John Irving: Last Night In Twisted River

One thing was certain: Young Dominic wouldn’t be a logger. You need your balance for that kind of work. And the mills were where he’d been injured-not to mention that his runaway father’s drunken “friend” was a foreman there. The mills were not in Dominic Baciagalupo’s future, either.

“Hey, Baciagalupo!” Uncle Umberto had often hailed him. “You may have a Neapolitan name, but you hang around like a Sicilian.”

“I am Sicilian,” Dominic would dutifully say; his mother seemed inordinately proud of it, the boy thought.

“Yeah, well, your name is napolitano,” Umberto told him.

“After my dad, I suppose,” young Dominic ventured to guess.

“Your dad was no Baciagalupo,” Uncle Umberto informed him. “Ask Nunzi where your name came from-she gave it to you.”

The twelve-year-old didn’t like it when Umberto, who clearly disliked Dominic’s mother, called her “Nunzi”-an affectionate family nickname, shortened from Annunziata-which Umberto didn’t say affectionately at all. (In a play, or in a film, the audience would have had no trouble recognizing Umberto as a minor character; yet the best actor to play Umberto would be one who always believed he was cast in a major role.)

“And you’re not really my uncle, I suppose?” Dominic inquired of Umberto.

“Ask your mama,” Umberto said. “If she wanted to keep you siciliano , she shoulda given you her name.”

His mother’s maiden name was Saetta-she was very proud of the sigh-AY-tah, as she pronounced the Sicilian name, and of all the Saettas Dominic had heard her speak of when she chose to talk about her heritage.

Annunziata was reluctant to speak of Dominic’s heritage at all. What little the boy had gleaned-bits of information, or misinformation-had been gathered slowly and insufficiently, like the partial evidence, the incomplete clues, in the increasingly popular board game of young Dan’s childhood, one the cook and Ketchum played with the boy, and sometimes Jane joined them. (Was it Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick, or had the murder been committed by Miss Scarlet in the ballroom with the revolver?)

All young Dominic knew was that his father, a Neapolitan, had abandoned the pregnant Annunziata Saetta in Boston; he was rumored to have taken a boat back to Naples. To the question “Where is he now?” (which the boy had asked his mother, many times), Annunziata would shrug and sigh, and looking either to Heaven or in the direction of the exhaust vent above her kitchen stove, she would say mysteriously to her son: “Vicino di Napoli.” “In the vicinity of Naples,” young Dominic had guessed. With the help of an atlas, and because the boy had heard his mother murmur the names of two hill towns (and provinces) in the vicinity of Naples in her sleep-Benevento and Avellino-Dominic had concluded that his dad had fled to that region of Italy.

As for Umberto, he was clearly not an uncle-and definitely a “legendary asshole,” as Ketchum would have said.

“What kind of name is Umberto?” Dominic had asked the foreman.

“From da king!” Umberto had answered indignantly.

“I mean it’s a Neapolitan name, right?” the boy had asked.

“What are you questioning me for? You da twelve-year-old, pretending to be sixteen!” Umberto cried.

“You told me to say I was sixteen,” Dominic reminded the foreman.

“Look, you gotta job, Baciagalupo,” Umberto had said.

Then the logs rolled, and Dominic became a cook. His mother, a Sicilian-born Italian-American transported by an unwanted pregnancy from Boston’s North End to Berlin, New Hampshire, could cook. She’d left the city and had moved to the north country when Gennaro Capodilupo had slipped away to the docks off Atlantic Avenue and Commercial Street, leaving her with child as he sailed (figuratively, if not literally) “back to Naples.”

Asshole (if not Uncle) Umberto was right: Dominic’s dad was no Baciagalupo. The absconding father was a Capodilupo-cah-poh-dee-LEW-poh, as Annunziata told her son, meant “Head of the Wolf.” What was the unwed mother to do? “For the lies he told, your father should have been a Boccada lu po!” she said to Dominic. This meant “Mouth of the Wolf,” the boy would learn-a fitting name for Asshole Umberto, young Dominic often thought. “But you , Angelù-you are my kiss of the wolf!” his mom said.

In an effort to legitimize him, and because his mother had a highhanded love of words, she would not name Dominic a head of (or a mouth of) the wolf; for Annunziata Saetta, only a kiss of the wolf would do. It should have been spelled “Baciacalupo,” but Nunzi always pronounced the second “c” in Baciacalupo like a “g.” Over time, and due to a clerical error in kindergarten, the misspelled name had stuck. He’d become Dominic Baciagalupo before he became a cook. His mother also called him Dom, for short-Dominic being derived from doménica , which means “Sunday.” Not that Annunziata was a tireless adherent of what Ketchum called “Catholic thinking.” What was both Catholic and Italian in the Saetta family had driven the young, unmarried woman north to New Hampshire; in Berlin, other Italians (presumably, also Catholics) would look after her.

Had they expected she would put her child up for adoption, and come back to the North End? Nunzi knew that this was done, but she wouldn’t consider giving up her baby, and-notwithstanding the sizable nostalgia she expressed for the Italian North End-she was never tempted to go back to Boston, either. In her unplanned condition, she had been sent away; understandably, she resented it.

While Annunziata remained a loyal Sicilian in her own kitchen, the proverbial ties that bind were irreparably frayed. Her Boston family-and, by association, the Italian community in the North End, and whatever represented “Catholic thinking” there-had disowned her. In turn, she disowned them. Nunzi never went to Mass herself, nor did she make Dominic go. “It’s enough if we go to confession, when we want to,” she would tell young Dom-her little kiss of the wolf.

She wouldn’t teach the boy Italian, either-some essential cooking lingo excepted-nor was Dominic inclined to learn the language of “the old country,” which to the boy meant the North End of Boston, not Italy. It was both a language and a place that had rejected his mother. Italian would never be Dominic Baciagalupo’s language; he said, adamantly, that Boston was nowhere he ever wanted to go.

Everything in Annunziata Saetta’s new life was defined by a sense of starting over. The youngest of three sisters, she could read and speak English as well as she could cook siciliano . Nunzi taught children how to read in a Berlin elementary school-and after the accident, she took Dominic out of school and taught him some fundamental cooking skills. She also insisted that the boy read books-not just cookbooks but everything she read, which were mostly novels. Her son had been crippled while violating the generally overlooked child-labor laws; Annunziata had taken him out of circulation, her version of homeschooling being both culinary and literary.

Neither area of education was available to Ketchum, who had left school when he was younger than twelve. At nineteen, in 1936, Ketchum could neither read nor write, but when he wasn’t working as a logger, he was loading lumber onto the railroad flatcars from the open platforms at the end of the biggest Berlin mill. The deck crew tapered the load at the top, so that the flatcars could safely pass through the tunnels or under the bridges. “That was the extent of my education, before your mom taught me to read,” Ketchum enjoyed telling Danny Baciagalupo; the cook would commence to shake his head again, although the story of Dominic’s late wife teaching Ketchum to read was apparently incontestable.