Last Night In Twisted River

Annunziata had uttered in her sleep, and no one but Tony Angel had heard his mother say it. The goddamn cowboy couldn’t possibly come up with any connections to Benevento.

“Shit, it sure sounds Italian-I’ll give you that, Cookie,” Ketchum had said.

The Putney pizza place had been right on Route 5, just before the fork in the center of town, where Route 5 continued north, past the paper mill and a tourist trap called Basketville. Windham College was a little farther north, up Route 5. The left-hand fork, where the Putney General Store was-and the Putney Food Co-op, with the self- lacerating butcher of “indeterminable” sex-went off in the direction of Westminster West. Out that way was the Putney School-a prep school Danny disdained, because he thought it wasn’t up to Exeter’s standards-and, on Hickory Ridge Road, where the writer Danny Angel still lived, there was an independent elementary school called the Grammar School, which had been very much up to Danny’s standards.

He’d sent Joe there, and the boy had done well enough to get into Northfield Mount Hermon-a prep school Danny did approve of. NMH, as the school was called, was about half an hour south of Brattleboro, in Massachusetts-and an hour’s drive from Danny’s property in Putney. Joe, who was a senior in the spring of 1983, saw quite a lot of his dad and his grandfather.

In his Brattleboro apartment, the cook had a guest bedroom that was always ready for his grandson. Tony had torn out the kitchen in that apartment, but he’d kept the plumbing intact; he had built quite a spacious bathroom, which overlooked the Connecticut. The bathtub was big and reminded the cook of the one Carmella had had in her kitchen in that cold-water Charter Street apartment. Tony still didn’t know for certain that Daniel had spied on Carmella in that bathtub, but he’d read all five of his son’s novels, and in one of them there’s a luscious-looking Italian woman who luxuriates in taking long baths. The woman’s stepson is of an age where he’s just beginning to masturbate, and the boy beats off while watching his stepmother bathe. (The clever kid bores a hole in the bathroom wall; his bedroom is conveniently next to the bathroom.)

While there were these little details of a recognizable kind in Danny Angel’s novels, the cook more often noticed things that he was sure his son must have made up. If Carmella had put in an identifiable bathtub appearance, the character of the stepmother in that novel was definitely not based on Carmella; nor could the cook find any but the most superficial elements of himself in Daniel’s novels, or much of Ketchum. (A minor character’s broken wrist is mentioned in passing in one novel, and there’s a different character’s penchant for saying, “Constipated Christ!” in another.) Both Ketchum and Tony Angel had talked about the absence of anyone in the novels who revealed to them their quintessential and beloved Daniel.

“Where is that boy hiding himself?” Ketchum had asked the cook, because even in Danny Angel’s fourth (and most famous) novel, which was titled The Kennedy Fathers, the main character-who escapes the war in Vietnam with the same paternity deferment that kept Danny out of the war-bears little essential resemblance to the Daniel that Ketchum and the cook knew and loved.

There was a character based on Katie in The Kennedy Fathers- Caitlin, Danny Angel named her-a little sprite of a thing with a disproportionately oversize capacity for serial infidelities. She saves a truly hard-to-believe number of Kennedy fathers from the Vietnam War. The Caitlin character races through numerous husbands with the same casual frankness both the cook and Ketchum associated with the way Katie probably gave blow jobs-yet Caitlin wasn’t Katie.

“She’s way too nice,” Tony Angel told his old friend.

“I’ll say she is!” Ketchum agreed. “You even end up liking her!”

All her husbands end up liking Caitlin, too-or they can’t get over her, if that amounts to the same thing. And all those babies who are born and get abandoned by their mother-well, we never find out what they think of their mother. The novel concludes when President Nixon puts an end to the 3-A deferment, while the war will drag on for five more years, and the Caitlin character just kind of disappears; she is a lost soul in the last chapter of The Kennedy Fathers. There’s something that doesn’t bode well about how she phones all her husbands and asks to speak to her kids, who have no memory of her. That’s the last we hear about Caitlin-it’s a sympathetic moment.

