Last Night in Twisted River

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 maitred' material, though he s

ubbed 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 courses, at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. He had never heard of the college before he'd applied for the job, but with a first novel being published by Random House and an M.F.A. from a prestigious writing program like Iowa's--well, Danny was going to be a college teacher. The young writer was happy about returning to New England. He'd missed his dad, and Carmella--and, who knows, he might actually get to see more of Ketchum. Danny hadn't seen Ketchum but once since that terrible April Sunday when the boy and his dad had fled from Twisted River.

Ketchum had shown up in Durham when Danny was starting his freshman year at the University of New Hampshire. The veteran logger was in his mid-forties by then, and he'd come to Danny's dorm with a gruff announcement: "Your dad tells me you never learned how to drive on a real road."

"Ketchum, we didn't have a car in Boston--we sold the Chieftain the same week we arrived--and you don't have any time to take driving lessons at a place like Exeter," Danny explained.

"Constipated Christ!" Ketchum said. "A college kid who can't get a driver's license is no one I want to be associated with!"

Ketchum then taught Danny how to drive his old truck; those were hard lessons for a young man whose driving experience, heretofore, had been with automatic transmission on the haul roads around Twisted River. For the week or more that Ketchum was in Durham, he lived in his truck--"just like the wanigan days," the woodsman said. The parking authorities at UNH twice gave Ketchum parking tickets when the logger was sleeping in the back of his truck. Ketchum gave the tickets to Danny. "You can pay these," Ketchum told the young man. "The driving lessons are free." It upset Danny that he hadn't seen the woodsman but once in seven years. Now it had been six more years.

How can you not see someone as important to you as that? Daniel Baciagalupo was thinking in the Iowa spring rain. More perplexing, his father had not seen Ketchum once in thirteen years. What was the matter with them? But half of Danny's mind was still unfocused--lost in the run-amuck chapter he was blundering about in.

THE YOUNG WRITER had jumped ahead to his family's first meeting with Mr. Carlisle, the scholarship person at Exeter--once again in Vicino di Napoli. Maybe Danny also had Carmella to thank for getting him into the academy, because Mr. Carlisle had never laid eyes on anyone quite like Carmella--not in Exeter, New Hampshire, surely--and the smitten man must have thought, If the Baciagalupo kid doesn't get into Exeter, I might never see this woman again!

Mr. Carlisle would be crushed that Carmella wasn't with Danny when the boy first visited the prep school. Dominic didn't make the trip, either. How could they? In Boston, March 17 wasn't only St. Patrick's Day. (The young Irish puking green beer in the streets was an annual embarrassment to Mr. Leary.) It was also Evacuation Day, a big deal in the North End, because in 1774 or 1775--Danny could never remember the correct year; actually, it was 1776--the artillery was set up in the Copps Hill Burying Ground to escort the British ships out of Boston Harbor. You got a day off from school on Evacuation Day, and on Bunker Hill Day, if you lived in Boston.

That year, 1957, Evacuation Day had come on a Sunday. Monday was the school holiday, and Mr. Leary had taken Danny on the train to Exeter. (The Evacuation Day holiday was an impossible day for Dominic and Carmella to be away from the restaurant.) The writer's unfocused mind had once more jumped ahead to that train ride to Exeter with Mr. Leary--and what would be their first look at the venerable academy. Mr. Carlisle had been a most welcoming host, but it must have killed him not to see Carmella.

And despite his promise to come home a lot--every weekend he could--Danny wouldn't do that. He rarely came home to Boston on his Exeter weekends--maybe twice a term, tops, and then he would meet his Exeter friends on a Saturday night in Scollay Square, usually to see the strippers at the Old Howard. You had to fake your age, but that was easy; they let the kids in most nights. You just had to be respectful to the ladies. On one of those nights at the Old Howard, Danny ran into his former English teacher. That was a sad night. For Mr. Leary, who loved Latin, it was an errare humanum est night--a "to err is human" night, for both the revered teacher and his prize student. Talk about jumping ahead! He would have to write about that unhappy night (or some version of it) one day, Daniel Baciagalupo supposed.

His first novel was dedicated to Mr. Leary. Because of the Irishman's love of Latin, Danny had written:

MICHAEL LEARY,

IN MEMORIAM

It was from Mr. Leary that he'd first heard the phrase in medias res. Mr. Leary had praised young Dan's writing by saying that, "as a reader," he liked how Danny often began a narrative in the middle of the story rather than at the chronological beginning.

"What's that called--is there a name for it?" the boy had innocently asked.

Mr. Leary had answered: "I call it in medias res, which in Latin means 'in the middle of things.'"