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The cook really liked Brattleboro, and having his own restaurant. He had hated Vermont those first few years-better said, it was Putney he’d hated. Putney had an alternative style about it. (“Putney is an alternative to a town,” the cook now liked to say to people.)
Tony had missed the North End-“something wicked,” as Ketchum would say-and Putney was full of self-advertising hippies and other dropouts. There was even a commune a few miles out of town; the name of it had the word clover in it, but Tony couldn’t remember what the rest of it was. He believed it was a women-only commune, which led the cook to suspect they were all lesbians.
And the butcher in the Putney Food Co-op kept cutting herself, or himself; cutting yourself wasn’t what a butcher was supposed to do, and Tony thought the butcher’s sex was “indeterminable.”
“For God’s sake, Dad, the butcher is clearly a woman,” Da
“You say she is, but have you taken all her clothes off-just to be sure?” his dad asked him.
Yet Tony Angel had opened his own pizza place in Putney, and despite the cook’s constant complaints about Windham College-it didn’t look like a “real” college to him (never mind that he’d not been to college), and all the college kids were “assholes”-the pizza place did very well, largely because of the Windham students.
“Constipated Christ, don’t call it Angel’s Pizza-or anything with the Angel name in it,” Ketchum had told the cook. In retrospect, Ketchum had grown increasingly uncomfortable with Da
The cook often dreamed of that asshole Ge
“And don’t get cute and call the pizza place Vicinity of Naples,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I know the cowboy doesn’t speak Italian, but any fool might one day figure out that Vicino di Napoli, or however the fuck you say it, means ‘in the Vicinity of Naples.’”
So the cook had called his Putney pizza place Benevento; it was always the first of the two towns or provinces A
“Shit, it sure sounds Italian-I’ll give you that, Cookie,” Ketchum had said.
The Putney pizza place had been right on Route 5, just before the fork in the center of town, where Route 5 continued north, past the paper mill and a tourist trap called Basketville. Windham College was a little farther north, up Route 5. The left-hand fork, where the Putney General Store was-and the Putney Food Co-op, with the self-lacerating butcher of “indeterminable” sex-went off in the direction of Westminster West. Out that way was the Putney School-a prep school Da
He’d sent Joe there, and the boy had done well enough to get into Northfield Mount Hermon-a prep school Da
In his Brattleboro apartment, the cook had a guest bedroom that was always ready for his grandson. Tony had torn out the kitchen in that apartment, but he’d kept the plumbing intact; he had built quite a spacious bathroom, which overlooked the Co
While there were these little details of a recognizable kind in Da
“Where is that boy hiding himself?” Ketchum had asked the cook, because even in Da
There was a character based on Katie in The Ke
“She’s way too nice,” Tony Angel told his old friend.
“I’ll say she is!” Ketchum agreed. “You even end up liking her!”
All her husbands end up liking Caitlin, too-or they can’t get over her, if that amounts to the same thing. And all those babies who are born and get abandoned by their mother-well, we never find out what they think of their mother. The novel concludes when President Nixon puts an end to the 3-A deferment, while the war will drag on for five more years, and the Caitlin character just kind of disappears; she is a lost soul in the last chapter of The Ke
Ketchum and the cook knew very well that Katie had not once called Daniel and asked to speak to Joe; it seemed that she simply hadn’t cared enough about them to even inquire how they were doing, though Ketchum always said that Da