Last Night in Twisted River (22 page)

By her own strange logic, Carmella had gone on
displacing
herself, the writer Daniel Baciagalupo thought, because
Angelù
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 maître d’ he was named after, the boy was never a Joseph; old Polcari had liked Giusé, 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.

The first time they met, the cook couldn’t look at her—it was the same way he had treated
(still
treated) Danny’s aunt Filomena. “I should never have shown you your mother’s photographs,” Dominic said, when Danny told him he was marrying Katie.

I suppose I should have married some nice
fat
person! Daniel Baciagalupo found himself thinking, instead of working ahead on the chapter he was writing.

But the war in Vietnam would drag on, and on; Nixon would win the ’68 election by promising voters an end to the war, but the war would continue until 1975. On April 23, 1970, issuing his own executive order, President Nixon put an end to the 3-A paternity deferment for new fathers—if the child was conceived on or after that date. In the last five years of the war, another 23,763 U.S. soldiers would be killed, and Daniel Baciagalupo would finally come to realize that he should have thanked Katie Callahan for saving his life.

“So what if she
was
a serial baby maker for draft dodgers,” Ketchum would write to Danny. “She saved your ass, sure as shit. And I wasn’t kidding—I would have chopped off your right hand to spare you getting your balls blown off, if she hadn’t saved you. A finger or two, anyway.”

But that April night in ’67, when he kept trying to write in the rain in Iowa City, Daniel Baciagalupo preferred to think that it was his two-year-old, little Joe, who’d saved him.

Probably no one could have saved Katie. Many years later, Daniel Baciagalupo would read
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
, a memoir by the fiction writer Robert Stone. “Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility,” Stone would write. “Things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of us who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived.”

Well, that certainly rang true for Katie Callahan, Danny would think, when he read that passage. But that book by Robert Stone wouldn’t be written in time to save Katie. So she wasn’t looking for protection, and she couldn’t be saved, but—in addition to her looks, which were both wanton and seemingly underage—no small part of her appeal, and what made her most desirable to Danny, was that Katie was a renegade. (She also had the edginess of a sexual deserter; you never knew what she would do next, because Katie didn’t know, either.)

“SIT DOWN, MICHAEL, SIT DOWN
—eat
something!” old Polcari had kept urging Mr. Leary, but the agitated Irishman was too worked up to eat. He had a beer, and then a glass or two of red wine. Poor Mr. Leary couldn’t look at Carmella Del Popolo, Danny knew, without imagining that spade-shaped elf’s goatee she’d possibly left unshaven in her left armpit. And when Dominic limped off to the kitchen to bring Mr. Leary a slice of the English teacher’s favorite Sicilian meat loaf, Danny Baciagalupo, the writer-in-progress, saw the old owl looking at his dad’s limp with new and startled eyes. Maybe a
bear
did that to the cook’s foot! Mr. Leary might have been thinking; maybe there really had been a three-or four-hundred-pound Indian woman whose hair had hung below her waist!

There was one other thing Mr. Leary had lied about to Exeter—the part about these immigrants being prone to
exaggeration
. Hadn’t Mr. Leary said that the Baciagalupo boy was “unlike the rest”? In the area of
writerly
exaggeration, Daniel Baciagalupo was a born exaggerator! And Danny was still at it on that rainy night in Iowa City, though he was sorely distracted; he was still a little bit in love with Katie Callahan, too. (Danny was only beginning to understand what his father had meant by the color he’d called
lethal
blue.)

How did that Johnny Cash song go? He’d first heard it six or seven years ago, Danny was guessing.

Oh, I never got over those blue eyes,
I see them everywhere
.

More distractions, the writer thought; it was as if he were determined to physically remove himself (to
detach
himself) from that night in Vicino di Napoli with dear Mr. Leary.

It had taken Mr. Leary a third or fourth glass of red wine, and most of the meat loaf, before he was brave enough to take the pearl-gray envelope out of his inside jacket pocket. From across the table, Danny spotted the crimson lettering; the fifteen-year-old knew what Exeter’s school colors were.

“And it’s all
boys
, Dominic,” the writer could still hear Mr. Leary saying. The old English teacher had indicated, with a nod of his head, the attractive Calogero girl (Danny’s older cousin Elena) and her overripe friend Teresa DiMattia. Those girls were all over Danny whenever the after-school busboy was trying to change into his black busboy pants back in the kitchen.

“Give Danny some privacy, girls,” Tony Molinari would tell them, but they wouldn’t let up with their ceaseless
vamping
. In addition to dear Mr. Leary, maybe Danny had those girls to thank for his dad’s decision to let him go to Exeter.

The hard parts to write about were the tears in his father’s eyes when he said, “Well, Daniel, if it’s a good school, like Michael says, and if you really want to go there—well, I guess Carmella and I can come visit you there on occasion, and you can come home to Boston on the occasional weekends.” His dad’s voice had broken on the
occasion
and
occasional
words, Daniel Baciagalupo would remember on that rainy night when he absolutely could not write—but he kept trying to—in Iowa City.

Danny remembered, too, how he’d gone off to the back of the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli, so that his father wouldn’t see him start to cry—by then Carmella was crying, too, but she was always crying—and Danny took a little extra time in the kitchen to wet a dishcloth. Unobserved by Mr. Leary, who was overly fond of red wine, Danny wiped clean the back of his teacher’s trenchcoat. The chalk-white
O’
had been easy to erase, easier to erase than the
rest
of that evening.

Danny would never forget lying in his bedroom later that night, in the Wesley Place apartment, hearing his dad cry and cry—with Carmella crying, too, as she tried to comfort him.