Danny could run five or six miles at a pace of seven minutes per mile, usually running the last mile in closer to six minutes. At forty-one, he’d had no injuries and was still slight of build; at five feet seven, he weighed only 145 pounds. (His dad was a little smaller, and perhaps the limp made him seem shorter than he was.) Because of the occasional bad dog on the back road to Westminster West, Danny ran with a couple of sawed-off squash racquets-just the handles. If a dog attacked him when he was running, Danny would stick one of the racquet handles in the dog’s face-until the dog chomped on it. Then, with the other sawed-off handle, he would hit the dog-usually on the bridge of the nose.
Danny didn’t play squash. His friend in Westminster West was the squash player. When Armando DeSimone broke one of his racquets, he gave it to Danny, who sawed off the racquet head and kept the handle. Armando had grown up in the North End about a decade before Danny and his dad moved there; like the cook, Armando still drove to his beloved Boston, periodically, to shop. Armando and Danny enjoyed cooking for each other. They’d been colleagues in the English department at Windham, and when the college folded, Armando took a job teaching at the Putney School. His wife, Mary, had been Joe’s English and history teacher at the Grammar School.
When Danny Angel became rich and famous, he lost a few of the old friends he’d had, but not the DeSimones. Armando had read all but the first of Danny Angel’s novels in manuscript. For five out of six novels, he’d been Danny’s earliest reader. You don’t lose a friend like that.
Armando had built a squash court in an old barn on his Westminster West property; he talked about building a swimming pool next, but in the meantime he and Mary swam in Danny’s pool. Nearly every afternoon, when it wasn’t raining, the writer would run to the DeSimones’ house in Westminster West; then Armando and Mary would drive Danny back to Putney, and they’d all swim in the pool. Danny would make drinks for them and serve the drinks at the pool after they swam.
Danny had stopped drinking sixteen years ago-long enough so that he had no problem having alcohol in his house, or fixing drinks for his friends. And he wouldn’t dream of having a dinner party and not serving wine, though he could remember that when he’d first stopped drinking, he was unable to be around people who were drinking anything alcoholic. At the time, in Iowa City, that had been a problem.
As for the writer’s second life in Iowa City, with his dad and little Joe-well, that had been a peaceful interlude, for the most part, except for the unwelcome reminders of Danny’s earlier time in that town with Katie. In retrospect, Danny thought, those last three years in Iowa -in the early seventies, when Joe had been in the second, third, and fourth grades, and the greatest danger the boy faced was what might happen to him on his bicycle-seemed almost blissful. Iowa City had been safe in those years.
Joe was seven when he’d gone back to Iowa with his dad and grandfather, and was still only ten when they’d returned to Vermont. Maybe those ages were the safest ages, the writer was imagining as he ran; possibly, Iowa City had had nothing to do with it.
CHILDHOOD, AND HOW IT FORMS YOU-moreover, how your child hood is relived in your life as an adult-that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed as he ran. From the age of twelve, he had become afraid for his father; the cook was still a hunted man. Like his dad, but for different reasons, Danny had been a young father-in reality, he’d also been a single parent (even before Katie left him). Now, at forty-one, Danny was more afraid for young Joe than he was for his dad.
Maybe it was more than the Katie Callahan gene that put Joe at risk; nor did Danny necessarily believe that the source of the wildness in his son was the boy’s free-spirited grandmother, that daring woman who’d courted disaster on the late-winter ice of Twisted River. No, when Danny looked at young Joe at eighteen, it was himself at that dangerous age he saw. From all they’d read into (and had misread in) Danny Angel’s novels, the cook and Ketchum couldn’t have fathomed the perilous configuration of the various bullets Danny had dodged-not only in his life with Katie, but long before her.
It hadn’t been Josie DiMattia who’d sexually initiated Danny at the age of fifteen, before he went off to Exeter; furthermore, Carmella may have caught them at it, but Josie wasn’t the one who got pregnant. Ketchum had indeed driven Danny to that orphanage with the obliging midwife in Maine, but with the oldest DiMattia girl, Teresa. (Perhaps Teresa had given so many condoms to her younger sisters that she’d forgotten to save some for herself.) And neither Teresa nor Danny’s equally older cousin Elena Calogero had provided Danny with his first sexual experience-though the boy was much more attracted to those older girls than he was to any girl his own age, including Josie, who’d been only a little older. There’d also been an older Saetta cousin, Giuseppina, who’d seduced young Dan, but Giuseppina wasn’t his first seducer.
No, indeed-that instructive and most formative experience had been with the boy’s aunt Filomena, his mother’s youngest sister, when Danny had been only fourteen. Had Filomena been in her late twenties, or might she already have turned thirty when the assignations with her young nephew began? Danny was wondering as he approached the final two miles of his run.
It was still May; the blackflies were bad, but not at the pace he was running, which he began to pick up. As he ran, he could hear his heart and his own breathing, though these elevated functions didn’t seem to Danny as loud or urgent as the beating of his heart or his gasps for breath whenever the boy had been with his insane aunt Filomena. What had she been thinking? It was Danny’s dad she’d adored, and the cook wouldn’t look at her. Had the way her nephew doted on her-Danny couldn’t take his eyes off her-seemed a sufficient consolation prize to Filomena?
She’d been only the second woman in the Saetta and Calogero clans to attend college, but Filomena had shared another distinction with her older sister Rosie-namely, a certain lawlessness with men. Filomena might have been only a preteen-at most, thirteen or fourteen-when Rosie had been sent away to the north country. She’d loved Rosie, and had looked up to her-only to see her disgraced, and displayed as a bad example to the younger girls in the family. Filomena had been sent to Sacred Heart, an all-girls’ Catholic school near the Paul Revere House on North Square. She’d been kept as safe from boys as was humanly and spiritually possible.
As Danny Angel picked up the pace in his long run, he considered that this might have been why his aunt Filomena had been more interested in him, a boy, than she appeared to be interested in men. (Her sacred sister’s widower excluded-yet Filomena must have known that the cook was a closed door to her, an unfulfilled fantasy, whereas Danny, who had not yet started to shave, had his father’s long eyelashes and his mother’s fair, almost fragile skin.) And it must have made an impression on Filomena that, at fourteen, the boy worshipped his small, pretty aunt. According to Danny’s dad, Filomena’s eyes weren’t the same lethal blue as Rosie’s, but his aunt’s eyes, and all the rest of her, were dangerous enough to do Danny some long-lasting harm. For one thing, Filomena managed to make all girls Danny’s age uninteresting to him-that is, until he met Katie.