John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Young Dan was born in Berlin -“just before mud season,” as his father always put it (mud season being more definitive than the calendar)-and almost immediately upon his birth, the boy’s hardworking parents moved away from the mill town. To the cook’s sensibilities, the stench of the paper mill was a constant insult. It seemed plausible to believe that one day the war would be over, and when it was, Berlin would grow bigger-beyond all recognition, except for the smell. But in 1942, the town was already too big and too fetid-and too full of mixed memories-for Dominic Baciagalupo. And Rosie’s prior experience in the North End had made her wary of moving back to Boston, although both the Saetta and Calogero families entreated the young cousins to come “home.”

Children know when they are not loved unconditionally. Dominic was aware that his mother had felt she was spurned. And while Rosie never appeared to resent the circumstances that had compelled her to marry a mere boy , she truly resented how her family had banished her to Berlin in the first place.

The entreaties by the Saetta and Calogero families fell on deaf ears. Who were they to say all was forgiven? Apparently, it was okay with them that the cousins were married, and that they had a child; but what Dominic and Rosie remembered was how it had not been okay for either a Saetta or a Calogero to be pregnant and un married.

“Let them find someone else to forgive,” was how Rosie put it. Dominic, knowing how Nunzi had felt, agreed. Boston was a bridge that had been burned behind them; more to the point, the young couple felt confident that they hadn’t burned it.

Surely moral condemnation wasn’t new to New England, not in 1942; and while most people might have chosen Boston over Twisted River, the decisions made by many young married couples are circumstantial. To the newly formed Baciagalupo family, Twisted River may have seemed remote and raw-looking, but there was no paper mill. The sawmill and logging-camp settlement had never kept a cook through a single mud season, and there was no school-not in a town largely inhabited by itinerants. There was, however, the potential for a school in the smaller but more permanent-seeming settlement on Phillips Brook-namely, Paris (formerly, West Dummer), which was only a few miles on the log-hauler road from the visibly scruffier settlement in Twisted River, where the logging company had heretofore refused to invest in a permanent cookhouse. According to the company, the portable, makeshift kitchen and the dining wanigans would have to do. That this made Twisted River look more like a logging camp than an actual town failed to discourage Dominic and Rosie Baciagalupo, to whom Twisted River beckoned as an opportunity-albeit a rough one.

In the summer of ’42-leaving themselves enough time to order textbooks and other supplies, in preparation for the new Paris school-the cook and the schoolteacher, together with their infant son, followed the Androscoggin north to Milan, and then traveled north-northwest on the haul road from the Pontook Reservoir. Where Twisted River poured into the Pontook was simply called “the narrows;” there wasn’t even a sawmill, and the rudimentary Dead Woman Dam was as yet unnamed. (As Ketchum would say: “Things were a lot less fancy then.”)

The couple with their child arrived at the basin below Twisted River before nightfall and the mosquitoes. To those few who remembered the young family’s arrival, the man with the limp and his pretty but older-looking wife with her new baby must have appeared hopeful-although they carried only a few clothes with them. Their books and the rest of their clothes, together with the cook’s kitchenware, had come ahead of them-all of it on an empty logging truck, covered with a tarp.

The kitchen and dining wanigans needed more than a good cleaning: A full-scale restoration was what the wanigans wanted-and what the cook would insist on having, if he was going to stay. And if the logging company expected the cook to remain past the next mud season, they would have to build a permanent cookhouse-with bedrooms above the cookhouse, where the cook and his family intended to live.

Rosie was more modest in her demands: A one-room school would be sufficient for Paris, née West Dummer, where there had never been a school before; there were only a few families with school-age children on Phillips Brook in 1942, and fewer still in Twisted River. There would soon be more-after the war, when the men came home-but Rosie Baciagalupo, née Calogero, wouldn’t get to see the men return from war, nor would she ever educate their children.

The young schoolteacher died in the late winter of 1944-shortly after her son, Dan, had turned two. The boy had no memory of his mother, whom he knew only by the photographs his father had kept-and by the passages she’d underlined in her many books, which his dad had saved, too. (As in the case of Dominic Baciagalupo’s mother, Rosie had liked to read novels.)

To judge Dominic by his apparent pessimism-there was an air of aloofness about his conduct, or a noticeable detachment in his demeanor, and even something melancholic in his bearing-you might conclude that he had never recovered from the tragic death of his twenty-seven-year-old wife. Yet, in addition to his beloved son, Dominic Baciagalupo had got one thing that he’d wanted: The cookhouse had been built to his specifications.

Apparently, there was a Paris Manufacturing Company connection; some bigwig’s wife, passing through Berlin, had raved about Dominic’s cooking. The word had gotten around: The food was way better than standard logging-camp fare. It wouldn’t have been right for Dominic to just pack up and leave, but the cook and his son had stayed for ten years.

Of course there was an old logger or two-chief among them, Ketchum-who knew the miserable reason. The cook, who was a widower at twenty, blamed himself for his wife’s death-and he wasn’t the only man who made living in Twisted River resemble a mercilessly extended act of penance. (One had only to think of Ketchum.)

IN 1954, DOMINIC BACIAGALUPO was only thirty-young to have a twelve-year-old son-but Dominic had the look of a man long resigned to his fate. He was so unflinchingly calm that he radiated a kind of acceptance that could easily be mistaken for pessimism. There was nothing pessimistic about the good care he took of his boy, Daniel, and it was only for the sake of his son that the cook ever complained about the harshness or the limitations of life in Twisted River -the town still didn’t have a school, for example.

As for the school the Paris Manufacturing Company had built on Phillips Brook, there’d been no discernible improvements on the quality of education Rosie Baciagalupo had provided. Granted, the one-room schoolhouse had been rebuilt since the forties, but the school’s thuggish culture was dominated by the older boys who’d been held back a grade or two. There was no controlling them-the long-suffering schoolteacher was no Rosie Baciagalupo. The Paris school’s thugs were inclined to bully the cook’s son-not only because Danny lived in Twisted River and his dad limped. They also teased the boy for the proper way in which he invariably spoke. Young Dan’s enunciation was exact; his diction never descended to the dropped consonants and broad vowels of the Paris kids, and they abused him for it. (“The West Dummer kids,” Ketchum unfailingly called them.)

“Stand your ground, Daniel-just don’t get killed,” his father predictably told him. “I promise you, one day we’ll leave here.”

But whatever its faults, and his family’s sad story, the Paris Manufacturing Company School on Phillips Brook was the only school the boy had attended; even the thought of leaving that school made Danny Baciagalupo anxious.