In truth, by the time he was a senior in college, Joe seemed to have outgrown his recklessness. His drinking-what little he did of it-was in control. He skied fast, but he’d had no injuries. He appeared to be a good driver; for four years, he drove a car in Colorado and didn’t get a single speeding ticket. He’d even slowed down with the girls a little-or so it had seemed to his grandfather and his dad. Of course the cook and his son had never stopped worrying about the boy; throughout his college years, however, Joe had honestly given them little cause to be concerned. Even his grades had been good-better than they’d been at Northfield Mount Hermon. (Like many kids who’d gone away from home to an independent boarding school, Joe always claimed that college was easier.)
As a novelist, Danny Angel had taken pains to make the arguably suicidal character in Baby in the Road as unlike Joe as possible. The young man in the book is a sensitive, artistic type. He’s in delicate health-from the beginning, he seems fated to die-and he’s no athlete. The novel is set in Vermont, not in Colorado. Revised, the boy’s wayward mother isn’t wayward enough to be a Katie character, although, like her doomed son, she has a drinking problem. In the rewrite, the Danny character, the boy’s grieving father, doesn’t give up drinking, but he’s not an alcoholic. (He is never compromised or incapacitated by what he drinks; he’s just depressed.)
In the first few years after Joe died, the cook would occasionally try to talk his son out of drinking again. “You’ll feel better if you don’t, Daniel. In the long run, you’ll wish you hadn’t gone back to it.”
“It’s for research, Pop,” Danny would tell his dad, but that answer no longer applied-not after he’d rewritten Baby in the Road, and the book had been finished for more than five years. In the new novel that Danny was writing, the main characters weren’t drinkers; Danny’s drinking wasn’t for “research”-not that it ever was.
But the cook could see that Danny didn’t drink to excess. He had a couple of beers before dinner-he’d always liked the taste of beer-and not more than a glass or two of red wine with his meal. (Without the wine, he didn’t sleep.) It was clear that Dominic’s beloved Daniel hadn’t gone back to being the kind of drinker he used to be.
Dominic could also see for himself that his son’s sadness had endured. After Joe’s death, Ketchum observed that Danny’s sadness had a look of permanence about it. Even interviewers, or anyone meeting the author for the first time, noticed it. Not surprisingly, in many of the interviews Danny had done for various publications of Baby in the Road, the questions about the novel’s main subject-the death of a child-had been personal. In every novel, there are parts that hit uncomfortably close to home for the novelist; obviously, these are areas of emotional history that the writer would prefer not to talk about.
Wasn’t it enough that Danny had made every effort to detach himself from the personal? He’d enhanced, he’d exaggerated, he’d stretched the story to the limits of believability-he’d made the most awful things happen to characters he had imagined as completely as possible. (“So-called real people are never as complete as wholly imagined characters,” the novelist had repeatedly said.) Yet Danny Angel’s interviewers had asked him almost nothing about the story and the characters in Baby in the Road; instead they’d asked Danny how he was “dealing with” the death of his son. Had the writer’s “real-life tragedy” made him reconsider the importance of fiction-meaning the weight, the gravity, the relative value of the “merely” make-believe?
That kind of question drove Danny Angel crazy, but he expected too much from journalists; most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been “wholly imagined.” And those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice?
But couldn’t it be argued that Danny should have anticipated the personal nature of his interviewers’ questions concerning Baby in the Road? Even nonreaders had heard about the accident that killed the famous writer’s son. (To Ketchum’s relief, the cowboy seemed to have missed it.) There’d also been the predictable pieces about the calamitous lives of celebrities’ children-unfair in Joe’s case, because the accident didn’t appear to have been Joe’s fault, and he hadn’t been drinking. Yet Danny should have anticipated this, too: Before there was verification that alcohol wasn’t a factor, there would be those in the media who too quickly assumed it had been.
At first, after the accident-and again, when Baby in the Road was published-Dominic had done his best to shield his son from his fan mail. Danny had let his dad be a first reader, understanding that the cook would decide which letters he should or shouldn’t see. That was how the letter from Lady Sky was lost.
“You have some weird readers,” the cook had complained one day. “And so many of your fans address you by your first name, as if they were your friends! It would unnerve me-how you have all these people you don’t know presuming that they know you.”
“Give me an example, Pop,” Danny said.
“Well, I don’t know,” Dominic said. “I throw out more mail than I show you, you know. There was one letter last week-she might have been a stripper, for all I know. She had a stripper’s name.”
“Like what?” Danny had asked his dad.
“‘Lady Sky,’” the cook had said. “Sounds like a stripper to me.”
“I think her real name is Amy,” Danny said; he tried to remain calm.
“You know her?”
“I know only one Lady Sky.”
“I’m sorry, Daniel-I just assumed she was a wacko.”
“What did she say, Pop-do you remember?”
Naturally, the cook couldn’t remember all the details-just that the woman seemed presumptuous and deranged. She’d written some gibberish about protecting Joe from pigs; she’d said she was no longer flying, as if she’d once been able to fly.
“Did she want me to write her back?” Danny asked his dad. “Do you remember where her letter was from?”
“Well, I’m sure there was a return address-they all want you to write them back!” the cook cried.
“It’s okay, Pop-I’m not blaming you,” Danny said. “Maybe she’ll write again.” (He didn’t really think so, and his heart was aching.)
“I had no idea you wanted to hear from someone named Lady Sky, Daniel,” the cook said.
Something must have happened to Amy; Danny wondered what it could have been. You don’t jump naked out of airplanes for no reason, the writer thought.
“I was sure she was a crazy person, Daniel.” With that, the cook paused. “She said she had lost a child, too,” Dominic told his son. “I thought I would spare you those letters. There were quite a lot of them.”
“Maybe you should show me those letters, Dad,” Danny said.
After the discovery that Lady Sky had written to him, Danny received a few more letters from his fans who’d lost children, but he’d been unable to answer a single one of those letters. There were no words to say to those people. Danny knew, since he was one of them. He would wonder how Amy had managed it; in his new life, without Joe, Danny didn’t think it would be all that hard to jump naked out of an airplane.