John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Joe was seven when he’d gone back to Iowa with his dad and grandfather, and was still only ten when they’d returned to Vermont. Maybe those ages were the safest ages, the writer was imagining as he ran; possibly, Iowa City had had nothing to do with it.

CHILDHOOD, AND HOW IT FORMS YOU-moreover, how your child hood is relived in your life as an adult-that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed as he ran. From the age of twelve, he had become afraid for his father; the cook was still a hunted man. Like his dad, but for different reasons, Danny had been a young father-in reality, he’d also been a single parent (even before Katie left him). Now, at forty-one, Danny was more afraid for young Joe than he was for his dad.

Maybe it was more than the Katie Callahan gene that put Joe at risk; nor did Danny necessarily believe that the source of the wildness in his son was the boy’s free-spirited grandmother, that daring woman who’d courted disaster on the late-winter ice of Twisted River. No, when Danny looked at young Joe at eighteen, it was himself at that dangerous age he saw. From all they’d read into (and had misread in) Danny Angel’s novels, the cook and Ketchum couldn’t have fathomed the perilous configuration of the various bullets Danny had dodged-not only in his life with Katie, but long before her.

It hadn’t been Josie DiMattia who’d sexually initiated Danny at the age of fifteen, before he went off to Exeter; furthermore, Carmella may have caught them at it, but Josie wasn’t the one who got pregnant. Ketchum had indeed driven Danny to that orphanage with the obliging midwife in Maine, but with the oldest DiMattia girl, Teresa. (Perhaps Teresa had given so many condoms to her younger sisters that she’d forgotten to save some for herself.) And neither Teresa nor Danny’s equally older cousin Elena Calogero had provided Danny with his first sexual experience-though the boy was much more attracted to those older girls than he was to any girl his own age, including Josie, who’d been only a little older. There’d also been an older Saetta cousin, Giuseppina, who’d seduced young Dan, but Giuseppina wasn’t his first seducer.

No, indeed-that instructive and most formative experience had been with the boy’s aunt Filomena, his mother’s youngest sister, when Danny had been only fourteen. Had Filomena been in her late twenties, or might she already have turned thirty when the assignations with her young nephew began? Danny was wondering as he approached the final two miles of his run.

It was still May; the blackflies were bad, but not at the pace he was running, which he began to pick up. As he ran, he could hear his heart and his own breathing, though these elevated functions didn’t seem to Danny as loud or urgent as the beating of his heart or his gasps for breath whenever the boy had been with his insane aunt Filomena. What had she been thinking? It was Danny’s dad she’d adored, and the cook wouldn’t look at her. Had the way her nephew doted on her-Danny couldn’t take his eyes off her-seemed a sufficient consolation prize to Filomena?

She’d been only the second woman in the Saetta and Calogero clans to attend college, but Filomena had shared another distinction with her older sister Rosie-namely, a certain lawlessness with men. Filomena might have been only a preteen-at most, thirteen or fourteen-when Rosie had been sent away to the north country. She’d loved Rosie, and had looked up to her-only to see her disgraced, and displayed as a bad example to the younger girls in the family. Filomena had been sent to Sacred Heart, an all-girls’ Catholic school near the Paul Revere House on North Square. She’d been kept as safe from boys as was humanly and spiritually possible.

As Danny Angel picked up the pace in his long run, he considered that this might have been why his aunt Filomena had been more interested in him, a boy, than she appeared to be interested in men . (Her sacred sister’s widower excluded-yet Filomena must have known that the cook was a closed door to her, an unfulfilled fantasy, whereas Danny, who had not yet started to shave, had his father’s long eyelashes and his mother’s fair, almost fragile skin.) And it must have made an impression on Filomena that, at fourteen, the boy worshipped his small, pretty aunt. According to Danny’s dad, Filomena’s eyes weren’t the same lethal blue as Rosie’s, but his aunt’s eyes, and all the rest of her, were dangerous enough to do Danny some long-lasting harm. For one thing, Filomena managed to make all girls Danny’s age uninteresting to him-that is, until he met Katie.

The cook and Ketchum had jumped to the conclusion that young Daniel had seen something of his mother in Katie. What the boy had seen, perhaps, was that combination of a repressed girlhood in an angry young woman of wanton self-destructiveness; Katie had been a younger, more political version of his aunt Filomena. The difference between them was that Filomena had been devoted to the boy, and her sexual efforts to outdo the mere girls in Danny’s life were entirely successful. Denied any demonstrable expression of her sexuality as a girl, Filomena (in her late twenties, and well into her thirties) was a woman possessed. By the time Danny met her, Katie Callahan was almost indifferent to sex; that she’d had a lot of sex didn’t mean that she actually liked it. By the time Danny met her, Katie already thought of sex as a way of negotiating .

In Danny’s prep-school years, his aunt Filomena would book a room at the Exeter Inn almost every weekend. The boy’s trysts in that musty brick building were the unparalleled pleasures of his life at Exeter, and a contributing reason why he spent so few of his Exeter weekends at home in the North End. Carmella and the cook always worked hardest at Vicino di Napoli on Friday and Saturday nights, while the boy banged his youthful aunt-often in a Colonial four-poster bed, beneath a gauzy-white canopy. (He was a runner; runners have stamina.) With Filomena’s considerable and licentious assistance, Danny had achieved an adult independence-from both his actual and his Exeter families.

How could the boy possibly have had any interest in Exeter ’s dances with various girls’ schools? How could a closely chaperoned and chaste hug on the dance floor ever compete with the ardent, sweat-slicked contact he’d maintained with Filomena on an almost weekly basis-not only throughout his Exeter years but including Danny’s first two years of college in Durham?

And all the while, those Calogeros and Saettas took pity on “poor” Filomena; pretty as she was, she struck them as an eternal wallflower, both a maiden aunt and a spinster-in-the-making. Little did they know that, for seven hungry years, the woman was indulging the ceaseless sexual appetites of a teenage boy on his way to becoming a young man. In those seven years that his aunt Filomena dominated Danny’s sexual life, she more than made up for lost time. That she was a teacher at Sacred Heart-in the same Catholic and all-girls’ environment where the younger Filomena had been held down-was a perfect disguise.

All those other Calogeros, and the Saettas, thought of Filomena as “pathetic”-those were his father’s very words for her, Danny remembered, as he ran harder and harder. Outwardly, Filomena had seemed the picture of propriety and Catholic repression, but-oh!-not when she shed her clothes!

“Let’s just say I keep them busy at confession,” she told her spellbound nephew, for whom Filomena had set a standard; the young women who followed Filomena in Danny’s life couldn’t match his aunt’s erotic performance.

Filomena was in her mid-to late thirties-too old to have a baby, in her estimation-when the issue of Danny going to Vietnam (or not) was raised. She might have been happier with Ketchum’s solution; if Danny had lost a finger or two, he might have stayed with his aunt a little longer. Filomena was insane, but she was no fool; she knew she wouldn’t get to keep her beloved young Dan forever. She liked the sound of Katie Callahan’s idea better than she ever warmed to Ketchum’s plan-after all, in her own odd way, Filomena loved her nephew, and she had not met Katie.