Last Night In Twisted River

CHAPTER 5. NOM DE PLUME

IT WAS ALMOST EXACTLY AN UNLUCKY THIRTEEN YEARS SINCE Constable Carl had tripped over the body of the Indian dishwasher in his kitchen, and not even Ketchum could say for certain if the cowboy was suspicious of the cook and his son, who had disappeared that same night. To hear it from the most insightful gossips in that area of Coos County -that is to say, all along the upper Androscoggin -Injun Jane had disappeared with them.

According to Ketchum, it bothered Carl that people thought Jane had run off with the cook-more than the constable seemed troubled by the likelihood that he had murdered his companion with an unknown blunt instrument. (The murder weapon was never found.) And Carl must have believed he’d killed Jane; surely, he’d disposed of her body. Absolutely no one had seen her. (Her body hadn’t turned up, either.)

Yet Ketchum continued to get insinuating inquiries from the cowboy, whenever their paths crossed. “Have you still not heard a word from Cookie?” Carl would never fail to ask Ketchum. “I thought you two were friends.”

“Cookie never had a whole lot to say,” Ketchum would point out repeatedly. “I’m not surprised I haven’t heard from him.”

“And what about the boy?” the cowboy occasionally asked.

“What about him? Danny’s just a kid,” Ketchum faithfully answered. “Kids don’t write much, do they?”

But Daniel Baciagalupo wrote a lot-not only to Ketchum. From their earliest correspondence, the boy had told Ketchum that he wanted to become a writer.

“In that case, it would be best not to expose yourself to too much Catholic thinking,” Ketchum had replied; his handwriting struck young Dan as curiously feminine. Danny had asked his dad if his mom had taught her handwriting to Ketchum-this in addition to the dancing, not to mention teaching the logger how to read.

All Dominic had said was: “I don’t think so.”

The puzzle of Ketchum’s pretty penmanship remained unsolved, nor did Dominic appear to give his old friend’s handwriting much thought-not to the degree young Dan did. For thirteen years, Danny Baciagalupo, the would-be writer, had corresponded with Ketchum more than his father had. The letters that passed between Ketchum and the cook were generally terse and to the point. Was Constable Carl looking for them? Dominic always wanted to know.

“You better assume so,” was essentially all that Ketchum had conveyed to the cook, though lately Ketchum had had more to say. He’d sent Danny and Dominic the exact same letter; a further novelty was that the letter was typed. “Something’s up,” Ketchum had begun. “We should talk.”

This was easier said than done-Ketchum had no phone. He was in the habit of calling both Dominic and young Dan collect from a public phone booth; these calls often ended abruptly, when Ketchum announced he was freezing his balls off. Granted, it was cold in northern New Hampshire-and in Maine, where Ketchum appeared to be spending more and more of his time-but, over the years, Ketchum’s collect calls were almost invariably made in the cold-weather months. (Perhaps by choice-maybe Ketchum liked to keep things brief.)

Ketchum’s very first typed letter to young Dan and his dad went on to say that the cowboy had let slip “an ominous insinuation.” This was nothing new-Constable Carl was ominous, and he was forever insinuating, both Dominic and Danny already knew-but this time there’d been specific mention of Canada. In Carl’s opinion, the Vietnam War was the reason relations between the United States and Canada had soured. “I’m not gettin’ shit in the area of cooperation from the Canadian authorities,” was all the cowboy had said to Ketchum, who took this to mean that Carl was still making inquiries across the border. For thirteen years, the cop had believed that the cook and his son went to Toronto. If the cowboy was looking for them, he wasn’t making inquiries in Boston -not yet. But now Ketchum had written that something was up.

KETCHUM’S LONG-AGO ADVICE TO DANNY-namely, if the boy wanted to be a writer, he shouldn’t expose himself to too much Catholic thinking-may have been a misunderstanding on Ketchum’s part. The Michelangelo School -Danny’s new school in the North End-was a middle school, and a public one. The kids called the school the Mickey because the teachers were Irish, but there were no nuns among them. Ketchum must have assumed that the Michelangelo was a Catholic school. (“Don’t let them brainwash you,” he had written to Danny-the them word, though probably connected to Catholic thinking, was forever unclear.)

But young Dan was not struck (or even remotely influenced) by what was Catholic about the Mickey; what he had noticed about the North End, from the start, was what was Italian about it. The Michelangelo School Center had been a frequent site of the mass meetings where Italian immigrants gathered for Americanization. The overcrowded, cold-water tenement buildings, where so many of Danny’s schoolmates at the Mickey lived, had originally been built for the Irish immigrants, who’d come to the North End before the Italians. But the Irish had moved-to Dorchester and Roxbury, or they were “Southies” now. Not all that long ago, there’d been a small number of Portuguese fishermen-maybe there still was a family or two, in the vicinity of Fleet Street-but in 1954, when Danny Baciagalupo and his dad arrived, the North End was virtually all Italian.

The cook and his son were not treated as strangers-not for long. Too many relatives wanted to take them in. There were countless Calogeros, ceaseless Saettas; cousins, and not-really-cousins, called the Baciagalupos “family.” But Dominic and young Dan were unused to large families-not to mention extended ones. Hadn’t being standoffish helped them to survive in Coos County? The Italians didn’t understand “standoffish;” either they gave you un abbràccio (“an embrace”) or you were in for a fight.

The elders still gathered on street corners and in the parks, where one heard not only the dialects of Naples and Sicily, but of Abruzzi and Calabria as well. In the warm weather, both the young and the old lived outdoors, in the narrow streets. Many of these immigrants had come to America at the turn of the century-not only from Naples and Palermo, but also from innumerable southern Italian villages. The street life they had left behind had been re-created in the North End of Boston-in the open-air fruit and vegetable stands, the small bakeries and pastry shops, the meat markets, the pushcarts with fresh fish every Friday on Cross and Salem streets, the barbershops and shoeshine shops, the summertime feasts and festivals, and those curious religious societies whose street-level windows were painted with figures of patron saints. At least the saints were “curious” to Dominic and Daniel Baciagalupo, who (in thirteen years) had failed to find exactly what was Catholic or Italian within themselves.

Well, to be fair, perhaps Danny hadn’t entirely “failed” with the Italian part-he was still trying to lose that northern New Hampshire coldness. Dominic, it seemed, would never lose it; he could cook Italian, but being one was another matter.

Despite Ketchum’s likely misunderstanding that the Michelangelo was a Catholic school, it had long seemed unfair to Danny that his dad blamed Ketchum for giving young Dan the idea of going “away” to a boarding school. All Ketchum had said, in one of his earlier letters to Danny-in that positively girlish handwriting-was that the smartest “fella” he ever knew had attended a private school in the vicinity of the New Hampshire seacoast. Ketchum meant Exeter, not a long drive north of Boston -and in those days you could take the train, what Ketchum called “the good old Boston and Maine.” From Boston ’s North Station, the Boston & Maine ran to northern New Hampshire, too. “Hell, I’m sure you can walk from the North End to North Station,” Ketchum wrote to young Dan. “Even a fella with a limp could walk that far, I imagine.” (The fella word was increasingly common in Ketchum’s vocabulary-maybe from Six-Pack, though Jane had also used the word. Both Danny and his dad said it, too.)

The cook had not taken kindly to what he called Ketchum’s “interference” in Daniel’s secondary-school education, though young Dan had argued with his father on that point; illogically, Dominic didn’t blame the boy’s seventh-and eighth-grade English teacher at the Mickey, Mr. Leary, who’d had far more to do with Danny eventually going to Exeter than Ketchum had ever had.

For that matter, the cook should have blamed himself-for when Dominic learned that Exeter (in those days) was an all-boys’ school, he was suddenly persuaded to allow his beloved Daniel to leave home in the fall of 1957, when the boy was only fifteen. Dominic would be heartbroken by how much he missed his son, but the cook could sleep at night, secure in the knowledge (or, as Ketchum would say, “the illusion”) that his boy was safe from girls. Dominic let Daniel go to Exeter because he wanted to keep his son away from girls “for as long as possible,” as he wrote to Ketchum.

“Well, that’s your problem, Cookie,” his old friend wrote back.

Indeed, it was. It hadn’t been such an apparent problem when they’d first come to the North End-when young Dan was only twelve, and he appeared to take no notice of girls-but the cook saw how the girls already noticed his son. Among those cousins and not-really-cousins in the Saetta and Calogero clans, there would soon be some kissing cousins among them, the cook could easily imagine-not to mention all the other girls the boy would meet, for the North End was a neighborhood, where you met people like crazy. The cook and his twelve-year-old had never lived in a neighborhood before.

On that April Sunday in ’54, father and son had had some difficulty finding the North End, and-even back then-it was easier to walk in the North End than it was to drive. (Both driving and parking the Pontiac Chieftain in that neighborhood had been a task-certainly not equal to transporting Injun Jane’s body from the cookhouse to Constable Carl’s kitchen, but a task nonetheless.) When they wove their way, on foot, to Hanover Street -passing once within view of the gold dome of the Sumner Tunnel Authority, which appeared to shine down on them like a new sun on a different planet-they saw two other restaurants (the Europeo and Mother Anna’s) near Cross Street before they spotted Vicino di Napoli.

It was late afternoon-it had been a long drive from northern New Hampshire -but it was a warm, sunny day compared to the cold-morning light at Dead Woman Dam, where they’d left Angel’s bluish body with Ketchum.

Here, the sidewalks teemed with families; people were actually talking-some of them shouting-to one another. (There-at Dead Woman Dam and in Twisted River, on the morning they left-they’d seen only the slain Indian dishwasher, the drowned boy, and Ketchum.) Here, from the moment they’d parked the Pontiac and started walking, Danny had been too excited to speak; he’d never seen such a place, except in the movies. (There were no movies to see in Twisted River; occasionally, Injun Jane had taken young Dan to Berlin to see one. The cook had said he would never go back to Berlin, “except in handcuffs.”)

That April Sunday on Hanover Street, when they stopped walking outside Vicino di Napoli, Danny glanced at his father, who looked as if he’d been dragged to the North End in handcuffs-or else the cook felt doomed to be darkening the restaurant’s door. Was a curse attached to the bearer of sad tidings? Dominic was wondering. What becomes of the man who brings bad news? One day, does something worse happen to him?

Young Dan could sense his dad’s hesitation, but before either father or son could open the door, an old man opened it from inside the restaurant. “Come een-a, come een-a!” he said to them; he took Danny by the wrist, pulling him into the welcoming smell of the place. Dominic mutely followed them. At first glance, the cook could tell that the old man was not his despised father; the elderly gentleman looked nothing like Dominic, and he was too old to have been Gennaro Capodilupo.

He was, as he very much appeared to be, both the maître d’ and owner of Vicino di Napoli, and he had no memory of having met Annunziata Saetta, though he’d known Nunzi (without knowing it) and he knew plenty of Saettas-nor did the old man realize, on this particular Sunday, that it was Dominic’s father, Gennaro Capodilupo, whom he’d fired; Gennaro, that pig, had been an overly flirtatious bus-boy at Vicino di Napoli. (The restaurant was where Nunzi and Dominic’s philandering dad had met!) But the aged owner and maître d’ had heard of Annunziata Saetta; he’d heard of Rosina or “Rosie” Calogero, too. Scandals are the talk of neighborhoods, as young Dan and his dad would soon learn.

As for Vicino di Napoli, the dining room was not big, and the tables were small; there were red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, and two young women and a kid (about Angel’s age) were arranging the place settings. There was a stainless-steel serving counter, beyond which Dominic could see a brick-lined pizza oven and an open kitchen, where two cooks were at work. Dominic was relieved that neither of the cooks was old enough to be his father.

“We’re not quite ready to serve, but you can sit down-have-a something to drink, maybe,” the old man said, smiling at Danny.

Dominic reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, where he felt Angelù Del Popolo’s wallet-it was still damp. But he had barely taken the wallet out when the maître d’ backed away from him. “Are you a cop?” the old man asked. The cop word got the attention of the two cooks Dominic had spotted in the kitchen; they came cautiously out from behind the serving counter. The kid and the two women setting the tables stopped working and stared at Dominic, too.

“Cops don’t usually work with their children,” one of the cooks said to the old man. This cook was covered with flour-not just his apron but his hands and bare forearms were a dusty white. (The pizza chef, probably, Dominic thought.)

“I’m not a cop, I’m a cook,” Dominic told them. The two younger men and the old one laughed with relief; the two women and the kid went back to work. “But I have something to show you,” Dominic said. The cook was fishing around in Angel’s wallet. He couldn’t make up his mind what to show them first-the Boston transit pass with Angelù Del Popolo’s name and date of birth, or the photograph of the pretty but plump woman. He chose the streetcar and subway pass with the dead boy’s actual name, but before Dominic could decide which of the men to show the pass to, the old man saw the photo in the open wallet and grabbed the wallet out of Dominic’s hands.

“Carmella!” the maître d’ cried.

“There was a boy,” Dominic began, as the two cooks hovered over the picture under plastic in the wallet. “Maybe she’s his mother.”

Dominic got no further. The pizza chef hid his face in his hands, completely whitening both cheeks. “An-geh-LOO!” he wailed.

“No! No! No!” the old man sang, grabbing Dominic by both shoulders and shaking him.

The other cook (clearly the principal or first chef) held his heart, as if he’d been stabbed.

The pizza chef, as white-faced as a clown, lightly touched young Dan’s hand with his flour-covered fingers. “What has happened to Angelù?” he asked the boy in such a gentle way that Dominic knew the man must have a child Daniel’s age, or that he’d had one. Both cooks were about ten years older than Dominic.

“Angel drowned,” Danny told them all.

“It was an accident,” his father spoke up.

“Angelù was-a no fisherman!” the maître d’ lamented.

“It was a logging accident,” Dominic explained. “There was a river drive, and the boy slipped under the logs.”

The young women and the kid about Angel’s age had bolted-Danny hadn’t seen them leave. (It would turn out that they had fled no farther than the kitchen.)

“Angelù used to work here, after school,” the old man was saying, to Danny. “His mama, Carmella-she works here now.”

The other cook had stepped closer, holding out his hand to Dominic. “Antonio Molinari,” the principal chef said, somberly shaking Dominic’s hand.

“Dominic Baciagalupo,” the cook replied. “I was the cook in the logging camp. This is my son, Daniel.”

“Giusé Polcari,” the old man said to young Dan with downcast eyes. “Nobody calls me Giuseppe. I also like just plain Joe.” Pointing to the pizza chef, old Polcari said: “This is my son Paul.”

“You can call me Dan or Danny,” the boy told them. “Only my dad calls me Daniel.”

Tony Molinari had gone to the door of the restaurant; he was watching the passersby on Hanover Street. “Here she comes!” he said. “I see Carmella!” The two cooks fled into their kitchen, leaving the bewildered Baciagalupos with old Polcari.

“You gotta tell her-I no can-a do it,” Giusé (or just plain Joe) was saying. “I introduce you,” the maître d’ said, pushing Dominic closer to the restaurant’s door; Danny was holding his dad’s hand. “Her husband drowned, too-they were a true-love story!” old Polcari was telling them. “But he was a fisherman-they drown a lot.”

“Does Carmella have other children?” Dominic asked. Now the three of them could see her-a full-figured woman with a beautiful face and jet-black hair. She was not yet forty; maybe she was Ketchum’s age or a little older. Big breasts, big hips, big smile-only the smile was bigger than Injun Jane’s, young Dan would notice.

“Angelù was her one and only,” Giusé answered Dominic. Danny let go of his dad’s hand, because old Polcari was trying to give him something. It was Angel’s wallet, which felt wet and cold-the transit pass stuck out of it crookedly. Danny opened the wallet and put the pass back in place, just as Carmella Del Popolo walked in the door.

“Hey, Joe-am I late?” she asked the old man cheerfully.

“Not you, Carmella-you-a always on time!”

Maybe this was one of those moments that made Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer-his first and inevitably awkward attempt at foreshadowing. The boy suddenly saw into his father’s future, if not so clearly into his own. Yes, Carmella was a little older and certainly plumper than the woman in the photo Angel had carried in his wallet, but in no one’s estimation had she lost her looks. At twelve, Danny may have been too young to notice girls-or the girls themselves were too young to get his attention-but the boy already had an interest in women. (In Injun Jane, surely-in Six-Pack Pam, definitely.)

Carmella Del Popolo forcefully reminded young Dan of Jane. Her olive-brown skin was not unlike Jane’s reddish-brown coloring; her slightly flattened nose and broad cheekbones were the same, as were her dark-brown eyes-like Jane’s, Carmella’s eyes were almost as black as her hair. And wouldn’t Carmella soon have a sadness like Jane’s inside her? Jane had lost a son, too, and Carmella-like Dominic Baciagalupo-had already lost an adored spouse.

It was not that Danny could see, at that moment, the slightest indication that his dad was attracted to Carmella, or she to him; it was rather that the boy knew one thing for certain. Angel’s mother was the next woman his father would be attached to-for as long as the North End kept them safe from Constable Carl.

“You gotta sit down, Carmella,” old Polcari was saying, as he retreated toward the kitchen, where the others were hiding. “This is that cook and his son, from up-a north-you know, Angelù’s buddies.”

The woman, who was already radiant, brightened even more. “You are Dominic?” she cried, pressing the cook’s temples with her palms. By the time she turned to Danny, which she did quickly, Giusé Polcari had disappeared with the other cowards. “And you must be Danny!” Carmella said with delight. She hugged him, hard-not as hard as Jane had hugged him, at times, but hard enough to make young Dan think of Jane again.

