John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

With the war in Vietnam, they would lower the drinking age in many states to eighteen, the logic being that if they could send mere boys off to die at that age, shouldn’t the kids at least be allowed to drink? After the war was over, the drinking age would go back up to twenty-one again-but not until 1984-though nowadays, Tony knew, many kids Joe’s age had fake I.D.’s. The cook saw them all the time at Avellino; he knew his grandson had one.

It was how Joe was more than fast with girls that really worried Tony Angel. Going too fast too soon with girls could get you in as much trouble as drinking, the former Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, knew. It had gotten the cook in trouble, in his opinion-and Daniel, too.

Despite Carmella’s best efforts, Tony knew all about her catching her niece Josie with Daniel; the cook was sure that his son had banged more than one of those DiMattia girls, and even a Saetta and a Calogero or two! But young Joe had at least seen, if not actually overheard, his father in a few more adult relationships than whatever foolishness Daniel had been up to with his kissing cousins. And his grandfather knew that Joe had spent more than a few nights in the girls’ dorms at NMH. (It was a wonder the boy hadn’t been caught and kicked out of school; now, in the spring term of his senior year, maybe he would be!) There were things Joe’s dad didn’t know, but his grandfather did.

In his frantic last night in Twisted River, the cook had prayed-for the first and only time, until now. Please, God, give me time , Tony Angel had prayed, long ago-seeing his twelve-year-old’s small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. (Daniel had been waiting in the passenger seat, as if he’d never lost faith that his father would safely return from leaving Injun Jane’s body at Carl’s.)

For all the talking the cook and Ketchum did about Danny Angel’s novels-not only about what was in them but, more important, what the writer seemed to be purposely leaving out-the one thing the men noticed without fail was how much the books were about what Danny feared . Maybe the imagination does that, Tony thought, as he peeked under the damp towels covering his pizza dough; the dough hadn’t risen enough for him to punch it down. Danny Angel’s novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen. The stories often indulged the nightmarish-namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril-in part, because they were young!

Tony Angel wasn’t much of a reader anymore-though he’d bought innumerable novels (on his son’s and Ketchum’s recommendations) at The Book Cellar. He’d read a lot of first chapters and had just stopped. Something about Ketchum’s relationship with Rosie had kicked the reading right out of the cook. The only novels he actually finished-and he read every word-were his son’s. Tony wasn’t like Ketchum, who’d read (or heard) everything.

The cook knew his son’s worst fears: Daniel was absolutely terrified of something happening to his loved ones; he simply obsessed about that subject. That was where the writer’s fearful imagination came from-childhood terrors. The writer Danny Angel seemed driven to imagine the worst things that could happen in any given situation. In a way, as a writer-that is to say, in his imagination- the cook’s son (at forty-one) was still a child.

IN HIS QUIET KITCHEN, in his cherished Avellino, the cook prayed that he be allowed to live a little longer; he wanted to help his grandson survive being a teenager. Maybe boys aren’t out of the woods until their late twenties, Tony considered-after all, Daniel had been twenty-two when he married Katie. (Certainly that had been taking a risk!) What if Joe had to be thirty before he was safe? And if anything did happen to Joe, the cook prayed he would still be alive to look after Daniel; he knew how much help his son would need then.

Tony Angel looked at the silent radio; he almost turned it on, just to help him banish these morbid thoughts. He considered writing a letter to Ketchum instead of turning on the radio, but he didn’t do either of these things; he just kept praying. It seemed that the praying had come to him out of nowhere, and he wished he could stop doing it.

There in his kitchen, next to his cookbooks, were various editions of Danny Angel’s novels, which the cook kept in chronological order. There was no more revered place for those novels than among his dad’s cookbooks, Danny knew. But it didn’t calm the cook down to look at his famous son’s books.

After Family Life in Coos County , the cook knew that Daniel had published The Mickey , but was that in 1972 or ’73? The first novel had been dedicated to Mr. Leary, but the second one should have been, given its subject matter. As he’d more or less promised, however, Danny had dedicated his second novel to his dad. “For my father, Dominic Baciagalupo,” the dedication read, which was a little confusing, because the author’s name was Danny Angel-and Dominic was already called Tony, or Mr . Angel.

“Isn’t that sort of like letting the nom-de-plume cat out of the nom-de-plume bag?” Ketchum had complained, but it had turned out for the better. When Danny became famous for his fourth novel, the issue of him writing under a nom de plume had long been defused. Almost everyone in the literary world knew that Danny Angel was a nom de plume, but very few people remembered what his real name was-or they didn’t care. (Mr. Leary had been right to suggest that there were easier names to remember than Baciagalupo, and how many people-even in the literary world-know what John Le Carré’s real name is?)

Danny, not surprisingly, had defended his decision to Ketchum by saying that he doubted the deputy sheriff was very active in the literary world; even the logger had to acknowledge that the cowboy wasn’t a reader. Besides, very few people read The Mickey when it was originally published. When his fourth novel made Danny famous, and readers went back to the earlier books, that was when everyone read The Mickey .

A secondary but major character in The Mickey is a repressed Irishman who teaches English at the Michelangelo School; the novel focuses on the main character’s last encounter with his former English teacher at a striptease show in the Old Howard. To the cook, it seemed a slight coincidence to build a whole book around-the mutual shame and embarrassment of the former student (now an Exeter boy, with a bunch of his Exeter friends) and the character who was clearly modeled on Mr. Leary. Probably, the episode at the Old Howard had actually happened-or so the novelist’s father believed.

The third novel came along in ’75, just after they’d all moved back to Vermont from Iowa. The cook would wonder if his was the only family to have mistakenly assumed that “kissing cousins” meant cousins who were sexually interested in, or involved with, one another. Danny’s third novel was called Kissing Kin . (Originally, so-called kissing kin meant any distant kin who were familiar enough to be greeted with a kiss; it didn’t mean what Danny’s dad had always thought.)

The cook was relieved that his son’s third book wasn’t dedicated to Danny’s cousins in the Saetta and Calogero families, because the irony of such a dedication might not have been appreciated by the male members of those families. The story concerns a young boy’s sexual initiation in the North End; he is seduced by an older cousin who works as a waitress in the same restaurant where the boy has a part-time job as a busboy. The older cousin in the novel was clearly modeled, the cook knew, on that slut Elena Calogero-better said, the physical description of the character was true to Elena. Yet both Carmella and the cook were pretty sure that Daniel’s first sexual experience had been with Carmella’s niece Josie DiMattia.