As a boy, and as a young man, Danny had always assumed that his dad and Ketchum were different, chiefly because his dad was a cook and Ketchum was a river driver-a logger, tougher than his caulk boots, an intemperate woodsman who would never back down from a fight.
But Ketchum was estranged from his children; he’d already lost them. It wasn’t necessarily true that Ketchum was braver, or more bold, than the cook. Ketchum wasn’t a father, not anymore; he didn’t have as much to lose. Danny only now understood that his dad had been doing his best to look out for him. Leaving Twisted River had been a father’s decision. And the cook and his son were both trying to look out for young Joe; their mutual fear for the boy had brought Danny and his dad closer together.
He’d felt close to his father in Iowa City, too, the writer was remembering. (Their Asian interlude, as Danny thought of Iowa that second time around.) His dad’s steadiest girlfriend those years in Iowa City had been an ER nurse at Mercy Hospital -Yi-Yiing was Chinese. She was Danny’s age-in her early thirties, almost twenty years younger than the cook-and she had a daughter, who was Joe’s age, back in Hong Kong. Her husband had left her upon the daughter’s birth-he’d wanted a son-and Yi-Yiing had trusted her mother and father to care for her child while she’d made a new life for herself in the Midwest. The nursing career had been a good choice, and so had Iowa City. The doctors at Mercy Hospital had declared that Yi-Yiing was indispensable. She had her green card and was on track to become a U.S. citizen.
Of course Yi-Yiing would hear the occasional gook word-the most common insult from a prejudiced patient in the emergency room, and from an unseen driver or passenger in a moving car. But it didn’t faze her to be mistaken for the war bride of a Vietnam vet. She had a harder, uphill task ahead of her-namely, moving her daughter and her parents to the United States -but she was well on her way to unraveling the red tape that was involved. Yi-Yiing had her own reasons for remaining undistracted from achieving her goal. (She’d been assured it would be easier to bring her family to the United States once the war in Vietnam was over; it was “only a matter of time,” a reliable authority had told her.)
What Yi-Yiing had said to Tony Angel was that it wasn’t the time for her to be “romantically involved.” Maybe this was music to his dad’s ears, Danny had thought at the time. Quite possibly, given Yi-Yiing’s heroic undertaking, the cook was a consoling and undemanding partner for her; with so much of his life lost to the past, Tony Angel wasn’t exactly seeking so-called romantic involvement, either. Moreover, that the cook’s grandson was the same age as Yi-Yiing’s daughter gave the nurse a motherly affection for young Joe.
Danny and his dad always had to think about Joe before including new women in their lives. Danny had liked Yi-Yiing-no small part of the reason being how sincerely she’d paid attention to Joe-though it was awkward that Yi-Yiing was Danny’s age, and that the writer was attracted to her.
In those three years, Danny and his dad had rented three different houses on Court Street in Iowa City -all from tenured faculty on sabbaticals. Court Street was tree-lined with large, three-story houses; it was a kind of residential faculty row. The street was also within safe walking distance of the Longfellow Elementary School, where Joe would attend second, third, and fourth grades. Court Street was somewhat removed from downtown Iowa City, and Danny never had to drive on Iowa Avenue, where he’d earlier lived with Katie-not, in any case, on his way to and from the English-Philosophy Building on the Iowa River. (The EPB, as it was called, was where Danny’s office at the Writers’ Workshop was.)
As big as the rental houses on Court Street were, Danny didn’t write at home-largely because Yi-Yiing worked irregular hours in the ER at Mercy Hospital. She often slept in the cook’s bedroom until midday, when she would come down to the kitchen and fix herself something to eat in her silk pajamas. When she wasn’t working at the hospital, Yi-Yiing lived in her slinky Hong Kong pajamas.
Danny liked walking Joe to school, and then going to write at the English-Philosophy Building. When his office door was closed, his students and the other faculty knew not to bother him. (Yi-Yiing was small of stature, short but surprisingly heavyset, with a pretty face and long, coal-black hair. She had many pairs of the silk pajamas, in a variety of vibrant colors; as Danny recalled, even her black pajamas appeared to vibrate.) This parenthetical non sequitur, long after he’d begun his morning’s writing-an alluring image of Yi-Yiing in her vibrating pajamas, asleep in his father’s bed-was a lingering distraction. Yi-Yiing and her pajamas, or their enticing presence, traveled to the English-Philosophy Building with Danny.
“I don’t know how you can write in such a sterile building,” the writer Raymond Carver said of the EPB. Ray was a colleague of Danny Angel’s at the workshop in those years.
“It’s not as… sterile as you may think,” Danny said to Ray.
Another writer colleague, John Cheever, compared the EPB to a hotel-“one catering to conventioneers”-but Danny liked his fourth-floor office there. Most mornings, the offices and classrooms of the Writers’ Workshop were deserted. No one but the workshop’s administrative assistant was ever there, and she was good about taking messages and not putting through any phone calls-not unless there was a call from young Joe or Danny’s dad.
The aesthetics of a given workplace notwithstanding, writers tend to love where they work well. For as much of the day as Joe was safe in school, Danny grew to love the EPB. The fourth floor was silent, a virtual sanctuary-provided he left by midafternoon.
Usually, writers don’t confine their writing to the good things, do they? Danny Angel was thinking, as he scribbled away in his notebook at Avellino, where Iowa City was foremost on his mind. “The Baby in the Road,” he had written-a chapter title, possibly, but there was more to it than that. He’d crossed out the The and had written, “A Baby in the Road,” but neither article pleased him-he quickly crossed out the A, too. Above where he was writing, on the same page of the notebook, was more evidence of the writer’s reluctance to use an article-“The Blue Mustang” had been revised to “Blue Mustang.” (Maybe just “Baby in the Road” was the way to go?)
To anyone seeing the forty-one-year-old writer’s expression, this exercise was both more meaningful and more painful than a mere title search. To Dot and May, the troubled-looking young author seemed strangely attractive and familiar; waiting for their food, they both watched him intently. In the absence of signs to read out loud, May was at a momentary loss for words, but Dot whispered to her friend: “Whatever he’s writin’, he’s not havin’ any fun doin’ it.”
“I could give him some fun doin’ it!” May whispered back, and both ladies commenced to cackling, in their inimitable fashion.
At this moment in time, it took a lot to distract Danny from his writing. The blue Mustang and the baby in the road had seized the writer’s attention, almost completely; that one or the other might make a good title was immaterial. Both the blue Mustang and the baby in the road were triggers to Danny’s imagination, and they meant much more to him than titles. Yet the distinctive cackles of the two old ladies caused Danny to look up from his notebook, whereupon Dot and May quickly looked away. They’d been staring at him-that much was clear to Danny, who would have sworn that he’d heard the fat women’s indelible and derisive laughter before. But where, and when?
Too long ago for Danny to remember, obviously, seized as he was by those fresher, more memorable details, the speeding blue Mustang and that helpless baby in the road. Danny was a far distance from the twelve-year-old he’d been in the cookhouse kitchen, where (and when) Dot and May’s cackling had once been as constant as punctuation. The writer returned his attention to his notebook; he was imagining Iowa City, but he was closer to that time in Twisted River than he could have known.