Last Night in Twisted River

Danny had stopped drinking sixteen years ago--long enough so that he had no problem having alcohol in his house, or fixing drinks for his friends. And he wouldn't dream of having a dinner party and not serving wine, though he could remember that when he'd first stopped drinking, he was unable to be around people who were drinking anything alcoholic. At the time, in Iowa City, that had been a problem.

As for the writer's second life in Iowa City, with his dad and little Joe--well, that had been a peaceful interlude, for the most part, except for the unwelcome reminders of Danny's earlier time in that town with Katie. In retrospect, Danny thought, those last three years in Iowa--in the early seventies, when Joe had been in the second, third, and fourth grades, and the greatest danger the boy faced was what might happen to him on his bicycle--seemed almost blissful. Iowa City had been safe in those years.

Joe was seven when he'd gone back to Iowa with his dad and grandfather, and was still only ten when they'd returned to Vermont. Maybe those ages were the safest ages, the writer was imagining as he ran; possibly, Iowa City had had nothing to do with it.

--

CHILDHOOD, AND HOW IT FORMS YOU--moreover, how your child hood is relived in your life as an adult--that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed as he ran. From the age of twelve, he had become afraid for his father; the cook was still a hunted man. Like his dad, but for different reasons, Danny had been a young father--in reality, he'd also been a single parent (even before Katie left him). Now, at forty-one, Danny was more afraid for young Joe than he was for his dad.

Maybe it was more than the Katie Callahan gene that put Joe at risk; nor did Danny necessarily believe that the source of the wildness in his son was the boy's free-spirited grandmother, that daring woman who'd courted disaster on the late-winter ice of Twisted River. No, when Danny looked at young Joe at eighteen, it was himself at that dangerous age he saw. From all they'd read into (and had misread in) Danny Angel's novels, the cook and Ketchum couldn't have fathomed the perilous configuration of the various bullets Danny had dodged--not only in his life with Katie, but long before her.

It hadn't been Josie DiMattia who'd sexually initiated Danny at the age of fifteen, before he went off to Exeter; furthermore, Carmella may have caught them at it, but Josie wasn't the one who got pregnant. Ketchum had indeed driven Danny to that orphanage with the obliging midwife in Maine, but with the oldest DiMattia girl, Teresa. (Perhaps Teresa had given so many condoms to her younger sisters that she'd forgotten to save some for herself.) And neither Teresa nor Danny's equally older cousin Elena Calogero had provided Danny with his first sexual experience--though the boy was much more attracted to those older girls than he was to any girl his own age, including Josie, who'd been only a little older. There'd also been an older Saetta cousin, Giuseppina, who'd seduced young Dan, but Giuseppina wasn't his first seducer.

No, indeed--that instructive and most formative experience had been with the boy's aunt Filomena, his mother's youngest sister, when Danny had been only fourteen. Had Filomena been in her late twenties, or might she already have turned thirty when the assignations with her young nephew began? Danny was wondering as he approached the final two miles of his run.

It was still May; the blackflies were bad, but not at the pace he was running, which he began to pick up. As he ran, he could hear his heart and his own breathing, though these elevated functions didn't seem to Danny as loud or urgent as the beating of his heart or his gasps for breath whenever the boy had been with his insane aunt Filomena. What had she been thinking? It was Danny's dad she'd adored, and the cook wouldn't look at her. Had the way her nephew doted on her--Danny couldn't take his eyes off her--seemed a sufficient consolation prize to Filomena?

She'd been only the second woman in the Saetta and Calogero clans to attend college, but Filomena had shared another distinction with her older sister Rosie--namely, a certain lawlessness with men. Filomena might have been only a preteen--at most, thirteen or fourteen--when Rosie had been sent away to the north country. She'd loved Rosie, and had looked up to her--only to see her disgraced, and displayed as a bad example to the younger girls in the family. Filomena had been sent to Sacred Heart, an all-girls' Catholic school near the Paul Revere House on North Square. She'd been kept as safe from boys as was humanly and spiritually possible.

