Last Night In Twisted River

about Ketchum’s relationship with Rosie had kicked the reading right out of the cook. The only novels he actually finished-and he read every word-were his son’s. Tony wasn’t like Ketchum, who’d read (or heard) everything.

The cook knew his son’s worst fears: Daniel was absolutely terrified of something happening to his loved ones; he simply obsessed about that subject. That was where the writer’s fearful imagination came from-childhood terrors. The writer Danny Angel seemed driven to imagine the worst things that could happen in any given situation. In a way, as a writer-that is to say, in his imagination-the cook’s son (at forty-one) was still a child.

IN HIS QUIET KITCHEN, in his cherished Avellino, the cook prayed that he be allowed to live a little longer; he wanted to help his grandson survive being a teenager. Maybe boys aren’t out of the woods until their late twenties, Tony considered-after all, Daniel had been twenty-two when he married Katie. (Certainly that had been taking a risk!) What if Joe had to be thirty before he was safe? And if anything did happen to Joe, the cook prayed he would still be alive to look after Daniel; he knew how much help his son would need then.

Tony Angel looked at the silent radio; he almost turned it on, just to help him banish these morbid thoughts. He considered writing a letter to Ketchum instead of turning on the radio, but he didn’t do either of these things; he just kept praying. It seemed that the praying had come to him out of nowhere, and he wished he could stop doing it.

There in his kitchen, next to his cookbooks, were various editions of Danny Angel’s novels, which the cook kept in chronological order. There was no more revered place for those novels than among his dad’s cookbooks, Danny knew. But it didn’t calm the cook down to look at his famous son’s books.

After Family Life in Coos County, the cook knew that Daniel had published The Mickey, but was that in 1972 or ’73? The first novel had been dedicated to Mr. Leary, but the second one should have been, given its subject matter. As he’d more or less promised, however, Danny had dedicated his second novel to his dad. “For my father, Dominic Baciagalupo,” the dedication read, which was a little confusing, because the author’s name was Danny Angel-and Dominic was already called Tony, or Mr. Angel.

“Isn’t that sort of like letting the nom-de-plume cat out of the nom-de-plume bag?” Ketchum had complained, but it had turned out for the better. When Danny became famous for his fourth novel, the issue of him writing under a nom de plume had long been defused. Almost everyone in the literary world knew that Danny Angel was a nom de plume, but very few people remembered what his real name was-or they didn’t care. (Mr. Leary had been right to suggest that there were easier names to remember than Baciagalupo, and how many people-even in the literary world-know what John Le Carre’s real name is?)

Danny, not surprisingly, had defended his decision to Ketchum by saying that he doubted the deputy sheriff was very active in the literary world; even the logger had to acknowledge that the cowboy wasn’t a reader. Besides, very few people read The Mickey when it was originally published. When his fourth novel made Danny famous, and readers went back to the earlier books, that was when everyone read The Mickey.

A secondary but major character in The Mickey is a repressed Irishman who teaches English at the Michelangelo School; the novel focuses on the main character’s last encounter with his former English teacher at a striptease show in the Old Howard. To the cook, it seemed a slight coincidence to build a whole book around-the mutual shame and embarrassment of the former student (now an Exeter boy, with a bunch of his Exeter friends) and the character who was clearly modeled on Mr. Leary. Probably, the episode at the Old Howard had actually happened-or so the novelist’s father believed.

The third novel came along in ’75, just after they’d all moved back to Vermont from Iowa. The cook would wonder if his was the only family to have mistakenly assumed that “kissing cousins” meant cousins who were sexually interested in, or involved with, one another. Danny’s third novel was called Kissing Kin. (Originally, so-called kissing kin meant any distant kin who were familiar enough to be greeted with a kiss; it didn’t mean what Danny’s dad had always thought.)

The cook was relieved that his son’s third book wasn’t dedicated to Danny’s cousins in the Saetta and Calogero families, because the irony of such a dedication might not have been appreciated by the male members of those families. The story concerns a young boy’s sexual initiation in the North End; he is seduced by an older cousin who works as a waitress in the same restaurant where the boy has a part-time job as a busboy. The older cousin in the novel was clearly modeled, the cook knew, on that slut Elena Calogero-better said, the physical description of the character was true to Elena. Yet both Carmella and the cook were pretty sure that Daniel’s first sexual experience had been with Carmella’s niece Josie DiMattia.

The novel might have been pure fantasy, or wishful thinking, the cook supposed. But there were details that particularly bothered the writer’s dad-for example, how the older cousin breaks off the relationship with the young boy when he’s going off to boarding school. The waitress tells the kid that all along, she wanted to be fucking the boy’s father-not the boy. (Little is written about the character of the dad; he’s rather distantly described as the “new cook” in the restaurant where his son is a busboy.) The rejected boy goes off to school hating his father, because he imagines that the older cousin will eventually seduce his dad.

Surely this couldn’t be true-this was outrageous! Tony Angel was thinking, as he searched in the book for that passage where the train is pulling out of North Station, and the boy is looking out the window of the train at his father on the station platform. The boy suddenly can’t bear to look at his dad; his attention shifts to his stepmother. “I knew that the next time I saw her she would probably have put on a few more pounds,” Danny Angel wrote.

“How could you write that about Carmella?” the cook had yelled at his writer son when he’d first read that hurtful sentence.

“It’s not Carmella, Dad,” Daniel said. (Okay-maybe the character of the stepmother in Kissing Kin wasn’t Carmella, but Danny Angel dedicated the novel to her.)

“I suppose it’s just tough luck being in a writer’s family,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I mean, we get mad if Danny writes about us, or someone we know, but we also get mad at him for not writing about us, or for not really writing about himself-his true self, I mean. Not to mention that he made his damn ex-wife a better person than she ever was!”

All that was true, the cook thought. Somehow what struck him about Daniel’s fiction was that it was both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time. (Danny disagreed, of course. After his schoolboy attempts at fiction writing, which he’d shown only to Mr. Leary-and those stories were nothing but a confusing mix of memoir and fantasy, both exaggerated, and nearly as “confusing” to Danny as they were to the late Michael Leary-the young novelist had not really been autobiographical at all, not in his opinion.)

The cook couldn’t find the passage he was searching for in Kissing Kin. He put his son’s third novel back on the bookshelf, his eyes passing quickly over the fourth one-“the fame-maker,” Ketchum called it. Tony Angel didn’t even like to look at The Kennedy Fathers-the one with the fake Katie in it, as he thought of it. The novel had not only made his son famous; it was an international bestseller and the first one of Daniel’s books to be made into a movie.

Almost everyone said that it wasn’t a bad movie, though it was not nearly as successful as the novel. Danny didn’t like the film, but he said he didn’t hate it, either; he just wanted nothing to do with the moviemaking process. He said that he never wanted to write a screenplay, and that he wouldn’t sell the film rights to any of his other novels-unless someone wrote a halfway decent adaptation first, and Danny got to read the screenplay before he sold the movie rights to the novel.

The writer had explained to his dad that this was not the way the movie business worked; generally speaking, the rights to make a film from a novel were sold before a screenwriter was even attached to the project. By demanding to see a finished screenplay before he would consider selling the rights to his novel, Danny Angel was pretty much assuring himself that no one would ever make another movie of one of his books-not while he was alive, anyway.

“I guess Danny did hate the movie of The Kennedy Fathers, after all,” Ketchum had said to the cook.