John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Lupita was a wounded soul, and she certainly recognized the damage done to others. She could not clean Danny’s third-floor writing room without weeping, though Lupita had never met Joe; in those years when he’d come to Canada from Colorado, Joe never stayed for long, and Danny and his dad had not yet met what the cook called “the Mexican marvel.” They’d had a host of unsatisfactory cleaning women in those years.

Lupita was a relatively recent find, but she was visibly moved by these two saddened gentlemen who’d lost, respectively, a son and a grandson. She’d told the cook that she was worried about how Danny was doing, but to Danny she would only say: “Your boy is in Heaven-higher up than the third floor, Señor Angel.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Lupita,” Danny had replied.

“¿Enfermo?” Lupita was always inquiring-not of the seventy-six-year-old cook but of his depressed fifty-eight-year-old son.

“No, I am not sick, Lupita,” Danny never failed to answer her. “Yo sólo soy un escritor.” (“I am merely a writer”-as if that explained how miserable he must have looked to her.)

Lupita had lost a child, too; she couldn’t speak of it to Danny, but she’d told the cook. There were no details, and there was scant mention of the child’s father, a Canadian. If Lupita had ever had a husband, she’d also lost him. Danny didn’t think there were many Mexicans in Toronto, but probably more would be coming soon.

Lupita seemed ageless, with her smooth brown skin and long black hair, though Danny and his dad guessed that she was somewhere between their ages, in her sixties, and while she wasn’t a big woman, she was heavy-noticeably overweight, if not fat in a condemnatory way.

Because Lupita had a pretty face, and she was in the habit of leaving her shoes on the ground floor of the house (she crept about the upstairs barefoot, or in her socks), Danny once said to his father that Lupita reminded him of Injun Jane. The cook couldn’t agree that there was any resemblance; Dominic had sternly shaken his head at the suggestion. Either Danny’s dad was in denial regarding the obvious likeness Lupita shared with Jane, or else Danny’s memory of the Indian dishwasher was misleading him-the way fiction writers are often misled by their memories.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, when the cook was busy with the dinner prep at Patrice, Danny often left his writing room on the third floor-just as the last of the sun, if there was any to speak of, was glimmering through the skylight. There was no visible sun on this gray December afternoon, which made it easier for the novelist to tear himself away from his desk. Whatever remaining light there was from the west barely managed to penetrate the second-floor hall. In his socks, Danny padded to his father’s bedroom. When the cook was out, his son often went into that room to see the snapshots Dominic had pinned to the five bulletin boards hanging from the bedroom’s walls.

There was an old-fashioned desk, with drawers, in his dad’s bedroom, and Danny knew there were hundreds more photographs in those drawers. With Lupita’s help, Dominic constantly rearranged the snapshots on his bulletin boards; the cook never threw a photo away, but instead returned each removed picture to one of the desk drawers. That way, twice-used (or thrice-used) photos became new again-once more displayed on the bulletin boards, the only telltale signs of their previous use being the excessive number of almost invisible pinpricks.

On the bulletin boards, the snapshots were intricately overlapped in a confusing but possibly thematic pattern-either of Dominic’s design or of Lupita’s, because Danny knew that without the Mexican cleaning woman’s assistance, his dad could not have managed to unpin and repin the photographs with such evident ardor and repetition. It was hard work, and because of where the bulletin boards were mounted on the walls, it was necessary to perch on the arm of a couch, or stand on a chair, in order to reach the uppermost sections-not a labor that the cook, with his limp, could easily perform. (Given what she weighed, and her estimated age, Danny worried about Lupita undertaking such a balancing act on a couch or a chair.)

In spite of his considerable imagination, Danny Angel couldn’t fathom his father’s logic; the overlapping snapshots defied either a historical or a visual interpretation. In an ancient black-and-white photograph, a surprisingly young-looking Ketchum appeared to be dancing with Injun Jane in what Danny clearly remembered was the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River. That this old photo was juxtaposed with one (in color) of Danny with Joe (as a toddler) in Iowa was inexplicable-except that Danny recalled Katie being in that photograph, and the cook had cleverly overlapped her entirely with a photo of Carmella with Paul Polcari, standing in front of the pizza oven in Vicino di Napoli; either Tony Molinari or old Giusé Polcari must have snapped the picture.

Thus Vermont overlapped Boston, or vice versa- Avellino and Mao’s were apparently interchangeable-and the Asian faces of the cook’s own Iowa interlude appeared alongside more current Torontonians. The early days at Maxim’s, which gave way to Bastringue on Queen Street West, would be captured next to Ketchum in one or another of his virtual wanigans of a pickup truck, or beside Joe as a college student in Colorado-often on skis, or in a mountain-bike race-and there was even one of Joe’s Iowa City friend Max, who (together with Joe) had come close to being killed in that alleyway behind the Court Street house by the speeding blue Mustang. The portrait of the two eight-year-olds was bafflingly pinned next to one of the young culinary maestro Silvestro, being kissed on both cheeks by his female sous chefs, Joyce and Kristine.

Was it possible, Danny wondered, that most of the photographs had been pinned to the bulletin boards not only by Lupita’s plump hands but according to her artless plan? That would explain the seeming randomness of the arrangements-if the collages of snapshots had been almost entirely up to Lupita, if the cook had played next to no part in the overall design. (That might also explain, the writer thought, why no picture of Ketchum was returned to the desk drawers-not since Lupita had come to work for Danny and his dad.)

How had the eighty-three-year-old logger managed to make such a romantic impression on the sixty-something Mexican cleaning woman? Danny was thinking. The cook seemed to be nauseated by the very idea; Lupita couldn’t have encountered Ketchum more than two or three times. “It must be because of Lupita’s ardent Catholicism!” Dominic had exclaimed.

To his dad’s thinking, Danny knew, there could only be superstitious or nonsensical reasons for any woman in her right mind to be attracted to Ketchum.

NOW, IN HIS OWN BEDROOM, Danny changed into his workout clothes. There were no photographs of Joe in Danny’s bedroom; Danny Angel had enough trouble sleeping without pictures of his dead son. Except in the evenings-when he went out for dinner, or to see a movie-Danny rarely left the house on Cluny Drive, and most evenings his dad was working. Dominic’s idea of semiretirement was that he usually left the restaurant and took himself home to bed by 10:30 or 11:00 every night, even when Patrice was packed; that was retired enough for him.

When Danny was on a book tour, or otherwise out of town, the cook went into his son’s bedroom-just to remind himself of what might have been, if Joe hadn’t died. It grieved Dominic Baciagalupo that the only photographs in his beloved Daniel’s bedroom were of the screenwriter Charlotte Turner, who was fifteen years younger than his son-and, boy, did she look it. Charlotte was just twenty-seven when she’d met Daniel-in ’84, when he’d been forty-two. (This was shortly after the cook and his son had come to Canada. East of Bangor had just been published, and Joe was finishing his freshman year at Colorado.) Charlotte was only eight years older than Joe, and she’d been a very young-looking twenty-seven.