CHAPTER 8. DEAD DOG; REMEMBERING MAO’S
FROM THE FAMOUS WRITER’S “COMPOUND”-AS THE PUTNEY locals (and the writer’s own father) were inclined to call it- Hickory Ridge Road climbed for over a mile, the road both crossing the brook and running parallel to the water. The so-called back road from Putney to Westminster West was dirt, and at a point less than midway between Danny Angel’s property in Putney and his best friend’s house in Westminster West, there was quite a pretty farm, with horses, at the end of a long, steep driveway. In the warm weather-after he’d opened his swimming pool in May, and before he winterized the pool every October-Danny called his friend in Westminster West and told him when he was starting out on a run. It was four or five miles, maybe six or seven; Danny was such a daydreamer that he didn’t keep track of the distance of his runs anymore.
The pretty farm at the end of the long, uphill driveway seemed to focus the writer’s reveries, because an older woman with snow-white hair (and the body of a dancer in her twenties) lived there. Danny had had an affair with her some years ago-her name was Barrett. She wasn’t married, and hadn’t been at the time; there was no scandal attached to their relationship. Nevertheless, in the writer’s imagination-at about the two-mile mark of his run-Danny always foresaw his own murder at the place where this woman’s steep driveway met the road. He would be running on the road, just a half-second past her driveway, and Barrett would come gliding down the hill, her car coasting in neutral, with the engine off, so that by the time he heard her tires scattering the loose gravel on the road, it would be too late for him to get out of the almost-silent car’s path.
A spectacular way for a storyteller to die, Danny had imagined-a vehicular homicide, with the famous novelist’s ex-lover at the wheel of the murder weapon!
That Barrett had no such designs on ending the writer’s life didn’t matter; it would have been a good story. In fact, she’d had many affairs, and (in Danny’s estimation) Barrett harbored no homicidal feelings for her ex-lovers; the writer doubted that Barrett would go out of her way to run over any of them. She was exclusively focused on caring for her horses and maintaining her youthful physique.
When there was a conceivably interesting movie playing at the Latchis in Brattleboro, Danny would often ask Barrett to see the film with him, and they would have dinner at Avellino. That Barrett was much closer in age to Danny’s dad than she was to Danny had provided the cook with grounds for complaining to his writer son. Nowadays, Danny frequently found it necessary to remind his father that he and Barrett were “just friends.”
Danny could run five or six miles at a pace of seven minutes per mile, usually running the last mile in closer to six minutes. At forty-one, he’d had no injuries and was still slight of build; at five feet seven, he weighed only 145 pounds. (His dad was a little smaller, and perhaps the limp made him seem shorter than he was.) Because of the occasional bad dog on the back road to Westminster West, Danny ran with a couple of sawed-off squash racquets-just the handles. If a dog attacked him when he was running, Danny would stick one of the racquet handles in the dog’s face-until the dog chomped on it. Then, with the other sawed-off handle, he would hit the dog-usually on the bridge of the nose.
Danny didn’t play squash. His friend in Westminster West was the squash player. When Armando DeSimone broke one of his racquets, he gave it to Danny, who sawed off the racquet head and kept the handle. Armando had grown up in the North End about a decade before Danny and his dad moved there; like the cook, Armando still drove to his beloved Boston, periodically, to shop. Armando and Danny enjoyed cooking for each other. They’d been colleagues in the English department at Windham, and when the college folded, Armando took a job teaching at the Putney School. His wife, Mary, had been Joe’s English and history teacher at the Grammar School.
When Danny Angel became rich and famous, he lost a few of the old friends he’d had, but not the DeSimones. Armando had read all but the first of Danny Angel’s novels in manuscript. For five out of six novels, he’d been Danny’s earliest reader. You don’t lose a friend like that.
Armando had built a squash court in an old barn on his Westminster West property; he talked about building a swimming pool next, but in the meantime he and Mary swam in Danny’s pool. Nearly every afternoon, when it wasn’t raining, the writer would run to the DeSimones’ house in Westminster West; then Armando and Mary would drive Danny back to Putney, and they’d all swim in the pool. Danny would make drinks for them and serve the drinks at the pool after they swam.
Danny had stopped drinking sixteen years ago-long enough so that he had no problem having alcohol in his house, or fixing drinks for his friends. And he wouldn’t dream of having a dinner party and not serving wine, though he could remember that when he’d first stopped drinking, he was unable to be around people who were drinking anything alcoholic. At the time, in Iowa City, that had been a problem.
As for the writer’s second life in Iowa City, with his dad and little Joe-well, that had been a peaceful interlude, for the most part, except for the unwelcome reminders of Danny’s earlier time in that town with Katie. In retrospect, Danny thought, those last three years in Iowa -in the early seventies, when Joe had been in the second, third, and fourth grades, and the greatest danger the boy faced was what might happen to him on his bicycle-seemed almost blissful. Iowa City had been safe in those years.
Joe was seven when he’d gone back to Iowa with his dad and grandfather, and was still only ten when they’d returned to Vermont. Maybe those ages were the safest ages, the writer was imagining as he ran; possibly, Iowa City had had nothing to do with it.
CHILDHOOD, AND HOW IT FORMS YOU-moreover, how your child hood is relived in your life as an adult-that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed as he ran. From the age of twelve, he had become afraid for his father; the cook was still a hunted man. Like his dad, but for different reasons, Danny had been a young father-in reality, he’d also been a single parent (even before Katie left him). Now, at forty-one, Danny was more afraid for young Joe than he was for his dad.
Maybe it was more than the Katie Callahan gene that put Joe at risk; nor did Danny necessarily believe that the source of the wildness in his son was the boy’s free-spirited grandmother, that daring woman who’d courted disaster on the late-winter ice of Twisted River. No, when Danny looked at young Joe at eighteen, it was himself at that dangerous age he saw. From all they’d read into (and had misread in) Danny Angel’s novels, the cook and Ketchum couldn’t have fathomed the perilous configuration of the various bullets Danny had dodged-not only in his life with Katie, but long before her.
It hadn’t been Josie DiMattia who’d sexually initiated Danny at the age of fifteen, before he went off to Exeter; furthermore, Carmella may have caught them at it, but Josie wasn’t the one who got pregnant. Ketchum had indeed driven Danny to that orphanage with the obliging midwife in Maine, but with the oldest DiMattia girl, Teresa. (Perhaps Teresa had given so many condoms to her younger sisters that she’d forgotten to save some for herself.) And neither Teresa nor Danny’s equally older cousin Elena Calogero had provided Danny with his first sexual experience-though the boy was much more attracted to those older girls than he was to any girl his own age, including Josie, who’d been only a little older. There’d also been an older Saetta cousin, Giuseppina, who’d seduced young Dan, but Giuseppina wasn’t his first seducer.