Dominic only now realized why there’d been so little money in Angel’s wallet, and why they’d found next to nothing among the dead boy’s few things. Angel had been sending his earnings to his mother. The boy had begged rides to the post office with Injun Jane; he’d told Jane that the postage to Canada was complicated, but he’d been buying money orders for his mom. He’d clearly been faithful about writing her, too, for she knew how the cook and his son had befriended her boy. All at once, she asked about Ketchum.

“Is Mr. Ketchum with you?” Carmella said to Danny, the boy’s face held warmly in her hands. (Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say-as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.) But it was then that Carmella seemed to notice there was no one else in the dining room, and no one visible in the kitchen; the poor woman took this to mean that they intended to surprise her. Maybe her Angelù had made an unannounced visit to see her? Were the others hiding her dearest one in the kitchen, all of them managing to keep deathly quiet? “An-geh-LOO!” Carmella called. “Are you and Mr. Ketchum here, too? An-geh-LOO?”

Years later, when he’d grown accustomed to being a writer, Daniel Baciagalupo would think it was only natural, what happened then, back in the kitchen. They were not cowards; they were just people who loved Carmella Del Popolo, and they couldn’t bear to see her hurt. But, at the time, young Dan had been shocked. It was Paul Polcari, the pizza chef, who started it. “An-geh-LOO!” he wailed.

“No! No! No!” his elderly father sang.

“Angelù, Angelù,” Tony Molinari called, more softly.

The young women and the kid about Angel’s age were crooning the dead boy’s name, too. This chorus from the kitchen was not what Carmella had hoped to hear; they made such a dismal howl that the poor woman looked to Dominic for some explanation, seeing only the sorrow and panic in his face. Danny couldn’t look at Angel’s mom-it would have been like looking at Injun Jane a half-second before the skillet struck her.

A chair had been pulled out from the table nearest them-old Polcari’s departing gesture, even before he had bid Carmella to sit down-and Carmella not so much sat in the chair as she collapsed into it, the olive-brown color abandoning her face. She had suddenly seen her son’s wallet in young Dan’s small hands, but when she’d reached and felt how wet and cold it was, she reeled backward and half fell into the chair. The cook was quick to hold her there, kneeling beside her with his arm around her shoulders, and Danny instinctively knelt at her feet.

She wore a silky black skirt and a pretty white blouse-the blouse would soon be spotted with her tears-and when she looked into Danny’s dark eyes, she must have seen her son as he’d once looked to her, because she pulled the boy’s head into her lap and held him there as if he were her lost Angelù.

“Not Angelù!” she cried.

One of the chefs in the kitchen now rhythmically beat on a pasta pot with a wooden spoon; like an echo, he called out, “Not Angelù!”

“I’m so sorry,” young Dan heard his dad say.

“He drowned,” the boy said, from Carmella’s lap; he felt her hold his head more tightly there, and once again the immediate future appeared to him. For as long as he lived with his dad and Carmella Del Popolo, Danny Baciagalupo would be her surrogate Angelù. (“You can’t blame the boy for wanting to go away to school,” Ketchum would one day write his old friend. “Blame me, if you want to, Cookie, but don’t blame Danny.”)

“Not drowned!” Carmella screamed over the clamor from the kitchen. Danny couldn’t hear what his father was whispering in the grieving woman’s ear, but he could feel her body shaking with sobs, and he managed to slightly turn his head in her lap-enough to see the mourners come out of the kitchen. No pots and pans, or wooden spoons-they brought just themselves, their faces streaked with tears. (The face of Paul, the pizza chef, was streaked with flour, too.) But Daniel Baciagalupo already had an imagination; he didn’t need to hear what his dad was saying in Carmella’s ear. The accident word was surely part of it-it was a world of accidents, both the boy and his dad already knew.

“These are good people,” old Polcari was saying; this sounded like a prayer. It was later that Danny realized Joe Polcari had not been praying; he’d been speaking to Carmella about the cook and his son “from up-a north.” Indeed, the boy and his father were the ones who walked Carmella home. (She had needed to slump against them, at times close to swooning, but she was easy to support-she had to be more than a hundred pounds lighter than Jane, and Carmella was alive.)

But even before they left Vicino di Napoli that afternoon-when Danny’s head was still held fast in the distraught mother’s lap-Daniel Baciagalupo recognized another trick that writers know. It was something he already knew how to do, though he would not apply it to his method of writing for a few more years. All writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this-even at twelve. With his face secure in Carmella’s warm grip, the boy simply removed himself from this tableau; from the vantage of the pizza oven, perhaps, or at least as far removed from the mourners as if he were standing, unseen, on the kitchen side of the serving counter, Danny saw how the staff of Vicino di Napoli had gathered around the seated Carmella and his kneeling dad.

Old Polcari stood behind Carmella, with one hand on the nape of her neck and the other hand on his heart. His son Paul, the pizza chef, stood in his aura of flour with his head bowed, but he had symmetrically positioned himself at Carmella’s hip-perfectly opposite to the hip where Dominic knelt beside her. The two young women-waitresses, still learning their craft from Carmella-knelt on the floor directly behind young Dan, who, from the distance of the kitchen, could see himself on his knees with his head held in Carmella’s lap. The other cook-the first or principal chef, Tony Molinari-stood slightly apart from the rest of them with his arm around the narrow shoulders of the kid about Angel’s age. (He was the busboy, Danny would soon learn; being a busboy would be Danny’s first job at Vicino di Napoli.)

But at this exact and sorrowful moment, Daniel Baciagalupo took in the whole tableau from afar. He would begin writing in the first-person voice, as many young writers do, and the tortured first sentence of one of his early novels would refer (in part) to this virtual Pietà on that April Sunday in Vicino di Napoli. In the novice writer’s own words: “I became a member of a family I was unrelated to-long before I knew nearly enough about my own family, or the dilemma my father had faced in my early childhood.”

“LOSE THE BACIAGALUPO,” Ketchum had written to them both. “In case Carl comes looking for you-better change your last name, just to be safe.” But Danny had refused. Daniel Baciagalupo was proud of his name-he even took some rebellious pride in what his father had told him of his name’s history. All the years those West Dummer kids had called him a Guinea and a Wop made young Dan feel that he’d earned his name; now, in the North End (in an Italian neighborhood), why would he want to lose the Baciagalupo? Besides, the cowboy-if he came looking-would be trying to find a Dominic Baciagalupo, not a Daniel.

Dominic didn’t feel the same way about his surname. To him, Baciagalupo had always been a made-up name. After all, Nunzi had named him-he’d been her Kiss of the Wolf, when in reality it would have made more sense for him to have been a Saetta, which he half was, or for his mother to have called him a Capodilupo, if only to shame his irresponsible father. (“That-a no-good fuck Gennaro,” as old Joe Polcari would one day refer to the flirtatious, fired busboy who’d disappeared-only God knew where.)

And Dominic had lots of last names he could have chosen. Everyone in Annunziata’s enormous family wanted him to become a Saetta, whereas Rosie’s innumerable nieces and nephews-not to mention his late wife’s more immediate family-wanted him to be a Calogero. Dominic didn’t fall into that trap; he saw in an instant how insulted the Saettas would be if he changed his name to Calogero, and vice versa. Dominic’s nickname at Vicino di Napoli, where he was almost immediately apprenticed to the first chef, Tony Molinari, and the pizza chef, Paul Polcari, would be Gambacorta-“Short Leg,” an affectionate reference to his limp-which was soon shortened to Gamba (just plain “Leg”). But Dominic decided that, outside his life in the restaurant, neither Gambacorta nor Gamba was a suitable surname-not for a cook.

“What about Bonvino?” old Giusé Polcari would suggest. (The name meant “Good Wine,” but Dominic didn’t drink.)

Buonopane (“Good Bread”) would be Tony Molinari’s recommendation, whereas Paul Polcari, the pizza chef, was in favor of Capobianco (“White Head”)-because Paul was usually white all over, due to the flour. But these names were too comical for a man with Dominic’s sober disposition.

Their first night in the North End, Danny could have predicted what his dad would choose for a new last name. When father and son walked the widow Del Popolo to her brick tenement building on Charter Street-Carmella lived in a three-room walk-up near the old bathhouse and the Copps Hill Burying Ground; the only hot water was what she heated on her gas stove-young Dan could see far enough into his father’s future to envision that Dominic Baciagalupo would (so to speak) quickly slip into the drowned fisherman’s shoes. Although her late husband’s shoes didn’t actually fit Dominic, Carmella would one day be happy to discover that Dominic could wear the unfortunate fisherman’s clothes-both men were slightly built, as was Danny, who would soon be wearing Angel’s left-behind clothes. Naturally enough, father and son needed some city attire; people dressed differently in Boston than they did in Coos County. It would come as no surprise to Danny Baciagalupo, who wouldn’t (at first) take Ketchum’s advice and change his last name, that his dad became Dominic Del Popolo (after all, he was a cook “of the people”)-if not on that first night in the North End.

In Carmella’s kitchen was a bathtub bigger than the kitchen table, which already had the requisite three chairs. Two large pasta pots were full of water-forever hot, but not boiling, on the gas stove. Carmella did next to no cooking in her kitchen; she kept the water hot for her baths. For a woman who lived in a cold-water tenement, she was very clean and smelled wonderful; with Angel’s help, she had managed to pay the gas bill. In the North End in those days, there weren’t enough full-time jobs for young men of Angel’s age. For young men who were strong enough, there were more full-time jobs to be found in the north country, in Maine and New Hampshire, but the work there could be dangerous-as poor Angel had discovered.

Danny and his dad sat at the small kitchen table with Carmella while she cried. The boy and his father told the sobbing mother stories about her drowned son; naturally, some of the stories led them to talk about Ketchum. When Carmella had temporarily cried herself out, the three of them, now hungry, went back to Vicino di Napoli, which served only pizza or quick pasta dishes on Sunday nights. (At that time, the Sunday midday meal was the main one for most Italians.) And the restaurant closed early on Sundays; the chefs prepared a dinner for the staff after the evening’s customers had gone home. Most other nights, the restaurant was open for business fairly late, and the cooks fed themselves and the staff in the midafternoon, before dinner.

The aged owner and maître d’ had been expecting the three of them to return; four of the small tables had been pushed together, and the place settings were already prepared for them. They ate and drank as at a wake, pausing only to cry-everyone but young Dan cried-and to toast the dead boy they’d all loved, though neither Danny nor his dad would touch a drop of wine. There were the oft-repeated “Hail Marys,” many in unison, but there was no open coffin to view-no nightlong prayer vigil, either. Dominic had assured the mourners that Ketchum knew Angel was Italian; the river driver would have arranged “something Catholic” with the French Canadians. (Danny had given his dad a look, because they both knew that the woodsman would have done no such thing; Ketchum would have kept everything Catholic, and the French Canadians, as far away from Angel as possible.)

It was quite late when Tony Molinari asked Dominic where he and Danny were spending the night; surely they didn’t want to drive all the way back to northern New Hampshire. As he’d told Ketchum, Dominic wasn’t a gambler-not anymore-but he trusted the company he was in and (to his own and Danny’s surprise) told them the truth. “We can’t ever go back-we’re on the run,” Dominic said. It was Danny’s turn to cry; the two young waitresses and Carmella were quick to comfort the boy.

“Say-a no more, Dominic-we don’t-a need to know why, or who you’re running from!” old Polcari cried. “You’re-a safe with us.”

“I’m not surprised, Dominic. Anyone can see you’ve been in a fight,” Paul, the pizza chef, said, patting the cook’s shoulder with a sympathetic, flour-covered hand. “That’s one ugly-looking lip you’ve got-it’s still bleeding, you know.”

“Maybe you need stitches,” Carmella said to the cook, with heartfelt concern. But Dominic dismissed her suggestion by shaking his head; he said nothing, but all of them could see the gratitude in the cook’s shy smile. (Danny had given his dad another look, but the boy didn’t doubt his father’s reasoning for not explaining the circumstances of his lip injury; that father and son were on the run had nothing to do with the questionable character and aberrant behavior of Six-Pack Pam.)

“You can stay with me,” Tony Molinari said to Dominic.

“They’ll stay with me,” Carmella told Molinari. “I have a spare room.” Her offer was incontestable, because she meant Angel’s room; even mentioning the room made Carmella commence to cry again. When Danny and his dad walked her back to the cold-water apartment on Charter Street, she told them to take the bigger bed-in her room. She would sleep in the single bed in her departed Angelù’s room.

They would hear her crying herself to sleep-that is, she was trying to. When the crying had gone on for a long time, young Dan whispered to his father: “Maybe you should go to her.”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate, Daniel. It’s her boy she misses-I think you should go to her.”

Danny Baciagalupo went to Angel’s room, where Carmella held out her arms to the boy, and he got into the narrow bed beside her. “An-geh-LOO,” she whispered in his ear, until she finally fell asleep. Danny didn’t dare get out of the bed, for fear he would wake her. He lay in her warm arms, smelling her good, clean smell, until he fell asleep, too. It had been a long, violent day for the twelve-year-old-counting the dramatic events of the previous night, of course-and young Dan must have been tired.

Wouldn’t even the way he fell asleep somehow contribute to Danny becoming a writer? On the night of the same day he had killed the three-hundred-plus-pound Indian dishwasher, who happened to be his father’s lover, Daniel Baciagalupo would find himself in the warm embrace of the widow Del Popolo, the voluptuous woman who would soon replace Injun Jane in his father’s next life-his dad’s sad but (for the time being) ongoing story. One day, the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events-these are what move a story forward-but at the moment Danny lost consciousness in Carmella’s sweet-smelling arms, the exhausted boy had merely been thinking: How coincidental is this? (He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)

Perhaps the photographs of his dead mother were sufficient to make young Dan become a writer; he had managed to take only some of them from the cookhouse in Twisted River, and he would miss the books he’d kept her photos pressed flat in-particularly, those novels that contained passages Rosie had underlined. The passages themselves were a way for the boy to better imagine his mother, together with the photos. Trying to remember those left-behind pictures was a way of imagining her, too.

Only a few of the photographs he brought to Boston were in color, and his dad had told Danny that the black-and-white photos were somehow “truer” to what Dominic called “the lethal blue of her eyes.” (Why “lethal”? the would-be writer wondered. And how could those black-and-white pictures be “truer” to his mother’s blue eyes than the standard color-by-Kodak photographs?)

Rosie’s hair had been dark brown, almost black, but she was surprisingly fair-skinned, with sharply angular, fragile-looking features, which served to make her seem even more petite than she was. When young Dan would meet all the Calogeros-among them, his mother’s younger sisters-he saw that two of these aunts were small and pretty, like his mom in the photographs, and the youngest of them (Filomena) also had blue eyes. But Danny would notice that, as much as he was drawn to stare at Filomena-she must have been about the same age as the boy’s mother when Rosie had died (in her mid-to late twenties, in Danny’s estimation)-his father was quick to say that Filomena’s eyes were not the same blue as his mom’s. (Not lethal enough, maybe, the boy could only guess.) Young Dan would notice, too, that his dad rarely spoke to Filomena; Dominic seemed almost rude to her, in that he purposely wouldn’t look at her or ever comment on what she was wearing.

Was it as a writer that Daniel Baciagalupo began to notice such defining details? Had the boy already discerned what could be called a pattern-in-progress in his father’s attraction, in turn, to Injun Jane and to Carmella Del Popolo-both of them big, dark-eyed women, as opposite to Rosie Calogero as the twelve-year-old could imagine? For if Rosie had truly been the love of his dad’s life, might not Dominic purposely be denying himself contact with any woman remotely like her?

In fact, Ketchum would one day accuse the cook of maintaining an unnatural fidelity to Rosie by choosing to be with women who were grossly unlike her. Danny must have written Ketchum about Carmella, and the boy probably said she was big, because the cook had been careful-in his letters to his old friend-to make no mention of his new girlfriend’s size, or the color of her eyes. Dominic would tell Ketchum next to nothing about Angel’s mother and his developing relationship with her. Dominic wouldn’t even respond to Ketchum’s accusatory letter, but the cook was angry that the logger had criticized his apparent taste in women. At the time, Ketchum was still with Six-Pack Pam-speaking of women opposite to Cousin Rosie!

To remember Pam, Dominic needed only to look in a mirror, where the scar on his lower lip would remain very noticeable long after the night Six-Pack attacked him. It would be a surprise to Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, that Ketchum and Six-Pack would last as a couple for very long. But they would be together for a few years longer than Dominic had been with Injun Jane-even a little longer than the cook would manage to stay with Carmella Del Popolo, Angel’s large but lovely mom.

THE FIRST MORNING father and son would wake up in Boston, it was to the tantalizing sounds of Carmella having a bath in her small kitchen. Respecting the woman’s privacy, Dominic and young Dan lay in their beds while Carmella performed her seductive-sounding ablutions; unbeknownst to them, she’d put a third and fourth pasta pot of water on the stove, and these would soon be coming to a near boil. “There’s plenty of hot water!” she called to them. “Who wants the next bath?”

Because the cook had already been thinking about how he might fit, albeit snugly, in the same big bathtub with Carmella Del Popolo, Dominic somewhat insensitively suggested that he and Daniel could share a bath-he meant the same bathwater-an idea that the twelve-year-old found repellent. “No, Dad!” the boy called, from the narrow bed in Angel’s room.

They could hear Carmella as the heavy woman rose dripping from the bathtub. “I know boys Danny’s age-they need some privacy!” she said.

