Last Night In Twisted River

shoeshine shops, the summertime feasts and festivals, and those curious religious societies whose street-level windows were painted with figures of patron saints. At least the saints were “curious” to Dominic and Daniel Baciagalupo, who (in thirteen years) had failed to find exactly what was Catholic or Italian within themselves.

Well, to be fair, perhaps Danny hadn’t entirely “failed” with the Italian part-he was still trying to lose that northern New Hampshire coldness. Dominic, it seemed, would never lose it; he could cook Italian, but being one was another matter.

Despite Ketchum’s likely misunderstanding that the Michelangelo was a Catholic school, it had long seemed unfair to Danny that his dad blamed Ketchum for giving young Dan the idea of going “away” to a boarding school. All Ketchum had said, in one of his earlier letters to Danny-in that positively girlish handwriting-was that the smartest “fella” he ever knew had attended a private school in the vicinity of the New Hampshire seacoast. Ketchum meant Exeter, not a long drive north of Boston -and in those days you could take the train, what Ketchum called “the good old Boston and Maine.” From Boston ’s North Station, the Boston & Maine ran to northern New Hampshire, too. “Hell, I’m sure you can walk from the North End to North Station,” Ketchum wrote to young Dan. “Even a fella with a limp could walk that far, I imagine.” (The fella word was increasingly common in Ketchum’s vocabulary-maybe from Six-Pack, though Jane had also used the word. Both Danny and his dad said it, too.)

The cook had not taken kindly to what he called Ketchum’s “interference” in Daniel’s secondary-school education, though young Dan had argued with his father on that point; illogically, Dominic didn’t blame the boy’s seventh-and eighth-grade English teacher at the Mickey, Mr. Leary, who’d had far more to do with Danny eventually going to Exeter than Ketchum had ever had.

For that matter, the cook should have blamed himself-for when Dominic learned that Exeter (in those days) was an all-boys’ school, he was suddenly persuaded to allow his beloved Daniel to leave home in the fall of 1957, when the boy was only fifteen. Dominic would be heartbroken by how much he missed his son, but the cook could sleep at night, secure in the knowledge (or, as Ketchum would say, “the illusion”) that his boy was safe from girls. Dominic let Daniel go to Exeter because he wanted to keep his son away from girls “for as long as possible,” as he wrote to Ketchum.

“Well, that’s your problem, Cookie,” his old friend wrote back.

Indeed, it was. It hadn’t been such an apparent problem when they’d first come to the North End-when young Dan was only twelve, and he appeared to take no notice of girls-but the cook saw how the girls already noticed his son. Among those cousins and not-really-cousins in the Saetta and Calogero clans, there would soon be some kissing cousins among them, the cook could easily imagine-not to mention all the other girls the boy would meet, for the North End was a neighborhood, where you met people like crazy. The cook and his twelve-year-old had never lived in a neighborhood before.

On that April Sunday in ’54, father and son had had some difficulty finding the North End, and-even back then-it was easier to walk in the North End than it was to drive. (Both driving and parking the Pontiac Chieftain in that neighborhood had been a task-certainly not equal to transporting Injun Jane’s body from the cookhouse to Constable Carl’s kitchen, but a task nonetheless.) When they wove their way, on foot, to Hanover Street -passing once within view of the gold dome of the Sumner Tunnel Authority, which appeared to shine down on them like a new sun on a different planet-they saw two other restaurants (the Europeo and Mother Anna’s) near Cross Street before they spotted Vicino di Napoli.

It was late afternoon-it had been a long drive from northern New Hampshire -but it was a warm, sunny day compared to the cold-morning light at Dead Woman Dam, where they’d left Angel’s bluish body with Ketchum.

Here, the sidewalks teemed with families; people were actually talking-some of them shouting- to one another. (There-at Dead Woman Dam and in Twisted River, on the morning they left-they’d seen only the slain Indian dishwasher, the drowned boy, and Ketchum.) Here, from the moment they’d parked the Pontiac and started walking, Danny had been too excited to speak; he’d never seen such a place, except in the movies. (There were no movies to see in Twisted River; occasionally, Injun Jane had taken young Dan to Berlin to see one. The cook had said he would never go back to Berlin, “except in handcuffs.”)

