by John Irving
With the war in Vietnam, they would lower the drinking age in many states to eighteen, the logic being that if they could send mere boys off to die at that age, shouldn't the kids at least be allowed to drink? After the war was over, the drinking age would go back up to twenty-one again--but not until 1984--though nowadays, Tony knew, many kids Joe's age had fake I.D.'s. The cook saw them all the time at Avellino; he knew his grandson had one.
It was how Joe was more than fast with girls that really worried Tony Angel. Going too fast too soon with girls could get you in as much trouble as drinking, the former Dominic Del Popolo, ne Baciagalupo, knew. It had gotten the cook in trouble, in his opinion--and Daniel, too.
Despite Carmella's best efforts, Tony knew all about her catching her niece Josie with Daniel; the cook was sure that his son had banged more than one of those DiMattia girls, and even a Saetta and a Calogero or two! But young Joe had at least seen, if not actually overheard, his father in a few more adult relationships than whatever foolishness Daniel had been up to with his kissing cousins. And his grandfather knew that Joe had spent more than a few nights in the girls' dorms at NMH. (It was a wonder the boy hadn't been caught and kicked out of school; now, in the spring term of his senior year, maybe he would be!) There were things Joe's dad didn't know, but his grandfather did.
In his frantic last night in Twisted River, the cook had prayed--for the first and only time, until now. Please, God, give me time, Tony Angel had prayed, long ago--seeing his twelve-year-old's small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. (Daniel had been waiting in the passenger seat, as if he'd never lost faith that his father would safely return from leaving Injun Jane's body at Carl's.)
For all the talking the cook and Ketchum did about Danny Angel's novels--not only about what was in them but, more important, what the writer seemed to be purposely leaving out--the one thing the men noticed without fail was how much the books were about what Danny feared. Maybe the imagination does that, Tony thought, as he peeked under the damp towels covering his pizza dough; the dough hadn't risen enough for him to punch it down. Danny Angel's novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen. The stories often indulged the nightmarish--namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril--in part, because they were young!
Tony Angel wasn't much of a reader anymore--though he'd bought innumerable novels (on his son's and Ketchum's recommendations) at The Book Cellar. He'd read a lot of first chapters and had just stopped. Something about Ketchum's relationship with Rosie had kicked the reading right out of the cook. The only novels he actually finished--and he read every word--were his son's. Tony wasn't like Ketchum, who'd read (or heard) everything.
The cook knew his son's worst fears: Daniel was absolutely terrified of something happening to his loved ones; he simply obsessed about that subject. That was where the writer's fearful imagination came from--childhood terrors. The writer Danny Angel seemed driven to imagine the worst things that could happen in any given situation. In a way, as a writer--that is to say, in his imagination--the cook's son (at forty-one) was still a child.
IN HIS QUIET KITCHEN, in his cherished Avellino, the cook prayed that he be allowed to live a little longer; he wanted to help his grandson survive being a teenager. Maybe boys aren't out of the woods until their late twenties, Tony considered--after all, Daniel had been twenty-two when he married Katie. (Certainly that had been taking a risk!) What if Joe had to be thirty before he was safe? And if anything did happen to Joe, the cook prayed he would still be alive to look after Daniel; he knew how much help his son would need then.
Tony Angel looked at the silent radio; he almost turned it on, just to help him banish these morbid thoughts. He considered writing a letter to Ketchum instead of turning on the radio, but he didn't do either of these things; he just kept praying. It seemed that the praying had come to him out of nowhere, and he wished he could stop doing it.
There in his kitchen, next to his cookbooks, were various editions of Danny Angel's novels, which the cook kept in chronological order. There was no more revered place for those novels than among his dad's cookbooks, Danny knew. But it didn't calm the cook down to look at his famous son's books.