As Danny Angel picked up the pace in his long run, he considered that this might have been why his aunt Filomena had been more interested in him, a boy, than she appeared to be interested in men. (Her sacred sister's widower excluded--yet Filomena must have known that the cook was a closed door to her, an unfulfilled fantasy, whereas Danny, who had not yet started to shave, had his father's long eyelashes and his mother's fair, almost fragile skin.) And it must have made an impression on Filomena that, at fourteen, the boy worshipped his small, pretty aunt. According to Danny's dad, Filomena's eyes weren't the same le

thal blue as Rosie's, but his aunt's eyes, and all the rest of her, were dangerous enough to do Danny some long-lasting harm. For one thing, Filomena managed to make all girls Danny's age uninteresting to him--that is, until he met Katie.

The cook and Ketchum had jumped to the conclusion that young Daniel had seen something of his mother in Katie. What the boy had seen, perhaps, was that combination of a repressed girlhood in an angry young woman of wanton self-destructiveness; Katie had been a younger, more political version of his aunt Filomena. The difference between them was that Filomena had been devoted to the boy, and her sexual efforts to outdo the mere girls in Danny's life were entirely successful. Denied any demonstrable expression of her sexuality as a girl, Filomena (in her late twenties, and well into her thirties) was a woman possessed. By the time Danny met her, Katie Callahan was almost indifferent to sex; that she'd had a lot of sex didn't mean that she actually liked it. By the time Danny met her, Katie already thought of sex as a way of negotiating.

In Danny's prep-school years, his aunt Filomena would book a room at the Exeter Inn almost every weekend. The boy's trysts in that musty brick building were the unparalleled pleasures of his life at Exeter, and a contributing reason why he spent so few of his Exeter weekends at home in the North End. Carmella and the cook always worked hardest at Vicino di Napoli on Friday and Saturday nights, while the boy banged his youthful aunt--often in a Colonial four-poster bed, beneath a gauzy-white canopy. (He was a runner; runners have stamina.) With Filomena's considerable and licentious assistance, Danny had achieved an adult independence--from both his actual and his Exeter families.

How could the boy possibly have had any interest in Exeter's dances with various girls' schools? How could a closely chaperoned and chaste hug on the dance floor ever compete with the ardent, sweat-slicked contact he'd maintained with Filomena on an almost weekly basis--not only throughout his Exeter years but including Danny's first two years of college in Durham?

And all the while, those Calogeros and Saettas took pity on "poor" Filomena; pretty as she was, she struck them as an eternal wallflower, both a maiden aunt and a spinster-in-the-making. Little did they know that, for seven hungry years, the woman was indulging the ceaseless sexual appetites of a teenage boy on his way to becoming a young man. In those seven years that his aunt Filomena dominated Danny's sexual life, she more than made up for lost time. That she was a teacher at Sacred Heart--in the same Catholic and all-girls' environment where the younger Filomena had been held down--was a perfect disguise.

All those other Calogeros, and the Saettas, thought of Filomena as "pathetic"--those were his father's very words for her, Danny remembered, as he ran harder and harder. Outwardly, Filomena had seemed the picture of propriety and Catholic repression, but--oh!--not when she shed her clothes!

"Let's just say I keep them busy at confession," she told her spellbound nephew, for whom Filomena had set a standard; the young women who followed Filomena in Danny's life couldn't match his aunt's erotic performance.

Filomena was in her mid-to late thirties--too old to have a baby, in her estimation--when the issue of Danny going to Vietnam (or not) was raised. She might have been happier with Ketchum's solution; if Danny had lost a finger or two, he might have stayed with his aunt a little longer. Filomena was insane, but she was no fool; she knew she wouldn't get to keep her beloved young Dan forever. She liked the sound of Katie Callahan's idea better than she ever warmed to Ketchum's plan--after all, in her own odd way, Filomena loved her nephew, and she had not met Katie.

