married a Sicilian.

  By her own strange logic, Carmella had gone on displacing herself, the writer Daniel Baciagalupo thought, because Angelu was Sicilian (for "Angelo") and Carmella had attached herself to Dominic. But in the chapter Danny was writing, which he'd titled "Going Away to School," he was adrift and had lost his focus.

  Too much of the crucial moment in the chapter--when the father is fighting back tears at the same time he is giving his son permission to go off to boarding school--was in the point of view of the boy's well-meaning but meddlesome English teacher.

  "Hi, Mike!" Tony Molinari had said that afternoon in the restaurant. (Or had Paul Polcari, the pizza chef, greeted Mr. Leary first? Old Joe Polcari, who used to play checkers with Mr. Leary in the Prado, always addressed the English teacher as Michael--as my dad did, Danny Baciagalupo remembered.)

  It was a bad night for Danny to try to write--perhaps this scene, especially. The wife (of three years) who'd just left him had always said she wouldn't stay, but he hadn't believed her--he hadn't wanted to believe her, as Ketchum had pointed out. Young Dan had met Katie Callahan when he was still an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire; he'd been a junior when Katie was a senior, but they'd both been models in the life-drawing classes.

  When she told him she was leaving, Katie said: "I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far."

  "What stuff is that?" he'd asked her.

  "We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads," she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa City. He wrote mostly at night, when little Joe was sleeping. Absolutely everyone, but not Katie, called the two-year-old Joe. (Like the maitre d' he was named after, the boy was never a Joseph; old Polcari had liked Giuse, or just plain Joe.)

  As for being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads, Katie meant this more literally--in her own case. His senior year in Durham, when Katie had been pregnant with Joe, she'd still modeled for the life-drawing classes and had slept with one of the art students. Now, in Iowa City--when Danny was about to graduate from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, with an M.F.A. in creative writing--Katie was still modeling for life-drawing classes, but this time she was sleeping with one of the faculty.

  Yet that wasn't why she was moving on, she'd told her husband. She had proposed marrying Danny, and having a baby, before his graduation from college. "You don't want to go to Vietnam, do you?" she'd asked him.

  Actually, Danny had thought (at the time) that he did want to go--not because he didn't oppose the war politically, though he would never be as political as Katie. (Ketchum called her a "fucking anarchist.") It was as a writer that Daniel Baciagalupo thought he should go to Vietnam; he believed he should see a war and know what one was like. Both his dad and Ketchum had told him his thinking was full of shit on that subject.

  "I didn't let you go away from me, to goddamn Exeter, to let you die in a dumb war!" Dominic had cried.

  Ketchum had threatened to come find Danny and cut a few fingers off his right hand. "Or your whole fucking hand!" Ketchum had thundered--freezing his balls off in a phone booth somewhere.

  Both men had promised young Dan's mother that they would never let her boy go to war. Ketchum said he would use his Browning knife on Danny's right hand, or on just the fingers; the knife had a foot-long blade, and Ketchum kept it very sharp. "Or I'll put a deer slug in my twelve-gauge and shoot you point-blank in one of your knees!"

  Daniel Baciagalupo would accept Katie Callahan's suggestion instead. "Go on, knock me up," Katie had said. "I'll marry you and have your kid. Just don't expect me to stay around for long--I'm not anybody's wife, and I'm not mother material, but I know how to have a baby. It's for a good cause--keeping one more body out of this fucking war. And you say you want to be a writer! Well, you have to live to do that, don't you? Fuckhead!"

  It was never the case that she deceived him; he'd known from the first what she was like. They met when they were undressing together for a life-drawing class. "What's your name?" she'd asked him. "And what do you want to be when you grow up?"

  "I'm going to be a writer," Danny said, even before he told her his name.

  "If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write," Katie Callahan said.

  "What did you say?" he asked her.

  "Rilke said that, fuckhead. If you want to be a fucking writer, you ought to read him," she said.

  Now she was leaving him because she'd met (in her words) "another stupid boy who thinks he should go to Vietnam--just to fucking see it!" Katie was going to get this other boy to knock her up. Then, one day, she would move on again--"until this fucking war is over."

  She would eventually run out of time; mathematically speaking, there were a limited number of would-be soldiers she could save from the war in this fashion. They called young dads like Danny Baciagalupo "Kennedy fathers;" in March 1963, President Kennedy had issued an executive order expanding paternity deferment. It would exist only for a little while--that having a child was a workable deferment from the draft--but it had served for Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer. He'd gone from 2-S (the student deferment) to 3-A--fathers maintaining a bona fide relationship with a child were deferred. Having a kid could get you out of the war; eventually, the fuckers would close that door, too, but Danny had walked right through it. Whether it would work or not for this other "stupid boy" she had
met--well, at the time, not even Katie could say. She was leaving, anyway, whether or not she made a baby for the new would-be soldier, and regardless of how many more babies she would or wouldn't get to make for such a noble cause.

  "Let me see if I have this right," were among Danny's last words to his departing wife, who'd never really been a wife, and who had no further interest in being a mother.

  "If I stay any longer, fuckhead, the two-year-old is going to remember me," Katie had said. (She'd actually called her own child "the two-year-old.")

  "His name's Joe," Danny had reminded her. That was when he'd said: "Let me see if I have this right. You're not just an anti-war activist and a sexual anarchist, you're also this radical chick who specializes in serial baby making for draft dodgers--have I got that right?"

  "Put it in writing, fuckhead," Katie had suggested; and these were her last words to her husband: "Maybe it'll sound better in writing."

  Both Ketchum and his dad had warned him. "I think letting me cut a few fingers off your right hand would be easier, and less painful in the long run," Ketchum had said. "How about just your fucking trigger finger? They won't draft you, I'll bet, if you can't squeeze a trigger."

  Dominic had taken a dislike to Katie Callahan on the mere evidence of the first photograph Daniel showed him.

  "She looks way too thin," the cook commented, scowling at the photo. "Does she ever eat anything?" (He should talk! Danny had thought; both Danny and his dad were thin, and they ate a lot.) "Are her eyes really that blue?" his father asked.

  "Actually, her eyes are even bluer," Danny told his dad.

  What is it about these preternaturally small women? Dominic found himself thinking, remembering his not-really-a-cousin Rosie. Had his beloved Daniel succumbed to one of those little-girl women whose petite appearance was deceiving? Even that first photograph of Katie conveyed to the cook the kind of childlike woman some men feel compelled to protect. But Katie didn't need protection; she didn't want it, either.