John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

The matches were on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tony Angel’s Brattleboro restaurant was closed Wednesday, so that Tony could see some of his grandson’s wrestling matches. But the cook could never find the time to see Joe wrestle on a Saturday, and it seemed that the more important matches-the season-ending tournaments, for example-were on the weekends. Danny Angel got to see more than half of his son’s matches, but the writer took a lot of publishing-related trips. It was Ketchum who went to almost all of Joe’s “fights,” as the logger was inclined to call them.

“You missed a good fight,” Ketchum would say, when he called the cook or Danny to tell them the results of young Joe’s wrestling matches.

UNTIL HE HAD A BESTSELLER with The Kennedy Fathers , Danny didn’t know that publishing houses had publicity departments. Now that his publishers were promoting his books, Danny felt an obligation to do some traveling on the books’ behalf. And the translations were published at different times, rarely simultaneously with the English-language editions. This meant that it was unusual for a year to go by without Danny going somewhere to do a book tour.

When it wasn’t wrestling season and his dad was traveling, Joe often spent weekends at his grandfather’s apartment in Brattleboro. Sometimes his friends from Northfield Mount Hermon would have their parents take them out to dinner at Tony Angel’s Italian restaurant. Occasionally, Joe would help out in the kitchen. It was like old times, and not like them, the cook would think-seeing his grandson instead of his son in a working kitchen, or busing tables. Tony, né Dominic, was reminded that he’d not seen as much of Daniel in those prep-school years as he now saw of Joe. Because of this, there was something bittersweet about the cook’s relationship with his grandson; almost magically, there were times when Tony Angel got to relax with Joe-without once judging the boy the way the cook had felt compelled to judge (and criticize) Daniel.

The other guys on Joe’s wrestling team had grown fond of Ketchum. “Is he your uncle-that tough-looking man with the scar?” the wrestlers would ask Joe.

“No, Ketchum’s just a friend of the family-he was a river driver,” Joe would tell them.

One day, Joe’s wrestling coach asked him, “Did that big man with the hard handshake ever wrestle? He kind of looks like he might have, or could have.”

“Not officially,” Joe answered.

“What about that scar?” the coach asked Joe. “That’s a nasty one-better than your average head-butt, anyway.”

“That was no head-butt-that was a bear,” Joe told the coach.

“A bear!”

“Just don’t ever ask Ketchum about it,” Joe said. “It’s a terrible story. Ketchum had to kill the bear, but he didn’t want to. He likes bears, generally.”

There was a bit of the writer Danny Angel in Joe Baciagalupo, clearly-a deeper ingredient than a physical resemblance. But Danny worried that there was something reckless about his son; it wasn’t a Baciagalupo recklessness of the imagination , either. It also wasn’t the wrestling, which was nothing Danny had ever wanted to do-and the cook couldn’t have imagined doing it, not with that limp. In fact, the wrestling seemed safe enough-once Joe had learned a little about it. There was another element in young Joe that Danny didn’t recognize as coming from himself or his dad.

If there was an active Katie Callahan gene in the boy, maybe it was his penchant for risk-taking. He skied too fast, he drove a car too fast, and he was more than fast with girls; it seemed to his writer father that Joe just took too many chances.

“Maybe that’s the Katie in him,” Danny had said to his dad.

“Maybe,” the cook replied; Tony Angel didn’t like to think that anything of that awful woman had gotten into his grandson. “Then again, it might be your mother, Daniel. Rosie was a risk-taker, after all-just ask Ketchum.”

In the time he’d spent looking at those photographs of his mother, Danny could have written a novel-though he’d stopped looking at the photos, for a while, after he learned the truth about his mom and Ketchum and his father. He’d once tried to give the photos to his dad, but Tony Angel wouldn’t take them. “No, they’re yours-I can see her very clearly, Daniel.” His father tapped his temple. “Up here.”

“Maybe Ketchum would like the photos,” Danny said.

“Ketchum has his own pictures of your mother, Daniel,” the cook told him.

Over time, a few of those photos Danny had pressed flat between the pages of the novels left behind in Twisted River-some of them, but no way near all of them-had been sent to him by Ketchum. “Here, I found this picture in one of her books,” the accompanying letter from Ketchum would say. “I thought you should have it, Danny.”

Albeit reluctantly, Danny had kept the photos. Joe liked to look at them. Perhaps the cook was right: Maybe Joe got some of his risk-taking or reckless instincts from his grandmother, not from Katie. When Danny looked at his mom’s pictures, he saw a pretty woman with intense blue eyes, but the drunken rebel who’d do-si-doed two drunken men on the black ice of Twisted River-well, that element of Rosie Baciagalupo, née Calogero, wasn’t evident in the photos her son had kept.

“Just keep an eye on his drinking,” the cook had told his son-he meant young Joe’s drinking. (It was Tony Angel’s way of inquiring if his eighteen-year-old grandson was drinking yet.)

“I suppose there’s the occasional party,” Danny told his dad, “but Joe doesn’t drink around me.”

“The kind of drinking Joe might do around you isn’t the kind we need to worry about,” the cook said.

Joe’s drinking would bear watching, the writer Danny Angel imagined. As for his son’s genetic package, Danny knew more than he cared to remember about the boy’s mom, Katie Callahan; she’d had one whale of an alcohol problem. And in Katie’s case, she’d done more than the “occasional” marijuana, when she and Danny had been a couple-she’d smoked more than a “little” pot, Danny knew.

IT COULD BE ARGUED that Windham College was in its death throes before the end of the Vietnam War. Decreasing enrollment and an inability to meet a loan repayment would force the college to close in 1978, but Danny Angel sensed that there were signs of trouble ahead for Windham well before then. The writer would resign from the college in 1972, when he accepted a teaching job back at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. He’d not written The Kennedy Fathers yet; Danny still had to teach for a living, and for teaching-writing jobs, Iowa is as good as they get. (You have students who are serious, and busy with their own writing, which means you get lots of time to write.)

Danny Angel would publish his second novel and write his third when he was again in Iowa City. In those years, before Joe was a teenager, Iowa City was a great town for Danny’s son, too-pretty good schools, as one would expect in a university town, and a semblance of neighborhood life. Iowa City wasn’t the North End, to be sure-not when it came to restaurants, especially-but Danny had liked being back there.

The writer gave his dad a choice: Tony Angel could come to Iowa City or he could stay in Putney. Danny wanted to keep the Vermont farmhouse. He’d bought the rental property on Hickory Ridge Road, just before he accepted the Iowa offer and resigned from Windham, because he wanted his father to be able to stay in Windham County -if the cook wanted to.

In the cook’s mind, Carmella was the question. For the five years Tony Angel ran the Benevento pizza place in Putney, he’d taken a lot of shopping trips to Boston. It was more than a two-hour drive each way-kind of far for “shopping.” Danny’s dad claimed that he had to buy his pizza sausages at the Abruzzese meat market in the North End-and while he was in his old neighborhood, he might as well stock up on his cheeses, his olives, and his olive oil. But Danny knew that his dad was trying to “stock up” on as much of Carmella as he could. They hadn’t really been able to break things off cleanly.