Last Night In Twisted River

“They’ll stay with me,” Carmella told Molinari. “I have a spare room.” Her offer was incontestable, because she meant Angel’s room; even mentioning the room made Carmella commence to cry again. When Danny and his dad walked her back to the cold-water apartment on Charter Street, she told them to take the bigger bed-in her room. She would sleep in the single bed in her departed Angelu’s room.

They would hear her crying herself to sleep-that is, she was trying to. When the crying had gone on for a long time, young Dan whispered to his father: “Maybe you should go to her.”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate, Daniel. It’s her boy she misses-I think you should go to her.”

Danny Baciagalupo went to Angel’s room, where Carmella held out her arms to the boy, and he got into the narrow bed beside her. “An-geh-LOO,” she whispered in his ear, until she finally fell asleep. Danny didn’t dare get out of the bed, for fear he would wake her. He lay in her warm arms, smelling her good, clean smell, until he fell asleep, too. It had been a long, violent day for the twelve-year-old-counting the dramatic events of the previous night, of course-and young Dan must have been tired.

Wouldn’t even the way he fell asleep somehow contribute to Danny becoming a writer? On the night of the same day he had killed the three-hundred-plus-pound Indian dishwasher, who happened to be his father’s lover, Daniel Baciagalupo would find himself in the warm embrace of the widow Del Popolo, the voluptuous woman who would soon replace Injun Jane in his father’s next life-his dad’s sad but (for the time being) ongoing story. One day, the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events-these are what move a story forward-but at the moment Danny lost consciousness in Carmella’s sweet-smelling arms, the exhausted boy had merely been thinking: How coincidental is this? (He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)

Perhaps the photographs of his dead mother were sufficient to make young Dan become a writer; he had managed to take only some of them from the cookhouse in Twisted River, and he would miss the books he’d kept her photos pressed flat in-particularly, those novels that contained passages Rosie had underlined. The passages themselves were a way for the boy to better imagine his mother, together with the photos. Trying to remember those left-behind pictures was a way of imagining her, too.

Only a few of the photographs he brought to Boston were in color, and his dad had told Danny that the black- and-white photos were somehow “truer” to what Dominic called “the lethal blue of her eyes.” (Why “lethal”? the would-be writer wondered. And how could those black-and-white pictures be “truer” to his mother’s blue eyes than the standard color-by-Kodak photographs?)

Rosie’s hair had been dark brown, almost black, but she was surprisingly fair-skinned, with sharply angular, fragile-looking features, which served to make her seem even more petite than she was. When young Dan would meet all the Calogeros-among them, his mother’s younger sisters-he saw that two of these aunts were small and pretty, like his mom in the photographs, and the youngest of them (Filomena) also had blue eyes. But Danny would notice that, as much as he was drawn to stare at Filomena-she must have been about the same age as the boy’s mother when Rosie had died (in her mid-to late twenties, in Danny’s estimation)-his father was quick to say that Filomena’s eyes were not the same blue as his mom’s. (Not lethal enough, maybe, the boy could only guess.) Young Dan would notice, too, that his dad rarely spoke to Filomena; Dominic seemed almost rude to her, in that he purposely wouldn’t look at her or ever comment on what she was wearing.

Was it as a writer that Daniel Baciagalupo began to notice such defining details? Had the boy already discerned what could be called a pattern-in-progress in his father’s attraction, in turn, to Injun Jane and to Carmella Del Popolo-both of them big, dark-eyed women, as opposite to Rosie Calogero as the twelve-year-old could imagine? For if Rosie had truly been the love of his dad’s life, might not Dominic purposely be denying himself contact with any woman remotely like her?

In fact, Ketchum would one day accuse the cook of maintaining an unnatural fidelity to Rosie by choosing to be with women who were grossly unlike her. Danny must have written Ketchum about Carmella, and the boy probably said she was big, because the cook had been careful-in his letters to his old friend-to make no mention of his new girlfriend’s size, or the color of her eyes. Dominic would tell Ketchum next to nothing about Angel’s mother and his developing relationship with her. Dominic wouldn’t even respond to Ketchum’s accusatory letter, but the cook was angry that the logger had criticized his apparent taste in women. At the time, Ketchum was still with Six-Pack Pam-speaking of women opposite to Cousin Rosie!