Yes, young Dan thought-not fully understanding that he would soon need more privacy from his dad and Carmella. After all, Danny was almost a teenager. While they wouldn’t live together for long in the cold-water flat on Charter Street with the big bathtub in the small kitchen and an absurdly small water closet (with just a curtain, instead of a door)-the so-called WC contained only a toilet and a diminutive sink with a mirror above it-the apartment they would move into wasn’t much larger, or half private enough for a teenage Daniel Baciagalupo, though it did have hot water. It would be another walk-up on what would one day be called Wesley Place-an alley that ran alongside the Caffè Vittoria-and in addition to having two bedrooms, there was a full-size bathroom with both a tub and a shower (and an actual door), and the kitchen was large enough for a table with six chairs.

Still, the bedrooms were next to each other; in the North End, there was nothing they could afford that was at all comparable to the spaciousness of the second floor of the cookhouse in Twisted River. And Danny was already too old to overhear his father and Carmella trying to keep their lovemaking quiet-certainly after the boy, with his excitable imagination, had heard and seen his dad and Injun Jane doing it.

The cook and Carmella, with young Dan increasingly aware of himself as the surrogate Angel, had an acceptable living arrangement, but it was not one that would last. It would soon be time for the teenager to create a little distance between himself and his dad-and, as he grew older, Danny was made more uncomfortable by another problem.

If he had once suffered from a presexual state of arousal, first inspired by Jane and then by Six-Pack Pam, the teenager could find no relief from his deepening desire for Carmella Del Popolo-his dad’s “Injun replacement,” as Ketchum called her. Danny’s attraction to Carmella was a more troubling problem than the privacy issues.

“You need to get away,” Ketchum would write to young Dan, although the boy truly liked his life in the North End. In fact, he loved it, especially in comparison to the life he’d had in Twisted River -at the Paris Manufacturing Company School, in particular.

The Michelangelo School thought little of the education Danny Baciagalupo had received among those Phillips Brook bums-those West Dummer dolts, as Ketchum called them. The authorities at the Mickey made Danny repeat a grade; he was a year older than most of his classmates. By seventh grade, when the would-be writer first mentioned Ketchum’s Exeter idea to his English teacher, Mr. Leary, the Irishman already considered Danny Baciagalupo to be among his very best students. By the time the boy was taking eighth-grade English, Danny was far and away Mr. Leary’s teacher’s pet.

Several of Mr. Leary’s former pupils had gone on to attend Boston Latin. A few had attended Roxbury Latin-in the old Irishman’s opinion, a somewhat snooty Anglo school. Two boys Mr. Leary had taught had gone to Milton, and one to Andover, but no one from Mr. Leary’s English classes had ever gone to Exeter; it was farther afield from Boston than those other good schools, and Mr. Leary knew it was a very good school. Might it have been a feather in Mr. Leary’s cap if Daniel Baciagalupo were accepted at Exeter?

Mr. Leary felt bedeviled by most of the other seventh-and eighth-grade boys at the Mickey. It was notable that Danny didn’t join in the teasing his teacher took, because teasing-and other, harsher forms of harassment-reminded the boy of his Paris school experience.

Mr. Leary was red-faced from drink; he had a potato-shaped nose, the veritable image of the alleged staple of his countrymen’s diet. Wild white tufts of hair, like fur, stuck out above his ears, but Mr. Leary was otherwise bald-with a pronounced dent in the top of his head. He looked like a partially defeathered owl. “As a child,” Mr. Leary told all his students, “I was hit on the head by an unabridged dictionary, which doubtless gave me my abundant love of words.”

Both the seventh-and eighth-grade boys called him “O,” for Mr. Leary had dropped the O’ from his name. These badly behaved boys wrote no end of O’s on the blackboard when Mr. Leary was out of the classroom. They called to him, “O!”-but only when his back was turned.

Why this tormented the former Mr. O’Leary so, Danny didn’t understand, nor did Daniel Baciagalupo think it was any big deal for his teacher to have dropped the O’ from his name. (Just look at Angel Pope, and everything he had dropped. Did the Italian kids think that only the Irish occasionally tried to make less of their ethnicity?)

But Mr. Leary’s foremost reason for finding Daniel Baciagalupo such an excellent student was that the boy loved to write, and he wrote and wrote. In the seventh and eighth grade at the Mickey, Mr. Leary had never seen anything quite like it. The boy seemed possessed-or at least obsessed.

True, it would not infrequently disturb Mr. Leary to read what young Dan would write about, but his stories-many of them farfetched, most of them violent, and all of them with an undue amount of sexual content, totally inappropriate for a teenager-were invariably well-written and clear. The kid simply had a gift for storytelling; Mr. Leary just wanted to help him master the grammar, and all the rest of the mechanics of writing. At Exeter, Mr. Leary had heard, they were sticklers for grammar. They made a nuts-and-bolts business out of writing there-you had to write every day, about something.

When Mr. Leary wrote to the admissions people at Exeter, he made no mention of the subject matter of young Dan’s creative writing. Exeter was not much interested in so-called creative writing, anyway; the essay, Mr. Leary assumed, was all-important there. And the Michelangelo School, where Daniel Baciagalupo was such an exceptional student, was in a neighborhood of Italo-Americans. (Mr. Leary was careful not to use the immigrant word, though this was very much his meaning.) These people were prone to laziness and exaggeration, Mr. Leary wanted Exeter to know. The Baciagalupo boy was “unlike the rest.”

To listen to most of these Italians, Mr. Leary suggested, you would get the impression that they had all lived with rats (and other appalling conditions) in the steerage class of the ships that brought them to America-all of them orphans, or otherwise landing on the docks alone, and with no more than a few miserable lira to their names. And while many of the teenage girls were beautiful, they would all become hopelessly fat as women; this was because of the pasta and their unrestrained appetites. The latter, Mr. Leary suspected, were not limited to overeating. Truth be told, these Italians were not as industrious as those hardworking earlier immigrants-the Irish-and while Mr. Leary didn’t exactly say these things to the admissions people at Exeter, he imparted no small amount of his prejudices while singing in praise of Daniel Baciagalupo’s talents and character, not to mention citing the “difficulties” the boy had faced and overcome “at home.”

There was a single parent-“a rather uncommunicative cook,” as Mr. Leary described him. This cook lived with a woman Mr. Leary would describe as “a widow who has suffered multiple tragedies”-to wit, if ever there were a worthy candidate for the enviable position of a full-scholarship student at Exeter, Daniel Baciagalupo was his name! Cleverly, Mr. Leary was not only aware of his prejudices; he wanted to be sure that Exeter was aware of his prejudices, too. He intended to make the North End of Boston sound like a place Danny needed to be rescued from. Mr. Leary wanted someone from Exeter to come see the Michelangelo School -even if this meant seeing how disrespected Mr. Leary was there. For surely if a scholarship person met Daniel Baciagalupo in the company of those badly behaved boys at the Mickey-and, just as important, saw the would-be writer in the context of that noisy neighborhood restaurant where both the boy’s father and the tragic widow worked-well, it would simply be obvious how Danny Baciagalupo stood out. The boy did stand out, but young Dan would have stood out anywhere-not only in the North End-though Mr. Leary didn’t say this. As it would turn out, he said enough.

His letter had its desired effect. “Get a load of this guy!” (meaning Mr. Leary with his abundant prejudices) the first person in the admissions office at Exeter must have said. The letter was passed on to another reader, and to another; a lot of people at Exeter probably read that letter, among them the very “scholarship person” Mr. Leary had in mind all along.

And that person doubtless said, “I have to see this”-meaning not only the Mickey, and Mr. Leary, but also the underprivileged circumstances of Daniel Baciagalupo’s Italo-American life.

There was much more that Mr. Leary didn’t say. What need was there for Exeter to know about the boy’s outrageous imagination? What had happened to the father in that one story? He’d been lamed (forever crippled) by a bear-the bear had eaten one of the father’s feet-but the maimed man had somehow managed to beat back the bear with a frying pan! This same maimed man lost his wife in a square-dancing accident. There’d been a square dance outdoors, on a dock; the dock had collapsed, and all the dancers were drowned. The man who’d lost his foot to the bear had been spared because he couldn’t dance! (He was just watching from afar, if Mr. Leary remembered the story correctly-it was all preposterous stuff, but well-written, very well-written.)

There was even a friend of this same fictional family who’d been brain-damaged by a corrupt cop. The victim was an unlikely lumberjack-“unlikely,” in Mr. Leary’s opinion, because the lumberjack was described as a great reader. Even more improbable, he’d been so badly beaten by the cop that he’d forgotten how to read! And the women in Daniel Baciagalupo’s stories-Lord have mercy, thought Mr. Leary.

There was a native woman from a local Indian tribe-the story about the maimed man was set in the boondocks of northern New Hampshire and featured a dance hall where there was no dancing. (Come on, Mr. Leary had thought when he’d read the story-what would be the point of that?) But the story had been well-written, as always, and the Indian woman weighed three or four hundred pounds, and her hair hung below her waist; this caused a retarded boy (the child of the father who’d been attacked by the bear) to mistake the Indian for another bear! The unfortunate retard actually thought that the same bear had returned to eat the rest of his dad, when in truth the Indian woman was having sex with the cripple-in what Mr. Leary could only imagine must have been the superior position.

But when the teacher had said this to Danny (“I gather the Indian woman was in the-ah, well-superior position”), the Baciagalupo boy looked uncomprehending. The young writer had not understood.

“No, she was just on top,” Danny had answered Mr. Leary. The teacher had smiled adoringly. In Mr. Leary’s eyes, Daniel Baciagalupo was a genius-in-progress; the wonder boy could do no wrong.

Yet what had happened to the overweight Indian woman was horrendous. The retarded boy had killed her; he’d hit her with the exact same frying pan his father had used as a weapon against the bear! Young Baciagalupo’s powers of description were perhaps at their best when he rendered the reposeful posture of the naked, dead Indian woman. The thoughtful father had quickly covered her exposed crotch with a pillow-perhaps to spare his damaged son any further misunderstanding. But the retarded boy had already seen more than his limited intelligence could stand. For years, he would be haunted by the sight of the slain woman’s huge breasts-how they had lifelessly slumped into the hollows of her armpits. How did the kid keep coming up with details like those? Mr. Leary would wonder. (Mr. Leary would be haunted by the naked, dead Indian woman, too.)

But why say anything to Exeter about those questionable elements of the boy’s imagination, which had even upset Mr. Leary? Those extreme details were mere indulgences the more mature writer would one day outgrow. For example, the woman who wore a man’s wool-flannel shirt, without a bra; she had raped the retarded boy, after she’d consumed an entire six-pack of beer! Why did Exeter need to know about her? (Mr. Leary wished he could forget her.) Or the woman in one of the cold-water tenement buildings on Charter Street, near the bathhouse and the Copps Hill Burying Ground-as Mr. Leary remembered her, she had pretty big breasts, too. This was another Baciagalupo story, and the woman on Charter Street was referred to as the stepmother of the retarded boy-the same boy from that earlier story, but he was no longer called retarded. (In the new story, the boy was described as “just plain damaged.”)

The father with the eaten foot had confusing dreams-both of the bear and of the slain Indian woman. Given the voluptuousness of the damaged boy’s stepmother, Mr. Leary suspected the father of having a preternatural attraction to overweight women; naturally, it was entirely possible that the young writer found big women alluring. (Mr. Leary was beginning to feel the unwelcome allure of such women himself.)

And the stepmother was Italian, thus inviting Mr. Leary’s prejudices to come into play; he looked for signs of laziness and exaggeration in the woman, finding (to his enormous satisfaction) a perfect example of the aforementioned “unrestrained appetites” Mr. Leary had long held Italian women accountable for. The woman overbathed herself.

She was so eccentrically devoted to her baths that an oversize bathtub was the centerpiece of the cold-water flat’s undersize kitchen, where four pasta pots were constantly simmering-her bathwater was heated on the gas stove. The placement of the bathtub created quite a privacy problem for the indulgent woman’s damaged stepson, who had bored a hole in his bedroom door, which opened into the kitchen.

What further damage was done to the boy by spying on his naked stepmother-well, Mr. Leary could only imagine! And, to talk about young Baciagalupo’s inventiveness with details, when the voluptuary shaved her armpits, she left a small, spade-shaped patch of hair (in one armpit) purposely unshaven, “like an elf’s meticulously trimmed goatee,” young Dan had written.

“In which armpit?” Mr. Leary had asked the beginning writer.

“The left one,” Danny answered, without a moment’s hesitation.

“Why the left one, and not the right?” the English teacher asked.

The Baciagalupo boy looked thoughtful, as if he were trying to remember a rather complicated sequence of events. “She’s right-handed,” Danny answered. “She’s not as skillful with the razor when she’s shaving with her left hand. She shaves her right armpit with her left hand,” he explained to his teacher.

“Those are good details, too,” Mr. Leary told him. “I think you should put those details in the story.”

“Okay, I will,” young Dan said; he liked Mr. Leary, and did his best to protect his English teacher from the torments of the other boys.

The other boys didn’t bother Danny. Sure, there were bullies at the Mickey, but they weren’t as tough as those Paris Manufacturing Company thugs. If some bully in the North End gave Danny Baciagalupo any trouble, young Dan just told his older cousins. The bully would get the shit kicked out of him by a Calogero or a Saetta; the older cousins could have kicked the shit out of those West Dummer dolts, too.

Danny didn’t show his writing to anyone but Mr. Leary. Of course the boy wrote rather long letters to Ketchum, but those letters weren’t fiction; no one in his right mind would make up a story and try to pass it off on Ketchum. Besides, it was for pouring out his heart that young Dan needed Ketchum. Many of the letters to Ketchum began, “You know how much I love my dad, I really do, but…” and so on.

Like father, like son: The cook had kept things from his son, and Danny (in grades seven and eight, especially) was of an age to keep things back. He would be thirteen when he began grade seven and first met Mr. Leary; the Baciagalupo boy would be fifteen when he graduated from eighth grade. He was both fourteen and fifteen when he showed his English teacher the stories he made up with ever-increasing compulsion.

Despite Mr. Leary’s misgivings about the subject matter-meaning the sexual content, chiefly-the wise old owl of an Irishman never said an unpraiseworthy word to his favorite pupil. The Baciagalupo boy was going to be a writer; in Mr. Leary’s mind, there was no doubt about it.

The English teacher kept his fingers crossed about Exeter; if the boy was accepted, Mr. Leary hoped the school would be so rigorous that it might save young Baciagalupo from the more unsavory aspects of his imagination. At Exeter, maybe the mechanics of writing would be so thoroughly demanding and time-consuming that Danny would become a more intellectual writer. (Meaning what, exactly? Not quite such a creative one?)

Mr. Leary himself was not entirely sure what he meant by the mystifying thought that becoming a more intellectual writer might make Danny a less creative one-if that was what Mr. Leary thought-but the teacher’s intentions were good. Mr. Leary wanted all the best for the Baciagalupo boy, and while he would never criticize a word young Dan had written, the old English teacher ventured out on a limb in making a bold suggestion. (Well, it wasn’t that bold a suggestion; it merely seemed bold to Mr. Leary.) This happened to be in that almost-mud-season time of Danny’s eighth-grade year-in March 1957, when Danny had just turned fifteen, and the boy and his teacher were waiting to hear from Exeter. That Mr. Leary made the aforementioned “bold suggestion” would (years later) prompt Daniel Baciagalupo to write his own version of Ketchum’s periodic claim.

“All the shit seems to happen in mud season!” Ketchum regularly complained, in seeming refutation of the fact that the cook and his beloved cousin Rosie were married in mud season, and young Dan had been born just before it. (Of course, there was no actual mud season in Boston.)

“Danny?” Mr. Leary asked tentatively-almost as if he weren’t sure of the boy’s name. “Down the road, as a writer, you might want to consider a nom de plume.”

“A what?” the fifteen-year-old asked.

“A pen name. Some writers choose their own names, instead of publishing under their given names. It’s called a nom de plume in French,” the boy’s teacher explained. Mr. Leary felt his heart rise to his throat, because young Baciagalupo suddenly looked as if he’d been slapped.

“You mean lose the Baciagalupo,” Danny said.

“It’s just that there are easier names to say, and remember,” Mr. Leary told his favorite pupil. “I thought that, since your father changed his name-and the widow Del Popolo hasn’t become a Baciagalupo, has she?-well, I merely imagined that you might not be so terribly attached to the Baciagalupo name yourself.”

“I’m very attached to it,” young Dan said.

“Yes, I can see that-then by all means you must hang on to that name!” Mr. Leary said with genuine enthusiasm. (He felt awful; he’d not meant to insult the boy.)

“I think Daniel Baciagalupo is a good name for a writer,” the determined fifteen-year-old told his teacher. “If I write good books, won’t readers go to the trouble of remembering my name?”

“Of course they will, Danny!” Mr. Leary cried. “I’m sorry about the nom-de-plume business-it was truly insensitive of me.”

“That’s okay-I know you’re just trying to help me,” the boy told him.

“We should be hearing some word from Exeter any day now,” Mr. Leary said anxiously; he was desperate to change the subject from the pen-name faux pas.

“I hope so,” Danny Baciagalupo said seriously. A more thoughtful expression had returned to young Dan’s face; he’d stopped scowling.

Mr. Leary, who was agitated that he’d overstepped his bounds, knew that the boy went to work at Vicino di Napoli almost every afternoon after school; the well-meaning English teacher let Danny go on his way.

