John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“I was just asking him,” Celeste said. “Memories, I guess.”

“Good ones, huh?” Loretta asked the cook; she took a clean dish towel from the rack and patted his cheek. Even the dishwasher and the busboy, two Brattleboro high school kids, were watching Tony Angel with concern.

The cook and his sous chef were not rigid about sticking to their stations, though normally Greg did the grilling, roasting, and broiling, while Tony watched over the sauces.

“You want me to be the saucier tonight, boss?” Greg asked the cook.

“I’m fine,” Tony told them all, shaking his head. “Don’t you ever have memories?”

“Danny called-I forgot to tell you,” Loretta said to the cook. “He’s coming in tonight.”

“Yeah, Danny sounds like he had an exciting day-for a writer,” Celeste told Tony. “He got attacked by two dogs. Rooster killed one. He wanted a table at the usual time, but just for one. He said that Barrett wouldn’t appreciate the dog story. He said, ‘Tell Pop I’ll see him later.’”

The “Pop” had its origins in Iowa City -the cook liked it.

Barrett was originally from England; though she’d lived in the United States for years, her English accent struck Tony Angel as sounding more and more English every time he heard it. People in America were overly impressed by English accents, the cook thought. Perhaps English accents made many Americans feel uneducated.

Tony knew what his son had meant by Barrett not appreciating the dog story. Although Danny had been bitten by dogs when he was running, Barrett was one of those animal lovers who always took the dog’s side. (There were no “bad” dogs, only bad dog owners; the Vermont State Police should never shoot anyone’s dog; if Danny didn’t run with the squash-racquet handles, maybe the dogs wouldn’t try to bite him, and so forth.) But the cook knew that his son ran with the racquet handles because he’d been bitten when he ran without them-he’d needed stitches twice but the rabies shots only once.

Tony Angel was glad that his son wasn’t coming to dinner with Barrett. It bothered the cook that Daniel had ever slept with a woman almost as old as his own father ! But Barrett’s Englishness and her belief that there were no bad dogs bothered Tony more. Well, wasn’t an unexamined love of dogs to be expected from a horse person? the cook asked himself.

Tony Angel used an old Stanley woodstove from Ireland for his pizzas; he knew how to keep the oven at six hundred degrees without making the rest of the kitchen too hot, but it had taken him two years to figure it out. He was refilling the woodbox in the Stanley when he heard Loretta unlocking the front door and inviting the first customers into the dining room.

“There was another phone call,” Greg told the cook.

Tony hoped that Daniel hadn’t changed his mind about coming to dinner, or that his son hadn’t decided to bring Barrett with him, but the other message was from Ketchum.

The old logger had gone on and on to Greg about the miraculous invention of the fax machine. God knows for how long fax machines had been invented, the cook thought, but this was not the first he’d heard about Ketchum wanting one. Danny had been to New York and seen some rudimentary fax machine in operation in the production department of his publishing house; in Daniel’s estimation, his father recalled, it had been a bulky machine that produced oily scraps of paper with hard-to-read writing, but this didn’t deter Ketchum. The formerly illiterate woodsman wanted Danny and his dad to have fax machines; then Ketchum would get one, and they could all be instantly in contact with one another.

Dear God, the cook was thinking, there would be no end of faxes; I’ll have to buy reams of paper. And there will be no more peaceful mornings, Tony Angel thought; he loved his morning coffee and his favorite view of the Connecticut. (Like the cook, Ketchum was an early riser.)

Tony Angel had never seen where Ketchum lived in Errol, but he’d envisioned something from the wanigan days-a trailer maybe, or several trailers. Formerly mobile homes, perhaps, but no longer mobile-or a Volkswagen bus with a woodstove inside it, and without any wheels. That Ketchum (at sixty-six) had only recently learned to read but now wanted a fax machine was unimaginable. Not that long ago, Ketchum hadn’t even owned a phone!

THE COOK KNEW WHY he had cried; his “memories” had nothing to do with it. As soon as he’d thought of taking a trip with his son to see the Chengs in their Connecticut restaurant, Tony Angel had known that Daniel would never do it. The writer was a workaholic; to the cook’s thinking, a kind of logorrhea had possessed his son. That Daniel was coming to dinner at Avellino alone was fine with Tony Angel, but that his son was alone (and probably would remain so) made the cook cry. If he worried about his grandson, Joe-for all the obvious dangers any eighteen-year-old needed to be lucky to escape-the cook was sorry that his son, Daniel, struck him as a terminally lonely, melancholic soul. He’s even lonelier and more melancholic than I am! Tony Angel was thinking.

“Table of four,” Loretta was saying to Greg, the sous chef. “One wild-mushroom pizza, one pepperoni,” she told the cook.

Celeste came into the kitchen from the dining room. “Danny’s here, alone,” she said to Tony.

“One calamari with penne,” Loretta went on, reciting. When it was busy, she just left the two cooks her orders in writing, but when there was almost no one in Avellino, Loretta seemed to enjoy the drama of an out-loud presentation.

“The table of four doesn’t want any first courses?” Greg asked her.

“They all want the arugula salad with the shaved Parmesan,” Loretta said. “You’ll love this one.” She paused for the full effect. “One chicken paillard, but hold the capers.”

“Christ,” Greg said. “A sauce grenobloise is all about the capers.”

“Just give the bozo the red-wine reduction with rosemary-it’s as good on the chicken as it is on the braised beef,” Tony Angel said.

“It’ll turn the chicken purple , Tony,” his sous chef complained.

“You’re such a purist, Greg,” the cook said. “Then give the bozo the paillard with a little olive oil and lemon.”

“Danny says to surprise him,” Celeste told Tony. She was watching the cook closely. She’d heard him cry in his sleep, too.

“Well, that will be fun,” the cook said. (Finally, there’s a smile-albeit a small one-Celeste was thinking.)

MAY WAS A TALKATIVE PASSENGER. While Dot drove-her head nodding, but usually not in rhythm to whatever junk was playing on the radio-May read most of the road signs out loud, the way children who’ve only recently learned to read sometimes do.

“ Bellows Falls,” May had announced, as they’d passed that exit on I-91-maybe fifteen or more minutes ago. “Who would want to live in Bellows Falls?”

“You been there?” Dot asked her old friend.

“Nope. It just sounds awful,” May said.

“It’s beginnin’ to look like suppertime, isn’t it?” Dot asked.

“I could eat a little somethin’,” May admitted.

“Like what?” Dot asked.

“Oh, just half a bear or a whole cow, I guess,” May said, cackling. Dot cackled with her.

“Even half a cow would hit the spot,” Dot more seriously proposed.

“Putney,” May read out loud, as they passed the exit sign.

“What kinda name is that, do you suppose? Not Injun, from the sound of it,” Dot said.

“Nope. Not Injun,” May agreed. The three Brattleboro exits were coming up.

“How ’bout a pizza?” Dot said.