John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Those taverns had not been far enough out of the North End to have escaped the cook’s attention. One day he’d followed Daniel and his cousins to the Bell in Hand. When the cook saw his young son drinking a beer, he’d pulled the boy out of the tavern by his ear.

As the writer Danny Angel sat working away in his notebook at Avellino-waiting for his dad, the cook, to surprise him-he wished that his humiliation in the Bell in Hand, in front of his older cousins, had been sufficient to make him stop drinking before he really got started. But in order to stop himself, Danny had needed a greater fright and subsequent humiliation than that earlier misadventure in a Boston bar. It would come, but not before he was a father. (“If becoming a parent doesn’t make you responsible,” the cook had once said to his son, “nothing will.”)

Had Danny been thinking as a father when he’d typed a one-page message to the hippie carpenter, and had driven out the back road to Westminster West in order to put the message in the asshole dog owner’s mailbox, before driving to Brattleboro and his surprise dinner at Avellino? Was this what the writer would have wanted young Joe to do, if his son were to find himself in a similarly hostile situation?

“I am truly sorry your dog is dead,” Danny had typed. “I was angry. You take no responsibility for your dogs, and you won’t acknowledge that a public road is not your dogs’ territory. But I should have held my temper better than I did. I’ll run somewhere else. You’ve lost a dog; I’ll give up my favorite run. Enough is enough, okay?”

It was just a plain piece of typing paper. The writer didn’t include his name. If Armando was right-if the asshole was a writer carpenter, and/or one of Danny’s former students at Windham -then of course the infuriating dog owner already knew that the runner with the squash-racquet handles was the writer Danny Angel. But Danny saw no reason to advertise this. He didn’t put the piece of paper in an envelope, either; he’d just folded it twice and put it in the dog owner’s mailbox, out where the driveway lined with dead vehicles met the road.

Now, as he sat writing in Avellino, Danny knew what Armando would say: “You don’t try to make peace with assholes,” or words to that effect. But Armando didn’t have children. Did that make Armando more unafraid? The very idea of an altercation escalating out of control-well, wasn’t that high on the list of things to protect your children from? (In the notebook, where Danny was scribbling to himself, the phrase “a nameless fear” stood out with an identifying awkwardness in several unfinished sentences.)

As a boy, and as a young man, Danny had always assumed that his dad and Ketchum were different, chiefly because his dad was a cook and Ketchum was a river driver-a logger, tougher than his caulk boots, an intemperate woodsman who would never back down from a fight.

But Ketchum was estranged from his children; he’d already lost them. It wasn’t necessarily true that Ketchum was braver, or more bold, than the cook. Ketchum wasn’t a father, not anymore; he didn’t have as much to lose. Danny only now understood that his dad had been doing his best to look out for him. Leaving Twisted River had been a father’s decision. And the cook and his son were both trying to look out for young Joe; their mutual fear for the boy had brought Danny and his dad closer together.

He’d felt close to his father in Iowa City, too, the writer was remembering. (Their Asian interlude, as Danny thought of Iowa that second time around.) His dad’s steadiest girlfriend those years in Iowa City had been an ER nurse at Mercy Hospital -Yi-Yiing was Chinese. She was Danny’s age-in her early thirties, almost twenty years younger than the cook-and she had a daughter, who was Joe’s age, back in Hong Kong. Her husband had left her upon the daughter’s birth-he’d wanted a son-and Yi-Yiing had trusted her mother and father to care for her child while she’d made a new life for herself in the Midwest. The nursing career had been a good choice, and so had Iowa City. The doctors at Mercy Hospital had declared that Yi-Yiing was indispensable. She had her green card and was on track to become a U.S. citizen.

Of course Yi-Yiing would hear the occasional gook word-the most common insult from a prejudiced patient in the emergency room, and from an unseen driver or passenger in a moving car. But it didn’t faze her to be mistaken for the war bride of a Vietnam vet. She had a harder, uphill task ahead of her-namely, moving her daughter and her parents to the United States -but she was well on her way to unraveling the red tape that was involved. Yi-Yiing had her own reasons for remaining undistracted from achieving her goal. (She’d been assured it would be easier to bring her family to the United States once the war in Vietnam was over; it was “only a matter of time,” a reliable authority had told her.)

What Yi-Yiing had said to Tony Angel was that it wasn’t the time for her to be “romantically involved.” Maybe this was music to his dad’s ears, Danny had thought at the time. Quite possibly, given Yi-Yiing’s heroic undertaking, the cook was a consoling and undemanding partner for her; with so much of his life lost to the past, Tony Angel wasn’t exactly seeking so-called romantic involvement, either. Moreover, that the cook’s grandson was the same age as Yi-Yiing’s daughter gave the nurse a motherly affection for young Joe.

Danny and his dad always had to think about Joe before including new women in their lives. Danny had liked Yi-Yiing-no small part of the reason being how sincerely she’d paid attention to Joe-though it was awkward that Yi-Yiing was Danny’s age, and that the writer was attracted to her.

In those three years, Danny and his dad had rented three different houses on Court Street in Iowa City -all from tenured faculty on sabbaticals. Court Street was tree-lined with large, three-story houses; it was a kind of residential faculty row. The street was also within safe walking distance of the Longfellow Elementary School, where Joe would attend second, third, and fourth grades. Court Street was somewhat removed from downtown Iowa City, and Danny never had to drive on Iowa Avenue, where he’d earlier lived with Katie-not, in any case, on his way to and from the English-Philosophy Building on the Iowa River. (The EPB, as it was called, was where Danny’s office at the Writers’ Workshop was.)

As big as the rental houses on Court Street were, Danny didn’t write at home-largely because Yi-Yiing worked irregular hours in the ER at Mercy Hospital. She often slept in the cook’s bedroom until midday, when she would come down to the kitchen and fix herself something to eat in her silk pajamas. When she wasn’t working at the hospital, Yi-Yiing lived in her slinky Hong Kong pajamas.

Danny liked walking Joe to school, and then going to write at the English-Philosophy Building. When his office door was closed, his students and the other faculty knew not to bother him. (Yi-Yiing was small of stature, short but surprisingly heavyset, with a pretty face and long, coal-black hair. She had many pairs of the silk pajamas, in a variety of vibrant colors; as Danny recalled, even her black pajamas appeared to vibrate.) This parenthetical non sequitur, long after he’d begun his morning’s writing-an alluring image of Yi-Yiing in her vibrating pajamas, asleep in his father’s bed-was a lingering distraction. Yi-Yiing and her pajamas, or their enticing presence, traveled to the English-Philosophy Building with Danny.

“I don’t know how you can write in such a sterile building,” the writer Raymond Carver said of the EPB. Ray was a colleague of Danny Angel’s at the workshop in those years.