Last Night In Twisted River

and one to Andover, but no one from Mr. Leary’s English classes had ever gone to Exeter; it was farther afield from Boston than those other good schools, and Mr. Leary knew it was a very good school. Might it have been a feather in Mr. Leary’s cap if Daniel Baciagalupo were accepted at Exeter?

Mr. Leary felt bedeviled by most of the other seventh-and eighth-grade boys at the Mickey. It was notable that Danny didn’t join in the teasing his teacher took, because teasing-and other, harsher forms of harassment-reminded the boy of his Paris school experience.

Mr. Leary was red-faced from drink; he had a potato-shaped nose, the veritable image of the alleged staple of his countrymen’s diet. Wild white tufts of hair, like fur, stuck out above his ears, but Mr. Leary was otherwise bald-with a pronounced dent in the top of his head. He looked like a partially defeathered owl. “As a child,” Mr. Leary told all his students, “I was hit on the head by an unabridged dictionary, which doubtless gave me my abundant love of words.”

Both the seventh-and eighth-grade boys called him “O,” for Mr. Leary had dropped the O’ from his name. These badly behaved boys wrote no end of O’s on the blackboard when Mr. Leary was out of the classroom. They called to him, “O!”-but only when his back was turned.

Why this tormented the former Mr. O’Leary so, Danny didn’t understand, nor did Daniel Baciagalupo think it was any big deal for his teacher to have dropped the O’ from his name. (Just look at Angel Pope, and everything he had dropped. Did the Italian kids think that only the Irish occasionally tried to make less of their ethnicity?)

But Mr. Leary’s foremost reason for finding Daniel Baciagalupo such an excellent student was that the boy loved to write, and he wrote and wrote. In the seventh and eighth grade at the Mickey, Mr. Leary had never seen anything quite like it. The boy seemed possessed-or at least obsessed.

True, it would not infrequently disturb Mr. Leary to read what young Dan would write about, but his stories- many of them farfetched, most of them violent, and all of them with an undue amount of sexual content, totally inappropriate for a teenager-were invariably well-written and clear. The kid simply had a gift for storytelling; Mr. Leary just wanted to help him master the grammar, and all the rest of the mechanics of writing. At Exeter, Mr. Leary had heard, they were sticklers for grammar. They made a nuts-and-bolts business out of writing there-you had to write every day, about something.

When Mr. Leary wrote to the admissions people at Exeter, he made no mention of the subject matter of young Dan’s creative writing. Exeter was not much interested in so-called creative writing, anyway; the essay, Mr. Leary assumed, was all-important there. And the Michelangelo School, where Daniel Baciagalupo was such an exceptional student, was in a neighborhood of Italo-Americans. (Mr. Leary was careful not to use the immigrant word, though this was very much his meaning.) These people were prone to laziness and exaggeration, Mr. Leary wanted Exeter to know. The Baciagalupo boy was “unlike the rest.”

To listen to most of these Italians, Mr. Leary suggested, you would get the impression that they had all lived with rats (and other appalling conditions) in the steerage class of the ships that brought them to America-all of them orphans, or otherwise landing on the docks alone, and with no more than a few miserable lira to their names. And while many of the teenage girls were beautiful, they would all become hopelessly fat as women; this was because of the pasta and their unrestrained appetites. The latter, Mr. Leary suspected, were not limited to overeating. Truth be told, these Italians were not as industrious as those hardworking earlier immigrants-the Irish-and while Mr. Leary didn’t exactly say these things to the admissions people at Exeter, he imparted no small amount of his prejudices while singing in praise of Daniel Baciagalupo’s talents and character, not to mention citing the “difficulties” the boy had faced and overcome “at home.”

