Last Night in Twisted River (17 page)

“Maybe he’s looking after Jane now,” Danny said.

“Don’t get religious on me, Danny—just remember the Injun as she was. Jane truly loved you,” Ketchum told the twelve-year-old. “Just honor her memory—that’s all you can do.”

“I am missing you already, Ketchum!” the boy suddenly cried out.

“Oh, shit, Danny—you best get going, if you’re going,” the river-man said.

Then Ketchum started his truck and drove off on the haul road, toward Twisted River, leaving the cook and his son to their lengthier and less certain journey—to their next life, no less.

II.

BOSTON, 1967
——

CHAPTER 5

NOM DE PLUME

I
T 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.