Страница 45 из 147
CHAPTER 6. IN MEDIAS RES
IN THEIR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON WESLEY PLACE, FOR REASONS that defied logic, the telephone was on Carmella’s side of the bed. In those years Da
Carmella had told Da
“Shouldn’t the phone be on my side of the bed?” Dominic had asked Carmella. “I mean, you don’t want to have to talk to Ketchum, and if it’s Daniel-or worse, if there’s any bad news about Daniel-”
Carmella wouldn’t let him finish. “If there’s bad news about Da
“That’s crazy, Carmella,” the cook said.
But that was the way it had worked out; the phone stayed on Carmella’s side of the bed. Whenever Ketchum called collect, Carmella always accepted the call, and she usually said, “Hello, Mr. Ketchum. When am I going to get to meet you? I would very much like to meet you one day.” (Ketchum wasn’t very talkative-not to her, anyway. She would soon pass the phone to Dominic-“Gamba,” she fondly called him.)
But that spring of ’67, when the news came about Da
That had given Carmella quite a chill; she’d been upset enough with the way things were that spring, and now Mr. Ketchum had frightened her. And Carmella wished that Da
“It’s not exactly on her, it’s under her,” the cook had commented. He meant that the money in Katie’s family was a safety net for the wild girl; she could behave in any fashion she wanted because the family money was there to catch her if she fell. Dominic felt certain, as Ketchum did, that Katie Callahan’s so-called free spirit was a fraud. Da
Katie was nothing but a renegade young woman with a money cushion under her; “a mere sexual outlaw,” Ketchum had called her. Whereas Rosie had loved both a boy and a man. She’d been trapped because she had genuinely loved the two of them-hence they’d been trapped, too. By comparison, the Callahan whore had just been fucking around; worse, with her high-minded politics, Katie thought she was above such mundanities as marriage and motherhood.
Carmella knew it pained Dominic that Da
Carmella had been the one who’d answered the phone on that early morning Da
“Secondo Angelo,” old Polcari had first named him-literally, “Second Angel.”
All of them had been careful to call him Angelo, never Angelù, and around Carmella they would shorten the nickname to just plain Secondo-though Carmella herself was so fond of Da
In restaurant language, secondo also means “second course,” so it was the name that had stuck.
But now Carmella’s Secondo Angelo was in no mood to speak to her. “I need to talk to my dad, Carmella,” he said.
(Ketchum had warned the cook that Da
On the April morning Da
“I’m sorry-I was going to tell you,” the cook started.
Carmella could hear Da
“Maybe for something like this to happen to you, so you might understand how difficult it can be with women,” Dominic said. There in the bed, Carmella punched him. The “this” referred to Katie leaving, of course-as if that relationship, which was wrongheaded from the start, was at all comparable to what had gone on with Rosie and Ketchum. And why had they lied to the boy about the bear for so long? Carmella couldn’t understand it; she certainly didn’t expect Da
She lay there listening to the cook tell his son about that night in the cookhouse kitchen, when Rosie had confessed to sleeping with Ketchum-and then Ketchum had walked through the screen door, when all of them were drunk, and Dominic had hit his old friend with the skillet. Luckily, Ketchum had been in enough fights; he never entirely believed that there was anyone alive who wouldn’t take a swing at him. The big man’s reactions were ingrained. He must have deflected the skillet with a forearm, slightly turning the weapon in Dominic’s hand, so that only the cast-iron edge of the frying pan hit him-and it hit him in the dead center of his forehead, not in the temple, where even a partially blocked blow from such a heavy implement might have killed him.
There’d been no doctor in Twisted River, and there wasn’t even a sawmill and a so-called millpond at what would become Dead Woman Dam, where there would later be an absolute moron of a doctor. Rosie had stitched up Ketchum’s forehead on one of the dining-room tables; she’d used the ultra-thin stainless-steel wire the cook kept on hand for trussing up his chickens and turkeys. The cook had sterilized the wire by boiling it first, and Ketchum had bellowed like a bull moose throughout the process. Dominic had limped around and around the table while Rosie talked to the two of them. She was so angry that she was rough with the stitches.