After Family Life in Coos County, the cook knew that Daniel had published The Mickey, but was that in 1972 or '73? The first novel had been dedicated to Mr. Leary, but the second one should have been, given its subject matter. As he'd more or less promised, however, Danny had dedicated his second novel to his dad. "For my father, Dominic Baciagalupo," the dedication read, which was a little confusing, because the author's name was Danny Angel--and Dominic was already called Tony, or Mr. Angel.
"Isn't that sort of like letting the nom-de-plume cat out of the nom-de-plume bag?" Ketchum had complained, but it had turned out for the better. When Danny became famous for his fourth novel, the issue of him writing under a nom de plume had long been defused. Almost everyone in the literary world knew that Danny Angel was a nom de plume, but very few people remembered what his real name was--or they didn't care. (Mr. Leary had been right to suggest that there were easier names to remember than Baciagalupo, and how many people--even in the literary world--know what John Le Carre's real name is?)
Danny, not surprisingly, had defended his decision to Ketchum by saying that he doubted the deputy sheriff was very active in the literary world; even the logger had to acknowledge that the cowboy wasn't a reader. Besides, very few people read The Mickey when it was originally published. When his fourth novel made Danny famous, and readers went back to the earlier books, that was when everyone read The Mickey.
A secondary but major character in The Mickey is a repressed Irishman who teaches English at the Michelangelo School; the novel focuses on the main character's last encounter with his former English teacher at a striptease show in the Old Howard. To the cook, it seemed a slight coincidence to build a whole book around--the mutual shame and embarrassment of the former student (now an Exeter boy, with a bunch of his Exeter friends) and the character who was clearly modeled on Mr. Leary. Probably, the episode at the Old Howard had actually happened--or so the novelist's father believed.
The third novel came along in '75, just after they'd all moved back to Vermont from Iowa. The cook would wonder if his was the only family to have mistakenly assumed that "kissing cousins" meant cousins who were sexually interested in, or involved with, one another. Danny's third novel was called Kissing Kin. (Originally, so-called kissing kin meant any distant kin who were familiar enough to be greeted with a kiss; it didn't mean what Danny's dad had always thought.)
The cook was relieved that his son's third book wasn't dedicated to Danny's cousins in the Saetta and Calogero families, because the irony of such a dedication might not have been appreciated by the male members of those families. The story concerns a young boy's sexual initiation in the North End; he is seduced by an older cousin who works as a waitress in the same restaurant where the boy has a part-time job as a busboy. The older cousin in the novel was clearly modeled, the cook knew, on that slut Elena Calogero--better said, the physical description of the character was true to Elena. Yet both Carmella and the cook were pretty sure that Daniel's first sexual experience had been with Carmella's niece Josie DiMattia.
The novel might have been pure fantasy, or wishful thinking, the cook supposed. But there were details that particularly bothered the writer's dad--for example, how the older cousin breaks off the relationship with the young boy when he's going off to boarding school. The waitress tells the kid that all along, she wanted to be fucking the boy's father--not the boy. (Little is written about the character of the dad; he's rather distantly described as the "new cook" in the restaurant where his son is a busboy.) The rejected boy goes off to school hating his father, because he imagines that the older cousin will eventually seduce his dad.
Surel
y this couldn't be true--this was outrageous! Tony Angel was thinking, as he searched in the book for that passage where the train is pulling out of North Station, and the boy is looking out the window of the train at his father on the station platform. The boy suddenly can't bear to look at his dad; his attention shifts to his stepmother. "I knew that the next time I saw her she would probably have put on a few more pounds," Danny Angel wrote.
"How could you write that about Carmella?" the cook had yelled at his writer son when he'd first read that hurtful sentence.
"It's not Carmella, Dad," Daniel said. (Okay--maybe the character of the stepmother in Kissing Kin wasn't Carmella, but Danny Angel dedicated the novel to her.)
"I suppose it's just tough luck being in a writer's family," Ketchum had told the cook. "I mean, we get mad if Danny writes about us, or someone we know, but we also get mad at him for not writing about us, or for not really writing about himself--his true self, I mean. Not to mention that he made his damn ex-wife a better person than she ever was!"
