Last Night in Twisted River (33 page)

The cook couldn’t find the passage he was searching for in
Kissing
Kin
. He put his son’s third novel back on the bookshelf, his eyes passing quickly over the fourth one—“the fame-maker,” Ketchum called it. Tony Angel didn’t even like to look at
The Kennedy Fathers—
the one with the fake Katie in it, as he thought of it. The novel had not only made his son famous; it was an international bestseller and the first one of Daniel’s books to be made into a movie.

Almost everyone said that it wasn’t a bad movie, though it was not nearly as successful as the novel. Danny didn’t like the film, but he said he didn’t hate it, either; he just wanted nothing to do with the moviemaking process. He said that he never wanted to write a screenplay, and that he wouldn’t sell the film rights to any of his other novels—unless someone wrote a halfway decent adaptation first, and Danny got to read the screenplay
before
he sold the movie rights to the novel.

The writer had explained to his dad that this was not the way the movie business worked; generally speaking, the rights to make a film from a novel were sold before a screenwriter was even attached to the project. By demanding to see a finished screenplay before he would consider selling the rights to his novel, Danny Angel was pretty much assuring himself that no one would ever make another movie of one of his books—not while he was alive, anyway.

“I guess Danny
did
hate the movie of
The Kennedy Fathers
, after all,” Ketchum had said to the cook.

But the logger and the author’s dad had to be careful what they said about
The Kennedy Fathers
around young Joe. Danny had dedicated the novel to his son. Ketchum and the cook were at least pleased to see that the book
wasn’t
dedicated to Katie. Naturally, Danny was aware that the two old friends weren’t exactly fans of his famous fourth novel.

It was only natural, one of Daniel’s publishers had told the cook—she was one of the foreign ones, one of the older women the writer had slept with—that whatever novel Danny Angel wrote after
The Kennedy Fathers
was going to get criticized for not living up to the breakthrough book and runaway bestseller that the famous fourth novel was. Even so, Danny didn’t help himself by writing a fifth novel that was both dense and sexually disturbing. And, as more than one critic wrote, the writer loved semicolons to excess; he’d even put one in the
title!

It was simply stupid, that title
—The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt
, Daniel had called it. “Constipated Christ!” Ketchum had shouted at the bestselling author. “Couldn’t you have called it one thing or the other?”

In interviews, Danny always said that the title reflected the old-fashioned nineteenth-century kind of story that the novel was. “Bullshit,” the cook had said to his son. “That title makes you look like you can’t make up your mind.”

“Whatever you call them, they look like someone smashed a fly over the comma,” Ketchum said to Danny, about all the semicolons. “The only writing I do are letters to you and your dad, but I’ve written rather a lot of them, and in all those letters, I don’t believe I’ve ever used as many of those damn things as you use on any one fucking page of this novel.”

“They’re called semicolons, Ketchum,” the writer said.

“I don’t care what they’re called, Danny,” the old woodsman said. “I’m just telling you that you use too damn many of them!”

But of course what really pissed off Ketchum and the cook about Danny Angel’s fifth novel was the fucking dedication—“Katie, in memoriam.”

All Tony Angel could say about it to Ketchum was: “That Callahan cunt broke my son’s heart and abandoned my grandson.” (It was not a good time, Ketchum knew, to point out to his old friend that she’d also kept his son out of the war and had
given
him the grandson.)

Not to mention what
The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt
was about, the cook was thinking, as he looked with suspicion at the novel on his kitchen bookshelf. It’s another North End story, but this time the boy who is coming of age is sexually initiated by one of his
aunts—
not an older cousin—and the maiden aunt and spinster is a dead ringer for Rosie’s youngest sister, the unfortunate Filomena Calogero!

Surely
this
hadn’t happened! the cook hoped, but had Daniel once wished that it had—or had it
almost
happened? Once again (as in any Danny Angel novel) the graphic detail was quite convincing, and the sexual descriptions of the boy’s petite aunt—she was such a pathetic, self-pitying woman!—were painful for the cook, though he’d read every word.