As he often did after school, Mr. Leary did some errands in the neighborhood. He still lived in the area of Northeastern University, where he’d gone to graduate school and met his wife; he took the subway to the Haymarket station every morning, and he took it home again, but he did his shopping (what little there was of it) in the North End. He’d taught at the Michelangelo for so long, virtually everyone in the neighborhood knew him; he’d taught either them or their children. Simply because they teased him-after all, he was Irish-didn’t mean that they didn’t like Mr. Leary, whose eccentricities amused them.

The afternoon of his ill-conceived “bold suggestion,” Mr. Leary paused in the garden at St. Leonard Church, once again fretting at the absence of an ’s-obviously, to the old English teacher, the church should have been named St. Leonard’s. Mr. Leary did his confessing at St. Stephen’s, which had a proper’s. He simply liked St. Stephen’s better; it was more like a Catholic church anywhere. St. Leonard was somehow more Italian-even that familiar prayer in the garden of the church was translated into Italian. “Ora sono qui. Preghiamo insieme. Dio ti aiuta.” (“Now I’m here. Let’s pray together. God will help you.”)

Mr. Leary prayed that God would help Daniel Baciagalupo get a full scholarship to Exeter. And there was another thing he’d never liked about St. Leonard, Mr. Leary thought, as he was leaving the garden. He hadn’t gone inside the church; there was a plaster saint inside, San Peregrine, with his right leg bandaged. Mr. Leary found the statue vulgar.

And there was something else he preferred about St. Stephen’s, the old Irishman was musing-how the church was across from the Prado, where the old men gathered to play checkers in the good weather. Mr. Leary occasionally stopped to play checkers with them. A few of those old guys were really good, but the ones who hadn’t learned English irritated Mr. Leary; not learning English was either not American enough or too Italian to suit him.

A former pupil (a fireman now) called to the old teacher outside the fire station on the corner of Hanover and Charter streets, and Mr. Leary stopped to chat with the robust fellow. In no particular order, Mr. Leary then refilled a prescription at Barone’s Pharmacy; in the same location, he paused at Tosti’s, the record store, where he occasionally bought a new album. The one Italian “indulgence” that Mr. Leary loved was opera-well, to be fair, he also loved the way they served the espresso at the Caffè Vittoria, and the Sicilian meat loaf Danny Baciagalupo’s dad made at Vicino di Napoli.

Mr. Leary made a small purchase at the Modern, a pastry shop on Hanover. He bought some cannoli to take home for his breakfast-the pastry cylinders were filled with sweetened ricotta cheese, nuts, and candied fruits. Mr. Leary had to confess to loving those Italian indulgences, too.

He didn’t like to look up Hanover Street in the direction of Scollay Square, though he walked in that direction to take the subway home from the Haymarket station every school day. South of the Haymarket was the Casino Theatre, and in the near vicinity of the Scollay Square subway station was the Old Howard. At both establishments, Mr. Leary tried to see the new striptease shows on the nights they opened-before the censors saw the shows and inevitably “trimmed” them. His regular attendance at these striptease joints made Mr. Leary feel ashamed, although his wife had died long ago. His wife probably wouldn’t have cared that he went to see the strippers-or she would have minded this indulgence less than if he’d remarried, which he hadn’t. Yet Mr. Leary had seen a few of these strippers perform so many times, in a way he occasionally felt that he was married to them. He had memorized the mole (if it was a mole) on Peaches, the so-called Queen of Shake. Lois Dufee-whose name, Mr. Leary believed, was incorrectly spelled-was six feet four and had peroxide-blond hair. Sally Rand danced with balloons, and there was another dancer who used feathers. Precisely what he saw these and other strippers do was the usual subject of what he confessed at St. Stephen’s-that and the repeated acknowledgment that he didn’t miss his wife, not anymore. He’d once missed her, but-like his wife herself-the missing-her part had left him.

It was a relatively new habit of Mr. Leary’s-since he had written to Exeter-that, before he finally left the North End every school day afternoon, he would stop back at the Michelangelo and see if there was anything in his mailbox. He was thinking to himself that he had a new confession to make at St. Stephen’s-for it weighed on him like a sin that he’d proposed a nom de plume to the Baciagalupo boy-when he sorted through the mail, which had arrived late in the day. Yet what a good name for a writer Daniel Leary would have been! the old Irishman was thinking. Then he saw the pearl-gray envelope with the crimson lettering, and what very classy lettering it was!

Phillips ExeterAcademy

Do you finally believe? Mr. Leary thought to himself. No prayer in a churchyard was ever wasted-even in that ultra-Italian garden at St. Leonard. “God will help you-Dio ti aiuta,” the crafty old Irishman said aloud, in English and Italian (just to be on the safe side, before he opened the envelope and read the letter from the scholarship person at Exeter).

Mr. Carlisle was coming to Boston. He wanted to visit the Michelangelo School and meet Mr. Leary. Mr. Carlisle very much looked forward to meeting Daniel Baciagalupo-and the boy’s father, the cook, and the boy’s stepmother, too. Mr. Leary realized that he may have overstepped his bounds, once more, by referring to the widow Del Popolo as Danny’s “stepmother;” to the English teacher’s knowledge, the cook and the curvy waitress weren’t married.

Naturally, Mr. Leary had overstepped himself in a few other areas as well. While young Dan had told his English teacher that his dad was reluctant to let the boy leave home and go away to school-and Carmella Del Popolo had actually cried at the very idea-Mr. Leary had already submitted his favorite student’s transcripts to the venerable academy. He’d even persuaded a couple of other teachers at the Mickey to write recommendations for young Baciagalupo. Mr. Leary had virtually applied for admission on behalf of Daniel Baciagalupo-all without telling the boy’s father what he was up to! Now, in Mr. Carlisle’s letter, there were references to the family’s need to submit financial statements-something the rather remote cook might be opposed to, it occurred to Mr. Leary, who was hoping he had not overstepped his bounds (again) to the degree that he’d utterly failed with the pen-name plan. The nom de plume had been an embarrassing mistake.

Oh, my, Mr. Leary was thinking-time to pray more! But he courageously took the Exeter letter in hand, together with his little parcel of pastries from the Modern, and he once more sallied forth on Hanover Street-this time not to the garden in the churchyard at St. Leonard but to Vicino di Napoli, where he knew he would find the Baciagalupo boy together with the “rather remote” cook, as Mr. Leary thought of Danny’s dad, and that overweight woman the widow Del Popolo.

The voluptuous waitress had once come to a teacher’s conference with Mr. Leary; her late son, Angelù, had been an open and friendly presence in Mr. Leary’s seventh-grade English class. Angelù had never been among those badly behaved boys who tormented Mr. Leary for dropping the O’ from his given name. The Del Popolo boy had been quite a good reader, too-though he was easily distracted, as Mr. Leary had told his mother. Then Angelù had dropped out of school, and gone to work in that godforsaken north country, where the lad had drowned like his father before him. (Quite a convincing argument for staying in school, if Mr. Leary had ever heard one!)

But ever since that teacher’s conference with the widow Del Popolo, Mr. Leary had suffered the occasional dreams about her; probably every man who’d met that woman suffered those dreams, the old English teacher imagined. Nevertheless, her name had more than once come up in his confessions at St. Stephen’s. (If Carmella Del Popolo had ever been a stripper at either the Casino Theatre or the Old Howard, they would have packed the place every night!)

With the Exeter letter returned to its envelope, and in his haste to beat a path to the little Italian restaurant, which had become (Mr. Leary knew) one of the most popular eating places in the North End, the owlish Irishman failed to notice the giant white O’ that one of those badly behaved boys at the Mickey had rubbed with chalk onto the back of the teacher’s navy-blue trench coat. Mr. Leary had not worn the trench coat on his earlier errands in the neighborhood, but now he donned the coat, unseeing; thus he went on his eager but anxious way, marked from behind with a chalk-white O’ as identifiable (from a block away) as a bull’s-eye.

WHEN IT WAS MUD SEASON in Coos County in 1967, Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer, was living in Iowa City, Iowa; they had a real spring in Iowa, no mud seasons there. But Danny, who was twenty-five with a two-year-old son-his wife had just left him-was very much in a mud-season frame of mind. He was also writing, at this moment, and trying to remember precisely what they had been talking about in Vicino di Napoli when Mr. Leary, with the letter from Exeter in his jacket, knocked fervently on the door, which was locked. (The staff was finishing its midafternoon meal.)

“It’s the Irishman! Let him een-a!” cried old Polcari.

One of the young waitresses opened the door for Mr. Leary-Danny’s cousin Elena Calogero. She was in her late teens or early twenties, as was the other young waitress assisting Carmella, Teresa DiMattia. Carmella’s maiden name had been DiMattia. As the widow Del Popolo was fond of saying, she was a “twice-displaced Neapolitan”-the first time because she’d come as a child with her family to the North End from Sicily (her grandparents had long before moved from the vicinity of Naples), and the second time because she’d married a Sicilian.

By her own strange logic, Carmella had gone on displacing herself, the writer Daniel Baciagalupo thought, because Angelù was Sicilian (for “Angelo”) and Carmella had attached herself to Dominic. But in the chapter Danny was writing, which he’d titled “Going Away to School,” he was adrift and had lost his focus.

Too much of the crucial moment in the chapter-when the father is fighting back tears at the same time he is giving his son permission to go off to boarding school-was in the point of view of the boy’s well-meaning but meddlesome English teacher.

“Hi, Mike!” Tony Molinari had said that afternoon in the restaurant. (Or had Paul Polcari, the pizza chef, greeted Mr. Leary first? Old Joe Polcari, who used to play checkers with Mr. Leary in the Prado, always addressed the English teacher as Michael-as my dad did, Danny Baciagalupo remembered.)

It was a bad night for Danny to try to write-perhaps this scene, especially. The wife (of three years) who’d just left him had always said she wouldn’t stay, but he hadn’t believed her-he hadn’t wanted to believe her, as Ketchum had pointed out. Young Dan had met Katie Callahan when he was still an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire; he’d been a junior when Katie was a senior, but they’d both been models in the life-drawing classes.

When she told him she was leaving, Katie said: “I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn’t travel very far.”

“What stuff is that?” he’d asked her.

“We’re completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads,” she’d told him. Maybe that’s part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa City. He wrote mostly at night, when little Joe was sleeping. Absolutely everyone, but not Katie, called the two-year-old Joe. (Like the maître d’ he was named after, the boy was never a Joseph; old Polcari had liked Giusé, or just plain Joe.)

As for being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads, Katie meant this more literally-in her own case. His senior year in Durham, when Katie had been pregnant with Joe, she’d still modeled for the life-drawing classes and had slept with one of the art students. Now, in Iowa City-when Danny was about to graduate from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, with an M.F.A. in creative writing-Katie was still modeling for life-drawing classes, but this time she was sleeping with one of the faculty.

Yet that wasn’t why she was moving on, she’d told her husband. She had proposed marrying Danny, and having a baby, before his graduation from college. “You don’t want to go to Vietnam, do you?” she’d asked him.

Actually, Danny had thought (at the time) that he did want to go-not because he didn’t oppose the war politically, though he would never be as political as Katie. (Ketchum called her a “fucking anarchist.”) It was as a writer that Daniel Baciagalupo thought he should go to Vietnam; he believed he should see a war and know what one was like. Both his dad and Ketchum had told him his thinking was full of shit on that subject.

“I didn’t let you go away from me, to goddamn Exeter, to let you die in a dumb war!” Dominic had cried.

Ketchum had threatened to come find Danny and cut a few fingers off his right hand. “Or your whole fucking hand!” Ketchum had thundered-freezing his balls off in a phone booth somewhere.

Both men had promised young Dan’s mother that they would never let her boy go to war. Ketchum said he would use his Browning knife on Danny’s right hand, or on just the fingers; the knife had a foot-long blade, and Ketchum kept it very sharp. “Or I’ll put a deer slug in my twelve-gauge and shoot you point-blank in one of your knees!”

Daniel Baciagalupo would accept Katie Callahan’s suggestion instead. “Go on, knock me up,” Katie had said. “I’ll marry you and have your kid. Just don’t expect me to stay around for long-I’m not anybody’s wife, and I’m not mother material, but I know how to have a baby. It’s for a good cause-keeping one more body out of this fucking war. And you say you want to be a writer! Well, you have to live to do that, don’t you? Fuckhead!”

It was never the case that she deceived him; he’d known from the first what she was like. They met when they were undressing together for a life-drawing class. “What’s your name?” she’d asked him. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I’m going to be a writer,” Danny said, even before he told her his name.

“If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write,” Katie Callahan said.

“What did you say?” he asked her.

“Rilke said that, fuckhead. If you want to be a fucking writer, you ought to read him,” she said.

Now she was leaving him because she’d met (in her words) “another stupid boy who thinks he should go to Vietnam -just to fucking see it!” Katie was going to get this other boy to knock her up. Then, one day, she would move on again-“until this fucking war is over.”

She would eventually run out of time; mathematically speaking, there were a limited number of would-be soldiers she could save from the war in this fashion. They called young dads like Danny Baciagalupo “Kennedy fathers;” in March 1963, President Kennedy had issued an executive order expanding paternity deferment. It would exist only for a little while-that having a child was a workable deferment from the draft-but it had served for Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer. He’d gone from 2-S (the student deferment) to 3-A-fathers maintaining a bona fide relationship with a child were deferred. Having a kid could get you out of the war; eventually, the fuckers would close that door, too, but Danny had walked right through it. Whether it would work or not for this other “stupid boy” she had met-well, at the time, not even Katie could say. She was leaving, anyway, whether or not she made a baby for the new would-be soldier, and regardless of how many more babies she would or wouldn’t get to make for such a noble cause.

“Let me see if I have this right,” were among Danny’s last words to his departing wife, who’d never really been a wife, and who had no further interest in being a mother.

“If I stay any longer, fuckhead, the two-year-old is going to remember me,” Katie had said. (She’d actually called her own child “the two-year-old.”)

“His name’s Joe,” Danny had reminded her. That was when he’d said: “Let me see if I have this right. You’re not just an anti-war activist and a sexual anarchist, you’re also this radical chick who specializes in serial baby making for draft dodgers-have I got that right?”

“Put it in writing, fuckhead,” Katie had suggested; and these were her last words to her husband: “Maybe it’ll sound better in writing.”

Both Ketchum and his dad had warned him. “I think letting me cut a few fingers off your right hand would be easier, and less painful in the long run,” Ketchum had said. “How about just your fucking trigger finger? They won’t draft you, I’ll bet, if you can’t squeeze a trigger.”

Dominic had taken a dislike to Katie Callahan on the mere evidence of the first photograph Daniel showed him.

“She looks way too thin,” the cook commented, scowling at the photo. “Does she ever eat anything?” (He should talk! Danny had thought; both Danny and his dad were thin, and they ate a lot.) “Are her eyes really that blue?” his father asked.

“Actually, her eyes are even bluer,” Danny told his dad.

What is it about these preternaturally small women? Dominic found himself thinking, remembering his not-really-a-cousin Rosie. Had his beloved Daniel succumbed to one of those little-girl women whose petite appearance was deceiving? Even that first photograph of Katie conveyed to the cook the kind of childlike woman some men feel compelled to protect. But Katie didn’t need protection; she didn’t want it, either.

The first time they met, the cook couldn’t look at her-it was the same way he had treated (still treated) Danny’s aunt Filomena. “I should never have shown you your mother’s photographs,” Dominic said, when Danny told him he was marrying Katie.

I suppose I should have married some nice fat person! Daniel Baciagalupo found himself thinking, instead of working ahead on the chapter he was writing.

But the war in Vietnam would drag on, and on; Nixon would win the ’68 election by promising voters an end to the war, but the war would continue until 1975. On April 23, 1970, issuing his own executive order, President Nixon put an end to the 3-A paternity deferment for new fathers-if the child was conceived on or after that date. In the last five years of the war, another 23,763 U.S. soldiers would be killed, and Daniel Baciagalupo would finally come to realize that he should have thanked Katie Callahan for saving his life.

“So what if she was a serial baby maker for draft dodgers,” Ketchum would write to Danny. “She saved your ass, sure as shit. And I wasn’t kidding-I would have chopped off your right hand to spare you getting your balls blown off, if she hadn’t saved you. A finger or two, anyway.”

But that April night in ’67, when he kept trying to write in the rain in Iowa City, Daniel Baciagalupo preferred to think that it was his two-year-old, little Joe, who’d saved him.

Probably no one could have saved Katie. Many years later, Daniel Baciagalupo would read Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, a memoir by the fiction writer Robert Stone. “Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility,” Stone would write. “Things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of us who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived.”

Well, that certainly rang true for Katie Callahan, Danny would think, when he read that passage. But that book by Robert Stone wouldn’t be written in time to save Katie. So she wasn’t looking for protection, and she couldn’t be saved, but-in addition to her looks, which were both wanton and seemingly underage-no small part of her appeal, and what made her most desirable to Danny, was that Katie was a renegade. (She also had the edginess of a sexual deserter; you never knew what she would do next, because Katie didn’t know, either.)

