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Ketchum’s very first typed letter to young Dan and his dad went on to say that the cowboy had let slip “an ominous insinuation.” This was nothing new-Constable Carl was ominous, and he was forever insinuating, both Dominic and Da
KETCHUM’S LONG-AGO ADVICE TO DANNY-namely, if the boy wanted to be a writer, he shouldn’t expose himself to too much Catholic thinking-may have been a misunderstanding on Ketchum’s part. The Michelangelo School -Da
But young Dan was not struck (or even remotely influenced) by what was Catholic about the Mickey; what he had noticed about the North End, from the start, was what was Italian about it. The Michelangelo School Center had been a frequent site of the mass meetings where Italian immigrants gathered for Americanization. The overcrowded, cold-water tenement buildings, where so many of Da
The cook and his son were not treated as strangers-not for long. Too many relatives wanted to take them in. There were countless Calogeros, ceaseless Saettas; cousins, and not-really-cousins, called the Baciagalupos “family.” But Dominic and young Dan were unused to large families-not to mention extended ones. Hadn’t being standoffish helped them to survive in Coos County? The Italians didn’t understand “standoffish;” either they gave you un abbràccio (“an embrace”) or you were in for a fight.
The elders still gathered on street corners and in the parks, where one heard not only the dialects of Naples and Sicily, but of Abruzzi and Calabria as well. In the warm weather, both the young and the old lived outdoors, in the narrow streets. Many of these immigrants had come to America at the turn of the century-not only from Naples and Palermo, but also from i
Well, to be fair, perhaps Da
Despite Ketchum’s likely misunderstanding that the Michelangelo was a Catholic school, it had long seemed unfair to Da
The cook had not taken kindly to what he called Ketchum’s “interference” in Daniel’s secondary-school education, though young Dan had argued with his father on that point; illogically, Dominic didn’t blame the boy’s seventh-and eighth-grade English teacher at the Mickey, Mr. Leary, who’d had far more to do with Da
For that matter, the cook should have blamed himself-for when Dominic learned that Exeter (in those days) was an all-boys’ school, he was suddenly persuaded to allow his beloved Daniel to leave home in the fall of 1957, when the boy was only fifteen. Dominic would be heartbroken by how much he missed his son, but the cook could sleep at night, secure in the knowledge (or, as Ketchum would say, “the illusion”) that his boy was safe from girls. Dominic let Daniel go to Exeter because he wanted to keep his son away from girls “for as long as possible,” as he wrote to Ketchum.
“Well, that’s your problem, Cookie,” his old friend wrote back.
Indeed, it was. It hadn’t been such an apparent problem when they’d first come to the North End-when young Dan was only twelve, and he appeared to take no notice of girls-but the cook saw how the girls already noticed his son. Among those cousins and not-really-cousins in the Saetta and Calogero clans, there would soon be some kissing cousins among them, the cook could easily imagine-not to mention all the other girls the boy would meet, for the North End was a neighborhood, where you met people like crazy. The cook and his twelve-year-old had never lived in a neighborhood before.
On that April Sunday in ’54, father and son had had some difficulty finding the North End, and-even back then-it was easier to walk in the North End than it was to drive. (Both driving and parking the Pontiac Chieftain in that neighborhood had been a task-certainly not equal to transporting Injun Jane’s body from the cookhouse to Constable Carl’s kitchen, but a task nonetheless.) When they wove their way, on foot, to Hanover Street -passing once within view of the gold dome of the Sumner Tu
It was late afternoon-it had been a long drive from northern New Hampshire -but it was a warm, su
Here, the sidewalks teemed with families; people were actually talking-some of them shouting-to one another. (There-at Dead Woman Dam and in Twisted River, on the morning they left-they’d seen only the slain Indian dishwasher, the drowned boy, and Ketchum.) Here, from the moment they’d parked the Pontiac and started walking, Da