“You gotta sit down, Carmella,” old Polcari was saying, as he retreated toward the kitchen, where the others were hiding. “This is that cook and his son, from up-a north-you know, Angelù’s buddies.”
The woman, who was already radiant, brightened even more. “You are Dominic?” she cried, pressing the cook’s temples with her palms. By the time she turned to Danny, which she did quickly, Giusé Polcari had disappeared with the other cowards. “And you must be Danny!” Carmella said with delight. She hugged him, hard-not as hard as Jane had hugged him, at times, but hard enough to make young Dan think of Jane again.
Dominic only now realized why there’d been so little money in Angel’s wallet, and why they’d found next to nothing among the dead boy’s few things. Angel had been sending his earnings to his mother. The boy had begged rides to the post office with Injun Jane; he’d told Jane that the postage to Canada was complicated, but he’d been buying money orders for his mom. He’d clearly been faithful about writing her, too, for she knew how the cook and his son had befriended her boy. All at once, she asked about Ketchum.
“Is Mr. Ketchum with you?” Carmella said to Danny, the boy’s face held warmly in her hands. (Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say-as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.) But it was then that Carmella seemed to notice there was no one else in the dining room, and no one visible in the kitchen; the poor woman took this to mean that they intended to surprise her. Maybe her Angelù had made an unannounced visit to see her? Were the others hiding her dearest one in the kitchen, all of them managing to keep deathly quiet? “An-geh-LOO!” Carmella called. “Are you and Mr. Ketchum here, too? An-geh-LOO?”
Years later, when he’d grown accustomed to being a writer, Daniel Baciagalupo would think it was only natural, what happened then, back in the kitchen. They were not cowards; they were just people who loved Carmella Del Popolo, and they couldn’t bear to see her hurt. But, at the time, young Dan had been shocked. It was Paul Polcari, the pizza chef, who started it. “An-geh-LOO!” he wailed.
“No! No! No!” his elderly father sang.
“Angelù, Angelù,” Tony Molinari called, more softly.
The young women and the kid about Angel’s age were crooning the dead boy’s name, too. This chorus from the kitchen was not what Carmella had hoped to hear; they made such a dismal howl that the poor woman looked to Dominic for some explanation, seeing only the sorrow and panic in his face. Danny couldn’t look at Angel’s mom-it would have been like looking at Injun Jane a half-second before the skillet struck her.
A chair had been pulled out from the table nearest them-old Polcari’s departing gesture, even before he had bid Carmella to sit down-and Carmella not so much sat in the chair as she collapsed into it, the olive-brown color abandoning her face. She had suddenly seen her son’s wallet in young Dan’s small hands, but when she’d reached and felt how wet and cold it was, she reeled backward and half fell into the chair. The cook was quick to hold her there, kneeling beside her with his arm around her shoulders, and Danny instinctively knelt at her feet.
She wore a silky black skirt and a pretty white blouse-the blouse would soon be spotted with her tears-and when she looked into Danny’s dark eyes, she must have seen her son as he’d once looked to her, because she pulled the boy’s head into her lap and held him there as if he were her lost Angelù.
“Not Angelù!” she cried.
One of the chefs in the kitchen now rhythmically beat on a pasta pot with a wooden spoon; like an echo, he called out, “Not Angelù!”
“I’m so sorry,” young Dan heard his dad say.
“He drowned,” the boy said, from Carmella’s lap; he felt her hold his head more tightly there, and once again the immediate future appeared to him. For as long as he lived with his dad and Carmella Del Popolo, Danny Baciagalupo would be her surrogate Angelù. (“You can’t blame the boy for wanting to go away to school,” Ketchum would one day write his old friend. “Blame me, if you want to, Cookie, but don’t blame Danny.”)
“Not drowned!” Carmella screamed over the clamor from the kitchen. Danny couldn’t hear what his father was whispering in the grieving woman’s ear, but he could feel her body shaking with sobs, and he managed to slightly turn his head in her lap-enough to see the mourners come out of the kitchen. No pots and pans, or wooden spoons-they brought just themselves, their faces streaked with tears. (The face of Paul, the pizza chef, was streaked with flour, too.) But Daniel Baciagalupo already had an imagination; he didn’t need to hear what his dad was saying in Carmella’s ear. The accident word was surely part of it-it was a world of accidents, both the boy and his dad already knew.
“These are good people,” old Polcari was saying; this sounded like a prayer. It was later that Danny realized Joe Polcari had not been praying; he’d been speaking to Carmella about the cook and his son “from up-a north.” Indeed, the boy and his father were the ones who walked Carmella home. (She had needed to slump against them, at times close to swooning, but she was easy to support-she had to be more than a hundred pounds lighter than Jane, and Carmella was alive.)
But even before they left Vicino di Napoli that afternoon-when Danny’s head was still held fast in the distraught mother’s lap-Daniel Baciagalupo recognized another trick that writers know. It was something he already knew how to do, though he would not apply it to his method of writing for a few more years. All writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this-even at twelve. With his face secure in Carmella’s warm grip, the boy simply removed himself from this tableau; from the vantage of the pizza oven, perhaps, or at least as far removed from the mourners as if he were standing, unseen, on the kitchen side of the serving counter, Danny saw how the staff of Vicino di Napoli had gathered around the seated Carmella and his kneeling dad.
Old Polcari stood behind Carmella, with one hand on the nape of her neck and the other hand on his heart. His son Paul, the pizza chef, stood in his aura of flour with his head bowed, but he had symmetrically positioned himself at Carmella’s hip-perfectly opposite to the hip where Dominic knelt beside her. The two young women-waitresses, still learning their craft from Carmella-knelt on the floor directly behind young Dan, who, from the distance of the kitchen, could see himself on his knees with his head held in Carmella’s lap. The other cook-the first or principal chef, Tony Molinari-stood slightly apart from the rest of them with his arm around the narrow shoulders of the kid about Angel’s age. (He was the busboy, Danny would soon learn; being a busboy would be Danny’s first job at Vicino di Napoli.)
But at this exact and sorrowful moment, Daniel Baciagalupo took in the whole tableau from afar. He would begin writing in the first-person voice, as many young writers do, and the tortured first sentence of one of his early novels would refer (in part) to this virtual Pietà on that April Sunday in Vicino di Napoli. In the novice writer’s own words: “I became a member of a family I was unrelated to-long before I knew nearly enough about my own family, or the dilemma my father had faced in my early childhood.”
“LOSE THE BACIAGALUPO,” Ketchum had written to them both. “In case Carl comes looking for you-better change your last name, just to be safe.” But Danny had refused. Daniel Baciagalupo was proud of his name-he even took some rebellious pride in what his father had told him of his name’s history. All the years those West Dummer kids had called him a Guinea and a Wop made young Dan feel that he’d earned his name; now, in the North End (in an Italian neighborhood), why would he want to lose the Baciagalupo? Besides, the cowboy-if he came looking-would be trying to find a Dominic Baciagalupo, not a Daniel.