Last Night in Twisted River (18 page)

“Cops don’t usually work with their children,” one of the cooks said to the old man. This cook was covered with flour—not just his apron but his hands and bare forearms were a dusty white. (The pizza chef, probably, Dominic thought.)

“I’m not a cop, I’m a cook,” Dominic told them. The two younger men and the old one laughed with relief; the two women and the kid went back to work. “But I have something to show you,” Dominic said. The cook was fishing around in Angel’s wallet. He couldn’t make up his mind what to show them first—the Boston transit pass with Angelù Del Popolo’s name and date of birth, or the photograph of the pretty but plump woman. He chose the streetcar and subway pass with the dead boy’s actual name, but before Dominic could decide which of the men to show the pass to, the old man saw the photo in the open wallet and grabbed the wallet out of Dominic’s hands.

“Carmella!” the maître d’ cried.

“There was a
boy,”
Dominic began, as the two cooks hovered over the picture under plastic in the wallet. “Maybe she’s his mother.”

Dominic got no further. The pizza chef hid his face in his hands, completely whitening both cheeks. “An-geh-LOO!” he wailed.

“No! No! No!” the old man sang, grabbing Dominic by both shoulders and shaking him.

The other cook (clearly the principal or first chef) held his heart, as if he’d been stabbed.

The pizza chef, as white-faced as a clown, lightly touched young Dan’s hand with his flour-covered fingers. “What has happened to Angelù?” he asked the boy in such a gentle way that Dominic knew the man must have a child Daniel’s age, or that he’d had one. Both cooks were about ten years older than Dominic.

“Angel drowned,” Danny told them all.

“It was an accident,” his father spoke up.

“Angelù was-a no fisherman!” the maître d’ lamented.

“It was a logging accident,” Dominic explained. “There was a river drive, and the boy slipped under the logs.”

The young women and the kid about Angel’s age had bolted—Danny hadn’t seen them leave. (It would turn out that they had fled no farther than the kitchen.)

“Angelù used to work here, after school,” the old man was saying, to Danny. “His mama, Carmella—she works here now.”

The other cook had stepped closer, holding out his hand to Dominic. “Antonio Molinari,” the principal chef said, somberly shaking Dominic’s hand.

“Dominic Baciagalupo,” the cook replied. “I was the cook in the logging camp. This is my son, Daniel.”

“Giusé Polcari,” the old man said to young Dan with downcast eyes. “Nobody calls me Giuseppe. I also like just plain Joe.” Pointing to the pizza chef, old Polcari said: “This is my son Paul.”

“You can call me Dan or Danny,” the boy told them. “Only my dad calls me Daniel.”

Tony Molinari had gone to the door of the restaurant; he was watching the passersby on Hanover Street. “Here she comes!” he said. “I see Carmella!” The two cooks fled into their kitchen, leaving the bewildered Baciagalupos with old Polcari.

“You gotta tell her—I no can-a do it,” Giusé (or just plain Joe) was saying. “I introduce you,” the maître d’ said, pushing Dominic closer to the restaurant’s door; Danny was holding his dad’s hand. “Her husband drowned, too—they were a true-love story!” old Polcari was telling them. “But he was a fisherman—they drown a
lot.”

“Does Carmella have other children?” Dominic asked. Now the three of them could see her—a full-figured woman with a beautiful face and jet-black hair. She was not yet forty; maybe she was Ketchum’s age or a little older. Big breasts, big hips, big smile—only the smile was bigger than Injun Jane’s, young Dan would notice.

“Angelù was her one and only,” Giusé answered Dominic. Danny let go of his dad’s hand, because old Polcari was trying to give him something. It was Angel’s wallet, which felt wet and cold—the transit pass stuck out of it crookedly. Danny opened the wallet and put the pass back in place, just as Carmella Del Popolo walked in the door.

“Hey, Joe—am I late?” she asked the old man cheerfully.

“Not you, Carmella—you-a always on time!”

Maybe this was one of those moments that made Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer—his first and inevitably awkward attempt at
foreshadowing
. The boy suddenly saw into his father’s future, if not so clearly into his own. Yes, Carmella was a little older and certainly plumper than the woman in the photo Angel had carried in his wallet, but in no one’s estimation had she lost her looks. At twelve, Danny may have been too young to notice girls—or the girls themselves were too young to get his attention—but the boy already had an interest in
women
. (In Injun Jane, surely—in Six-Pack Pam, definitely.)

