"Didn't you want to see her?" Danny had asked his dad, too many times.
"I trust Ketchum," his father had answered. "If anything ever happens to me, Daniel, you trust him, too."
Danny realized that he must have crept back upstairs to his bedroom, and fallen asleep, when he smelled the lamb hash in addition to all the baking; he'd not been aware of his dad opening the difficult outer door to the cookhouse kitchen and getting the ground lamb from the cooler. The boy lay in his bed with his eyes still closed, savoring all the smells. He wanted to ask Ketchum if his mom had been faceup in the water when he'd first spotted her, or if he'd found her in the spillway facedown.
Danny got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen; only then did he realize that his father had found the time to come upstairs and get dressed, probably after Ketchum had passed out on the cot. Dan watched his dad working at the stove; when the cook was concentrating on three or four tasks that were all in close proximity to one another, his limp was almost undetectable. At such moments, Danny could imagine his father at the age of twelve--before the ankle accident. At twelve, Danny Baciagalupo was a lonely kid; he had no friends. He often wished that he could have known his dad when they were both twelve-year-olds.
WHEN YOU'RE TWELVE, four years seems like a long time. Annunziata Saetta knew that it wouldn't take her little Dom's ankle four years to heal; Nunzi's beloved Kiss of the Wolf was off the crutches in four months, and he was reading as well as any fifteen-year-old by the time he was only thirteen. The homeschooling worked. In the first place, Annunziata was an elementary-school teacher; she knew how much of the school day was wasted on discipline, recess, and snacks. The boy did his homework, and double-checked it, during what amounted to Nunzi's school day; Dominic had time for lots of extra reading, and he kept a journal of the recipes he was learning, too.
The boy's cooking skills were more slowly acquired, and--after the accident--Annunziata made her own child-labor laws. She would not permit young Dominic to go off to work at a breakfast place in Berlin until the boy really knew his way around a kitchen, and he had to wait until he'd turned sixteen; in those four years, Dom became an extremely well-read sixteen-year-old, and an accomplished cook, who was less experienced at shaving than he was at walking with a limp.
It was 1940 when Dominic Baciagalupo met Danny's mom. She was a twenty-three-year-old teaching in the same elementary school as Annunziata Saetta; in fact, the cook's mother introduced her sixteen-year-old son to the new teacher.
Nunzi had no choice in the matter. Her cousin Maria, another Saetta, had married a Calogero--a common Sicilian surname. "After some Greek saint who died there--the name has something to do with children in general, I think, or maybe orphans in particular," Nunzi had explained to Dominic. She pronounced the name cah-LOH-ger-roh. It was used as a first name, too, his mother explained--"frequently for bastards."
At sixteen, Dominic was sensitive to the subject of illegitimacy--not that Annunziata wasn't. Her cousin had sent her pregnant daughter away to the wilds of New Hampshire, bemoaning the fact that the daughter was the first woman in the Calogero family to have graduated from college. "It was only a teachers' college, and a lot of good it did her--she still got knocked up!" the poor girl's mother told Nunzi, who repeated this insensitivity to Dom. The boy understood without further detail that the pregnant twenty-three-year-old was being sent to them because Annunziata and her bastard were considered in the same boat. Her name was Rosina, but--given Nunzi's fondness for abbreviations--the banished girl was already a Rosie before she made the trip from Boston to Berlin.
As was often the way "back then"--not only in the North End, and by no means limited to Italian or Catholic families--the Saettas and the Calogeros were sending one family scandal to live with another. Thus Annunziata was given a reason to resent her Boston relatives twice. "Let this be a lesson to you, Dom," the teenager's mother told him. "We are not going to judge poor Rosie for her unfortunate condition--we are going to love her, like nothing was the matter."
While Annunziata should be commended for her spirit of forgiveness--especially in 1940, when unwed mothers could generally be counted among America's most unforgiven souls--it was both reckless and unnecessary to tell her sixteen-year-old son that he was going to love his second cousin "like nothing was the matter."
"Why is she my second cousin?" the boy asked his mom.
"Maybe that's not what she is--maybe she's called your cousin once-removed, or something," Nunzi said. When Dominic looked confused, his mother said: "Whatever she's called, she's not really your cousin--not a first cousin, anyway."
