Last Night In Twisted River

“It’s called a pen name,” Danny told him. “Just how the fuck did you meet the schoolteacher lady in the library when you can’t even read?”

“Well, I can read some of the authors’ names and the titles,” Ketchum said indignantly. “I can borrow books and find someone to read them to me!”

“Oh,” Danny said. He guessed that was what Ketchum had done with his mother-this in lieu of learning to read. What had Ketchum called the reading-aloud part to Dominic? Foreplay, wasn’t it? (Actually, that had been Dominic’s word for it. Danny’s dad had told his son this funny story!)

“A pen name,” Ketchum repeated thoughtfully. “I believe there’s another phrase for it, something French- sounding.”

“A nom de plume,” Danny told him.

“That’s it!” Ketchum cried. “A nom de plume. Well, that’s what you need-just to be on the safe side.”

“I don’t suppose you have any suggestions,” Daniel Baciagalupo said.

“You’re the writer-that’s your job,” Ketchum told him. “Ketchum kind of goes with Daniel, doesn’t it? And it’s a fine old Coos County kind of name.”

“I’ll think about it,” Danny told him.

“I’m sure you can come up with something better,” Ketchum said.

“Tell me one thing,” Danny said. “If my mom hadn’t died that night in the river, which one of you would she have left? You or my dad? I can’t talk to my dad about that, Ketchum.”

“Shit!” Ketchum cried. “I heard you call that wife of yours ‘a free spirit.’ Katie was a lawless soul, a political radical, a fucking anarchist, and a coldhearted woman-you should have known better, Danny. But Rosie was a free spirit! She wouldn’t have left either of us-not ever! Your mom was a free spirit, Danny-like you young people today have never seen! Shit!” Ketchum cried again. “Sometimes you ask the dumbest questions-you make me think you’re still a college kid who can’t properly drive a car, or that you’re still a twelve-year-old, one your dad and Jane and I could still fool about the world, if we wanted to. Talk to your dad, Danny-talk to him.”

There was a click, followed by a dial tone, because Ketchum had disconnected the call, leaving the young writer alone with his thoughts.

CHAPTER 6. IN MEDIAS RES

IN THEIR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON WESLEY PLACE, FOR REASONS that defied logic, the telephone was on Carmella’s side of the bed. In those years Danny was away at boarding school and then at college, if the phone ever rang, young Dan was the reason the cook wanted to answer it-hoping it was Daniel, and not some terrible news about him. (More often, when the phone rang, it was Ketchum.)

Carmella had told Danny that he should call home more than he did. “You’re the only reason we have a phone, your dad is always telling me!” The boy was pretty good, after that, about calling more frequently.

“Shouldn’t the phone be on my side of the bed?” Dominic had asked Carmella. “I mean, you don’t want to have to talk to Ketchum, and if it’s Daniel-or worse, if there’s any bad news about Daniel-”

Carmella wouldn’t let him finish. “If there’s bad news about Danny, I want to know it first-so I can tell you about it, and put my arm around your shoulders, the way you told me and held me,” she said to him.

“That’s crazy, Carmella,” the cook said.

But that was the way it had worked out; the phone stayed on Carmella’s side of the bed. Whenever Ketchum called collect, Carmella always accepted the call, and she usually said, “Hello, Mr. Ketchum. When am I going to get to meet you? I would very much like to meet you one day.” (Ketchum wasn’t very talkative-not to her, anyway. She would soon pass the phone to Dominic-“Gamba,” she fondly called him.)

But that spring of ’67, when the news came about Danny’s miserable marriage-that awful wife of his; the dear boy had deserved better-and there’d been more collect calls than usual from up north (most of them about that menacing cop), Ketchum had scared Carmella. Dominic would later think that Ketchum probably meant to. When she’d said the usual to the old woodsman-Carmella was about to hand the phone across the bed to Dominic- Ketchum said, “I don’t know that you want to meet me, ever, because it might not be under the best of circumstances.”

That had given Carmella quite a chill; she’d been upset enough with the way things were that spring, and now Mr. Ketchum had frightened her. And Carmella wished that Danny was as relieved as she was that Katie had left him. It was one thing to leave the man you were with-Carmella could understand that-but it was a sin for a mother to walk away from her own child. Carmella was relieved that Katie had left, because Carmella believed that Katie wouldn’t have been any kind of mother if she’d stayed. Of course, Carmella and Dominic had never liked Katie Callahan; they’d both seen their share of customers like her in Vicino di Napoli. “You can smell the money on her,” Carmella had said to the cook.

“It’s not exactly on her, it’s under her,” the cook had commented. He meant that the money in Katie’s family was a safety net for the wild girl; she could behave in any fashion she wanted because the family money was there to catch her if she fell. Dominic felt certain, as Ketchum did, that Katie Callahan’s so-called free spirit was a fraud. Danny had misunderstood his dad; the boy thought that the cook didn’t like Katie strictly because the young woman looked like Rosie, Danny’s unfaithful mother. But Katie’s looks had little to do with what Dominic and Ketchum didn’t like about her; it was how she was not like Rosie Calogero that had bothered them, from the beginning.

Katie was nothing but a renegade young woman with a money cushion under her; “a mere sexual outlaw,” Ketchum had called her. Whereas Rosie had loved both a boy and a man. She’d been trapped because she had genuinely loved the two of them-hence they’d been trapped, too. By comparison, the Callahan whore had just been fucking around; worse, with her high-minded politics, Katie thought she was above such mundanities as marriage and motherhood.

Carmella knew it pained Dominic that Danny believed his mother had been the same sort of lawless creature Katie was. Though Dominic had gone to great lengths to explain the threesome with Rosie and Ketchum to Carmella, she had to confess that she didn’t understand it much better than Danny did. Carmella could understand the reason for it happening, but not for it continuing the way it had. Danny didn’t get that part of it, either. Carmella also had been mad at her dear Gamba for not telling the boy about his mother sooner. Danny had long been old enough to know the story, and it would have been better if his dad had told him before the cat got let out of the bag in that conversation Danny had had with Mr. Ketchum.

Carmella had been the one who’d answered the phone on that early morning Danny called to talk about it. “Secondo!” she said, when she heard his voice on the phone. That had been Danny’s nickname all the years he’d worked at Vicino di Napoli.

“Secondo Angelo,” old Polcari had first named him-literally, “Second Angel.”

All of them had been careful to call him Angelo, never Angelu, and around Carmella they would shorten the nickname to just plain Secondo-though Carmella herself was so fond of Danny that she often spoke of him as her secondo figlio (her “second son”).

In restaurant language, secondo also means “second course,” so it was the name that had stuck.

But now Carmella’s Secondo Angelo was in no mood to speak to her. “I need to talk to my dad, Carmella,” he said.

(Ketchum had warned the cook that Danny would be calling. “I’m sorry, Cookie,” that call from Ketchum had begun. “I fucked up.”)

On the April morning Danny called, Carmella knew that the young man would be angry at his dad for not telling him all those things. Of course she heard mostly Dominic’s side of the conversation, but she could nevertheless tell how the phone call was going-badly.

“I’m sorry-I was going to tell you,” the cook started.

Carmella could hear Danny’s response to that, because he shouted into the phone at his father. “What were you waiting for?”