Had Filomena met that most vulgar young woman, she might have opted for Ketchum's Browning knife instead, but ultimately that decision wasn't hers. Filomena felt fortunate to have captured such a vital young man's almost complete attention for the seven years she'd held him in her thrall. Danny's dalliances with those DiMattia girls, or several of his kissing cousins, didn't bother her. Filomena knew that Danny would always come back to her, with renewed vigor. Those clumsy sluts couldn't hold a candle to her--not in the boy's fond estimation, anyway. Nor would Katie ever become the younger Filomena Danny may have desired--or, once upon a time, wished her to be.

Filomena would be in her mid-to late fifties now, the writer knew--running harder. Filomena had never married; she was no longer at Sacred Heart, but she was still teaching. His novel with the semicolon in the title--the one everyone had scorned (The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt)--had received one favorable review, which the writer Danny Angel appreciated.

In her letter, Filomena wrote: "I warmly enjoyed your novel, as you no doubt intended--a generous amount of homage with a justifiable measure of condemnation. Yes, I took advantage of you--if only in the beginning. That you stayed with me so long made me proud of myself, as I am proud of you now. And I'm sorry if, for a time, I made it hard for you to appreciate those inexperienced girls. But you must learn to choose more wisely, my dear--now that you're a little older than I was when we went our separate ways."

She'd written that letter two years ago--The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt had been published in '81. He'd often thought of seeing her again, but how could Danny revisit Filomena without having unrealistic expectations? A man in his early forties, his unmarried aunt in her mid-to late fifties--well, what sort of relationship could exist between them now?

Nor had he learned to choose more wisely, as Filomena had recommended; perhaps he'd purposely decided against choosing to be with anyone who so much as hinted at the promise of permanence. And the writer knew he was too old to still hold his aunt accountable for introducing him to sex when he was too young. Whatever reluctance Danny felt for involving himself in a permanent relationship couldn't be blamed on Filomena--certainly not anymore.

IT WAS THE BAD-DOG PART of Danny's run; if there was going to be trouble, it would happen here. Danny was looking for the different-eyed dog in the narrow, flat driveway lined with abandoned vehicles--dead cars, some minus tires, trucks without engines, a motorcycle on its side and missing its handlebars--when the big male dog emerged from a Volkswagen bus without any doors. A husky-shepherd mix, he came into the road on a dead run--no bark, not a growl, all business. The patter of the pads of his paws on the dirt road was the only sound the dog made; he hadn't yet begun to breathe hard.

Danny had had to beat him off with the squash-racquet handles before, and he'd had words with the animal's no-less-aggressive owner--a young man in his twenties, possibly one of those former Windham College students who wouldn't move away. The guy had a hippie appearance but was no pacifist; he might have been one of the countless young men living in the Putney area who called themselves "carpenters." (If so, he was a carpenter who either didn't work or was always at home.)

"Mind your dog!" Danny had called up the driveway to him, that previous time.

"Fuck you! Run somewhere else!" the hippie carpenter had yelled back.

Now here was the unchained dog again, snapping at the runner. Danny moved to the far-right side of the road and tried to outrun the dog, but the husky-shepherd quickly gained on him. Danny stopped diagonally across the road from the hippie carpenter's driveway, and the dog stopped, too--circling him, his head low to the ground, his teeth bared. When the dog lunged at his thigh, Danny jabbed him in the ear with one of the sawed-off squash racquets; when the husky-shepherd seized the racquet handle in his teeth, Danny hit the animal as hard as he could with the other handle, both on the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. (One of his eyes was the light-blue color of a Siberian husky's eyes, and the other was the dark-brown, more penetrating eye of a German shepherd.) The dog yelped and let go of the first racquet handle. Danny hit him on one ear, then the other, as the animal momentarily retreated.

"Leave my dog alone, you son of a bitch!" the hippie carpenter yelled. He was walking down his driveway between the rows of wrecked vehicles.