Ketchum and the cook knew very well that Katie had not once called Daniel and asked to speak to Joe; it seemed that she simply hadn’t cared enough about them to even inquire how they were doing, though Ketchum always said that Danny might hear from Katie if he ever became famous.

When The Kennedy Fathers was published, and Danny did become famous, he still didn’t hear from Katie. He did, however, hear from a few other Kennedy fathers. Most of the letters about the novel were favorable. Danny believed there was some shared guilt among such fathers, who’d all felt, at one time in their lives, that they probably should have gone to Vietnam, or (like Danny) they’d actually wanted to go. Now, of course, they all knew they were lucky that they hadn’t gone to the war.

The novel was praised for seeing yet another dimension of how the war in Vietnam did permanent damage to America, and how the country would long be divided by that war. The young fathers in the novel might (or might not) turn out to be good fathers, and it was too soon to say if those children-those “tickets out of Vietnam,” as Danny called them-would be damaged. Most reviewers thought that Caitlin was the novel’s most memorable character, and the real hero of the story. She sacrifices herself to save these young men’s lives, even though she leaves them-and quite possibly her own children-feeling haunted.

But the novel really pissed off Ketchum and the cook. They had hoped to read a hatchet job on Katie. But Danny didn’t do that; instead, he’d turned his awful ex-wife into a fucking hero!

One letter Danny received from a Kennedy father was worth saving, and he would show it to his son-this was several years after The Kennedy Fathers was first published, in the spring of Joe’s junior year at Northfield Mount Hermon, when the boy had been driving for only a year and had just turned seventeen. At young Joe’s suggestion, Danny also showed the letter to his dad and Ketchum. While Danny and Joe had talked about the letter-both about what it meant, and what it didn’t say-Ketchum and the cook were careful in their responses to Danny. The older men knew that Danny’s feelings for Katie were a little different from theirs.

The letter was from a self-described “single parent” living in Portland, Oregon -a man named Jeff Reese. The letter began: “Like you, I am a Kennedy father-one of the stupid boys Katie Callahan saved. I’m not sure how many of us there are. I know of at least one other-I mean, in addition to you and me-and I am writing him, too. I regret to inform you both that Katie couldn’t save herself-just a few of us stupid boys. I can’t tell you more, but I know it was an accidental overdose.” He didn’t say of what. Perhaps Jeff Reese assumed that Danny would have known what substance Katie was abusing, but they’d not done any serious drugs together, only the occasional marijuana. In their case, the drinking and a little pot had been more than enough. (There wasn’t a word about The Kennedy Fathers, though one would guess that Jeff Reese had somewhat belatedly read it. Maybe he’d read just enough of the book to see for himself that the Caitlin character wasn’t really Katie. And if Katie had read The Kennedy Fathers, or any of Danny Angel’s other novels, Jeff Reese didn’t say; at least Katie must have known that Daniel Baciagalupo had become Danny Angel, for how else would Jeff Reese have made the connection?)

Danny had driven down to Northfield Mount Hermon for an impromptu visit with Joe at his son’s school. The old James Gym was empty-it wasn’t wrestling season-and they sat together on the sloped wooden track, reading and rereading the letter about Joe’s mother. Maybe the boy had thought he would one day hear from his mom; Danny had never expected to hear from Katie, but the writer in him had thought she might try to make contact with her son.

At seventeen, Joe Baciagalupo often looked like he needed a shave, and he had the more defined facial features of a young man in his early twenties; yet there was something expectant and open in his expression that reminded his father of a more childlike Joe, or of the “little” Joe the boy had been. This might have made Danny say to him, “I’m sorry that you didn’t have a mother, or that I didn’t find someone who could have done a good job in that role for you.”

“But it’s not just a role, is it?” Joe asked his dad; he was still holding the letter about his mother dying from an overdose, and Danny would later think that the way the seventeen-year-old looked at the letter, it was as if it were foreign currency-a curiosity, exotic-looking, but of no particular use at the moment. “I mean, I had you-you’ve always been there,” Joe continued. “And your dad-well, you know, he’s like a second dad to me. And then there’s Ketchum.”