“SIT DOWN, MICHAEL, SIT DOWN-eat something!” old Polcari had kept urging Mr. Leary, but the agitated Irishman was too worked up to eat. He had a beer, and then a glass or two of red wine. Poor Mr. Leary couldn’t look at Carmella Del Popolo, Danny knew, without imagining that spade-shaped elf’s goatee she’d possibly left unshaven in her left armpit. And when Dominic limped off to the kitchen to bring Mr. Leary a slice of the English teacher’s favorite Sicilian meat loaf, Danny Baciagalupo, the writer-in-progress, saw the old owl looking at his dad’s limp with new and startled eyes. Maybe a bear did that to the cook’s foot! Mr. Leary might have been thinking; maybe there really had been a three-or four-hundred-pound Indian woman whose hair had hung below her waist!

There was one other thing Mr. Leary had lied about to Exeter -the part about these immigrants being prone to exaggeration. Hadn’t Mr. Leary said that the Baciagalupo boy was “unlike the rest”? In the area of writerly exaggeration, Daniel Baciagalupo was a born exaggerator! And Danny was still at it on that rainy night in Iowa City, though he was sorely distracted; he was still a little bit in love with Katie Callahan, too. (Danny was only beginning to understand what his father had meant by the color he’d called lethal blue.)

How did that Johnny Cash song go? He’d first heard it six or seven years ago, Danny was guessing.

Oh, I never got over those blue eyes,

I see them everywhere.

More distractions, the writer thought; it was as if he were determined to physically remove himself (to detach himself) from that night in Vicino di Napoli with dear Mr. Leary.

It had taken Mr. Leary a third or fourth glass of red wine, and most of the meat loaf, before he was brave enough to take the pearl-gray envelope out of his inside jacket pocket. From across the table, Danny spotted the crimson lettering; the fifteen-year-old knew what Exeter ’s school colors were.

“And it’s all boys, Dominic,” the writer could still hear Mr. Leary saying. The old English teacher had indicated, with a nod of his head, the attractive Calogero girl (Danny’s older cousin Elena) and her overripe friend Teresa DiMattia. Those girls were all over Danny whenever the after-school busboy was trying to change into his black busboy pants back in the kitchen.

“Give Danny some privacy, girls,” Tony Molinari would tell them, but they wouldn’t let up with their ceaseless vamping. In addition to dear Mr. Leary, maybe Danny had those girls to thank for his dad’s decision to let him go to Exeter.

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 Giusé 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 maître d’, thus giving themselves a break from the kitchen. Dominic (with his limp) was not maître-d’ material, though he subbed as the first or principal chef, and Danny’s dad also took turns at the pizza-chef position-whenever Paul Polcari was the maître 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.’”

Well, that was kind of where he was at this moment in his life, Daniel Baciagalupo was thinking. He had a two-year-old son, whom he’d inexplicably not named after his father; he’d lost his wife, and had not yet met another woman. He was struggling to begin a second novel while the first one was not yet published, and he was about to go back to New England to his first noncooking, not-in-a-kitchen job. If that wasn’t in medias res, Daniel Baciagalupo thought, what was?

And, continuing in Latin, when Danny had first gone to Exeter, he’d gone with Mr. Leary, who was with the boy in loco parentis-that is, “in the place of a parent.”

Maybe that was why the first novel was dedicated to Mr. Leary. “Not to your dad?” Ketchum would ask Danny. (Carmella would ask the young writer the same question.)

“Maybe the next one,” he would tell them both. His father never said anything about the dedication to Mr. Leary.

Danny got up from his desk to watch the rain streaking his windows in Iowa City. He then went and watched Joe sleeping. The way the chapter was going, the writer thought that he might as well go to bed, but he generally stayed up late. Like his dad, Daniel Baciagalupo didn’t drink anymore; Katie had cured him of that habit, which was not a story he wanted to think about on a night when his writing wasn’t working. He found himself wishing that Ketchum would call. (Hadn’t Ketchum said they should talk?)

Whenever Ketchum called from those faraway phone booths, time seemed to stop; whenever he heard from Ketchum, Daniel Baciagalupo, who was twenty-five, usually felt that he was twelve and leaving Twisted River all over again.

One day, the writer would acknowledge this: It was not a coincidence when the logger called on that rainy April night. As usual, Ketchum called collect, and Danny accepted the call. “Fucking mud season,” Ketchum said. “How the hell are you?”

“So you’re a typist now,” Danny said. “I’m going to miss your pretty handwriting.”

“It was never my handwriting,” Ketchum told him. “It was Pam’s. Six-Pack wrote all my letters.”

“Why?” Danny asked him.

“I can’t write!” Ketchum admitted. “I can’t read, either-Six-Pack read all your letters aloud to me, yours and your dad’s.”

This was a devastating moment for Daniel Baciagalupo; as the young writer would think of it later, it was right up there with his wife leaving him, but it would have more serious consequences. Danny thought of how he’d poured out his heart to Ketchum, of everything he’d written to the man-not to mention what Ketchum had to have told Pam, because it was obviously Six-Pack, not Ketchum, who’d replied. This meant that Six-Pack knew everything!

“I thought my mom taught you to read,” Danny said.

“Not really,” Ketchum replied. “I’m sorry, Danny.”

“So now Pam is typing? Danny asked. (This was truly hard to imagine; there’d not been a single typo in the typed letters both Danny and his dad had received from Ketchum.)

“There’s a lady I met in the library-she turned out to be a schoolteacher, Danny. She typed the letters for me.”

“Where’s Six-Pack?” Danny asked.

“Well, that’s kind of the problem,” Ketchum told him. “Six-Pack moved on. You know how that is,” he added. Ketchum knew all about Katie moving on-there was no more to say about it.

“Six-Pack left you?” Danny asked.

“That’s not the problem,” Ketchum answered. “I’m not surprised she left me-I’m surprised she stayed so long. But I’m surprised that she’s moved in with the cowboy,” Ketchum added. “That’s the problem.”

Both Danny and his dad knew that Carl wasn’t a constable anymore. (They also knew there was no more town of Twisted River; it had burned to the ground, and it had been a ghost town before it burned.) Carl was now a deputy sheriff of Coos County.

“Are you saying Six-Pack will tell the cowboy what she knows?” Danny asked Ketchum.

“Not immediately,” Ketchum answered. “She has no reason to do me any dirt-or to do you and your dad any harm, as far as I know. We parted on good enough terms. It’s what’ll happen to her when Carl beats her up, because he will. Or when he throws her out, because he won’t keep her for long. You haven’t seen Six-Pack in a while, Danny-she’s losing her looks something wicked.”

Daniel Baciagalupo was counting to himself. He knew that Ketchum and Six-Pack were the same age, and that they both were the exact same age as Carl. When he got to fifty, Danny wrote the number down-that was how old they were. He could imagine that Six-Pack Pam’s looks were going, and that the cowboy would one day kick her out. Carl would definitely beat her, even though the deputy sheriff had stopped drinking.

“Explain what you mean,” Danny said to Ketchum.

“It’ll be when Carl does something bad to Pam-that’ll be when she’ll tell him. Don’t you see, Danny?” Ketchum asked him. “It’s the only way she can hurt him. All these years, he’s been wondering about you and your dad-all these years, he’s been thinking he killed Jane. He just can’t remember it! I think it’s honestly driven him crazy-that he can’t remember killing her, but he believes he did.”

If he was a better man, it might be a relief to the cowboy to learn he didn’t kill Injun Jane. And if Six-Pack had led a gentler life, maybe she wouldn’t be tempted to use her knowledge of the situation as a weapon. (At worst, Pam might blurt out the truth to Carl-either accidentally, or while he was beating her up.) But Ketchum wasn’t counting on the cowboy to discover some essential goodness within himself, and the river driver knew the life Six-Pack had led. (He’d led that life, too; there was nothing gentle about it.) And the cowboy had driven himself crazy-not because he believed he’d killed Jane; he didn’t even feel guilty about that, much less crazy. Ketchum was right: What made Carl crazy was that he couldn’t remember killing her; Ketchum knew the cowboy would have enjoyed remembering that.

That he couldn’t remember was why the sheriff had eventually stopped drinking. Years ago, when Ketchum had first told Danny and his dad about “the new teetotaler in Coos County,” both the cook and his son had laughed about it-they’d positively howled.

“Cookie’s got to get out of Boston -that’s for starters,” Ketchum said now. “He ought to lose the Del Popolo, too. I’m going to tell him, but you’ve got to tell him, too, Danny. Your dad doesn’t always listen to me.”

“Ketchum, are you saying it’s inevitable that Pam will tell Carl everything?”

“As inevitable as the fact that one day, Danny, the cowboy is going to beat her up.”

“Jesus!” Danny suddenly cried. “What were you and Mom doing when she was supposed to be teaching you to read?”

“Talk to your dad, Danny-it’s not my business to tell you.”

“Were you sleeping with her?” Danny asked him.

“Talk to your dad, please,” Ketchum said. Danny couldn’t remember Ketchum ever saying the please word before.

“Does my dad know you slept with her?” Danny asked him.

“Constipated Christ!” Ketchum shouted into the phone. “Why do you think your dad busted half my head open with the damn skillet?”

“What did you just say?” Danny asked him.

“I’m drunk,” Ketchum told him. “Don’t listen to what I say.”

“I thought Carl cracked your head open with his Colt forty-five,” Danny said.

“Hell, if the cowboy had cracked my head open, I would have killed him!” Ketchum thundered. As soon as the logger said this, Danny knew it was true; Ketchum would never have tolerated having his head cracked open, unless Dominic had done it.

“I saw lights on in the cookhouse,” Ketchum began, suddenly sounding weary. “Your mom and dad were up late talking, and-in those days-drinking. I walked in the screen door to the kitchen. I didn’t know it was the night your mom told your dad about her and me.”

“I get it,” Danny said.

“Not all of it, you don’t. Talk to your dad,” Ketchum repeated.

“Did Jane know?” Danny asked.

“Shit, the Injun knew everything,” Ketchum told him.

“Ketchum?” Danny asked. “Does my dad know that you didn’t learn to read?”

“I’m trying to learn now,” Ketchum said defensively. “I think that schoolteacher lady is going to teach me. She said she would.”

“Does Dad know you can’t read?” the young man asked his father’s old friend.

“I suppose one of us will have to tell him,” Ketchum said. “Cookie is probably of the opinion that Rosie must have taught me something.”

“So that was why you called-what you meant by ‘Something’s up’ in your letter-is that it?” Danny asked him.

“I can’t believe you believed that bullshit about the fucking bear,” Ketchum said. The bear story had found its way, in a more remote form, into Daniel Baciagalupo’s first novel. But of course it hadn’t really been a bear that walked into the kitchen-it had just been Ketchum. And if the bear story hadn’t been planted in young Dan’s heart and mind, maybe he wouldn’t have reached for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet-maybe he wouldn’t have imagined that the sound of his father and Jane making love was the sound of a mauling-in-progress. Then maybe he wouldn’t have killed Jane.

“So there wasn’t a bear,” Danny said.

“Hell, there’s probably three thousand bears at any given time in northern New Hampshire -I’ve seen a bunch of bears. I’ve shot some,” Ketchum added. “But if a bear had walked into the cookhouse kitchen through that screen door, your father’s best way to save himself, and Rosie, would be if the two of them had exited the kitchen through the dining room-not running, either, or ever turning their backs on the bear, but just maintaining eye contact and backing up real slowly. No, you dummy, it wasn’t a bear-it was me! Anybody knows better than to hit a bear in the face with a fucking frying pan!”

“I wish I had never written about it,” was all Danny could say.

“There’s one more thing,” Ketchum told him. “It’s another kind of writing problem.”

“Jesus!” Danny said again. “How much have you been drinking?”

“You’re sounding more and more like your father,” Ketchum told him. “I just mean that you’re publishing a book, aren’t you? And have you thought about what it might mean if that book were to become a bestseller? If suddenly you were to become a popular writer, with your name and picture in the newspapers and magazines-you might even get to be on television!”

“It’s a first novel,” Danny said dismissively. “It will have only a small first printing, and not much publicity. It’s a literary novel, or I hope it is. It’s highly unlikely it’ll be a bestseller!”

“Think about it,” Ketchum said. “Anything’s possible, isn’t it? Don’t writers, even young ones, get lucky like other people-or unlucky, as the case may be?”

This time, Danny saw it coming-sooner than he’d seen it in Mr. Leary’s classroom at the Mickey when the old English teacher made his “bold suggestion” about the boy possibly losing the Baciagalupo. The pen-name proposition-it was coming again. Ketchum had first proposed a version of it to both Danny and his dad; now Ketchum was asking Dominic to lose the Del Popolo.

“Danny?” Ketchum asked. “Are you still there? What’s the name for it-when a writer chooses a name that’s not his or her given name? That George Eliot did it, didn’t she?”

“It’s called a pen name,” Danny told him. “Just how the fuck did you meet the schoolteacher lady in the library when you can’t even read?”

“Well, I can read some of the authors’ names and the titles,” Ketchum said indignantly. “I can borrow books and find someone to read them to me!”

“Oh,” Danny said. He guessed that was what Ketchum had done with his mother-this in lieu of learning to read. What had Ketchum called the reading-aloud part to Dominic? Foreplay, wasn’t it? (Actually, that had been Dominic’s word for it. Danny’s dad had told his son this funny story!)

“A pen name,” Ketchum repeated thoughtfully. “I believe there’s another phrase for it, something French-sounding.”

“A nom de plume,” Danny told him.

“That’s it!” Ketchum cried. “A nom de plume. Well, that’s what you need-just to be on the safe side.”

“I don’t suppose you have any suggestions,” Daniel Baciagalupo said.

“You’re the writer-that’s your job,” Ketchum told him. “Ketchum kind of goes with Daniel, doesn’t it? And it’s a fine old Coos County kind of name.”

“I’ll think about it,” Danny told him.

“I’m sure you can come up with something better,” Ketchum said.

“Tell me one thing,” Danny said. “If my mom hadn’t died that night in the river, which one of you would she have left? You or my dad? I can’t talk to my dad about that, Ketchum.”

“Shit!” Ketchum cried. “I heard you call that wife of yours ‘a free spirit.’ Katie was a lawless soul, a political radical, a fucking anarchist, and a coldhearted woman-you should have known better, Danny. But Rosie was a free spirit! She wouldn’t have left either of us-not ever! Your mom was a free spirit, Danny-like you young people today have never seen! Shit!” Ketchum cried again. “Sometimes you ask the dumbest questions-you make me think you’re still a college kid who can’t properly drive a car, or that you’re still a twelve-year-old, one your dad and Jane and I could still fool about the world, if we wanted to. Talk to your dad, Danny-talk to him.”

There was a click, followed by a dial tone, because Ketchum had disconnected the call, leaving the young writer alone with his thoughts.

CHAPTER 6. IN MEDIAS RES

IN THEIR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON WESLEY PLACE, FOR REASONS that defied logic, the telephone was on Carmella’s side of the bed. In those years Danny was away at boarding school and then at college, if the phone ever rang, young Dan was the reason the cook wanted to answer it-hoping it was Daniel, and not some terrible news about him. (More often, when the phone rang, it was Ketchum.)

Carmella had told Danny that he should call home more than he did. “You’re the only reason we have a phone, your dad is always telling me!” The boy was pretty good, after that, about calling more frequently.

“Shouldn’t the phone be on my side of the bed?” Dominic had asked Carmella. “I mean, you don’t want to have to talk to Ketchum, and if it’s Daniel-or worse, if there’s any bad news about Daniel-”

Carmella wouldn’t let him finish. “If there’s bad news about Danny, I want to know it first-so I can tell you about it, and put my arm around your shoulders, the way you told me and held me,” she said to him.

“That’s crazy, Carmella,” the cook said.

But that was the way it had worked out; the phone stayed on Carmella’s side of the bed. Whenever Ketchum called collect, Carmella always accepted the call, and she usually said, “Hello, Mr. Ketchum. When am I going to get to meet you? I would very much like to meet you one day.” (Ketchum wasn’t very talkative-not to her, anyway. She would soon pass the phone to Dominic-“Gamba,” she fondly called him.)

But that spring of ’67, when the news came about Danny’s miserable marriage-that awful wife of his; the dear boy had deserved better-and there’d been more collect calls than usual from up north (most of them about that menacing cop), Ketchum had scared Carmella. Dominic would later think that Ketchum probably meant to. When she’d said the usual to the old woodsman-Carmella was about to hand the phone across the bed to Dominic-Ketchum said, “I don’t know that you want to meet me, ever, because it might not be under the best of circumstances.”

That had given Carmella quite a chill; she’d been upset enough with the way things were that spring, and now Mr. Ketchum had frightened her. And Carmella wished that Danny was as relieved as she was that Katie had left him. It was one thing to leave the man you were with-Carmella could understand that-but it was a sin for a mother to walk away from her own child. Carmella was relieved that Katie had left, because Carmella believed that Katie wouldn’t have been any kind of mother if she’d stayed. Of course, Carmella and Dominic had never liked Katie Callahan; they’d both seen their share of customers like her in Vicino di Napoli. “You can smell the money on her,” Carmella had said to the cook.

“It’s not exactly on her, it’s under her,” the cook had commented. He meant that the money in Katie’s family was a safety net for the wild girl; she could behave in any fashion she wanted because the family money was there to catch her if she fell. Dominic felt certain, as Ketchum did, that Katie Callahan’s so-called free spirit was a fraud. Danny had misunderstood his dad; the boy thought that the cook didn’t like Katie strictly because the young woman looked like Rosie, Danny’s unfaithful mother. But Katie’s looks had little to do with what Dominic and Ketchum didn’t like about her; it was how she was not like Rosie Calogero that had bothered them, from the beginning.

