by John Irving
There was a character based on Katie in The Kennedy Fathers--Caitlin, Danny Angel named her--a little sprite of a thing with a disproportionately oversize capacity for serial infidelities. She saves a truly hard-to-believe number of Kennedy fathers from the Vietnam War. The Caitlin character races through numerous husbands with the same casual frankness both the cook and Ketchum associated with the way Katie probably gave blow jobs--yet Caitlin wasn't Katie.
"She's way too nice," Tony Angel told his old friend.
"I'll say she is!" Ketchum agreed. "You even end up liking her!"
All her husbands end up liking Caitlin, too--or they can't get over her, if that amounts to the same thing. And all those babies who are born and get abandoned by their mother--well, we never find out what they think of their mother. The novel concludes when President Nixon puts an end to the 3-A deferment, while the war will drag on for five more years, and the Caitlin character just kind of disappears; she is a lost soul in the last chapter of The Kennedy Fathers. There's something that doesn't bode well about how she phones all her husbands and asks to speak to her kids, who have no memory of her. That's the last we hear about Caitlin--it's a sympathetic moment.
Ketchum and the cook knew very well that Katie had not once called Daniel and asked to speak to Joe; it seemed that she simply hadn't cared enough about them to even inquire how they were doing, though Ketchum always said that Danny might hear from Katie if he ever became famous.
When The Kennedy Fathers was published, and Danny did become famous, he still didn't hear from Katie. He did, however, hear from a few other Kennedy fathers. Most of the letters about the novel were favorable. Danny believed there was some shared guilt among such fathers, who'd all felt, at one time in their lives, that they probably should have gone to Vietnam, or (like Danny) they'd actually wanted to go. Now, of course, they all knew they were lucky that they hadn't gone to the war.
The novel was praised for seeing yet another dimension of how the war in Vietnam did permanent damage to America, and how the country would long be divided by that war. The young fathers in the novel might (or might not) turn out to be good fathers, and it was too soon to say if those children--those "tickets out of Vietnam," as Danny called them--would be damaged. Most reviewers thought that Caitlin was the novel's most memorable character, and the real hero of the story. She sacrifices herself to save these young men's lives, even though she leaves them--and quite possibly her own children--feeling haunted.
But the novel really pissed off Ketchum and the cook. They had hoped to read a hatchet job on Katie. But Danny didn't do that; instead, he'd turned his awful ex-wife into a fucking hero!
One letter Danny received from a Kennedy father was worth saving, and he would show it to his son--this was several years after The Kennedy Fathers was first published, in the spring of Joe's junior year at Northfield Mount Hermon, when the boy had been driving for only a year and had just turned seventeen. At young Joe's suggestion, Danny also showed the letter to his dad and Ketchum. While Danny and Joe had talked about the letter--both about what it meant, and what it didn't say--Ketchum and the cook were careful in their responses to Danny. The older men knew that Danny's feelings for Katie were a little different from theirs.
The letter was from a self-described "single parent" living in Portland, Oregon--a man named Jeff Reese. The letter began: "Like you, I am a Kennedy father--one of the stupid boys Katie Callahan saved. I'm not sure how many of us there are. I know of at least one other--I mean, in addition to you and me--and I am writing him, too. I regret to inform you both that Katie couldn't save herself--just a few of us stupid boys. I can't tell you more, but I know it was an accidental overdose." He didn't say of what. Perhaps Jeff Reese assumed that Danny would have known what substance Katie was abusing, but they'd not done any serious drugs together, only the occasional marijuana. In their case, the drinking and a little pot had been more than enough. (There wasn't a word about The Kennedy Fathers, though one would guess that Jeff Reese had somewhat belatedly read it. Maybe he'd read just enough of the book to see for himself that the Caitlin character wasn't really Katie. And if Katie had read The Kennedy Fathers, or any of Danny Angel's other novels, Jeff Reese didn't say; at least Katie must have known that Daniel Baciagalupo had become Danny Angel, for how else would Jeff Reese have made the connection?)
