Страница 41 из 147
“I’m going to be a writer,” Da
“If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write,” Katie Callahan said.
“What did you say?” he asked her.
“Rilke said that, fuckhead. If you want to be a fucking writer, you ought to read him,” she said.
Now she was leaving him because she’d met (in her words) “another stupid boy who thinks he should go to Vietnam -just to fucking see it!” Katie was going to get this other boy to knock her up. Then, one day, she would move on again-“until this fucking war is over.”
She would eventually run out of time; mathematically speaking, there were a limited number of would-be soldiers she could save from the war in this fashion. They called young dads like Da
“Let me see if I have this right,” were among Da
“If I stay any longer, fuckhead, the two-year-old is going to remember me,” Katie had said. (She’d actually called her own child “the two-year-old.”)
“His name’s Joe,” Da
“Put it in writing, fuckhead,” Katie had suggested; and these were her last words to her husband: “Maybe it’ll sound better in writing.”
Both Ketchum and his dad had warned him. “I think letting me cut a few fingers off your right hand would be easier, and less painful in the long run,” Ketchum had said. “How about just your fucking trigger finger? They won’t draft you, I’ll bet, if you can’t squeeze a trigger.”
Dominic had taken a dislike to Katie Callahan on the mere evidence of the first photograph Daniel showed him.
“She looks way too thin,” the cook commented, scowling at the photo. “Does she ever eat anything?” (He should talk! Da
“Actually, her eyes are even bluer,” Da
What is it about these preternaturally small women? Dominic found himself thinking, remembering his not-really-a-cousin Rosie. Had his beloved Daniel succumbed to one of those little-girl women whose petite appearance was deceiving? Even that first photograph of Katie conveyed to the cook the kind of childlike woman some men feel compelled to protect. But Katie didn’t need protection; she didn’t want it, either.
The first time they met, the cook couldn’t look at her-it was the same way he had treated (still treated) Da
I suppose I should have married some nice fat person! Daniel Baciagalupo found himself thinking, instead of working ahead on the chapter he was writing.
But the war in Vietnam would drag on, and on; Nixon would win the ’68 election by promising voters an end to the war, but the war would continue until 1975. On April 23, 1970, issuing his own executive order, President Nixon put an end to the 3-A paternity deferment for new fathers-if the child was conceived on or after that date. In the last five years of the war, another 23,763 U.S. soldiers would be killed, and Daniel Baciagalupo would finally come to realize that he should have thanked Katie Callahan for saving his life.
“So what if she was a serial baby maker for draft dodgers,” Ketchum would write to Da
But that April night in ’67, when he kept trying to write in the rain in Iowa City, Daniel Baciagalupo preferred to think that it was his two-year-old, little Joe, who’d saved him.
Probably no one could have saved Katie. Many years later, Daniel Baciagalupo would read Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, a memoir by the fiction writer Robert Stone. “Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility,” Stone would write. “Things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of us who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived.”
Well, that certainly rang true for Katie Callahan, Da
“SIT DOWN, MICHAEL, SIT DOWN-eat something!” old Polcari had kept urging Mr. Leary, but the agitated Irishman was too worked up to eat. He had a beer, and then a glass or two of red wine. Poor Mr. Leary couldn’t look at Carmella Del Popolo, Da
There was one other thing Mr. Leary had lied about to Exeter -the part about these immigrants being prone to exaggeration. Hadn’t Mr. Leary said that the Baciagalupo boy was “unlike the rest”? In the area of writerly exaggeration, Daniel Baciagalupo was a born exaggerator! And Da
How did that Joh
Oh, I never got over those blue eyes,
I see them everywhere.
More distractions, the writer thought; it was as if he were determined to physically remove himself (to detach himself) from that night in Vicino di Napoli with dear Mr. Leary.
It had taken Mr. Leary a third or fourth glass of red wine, and most of the meat loaf, before he was brave enough to take the pearl-gray envelope out of his inside jacket pocket. From across the table, Da