John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Buonopane (“Good Bread”) would be Tony Molinari’s recommendation, whereas Paul Polcari, the pizza chef, was in favor of Capobianco (“White Head”)-because Paul was usually white all over, due to the flour. But these names were too comical for a man with Dominic’s sober disposition.

Their first night in the North End, Danny could have predicted what his dad would choose for a new last name. When father and son walked the widow Del Popolo to her brick tenement building on Charter Street-Carmella lived in a three-room walk-up near the old bathhouse and the Copps Hill Burying Ground; the only hot water was what she heated on her gas stove-young Dan could see far enough into his father’s future to envision that Dominic Baciagalupo would (so to speak) quickly slip into the drowned fisherman’s shoes. Although her late husband’s shoes didn’t actually fit Dominic, Carmella would one day be happy to discover that Dominic could wear the unfortunate fisherman’s clothes-both men were slightly built, as was Danny, who would soon be wearing Angel’s left-behind clothes. Naturally enough, father and son needed some city attire; people dressed differently in Boston than they did in Coos County. It would come as no surprise to Danny Baciagalupo, who wouldn’t (at first) take Ketchum’s advice and change his last name, that his dad became Dominic Del Popolo (after all, he was a cook “of the people”)-if not on that first night in the North End.

In Carmella’s kitchen was a bathtub bigger than the kitchen table, which already had the requisite three chairs. Two large pasta pots were full of water-forever hot, but not boiling, on the gas stove. Carmella did next to no cooking in her kitchen; she kept the water hot for her baths. For a woman who lived in a cold-water tenement, she was very clean and smelled wonderful; with Angel’s help, she had managed to pay the gas bill. In the North End in those days, there weren’t enough full-time jobs for young men of Angel’s age. For young men who were strong enough, there were more full-time jobs to be found in the north country, in Maine and New Hampshire, but the work there could be dangerous-as poor Angel had discovered.

Danny and his dad sat at the small kitchen table with Carmella while she cried. The boy and his father told the sobbing mother stories about her drowned son; naturally, some of the stories led them to talk about Ketchum. When Carmella had temporarily cried herself out, the three of them, now hungry, went back to Vicino di Napoli, which served only pizza or quick pasta dishes on Sunday nights. (At that time, the Sunday midday meal was the main one for most Italians.) And the restaurant closed early on Sundays; the chefs prepared a dinner for the staff after the evening’s customers had gone home. Most other nights, the restaurant was open for business fairly late, and the cooks fed themselves and the staff in the midafternoon, before dinner.

The aged owner and maître d’ had been expecting the three of them to return; four of the small tables had been pushed together, and the place settings were already prepared for them. They ate and drank as at a wake, pausing only to cry-everyone but young Dan cried-and to toast the dead boy they’d all loved, though neither Danny nor his dad would touch a drop of wine. There were the oft-repeated “Hail Marys,” many in unison, but there was no open coffin to view-no nightlong prayer vigil, either. Dominic had assured the mourners that Ketchum knew Angel was Italian; the river driver would have arranged “something Catholic” with the French Canadians. (Danny had given his dad a look, because they both knew that the woodsman would have done no such thing; Ketchum would have kept everything Catholic, and the French Canadians, as far away from Angel as possible.)

It was quite late when Tony Molinari asked Dominic where he and Danny were spending the night; surely they didn’t want to drive all the way back to northern New Hampshire. As he’d told Ketchum, Dominic wasn’t a gambler-not anymore-but he trusted the company he was in and (to his own and Danny’s surprise) told them the truth. “We can’t ever go back-we’re on the run,” Dominic said. It was Danny’s turn to cry; the two young waitresses and Carmella were quick to comfort the boy.

“Say-a no more, Dominic-we don’t-a need to know why, or who you’re running from!” old Polcari cried. “You’re-a safe with us.”

“I’m not surprised, Dominic. Anyone can see you’ve been in a fight,” Paul, the pizza chef, said, patting the cook’s shoulder with a sympathetic, flour-covered hand. “That’s one ugly-looking lip you’ve got-it’s still bleeding, you know.”

“Maybe you need stitches,” Carmella said to the cook, with heartfelt concern. But Dominic dismissed her suggestion by shaking his head; he said nothing, but all of them could see the gratitude in the cook’s shy smile. (Danny had given his dad another look, but the boy didn’t doubt his father’s reasoning for not explaining the circumstances of his lip injury; that father and son were on the run had nothing to do with the questionable character and aberrant behavior of Six-Pack Pam.)

“You can stay with me,” Tony Molinari said to Dominic.

“They’ll stay with me,” Carmella told Molinari. “I have a spare room.” Her offer was incontestable, because she meant Angel’s room; even mentioning the room made Carmella commence to cry again. When Danny and his dad walked her back to the cold-water apartment on Charter Street, she told them to take the bigger bed-in her room. She would sleep in the single bed in her departed Angelù’s room.

They would hear her crying herself to sleep-that is, she was trying to. When the crying had gone on for a long time, young Dan whispered to his father: “Maybe you should go to her.”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate, Daniel. It’s her boy she misses-I think you should go to her.”

Danny Baciagalupo went to Angel’s room, where Carmella held out her arms to the boy, and he got into the narrow bed beside her. “An-geh-LOO,” she whispered in his ear, until she finally fell asleep. Danny didn’t dare get out of the bed, for fear he would wake her. He lay in her warm arms, smelling her good, clean smell, until he fell asleep, too. It had been a long, violent day for the twelve-year-old-counting the dramatic events of the previous night, of course-and young Dan must have been tired.

Wouldn’t even the way he fell asleep somehow contribute to Danny becoming a writer? On the night of the same day he had killed the three-hundred-plus-pound Indian dishwasher, who happened to be his father’s lover, Daniel Baciagalupo would find himself in the warm embrace of the widow Del Popolo, the voluptuous woman who would soon replace Injun Jane in his father’s next life-his dad’s sad but (for the time being) ongoing story. One day, the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events-these are what move a story forward-but at the moment Danny lost consciousness in Carmella’s sweet-smelling arms, the exhausted boy had merely been thinking: How coincidental is this? (He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)

Perhaps the photographs of his dead mother were sufficient to make young Dan become a writer; he had managed to take only some of them from the cookhouse in Twisted River, and he would miss the books he’d kept her photos pressed flat in-particularly, those novels that contained passages Rosie had underlined. The passages themselves were a way for the boy to better imagine his mother, together with the photos. Trying to remember those left-behind pictures was a way of imagining her, too.

Only a few of the photographs he brought to Boston were in color, and his dad had told Danny that the black-and-white photos were somehow “truer” to what Dominic called “the lethal blue of her eyes.” (Why “lethal”? the would-be writer wondered. And how could those black-and-white pictures be “truer” to his mother’s blue eyes than the standard color-by-Kodak photographs?)