There was a single parent-“a rather uncommunicative cook,” as Mr. Leary described him. This cook lived with a woman Mr. Leary would describe as “a widow who has suffered multiple tragedies”-to wit, if ever there were a worthy candidate for the enviable position of a full-scholarship student at Exeter, Daniel Baciagalupo was his name! Cleverly, Mr. Leary was not only aware of his prejudices; he wanted to be sure that Exeter was aware of his prejudices, too. He intended to make the North End of Boston sound like a place Danny needed to be rescued from. Mr. Leary wanted someone from Exeter to come see the Michelangelo School -even if this meant seeing how disrespected Mr. Leary was there. For surely if a scholarship person met Daniel Baciagalupo in the company of those badly behaved boys at the Mickey-and, just as important, saw the would-be writer in the context of that noisy neighborhood restaurant where both the boy’s father and the tragic widow worked-well, it would simply be obvious how Danny Baciagalupo stood out. The boy did stand out, but young Dan would have stood out anywhere-not only in the North End- though Mr. Leary didn’t say this. As it would turn out, he said enough.

His letter had its desired effect. “Get a load of this guy!” (meaning Mr. Leary with his abundant prejudices) the first person in the admissions office at Exeter must have said. The letter was passed on to another reader, and to another; a lot of people at Exeter probably read that letter, among them the very “scholarship person” Mr. Leary had in mind all along.

And that person doubtless said, “I have to see this”-meaning not only the Mickey, and Mr. Leary, but also the underprivileged circumstances of Daniel Baciagalupo’s Italo-American life.

There was much more that Mr. Leary didn’t say. What need was there for Exeter to know about the boy’s outrageous imagination? What had happened to the father in that one story? He’d been lamed (forever crippled) by a bear-the bear had eaten one of the father’s feet-but the maimed man had somehow managed to beat back the bear with a frying pan! This same maimed man lost his wife in a square-dancing accident. There’d been a square dance outdoors, on a dock; the dock had collapsed, and all the dancers were drowned. The man who’d lost his foot to the bear had been spared because he couldn’t dance! (He was just watching from afar, if Mr. Leary remembered the story correctly-it was all preposterous stuff, but well- written, very well-written.)

There was even a friend of this same fictional family who’d been brain-damaged by a corrupt cop. The victim was an unlikely lumberjack-“unlikely,” in Mr. Leary’s opinion, because the lumberjack was described as a great reader. Even more improbable, he’d been so badly beaten by the cop that he’d forgotten how to read! And the women in Daniel Baciagalupo’s stories-Lord have mercy, thought Mr. Leary.

There was a native woman from a local Indian tribe-the story about the maimed man was set in the boondocks of northern New Hampshire and featured a dance hall where there was no dancing. (Come on, Mr. Leary had thought when he’d read the story-what would be the point of that?) But the story had been well-written, as always, and the Indian woman weighed three or four hundred pounds, and her hair hung below her waist; this caused a retarded boy (the child of the father who’d been attacked by the bear) to mistake the Indian for another bear! The unfortunate retard actually thought that the same bear had returned to eat the rest of his dad, when in truth the Indian woman was having sex with the cripple-in what Mr. Leary could only imagine must have been the superior position.

But when the teacher had said this to Danny (“I gather the Indian woman was in the-ah, well- superior position”), the Baciagalupo boy looked uncomprehending. The young writer had not understood.

“No, she was just on top,” Danny had answered Mr. Leary. The teacher had smiled adoringly. In Mr. Leary’s eyes, Daniel Baciagalupo was a genius-in-progress; the wonder boy could do no wrong.

Yet what had happened to the overweight Indian woman was horrendous. The retarded boy had killed her; he’d hit her with the exact same frying pan his father had used as a weapon against the bear! Young Baciagalupo’s powers of description were perhaps at their best when he rendered the reposeful posture of the naked, dead Indian woman. The thoughtful father had quickly covered her exposed crotch with a pillow-perhaps to spare his damaged son any further misunderstanding. But the retarded boy had already seen more than his limited intelligence could stand. For years, he would be haunted by the sight of the slain woman’s huge breasts-how they had lifelessly slumped into the hollows of her armpits. How did the kid keep coming up with details like those? Mr. Leary would wonder. (Mr. Leary would be haunted by the naked, dead Indian woman, too.)

But why say anything to Exeter about those questionable elements of the boy’s imagination, which had even