Danny had driven down to Northfield Mount Hermon for an impromptu visit with Joe at his son's school. The old James Gym was empty--it wasn't wrestling season--and they sat together on the sloped wooden track, reading and rereading the letter about Joe's mother. Maybe the boy had thought he would one day hear from his mom; Danny had never expected to hear from Katie, but the writer in him had thought she might try to make contact with her son.
At seventeen, Joe Baciagalupo often looked like he needed a shave, and he had the more defined facial features of a young man in his early twenties; yet there was something expectant and open in his expression that reminded his father of a more childlike Joe, or of the "little" Joe the boy had been. This might have made Danny say to him, "I'm sorry that you didn't have a mother, or that I didn't find someone who could have done a good job in that role for you."
"But it's not just a role, is it?" Joe asked his dad; he was still holding the letter about his mother dying from an overdose, and Danny would later think that the way the seventeen-year-old looked at the letter, it was as if it were foreign currency--a curiosity, exotic-looking, but of no particular use at the moment. "I mean, I had you--you've always been there," Joe continued. "And your dad--well, you know, he's like a second dad to me. And then there's Ketchum."
"Yes," was all the writer could say; when he talked to young Joe, Danny sometimes didn't know if he was talking to a child or a man. Was it part of the same anxiousness Danny had felt as a twelve-year-old that he suspected Joe kept things from him, or was it what Ketchum and the cook had kept from Danny that made him wonder about how forthcoming (or not) Joe was?
"I just want to be sure you're okay," Danny said to Joe, but the seventeen-year-old--child or man, or both--surely knew that by the okay word his father was implying much more than okay. The writer meant thriving; Danny also meant safe, as if regular father-son conversations could possibly ensure Joe's safety. (The child's or the man's.) Yet, as Danny would one day consider, maybe this was a writer's peculiar burden--namely, that the anxiety he felt as a father was conflated with the analysis he brought to bear on the characters in his fiction.
The day he showed Joe the letter about Katie, it struck Danny Angel that the news of Katie's death had an offstage, unreal quality; the distant report, from a stranger, had the effect of turning Katie into a minor fictional character. And if Danny had kept up the drinking with her, he would have turned out the same way--either an accident or a suicide, the finale disappointingly offstage. His dad had been right about the drinking; maybe not being able to handle it was, as his father had suggested, "genetic."
"AT LEAST HE HASN'T WRITTEN about Rosie--not yet," Ketchum wrote to his old friend.
Tony Angel had liked Ketchum's letters better before the old logger, who was now sixty-six, had learned to read. That lady he'd met in the library--"the schoolteacher" was all Ketchum ever called her--well, she'd done the job, but Ketchum was even crankier now that he could read and write, and the cook was convinced that Ketchum no longer listened as attentively. When you don't read, you have to listen; maybe those books the woodsman had heard were the books he'd understood best. Now Ketchum complained about almost everything he read. It also might have been that Tony Angel missed Six-Pack's handwriting. (In Ketchum's opinion, by the way, the cook had gotten crankier, too.)
Danny definitely missed Six-Pack Pam's influence on Ketchum; possibly his dependence on Pam had made Ketchum less lonely than he seemed to Danny now, and Danny had long ago accepted Six-Pack's role as a go-between in Ketchum's correspondence with the young writer and his dad.
Danny was forty-one in 1983. When men turn forty, most of them no lon
ger feel young, but Joe--at eighteen--knew he had a relatively young dad. Even the girls Joe's age (and younger) at Northfield Mount Hermon had told the boy that his famous father was very good-looking. Maybe Danny was good-looking, but he wasn't nearly as good-looking as Joe.
The young man was almost eight inches taller than his dad and grandfather. Katie, the boy's mother, had been a noticeably small woman, but the men in the Callahan family were uniformly tall--not heavy but very tall. Their height went with their "patrician airs," the cook had declared.
He and Carmella had hated the wedding; they'd felt snubbed the whole time. It had been a lavish affair, at an expensive private club in Manhattan--Katie was already a couple of months pregnant--and for all the money the party cost, the food had been inedible. The Callahans weren't food people; they were the kind of ice-cube suckers who had too many cocktails and filled themselves with endless hors d'oeuvres. They looked like they had so much money that they didn't need to eat--that was what Tony Angel told Ketchum, who was still driving logs on the Kennebec at the time. He'd told Danny he had too much to do in Maine and couldn't come to the wedding. But the real reason Ketchum hadn't gone to the wedding was that the cook had asked him not to come.
