by John Irving
Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had moved back East, this on the good counsel of Tzu-Min, the young Chinese lawyer who'd married Big Brother--she'd given him some solid business advice, and had never gone back to Taiwan. Connecticut was closer to Lower Manhattan, where Little Brother needed to shop; it made no sense for the Chengs to kill themselves while striving for authenticity in Iowa. The first name of their new restaurant, Baozi, meant "Wrapped" in Chinese. (The cook remembered the golden pork spring rolls and braised pork baozi that Ah Gou made every Chinese New Year. The steamed dough balls were split, like a sandwich, and filled with a braised pork shoulder that had been shredded and mixed with Chinese five-spice powder.) But Tzu-Min was the businessperson in the Cheng family; she changed the name of the restaurant to Lemongrass, which was both more marketable and more comprehensible in Connecticut.
One day, Tony Angel thought, maybe Daniel and I can drive down to Connecticut and eat at Lemongrass; we could spend the night somewhere in the vicinity. The cook missed Ah Gou and Xiao Dee, and he wished them well.
"What's the matter, Tony?" Celeste asked him. (The cook was crying, though he'd not been aware of it.)
"Nothing's the matter, Celeste. In fact, I'm very happy," Tony said. He smiled at her and bent over his red-wine reduction, savoring the smell. He'd blanched a sprig of fresh rosemary in boiling water, just to draw out the oil before putting the rosemary in the red wine.
"Yeah, well, you're crying," Celeste told him.
"Memories, I guess," the cook said. Greg, the sous chef, was watching him, too. Loretta came into the kitchen from the dining room.
"Are we going to unlock the place tonight, or make the customers find a way to break in?" she asked the cook.
"Oh, is it time?" Tony Angel asked. He must have left his watch upstairs in the bedroom, where he'd not yet finished the galleys of East of Bangor.
"What's he crying about?" Loretta asked her mother.
"I was just asking him," Celeste said. "Memories, I guess."
"Good ones, huh?" Loretta asked the cook; she took a clean dish towel from the rack and patted his cheek. Even the dishwasher and the busboy, two Brattleboro high school kids, were watching Tony Angel with concern.
The cook and his sous chef were not rigid about sticking to their stations, though normally Greg did the grilling, roasting, and broiling, while Tony watched over the sauces.
"You want me to be the saucier tonight, boss?" Greg asked the cook.
"I'm fine," Tony told them all, shaking his head. "Don't you ever have memories?"
"Danny called--I forgot to tell you," Loretta said to the cook. "He's coming in tonight."
"Yeah, Danny sounds like he had an exciting day--for a writer," Celeste told Tony. "He got attacked by two dogs. Rooster killed one. He wanted a table at the usual time, but just for one. He said that Barrett wouldn't appreciate the dog story. He said, 'Tell Pop I'll see him later.'"
The "Pop" had its origins in Iowa City--the cook liked it.
Barrett was originally from England; though she'd lived in the United States for years, her English accent struck Tony Angel as sounding more and more English every time he heard it. People in America were overly impressed by English accents, the cook thought. Perhaps English accents made many Americans feel uneducated.
Tony knew what his son had meant by Barrett not appreciating the dog story. Although Danny had been bitten by dogs when he was running, Barrett was one of those animal lovers who always took the dog's side. (There were no "bad" dogs, only bad dog owners; the Vermont State Police should never shoot anyone's dog; if Danny didn't run with the squash-racquet handles, maybe the dogs wouldn't try to bite him, and so forth.) But the cook knew that his son ran with the racquet handles because he'd been bitten when he ran without them--he'd needed stitches twice but the rabies shots only once.
Tony Angel was glad that his son wasn't coming to dinner with Barrett. It bothered the cook that Daniel had ever slept with a woman almost as old as his own father! But Barrett's Englishness and her belief that there were no bad dogs bothered Tony more. Well, wasn't an unexamined love of dogs to be expected from a horse person? the cook asked himself.
Tony Angel used an old Stanley woodstove from Ireland for his pizzas; he knew how to keep the oven at six hundred degrees without making the rest of the kitchen too hot, but it had taken him two years to figure it out. He was refilling the woodbox in the Stanley when he heard Loretta unlocking the front door and inviting the first customers into the dining room.