That April Sunday on Hanover Street, when they stopped walking outside Vicino di Napoli, Danny glanced at his father, who looked as if he’d been dragged to the North End in handcuffs-or else the cook felt doomed to be darkening the restaurant’s door. Was a curse attached to the bearer of sad tidings? Dominic was wondering. What becomes of the man who brings bad news? One day, does something worse happen to him?

Young Dan could sense his dad’s hesitation, but before either father or son could open the door, an old man opened it from inside the restaurant. “Come een-a, come een-a!” he said to them; he took Danny by the wrist, pulling him into the welcoming smell of the place. Dominic mutely followed them. At first glance, the cook could tell that the old man was not his despised father; the elderly gentleman looked nothing like Dominic, and he was too old to have been Gennaro Capodilupo.

He was, as he very much appeared to be, both the maitre d’ and owner of Vicino di Napoli, and he had no memory of having met Annunziata Saetta, though he’d known Nunzi (without knowing it) and he knew plenty of Saettas-nor did the old man realize, on this particular Sunday, that it was Dominic’s father, Gennaro Capodilupo, whom he’d fired; Gennaro, that pig, had been an overly flirtatious bus-boy at Vicino di Napoli. (The restaurant was where Nunzi and Dominic’s philandering dad had met!) But the aged owner and maitre d’ had heard of Annunziata Saetta; he’d heard of Rosina or “Rosie” Calogero, too. Scandals are the talk of neighborhoods, as young Dan and his dad would soon learn.

As for Vicino di Napoli, the dining room was not big, and the tables were small; there were red-and-white- checkered tablecloths, and two young women and a kid (about Angel’s age) were arranging the place settings. There was a stainless-steel serving counter, beyond which Dominic could see a brick-lined pizza oven and an open kitchen, where two cooks were at work. Dominic was relieved that neither of the cooks was old enough to be his father.

“We’re not quite ready to serve, but you can sit down-have-a something to drink, maybe,” the old man said, smiling at Danny.

Dominic reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, where he felt Angelu Del Popolo’s wallet-it was still damp. But he had barely taken the wallet out when the maitre d’ backed away from him. “Are you a cop?” the old man asked. The cop word got the attention of the two cooks Dominic had spotted in the kitchen; they came cautiously out from behind the serving counter. The kid and the two women setting the tables stopped working and stared at Dominic, too.

“Cops don’t usually work with their children,” one of the cooks said to the old man. This cook was covered with flour-not just his apron but his hands and bare forearms were a dusty white. (The pizza chef, probably, Dominic thought.)

“I’m not a cop, I’m a cook,” Dominic told them. The two younger men and the old one laughed with relief; the two women and the kid went back to work. “But I have something to show you,” Dominic said. The cook was fishing around in Angel’s wallet. He couldn’t make up his mind what to show them first-the Boston transit pass with Angelu Del Popolo’s name and date of birth, or the photograph of the pretty but plump woman. He chose the streetcar and subway pass with the dead boy’s actual name, but before Dominic could decide which of the men to show the pass to, the old man saw the photo in the open wallet and grabbed the wallet out of Dominic’s hands.

“Carmella!” the maitre d’ cried.

“There was a boy,” Dominic began, as the two cooks hovered over the picture under plastic in the wallet. “Maybe she’s his mother.”

Dominic got no further. The pizza chef hid his face in his hands, completely whitening both cheeks. “An-geh- LOO!” he wailed.

“No! No! No!” the old man sang, grabbing Dominic by both shoulders and shaking him.

The other cook (clearly the principal or first chef) held his heart, as if he’d been stabbed.

The pizza chef, as white-faced as a clown, lightly touched young Dan’s hand with his flour-covered fingers. “What has happened to Angelu?” he asked the boy in such a gentle way that Dominic knew the man must have a child Daniel’s age, or that he’d had one. Both cooks were about ten years older than Dominic.

“Angel drowned,” Danny told them all.

“It was an accident,” his father spoke up.