All that was true, the cook thought. Somehow what struck him about Daniel's fiction was that it was both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time. (Danny disagreed, of course. After his schoolboy attempts at fiction writing, which he'd shown only to Mr. Leary--and those stories were nothing but a confusing mix of memoir and fantasy, both exaggerated, and nearly as "confusing" to Danny as they were to the late Michael Leary--the young novelist had not really been autobiographical at all, not in his opinion.)
The cook couldn't find the passage he was searching for in Kissing Kin. He put his son's third novel back on the bookshelf, his eyes passing quickly over the fourth one--"the fame-maker," Ketchum called it. Tony Angel didn't even like to look at The Kennedy Fathers--the one with the fake Katie in it, as he thought of it. The novel had not only made his son famous; it was an international bestseller and the first one of Daniel's books to be made into a movie.
Almost everyone said that it wasn't a bad movie, though it was not nearly as successful as the novel. Danny didn't like the film, but he said he didn't hate it, either; he just wanted nothing to do with the moviemaking process. He said that he never wanted to write a screenplay, and that he wouldn't sell the film rights to any of his other novels--unless someone wrote a halfway decent adaptation first, and Danny got to read the screenplay before he sold the movie rights to the novel.
The writer had explained to his dad that this was not the way the movie business worked; generally speaking, the rights to make a film from a novel were sold before a screenwriter was even attached to the project. By demanding to see a finished screenplay before he would consider selling the rights to his novel, Danny Angel was pretty much assuring himself that no one would ever make another movie of one of his books--not while he was alive, anyway.
"I guess Danny did hate the movie of The Kennedy Fathers, after all," Ketchum had said to the cook.
But the logger and the author's dad had to be careful what they said about The Kennedy Fathers around young Joe. Danny had dedicated the novel to his son. Ketchum and the cook were at least pleased to see that the book wasn't dedicated to Katie. Naturally, Danny was aware that the two old friends weren't exactly fans of his famous fourth novel.
It was only natural, one of Daniel's publishers had told the cook--she was one of the foreign ones, one of the older women the writer had slept with--that whatever novel Danny Angel wrote after The Kennedy Fathers was going to get criticized for not living up to the breakthrough book and runaway bestseller that the famous fourth novel was. Even so, Danny didn't help himself by writing a fifth novel that was both dense and sexually disturbing. And, as more than one critic wrote, the writer loved semicolons to excess; he'd even put one in the title!
It was simply stupid, that title--The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt, Daniel had called it. "Constipated Christ!" Ketchum had shouted at the bestselling author. "Couldn't you have called it one thing or the other?"
In interviews, Danny always said that the title reflected the old-fashioned nineteenth-century kind of story that the novel was. "Bullshit," the cook had said to his son. "That title makes you look like you can't make up your mind."
"Whatever you call them, they look like someone smashed a fly over the comma," Ketchum said to Danny, about all the semicolons. "The only writing I do are letters to you and your dad, but I've written rather a lot of them, and in all those letters, I don't believe I've ever used as many of those damn things as you use on any one fucking page of this novel."
"They're called semicolons, Ketchum," the writer said.
"I don't care what they're called, Danny," the old woodsman said. "I'm just telling you that you use too damn many of them!"
But of course what really pissed off Ketchum and the cook about Danny Angel's fifth novel was the fucking dedication--"Katie, in memoriam."
All Tony Angel could say about it to Ketchum was: "That Callahan cunt broke my son's heart and abandoned my grandson." (It was not a good time, Ketchum knew, to point out to his old friend that she'd also kept his son out of the war and had given him the grandson.)
Not to mention what The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt was about, the cook was thinking, as he looked with suspicion at the novel on his kitchen bookshelf. It's another North End story, but this time the boy who is coming of age is sexually initiated by one of his aunts--not an older cousin--and the maiden aunt and spinster is a dead ringer for Rosie's youngest sister, the unfortunate Filomena Calogero!
