Last Night In Twisted River

But the war in Vietnam would drag on, and on; Nixon would win the ’68 election by promising voters an end to the war, but the war would continue until 1975. On April 23, 1970, issuing his own executive order, President Nixon put an end to the 3-A paternity deferment for new fathers-if the child was conceived on or after that date. In the last five years of the war, another 23,763 U.S. soldiers would be killed, and Daniel Baciagalupo would finally come to realize that he should have thanked Katie Callahan for saving his life.

“So what if she was a serial baby maker for draft dodgers,” Ketchum would write to Danny. “She saved your ass, sure as shit. And I wasn’t kidding-I would have chopped off your right hand to spare you getting your balls blown off, if she hadn’t saved you. A finger or two, anyway.”

But that April night in ’67, when he kept trying to write in the rain in Iowa City, Daniel Baciagalupo preferred to think that it was his two-year-old, little Joe, who’d saved him.

Probably no one could have saved Katie. Many years later, Daniel Baciagalupo would read Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, a memoir by the fiction writer Robert Stone. “Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility,” Stone would write. “Things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of us who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived.”

Well, that certainly rang true for Katie Callahan, Danny would think, when he read that passage. But that book by Robert Stone wouldn’t be written in time to save Katie. So she wasn’t looking for protection, and she couldn’t be saved, but-in addition to her looks, which were both wanton and seemingly underage-no small part of her appeal, and what made her most desirable to Danny, was that Katie was a renegade. (She also had the edginess of a sexual deserter; you never knew what she would do next, because Katie didn’t know, either.)

“SIT DOWN, MICHAEL, SIT DOWN-eat something!” old Polcari had kept urging Mr. Leary, but the agitated Irishman was too worked up to eat. He had a beer, and then a glass or two of red wine. Poor Mr. Leary couldn’t look at Carmella Del Popolo, Danny knew, without imagining that spade-shaped elf’s goatee she’d possibly left unshaven in her left armpit. And when Dominic limped off to the kitchen to bring Mr. Leary a slice of the English teacher’s favorite Sicilian meat loaf, Danny Baciagalupo, the writer-in-progress, saw the old owl looking at his dad’s limp with new and startled eyes. Maybe a bear did that to the cook’s foot! Mr. Leary might have been thinking; maybe there really had been a three-or four-hundred-pound Indian woman whose hair had hung below her waist!

There was one other thing Mr. Leary had lied about to Exeter -the part about these immigrants being prone to exaggeration. Hadn’t Mr. Leary said that the Baciagalupo boy was “unlike the rest”? In the area of writerly exaggeration, Daniel Baciagalupo was a born exaggerator! And Danny was still at it on that rainy night in Iowa City, though he was sorely distracted; he was still a little bit in love with Katie Callahan, too. (Danny was only beginning to understand what his father had meant by the color he’d called lethal blue.)

How did that Johnny Cash song go? He’d first heard it six or seven years ago, Danny was guessing.

Oh, I never got over those blue eyes,

I see them everywhere.

More distractions, the writer thought; it was as if he were determined to physically remove himself (to detach himself) from that night in Vicino di Napoli with dear Mr. Leary.

It had taken Mr. Leary a third or fourth glass of red wine, and most of the meat loaf, before he was brave enough to take the pearl-gray envelope out of his inside jacket pocket. From across the table, Danny spotted the crimson lettering; the fifteen-year-old knew what Exeter ’s school colors were.

“And it’s all boys, Dominic,” the writer could still hear Mr. Leary saying. The old English teacher had indicated, with a nod of his head, the attractive Calogero girl (Danny’s older cousin Elena) and her overripe friend Teresa DiMattia. Those girls were all over Danny whenever the after-school busboy was trying to change into his black busboy pants back in the kitchen.

“Give Danny some privacy, girls,” Tony Molinari would tell them, but they wouldn’t let up with their ceaseless vamping. In addition to dear Mr. Leary, maybe Danny had those girls to thank for his dad’s decision to let him go to Exeter.