"I know you, Ketchum--you'll bring your Browning knife and a twelve-gauge. You'll kill every Callahan you can identify, Katie included, and then you'll go to work on a couple of Danny's fingers with the Browning."
"I know you feel the same way I do, Cookie."
"Yes, I do," the cook admitted to his best friend, "and Carmella even agrees with us. But we've got to let Daniel do this his way. The Callahan whore is going to have someone's baby, and that baby will keep mine out of this disastrous war."
So Ketchum had stayed in Maine. The logger would later say it was a good thing Cookie had gone to the wedding. When Joe turned out to be tall, the cook might have been inclined to believe that his beloved Daniel couldn't have been the boy's father. After all, Katie fucked anyone she wanted to; she could easily have been knocked up by someone else and then married Daniel. But the wedding offered proof that there was a gene for tall men in the Callahan family, and Joe turned out to be the spitting image of Danny; it was just that the top of his dad's head came up only to the top of the young man's chest.
Joe had the body of an oarsman, but he wasn't a rower. For the most part, he'd grown up in Vermont--the boy was an experienced downhill skier. His dad didn't much care for the sport; as a runner, he preferred cross-country skiing, when he skied at all. Danny had continued to run; it still helped him to think, and to imagine things.
Joe was a wrestler at Northfield Mount Hermon, though he didn't have the body of a wrestler. It was probably Ketchum's influence that made Joe choose wrestling, the cook thought. (Ketchum was just a barroom brawler, but wrestling came closer to describing Ketchum's favorite kind of fight than boxing did. Usually, Ketchum didn't hit people until he got them down on the ground.)
The first time Ketchum had gone to one of Joe's wrestling matches at NMH, the barroom brawler hadn't understood the sport very well. Joe had scored a takedown, and his opponent lay stretched out on his side, when Ketchum shouted, "Now hit him--hit him now!"
"Ketchum," Danny said, "there's no hitting allowed--it's a wrestling match."
"Christ, that's the best time to hit a fella," Ketchum said, "when you've got him stretched out like that."
Later in that same match, Joe had his opponent in a near-pin position; Joe had sunk a half nelson around the other wrestler's neck and was tilting him toward his back.
"Joe's got his arm around the wrong side of the neck," Ketchum complained to the cook. "You can't choke someone with your arm around the back of a fella's neck--you've got to be on his fucking throat!"
"Joe's trying to pin that guy on his back, Ketchum--he's not trying to choke him!" Tony Angel told his old friend.
"Choking is illegal," Danny explained.
Joe won his match, and, after all the matches were over, Ketchum went to shake the boy's hand. That was when Ketchum stepped on a wrestling mat for the first time. When the woodsman felt the mat yield under his foot, he stepped quickly back to the hardwood floor of the gym; it was as if he'd stepped on something alive. "Shit, that's the first problem," Ketchum said. "The mat's too soft--you can't really hurt a guy on it."
"Ketchum, you're not trying to hurt your opponent--just pin him, or beat him on points," Danny tried to explain. But the next thing they knew, Ketchum was attempting to show Joe a better way to crank someone over on his back.
"You get him down on his belly, and pull one of his arms behind his back," Ketchum said with enthusiasm. "Then you get a little leverage under the fella's forearm, and you drive his right elbow till it touches his left ear. Believe me, he'll turn over--if he doesn't want to lose his whole shoulder!"
"You can't bend someone's arm past a forty-five-degree angle," Joe told the old logger. "Submission holds and choke holds used to be legal, but nowadays you can't make someone yield to pain--that's called a submission hold--and you can't choke anyone. Those things aren't legal--not anymore."
"Constipated Christ--it's like everything else!" Ketchum complained. "They take what was once a good thing and fuck it up with rules!"
But after Ketchum had seen a few more of Joe's matches, he grew to like high school wrestling. "Hell, to be honest with you, Cookie, when I first saw it, I thought it was a sissy way to fight. But once you get the idea of it, you can actually tell who would win the match if it was taking place in a parking lot and there was no referee."