Surely this hadn't happened! the cook hoped, but had Daniel once wished that it had--or had it almost happened? Once again (as in any Danny Angel novel) the graphic detail was quite convincing, and the sexual descriptions of the boy's petite aunt--she was such a pathetic, self-pitying woman!--were painful for the cook, though he'd read every word.
Critics also made the point that "the perhaps overrated writer" was "repeating himself;" Daniel had been thirty-nine when his fifth novel was published in 1981, and all the criticism must have stung him, though you wouldn't know it. If the cousin in Kissing Kin tells the boy she's breaking up with that she always wanted to sleep with his father instead, in the novel about the neurotic aunt, she tells the boy that she imagines she's having sex with his father whenever she has sex with the son! (What manifestation of self-torture is this? the cook had wondered, when he'd first read The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt.)
Maybe it did happen, the man who missed the Dominic in himself now imagined. He'd always thought that Rosie's sister Filomena was completely crazy. He couldn't look at her without feeling she was a grotesque mask of Rosie--"a Rosie imposter," he'd once described her to Ketchum. But Daniel had seemed improbably infatuated with Filomena; the boy couldn't stop himself from staring at her, and it was not as an aunt that he appeared to be regarding her. Had the flighty Filomena, who was still miserable and unmarried (or so the cook assumed), actually accepted or even encouraged her smitten young nephew's adoration?
"Why don't you just ask Danny if the crazy aunt popped his cherry?" Ketchum had inquired of the cook. That was a vulgar Coos County expression, and the cook hated it. (If he'd paid closer attention to the conversations around him in Boston, the cook might have realized that "cherry-popping" was a vulgar North End expression, too.)
There was one part of The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt that both Tony Angel and Ketchum had loved: the wedding at the end. The boy has grown up and he's marrying his college sweetheart--an indifferent bride, if you ever met one, and closer to a real-life Katie character than Caitlin in The Kennedy Fathers ever was. Also, Danny had nailed those ice-cube-sucking Callahan men dead between their eyes--those tight-assed patrician Republicans who, Danny believed, had made Katie the anarchist rule-breaker she was. She was a trust-fund kid who'd reinvented herself as a radical, but she'd been a faux revolutionary. Katie's only revolution had been a small, sexual one.
THERE WAS ONE BOOK Danny Angel had written that was not on the kitchen bookshelf in Avellino. That was his sixth novel, which h
ad not yet been published. But the cook had almost finished reading it. A copy of the galleys was upstairs in Tony Angel's bedroom. Ketchum also had a copy. Both men felt ambivalent about the novel, and neither was in any hurry to finish it.
East of Bangor was set in an orphanage in Maine in the 1960s--when abortion was still illegal. Virtually the same damn boy from those earlier Danny Angel novels--a boy from Boston who ends up going away to boarding school--gets two of his North End cousins pregnant, one when he's still a student at Exeter (before he's learned to drive) and the second after he's gone off to college. He goes to the University of New Hampshire, naturally.
There's an old midwife in the Maine orphanage who performs abortions--a deeply sympathetic woman who struck the cook as being modeled on the unlikely fusion of sweet, gentle Paul Polcari ("the fucking pacifist!" as Ketchum insisted on calling him) and Injun Jane.
The first cousin who goes off to Maine has the baby and leaves it behind; she is so devastated by having a child and not knowing what has become of it that she tells the other pregnant cousin not to do what she did. The second pregnant cousin also goes to Maine--to the very same orphanage, but to have an abortion. The problem is that the old midwife might not live long enough to perform the procedure. If the young midwife-in-training ends up doing the D & C, the cousin might suffer the consequences. The young midwife doesn't know enough about what she's doing.
Both Ketchum and the cook were hoping that the novel was going to turn out well, and that nothing too bad would happen to the second pregnant cousin. But, knowing Danny Angel's novels, the two old readers had their fears--and something else was worrying them.
