“I told you,” Ketchum would say, to both Danny and his dad. “ New Hampshire is next to Vermont -that’s too close for comfort, in my opinion. I think it’s a terrific idea for you both to go to Iowa. I’m sure little Joe will love it out there, too. It’s another Injun name, Iowa -isn’t it? Boy, those Injuns were once all over, weren’t they? And just look what this country did to them! It kind of makes you wonder about our country’s intentions, doesn’t it? Vietnam wasn’t the first thing that made us look bad. And where this asshole country is headed-well, maybe those Injuns lying underground in Iowa, and all over, might just say that we’re one day going to get what’s coming to us.”
HOW WOULD ONE describe Ketchum’s politics? the cook was thinking, as he limped down Brattleboro ’s Main Street, making his slow way back to his restaurant from The Book Cellar.
LIVE FREE OR DIE
That’s what it said on the New Hampshire license plates; Ketchum was clearly a live-free-or-die man, and he’d always believed that the country was going to Hell, but Tony Angel was wondering if his old friend had ever even voted. The woodsman was disinclined to trust any government, or anyone who took part in it. In Ketchum’s opinion, the only justification for having laws-for abiding by any rules, really-was that the assholes outnumbered the sensible fellas. (And of course the laws didn’t apply to Ketchum; he’d lived without rules, except those of his own making.)
The cook stopped walking and looked admiringly down the hill at his very own restaurant-the one he’d always wanted.
AVELLINO
ITALIAN COOKING
Avellino was that other hill town (also a province) in the vicinity of Naples; it had always been the second word Nunzi murmured in her sleep. And the sign said COOKING, not CUISINE-for the same reason that Tony Angel thought of himself and called himself a cook, not a chef. He would always be just a cook, Tony thought; he believed he wasn’t good enough to be a chef. Deep in his bones, the former Dominic Baciagalupo-how he missed the Dominic!-was just a mill-town, logging-camp kind of cook.
Tony Molinari was a chef, the cook was thinking-Paul Polcari, too. Tony Angel had learned a lot from those two-more than Nunzi ever could have taught him-but the cook had also learned he would never be as good as Molinari or Paul.
“You have no feeling for fish, Gamba,” Molinari had told him as sympathetically as possible. It was true. There was only one fish dish on the menu at Avellino, and sometimes the only seafood of the day was a pasta dish-if the cook could get calamari. (He stewed it slowly for a long time, in a spicy marinara sauce with black olives and pine nuts.) But in Brattleboro, the calamari he could get generally came frozen, which was all right, and the most reliable fresh fish was sword-fish, which Tony Molinari had taught him to prepare with lemon and garlic and olive oil-either under the broiler or on a grill-with fresh rosemary, if the cook could get it, or with dried oregano.
He didn’t do dolci. It was Paul Polcari who’d gently made the point that the cook had no feeling for desserts, either-more to the point, Italian desserts, Tony Angel was thinking. What he did do well was the regular mill-town and logging-camp fare-pies and cobblers. (In Vermont, you couldn’t go wrong with blueberries and apples.) At Avellino, the cook served a fruit-and-cheese course, too; many of his regular customers preferred that to dessert.
The admiration of his very own restaurant had distracted Tony Angel from his thoughts about Ketchum’s politics, which he returned to while he made his gimpy way downhill to Avellino. When it came to what other people called progress-most engines, and machinery of all sorts-Ketchum was a bit of a Luddite. Not only did he miss the river drives; he claimed he’d liked logging better before there were chainsaws! (But Ketchum was overly fond of guns, the cook was thinking-guns were in a category of machinery the old woodsman would approve of.)
Neither a liberal nor a conservative, Ketchum could best be described as a libertarian-well, the logger was a libertine, too, Tony Angel considered, and (in the woodsman’s younger days) something of a rake and a profligate. Why was it that every time he thought of Ketchum, the cook couldn’t help thinking of the logger in sexual terms? (The former Dominic Baciagalupo knew why that was, of course; it just always depressed him when his thoughts about Ketchum went there.)
Ketchum had been furious when father and son and grandson all came back to Vermont from Iowa, but the Writers’ Workshop had been generous to let Danny teach there for as long as they did. They’d offered him only a two-year contract; Danny had asked to stay a third year, and they let him, but in the summer of ’75, when Joe was ten, the family returned to Windham County. Danny loved his old farmhouse in Putney. His father would have nothing to do with living there. The Vietnam War was over; Windham College ’s death throes were more apparent. Besides, Tony Angel had never liked Putney.
While neither Danny’s second nor third novel would make him any money, the cook had increased his savings in Iowa -enough to buy the old storefront space with the apartment above it on Brattleboro ’s Main Street. That was the year Avellino was born-when Danny was commuting to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was the closest college-teaching job that the writer could find, but the distinguished and somewhat staid women’s college was well over an hour’s drive (nearly two) from Putney-a long commute in the winter months, if it was snowing. Still, living in Putney mattered to Danny. No small part of it was his high opinion of the Grammar School-within walking distance of home-where Joe would finish the eighth grade before going off to Northfield Mount Hermon.
The cook was shaking his head as he limped into his restaurant, because he was thinking that Daniel truly must love living in the country. Tony Angel didn’t; the North End had made a city man out of him, or at least he was a neighborhood kind of guy. But not Daniel. He’d made the commute to that women’s college for three years, before The Kennedy Fathers was published in ’78; the novel’s success had freed him from ever having to teach again.
Of course there’d been more money suddenly, and the cook had worried-he still worried-about what effect it might have on young Joe. Daniel was old enough (thirty-six) when the bestseller business found him to not be affected by either the fame or the good fortune. But when Joe was only thirteen, the boy woke up one morning with a famous father. Couldn’t this have made an unwelcome mark on any kid that age? And then there were the women Daniel went through-both before and after he was famous.
The writer had been living with one of his former Windham College students when he, Tony, and Joe moved to Iowa City. The girl with a boy’s name-“It’s Franky, with a y,” she liked to say with a pout-hadn’t made the move with them.
Thank God for that, the cook thought at the time. Franky was a feral-looking little thing, a virtual wild animal.
“She wasn’t my student when I began to sleep with her,” Danny had argued with his dad. No, but Franky had been one of his writing students only a year or two before; she was one of many Windham College students who never seemed to leave Putney. They went to Windham, they graduated, or they quit school but continued to hang around-they wouldn’t leave.
The girl had dropped in on her former teacher one day, and she’d simply stayed.
“What does Franky do all day?” his dad had asked Danny.