Katie was nothing but a renegade young woman with a money cushion under her; “a mere sexual outlaw,” Ketchum had called her. Whereas Rosie had loved both a boy and a man. She’d been trapped because she had genuinely loved the two of them-hence they’d been trapped, too. By comparison, the Callahan whore had just been fucking around; worse, with her high-minded politics, Katie thought she was above such mundanities as marriage and motherhood.

Carmella knew it pained Dominic that Danny believed his mother had been the same sort of lawless creature Katie was. Though Dominic had gone to great lengths to explain the threesome with Rosie and Ketchum to Carmella, she had to confess that she didn’t understand it much better than Danny did. Carmella could understand the reason for it happening, but not for it continuing the way it had. Danny didn’t get that part of it, either. Carmella also had been mad at her dear Gamba for not telling the boy about his mother sooner. Danny had long been old enough to know the story, and it would have been better if his dad had told him before the cat got let out of the bag in that conversation Danny had had with Mr. Ketchum.

Carmella had been the one who’d answered the phone on that early morning Danny called to talk about it. “Secondo!” she said, when she heard his voice on the phone. That had been Danny’s nickname all the years he’d worked at Vicino di Napoli.

“Secondo Angelo,” old Polcari had first named him-literally, “Second Angel.”

All of them had been careful to call him Angelo, never Angelù, and around Carmella they would shorten the nickname to just plain Secondo-though Carmella herself was so fond of Danny that she often spoke of him as her secondo figlio (her “second son”).

In restaurant language, secondo also means “second course,” so it was the name that had stuck.

But now Carmella’s Secondo Angelo was in no mood to speak to her. “I need to talk to my dad, Carmella,” he said.

(Ketchum had warned the cook that Danny would be calling. “I’m sorry, Cookie,” that call from Ketchum had begun. “I fucked up.”)

On the April morning Danny called, Carmella knew that the young man would be angry at his dad for not telling him all those things. Of course she heard mostly Dominic’s side of the conversation, but she could nevertheless tell how the phone call was going-badly.

“I’m sorry-I was going to tell you,” the cook started.

Carmella could hear Danny’s response to that, because he shouted into the phone at his father. “What were you waiting for?”

“Maybe for something like this to happen to you, so you might understand how difficult it can be with women,” Dominic said. There in the bed, Carmella punched him. The “this” referred to Katie leaving, of course-as if that relationship, which was wrongheaded from the start, was at all comparable to what had gone on with Rosie and Ketchum. And why had they lied to the boy about the bear for so long? Carmella couldn’t understand it; she certainly didn’t expect Danny to.

She lay there listening to the cook tell his son about that night in the cookhouse kitchen, when Rosie had confessed to sleeping with Ketchum-and then Ketchum had walked through the screen door, when all of them were drunk, and Dominic had hit his old friend with the skillet. Luckily, Ketchum had been in enough fights; he never entirely believed that there was anyone alive who wouldn’t take a swing at him. The big man’s reactions were ingrained. He must have deflected the skillet with a forearm, slightly turning the weapon in Dominic’s hand, so that only the cast-iron edge of the frying pan hit him-and it hit him in the dead center of his forehead, not in the temple, where even a partially blocked blow from such a heavy implement might have killed him.

There’d been no doctor in Twisted River, and there wasn’t even a sawmill and a so-called millpond at what would become Dead Woman Dam, where there would later be an absolute moron of a doctor. Rosie had stitched up Ketchum’s forehead on one of the dining-room tables; she’d used the ultra-thin stainless-steel wire the cook kept on hand for trussing up his chickens and turkeys. The cook had sterilized the wire by boiling it first, and Ketchum had bellowed like a bull moose throughout the process. Dominic had limped around and around the table while Rosie talked to the two of them. She was so angry that she was rough with the stitches.

“I wish I was stitching the two of you up,” she said, looking at Dominic, before telling them both how it was going to be. “If there is ever another act of violence between the two of you, I will leave you both-is that clear enough?” she’d asked them. “If you promise never to hurt each other-in fact, you must always look after each other, like good brothers-then I will never leave either of you, not until the day I die,” she told them. “So you can each have half of me, or you can both have none of me-in the latter case, I take Danny with me. Is everything understood?” They could tell she was totally serious about it.

“I suppose your mother was too proud to go back to Boston when she had the miscarriage-and she thought I was too young to be left alone when my mother died,” Carmella heard Dominic telling Danny. “Rosie must have thought she had to take care of me, and of course she knew that I loved her. I don’t doubt that she loved me, too, but I was still just a nice boy to her, and when she met Ketchum-well, he was her age. Ketchum was a man. We had no choice but to put up with it, Daniel-both Ketchum and I adored her, and in her own way I believe she loved the two of us.”

“What did Jane think of it?” Danny asked his dad, because Ketchum had said that the Injun knew everything.

“Well, exactly what you would expect Jane to think of it,” his father told him. “She said all three of us were assholes. Jane thought we were all taking a terrible chance-the Indian said it was a big gamble that any of it would work out. I thought so, too, but your mother wasn’t giving us another option-and Ketchum was always a bigger gambler than I was.”

“You should have told me earlier,” his son said.

“I know I should have, Daniel-I’m sorry,” Carmella heard the cook say.

Later, Dominic would tell Carmella what Danny had said to him then. “I don’t care that much about the bear-it was a good story,” Danny said to his dad. “But there’s another thing you’re wrong about. You told me you suspected that Ketchum killed Lucky Pinette. You and Jane, and half those West Dummer kids-that’s what you all told me.”

“I think Ketchum may have killed him, Daniel.”

“I think you’re wrong. Lucky Pinette was murdered in his bed-in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin. He’d had his head bashed in with a stamping hammer when they found him-isn’t that the story?” Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer, asked his father.

“That’s it, exactly,” his dad answered. “Lucky Pinette’s forehead was indented with the letter H.”

“Cold-blooded murder-right, Dad?”

“It sure looked like it, Daniel.”

“Then it wasn’t Ketchum,” Danny told him. “If Ketchum found it so easy to murder Lucky Pinette in bed, why doesn’t he just kill Carl? There’re any number of ways Ketchum could kill the cowboy-if Ketchum were a murderer.”

Dominic knew that Daniel was right. (“Maybe the boy really is a writer!” the cook would say when he told Carmella the story.) Because if Ketchum were a murderer, the cowboy would already be dead. Ketchum had promised Rosie he would look after Dominic-they had both promised to look after each other-and, under the circumstances, what better way to look after Dominic was there? Just kill the cowboy-in bed, or wherever the woodsman could catch Carl napping.

“Don’t you get it, Dad?” Danny had asked. “If Pam tells Carl everything, and the cowboy can’t find you or me, why wouldn’t he go after Ketchum? He’d know that Ketchum always knew everything-Six-Pack will tell him!”

But both father and son knew the answer to that. If the cowboy came after Ketchum, then Ketchum would kill him-both Ketchum and Carl knew that. Like most men who beat women, the cowboy was a coward; Carl probably wouldn’t dare go after Ketchum, not even with a rifle with a scope. The cowboy knew that the logger would be hard to kill-not like the cook.

“Dad?” Danny asked. “When are you getting the hell out of Boston?” By the guilty, frightened way Dominic turned in bed to look at her, Carmella must have known what the new topic of conversation was. They had discussed Dominic leaving Boston, but the cook either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Carmella when he was going.

When Dominic first told Carmella everything, he made one point particularly clear: If Carl ever came after him, and the cook had to go on the run again, Carmella couldn’t come with him. She’d lost her husband and her only child. She had been spared just one thing-she’d not seen them die. If Carmella went on the run with Dominic, the cowboy might not kill her, too, but she would watch the cook get killed. “I won’t allow it,” Dominic had told her. “If that asshole comes after me, I go alone.”

“Why can’t you and Danny just tell the police?” Carmella had asked him. “What happened to Jane was an accident! Can’t you make the police understand that Carl is crazy, and that he’s dangerous?”

It was hard to explain to someone who wasn’t from Coos County. In the first place, the cowboy was the police-or what passed for the police up there. In the second place, it wasn’t a crime to be crazy and dangerous-not anywhere, but especially not in northern New Hampshire. Nor was it much of a crime that Carl had buried or otherwise disposed of Jane’s body without telling anyone. The point was, the cowboy didn’t kill her-Danny did. And the cook had been old enough to know better than to have run away the first time, when if he’d stayed and simply told the truth, to someone-well, maybe then it might have worked out. (Or Dominic could have just gone back to Twisted River with Daniel. The cook could have bluffed it out, as Ketchum had wanted him to-as young Dan also had wanted.)

Of course, it was too late to change any of that now. It was early enough in their relationship when the cook had told Carmella all this; she’d accepted the terms. Now that she loved him more than a little, she regretted what she’d agreed to. Not going with him, if Dominic had to go, would be very hard for her. Naturally, Dominic knew he would miss Carmella-more than he’d missed Injun Jane. Maybe not as much as both he and Ketchum still missed Rosie, but the cook knew that Carmella was special. Yet the more he loved Carmella, the more dead set Dominic was against her going with him.

As Carmella lay in bed, she thought about the places she could no longer go in the North End, first because she’d gone there with the fisherman, and then-more painfully-because she associated specific areas of the neighborhood with those special things she’d done with Angelù. Now where would she no longer be able to go when Dominic (her dear Gamba) had left her? the widow Del Popolo wondered.

After Angelù drowned, Carmella took no more walks on Parmenter Street -specifically, not in the vicinity of what had been Cushman’s. The elementary school, where Angelù had gone to the early grades, had been torn down. (In ’55, or maybe in ’56-Carmella couldn’t remember.) In its place, there would one day be a library, but Carmella wouldn’t ever walk by that library.

Because she’d always been a waitress at Vicino di Napoli-it had been her first job and became her only one-she was free most mornings. When the little kids at Cushman’s took their school trips in the neighborhood, Carmella had always volunteered to be one of the parents who went along-just to help the teachers out. Therefore, she no longer went anywhere near the Old North Church, where she and Angelù’s class of schoolchildren had been shown the steeple that was restored in 1912 by the descendants of Paul Revere. It was an Episcopal church-one Carmella wouldn’t have attended, because she was Catholic-but it was famous (foremost, for its role in Paul Revere’s ride). Enshrined, under glass, were the bricks from the cell where the Pilgrim fathers had been imprisoned in England.

On two counts could Carmella not walk past the Mariners House on North Square, and this was awkward for her because it was so close to Vicino di Napoli. But it was the landmark of the Boston Port and Seamen’s Society, “dedicated to the service of seafarers.” The schoolchildren in Angelù’s class had visited the Mariners House, but Carmella had skipped that school trip-after all, she’d lost a fisherman at sea.

It was just plain silly how more innocent connections to the fisherman and Angelù haunted her, but they did. She loved the Caffè Vittoria but avoided that room with the pictures of Rocky Marciano, because both the fisherman and Angelù had admired the heavyweight champion. And she’d eaten with her husband and son at the Grotta Azzurra on Hanover Street, where Enrico Caruso used to eat, too. Now there was no more going there.

The fisherman had told her that no sailor had ever been mugged on Hanover Street, or ever would be; it was a safe walk for even the drunken-most sailors, all the way from the waterfront to the Old Howard and back. In addition to the striptease places, there were cheap bars frequented by the sailors, and the arcades around Scollay Square. (Of course this would all change; Scollay Square itself would go.) But the world Carmella had lived in with her drowned husband and drowned son was both sacred and haunted to her-the whole length of Hanover Street!

Even the scavenging seagulls over the Haymarket reminded her of the Saturday people-watching she had done there, with Angelù holding her hand. Now she looked with caution at that restaurant on Fleet Street where Stella’s used to be; she occasionally ate there with Dominic, on the nights Vicino di Napoli was closed. They ate at the Europeo, too-Dominic usually had the fried calamari, but never New York-style. (“Hold the red sauce-I like it just with lemon,” the cook would say.) Would she no longer be able to eat in these places after her Gamba was gone? Carmella wondered.

She would certainly have to move into a smaller apartment. Would it be so hot in the apartment in the summer that she would become like one of those old ladies in the tenement building on Charter Street? They took their chairs out of their apartments so they could sit on the sidewalk, where it was cooler. Those cold-water tenements had been bedecked with streamers for the saints’ feasts in the summer. Carmella suddenly recalled Angelù as a little boy sitting on the fisherman’s shoulders; Hanover Street had been closed for a procession. It was the Feast of San Rocco, Carmella was remembering. Nowadays, she didn’t like to watch the processions.

IN 1919, GIUSÉ POLCARI had been a young man. He remembered the Molasses Explosion, which killed twenty-one people in the North End-including the father of some kid Joe Polcari had known. “He was-a boiled to death in a tidal wave of hot molasses!” old Joe had said to Danny. Though the war was over, those who’d heard the explosion thought the Germans were coming-that Boston Harbor was being bombed, or something. “I saw a whole piano floating in the molasses!” old Polcari told young Dan.

In the kitchen of Vicino di Napoli was a black-and-white photograph of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; the two anarchist immigrants were handcuffed together. Sacco and Vanzetti were sent to the electric chair for the murder of a paymaster and a guard at a shoe company in South Braintree. Old Polcari-in his final, addle-brained days-couldn’t remember all the details, but he remembered the protest marches. “Sacco and Vanzetti were framed! A stool pigeon in the Charlestown Street jail fingered them, and the State of Massachusetts gave-a the stool pigeon a free ride back to Italy,” old Joe had said to Danny. There’d been a procession for Sacco and Vanzetti that started on Hanover Street in the North End and went all the way to Tremont Street, where the mounted police had broken up the crowd; there were thousands of protesters, Joe Polcari among them.

“If you or your son ever have a problem, Gamba, you tell me,” Giusé Polcari said to Dominic. “I know-a some guys-they feex-a your problem for you.”

Old Polcari meant the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia-not that Dominic could truly understand the distinction. When he’d behaved wildly as a kid, Nunzi had called him her camorrista. But it was Dominic’s impression that the Mafia was more or less in control of the North End, where both the Mafia and the Camorra were called the Black Hand.

When Dominic told Paul Polcari that the cowboy might be coming after him, Paul said, “If my dad were alive, he’d call his Camorra buddies, but I don’t know about those guys.”

“I don’t know about the Mafia, either,” Tony Molinari told Dominic. “If they do something for you, then you owe them.”

“I don’t want to involve you in my troubles,” Dominic said to them. “I’m not asking the Mafia to help me, or the Camorra.”

“The crazy cop won’t come after Carmella, will he?” Paul Polcari asked the cook.

“I don’t know-Carmella bears watching,” Dominic answered.

“We’ll watch her, all right,” Molinari said. “If the cowboy comes here, to the restaurant-well, we’ve got knives, cleavers-”

“Wine bottles,” Paul Polcari suggested.

“Don’t even think about it,” Dominic told them. “If Carl comes here looking for me, he’ll be armed-he wouldn’t go anywhere without that Colt forty-five on him.”

“I know what my dad would say,” Paul Polcari said. “He’d say, ‘A Colt forty-five is-a nothing-not if you’ve ever tried to get-a cozy with one of those women who work as stitchers in the shirt factory. Even naked, they got-a needles on ’em!’” (Joe Polcari meant the Leopold Morse factory in the old Prince Macaroni building; his son Paul said Giusé must have banged some tough broad who worked there, or he’d tried to.)

The three cooks laughed; they made an effort to forget about the deputy sheriff up in Coos County. What else could they do but try to forget about him?

Old Polcari had had a hundred jokes like that one about the shirt-stitchers. “Do you remember the one about the woman who worked the night shift at the Boston Sausage and Provision Company?” Dominic asked Paul and Tony.

Both chefs roared. “Yeah, she worked in the skinless-meat department,” Paul Polcari said.

“She had this sneaky little knife, for cutting the skin off the frankfurters!” Molinari remembered.

“She could peel-a your penis like it was a grape!” the three cooks shouted, almost in unison. Then Carmella came into the restaurant, and they stopped laughing.

“More dirty jokes?” she asked them. They were just firing up the pizza oven and waiting for the dough to rise; it was late morning, but the marinara sauce was already simmering. Carmella saw how worried they suddenly seemed, and they wouldn’t look in her eyes. “You were talking about Carl, weren’t you?” she asked them; they were like boys who’d been caught beating off. “Maybe you should do what Ketchum says-maybe, Gamba, you should listen to your old friend,” she said to Dominic. Two months had passed since Ketchum’s warning, but the cook still couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Carmella when he was leaving.

Now none of them could look at their beloved Gambacorta, the cook who limped. “Maybe you should go, if you’re going,” Carmella said to Dominic. “It’s almost summer,” she suddenly announced. “Do cops get summer vacations?” she asked them.

It was June-very nearly the last day of school, they all knew. That was a tough time of year for Carmella. All at once, there was nowhere she could go in the North End. The freed-from-school children were everywhere; they reminded Carmella of her Angelù primù, her first Angel.

The deputy sheriff had been with Six-Pack for these slowly passing two months. Yes, it was still a relatively new relationship, but-as Ketchum had pointed out-two months was a long time for Carl to go without whacking a woman. The cook couldn’t remember a time when one week went by and the cowboy didn’t hit Injun Jane.