Critics also made the point that “the perhaps overrated writer” was “repeating himself;” Daniel had been thirty-nine when his fifth novel was published in 1981, and all the criticism must have stung him, though you wouldn’t know it. If the cousin in
Kissing Kin
tells the boy she’s breaking up with that she always wanted to sleep with his father instead, in the novel about the neurotic aunt,
she
tells the boy that she
imagines
she’s having sex with his father whenever she has sex with the son! (What manifestation of self-torture is this? the cook had wondered, when he’d first read
The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt.)

Maybe it
did
happen, the man who missed the Dominic in himself now imagined. He’d always thought that Rosie’s sister Filomena was completely crazy. He couldn’t look at her without feeling she was a grotesque mask of Rosie—“a Rosie imposter,” he’d once described her to Ketchum. But Daniel had seemed improbably infatuated with Filomena; the boy couldn’t stop himself from staring at her, and it was not
as an aunt
that he appeared to be regarding her. Had the flighty Filomena, who was
still
miserable and unmarried (or so the cook assumed), actually accepted or even encouraged her smitten young nephew’s adoration?

“Why don’t you just
ask
Danny if the crazy aunt popped his cherry?” Ketchum had inquired of the cook. That was a vulgar Coos County expression, and the cook hated it. (If he’d paid closer attention to the conversations around him in Boston, the cook might have realized that “cherry-popping” was a vulgar North End expression, too.)

There was one part of
The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt
that both Tony Angel and Ketchum had loved: the wedding at the end. The boy has grown up and he’s marrying his college sweetheart—an indifferent bride, if you ever met one, and closer to a real-life Katie character than Caitlin in
The Kennedy Fathers
ever was. Also, Danny had nailed those ice-cube-sucking Callahan men dead between their eyes—those tight-assed patrician Republicans who, Danny believed, had made Katie the anarchist rule-breaker she was. She was a trust-fund kid who’d reinvented herself as a radical, but she’d been a faux revolutionary. Katie’s only revolution had been a small, sexual one.

THERE WAS ONE BOOK
Danny Angel had written that was not on the kitchen bookshelf in Avellino. That was his sixth novel, which had not yet been published. But the cook had almost finished reading it. A copy of the galleys was upstairs in Tony Angel’s bedroom. Ketchum also had a copy. Both men felt ambivalent about the novel, and neither was in any hurry to finish it.

East of Bangor
was set in an orphanage in Maine in the 1960s—when abortion was still illegal. Virtually the same damn boy from those earlier Danny Angel novels—a boy from Boston who ends up going away to boarding school—gets
two
of his North End cousins pregnant, one when he’s still a student at Exeter (before he’s learned to drive) and the second after he’s gone off to college. He goes to the University of New Hampshire, naturally.

There’s an old midwife in the Maine orphanage who performs abortions—a deeply sympathetic woman who struck the cook as being modeled on the unlikely fusion of sweet, gentle Paul Polcari (“the fucking
pacifist
!” as Ketchum insisted on calling him) and Injun Jane.

The first cousin who goes off to Maine has the baby and leaves it behind; she is so devastated by having a child and not knowing what has become of it that she tells the
other
pregnant cousin not to do what she did. The second pregnant cousin also goes to Maine—to the very same orphanage, but to have an abortion. The problem is that the old midwife might not live long enough to perform the procedure. If the young midwife-in-training ends up doing the D & C, the cousin might suffer the consequences. The young midwife doesn’t know enough about what she’s doing.

Both Ketchum and the cook were hoping that the novel was going to turn out well, and that nothing too bad would happen to the second pregnant cousin. But, knowing Danny Angel’s novels, the two old readers had their fears—and something else was worrying them.

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 abbràccio
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 Caffè 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.