Last Night in Twisted River

Danny guessed that the cleaning woman probably had a crush on Ketchum, though the cook claimed that Lupita must have pitied the logger for how old he was. The flowers were in anticipation of how near death Ketchum was, Dominic absurdly said--"the way people put flowers on a grave."

"You don't really believe that," Danny told his dad.

But the flowers and Lupita were a mystery. The Mexican cleaning woman never put a vase of flowers in the guest room for any other visitor to the Rosedale residence, and that guest room in the house on Cluny Drive was more than occasionally occupied--not only at Christmas. Salman Rushdie, the author with a death threat against him, sometimes stayed there when he was in Toronto; Danny Angel's other writer friends, both from Europe and the United States, often came to visit. Armando and Mary DeSimone were visitors to the city at least twice a year, and they always stayed with Danny and his dad.

Many of Danny's foreign publishers had slept in that guest room, which reflected the author's international reputation; the majority of the books in the room were translations of Danny Angel's novels. Hanging in that guest bedroom, too, was a framed poster of the French edition of Baby in the Road--Bebe dans la rue. (In the connecting bathroom, there was an oversize poster of the German translation of that same novel--Baby auf der Strasse.) Yet, in the mind of the Mexican cleaning woman, only Ketchum merited flowers.

Lupita was a wounded soul, and she certainly recognized the damage done to others. She could not clean Danny's third-floor writing room without weeping, though Lupita had never met Joe; in those years when he'd come to Canada from Colorado, Joe never stayed for long, and Danny and his dad had not yet met what the cook called "the Mexican marvel." They'd had a host of unsatisfactory cleaning women in those years.

Lupita was a relatively recent find, but she was visibly moved by these two saddened gentlemen who'd lost, respectively, a son and a grandson. She'd told the cook that she was worried about how Danny was doing, but to Danny she would only say: "Your boy is in Heaven--higher up than the third floor, Senor Angel."

"I'll take your word for it, Lupita," Danny had replied.

"?Enfermo?" Lupita was always inquiring--not of the seventy-six-year-old cook but of his depressed fifty-eight-year-old son.

"No, I am not sick, Lupita," Danny never failed to answer her. "Yo solo soy un escritor." ("I am merely a writer"--as if that explained how miserable he must have looked to her.)

Lupita had lost a child, too; she couldn't speak of it to Danny, but she'd told the cook. There were no details, and there was scant mention of the child's father, a Canadian. If Lupita had ever had a husband, she'd also lost him. Danny didn't think there were many Mexicans in Toronto, but probably more would be coming soon.

Lupita seemed ageless, with her smooth brown skin and long black hair, though Danny and his dad guessed that she was somewhere between their ages, in her sixties, and while she wasn't a big woman, she was heavy--noticeably overweight, if not fat in a condemnatory way.

Because Lupita had a pretty face, and she was in the habit of leaving her shoes on the ground floor of the house (she crept about the upstairs barefoot, or in her socks), Danny once said to his father that Lupita reminded him of Injun Jane. The cook couldn't agree that there was any resemblance; Dominic had sternly shaken his head at the suggestion. Either Danny's dad was in denial regarding the obvious likeness Lupita shared with Jane, or else Danny's memory of the Indian dishwasher was misleading him--the way fiction writers are often misled by their memories.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, when the cook was busy with the dinner prep at Patrice, Danny often left his writing room on the third floor--just as the last of the sun, if there was any to speak of, was glimmering through the skylight. There was no visible sun on this gray December afternoon, which made it easier for the novelist to tear himself away from his desk. Whatever remaining light there was from the west barely managed to penetrate the second-floor hall. In his socks, Danny padded to his father's bedroom. When the cook was out, his son often went into that room to see the snapshots Dominic had pinned to the five bulletin boards hanging from the bedroom's walls.

There was an old-fashioned desk, with drawers, in his dad's bedroom, and Danny knew there were hundreds more photographs in those drawers. With Lupita's help, Dominic constantly rearranged the snapshots on his bulletin boards; the cook never threw a photo away, but instead returned each removed picture to one of the desk drawers. That way, twice-used (or thrice-used) photos became new again--once more displayed on the bulletin boards, the only telltale signs of their previous use being the excessive number of almost invisible pinpricks.

On the bulletin boards, the snapshots were intricately overlapped in a confusing but possibly thematic pattern--either of Dominic's design or of Lupita's, because Danny knew that without the Mexican cleaning woman's assistance, his dad could not have managed to unpin and repin the photographs with such evident ardor and repetition. It was hard work, and because of where the bulletin boards were mounted on the walls, it was necessary to perch on the arm of a couch, or stand on a chair, in order to reach the uppermost sections--not a labor that the cook, with his limp, could easily perform. (Given what she weighed, and her estimated age, Danny worried about Lupita undertaking such a balancing act on a couch or a chair.)

In spite of his considerable imagination, Danny Angel couldn't fathom his father's logic; the overlapping snapshots defied either a historical or a visual interpretation. In an ancient black-and-white photograph, a surprisingly young-looking Ketchum appeared to be dancing with Injun Jane in what Danny clearly remembered was the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River. That this old photo was juxtaposed with one (in color) of Danny with Joe (as a toddler) in Iowa was inexplicable--except that Danny recalled Katie being in that photograph, and the cook had cleverly overlapped her entirely with a photo of Carmella with Paul Polcari, standing in front of the pizza oven in Vicino di Napoli; either Tony Molinari or old Giuse Polcari must have snapped the picture.