THERE WERE THINGS Carmella had never told her dear Gamba about his beloved Daniel. How the boy had managed to get laid before he even went off to Exeter, for example. Carmella had caught Danny doing it with one of her nieces-one of those DiMattia girls, Teresa’s younger sister Josie. Carmella had gone out to work in the restaurant, but she’d forgotten something and had to go back to the Wesley Place apartment. (Now she couldn’t even remember what it was she’d forgotten.) It was Danny’s day off from his busboy job. He already knew he had a full scholarship to Exeter -maybe he was celebrating. Of course Carmella knew that Josie DiMattia was older than Danny; probably Josie had started it. And all along Dominic had suspected that Teresa DiMattia-or her friend Elena Calogero, definitely a kissing cousin-would sexually initiate Danny.

Why was Gamba so worried about that? Carmella wondered. If the boy had had more sex-she meant in those years when he was a student at Exeter -maybe he wouldn’t have become so infatuated with that Callahan girl when he went to college! And if he’d fucked a few more of his kissing cousins-Calogeros and Saettas, or for that matter every female in the DiMattia family-possibly he would have knocked up someone a whole lot nicer than Katie!

But because Dominic had obsessed about Elena Calogero and Teresa DiMattia, when Carmella came into the apartment and saw Danny fucking someone on her bed, she first assumed it was Teresa who was initiating the frightened-looking fifteen-year-old. Naturally, young Dan was frightened because Carmella had caught them at it!

“Teresa, you whore!” Carmella cried. (She actually called the girl a troia-from that notorious Trojan woman-but the word meant “whore,” of course.)

“I’m Josie, Teresa’s sister,” the girl said indignantly. She must have been miffed that her aunt didn’t recognize her.

“Well, yes, you are,” Carmella replied. “And what are you doing using our bed, Danny? You’ve got your own bed, you disgraziato-”

“Jeez, yours is bigger,” Josie told her aunt.

“And I hope you’re using a condom!” Carmella cried.

Dominic used condoms; he didn’t mind, and Carmella preferred it. Maybe the boy had found his father’s condoms. When it came to condoms, it was a dumb world, Carmella knew. At Barone’s Pharmacy, they kept the condoms hidden, completely out of sight. If kids asked for them, the pharmacist would give them shit about it. Yet any responsible parent who had a kid that age would tell the kid to use a condom. Where exactly were the kids supposed to get them?

“Was it one of your dad’s condoms?” Carmella asked Danny, while the boy lay covered by a sheet; he looked mortified that she’d discovered him. The DiMattia girl, on the other hand, hadn’t even bothered to cover her breasts. She just sat sullenly naked, staring at her aunt with defiance. “Are you going to confess this, Josie?” Carmella asked the girl. “How are you going to confess this?”

“I brought the condoms-Teresa gave them to me,” Josie said, ignoring the larger question of confession.

Now Carmella was really angry. Just what did that troia Teresa think she was doing, giving her kid sister condoms! “How many did she give you?” Carmella asked. But before the girl could answer, Carmella asked Danny: “Don’t you have any homework to do?” Then Carmella seemed to realize that she was guilty of a certain hypocrisy in her hasty judgment of Teresa. (Shouldn’t Teresa be thanked for giving her kid sister condoms? Yet had the condoms enabled Josie to seduce Secondo?)

“Jeez, do you want me to count them or something?” Josie asked her aunt, about the condoms. Poor Danny just looked like he wanted to die, Carmella would always remember.

“Well, you kids be careful-I have to go to work,” Carmella told them. “Josie!” Carmella had cried, as she walked out of the apartment, just before she’d slammed the door. “You wash my sheets, you make my bed-or I’ll tell your mother!”

Carmella wondered if they had fucked all afternoon and evening, and if they’d had enough condoms. (She was so upset about it, she forgot that she’d gone back to the apartment because she’d forgotten something.)

Her dear Gamba had wanted his son to be safe from girls-and how the cook had cried when Danny went away to Exeter! Yet Carmella could never tell him that sending the boy to boarding school hadn’t really worked. (Not in the way Dominic had hoped.) Dominic had also been overly impressed by the list of the colleges and universities many Exeter graduates attended; the cook couldn’t understand why Danny hadn’t been a good enough student at the academy to get into one of those Ivy League schools. The University of New Hampshire had been a disappointment to Dominic, as were his son’s grades at Exeter. But the academy was a very hard school for someone coming from the Mickey, and Danny had demonstrated little aptitude for math and the sciences.

Mainly, the boy’s grades weren’t great because he wrote all the time. Mr. Leary had been right: So-called creative writing wasn’t valued at Exeter, but the mechanics of good writing was. And there were individual English teachers there who’d played the Mr. Leary role for Danny-they read the fiction that young Baciagalupo showed them. (They hadn’t once suggested a nom de plume, either.)

The other thing Danny did at Exeter was all that insane running. He ran cross-country in the fall, and ran on the track teams both winter and spring. He hated the required athletics at the school, but he liked running. He was a distance runner, primarily; it just went with his body, with his slightness. He was never very competitive; he liked to run as hard and as fast as he could, but he didn’t care about beating anybody. He had never been able to run before going to Exeter, and you could run year-round there.

There’d been nowhere to run in the North End-not if you liked running any distance. And in the Great North Woods, there was nowhere safe to run; you would trip over something, trying to run in those woods, and if you ran on one of the haul roads, a logging truck would mow you down or force you off the road. The logging companies owned those roads, and the asshole truck drivers-as Ketchum called them-drove as if they owned them. (Of course there was also the deer hunting, both bow season and the firearm season. If you tried running in the woods or on a haul road during deer season, some asshole hunter might shoot you or run you through with a hunting arrow.)

When Danny wrote Ketchum about his running at Exeter, Ketchum wrote the boy back as follows: “Hell, Danny, it’s a good thing you didn’t do all that running around Twisted River. Most places I’m familiar with in Coos County, if I see a fella running, I assume he’s done some dirt and is running away. It would be a safe bet to shoot most fellas you see running around here.”

Danny loved the indoor track at Exeter. The Thompson Cage had a sloped wooden track above a dirt one. It was a good place to think about the stories he was imagining; he could think very clearly when he ran, Danny discovered, especially when he started to get tired.

When he left Exeter with B grades in English and history, and C grades in just about everything else, Mr. Carlisle told Dominic and Carmella that perhaps the boy would be a “late bloomer.” But, as a writer, to publish a first novel less than a year after he left the Iowa Workshop was a fairly early-bloomer thing to do; of course Mr. Carlisle had been speaking strictly academically. And Danny’s grades at UNH were excellent; compared to Exeter, the University of New Hampshire had been easy. The hard part about Durham was meeting Katie Callahan, and everything that had happened with her-both in Durham and in Iowa City. Neither Carmella nor her dear Gamba could talk about that young woman without feeling sick, almost poisoned.

“And here you were, Gamba, worried about a few hot Italian girls in the North End!” Carmella had once exploded at him. “What you should have seen coming was that University of New Hampshire iceberg!”

“A cold cunt,” Ketchum had called Katie.

“It was all the writing, too,” Dominic had replied to Carmella. “All that damn imagining all the time-it couldn’t have been good for Daniel.”

“You’re crazy, Gamba,” Carmella told him. “Danny didn’t make up Katie. And would you really have wanted him to go to Vietnam instead?”

“Ketchum wouldn’t have let that happen,” Dominic told her. “Ketchum wasn’t kidding, Carmella. Daniel would have become a writer with some missing fingers on his writing hand.”

Maybe she didn’t want to meet Mr. Ketchum after all, Carmella found herself thinking.

THE WRITER DANIEL BACIAGALUPO received his M.F.A. degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in June 1967. Together with his two-year-old son, Joe, the writer left for Vermont almost immediately upon his graduation. Despite his troubles with Katie, Danny had liked Iowa City and the Writers’ Workshop, but Iowa was hot in the summer, and he wanted to take his time about finding a place to live in Putney, Vermont, where Windham College was. It would also be necessary to set up a proper day-care situation for little Joe, and to hire a regular babysitter for the boy-though perhaps one or two of Danny’s students at the college would be willing to help out.

He told only one of his teachers (and no one else) at Iowa about the nom-de-plume idea-the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who was a kind man and a good teacher. Vonnegut also knew about Danny’s difficulties with Katie. Danny didn’t tell Mr. Vonnegut the reason he was considering a pen name, just that he was unhappy about it.

“It doesn’t matter what your name is,” Vonnegut told him. He also told the young writer that Family Life in Coos County, Danny’s first book, was one of the best novels he’d ever read. “That’s what matters-not what name you use,” Mr. Vonnegut said.

The one criticism the author of Slaughterhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn’t like all the semicolons. “People will probably figure out that you went to college-you don’t have to try to prove it to them,” he told Danny.

But the semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place. He’d seen the titles and the authors’ names on the novels his mother had left behind-the books his father had bequeathed to Ketchum in Twisted River. Danny would be at Exeter before he actually read those books, but he’d paid special attention to those authors there-Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, for example. They wrote long, complicated sentences; Hawthorne and Melville had liked semicolons. Plus they were New England writers, those two-they were Danny’s favorites. And the English novelist Thomas Hardy naturally appealed to Daniel Baciagalupo, who-even at twenty-five-had seen his share of what looked like fate to him.

He’d been somewhat alone among his fellow workshop students at Iowa, in that he loved these older writers far better than most contemporary ones. But Danny did like Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and he liked the man, too. Danny was lucky with the teachers he had for his writing, beginning with Michael Leary.

“You’ll find someone,” Vonnegut said to Danny, when they said good-bye in Iowa City. (His teacher probably meant that Danny would meet the right woman, eventually.) “And,” Kurt Vonnegut added, “maybe capitalism will be kind to you.”

That last thought was the one Danny drove back East with. “Maybe capitalism will be kind to us,” he said several times to little Joe, en route to Vermont.

“You better find a place with a spare room for your dad,” Ketchum had told him, when they’d last talked. “Although Vermont isn’t far enough away from New Hampshire -not in my opinion. Couldn’t you get a teaching job out West somewhere?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Danny had said. “Southern Vermont is about the same driving distance from Coos County as Boston is, isn’t it? And we were far enough away in Boston for thirteen years!”

“ Vermont ’s too close-I just know it is,” Ketchum told him, “but right now it’s a lot safer for your father than staying in Boston.”

“I keep telling him,” Danny said.

“I keep telling him, too, but he’s not listening worth shit,” the woodsman said.

“It’s because of Carmella,” Danny told Ketchum. “He’s very attached to her. He should take her with him-I know she’d go, if he asked her-but he won’t. I think Carmella is the best thing that ever happened to him.”

“Don’t say that, Danny,” Ketchum told him. “You didn’t get to know your mother.”

Danny kept quiet about that with Ketchum. He didn’t want the old logger to hang up on him.

“Well, it looks to me like I’ll just have to haul Cookie’s ass out of Boston -one way or another,” Ketchum said, after there was silence for a while.

“How are you going to do that?” Danny asked him.

“I’ll put him in a cage, if I have to. You just find a house in Vermont that’s big enough, Danny. I’ll bring your dad to it.”

“Ketchum-you didn’t kill Lucky Pinette, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t!” Ketchum shouted into the phone. “Lucky wasn’t worth murdering.”

“I sometimes think that Carl is worth murdering,” the writer Daniel Baciagalupo ventured; he just floated that idea out there.

“I find that I keep thinking about it,” Ketchum admitted.

“I wouldn’t want you to get caught,” Danny told him.

“That’s not the problem I’m having with it,” the woodsman said. “I don’t imagine that Carl would care if he got caught-I mean for killing your dad.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Danny asked.

“I would like him to try to kill me first,” Ketchum answered. “Then I wouldn’t have a problem with it.”

It was just as the writer Daniel Baciagalupo had imagined; the conundrum was that although the cowboy was exceedingly stupid, he was smart enough to stay alive. And he’d stopped drinking-that meant Carl wouldn’t completely lose control of himself. That might have been why he hadn’t beaten up Six-Pack in two whole months, or at least he hadn’t beaten her enough for her to leave him and tell him what she knew.

Six-Pack still drank. Ketchum knew she could easily and completely lose control of herself-that was also a problem.

“I worry about something,” Danny told Ketchum. “You haven’t stopped drinking. Aren’t you afraid you’ll pass out dead drunk, and that’s when Carl will come after you?”

“You haven’t met my dog, Danny-he’s a fine animal.”

“I didn’t know you had a dog,” Danny said.

“Hell, when Six-Pack left me, I needed someone to talk to.”

“What about that lady you met in the library-the schoolteacher who’s teaching you how to read?” Danny asked the logger.

“She is teaching me, but it’s not a very conversational experience,” Ketchum said.

“You’re actually learning to read?” Danny asked.

“Yes, I am-it’s just slower going than counting coon shit,” Ketchum told him. “But I’m aiming to be ready to read that book of yours, when it’s published.” There was a pause on the phone before Ketchum asked: “How’s it going with the nom de plume? Have you come up with one?”

“My pen name is Danny Angel,” the writer Daniel Baciagalupo told Ketchum stiffly.

“Not Daniel? Your dad is real fond of the Daniel. I like the Angel part,” Ketchum said.

“Dad can still call me Daniel,” Danny said. “Danny Angel is the best I can do, Ketchum.”

“How’s that little Joe doing?” Ketchum asked; he could tell that the young writer was touchy about the nom-de-plume subject.

ON THE TRIP BACK EAST, Danny mostly drove at night, when little Joe was sleeping. He would find a motel with a pool and play with Joe most of the day. Danny took a nap in the motel when his two-year-old did; then he drove all night again. The writer Danny Angel had lots of time to think as he drove. He could think the whole night through. But even with his imagination, Danny couldn’t quite see a woodsman like Ketchum coming to Boston. Not even Danny Angel, né Daniel Baciagalupo, could have imagined how the fearsome logger would conduct himself there.

THAT WINDHAM COLLEGE would turn out to be a funny sort of place wouldn’t matter much to Danny Angel, whose first novel, Family Life in Coos County, would be published to fairly good reviews with modest hardcover sales. The young author would sell the paperback rights, and he sold the movie rights, too, though no film was ever made from the book-and the two novels that followed the first would receive more mixed reviews, and sell fewer copies. (Novels two and three wouldn’t even be published in paperback, and there was no interest in the movie rights for either book.) But all of that wouldn’t matter much to Danny, who was consumed by the task of keeping his father from harm-all the while trying to be a good dad to Joe. Danny just kept writing and writing. He would need to keep teaching to support himself and his young son-all the while saying to little Joe, “Maybe capitalism will be kind to us one day.”

It hadn’t been too tough to find a house to rent in Putney, one big enough to include his father-and Carmella, if she ever came to Vermont. It was a former farmhouse on a dirt road, which Danny liked because a brook ran alongside it; the road also crossed the brook in a couple of places. The running water was a reminder to Daniel Baciagalupo of where he’d come from. As for the farmhouse, it was a few miles from the village of Putney, which was little more than a general store and a grocery-called the Putney Food Co-op-and a convenience store with a gas station that was diagonally across from the old paper mill, on the road to the college. When Danny first saw the paper mill, he knew that his dad wouldn’t like living in Putney. (The cook came from Berlin; he hated paper mills.)

Windham College was an architectural eyesore on an otherwise beautiful piece of land. The faculty were a mix of moderately distinguished and not-so-distinguished professors; Windham had no academic virtues to speak of, but some of its faculty were actually good teachers who could have been working at better colleges and universities, but they wanted to live in Vermont. Many of the male students might not have been attending college at all if there hadn’t been a war in Vietnam; four years of college was the most widely available deferment from military service that young males of draft age had. Windham was that kind of place-not long for this world, but it would last as long as the war dragged on-and as the source of Danny’s first not-in-a-restaurant job, it wasn’t bad.

Danny wouldn’t have many students who were genuinely interested in writing, and the few he had weren’t talented or hardworking enough to suit him. At Windham, you were lucky if half the students in your classroom were interested in reading. But as a first novelist who’d been saved from the Vietnam War, which Daniel Baciagalupo knew was his case, he was a lenient teacher. Danny wanted everyone-his male students, especially-to stay in school.

If, as some cynics said, Windham ’s sole justification for existence was that it managed to prevent a few young men from going to Vietnam, that was okay with Danny Angel; he’d grown up enough politically to hate the war, and he was more of a writer than a teacher. Danny didn’t really care how academically responsible (or not) Windham College was. The teaching was just a job to him-one that gave him enough time to write, and to be a good father.

Danny let Ketchum know as soon as he and Joe had moved into the old farmhouse on Hickory Ridge Road. Danny didn’t care who was reading the logger’s letters to him now; the young writer assumed it was the library lady, the schoolteacher whose work-in-progress was teaching Ketchum how to read.

“There’s plenty of room for Dad,” Danny wrote to the woodsman; the writer included his new phone number and directions to the Putney house, from both Coos County and Boston. (It was nearly the end of June 1967.) “Maybe you’ll show up for the Fourth of July,” Danny wrote to Ketchum. “If so, I trust you to bring the fireworks.”

Ketchum was a big fireworks fan. There’d once been a fish he couldn’t catch. “I swear, it’s the biggest damn trout in Phillips Brook,” he’d declared, “and the smartest.” He’d blown up the fish, and no small number of nearby brook trout, with dynamite.

“Don’t bring any dynamite,” Danny had added, as a postscript. “Just the fireworks.”

IT WASN’T PRINCIPALLY “fireworks” that Ketchum brought to Boston, the first leg of his trip. The North Station was in that part of the West End that bordered on the North End. Ketchum got off the train, carrying a shotgun over one shoulder and a canvas duffel bag in the other hand; the duffel bag looked heavy, but not the way Ketchum was toting it. The gun was in a leather carrying case, but it was clear to everyone who saw the woodsman what the weapon was-it had to be either a rifle or a shotgun. The way the carrying case was tapered, you could tell that Ketchum was holding the barrel of the weapon with the butt-end over his shoulder.