Carmella Del Popolo forcefully reminded young Dan of Jane. Her olive-brown skin was not unlike Jane’s reddish-brown coloring; her slightly flattened nose and broad cheekbones were the same, as were her dark-brown eyes—like Jane’s, Carmella’s eyes were almost as black as her hair. And wouldn’t Carmella soon have a
sadness
like Jane’s inside her? Jane had lost a son, too, and Carmella—like Dominic Baciagalupo—had already lost an adored spouse.

It was not that Danny could see, at that moment, the slightest indication that his dad was attracted to Carmella, or she to him; it was rather that the boy knew one thing for certain. Angel’s mother was the next woman his father would be attached to—for as long as the North End kept them safe from Constable Carl.

“You gotta sit down, Carmella,” old Polcari was saying, as he retreated toward the kitchen, where the others were hiding. “This is that cook and his son, from up-a north
—you
know, Angelù’s buddies.”

The woman, who was already radiant, brightened even more. “You are
Dominic?”
she cried, pressing the cook’s temples with her palms. By the time she turned to Danny, which she did quickly, Giusé Polcari had disappeared with the other cowards. “And you must be
Danny!”
Carmella said with delight. She hugged him, hard—not as hard as Jane had hugged him, at times, but hard enough to make young Dan think of Jane again.

Dominic only now realized why there’d been so little money in Angel’s wallet, and why they’d found next to nothing among the dead boy’s few things. Angel had been sending his earnings to his mother. The boy had begged rides to the post office with Injun Jane; he’d told Jane that the postage to Canada was complicated, but he’d been buying money orders for his mom. He’d clearly been faithful about writing her, too, for she knew how the cook and his son had befriended her boy. All at once, she asked about Ketchum.

“Is Mr. Ketchum with you?” Carmella said to Danny, the boy’s face held warmly in her hands. (Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say—as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.) But it was then that Carmella seemed to notice there was no one else in the dining room, and no one visible in the kitchen; the poor woman took this to mean that they intended to surprise her. Maybe her Angelù had made an unannounced visit to see her? Were the others hiding her dearest one in the kitchen, all of them managing to keep deathly quiet? “An-geh-LOO!” Carmella called. “Are you and Mr. Ketchum here, too? An-geh-LOO?”

Years later, when he’d grown accustomed to being a writer, Daniel Baciagalupo would think it was only natural, what happened then, back in the kitchen. They were not cowards; they were just people who loved Carmella Del Popolo, and they couldn’t bear to see her hurt. But, at the time, young Dan had been shocked. It was Paul Polcari, the pizza chef, who started it. “An-geh-LOO!” he wailed.

“No! No! No!” his elderly father sang.

“Angelù, Angelù,” Tony Molinari called, more softly.

The young women and the kid about Angel’s age were crooning the dead boy’s name, too. This chorus from the kitchen was not what Carmella had hoped to hear; they made such a dismal howl that the poor woman looked to Dominic for some explanation, seeing only the sorrow and panic in his face. Danny couldn’t look at Angel’s mom—it would have been like looking at Injun Jane a half-second before the skillet struck her.

A chair had been pulled out from the table nearest them—old Polcari’s departing gesture, even before he had bid Carmella to sit down—and Carmella not so much sat in the chair as she collapsed into it, the olive-brown color abandoning her face. She had suddenly seen her son’s wallet in young Dan’s small hands, but when she’d reached and felt how wet and cold it was, she reeled backward and half fell into the chair. The cook was quick to hold her there, kneeling beside her with his arm around her shoulders, and Danny instinctively knelt at her feet.

She wore a silky black skirt and a pretty white blouse—the blouse would soon be spotted with her tears—and when she looked into Danny’s dark eyes, she must have seen her son as he’d once looked to her, because she pulled the boy’s head into her lap and held him there as if
he
were her lost Angelù.

“Not Angelù!” she cried.

One of the chefs in the kitchen now rhythmically beat on a pasta pot with a wooden spoon; like an echo, he called out, “Not Angelù!”

“I’m so sorry,” young Dan heard his dad say.