To remember Pam, Dominic needed only to look in a mirror, where the scar on his lower lip would remain very noticeable long after the night Six-Pack attacked him. It would be a surprise to Dominic Del Popolo, ne Baciagalupo, that Ketchum and Six-Pack would last as a couple for very long. But they would be together for a few years longer than Dominic had been with Injun Jane-even a little longer than the cook would manage to stay with Carmella Del Popolo, Angel’s large but lovely mom.

THE FIRST MORNING father and son would wake up in Boston, it was to the tantalizing sounds of Carmella having a bath in her small kitchen. Respecting the woman’s privacy, Dominic and young Dan lay in their beds while Carmella performed her seductive-sounding ablutions; unbeknownst to them, she’d put a third and fourth pasta pot of water on the stove, and these would soon be coming to a near boil. “There’s plenty of hot water!” she called to them. “Who wants the next bath?”

Because the cook had already been thinking about how he might fit, albeit snugly, in the same big bathtub with Carmella Del Popolo, Dominic somewhat insensitively suggested that he and Daniel could share a bath-he meant the same bathwater-an idea that the twelve-year-old found repellent. “No, Dad!” the boy called, from the narrow bed in Angel’s room.

They could hear Carmella as the heavy woman rose dripping from the bathtub. “I know boys Danny’s age-they need some privacy!” she said.

Yes, young Dan thought-not fully understanding that he would soon need more privacy from his dad and Carmella. After all, Danny was almost a teenager. While they wouldn’t live together for long in the cold-water flat on Charter Street with the big bathtub in the small kitchen and an absurdly small water closet (with just a curtain, instead of a door)-the so-called WC contained only a toilet and a diminutive sink with a mirror above it-the apartment they would move into wasn’t much larger, or half private enough for a teenage Daniel Baciagalupo, though it did have hot water. It would be another walk-up on what would one day be called Wesley Place-an alley that ran alongside the Caffe Vittoria-and in addition to having two bedrooms, there was a full-size bathroom with both a tub and a shower (and an actual door), and the kitchen was large enough for a table with six chairs.

Still, the bedrooms were next to each other; in the North End, there was nothing they could afford that was at all comparable to the spaciousness of the second floor of the cookhouse in Twisted River. And Danny was already too old to overhear his father and Carmella trying to keep their lovemaking quiet-certainly after the boy, with his excitable imagination, had heard and seen his dad and Injun Jane doing it.

The cook and Carmella, with young Dan increasingly aware of himself as the surrogate Angel, had an acceptable living arrangement, but it was not one that would last. It would soon be time for the teenager to create a little distance between himself and his dad-and, as he grew older, Danny was made more uncomfortable by another problem.

If he had once suffered from a presexual state of arousal, first inspired by Jane and then by Six-Pack Pam, the teenager could find no relief from his deepening desire for Carmella Del Popolo-his dad’s “Injun replacement,” as Ketchum called her. Danny’s attraction to Carmella was a more troubling problem than the privacy issues.

“You need to get away,” Ketchum would write to young Dan, although the boy truly liked his life in the North End. In fact, he loved it, especially in comparison to the life he’d had in Twisted River -at the Paris Manufacturing Company School, in particular.

The Michelangelo School thought little of the education Danny Baciagalupo had received among those Phillips Brook bums-those West Dummer dolts, as Ketchum called them. The authorities at the Mickey made Danny repeat a grade; he was a year older than most of his classmates. By seventh grade, when the would-be writer first mentioned Ketchum’s Exeter idea to his English teacher, Mr. Leary, the Irishman already considered Danny Baciagalupo to be among his very best students. By the time the boy was taking eighth-grade English, Danny was far and away Mr. Leary’s teacher’s pet.

Several of Mr. Leary’s former pupils had gone on to attend Boston Latin. A few had attended Roxbury Latin-in the old Irishman’s opinion, a somewhat snooty Anglo school. Two boys Mr. Leary had taught had gone to Milton,