Last Night in Twisted River

The first cousin who goes off to Maine has the baby and leaves it behind; she is so devastated by having a child and not knowing what has become of it that she tells the other pregnant cousin not to do what she did. The second pregnant cousin also goes to Maine--to the very same orphanage, but to have an abortion. The problem is that the old midwife might not live long enough to perform the procedure. If the young midwife-in-training ends up doing the D & C, the cousin might suffer the consequences. The young midwife doesn't know enough about what she's doing.

Both Ketchum and the cook were hoping that the novel was going to turn out well, and that nothing too bad would happen to the second pregnant cousin. But, knowing Danny Angel's novels, the two old readers had their fears--and something else was worrying them.

Over a year ago, Joe had gotten a girl in trouble at Northfield Mount Hermon. Because his father was famous--for a writer, Danny Angel was very recognizable--and because Joe already knew something about the subject of the novel his dad was writing, the boy hadn't asked for his father's help. Those anti-abortion people picketed most clinics or doctors' offices where you could get an abortion; Joe didn't want his dad taking him and the unfortunate girl to one of those places where the protesters were. What if some so-called right-to-lifer recognized his famous father?

"Smart boy," Ketchum said to Joe, when Danny's son had written him. Young Joe hadn't wanted to tell his grandfather, either, but Ketchum insisted that the cook come along with them.

They'd driven to an abortion clinic in Vermont together. Ketchum and the cook sat up front, in the cook's car; Joe and the sad, frightened girl were in the backseat. It had been an awkward situation because the couple were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend. They'd broken up almost a month before the girl discovered she was pregnant, but they both knew Joe was the baby's father; they were doing the right thing (in the cook and Ketchum's opinion), but it was difficult for them.

Ketchum tried to console them, but--Ketchum being Ketchum--it came out a little clumsily. The logger said more than he meant to. "There's one thing to be happy about," he told the miserable-looking couple in the backseat. "When the same thing happened to your dad and a girl he knew, Joe, abortion wasn't legal--and it wasn't necessarily safe."

Had the old woodsman forgotten the cook was in the car?

"So that's why you took Danny and that DiMattia girl to Maine!" Tony Angel cried. "I always thought so! You said you wanted to show them the Kennebec--'the last great river-driving river,' you called it, or some such bullshit. But that DiMattia girl was so dumb--she told Carmella you'd driven her and Danny somewhere east of Bangor. I knew Bangor was nowhere near the Kennebec!"

Ketchum and the cook had argued the whole way to the abortion clinic, where there'd been picketers; Joe had been right not to involve his famous father with the protesters. And all the way home--the ex-girlfriend and Joe were spending the weekend in Brattleboro with the boy's grandfather--Joe had held the girl in the backseat, where she sobbed and sobbed. She couldn't have been older than sixteen--seventeen, tops. "You're going to be all right," Joe, who was not yet seventeen, kept saying to the poor kid. Ketchum and the cook hoped so.

And now the two older men had stopped themselves in the last chapter of East of Bangor--Danny Angel's abortion novel, as it would be called. The cook could see that there was something of Ketchum in the character who drove the boy (and his first pregnant cousin) to Maine. By the description, the friendly older man also reminded the cook of Tony Molinari; Danny Angel calls him the principal chef in the North End restaurant where the two pregnant cousins work as waitresses. It's the way the man handles the truck they drive to Maine in--that was what led Tony Angel to see the so-called chef as "the Ketchum character." The Molinari likeness was a disguise Danny gave to the character, because of course the writer didn't know, when he was finishing the final draft of his abortion novel, that Ketchum had already told his dad about Danny getting the DiMattia girl pregnant--and how the logger drove the two of them to an orphanage somewhere east of Bangor, Maine.

The book was dedicated to those two chefs Danny Angel and his dad both loved, Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari--"Un abbraccio for Tony M. and Paul P.," the author had written, allowing the two men some measure of privacy. ("An embrace" for them from the former busboy/waiter/substitute pizza and sous chef in Vicino di Napoli.) Both those chefs, the cook knew, were retired; Vicino di Napoli was gone, and another restaurant with another name had taken its place in North Square.

Tony Angel still drove periodically to the North End to do a little shopping. He would meet Molinari and Paul at the Caffe Vittoria for some espresso. They always assured him that Carmella was doing well; she seemed reasonably content with another fella. It came as no surprise to the cook that Carmella would end up with someone; she was both beautiful and lovable.

East of Bangor might be a difficult novel for young Joe to read, whenever he got around to it; Joe had no time to read his father's novels when he was at Northfield Mount Hermon. To the cook's knowledge, his grandson had read only one of his dad's books: The Kennedy Fathers, of course--if only in the hope he would learn a little about what his mother had been like. (Given Ketchum's opinion of the Katie character, what young Joe would learn about his mother from that novel "wasn't worth a pinch of coon shit"--according to the logger.)

WELL, HERE I AM--back to worrying about young Joe again, and all that that leads to--the cook was thinking. He looked under the damp dish towels covering his pizza dough; the dough was ready to punch down, which the cook did. Tony Angel wet the dishcloths once more; he wrung them only partially dry before re-covering the bowls for his pizza dough's second rise.

He thought his next letter to Ketchum might begin, "There's so much to worry about, I can't seem to stop myself from doing it. And you'd laugh at me, Ketchum, because I've even been praying!" But the cook didn't begin that letter. He felt strangely exhausted, and he'd shot the whole morning doing almost nothing--just starting his pizza dough and limping to the bookstore and back. It was already time to go shopping. Avellino wasn't open for lunch--just dinner. Tony Angel shopped at midday; his staff showed up in the early afternoon.

