John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Tony Molinari was a chef , the cook was thinking-Paul Polcari, too. Tony Angel had learned a lot from those two-more than Nunzi ever could have taught him-but the cook had also learned he would never be as good as Molinari or Paul.

“You have no feeling for fish, Gamba,” Molinari had told him as sympathetically as possible. It was true. There was only one fish dish on the menu at Avellino, and sometimes the only seafood of the day was a pasta dish-if the cook could get calamari. (He stewed it slowly for a long time, in a spicy marinara sauce with black olives and pine nuts.) But in Brattleboro, the calamari he could get generally came frozen, which was all right, and the most reliable fresh fish was sword-fish, which Tony Molinari had taught him to prepare with lemon and garlic and olive oil-either under the broiler or on a grill-with fresh rosemary, if the cook could get it, or with dried oregano.

He didn’t do dolci . It was Paul Polcari who’d gently made the point that the cook had no feeling for desserts, either-more to the point, Italian desserts, Tony Angel was thinking. What he did do well was the regular mill-town and logging-camp fare-pies and cobblers. (In Vermont, you couldn’t go wrong with blueberries and apples.) At Avellino, the cook served a fruit-and-cheese course, too; many of his regular customers preferred that to dessert.

The admiration of his very own restaurant had distracted Tony Angel from his thoughts about Ketchum’s politics, which he returned to while he made his gimpy way downhill to Avellino. When it came to what other people called progress-most engines, and machinery of all sorts-Ketchum was a bit of a Luddite. Not only did he miss the river drives; he claimed he’d liked logging better before there were chainsaws! (But Ketchum was overly fond of guns, the cook was thinking-guns were in a category of machinery the old woodsman would approve of.)

Neither a liberal nor a conservative, Ketchum could best be described as a libertarian-well, the logger was a libertine, too, Tony Angel considered, and (in the woodsman’s younger days) something of a rake and a profligate. Why was it that every time he thought of Ketchum, the cook couldn’t help thinking of the logger in sexual terms? (The former Dominic Baciagalupo knew why that was, of course; it just always depressed him when his thoughts about Ketchum went there.)

Ketchum had been furious when father and son and grandson all came back to Vermont from Iowa, but the Writers’ Workshop had been generous to let Danny teach there for as long as they did. They’d offered him only a two-year contract; Danny had asked to stay a third year, and they let him, but in the summer of ’75, when Joe was ten, the family returned to Windham County. Danny loved his old farmhouse in Putney. His father would have nothing to do with living there. The Vietnam War was over; Windham College ’s death throes were more apparent. Besides, Tony Angel had never liked Putney.

While neither Danny’s second nor third novel would make him any money, the cook had increased his savings in Iowa -enough to buy the old storefront space with the apartment above it on Brattleboro ’s Main Street. That was the year Avellino was born-when Danny was commuting to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was the closest college-teaching job that the writer could find, but the distinguished and somewhat staid women’s college was well over an hour’s drive (nearly two) from Putney-a long commute in the winter months, if it was snowing. Still, living in Putney mattered to Danny. No small part of it was his high opinion of the Grammar School-within walking distance of home-where Joe would finish the eighth grade before going off to Northfield Mount Hermon.

The cook was shaking his head as he limped into his restaurant, because he was thinking that Daniel truly must love living in the country. Tony Angel didn’t; the North End had made a city man out of him, or at least he was a neighborhood kind of guy. But not Daniel. He’d made the commute to that women’s college for three years, before The Kennedy Fathers was published in ’78; the novel’s success had freed him from ever having to teach again.

Of course there’d been more money suddenly, and the cook had worried-he still worried-about what effect it might have on young Joe. Daniel was old enough (thirty-six) when the bestseller business found him to not be affected by either the fame or the good fortune. But when Joe was only thirteen, the boy woke up one morning with a famous father. Couldn’t this have made an unwelcome mark on any kid that age? And then there were the women Daniel went through-both before and after he was famous.

The writer had been living with one of his former Windham College students when he, Tony, and Joe moved to Iowa City. The girl with a boy’s name-“It’s Franky, with a y,” she liked to say with a pout-hadn’t made the move with them.

Thank God for that, the cook thought at the time. Franky was a feral-looking little thing, a virtual wild animal.

“She wasn’t my student when I began to sleep with her,” Danny had argued with his dad. No, but Franky had been one of his writing students only a year or two before; she was one of many Windham College students who never seemed to leave Putney. They went to Windham, they graduated, or they quit school but continued to hang around-they wouldn’t leave.

The girl had dropped in on her former teacher one day, and she’d simply stayed.

“What does Franky do all day?” his dad had asked Danny.

“She’s trying to be a writer,” Danny said. “Franky likes hanging around, and she’s nice to Joe -he likes her.”

Franky did some housecleaning, and a little cooking-if you could call it that, the cook thought. The wild girl was barefoot most of the time-even in that drafty old farmhouse in the winter months, when Daniel heated the whole place with a couple of woodstoves. (Putney was the kind of town that worshipped woodstoves, Tony Angel had observed; there was even an alternative to heating in that town! The cook simply hated the place.)

Franky was a dirty-blonde with lank hair and a slouchy posture. She wore funny old-fashioned dresses of the kind the cook remembered Nunzi wearing, except Franky never wore a bra, and her underarms-what the cook saw of them-were unshaven. And Franky couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three when she’d lived with Daniel and little Joe. Daniel had just turned thirty when they went to Iowa.

There’d been more young women in the writer’s life in Iowa City, one of his workshop students among them, and while there was no one special now-nor had there been anyone long-lasting since Danny Angel became famous-Joe, by the time he was a teenager, had seen his dad with numerous young women. (And three or four notably older women, the cook was remembering; two of those ladies were among Daniel’s foreign publishers.)

The Putney property was a virtual compound these days. The writer had turned the old farmhouse into his guesthouse; he’d built a new house for himself and Joe, and there was a separate building where Danny did his writing. His “writing shack,” Daniel called it. Some shack ! Tony Angel thought. The building was small, but it had a half-bathroom in it; there was also a phone, a TV, and a small fridge.

Danny may have liked living in the country, but he wasn’t exactly reclusive-hence the guesthouse. In his life as a writer, he’d gotten to know a number of city people, and they came to visit him-the occasional women included. Had Joe’s exposure to his famous father’s casual relationships with women made the teenager something of a playboy at prep school? Tony Angel wondered. He worried about his grandson-as much as, if not more than, the boy’s dad did. Yes, the eighteen-year-old’s drinking would bear watching, the cook knew. Joe had the mischievous insouciance of a boy who liked to party.