John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Rosie’s hair had been dark brown, almost black, but she was surprisingly fair-skinned, with sharply angular, fragile-looking features, which served to make her seem even more petite than she was. When young Dan would meet all the Calogeros-among them, his mother’s younger sisters-he saw that two of these aunts were small and pretty, like his mom in the photographs, and the youngest of them (Filomena) also had blue eyes. But Danny would notice that, as much as he was drawn to stare at Filomena-she must have been about the same age as the boy’s mother when Rosie had died (in her mid-to late twenties, in Danny’s estimation)-his father was quick to say that Filomena’s eyes were not the same blue as his mom’s. (Not lethal enough, maybe, the boy could only guess.) Young Dan would notice, too, that his dad rarely spoke to Filomena; Dominic seemed almost rude to her, in that he purposely wouldn’t look at her or ever comment on what she was wearing.

Was it as a writer that Daniel Baciagalupo began to notice such defining details? Had the boy already discerned what could be called a pattern-in-progress in his father’s attraction, in turn, to Injun Jane and to Carmella Del Popolo-both of them big, dark-eyed women, as opposite to Rosie Calogero as the twelve-year-old could imagine? For if Rosie had truly been the love of his dad’s life, might not Dominic purposely be denying himself contact with any woman remotely like her?

In fact, Ketchum would one day accuse the cook of maintaining an unnatural fidelity to Rosie by choosing to be with women who were grossly unlike her. Danny must have written Ketchum about Carmella, and the boy probably said she was big, because the cook had been careful-in his letters to his old friend-to make no mention of his new girlfriend’s size, or the color of her eyes. Dominic would tell Ketchum next to nothing about Angel’s mother and his developing relationship with her. Dominic wouldn’t even respond to Ketchum’s accusatory letter, but the cook was angry that the logger had criticized his apparent taste in women. At the time, Ketchum was still with Six-Pack Pam-speaking of women opposite to Cousin Rosie!

To remember Pam, Dominic needed only to look in a mirror, where the scar on his lower lip would remain very noticeable long after the night Six-Pack attacked him. It would be a surprise to Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, that Ketchum and Six-Pack would last as a couple for very long. But they would be together for a few years longer than Dominic had been with Injun Jane-even a little longer than the cook would manage to stay with Carmella Del Popolo, Angel’s large but lovely mom.

THE FIRST MORNING father and son would wake up in Boston, it was to the tantalizing sounds of Carmella having a bath in her small kitchen. Respecting the woman’s privacy, Dominic and young Dan lay in their beds while Carmella performed her seductive-sounding ablutions; unbeknownst to them, she’d put a third and fourth pasta pot of water on the stove, and these would soon be coming to a near boil. “There’s plenty of hot water!” she called to them. “Who wants the next bath?”

Because the cook had already been thinking about how he might fit, albeit snugly, in the same big bathtub with Carmella Del Popolo, Dominic somewhat insensitively suggested that he and Daniel could share a bath-he meant the same bathwater-an idea that the twelve-year-old found repellent. “No, Dad!” the boy called, from the narrow bed in Angel’s room.

They could hear Carmella as the heavy woman rose dripping from the bathtub. “I know boys Danny’s age-they need some privacy!” she said.

Yes, young Dan thought-not fully understanding that he would soon need more privacy from his dad and Carmella. After all, Danny was almost a teenager. While they wouldn’t live together for long in the cold-water flat on Charter Street with the big bathtub in the small kitchen and an absurdly small water closet (with just a curtain, instead of a door)-the so-called WC contained only a toilet and a diminutive sink with a mirror above it-the apartment they would move into wasn’t much larger, or half private enough for a teenage Daniel Baciagalupo, though it did have hot water. It would be another walk-up on what would one day be called Wesley Place-an alley that ran alongside the Caffè Vittoria-and in addition to having two bedrooms, there was a full-size bathroom with both a tub and a shower (and an actual door), and the kitchen was large enough for a table with six chairs.

Still, the bedrooms were next to each other; in the North End, there was nothing they could afford that was at all comparable to the spaciousness of the second floor of the cookhouse in Twisted River. And Danny was already too old to overhear his father and Carmella trying to keep their lovemaking quiet-certainly after the boy, with his excitable imagination, had heard and seen his dad and Injun Jane doing it .

The cook and Carmella, with young Dan increasingly aware of himself as the surrogate Angel, had an acceptable living arrangement, but it was not one that would last. It would soon be time for the teenager to create a little distance between himself and his dad-and, as he grew older, Danny was made more uncomfortable by another problem.

If he had once suffered from a presexual state of arousal, first inspired by Jane and then by Six-Pack Pam, the teenager could find no relief from his deepening desire for Carmella Del Popolo-his dad’s “Injun replacement,” as Ketchum called her. Danny’s attraction to Carmella was a more troubling problem than the privacy issues.

“You need to get away,” Ketchum would write to young Dan, although the boy truly liked his life in the North End. In fact, he loved it, especially in comparison to the life he’d had in Twisted River -at the Paris Manufacturing Company School, in particular.

The Michelangelo School thought little of the education Danny Baciagalupo had received among those Phillips Brook bums-those West Dummer dolts, as Ketchum called them. The authorities at the Mickey made Danny repeat a grade; he was a year older than most of his classmates. By seventh grade, when the would-be writer first mentioned Ketchum’s Exeter idea to his English teacher, Mr. Leary, the Irishman already considered Danny Baciagalupo to be among his very best students. By the time the boy was taking eighth-grade English, Danny was far and away Mr. Leary’s teacher’s pet.

Several of Mr. Leary’s former pupils had gone on to attend Boston Latin. A few had attended Roxbury Latin-in the old Irishman’s opinion, a somewhat snooty Anglo school. Two boys Mr. Leary had taught had gone to Milton, and one to Andover, but no one from Mr. Leary’s English classes had ever gone to Exeter; it was farther afield from Boston than those other good schools, and Mr. Leary knew it was a very good school. Might it have been a feather in Mr. Leary’s cap if Daniel Baciagalupo were accepted at Exeter?

Mr. Leary felt bedeviled by most of the other seventh-and eighth-grade boys at the Mickey. It was notable that Danny didn’t join in the teasing his teacher took, because teasing-and other, harsher forms of harassment-reminded the boy of his Paris school experience.

Mr. Leary was red-faced from drink; he had a potato-shaped nose, the veritable image of the alleged staple of his countrymen’s diet. Wild white tufts of hair, like fur, stuck out above his ears, but Mr. Leary was otherwise bald-with a pronounced dent in the top of his head. He looked like a partially defeathered owl. “As a child,” Mr. Leary told all his students, “I was hit on the head by an unabridged dictionary, which doubtless gave me my abundant love of words.”

Both the seventh-and eighth-grade boys called him “O,” for Mr. Leary had dropped the O’ from his name. These badly behaved boys wrote no end of O ’s on the blackboard when Mr. Leary was out of the classroom. They called to him, “O!”-but only when his back was turned.