"There was another phone call," Greg told the cook.
Tony hoped that Daniel hadn't changed his mind about coming to dinner, or that his son hadn't decided to bring Barrett with him, but the other message was from Ketchum.
The old logger had gone on and on to Greg about the miraculous invention of the fax machine. God knows for how long fax machines had been invented, the cook thought, but this was not the first he'd heard about Ketchum wanting one. Danny had been to New York and seen some rudimentary fax machine in operation in the production department of his publishing house; in Daniel's estimation, his father recalled, it had been a bulky machine that produced oily scraps of paper with hard-to-read writing, but this didn't deter Ketchum. The formerly illiterate woodsman wanted Danny and his dad to have fax machines; then Ketchum would get one, and they could all be instantly in contact with one another.
Dear God, the cook was thinking, there would be no end of faxes; I'll have to buy reams of paper. And there will be no more peaceful mornings, Tony Angel thought; he loved his morning coffee and his favorite view of the Connecticut. (Like the cook, Ketchum was an early riser.)
Tony Angel had never seen where Ketchum lived in Errol, but he'd envisioned something from the wanigan days--a trailer maybe, or several trailers. Formerly mobile homes, perhaps, but no longer mobile--or a Volkswagen bus with a woodstove inside it, and without any wheels. That Ketchum (at sixty-six) had only recently learned to read but now wanted a fax machine was unimaginable. Not that long ago, Ketchum hadn't even owned a phone!
THE COOK KNEW WHY he had cried; his "memories" had nothing to do with it. As soon as he'd thought of taking a trip with his son to see the Chengs in their Connecticut restaurant, Tony Angel had known that Daniel would never do it. The writer was a workaholic; to the cook's thinking, a kind of logorrhea had possessed his son. That Daniel was coming to dinner at Avellino alone was fine with Tony Angel, but that his son was alone (and probably would remain so) made the cook cry. If he worried about his grandson, Joe--for all the obvious dangers any eighteen-year-old needed to be lucky to escape--the cook was sorry that his son, Daniel, struck him as a terminally lonely, melancholic soul. He's even lonelier and more melancholic than I am! Tony Angel was thinking.
"Table of four," Loretta was saying to Greg, the sous chef. "One wild-mushroom pizza, one pepperoni," she told the cook.
Celeste came into the kitchen from the dining room. "Danny's here, alone," she said to Tony.
"One calamari with penne," Loretta went on, reciting. When it was busy, she just left the two cooks her orders in writing, but when there was almost no one in Avellino, Loretta seemed to enjoy the drama of an out-loud presentation.
"The table of four doesn't want any first courses?" Greg asked her.
"They all want the arugula salad with the shaved Parmesan," Loretta said. "You'll love this one." She paused for the full effect. "One chicken paillard, but hold the capers."
"Christ," Greg said. "A sauce grenobloise is all about the capers."
"Just give the bozo the red-wine reduction with rosemary--it's as good on the chicken as it is on the braised beef," Tony Angel said.
"It'll turn the chicken purple, Tony," his sous chef complained.
"You're such a purist, Greg," the cook said. "Then give the bozo the paillard with a little olive oil and lemon."
"Danny says to surprise him," Celeste told Tony. She was watching the cook closely. She'd heard him cry in his sleep, too.
"Well, that will be fun,"
the cook said. (Finally, there's a smile--albeit a small one--Celeste was thinking.)
MAY WAS A TALKATIVE PASSENGER. While Dot drove--her head nodding, but usually not in rhythm to whatever junk was playing on the radio--May read most of the road signs out loud, the way children who've only recently learned to read sometimes do.
"Bellows Falls," May had announced, as they'd passed that exit on I-91--maybe fifteen or more minutes ago. "Who would want to live in Bellows Falls?"
"You been there?" Dot asked her old friend.
"Nope. It just sounds awful," May said.
"It's beginnin' to look like suppertime, isn't it?" Dot asked.
"I could eat a little somethin'," May admitted.
"Like what?" Dot asked.
"Oh, just half a bear or a whole cow, I guess," May said, cackling. Dot cackled with her.
