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Yet what had happened to the overweight Indian woman was horrendous. The retarded boy had killed her; he’d hit her with the exact same frying pan his father had used as a weapon against the bear! Young Baciagalupo’s powers of description were perhaps at their best when he rendered the reposeful posture of the naked, dead Indian woman. The thoughtful father had quickly covered her exposed crotch with a pillow-perhaps to spare his damaged son any further misunderstanding. But the retarded boy had already seen more than his limited intelligence could stand. For years, he would be haunted by the sight of the slain woman’s huge breasts-how they had lifelessly slumped into the hollows of her armpits. How did the kid keep coming up with details like those? Mr. Leary would wonder. (Mr. Leary would be haunted by the naked, dead Indian woman, too.)
But why say anything to Exeter about those questionable elements of the boy’s imagination, which had even upset Mr. Leary? Those extreme details were mere indulgences the more mature writer would one day outgrow. For example, the woman who wore a man’s wool-fla
The father with the eaten foot had confusing dreams-both of the bear and of the slain Indian woman. Given the voluptuousness of the damaged boy’s stepmother, Mr. Leary suspected the father of having a preternatural attraction to overweight women; naturally, it was entirely possible that the young writer found big women alluring. (Mr. Leary was begi
And the stepmother was Italian, thus inviting Mr. Leary’s prejudices to come into play; he looked for signs of laziness and exaggeration in the woman, finding (to his enormous satisfaction) a perfect example of the aforementioned “unrestrained appetites” Mr. Leary had long held Italian women accountable for. The woman overbathed herself.
She was so eccentrically devoted to her baths that an oversize bathtub was the centerpiece of the cold-water flat’s undersize kitchen, where four pasta pots were constantly simmering-her bathwater was heated on the gas stove. The placement of the bathtub created quite a privacy problem for the indulgent woman’s damaged stepson, who had bored a hole in his bedroom door, which opened into the kitchen.
What further damage was done to the boy by spying on his naked stepmother-well, Mr. Leary could only imagine! And, to talk about young Baciagalupo’s inventiveness with details, when the voluptuary shaved her armpits, she left a small, spade-shaped patch of hair (in one armpit) purposely unshaven, “like an elf’s meticulously trimmed goatee,” young Dan had written.
“In which armpit?” Mr. Leary had asked the begi
“The left one,” Da
“Why the left one, and not the right?” the English teacher asked.
The Baciagalupo boy looked thoughtful, as if he were trying to remember a rather complicated sequence of events. “She’s right-handed,” Da
“Those are good details, too,” Mr. Leary told him. “I think you should put those details in the story.”
“Okay, I will,” young Dan said; he liked Mr. Leary, and did his best to protect his English teacher from the torments of the other boys.
The other boys didn’t bother Da
Da
Like father, like son: The cook had kept things from his son, and Da
Despite Mr. Leary’s misgivings about the subject matter-meaning the sexual content, chiefly-the wise old owl of an Irishman never said an unpraiseworthy word to his favorite pupil. The Baciagalupo boy was going to be a writer; in Mr. Leary’s mind, there was no doubt about it.
The English teacher kept his fingers crossed about Exeter; if the boy was accepted, Mr. Leary hoped the school would be so rigorous that it might save young Baciagalupo from the more unsavory aspects of his imagination. At Exeter, maybe the mechanics of writing would be so thoroughly demanding and time-consuming that Da
Mr. Leary himself was not entirely sure what he meant by the mystifying thought that becoming a more intellectual writer might make Da
“All the shit seems to happen in mud season!” Ketchum regularly complained, in seeming refutation of the fact that the cook and his beloved cousin Rosie were married in mud season, and young Dan had been born just before it. (Of course, there was no actual mud season in Boston.)
“Da
“A what?” the fifteen-year-old asked.
“A pen name. Some writers choose their own names, instead of publishing under their given names. It’s called a nom de plume in French,” the boy’s teacher explained. Mr. Leary felt his heart rise to his throat, because young Baciagalupo suddenly looked as if he’d been slapped.
“You mean lose the Baciagalupo,” Da
“It’s just that there are easier names to say, and remember,” Mr. Leary told his favorite pupil. “I thought that, since your father changed his name-and the widow Del Popolo hasn’t become a Baciagalupo, has she?-well, I merely imagined that you might not be so terribly attached to the Baciagalupo name yourself.”