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The writer had explained to his dad that this was not the way the movie business worked; generally speaking, the rights to make a film from a novel were sold before a screenwriter was even attached to the project. By demanding to see a finished screenplay before he would consider selling the rights to his novel, Da
“I guess Da
But the logger and the author’s dad had to be careful what they said about The Ke
It was only natural, one of Daniel’s publishers had told the cook-she was one of the foreign ones, one of the older women the writer had slept with-that whatever novel Da
It was simply stupid, that title-The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt, Daniel had called it. “Constipated Christ!” Ketchum had shouted at the bestselling author. “Couldn’t you have called it one thing or the other?”
In interviews, Da
“Whatever you call them, they look like someone smashed a fly over the comma,” Ketchum said to Da
“They’re called semicolons, Ketchum,” the writer said.
“I don’t care what they’re called, Da
But of course what really pissed off Ketchum and the cook about Da
All Tony Angel could say about it to Ketchum was: “That Callahan cunt broke my son’s heart and abandoned my grandson.” (It was not a good time, Ketchum knew, to point out to his old friend that she’d also kept his son out of the war and had given him the grandson.)
Not to mention what The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt was about, the cook was thinking, as he looked with suspicion at the novel on his kitchen bookshelf. It’s another North End story, but this time the boy who is coming of age is sexually initiated by one of his aunts-not an older cousin-and the maiden aunt and spinster is a dead ringer for Rosie’s youngest sister, the unfortunate Filomena Calogero!
Surely this hadn’t happened! the cook hoped, but had Daniel once wished that it had-or had it almost happened? Once again (as in any Da
Critics also made the point that “the perhaps overrated writer” was “repeating himself;” Daniel had been thirty-nine when his fifth novel was published in 1981, and all the criticism must have stung him, though you wouldn’t know it. If the cousin in Kissing Kin tells the boy she’s breaking up with that she always wanted to sleep with his father instead, in the novel about the neurotic aunt, she tells the boy that she imagines she’s having sex with his father whenever she has sex with the son! (What manifestation of self-torture is this? the cook had wondered, when he’d first read The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt.)
Maybe it did happen, the man who missed the Dominic in himself now imagined. He’d always thought that Rosie’s sister Filomena was completely crazy. He couldn’t look at her without feeling she was a grotesque mask of Rosie-“a Rosie imposter,” he’d once described her to Ketchum. But Daniel had seemed improbably infatuated with Filomena; the boy couldn’t stop himself from staring at her, and it was not as an aunt that he appeared to be regarding her. Had the flighty Filomena, who was still miserable and unmarried (or so the cook assumed), actually accepted or even encouraged her smitten young nephew’s adoration?
“Why don’t you just ask Da
There was one part of The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt that both Tony Angel and Ketchum had loved: the wedding at the end. The boy has grown up and he’s marrying his college sweetheart-an indifferent bride, if you ever met one, and closer to a real-life Katie character than Caitlin in The Ke
THERE WAS ONE BOOK Da
East of Bangor was set in an orphanage in Maine in the 1960s-when abortion was still illegal. Virtually the same damn boy from those earlier Da
There’s an old midwife in the Maine orphanage who performs abortions-a deeply sympathetic woman who struck the cook as being modeled on the unlikely fusion of sweet, gentle Paul Polcari (“the fucking pacifist!” as Ketchum insisted on calling him) and Injun Jane.
The first cousin who goes off to Maine has the baby and leaves it behind; she is so devastated by having a child and not knowing what has become of it that she tells the other pregnant cousin not to do what she did. The second pregnant cousin also goes to Maine -to the very same orphanage, but to have an abortion. The problem is that the old midwife might not live long enough to perform the procedure. If the young midwife-in-training ends up doing the D & C, the cousin might suffer the consequences. The young midwife doesn’t know enough about what she’s doing.
Both Ketchum and the cook were hoping that the novel was going to turn out well, and that nothing too bad would happen to the second pregnant cousin. But, knowing Da