"Even half a cow would hit the spot," Dot more seriously proposed.
"Putney," May read out loud, as they passed the exit sign.
"What kinda name is that, do you suppose? Not Injun, from the sound of it," Dot said.
"Nope. Not Injun," May agreed. The three Brattleboro exits were coming up.
"How 'bout a pizza?" Dot said.
"BRAT-el-burrow," May enunciated with near perfection.
"Definitely not an Injun name!" Dot said, and the two old ladies cackled some more.
"There's gotta be a pizza place in Brattleboro, don'tcha think?" May asked her friend.
"Let's have a look," Dot said. She took the second Brattleboro exit, which brought her onto Main Street.
"The Book Cellar," May read out loud, as they drove slowly past the bookstore on their right.
When they got to the next traffic light, and the steep part of the hill, they could see the marquee for the Latchis Theatre. A couple of the previous year's movies were playing--a Sylvester Stallone double feature, Rocky III and First Blood.
"I saw those movies," Dot said proudly.
"You saw them with me," May reminded her.
The two ladies were easily distracted by the movie marquee at the Latchis, and Dot was driving; Dot couldn't drive and look at both sides of the street at the same time. If it hadn't been for May, her hungry passenger and compulsive sign-reader, they might have missed seeing Avellino altogether. The Avellino word was a tough one for May; she stumbled over it but managed to say, "Italian cooking."
"Where?" Dot asked; they had already driven past it.
"Back there. Park somewhere," May told her friend. "It said 'Italian'--I know it did."
They ended up in the supermarket parking lot before Dot could gather her driving wits about her. "Now we'll just have to hoof it," she said to May.
Dot didn't like to hoof it; she had a bunion that was killing her and caused her to limp, which made May recall Cookie's limp, so that Cookie had been on the bad old broads' minds lately. (Also, the Injun conversation in the car might have made them remember their long-ago time in Twisted River.)
"I would walk a mile for a pizza, or two," May told her old friend.
"One of Cookie's pizzas, anyway," Dot said, and that did it.
"Oh, weren't they good!" May exclaimed. They had waddled their way to the Latchis, on the wrong side of the street, and were nearly killed crossing Main Street in a haphazard fashion. (Maybe Milan was more forgiving to pedestrians than Brattleboro.) Both Dot and May gave the finger to the driver who'd almost hit them.
"What was it Cookie wanted to put in his pizza dough?" Dot asked May.
"Honey!" May said, and they both cackled. "But he changed his mind about it," May remembered.
"I wonder what his secret ingredient was," Dot said.
"Didn't have one, maybe," May replied, with a shrug. They had stopped in front of the big picture window at Avellino, where May struggled out loud to say the restaurant's name.
"It sure sounds like real Italian," Dot decided. The two women read the menu that was posted in the window. "Two different pizzas," Dot observed.
"I'm stickin' to the pepperoni," May told her friend. "You can die eatin' wild mushrooms."
"The thing about Cookie's crust was that it was really thin, so you could eat a lot more pizza without gettin' filled up," Dot was remembering.
Inside, a family of four was finishing their meal--Dot and May could see that the two kids had ordered pizzas. There was a good-looking man, maybe fortyish, sitting alone at a table near the swinging doors to the kitchen. He was writing in a notebook--just a lined notebook of the kind students use. The old ladies didn't recognize Danny, of course. He'd been twelve when they'd last seen him, and now he was a whole decade older than his father was when Dot and May had last seen the cook.
Danny had looked up when the old ladies came in, but he'd quickly turned his attention back to whatever he was writing. He might not even have remembered what Dot and May looked like in 1954; twenty-nine years later, Danny didn't have the slightest idea who those bad old broads were.
"Just the two of you, ladies?" Celeste asked them. (It always amused Dot and May when anyone thought of them as "ladies.")
They were given a table near the window, under the old black-and-white photograph of the long-ago logjam in Brattleboro. "They used to drive logs down the Connecticut," Dot said to May.
"This must have been a mill town, in its day," May remarked. "Sawmills, paper, maybe--textiles, too, I suppose."
"There's an insane asylum in this town, I hear," Dot told her friend. When the waitress came to pour them water, Dot asked Celeste about it. "Is the loony bin still operatin' here?"