Thus Vermont overlapped Boston, or vice versa--Avellino and Mao's were apparently interchangeable--and the Asian faces of the cook's own Iowa interlude appeared alongside more current Torontonians. The early days at Maxim's, which gave way to Bastringue on Queen Street West, would be captured next to Ketchum in one or another of his virtual wanigans of a pickup truck, or beside Joe as a college student in Colorado--often on skis, or in a mountain-bike race--and there was even one of Joe's Iowa City friend Max, who (together with Joe) had come close to being killed in that alleyway behind the Court Street house by the speeding blue Mustang. The portrait of the two eight-year-olds was bafflingly pinned next to one of the young culinary maestro Silvestro, being kissed on both cheeks by his female sous chefs, Joyce and Kristine.

Was it possible, Danny wondered, that most of the photographs had been pinned to the bulletin boards not only by Lupita's plump hands but according to her artless plan? That would explain the seeming randomness of the arrangements--if the collages of snapshots had been almost entirely up to Lupita, if the cook had played next to no part in the overall design. (That might also explain, the writer thought, why no picture of Ketchum was returned to the desk drawers--not since Lupita had come to work for Danny and his dad.)

How had the eighty-three-year-old logger managed to make such a romantic impression on the sixty-something Mexican cleaning woman? Danny was thinking. The cook seemed to be nauseated by the very idea; Lupita couldn't have encountered Ketchum more than two or thr

ee times. "It must be because of Lupita's ardent Catholicism!" Dominic had exclaimed.

To his dad's thinking, Danny knew, there could only be superstitious or nonsensical reasons for any woman in her right mind to be attracted to Ketchum.

NOW, IN HIS OWN BEDROOM, Danny changed into his workout clothes. There were no photographs of Joe in Danny's bedroom; Danny Angel had enough trouble sleeping without pictures of his dead son. Except in the evenings--when he went out for dinner, or to see a movie--Danny rarely left the house on Cluny Drive, and most evenings his dad was working. Dominic's idea of semiretirement was that he usually left the restaurant and took himself home to bed by 10:30 or 11:00 every night, even when Patrice was packed; that was retired enough for him.

When Danny was on a book tour, or otherwise out of town, the cook went into his son's bedroom--just to remind himself of what might have been, if Joe hadn't died. It grieved Dominic Baciagalupo that the only photographs in his beloved Daniel's bedroom were of the screenwriter Charlotte Turner, who was fifteen years younger than his son--and, boy, did she look it. Charlotte was just twenty-seven when she'd met Daniel--in '84, when he'd been forty-two. (This was shortly after the cook and his son had come to Canada. East of Bangor had just been published, and Joe was finishing his freshman year at Colorado.) Charlotte was only eight years older than Joe, and she'd been a very young-looking twenty-seven.

She was a young-looking forty-three now, the cook reflected. It pained Dominic to see Charlotte's pictures, and to reflect on how fond he was of the young woman; the cook believed that Charlotte would have been the perfect wife for his lonely son.

But a deal is a deal. Charlotte had wanted children--"Just one child, if that's all you can handle," she'd told Danny--and Danny had promised her that he would get her pregnant and give her a child. There was only one condition. (Well, perhaps the condition word was wrong--maybe it was more of a request.) Would Charlotte wait to get pregnant until after Joe had graduated from college? At the time, Joe had three years to go at the University of Colorado, but Charlotte agreed to wait; she would only be thirty when Joe got his undergraduate degree. Besides, as the cook recalled, she and Daniel had loved each other very much. They'd been very happy together; those three years hadn't seemed like such a long time.

At twenty-seven, Charlotte Turner was fond of saying, dramatically, that she had lived in Toronto her "whole life." More to the point, she'd never lived with anyone--nor had she ever kept a boyfriend for longer than six months. When she met Danny, she was living in her late grandmother's house in Forest Hill; her parents wanted to sell the house, but she'd persuaded them to allow her to rent it. The house had been a cluttered, messy place when her grandmother lived there, but Charlotte had auctioned off the old furniture, and she'd turned the downstairs into her office and a small screening room; upstairs, where there was only one bathroom, she'd made a big bedroom out of three smaller, practically useless rooms. Charlotte didn't cook, and the house was unsuitable for entertaining; she'd left her grandmother's antiquated kitchen as it was, because the kitchen was sufficient for her. None of Charlotte's short-term boyfriends had ever spent the night in that house--Danny would be the first--and Charlotte never exactly moved in with Danny in the house on Cluny Drive.

The cook had offered to move out. He saw himself as a potential invasion of his son's privacy, and Dominic desperately wanted Daniel's relationship with Charlotte to succeed. But Charlotte wouldn't hear of "evicting" Danny's dad, as she put it--not until after the wedding, which was planned (more than two years in advance) for June '87, following Joe's college graduation. Joe would be Danny's best man.

At the time, it had seemed wise to wait on the wedding--and on Charlotte getting pregnant, and on having a new baby in the house. Danny had wanted to "shepherd" Joe through the boy's college years--that was the writer's word for it. But there were those in Toronto who knew Charlotte's history with men; they might have bet that a wedding as much as two years in the offing was unlikely, or that after leaving for one of her many trips to L.A., the young screenwriter simply wouldn't come back. In the short three years they'd been together, Charlotte had kept scarcely any clothes in Danny's bedroom closet, though she more often spent the night in that Cluny Drive house than Danny would at her place in Forest Hill. She did keep her share of toiletries in Danny's bathroom, and her considerable cosmetics.

Both Charlotte and Danny were early risers, and while Charlotte was attending to her hair and her skin--she had the most beautiful skin, the cook suddenly remembered--Danny made them breakfast. Then Charlotte would take the Yonge Street subway to St. Clair, where she would walk to her place in Forest Hill; she did a long day's work there.

Even after they were married, Charlotte always said, she planned to have an office outside the house on Cluny Drive. ("Besides, there isn't room here for all my clothes," she'd told Danny. "Even after your dad moves out, I'll need at least an office--if not an entire house--for my clothes.")