The kid who was then the busboy at Vicino di Napoli had just put his grandmother on a train. He saw Ketchum and ran ahead of him, back to the restaurant. The busboy said it appeared that Ketchum was “taking the long way around”-meaning that the logger must have looked at a map, and he’d chosen the most obvious route, which was not necessarily the fastest. Ketchum must have come along Causeway Street to Prince Street, and then intersected with Hanover-a kind of roundabout way to get to North Square, where the restaurant was, but the busboy alerted them all that the big man with a gun was coming.

“Which big man?” Dominic asked the busboy.

“I just know he’s got a gun-he’s carrying it over his shoulder!” the busboy said. Everyone who worked at Vicino di Napoli had been forewarned that the cowboy might be coming. “And he’s definitely from up north-he’s fucking scary-looking!”

Dominic knew that Carl would have the Colt.45 concealed. It was big for a handgun, but no one carried a revolver over his shoulder. “It sounds like you mean a rifle or a shotgun,” the cook said to the bus-boy.

“Jesus and Mary!” Tony Molinari said.

“He’s got a scar on his forehead like someone split his face with a cleaver!” the busboy cried.

“Is it Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked Dominic.

“It must be,” the cook told her. “It can’t be the cowboy. Carl is big and fat, but he’s not especially ‘scary-looking,’ and there’s not much of the north country about him. He just looks like a cop-either in or out of uniform.”

The busboy was still babbling. “He’s wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, and he’s got a huge hunting knife on his belt-it hangs almost to his knee!”

“That would be the Browning,” Dominic said. “It’s definitely Ketchum. In the summer, he just cuts the sleeves off his old flannel shirts-the ones that have torn sleeves, anyway.”

“What’s the gun for?” Carmella asked her dear Gamba.

“Maybe he’s going to shoot me before Carl gets a chance to,” Dominic said, but Carmella didn’t see the humor in it-none of them did. They went to the door and windows to look for Ketchum. It was that time of the afternoon they had to themselves; they were supposed to be eating their big meal of the day, before they started the dinner service.

“I’m setting a place for Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said, and she started to do so. The two younger waitresses were checking themselves out in a mirror. Paul Polcari held a pizza paddle in both hands; it was the size of a giant tennis racquet.

“Put the paddle down, Paul,” Molinari told him. “You look ridiculous.”

“There’s a lot of stuff in the duffel bag he’s carrying-ammunition, maybe,” the busboy said.

“Dynamite, possibly,” the cook said.

“The way the man looks, someone might arrest him before he gets here!” the busboy told them all.

“Why did he come? Why didn’t he call first?” Carmella asked her Gamba.

The cook shook his head; they would all just have to wait and see what Ketchum wanted.

“He’s coming to take you, Gamba, isn’t he?” Carmella asked the cook.

“Probably,” Dominic answered.

Even so, Carmella smoothed the little white apron over her black skirt; she unlocked the door and waited there. Someone should greet Mr. Ketchum, she was thinking.

What will I do in Vermont? the cook thought to himself. Who cares about eating Italian there?

Ketchum would waste little time with them. “I know who you are,” he told Carmella pleasantly. “Your boy showed me your picture, and you haven’t changed much.” She had changed in the thirteen-plus years since that wallet photo had been taken-she was at least twenty pounds heavier, they all knew-but Carmella appreciated the compliment. “Are you all here?” Ketchum asked them. “Or is someone in the kitchen?”

“We’re all here, Ketchum,” the cook told his old friend.

“Well, I can see you are, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “And from your disapproving expression, you don’t look too happy to see me.”

Ketchum didn’t wait for a response. He just walked into the back of the kitchen until they couldn’t see him. “Can you see me?” he called to them.

They hollered, “No!”-all but the cook.

“Well, I can still see you-this is perfect,” Ketchum told them. When he came out of the kitchen, he had the shotgun out of its carrying case; to a one, the cook included, they recoiled from it. The gun had a foreign smell-the gun oil, maybe, and the oil-stained leather case-but there was another smell, something truly foreign (even to cooks, even in a restaurant’s dining room and kitchen). Maybe the smell was death, because guns are designed to do just one thing-kill.

“This here is an Ithaca twenty-gauge-a single shot, no safety. It’s as sweet and simple as a shotgun comes,” Ketchum told them. “Even a child can shoot it.” He broke open the shotgun, allowing the barrel to fall almost to a forty-five-degree angle. “There’s no safety because you have to cock it with your thumb before it’ll fire-there’s no half-cock, either,” the woodsman was saying. They watched, fascinated-all but Dominic.

Everything Ketchum said about the gun made no sense to them, but Ketchum kept patiently repeating himself. He showed them how to load it, and how to take out the empty shell-he showed them again and again, until even the busboy and the young waitresses could have done it. It broke the cook’s heart to see the rapt attention Carmella gave to the old logger; even Carmella could have loaded and fired the damn shotgun by the time Ketchum had finished.

They didn’t really comprehend the gravity of the demonstration until Ketchum got to the part about the two kinds of ammunition. “This here is buckshot. You keep the Ithaca loaded at all times with buckshot.” Ketchum held up a big hand in front of Paul Polcari’s flour-whitened face. “From back there, where I was standing in the kitchen, the buckshot would make a pattern about this size on a target standing here.” They were getting the idea.

“You just have to see how it goes. If Carl is believing your story-and you all have to tell the cowboy the same story-maybe he’ll leave without incident. No shots need to be fired,” Ketchum was saying.

“What story is that?” the cook asked his old friend.

“Well, it’s about how you walked out on this lady,” Ketchum said, indicating Carmella. “Not that even a fool would, mind you-but that’s what you did, and everyone here hates you for it. They would like to kill you themselves, if they could find you. Do any of you have trouble remembering that story?” Ketchum asked them. They shook their heads-even the cook, but for a different reason.

“Just so there’s one of you back in the kitchen,” Ketchum continued. “I don’t care if the cowboy knows you’re back there-just so he can’t quite see you. You can be banging pots and pans around all you want to. If Carl asks to see you, and he will, just tell him you’re busy cooking.”

“Which one of us should be back in the kitchen with the gun?” Paul Polcari asked the woodsman.

“It doesn’t matter which one of you is back there-just so you all know how to work the Ithaca,” Ketchum answered.

“You know Carl will come here, I suppose?” Dominic asked him.

“It’s inevitable, Cookie. He’ll want to talk to Carmella most of all, but he’ll come here to talk to everyone. If he doesn’t believe your story, and there’s any trouble-that’s when one of you shoots him,” Ketchum said to them all.

“How will we know there’s going to be trouble?” Tony Molinari asked. “How will we know if he believes our story?”

“Well, you won’t see the Colt forty-five,” Ketchum answered. “Believe me, he’ll have it on him, but you won’t know there’s going to be trouble until you see the weapon. When Carl lets you see the Colt, he intends to use it.”

“Then we shoot him?” Paul Polcari asked.

“Whoever’s in the kitchen should call out to him first,” Ketchum told them. “You just say something like, ‘Hey, cowboy!’-just so he looks at you.”

“It would seem to me,” Molinari said, “that we’d have a better chance just to shoot him-I mean before he’s looking in the direction of the shooter.”

“No, not really,” Ketchum told him patiently. “If the cowboy is looking in your direction, assuming you take aim at his throat, you’ll hit him in the face and chest-both-and you’ll probably blind him.”

The cook looked at Carmella, because he thought she might faint. The busboy appeared to be feeling sick. “When the cowboy is blind, you don’t have to be in as big a hurry-when you take the empty shell out and put the deer slug in. The buckshot blinds him, but the deer slug is the kill-shot,” Ketchum explained to them. “First you blind him, then you kill him.”

The busboy dashed for the kitchen; they could hear him barfing in the overlarge sink the dishwasher used to scour pots and pans. “Maybe he’s not the one to be back in the kitchen,” Ketchum said softly to the others. “Hell, we used to jacklight deer in Coos County just like this. Shine the light on them, till the deer stared right at you. First the buckshot, then the deer slug.” But here the woodsman paused before continuing. “Well, with a deer-if you’re close enough-the buckshot will suffice. With the cowboy, we don’t want to take any unnecessary chances.”

“I don’t think we can kill anybody, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said. “We simply don’t know how to do that.”

“I just showed you how!” Ketchum told her. “That little Ithaca is the simplest gun I own. I won it in an arm-wrestling match in Milan -you remember, don’t you, Cookie?”

“I remember,” the cook told his old friend. It had turned into something more serious than an arm-wrestling match, as Dominic remembered it, but Ketchum had walked away with the single-shot Ithaca -there was no disputing that.

“Hell, just work on your story,” Ketchum told them. “If the story is good enough, maybe you won’t have to shoot the bastard.”

“Did you come all this way just to bring us the gun?” the cook asked his old friend.

“I brought the Ithaca for them, Cookie-it’s for your friends, not for you. I came to help you pack. We’ve got a little traveling to do.”

Dominic reached back for Carmella’s hand-he knew she was standing behind him-but Carmella was quicker. She wrapped her arms around her Gamba’s waist and burrowed her face into the back of his neck. “I love you, but I want you to go with Mr. Ketchum,” she told the cook.

“I know,” Dominic told her; he knew better than to resist her, or Ketchum.

“What else is in the duffel bag?” the busboy asked the logger; the kid had come out of the kitchen and was looking a little better.

“Fireworks-for the Fourth of July,” Ketchum said. “Danny asked me to bring them,” he told Dominic.

Carmella went with them to the walk-up on Wesley Place. The cook didn’t pack many things, but he took the eight-inch cast-iron skillet off the hook in their bedroom; Carmella supposed that the skillet was mostly symbolic. She walked with them to the car-rental place. They would drive the rental car to Vermont, and Ketchum would bring the car back to Boston; then he would take the train back to New Hampshire from North Station. Ketchum hadn’t wanted his truck to be missing for a few days; he didn’t want the deputy sheriff to know he was away. Besides, he needed a new truck, Ketchum told them; with all the driving he and Dominic had to do, Ketchum’s truck might not have made it.

For thirteen years, Carmella had been hoping to meet Mr. Ketchum. Now she’d met him, and his violence. She could see in an instant what her Angelù had admired about the man, and-when Ketchum had been younger-Carmella could easily imagine how Rosie Calogero (or any woman her age) might have fallen in love with him. But now she hated Ketchum for coming to the North End and taking her Gamba away; she would even miss the cook’s limp, she told herself.

Then Mr. Ketchum said something to her, and it completely won her over. “If, one day, you ever want to see the place where your boy perished, I would be honored to show you,” Ketchum said to her. Carmella had to fight back tears. She had so wanted to see the river basin where the accident happened, but not the logs; she knew the logs would be too much for her. Just the riverbank, where the cook and young Dan had stood and seen it happen-and maybe the exact spot in the water-yes, she might one day want to see that.

“Thank you, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said to him. She watched them get into the car. Ketchum, of course, was the driver.

“If you ever want to see me-” Carmella started to say to Dominic.

“I know,” the cook said to her, but he wouldn’t look at her.

COMPARED TO THE DAY HER GAMBA LEFT, the day Carl came to Vicino di Napoli was almost easy for Carmella. It had again been at the time of their midafternoon meal, and it was nearly the end of that summer-sometime in August ’67, when they’d all started to imagine (or hope) that the cowboy wasn’t ever coming.

Carmella saw the cop first. It was just as Gamba had told her: When Carl was out of uniform, he still looked like he was wearing one. Of course Ketchum had remarked on the jowls, and the way the cowboy’s neck was bunched in folds. (“Maybe all cops have bad haircuts,” Ketchum had said to her.)

“Someone go back in the kitchen,” Carmella said, standing up from the table; the door was locked, and she went to unlock it. It was Paul Polcari who went back in the kitchen. The second the cowboy came inside, Carmella found herself wishing it had been Molinari back there.

“You would be the Del Popolo woman?” the deputy sheriff asked her. He showed them all his badge while saying, “ Massachusetts is out of my jurisdiction-actually, everythin’ outside Coos County is out of my jurisdiction-but I’m lookin’ for a fella I think you all know. He’s got some answerin’ to do-name of Dominic, a little guy with a limp.”

Carmella started to cry; she cried easily, but in this case she had to force herself.

“That prick,” Molinari said. “If I knew where he was, I’d kill him.”

“Me, too!” Paul Polcari cried from the kitchen.

“Can you come out of there?” the deputy called to Paul. “I like to see everyone.”

“I’m busy cooking!” Paul screamed; pots and pans were banging.

The cowboy sighed. They all remembered how the cook and Ketchum had described Carl; they’d said the cop never stopped smiling, but it was the most insincere smile in the world. “Look,” the cowboy said to them, “I don’t know what the cook’s done to you, but he’s got some explainin’ to do to me-”

“He walked out on her!” Molinari said, pointing to Carmella.

“He stole her jewels!” the busboy cried.

The kid is an idiot! the others thought. (Even the cop might be smart enough to know that Carmella wasn’t the sort of woman who had jewels.)

“I didn’t figure Cookie for a jewel thief,” Carl said. “Are you people bein’ honest with me? You really don’t know where he is?”

“No!” one of the young waitresses cried out, as if her companion waitress had stabbed her.

“That prick,” Molinari repeated.

“What about you?” the cowboy called into the kitchen. Paul seemed to have lost his voice. When the pots and pans commenced to banging again, the others took this as a signal to move a little bit away from the cop. Ketchum had told them not to scatter like a bunch of chickens, but to get some necessary separation between the cowboy and themselves-just to give the shooter a decent shot at the bastard.

“If I knew where he was, I would cook him!” Paul Polcari shouted. He held the Ithaca in his heavily floured hands, which were shaking. He sighted down the barrel till he found the cowboy’s throat-what he could manage to see of it, under Carl’s multiple chins.

“Can you come out of there, where I can see you?” the cop called to Paul, squinting into the kitchen. “Wops,” the cowboy muttered. That was when Tony Molinari got a glimpse of the Colt. Carl had put his hand inside his jacket, and Molinari saw the big holster that was awkwardly at an angle under the deputy’s armpit, the fat man’s fingers just grazing the grip of the long-barreled handgun. The handle of the Colt.45 was inlaid with what looked like bone; it was probably deer antler.

For Christ’s sake, Paul! Molinari was thinking. The cowboy’s already looking at you-just shoot him! To her surprise, Carmella was thinking the same thing-just shoot him! She had all she could do not to cover both ears with her hands.

Paul Polcari just wasn’t the one for the job. The pizza chef was a sweet, gentle man; now he found that his throat felt as if a cup of flour had clogged it. He was trying to say, “Hey, cowboy!” The words wouldn’t come. And the cowboy kept squinting into the kitchen; Paul Polcari knew that he didn’t have to say anything. He could just pull the trigger and Carl would be blinded. But Paul couldn’t-more to the point, he didn’t-do it.

“Well, shit,” the deputy sheriff said. He was moving sideways, toward the restaurant door. Molinari was worried, because the cowboy was out of sight from Paul’s spot in the back of the kitchen; then Carl reached inside his jacket again, and they all froze. (Here comes the Colt! Molinari was thinking.) But now they saw it was just a small card that the cowboy had pulled out of his pocket; he handed it to Carmella. “Call me if that little cripple calls you,” Carl said to her; he was still smiling.

From the sound of the pots and pans falling in the kitchen, Molinari imagined that Paul Polcari had passed out back there.

“It should have been you in the kitchen, Tony,” Carmella told Molinari later, “but I can’t blame poor Paul.”

Paul Polcari would blame himself, however; he would never shut up about it. It took Tony Molinari almost an hour to clean the Ithaca of all the flour, too. But the cowboy wouldn’t come back. Maybe just having the gun in the kitchen had helped. As for the story Ketchum had told them to stick to, Carl must have believed it.

When their ordeal was over, Carmella cried and cried; they’d all assumed she was crying from the terrible tension of the moment. But her Gamba leaving had hurt her more; Carmella was crying because she knew that her Gamba’s ordeal was not over. Contrary to what she had said to Ketchum, she would have fired the Ithaca herself if she’d been back in the kitchen. One look at the cowboy-and, as Ketchum had forewarned her, the way he’d looked at her-had convinced Carmella that she could have pulled the trigger. But that chance wouldn’t come to her, or to any of them, again.

IN TRUTH, Carmella Del Popolo would miss Dominic more than she ever did the fisherman, and she would miss Secondo, too. She knew about that hole the boy had bored in his bedroom door in the cold-water Charter Street apartment. Maybe she bathed more modestly after she knew about the hole, but Carmella had let young Dan see her nonetheless. With the fisherman dead, and Angelù gone, there’d been no one to look at her for too long. When Dominic and Danny came into her life, Carmella didn’t really mind that the twelve-year-old watched her in the bathtub in the kitchen; she only worried what an influence the sight of her might have on the boy later on. (Carmella didn’t mean on Danny’s writing.)

Of all the people who were surprised, puzzled, disappointed, or indifferent regarding what the writer Daniel Baciagalupo would choose for a nom de plume, Carmella Del Popolo was without a doubt the most pleased. For when Family Life in Coos County, by Danny Angel, was published, Carmella was sure that Secondo had always known he was her surrogate son-just as surely as everyone in Vicino di Napoli knew (Carmella, most of all) that absolutely no one could replace her cherished but departed Angelù.