"It's called the retreat," Celeste explained.
"That's a sneaky fuck of a name for it!" May said. She and Dot were cackling again when Celeste went to get them menus. (She'd forgotten to bring the old biddies menus when she brought them their water. Celeste was still distracted by the cook's crying.)
A young couple came in, and Dot and May observed a younger waitress--Celeste's daughter, Loretta--showing them to their table. When Celeste came back with the menus, Dot said, "We'll both have the pepperoni pizza." (She and May had already had a look at the menu in the window.)
"One each or one to share?" Celeste asked them. (Just looking at these two, Celeste knew the answer.)
"One each," May told her.
"Would you like a salad, or a first course?" Celeste asked the old ladies.
"Nope. I'm saving room for the apple pie," May answered.
Dot said: "I imagine I'll be havin' the blueberry cobbler."
They both ordered Cokes--"real ones," May emphasized to Celeste. For the drive ahead, not to mention the slew of children and grandchildren, Dot and May wanted all the caffeine and sugar they could get.
"I swear," May said to Dot, "if my kids and grandkids keep havin' more kids, you can check me into that so-called retreat."
"I'll come visit you," her friend Dot told her. "If the pizza's any good," she added.
In the kitchen at Avellino, maybe the cook had heard the old ladies cackling. "Two pepperoni pizzas," Celeste told him. "Two probable pie and cobbler customers."
"Who are they?" the cook asked her; he wasn't usually so curious. "A couple of locals?"
"A couple of bad old broads, if you ask me--locals or otherwise," Celeste said.
It was almost time for the Red Sox game on the radio. Boston was playing at home, in Fenway Park, but Greg was listening to some sentimental crap called The Oldie-But-Goldie Hour on another station. The cook hadn't really been paying attention, but the featured recording, from 1967, was Surrealistic Pillow--the old Jefferson Airplane album.
When Tony Angel recognized Grace Slick's voice singing "Somebody to Love," he spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to his sous chef.
"Time for the game, Greg," the cook said.
"Just lemme hear--" the sous chef started to say, but Tony abruptly switched stations. (Everyone had heard the impatience in his voice and seen the angry way he'd reached for the radio.)
All the cook could say for himself was: "I do
n't like that song."
With a shrug, Celeste said to them all: "Memories, I guess."
Just one thin wall and two swinging doors away were two more old memories. Unfortunately, the cook would not get rid of Dot and May as easily as he'd cut off that song on the radio.
CHAPTER 9
THE FRAGILE, UNPREDICTABLE
NATURE OF THINGS
OUT ON THE CORALVILLE STRIP, WITHIN SIGHT OF MAO'S, there'd been a pizza place called The Greek's; kalamata olives and feta cheese was the favorite topping. (As Danny's dad had said at the time, "It isn't bad, but it isn't pizza.") In downtown Iowa City was an imitation Irish pub called O'Rourke's--pool tables, green beer every St. Patrick's Day, bratwurst or meatball sandwiches. To Danny, O'Rourke's was strictly a student hangout--an unconvincing copy of those Boston pubs south of the Haymarket, in the vicinity of Hanover Street. The oldest of these was the Union Oyster House, a clam bar and restaurant, which would one day be across the street from a Holocaust commemoration site, but there was also the Bell in Hand Tavern on the corner of Union and Marshall streets--a pub where the underage Daniel Baciagalupo had gotten drunk on beer with his older Saetta and Calogero cousins.
Those taverns had not been far enough out of the North End to have escaped the cook's attention. One day he'd followed Daniel and his cousins to the Bell in Hand. When the cook saw his young son drinking a beer, he'd pulled the boy out of the tavern by his ear.
As the writer Danny Angel sat working away in his notebook at Avellino--waiting for his dad, the cook, to surprise him--he wished that his humiliation in the Bell in Hand, in front of his older cousins, had been sufficient to make him stop drinking before he really got started. But in order to stop himself, Danny had needed a greater fright and subsequent humiliation than that earlier misadventure in a Boston bar. It would come, but not before he was a father. ("If becoming a parent doesn't make you responsible," the cook had once said to his son, "nothing will.")
