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Perhaps the photographs of his dead mother were sufficient to make young Dan become a writer; he had managed to take only some of them from the cookhouse in Twisted River, and he would miss the books he’d kept her photos pressed flat in-particularly, those novels that contained passages Rosie had underlined. The passages themselves were a way for the boy to better imagine his mother, together with the photos. Trying to remember those left-behind pictures was a way of imagining her, too.
Only a few of the photographs he brought to Boston were in color, and his dad had told Da
Rosie’s hair had been dark brown, almost black, but she was surprisingly fair-ski
Was it as a writer that Daniel Baciagalupo began to notice such defining details? Had the boy already discerned what could be called a pattern-in-progress in his father’s attraction, in turn, to Injun Jane and to Carmella Del Popolo-both of them big, dark-eyed women, as opposite to Rosie Calogero as the twelve-year-old could imagine? For if Rosie had truly been the love of his dad’s life, might not Dominic purposely be denying himself contact with any woman remotely like her?
In fact, Ketchum would one day accuse the cook of maintaining an u
To remember Pam, Dominic needed only to look in a mirror, where the scar on his lower lip would remain very noticeable long after the night Six-Pack attacked him. It would be a surprise to Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, that Ketchum and Six-Pack would last as a couple for very long. But they would be together for a few years longer than Dominic had been with Injun Jane-even a little longer than the cook would manage to stay with Carmella Del Popolo, Angel’s large but lovely mom.
THE FIRST MORNING father and son would wake up in Boston, it was to the tantalizing sounds of Carmella having a bath in her small kitchen. Respecting the woman’s privacy, Dominic and young Dan lay in their beds while Carmella performed her seductive-sounding ablutions; unbeknownst to them, she’d put a third and fourth pasta pot of water on the stove, and these would soon be coming to a near boil. “There’s plenty of hot water!” she called to them. “Who wants the next bath?”
Because the cook had already been thinking about how he might fit, albeit snugly, in the same big bathtub with Carmella Del Popolo, Dominic somewhat insensitively suggested that he and Daniel could share a bath-he meant the same bathwater-an idea that the twelve-year-old found repellent. “No, Dad!” the boy called, from the narrow bed in Angel’s room.
They could hear Carmella as the heavy woman rose dripping from the bathtub. “I know boys Da
Yes, young Dan thought-not fully understanding that he would soon need more privacy from his dad and Carmella. After all, Da
Still, the bedrooms were next to each other; in the North End, there was nothing they could afford that was at all comparable to the spaciousness of the second floor of the cookhouse in Twisted River. And Da
The cook and Carmella, with young Dan increasingly aware of himself as the surrogate Angel, had an acceptable living arrangement, but it was not one that would last. It would soon be time for the teenager to create a little distance between himself and his dad-and, as he grew older, Da
If he had once suffered from a presexual state of arousal, first inspired by Jane and then by Six-Pack Pam, the teenager could find no relief from his deepening desire for Carmella Del Popolo-his dad’s “Injun replacement,” as Ketchum called her. Da
“You need to get away,” Ketchum would write to young Dan, although the boy truly liked his life in the North End. In fact, he loved it, especially in comparison to the life he’d had in Twisted River -at the Paris Manufacturing Company School, in particular.
The Michelangelo School thought little of the education Da
Several of Mr. Leary’s former pupils had gone on to attend Boston Latin. A few had attended Roxbury Latin-in the old Irishman’s opinion, a somewhat snooty Anglo school. Two boys Mr. Leary had taught had gone to Milton, and one to Andover, but no one from Mr. Leary’s English classes had ever gone to Exeter; it was farther afield from Boston than those other good schools, and Mr. Leary knew it was a very good school. Might it have been a feather in Mr. Leary’s cap if Daniel Baciagalupo were accepted at Exeter?