“He drowned,” the boy said, from Carmella’s lap; he felt her hold his head more tightly there, and once again the immediate future appeared to him. For as long as he lived with his dad and Carmella Del Popolo, Danny Baciagalupo would be her surrogate Angelù. (“You can’t blame the boy for wanting to go away to school,” Ketchum would one day write his old friend. “Blame me, if you want to, Cookie, but don’t blame Danny.”)

“Not
drowned
!” Carmella screamed over the clamor from the kitchen. Danny couldn’t hear what his father was whispering in the grieving woman’s ear, but he could feel her body shaking with sobs, and he managed to slightly turn his head in her lap—enough to see the mourners come out of the kitchen. No pots and pans, or wooden spoons—they brought just themselves, their faces streaked with tears. (The face of Paul, the pizza chef, was streaked with flour, too.) But Daniel Baciagalupo already had an imagination; he didn’t need to hear what his dad was saying in Carmella’s ear. The
accident
word was surely part of it—it was a world of accidents, both the boy and his dad already knew.

“These are good people,” old Polcari was saying; this sounded like a prayer. It was later that Danny realized Joe Polcari had not been praying; he’d been speaking to Carmella about the cook and his son “from up-a north.” Indeed, the boy and his father were the ones who walked Carmella home. (She had needed to slump against them, at times close to swooning, but she was easy to support—she had to be more than a hundred pounds lighter than Jane, and Carmella was
alive.)

But even before they left Vicino di Napoli that afternoon—when Danny’s head was still held fast in the distraught mother’s lap—Daniel Baciagalupo recognized another trick that writers know. It was something he already knew how to do, though he would not apply it to his method of writing for a few more years. All writers must know how to distance themselves, to
detach
themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this—even at twelve. With his face secure in Carmella’s warm grip, the boy simply
removed
himself from this tableau; from the vantage of the pizza oven, perhaps, or at least as far removed from the mourners as if he were standing, unseen, on the kitchen side of the serving counter, Danny saw how the staff of Vicino di Napoli had gathered around the seated Carmella and his kneeling dad.

Old Polcari stood behind Carmella, with one hand on the nape of her neck and the other hand on his heart. His son Paul, the pizza chef, stood in his aura of flour with his head bowed, but he had symmetrically positioned himself at Carmella’s hip—perfectly opposite to the hip where Dominic knelt beside her. The two young women—waitresses, still learning their craft from Carmella—knelt on the floor directly behind young Dan, who, from the distance of the kitchen, could see himself on his knees with his head held in Carmella’s lap. The other cook—the first or principal chef, Tony Molinari—stood slightly apart from the rest of them with his arm around the narrow shoulders of the kid about Angel’s age. (He was the busboy, Danny would soon learn; being a busboy would be Danny’s first job at Vicino di Napoli.)

But at this exact and sorrowful moment, Daniel Baciagalupo took in the whole tableau from afar. He would begin writing in the first-person voice, as many young writers do, and the tortured first sentence of one of his early novels would refer (in part) to this virtual Pietà on that April Sunday in Vicino di Napoli. In the novice writer’s own words: “I became a member of a family I was unrelated to—long before I knew nearly enough about my own family, or the dilemma my father had faced in my early childhood.”

“LOSE THE BACIAGALUPO,”
Ketchum had written to them both. “In case Carl comes looking for you—better change your last name, just to be safe.” But Danny had refused. Daniel Baciagalupo was proud of his name—he even took some rebellious pride in what his father had told him of his name’s history. All the years those West Dummer kids had called him a Guinea and a Wop made young Dan feel that he’d
earned
his name; now, in the North End (in an Italian neighborhood), why would he want to lose the Baciagalupo? Besides, the cowboy—
if
he came looking—would be trying to find a
Dominic
Baciagalupo, not a Daniel.

Dominic didn’t feel the same way about his surname. To him, Baciagalupo had always been a made-up name. After all, Nunzi had named him—he’d been
her
Kiss of the Wolf, when in reality it would have made more sense for him to have been a Saetta, which he half was, or for his mother to have called him a Capodilupo, if only to shame his irresponsible father. (“That-a no-good fuck Gennaro,” as old Joe Polcari would one day refer to the flirtatious, fired busboy who’d disappeared—only God knew where.)