John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

While there were these little details of a recognizable kind in Danny Angel’s novels, the cook more often noticed things that he was sure his son must have made up. If Carmella had put in an identifiable bathtub appearance, the character of the stepmother in that novel was definitely not based on Carmella; nor could the cook find any but the most superficial elements of himself in Daniel’s novels, or much of Ketchum. (A minor character’s broken wrist is mentioned in passing in one novel, and there’s a different character’s penchant for saying, “Constipated Christ!” in another.) Both Ketchum and Tony Angel had talked about the absence of anyone in the novels who revealed to them their quintessential and beloved Daniel.

“Where is that boy hiding himself?” Ketchum had asked the cook, because even in Danny Angel’s fourth (and most famous) novel, which was titled The Kennedy Fathers , the main character-who escapes the war in Vietnam with the same paternity deferment that kept Danny out of the war-bears little essential resemblance to the Daniel that Ketchum and the cook knew and loved.

There was a character based on Katie in The Kennedy Fathers- Caitlin, Danny Angel named her-a little sprite of a thing with a disproportionately oversize capacity for serial infidelities. She saves a truly hard-to-believe number of Kennedy fathers from the Vietnam War. The Caitlin character races through numerous husbands with the same casual frankness both the cook and Ketchum associated with the way Katie probably gave blow jobs-yet Caitlin wasn’t Katie.

“She’s way too nice,” Tony Angel told his old friend.

“I’ll say she is!” Ketchum agreed. “You even end up liking her!”

All her husbands end up liking Caitlin, too-or they can’t get over her, if that amounts to the same thing. And all those babies who are born and get abandoned by their mother-well, we never find out what they think of their mother. The novel concludes when President Nixon puts an end to the 3-A deferment, while the war will drag on for five more years, and the Caitlin character just kind of disappears; she is a lost soul in the last chapter of The Kennedy Fathers . There’s something that doesn’t bode well about how she phones all her husbands and asks to speak to her kids, who have no memory of her. That’s the last we hear about Caitlin-it’s a sympathetic moment.

Ketchum and the cook knew very well that Katie had not once called Daniel and asked to speak to Joe; it seemed that she simply hadn’t cared enough about them to even inquire how they were doing, though Ketchum always said that Danny might hear from Katie if he ever became famous.

When The Kennedy Fathers was published, and Danny did become famous, he still didn’t hear from Katie. He did, however, hear from a few other Kennedy fathers. Most of the letters about the novel were favorable. Danny believed there was some shared guilt among such fathers, who’d all felt, at one time in their lives, that they probably should have gone to Vietnam, or (like Danny) they’d actually wanted to go. Now, of course, they all knew they were lucky that they hadn’t gone to the war.

The novel was praised for seeing yet another dimension of how the war in Vietnam did permanent damage to America, and how the country would long be divided by that war. The young fathers in the novel might (or might not) turn out to be good fathers, and it was too soon to say if those children-those “tickets out of Vietnam,” as Danny called them-would be damaged. Most reviewers thought that Caitlin was the novel’s most memorable character, and the real hero of the story. She sacrifices herself to save these young men’s lives, even though she leaves them-and quite possibly her own children-feeling haunted.

But the novel really pissed off Ketchum and the cook. They had hoped to read a hatchet job on Katie. But Danny didn’t do that; instead, he’d turned his awful ex-wife into a fucking hero!

One letter Danny received from a Kennedy father was worth saving, and he would show it to his son-this was several years after The Kennedy Fathers was first published, in the spring of Joe’s junior year at Northfield Mount Hermon, when the boy had been driving for only a year and had just turned seventeen. At young Joe’s suggestion, Danny also showed the letter to his dad and Ketchum. While Danny and Joe had talked about the letter-both about what it meant, and what it didn’t say-Ketchum and the cook were careful in their responses to Danny. The older men knew that Danny’s feelings for Katie were a little different from theirs.

The letter was from a self-described “single parent” living in Portland, Oregon -a man named Jeff Reese. The letter began: “Like you, I am a Kennedy father-one of the stupid boys Katie Callahan saved. I’m not sure how many of us there are. I know of at least one other-I mean, in addition to you and me-and I am writing him, too. I regret to inform you both that Katie couldn’t save herself-just a few of us stupid boys. I can’t tell you more, but I know it was an accidental overdose.” He didn’t say of what. Perhaps Jeff Reese assumed that Danny would have known what substance Katie was abusing, but they’d not done any serious drugs together, only the occasional marijuana. In their case, the drinking and a little pot had been more than enough. (There wasn’t a word about The Kennedy Fathers , though one would guess that Jeff Reese had somewhat belatedly read it. Maybe he’d read just enough of the book to see for himself that the Caitlin character wasn’t really Katie. And if Katie had read The Kennedy Fathers , or any of Danny Angel’s other novels, Jeff Reese didn’t say; at least Katie must have known that Daniel Baciagalupo had become Danny Angel, for how else would Jeff Reese have made the connection?)

Danny had driven down to Northfield Mount Hermon for an impromptu visit with Joe at his son’s school. The old James Gym was empty-it wasn’t wrestling season-and they sat together on the sloped wooden track, reading and rereading the letter about Joe’s mother. Maybe the boy had thought he would one day hear from his mom; Danny had never expected to hear from Katie, but the writer in him had thought she might try to make contact with her son.

At seventeen, Joe Baciagalupo often looked like he needed a shave, and he had the more defined facial features of a young man in his early twenties; yet there was something expectant and open in his expression that reminded his father of a more childlike Joe, or of the “little” Joe the boy had been. This might have made Danny say to him, “I’m sorry that you didn’t have a mother, or that I didn’t find someone who could have done a good job in that role for you.”

“But it’s not just a role , is it?” Joe asked his dad; he was still holding the letter about his mother dying from an overdose, and Danny would later think that the way the seventeen-year-old looked at the letter, it was as if it were foreign currency-a curiosity, exotic-looking, but of no particular use at the moment. “I mean, I had you- you’ve always been there,” Joe continued. “And your dad-well, you know, he’s like a second dad to me. And then there’s Ketchum.”

“Yes,” was all the writer could say; when he talked to young Joe, Danny sometimes didn’t know if he was talking to a child or a man. Was it part of the same anxiousness Danny had felt as a twelve-year-old that he suspected Joe kept things from him, or was it what Ketchum and the cook had kept from Danny that made him wonder about how forthcoming (or not) Joe was?

“I just want to be sure you’re okay,” Danny said to Joe, but the seventeen-year-old-child or man, or both-surely knew that by the okay word his father was implying much more than okay . The writer meant thriving; Danny also meant safe , as if regular father-son conversations could possibly ensure Joe’s safety. (The child’s or the man’s.) Yet, as Danny would one day consider, maybe this was a writer’s peculiar burden-namely, that the anxiety he felt as a father was conflated with the analysis he brought to bear on the characters in his fiction.