It was warmer under the covers, from where Danny heard the oven doors open and the baking pans and muffin tins slide in; then he heard the oven doors close. The unusual sound, which made the boy open his eyes and sit up in bed, was his father struggling to lift Ketchum-holding the big man under both arms while he dragged him to the folding cot. Danny hadn’t known that his dad was strong enough to lift Ketchum; the twelve-year-old crept quietly down the stairs and watched his father settle Ketchum on the cot, where the cook covered the logger with one of the unzipped sleeping bags, as if the opened bag were a blanket.
Dominic Baciagalupo was putting the potatoes on the griddle when Ketchum spoke to him. “There was no way I could let you see her, Cookie-it wouldn’t have been right.”
“I understand,” the cook said.
On the stairs, Danny closed his eyes again, seeing the story, which he knew by heart-Ketchum, taking small steps on the logs, drunk, while he reached into the pool created by the spillway. “Don’t come out here, Cookie!” Ketchum had called ashore. “Don’t you try walking on the logs-or on the dam, either!”
Dominic had watched Ketchum carry his dead wife along the edge of the containment boom. “Get away from me, Cookie!” Ketchum had called, as he came across the logs. “You can’t see her anymore-she’s not the same as she was!”
The cook, who was also drunk, had taken the blanket from the back of Ketchum’s truck. But Ketchum would not come ashore with the body; even drunk, he had kept walking on the logs with small, rapid steps. “Spread the blanket in the back of the truck, Cookie-then walk away!” When Ketchum came ashore, Dominic was standing at a triangular point-equidistant from the riverbank and Ketchum’s truck. “Just stand your ground, Cookie-till I cover her,” Ketchum had said.
Danny wondered if that was the source of his father’s frequent admonition: “Stand your ground, Daniel-just don’t get killed.” Maybe it had come from Ketchum, who had gently placed the cook’s dead wife in the back of his truck, covering her with the blanket. Dominic had kept his distance.
“Didn’t you want to see her?” Danny had asked his dad, too many times.
“I trust Ketchum,” his father had answered. “If anything ever happens to me, Daniel, you trust him, too.”
Danny realized that he must have crept back upstairs to his bedroom, and fallen asleep, when he smelled the lamb hash in addition to all the baking; he’d not been aware of his dad opening the difficult outer door to the cookhouse kitchen and getting the ground lamb from the cooler. The boy lay in his bed with his eyes still closed, savoring all the smells. He wanted to ask Ketchum if his mom had been faceup in the water when he’d first spotted her, or if he’d found her in the spillway facedown.
Danny got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen; only then did he realize that his father had found the time to come upstairs and get dressed, probably after Ketchum had passed out on the cot. Dan watched his dad working at the stove; when the cook was concentrating on three or four tasks that were all in close proximity to one another, his limp was almost undetectable. At such moments, Danny could imagine his father at the age of twelve-before the ankle accident. At twelve, Danny Baciagalupo was a lonely kid; he had no friends. He often wished that he could have known his dad when they were both twelve-year-olds.
WHEN YOU’RE TWELVE, four years seems like a long time. Annunziata Saetta knew that it wouldn’t take her little Dom’s ankle four years to heal; Nunzi’s beloved Kiss of the Wolf was off the crutches in four months, and he was reading as well as any fifteen-year-old by the time he was only thirteen. The homeschooling worked. In the first place, Annunziata was an elementary-school teacher; she knew how much of the school day was wasted on discipline, recess, and snacks. The boy did his homework, and double-checked it, during what amounted to Nunzi’s school day; Dominic had time for lots of extra reading, and he kept a journal of the recipes he was learning, too.
The boy’s cooking skills were more slowly acquired, and-after the accident-Annunziata made her own child-labor laws. She would not permit young Dominic to go off to work at a breakfast place in Berlin until the boy really knew his way around a kitchen, and he had to wait until he’d turned sixteen; in those four years, Dom became an extremely well-read sixteen-year-old, and an accomplished cook, who was less experienced at shaving than he was at walking with a limp.
It was 1940 when Dominic Baciagalupo met Danny’s mom. She was a twenty-three-year-old teaching in the same elementary school as Annunziata Saetta; in fact, the cook’s mother introduced her sixteen-year-old son to the new teacher.
Nunzi had no choice in the matter. Her cousin Maria, another Saetta, had married a Calogero-a common Sicilian surname. “After some Greek saint who died there-the name has something to do with children in general, I think, or maybe orphans in particular,” Nunzi had explained to Dominic. She pronounced the name cah-LOH-ger-roh. It was used as a first name, too, his mother explained-“frequently for bastards.”
At sixteen, Dominic was sensitive to the subject of illegitimacy-not that Annunziata wasn’t. Her cousin had sent her pregnant daughter away to the wilds of New Hampshire, bemoaning the fact that the daughter was the first woman in the Calogero family to have graduated from college. “It was only a teachers’ college, and a lot of good it did her-she still got knocked up!” the poor girl’s mother told Nunzi, who repeated this insensitivity to Dom. The boy understood without further detail that the pregnant twenty-three-year-old was being sent to them because Annunziata and her bastard were considered in the same boat. Her name was Rosina, but-given Nunzi’s fondness for abbreviations-the banished girl was already a Rosie before she made the trip from Boston to Berlin.
As was often the way “back then”-not only in the North End, and by no means limited to Italian or Catholic families-the Saettas and the Calogeros were sending one family scandal to live with another. Thus Annunziata was given a reason to resent her Boston relatives twice. “Let this be a lesson to you, Dom,” the teenager’s mother told him. “We are not going to judge poor Rosie for her unfortunate condition-we are going to love her, like nothing was the matter.”
While Annunziata should be commended for her spirit of forgiveness-especially in 1940, when unwed mothers could generally be counted among America ’s most unforgiven souls-it was both reckless and unnecessary to tell her sixteen-year-old son that he was going to love his second cousin “like nothing was the matter.”
“Why is she my second cousin?” the boy asked his mom.
“Maybe that’s not what she is-maybe she’s called your cousin once-removed, or something,” Nunzi said. When Dominic looked confused, his mother said: “Whatever she’s called, she’s not really your cousin-not a first cousin, anyway.”
This information (or misinformation) posed an unknown danger to a crippled sixteen-year-old boy. His accident, his rehabilitation, his homeschooling, not to mention his reinvention as a cook-all these-had deprived him of friends his own age. And “little” Dom had a fulltime job; he already saw himself as a young man. Now Nunzi had told him that the twenty-three-year-old Rosie Calogero was “not really” his cousin.
As for Rosie, when she arrived, she was not yet “showing;” that she soon would be posed another problem.
Rosie had a B.S. in education from the teachers’ college; at that time, frankly, she was overqualified to teach at a Berlin elementary school. But when the young woman started to look pregnant, she would need to temporarily quit her job. “Or else we’ll have to come up with a husband for you, either real or imaginary,” Annunziata told her. Rosie was certainly pretty enough to find a husband, a real one-Dominic thought she was absolutely beautiful-but the poor girl wasn’t about to sally forth on the requisite social adventures necessary for meeting available young men, not when she was expecting!