Joe was surprised by how many matches Ketchum attended. The old woodsman drove all over New England to see Joe and the NMH team wrestle. They had a pretty good team in Joe's senior year. In Joe's four years at Northfield Mount Hermon, Ketchum definitely saw more of the boy's wrestling matches than his father or grandfather did.
The matches were on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tony Angel's Brattleboro restaurant was closed Wednesday, so that Tony could see some of his grandson's wrestling matches. But the cook could never find the time to see Joe wrestle on a Saturday, and it seemed that the more important matches--the season-ending tournaments, for example--were on the weekends. Danny Angel got to see more than half of his son's matches, but the writer took a lot of publishing-related trips. It was Ketchum who went to almost all of Joe's "fights," as the logger was inclined to call them.
"You missed a good fight," Ketchum would say, when he called the cook or Danny to tell them the results of young Joe's wrestling matches.
UNTIL HE HAD A BESTSELLER with The Kennedy Fathers, Danny didn't know that publishing houses had publicity departments. Now that his publishers were promoting his books, Danny felt an obligation to do some traveling on the books' behalf. And the translations were published at different times, rarely simultaneously with the English-language editions. This meant that it was unusual for a year to go by without Danny going somewhere to do a book tour.
When it wasn't wrestling season and his dad was traveling, Joe often spent weekends at his grandfather's apartment in Brattleboro. Sometimes his friends from Northfield Mount Hermon would have their parents take them out to dinner at Tony Angel's Italian restaurant. Occasionally, Joe would help out in the kitchen. It was like old times, and not like them, the cook would think--seeing his grandson instead of his son in a working kitchen, or busing tables. Tony, ne Dominic, was reminded that he'd not seen as much of Daniel in those prep-school years as he now saw of Joe. Because of this, there was something bittersweet about the cook's relationship with his grandson; almost magically, there were times when Tony Angel got to relax with Joe--without once judging the boy the way the cook had felt compelled to judge (and criticize) Daniel.
The other guys on Joe's wrestling team had grown fond of Ketchum. "Is he your uncle--that tough-looking man with the scar?" the wrestlers would ask Joe.
"No, Ketchum's just a friend of the family--he was a river driver," Joe would tell them.
One day, Joe's wrestling coach asked him
, "Did that big man with the hard handshake ever wrestle? He kind of looks like he might have, or could have."
"Not officially," Joe answered.
"What about that scar?" the coach asked Joe. "That's a nasty one--better than your average head-butt, anyway."
"That was no head-butt--that was a bear," Joe told the coach.
"A bear!"
"Just don't ever ask Ketchum about it," Joe said. "It's a terrible story. Ketchum had to kill the bear, but he didn't want to. He likes bears, generally."
There was a bit of the writer Danny Angel in Joe Baciagalupo, clearly--a deeper ingredient than a physical resemblance. But Danny worried that there was something reckless about his son; it wasn't a Baciagalupo recklessness of the imagination, either. It also wasn't the wrestling, which was nothing Danny had ever wanted to do--and the cook couldn't have imagined doing it, not with that limp. In fact, the wrestling seemed safe enough--once Joe had learned a little about it. There was another element in young Joe that Danny didn't recognize as coming from himself or his dad.
If there was an active Katie Callahan gene in the boy, maybe it was his penchant for risk-taking. He skied too fast, he drove a car too fast, and he was more than fast with girls; it seemed to his writer father that Joe just took too many chances.
"Maybe that's the Katie in him," Danny had said to his dad.
"Maybe," the cook replied; Tony Angel didn't like to think that anything of that awful woman had gotten into his grandson. "Then again, it might be your mother, Daniel. Rosie was a risk-taker, after all--just ask Ketchum."
In the time he'd spent looking at those photographs of his mother, Danny could have written a novel--though he'd stopped looking at the photos, for a while, after he learned the truth about his mom and Ketchum and his father. He'd once tried to give the photos to his dad, but Tony Angel wouldn't take them. "No, they're yours--I can see her very clearly, Daniel." His father tapped his temple. "Up here."
"Maybe Ketchum would like the photos," Danny said.
"Ketchum has his own pictures of your mother, Daniel," the cook told him.