As for worrying, the cook wasn't alone; Danny worried a lot, too. And neither of them was as worried as Ketchum, even though it was almost June--way past mud season in southern Vermont, and they'd been mud-free for several weeks in northern New Hampshire. Ketchum had been known to feel almost exhilarated in those first few weeks after mud season had passed. But not now, and truly not since the cook had come back to Vermont from Iowa with his son and grandson. Ketchum didn't like them to be anywhere near New Hampshire--particularly not his old friend with the new and hard-to-get-used-to name.

The funny thing was that the cook, for all his worrying, didn't give the slightest thought to that. So much time had passed; it had been sixteen years since he'd moved out of Boston, and twenty-nine since his last, eventful night in Twisted River. Dominic Del Popolo, ne Baciagalupo, who was now Tony Angel, wasn't as worried about an angry old cowboy in Coos County as he was about other things.

The cook should have been more worried about Carl, because Ketchum was right. Vermont was next door to New Hampshire--too close for comfort. And the deputy sheriff, who was sixty-six, had retired; he had lots of time on his hands, and that cowboy was still looking for the little cripple who'd stolen his Injun Jane.

CHAPTER 8

DEAD DOG; REMEMBERING MAO'S

FROM THE FAMOUS WRITER'S "COMPOUND"--AS THE PUTNEY locals (and the writer's own father) were inclined to call it--Hickory Ridge Road climbed for over a mile, the road both crossing the brook and running parallel to the water. The so-called back road from Putney to Westminster West was dirt, and at a point less than midway between Danny Angel's property in Putney and his best friend's house in Westminster West, there was quite a pretty farm, with horses, at the end of a long, steep driveway. In the warm weather--after he'd opened his swimming pool in May, and before he winterized the pool every October--Danny called his friend in Westminster West and told him when he was starting out on a run. It was four or five miles, maybe six or seven; Danny was such a daydreamer that he didn't keep track of the distance of his runs anymore.

The pretty farm at the end of the long, uphill driveway seemed to focus the writer's reveries, because an older woman with snow-white hair (and the body of a dancer in her twenties) lived there. Danny had had an affair with her some years ago--her name was Barrett. She wasn't married, and hadn't been at the time; there was no scandal attached to their relationship. Nevertheless, in the writer's imagination--at about the two-mile mark of his run--Danny always foresaw his own murder at the place where this woman's steep driveway met the road. He would be running on the road, just a half-second past her drive

way, and Barrett would come gliding down the hill, her car coasting in neutral, with the engine off, so that by the time he heard her tires scattering the loose gravel on the road, it would be too late for him to get out of the almost-silent car's path.

A spectacular way for a storyteller to die, Danny had imagined--a vehicular homicide, with the famous novelist's ex-lover at the wheel of the murder weapon!

That Barrett had no such designs on ending the writer's life didn't matter; it would have been a good story. In fact, she'd had many affairs, and (in Danny's estimation) Barrett harbored no homicidal feelings for her ex-lovers; the writer doubted that Barrett would go out of her way to run over any of them. She was exclusively focused on caring for her horses and maintaining her youthful physique.

When there was a conceivably interesting movie playing at the Latchis in Brattleboro, Danny would often ask Barrett to see the film with him, and they would have dinner at Avellino. That Barrett was much closer in age to Danny's dad than she was to Danny had provided the cook with grounds for complaining to his writer son. Nowadays, Danny frequently found it necessary to remind his father that he and Barrett were "just friends."

Danny could run five or six miles at a pace of seven minutes per mile, usually running the last mile in closer to six minutes. At forty-one, he'd had no injuries and was still slight of build; at five feet seven, he weighed only 145 pounds. (His dad was a little smaller, and perhaps the limp made him seem shorter than he was.) Because of the occasional bad dog on the back road to Westminster West, Danny ran with a couple of sawed-off squash racquets--just the handles. If a dog attacked him when he was running, Danny would stick one of the racquet handles in the dog's face--until the dog chomped on it. Then, with the other sawed-off handle, he would hit the dog--usually on the bridge of the nose.

Danny didn't play squash. His friend in Westminster West was the squash player. When Armando DeSimone broke one of his racquets, he gave it to Danny, who sawed off the racquet head and kept the handle. Armando had grown up in the North End about a decade before Danny and his dad moved there; like the cook, Armando still drove to his beloved Boston, periodically, to shop. Armando and Danny enjoyed cooking for each other. They'd been colleagues in the English department at Windham, and when the college folded, Armando took a job teaching at the Putney School. His wife, Mary, had been Joe's English and history teacher at the Grammar School.

When Danny Angel became rich and famous, he lost a few of the old friends he'd had, but not the DeSimones. Armando had read all but the first of Danny Angel's novels in manuscript. For five out of six novels, he'd been Danny's earliest reader. You don't lose a friend like that.

Armando had built a squash court in an old barn on his Westminster West property; he talked about building a swimming pool next, but in the meantime he and Mary swam in Danny's pool. Nearly every afternoon, when it wasn't raining, the writer would run to the DeSimones' house in Westminster West; then Armando and Mary would drive Danny back to Putney, and they'd all swim in the pool. Danny would make drinks for them and serve the drinks at the pool after they swam.