This information (or misinformation) posed an unknown danger to a crippled sixteen-year-old boy. His accident, his rehabilitation, his homeschooling, not to mention his reinvention as a cook--all these--had deprived him of friends his own age. And "little" Dom had a fulltime job; he already saw himself as a young man. Now Nunzi had told him that the twenty-three-year-old Rosie Calogero was "not really" his cousin.
As for Rosie, when she arrived, she was not yet "showing;" that she soon would be posed another problem.
Rosie had a B.S. in education from the teachers' college; at that time, frankly, she was overqualified to teach at a Berlin elementary school. But when the young woman started to look pregnant, she would need to temporarily quit her job. "Or else we'll have to come up with a husband for you, either real or imaginary," Annunziata told her. Rosie was certainly pretty enough to find a husband, a real one--Dominic thought she was absolutely beautiful--but the poor girl wasn't about to sally forth on the requisite social adventures necessary for meeting available young men, not when she was expecting!
FOR FOUR YEARS, the boy had cooked with his mother. In some ways, because he wrote every recipe down--not to mention each variation of the recipes he would make, occasionally, without her--he was surpassing her, even as he learned. As it happened, on that life-changing night, Dominic was making dinner for the two women and himself. He was on his way to becoming famous at the breakfast place in Berlin, and he got home from work well before Rosie and his mom came home from school; except on weekends, when Nunzi liked to cook, Dominic was becoming the principal cook in their small household. Stirring his marinara sauce, he said: "Well, I could marry Rosie, or I could pretend to be her husband--until she finds someone more suitable. I mean, who needs to know?"
To Annunziata, it seemed like such a sweet and innocent offer; she laughed and gave her son a hug. But young Dom couldn't imagine anyone "more suitable" for Rosie than himself--he had been faking the pretend part. He would have married Rosie for real; the difference in their ages, or that they were vaguely related, was no stumbling block for him.
As for Rosie, it didn't matter that the sixteen-year-old's proposal, which was both sweet and not-so-innocent, was unrealistic--and probably illegal, even in northern New Hampshire. What affected the poor girl, who was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy, was that the lout who'd knocked her up had not offered to marry her--not even under what had amounted to considerable duress.
Given the predilections of the male members of both the Saetta and Calogero families, this "duress" took the form of multiple threats of castration ending with death by drowning. Whether it was Naples or Palermo the lout sailed back to was not made clear, but no marriage proposal was ever forthcoming. Dominic's spontaneous and heartfelt offer was the first time anyone had proposed to Rosie; overcome, she burst into tears at the kitchen table before Dominic could poach the shrimp in his marinara sauce. Sobbing, the distraught young woman went to bed without her dinner.
In the night, Annunziata awoke to the confusing sounds of Rosie's miscarriage--"confusing" because, at that moment, Nunzi didn't know if the loss of the baby was a blessing or a curse. Dominic Baciagalupo lay in his bed, listening to his second or once-removed cousin crying. The toilet kept flushing, the bathtub was filling--there must have been blood--and, over it all, came the sympathetic crooning of his mother's most consoling voice. "Rosie, maybe it's better this way. Now you don't need to quit your job--not even temporarily! Now we
don't have to come up with a husband for you--not a real one or the imaginary kind! Listen to me, Rosie--it wasn't a baby, not yet."
But Dominic lay wondering, What have I done? Even an imaginary marriage to Rosie gave the boy a nearly constant erection. (Well, he was sixteen years old--no wonder!) When he heard that Rosie had stopped crying, young Dom held his breath. "Did Dominic hear me--did I wake him up, do you think?" the boy heard the girl ask his mother.
"Well, he sleeps like the dead," Nunzi said, "but you did make quite a ruckus--understandably, of course."
"He must have heard me!" the girl cried. "I have to talk to him!" she said. Dominic could hear her step out of the tub. There was the vigorous rubbing of a towel, and the sound of her bare feet on the bathroom floor.
"I can explain to Dom in the morning," his mother was saying, but his not-really-a-cousin's bare feet were already padding down the hall to the spare room.
"No! I have something to tell him!" Rosie called. Dominic could hear a drawer open; a coat hanger fell in her closet. Then the girl was in his room--she just opened his door, without knocking, and lay down on the bed beside him. He could feel her wet hair touch his face.
"I heard you," he told her.
"I'm going to be fine," Rosie began. "I'll have a baby, some other day."
"Does it hurt?" he asked her. He kept his face turned away from her on the pillow, because he had brushed his teeth too long ago--he was afraid his breath was bad.