John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

But Danny had brought the cook’s ashes through U.S. Customs without any questioning. Now he sat up in bed and opened the jar, cautiously sniffing the contents. Knowing what was in the container, Danny wouldn’t have wanted to sprinkle it on a steak, but it still smelled like pepper and herbs and spices-it even looked like crushed herbs and a variety of spices, not human ashes. How fitting for a cook, that his remains had taken up residency in a jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice!

Dominic Baciagalupo, his writer son thought, might have gotten a kick out of that.

Danny turned out the lamp on the night table and lay in bed in the dark. “Last chance, Pop,” he whispered in the quiet room. “If you don’t have anything else to say, we’re going back to Twisted River.” But the cook’s ashes, together with the herbs and spices, maintained their silence.

DANNY ANGEL ONCE WENT ELEVEN YEARS between novels-between East of Bangor and Baby in the Road . Again, a death in the family would delay him, though Carmella had been wrong to suggest that the writer was once more taking “rather a long time between books.” It had been only six years since his most recent novel was published.

As had happened with Joe, after the cook was murdered, the novel Danny had been writing suddenly looked inconsequential to him. But this time there was no thought of revising the book-he’d simply thrown it away, all of it. And he had started a new and completely different novel, almost immediately. The new writing emerged from those months when what remained of his privacy had been taken from him; the writing itself was like a landscape suddenly and sharply liberated from a fog.

“The publicity was awful,” Carmella bluntly said, at dinner. But this time, Danny had expected the publicity. After all, a famous writer’s father had been murdered, and the writer himself had shot the killer-irrefutably, in self-defense. What’s more, Danny Angel and his dad had been on the run for nearly forty-seven years. The internationally bestselling author had left the United States for Canada, but not for political reasons-just as Danny always claimed, without revealing the actual circumstances. He and his dad had been running away from a crazy ex-cop!

Naturally, there were those in the American media who would say that the cook and his son should have gone to the police in the first place. (Did they miss the fact that Carl was the police?) Of course the Canadian press was indignant that “American violence” had followed the famous author and his father across the border. In retrospect, this was really a reference to the guns themselves-both the cowboy’s absurd Colt.45 and Ketchum’s Christmas present to Danny, the Winchester 20-gauge that had blown away the deputy sheriff’s throat. And in Canada, much was made of the fact that the writer’s possession of the shotgun was illegal. In the end, Danny wasn’t charged. Ketchum’s 20-gauge Ranger had been confiscated-that was all.

“That shotgun saved your life!” Ketchum had bellowed to Danny. “And it was a present , for Christ’s sake! Who confiscated it? I’ll blow his balls off!”

“Let it go, Ketchum,” Danny said. “I don’t need a shotgun, not anymore.”

“You have fans-and whatever their opposites are called-don’t you?” the old logger pointed out. “Some critters among them, I’ll bet.”

As for the question Danny was asked the most, by both the American and the Canadian media, it was: “Are you going to write about this?”

He’d learned to be icy in answering the oft-repeated question. “Not immediately,” Danny always said.

“But are you going to write about it?” Carmella had asked him again, over dinner.

He talked about the book he was writing instead. It was going well. In fact, he was writing like the wind-the words wouldn’t stop. This one would be another long novel, but Danny didn’t think it would take long to write. He didn’t know why it was coming so easily; from the first sentence, the story had flowed. He quoted the first sentence to Carmella. (Later, Danny would realize what a fool he’d been-to have expected her to be impressed!) “‘In the closed restaurant, after hours, the late cook’s son-the maestro’s sole surviving family member-worked in the dark kitchen.’” And from that mysterious beginning, Danny had composed the novel’s title: In the After-Hours Restaurant .

To the writer’s thinking, Carmella’s reaction was as predictable as her conversation. “It’s about Gamba?” she asked.

No, he tried to explain; the story was about a man who’s lived in the shadow of his famous father, a masterful cook who has recently died and left his only son (already in his sixties) a lost and furtive soul. In the rest of the world’s judgment, the son seems somewhat retarded. He’s lived his whole life with his father; he has worked as a sous chef to his dad in the restaurant the well-respected cook made famous. Now alone, the son has never paid his own bills before; he’s not once bought his own clothes. While the restaurant continues to employ him, perhaps out of a lingering mourning for the deceased cook, the son is virtually worthless as a sous chef without his father’s guidance. Soon the restaurant will be forced to fire him, or else demote him to being a dishwasher.

What the son discovers, however, is that he can “contact” the dead cook’s spirit by cooking up a storm in the nighttime kitchen-but only after the restaurant is closed. There, long after hours, the son secretly slaves to teach himself his dad’s recipes-everything the sous chef failed to learn from his father when the great cook was alive. And when the former sous chef masters a recipe to his dad’s satisfaction, the spirit of the deceased cook advises his son on more practical matters-where to buy his clothes, what bills to pay first, how often and by whom the car should be serviced. (His father’s ghost, the son soon realizes, has forgotten a few things-such as the fact that his somewhat retarded son never learned to drive a car.)

“Gamba is a ghost?” Carmella cried.

“I suppose I could have called the novel The Retarded Sous Chef,” Danny said sarcastically, “but I thought In the After-Hours Restaurant was a better title.”

“Secondo, someone might think it’s a cookbook,” Carmella cautioned him.

Well, what could he say? Surely no one would think a new novel by Danny Angel was a cookbook! Danny stopped talking about the story; to placate Carmella, he told her what the dedication was. “My father, Dominic Baciagalupo-in memoriam.” This would be his second dedication to his dad, bringing the number of dedications “in memoriam” up to four. Predictably, Carmella burst into tears. There was a certain safety, a familiar kind of comfort, in her tears; Carmella seemed almost happy when she was crying, or at least her disapproval of Danny was somewhat abated by her sorrow.

As he lay awake in bed now, with little confidence that he would fall asleep, Danny wondered why he’d tried so hard to make Carmella understand what he was writing. Why had he bothered? Okay, so she’d asked what he was writing-she had even said she was dying to know what was next! But he’d been a storyteller forever; Danny had always known how to change the subject.

As he drifted-ever so lightly-to sleep, Danny imagined the son (the tentative sous chef) in the after-hours kitchen, where his father’s ghost instructs him. Similar to Ketchum before the logger learned to read, the son makes lists of words he is struggling to recognize and remember; this night, the son is obsessed with pasta. “Orecchiette,” he writes, “means ‘little ears.’ They are small and disk-shaped.” Bit by bit, the sous chef is becoming a cook-if it isn’t too late, if his dead father’s restaurant will only give him more time to learn! “Farfalle,” the somewhat retarded son writes, “means ‘butterflies,’ but my dad also called them bow ties.”