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,” Danny told his father, with exasperation.

“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 Danny and his father choosing the name Angel-in case Carl ever remembered that the death of the original Angel had been coincident with the cook and his son leaving town in the first place. As for little Joe’s name, Danny had chosen it, though he’d wanted to name his son after his dad-Dominic, Jr. (Katie hadn’t liked either the Dominic or the Junior.) But Danny had refused to give little Joe the writer’s nom de plume. Joe had remained a Baciagalupo; the boy didn’t become an Angel. Both Danny and the cook remembered that Carl hadn’t been able to pronounce Baciagalupo; they told Ketchum it was unlikely the cowboy could spell it, either-not even to save his own fat ass. So what if Joe was still a Baciagalupo? Ketchum just had to live with it. And now Ketchum kept complaining about the Angel name!

The cook often dreamed of that asshole Gennaro Capodilupo, his runaway father. Tony Angel could still hear the names of those two hill towns, which were also provinces, in the vicinity of Naples -those words his mother, Nunzi, had murmured in her sleep: Benevento and Avellino. Tony believed that his father really had gone back to the vicinity of Naples, where he’d come from. But the truth was, the cook didn’t care. When someone abandons you, why should you care?

“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 Annunziata had uttered in her sleep, and no one but Tony Angel had heard his mother say it. The goddamn cowboy couldn’t possibly come up with any connections to Benevento.

“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 Danny disdained, because he thought it wasn’t up to Exeter’s standards-and, on Hickory Ridge Road, where the writer Danny Angel still lived, there was an independent elementary school called the Grammar School, which had been very much up to Danny’s standards.

He’d sent Joe there, and the boy had done well enough to get into Northfield Mount Hermon-a prep school Danny did approve of. NMH, as the school was called, was about half an hour south of Brattleboro, in Massachusetts-and an hour’s drive from Danny’s property in Putney. Joe, who was a senior in the spring of 1983, saw quite a lot of his dad and his grandfather.

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 Connecticut. The bathtub was big and reminded the cook of the one Carmella had had in her kitchen in that cold-water Charter Street apartment. Tony still didn’t know for certain that Daniel had spied on Carmella in that bathtub, but he’d read all five of his son’s novels, and in one of them there’s a luscious-looking Italian woman who luxuriates in taking long baths. The woman’s stepson is of an age where he’s just beginning to masturbate, and the boy beats off while watching his stepmother bathe. (The clever kid bores a hole in the bathroom wall; his bedroom is conveniently next to the bathroom.)

While there were these little details of a recognizable kind in Danny Angel’s novels, the cook more often noticed things that he was sure his son must have made up. If Carmella had put in an identifiable bathtub appearance, the character of the stepmother in that novel was definitely not based on Carmella; nor could the cook find any but the most superficial elements of himself in Daniel’s novels, or much of Ketchum. (A minor character’s broken wrist is mentioned in passing in one novel, and there’s a different character’s penchant for saying, “Constipated Christ!” in another.) Both Ketchum and Tony Angel had talked about the absence of anyone in the novels who revealed to them their quintessential and beloved Daniel.

“Where is that boy hiding himself?” Ketchum had asked the cook, because even in Danny Angel’s fourth (and most famous) novel, which was titled The Kennedy Fathers, the main character-who escapes the war in Vietnam with the same paternity deferment that kept Danny out of the war-bears little essential resemblance to the Daniel that Ketchum and the cook knew and loved.

There was a character based on Katie in The Kennedy Fathers-Caitlin, Danny Angel named her-a little sprite of a thing with a disproportionately oversize capacity for serial infidelities. She saves a truly hard-to-believe number of Kennedy fathers from the Vietnam War. The Caitlin character races through numerous husbands with the same casual frankness both the cook and Ketchum associated with the way Katie probably gave blow jobs-yet Caitlin wasn’t Katie.

“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 Kennedy Fathers. There’s something that doesn’t bode well about how she phones all her husbands and asks to speak to her kids, who have no memory of her. That’s the last we hear about Caitlin-it’s a sympathetic moment.

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 Danny might hear from Katie if he ever became famous.