Last Night in Twisted River

by John Irving

  Over a year ago, Joe had gotten a girl in trouble at Northfield Mount Hermon. Because his father was famous--for a writer, Danny Angel was very recognizable--and because Joe already knew something about the subject of the novel his dad was writing, the boy hadn't asked for his father's help. Those anti-abortion people picketed most clinics or doctors' offices where you could get an abortion; Joe didn't want his dad taking him and the unfortunate girl to one of those places where the protesters were. What if some so-called right-to-lifer recognized his famous father?

  "Smart boy," Ketchum said to Joe, when Danny's son had written him. Young Joe hadn't wanted to tell his grandfather, either, but Ketchum insisted that the cook come along with them.

  They'd driven to an abortion clinic in Vermont together. Ketchum and the cook sat up front, in the cook's car; Joe and the sad, frightened girl were in the backseat. It had been an awkward situation because the couple were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend. They'd broken up almost a month before the girl discovered she was pregnant, but they both knew Joe was the baby's father; they were doing the right thing (in the cook and Ketchum's opinion), but it was difficult for them.

  Ketchum tried to console them, but--Ketchum being Ketchum--it came out a little clumsily. The logger said more than he meant to. "There's one thing to be happy about," he told the miserable-looking couple in the backseat. "When the same thing happened to your dad and a girl he knew, Joe, abortion wasn't legal--and it wasn't necessarily safe."

  Had the old woodsman forgotten the cook was in the car?

  "So that's why you took Danny and that DiMattia girl to Maine!" Tony Angel cried. "I always thought so! You said you wanted to show them the Kennebec--'the last great river-driving river,' you called it, or some such bullshit. But that DiMattia girl was so dumb--she told Carmella you'd driven her and Danny somewhere east of Bangor. I knew Bangor was nowhere near the Kennebec!"

  Ketchum and the cook had argued the whole way to the abortion clinic, where there'd been picketers; Joe had been right not to involve his famous father with the protesters. And all the way home--the ex-girlfriend and Joe were spending the weekend in Brattleboro with the boy's grandfather--Joe had held the girl in the backseat, where she sobbed and sobbed. She couldn't have been older than sixteen--seventeen, tops. "You're going to be all right," Joe, who was not yet seventeen, kept saying to the poor kid. Ketchum and the cook hoped so.

  And now the two older men had stopped themselves in the last chapter of East of Bangor--Danny Angel's abortion novel, as it would be called. The cook could see that there was something of Ketchum in the character who drove the boy (and his first pregnant cousin) to Maine. By the description, the friendly older man also reminded the cook of Tony Molinari; Danny Angel calls him the principal chef in the North End restaurant where the two pregnant cousins work as waitresses. It's the way the man handles the truck they drive to Maine in--that was what led Tony Angel to see the so-called chef as "the Ketchum character." The Molinari likeness was a disguise Danny gave to the character, because of course the writer didn't know, when he was finishing the final draft of his abortion novel, that Ketchum had already told his dad about Danny getting the DiMattia girl pregnant--and how the logger drove the two of them to an orphanage somewhere east of Bangor, Maine.

  The book was dedicated to those two chefs Danny Angel and his dad both loved, Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari--"Un abbraccio for Tony M. and Paul P.," the author had written, allowing the two men some measure of privacy. ("An embrace" for them from the former busboy/waiter/substitute pizza and sous chef in Vicino di Napoli.) Both those chefs, the cook knew, were retired; Vicino di Napoli was gone, and another restaurant with another name had taken its place in North Square.

  Tony Angel still drove periodically to the North End to do a little shopping. He would meet Molinari and Paul at the Caffe Vittoria for some espresso. They always assured him that Carmella was doing well; she seemed reasonably content with another fella. It came as no surprise to the cook that Carmella would end up with someone; she was both beautiful and lovable.

  East of Bangor might be a difficult novel for young Joe to read, whenever he got around to it; Joe had no time to read his father's novels when he was at Northfield Mount Hermon. To the cook's knowledge, his grandson had read only one of his dad's books: The Kennedy Fathers, of course--if only in the hope he would learn a little about what his mother had been like. (Given Ketchum's opinion of the Katie character, what young Joe would learn about his mother from that novel "wasn't worth a pinch of coon shit"--according to the logger.)

  WELL, HERE I AM--back to worrying about young Joe again, and all that that leads to--the cook was thinking. He looked under the damp dish towels covering his pizza dough; the dough was ready to punch down, which the cook did. Tony Angel wet the dishcloths once more; he wrung them only partially dry before re-covering the bowls for his pizza dough's second rise.

  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, ne 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

  FROM 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 drive
way, 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 le
thal 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?