The hard parts to write about were the tears in his father’s eyes when he said, “Well, Daniel, if it’s a good school, like Michael says, and if you really want to go there-well, I guess Carmella and I can come visit you there on occasion, and you can come home to Boston on the occasional weekends.” His dad’s voice had broken on the occasion and occasional words, Daniel Baciagalupo would remember on that rainy night when he absolutely could not write-but he kept trying to-in Iowa City.

Danny remembered, too, how he’d gone off to the back of the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli, so that his father wouldn’t see him start to cry-by then Carmella was crying, too, but she was always crying-and Danny took a little extra time in the kitchen to wet a dishcloth. Unobserved by Mr. Leary, who was overly fond of red wine, Danny wiped clean the back of his teacher’s trenchcoat. The chalk-white O’ had been easy to erase, easier to erase than the rest of that evening.

Danny would never forget lying in his bedroom later that night, in the Wesley Place apartment, hearing his dad cry and cry-with Carmella crying, too, as she tried to comfort him.

Finally, young Dan had knocked on the wall between their bedrooms. “I love you! And I’ll come home a lot- every weekend I can!”

“I love you!” his dad had blubbered back.

“I love you, too!” Carmella had called.

Well, he couldn’t write that scene-he could never get it right, Daniel Baciagalupo was thinking.

The chapter titled “Going Away to School” was part of the twenty-five-year-old writer’s second novel. He had finished his first novel at the end of his first year in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he’d spent much of his second and final year revising it. He had been lucky enough, in his senior year at the University of New Hampshire, to have one of the writers-in-residence in the English department introduce him to a literary agent. And his first novel was bought by the first publisher the book was sent to. It would be several years before Daniel Baciagalupo would realize how fortunate he’d been. Possibly, no other student graduating from the Writers’ Workshop that year already had a novel accepted for publication. It had made Danny the envy of some other students. But he hadn’t made many friends among those students; he was one of the few who was married and had a child, so he’d not been a regular at the parties.

Danny had written to Ketchum about the book. He hoped that the logger would be among the first to read it. The novel wouldn’t be published until December of ’67, or maybe not until the New Year, and though it had a northern New Hampshire setting, Daniel Baciagalupo assured Ketchum and his dad that they weren’t in it. “It’s not about either of you, or about me-I’m not ready for that,” he’d told them.

“No Angel, no Jane?” Ketchum had asked; he’d sounded surprised, or perhaps disappointed.

“It’s not autobiographical,” Danny had told them, and it wasn’t.

Maybe Mr. Leary would have called the novel “rather remote,” had that dear man been alive to read it, but Mr. Leary had passed away. Thinking of that Exeter-letter afternoon in Vicino di Napoli, as Daniel Baciagalupo was, he remembered that old Giuse Polcari had died, too. The restaurant itself had moved twice-first to Fleet Street, then to North Square (where it was now)-and Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari took turns at being the maitre d’, thus giving themselves a break from the kitchen. Dominic (with his limp) was not maitre-d’ material, though he subbed as the first or principal chef, and Danny’s dad also took turns at the pizza-chef position-whenever Paul Polcari was the maitre d’. Carmella, as before, was the most sought-after waitress in the place; there were always a couple of younger women under her supervision.

In those summers he was home from Exeter and UNH-that is, until he married Katie-Danny had worked as a waiter at Vicino di Napoli, and he would sub as the pizza chef when Paul needed a night off, or when his dad did. If he hadn’t become a writer, Daniel Baciagalupo could have been a cook. That rainy night in Iowa, when the second novel wasn’t going so well, and the first novel wasn’t yet published, Danny was in a low enough mood to imagine that he might end up being a cook after all. (If the writing didn’t work out, at least he could cook.)

As for the upcoming academic year, Danny already had a job-teaching creative writing, and some other English