Last Night in Twisted River

  An assistant to the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship had discouraged them from a so-called fast-track application. In their case, what was the hurry? The famous writer wasn't rushing to change countries, was he? (The immigration lawyer had forewarned Danny that Canadians were a little suspicious of success; they tended to punish it, not reward it.) In fact, to escape undue attention, the cook and his son had made the slowest possible progress in their application for Canadian citizenship. The process had taken four, almost five years. But now, with the Florida fiasco, there'd been comments in the Canadian media about the writer Danny Angel's "defection;" his "giving up on the United States" when he did, more than a decade ago, made the author appear "prescient"--or so the Toronto Globe and Mail had said.

  It didn't help that the film adapted from East of Bangor had released in theaters only recently--in '99--and the movie had won a couple of Academy Awards in 2000. Early in the New Year, 2001, a joint session of Congress would meet to certify the electoral vote in the States; now that there was going to be a U.S. president who opposed abortion rights, it came as no surprise to Danny and his dad that the writer's liberal abortion politics were back in the news. And writers were more in the news in Canada than in the United States--not only for what they wrote but for what they said and did.

  Danny was still sensitive to what he read about himself in the American media, where he was frequently labeled "anti-American"--both for his writing and because of his expatriation to Toronto. In other parts of the world--without fail, in Europe and in Canada--the author's alleged anti-Americanism was viewed as a good thing. It was written that the expatriate writer "vilified" life in the United States--that is, in his novels. It had also been reported that the American-born author had moved to Toronto "to make a statement." (Despite Danny Angel's commercial success, he had accepted the fact that his Canadian taxes were higher than what he'd paid in the States.) But, as a novelist, Danny was increasingly uncomfortable when he was condemned or praised for his perceived anti-American politics. Naturally, he couldn't say--most of all, not to the press--why he had really moved to Canada.

  What Danny did say was that only two of his seven published novels could fairly be described as political; he was aware that he sounded defensive in saying this, but it was notably true. Danny's fourth book, The Kennedy Fathers, was a Vietnam novel--it was read as a virtual protest of that war. The sixth, East of Bangor, was a didactic novel--in the view of some critics, an abortion-rights polemic. But what was political about the other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experiences; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies--none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel's novels, the villain--if there was one--was more often human nature than the United States. Danny had never been any kind of activist.

  "All writers are outsiders," Danny Angel had once said. "I moved to Toronto because I like being an outsider." But no one believed him. Besides, it was a better story that the world-famous author had rejected the United States.

  Danny thought that his move to Canada had been sensationalized in the press, the presumed politics of their entirely personal decision magnified out of proportion. Yet what bothered the novelist more was that his novels had been trivialized. Danny Angel's fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them. But what did Danny expect?

  In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were "merely" made up. In any work of fiction, weren't those things that had really happened to the writer--or, perhaps, to someone the writer had intimately known--more authentic, more verifiably true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer's job was imagining, truly, a whole story--as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend the fiction in fiction writing--because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)

  Yet who was the audience for Danny Angel, or any other novelist, defending the fiction in fiction writing? Students of creative writing? Women of a certain age in book clubs, because weren't most book-club members usually women of a certain age? Who else was more interested in fiction than in so-called real life? Not Danny Angel's interviewers, evidently; the first question they always asked had to do with what was "real" about this or that novel. Was the main character based on an actual person? Had the novel's most memorable (meaning most catastrophic, most devastating) outcome actually happened to anyone the author knew or had known?

  Once again, what did Danny expect? Hadn't he begged the question? Just look at his last book, Baby in the Road; what did Danny think the media would make of it? He had begun that book, his seventh novel, before he'd left Vermont. Danny was almost finished with the manuscript in March '87. It was late March of that year when Joe died. In Colorado, it was not yet mud season. ("Shit, it was almost mud season," Ketchum would say.)

  It was Joe's senior year in Boulder; he had just turned twenty-two. The irony was that Baby in the Road had always been about the death of a beloved only child. But in the novel Danny had almost finished, the child dies when he's still in diapers--a two-year-old, run over in the road, much as what might have happened to little Joe that day on Iowa Avenue. The unfinished novel was about how the death of that child destroys what the cook and Ketchum would no doubt have described as the Danny character and the Katie character, who go their separate but doomed ways.

  Naturally, the novel would change. After the death of his son, Danny Angel didn't write for more than a year. It was not the writing that was hard, as Danny said to his friend Armando DeSimone; it was the imagining. Whenever Danny tried to imagine anything, all he could see was how Joe had died; what the writer also endlessly imagined were the small details that might have been subject to change, those infinitesimal details that could have kept his son alive. (If Joe had only done this, not that ... if the cook and his son had not been in Toronto at that time ... if Danny had bought or rented a house in Boulder, instead of Winter Park ... if Joe had not learned to ski ... if, as Ketchum had advised, they'd never lived in Vermont ... if an avalanche had closed the road over Berthoud Pass ... if Joe had been too drunk to drive, instead of being completely sober ... if the passenger had been another boy, not that girl ... if Danny hadn't been in love....) Well, was there anything a writer couldn't imagine?

  What wouldn't Danny have thought of, if only to torture himself? Danny couldn't bring Joe back to life; he couldn't change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel.

  When, after that year had passed, Danny Angel could finally bear to reread what he'd written in Baby in the Road, the accidental killing of that two-year-old in diapers, which once began the book, not to mention the subsequent tormenting of the dead toddler's parents, seemed almost inconsequential. Wasn't it worse to have a child escape death that first time, and grow up--only to die later, a young man in his prime? And to make the story worse in that way, in a novel--to make what happens more heartbreaking, in other words--well, wasn't that actually a better story? Doubtless, Danny believed so. He'd rewritten Baby in the Road from start to finish. This had taken another five, almost six years.

  Not surprisingly, the theme of the novel didn't change. How could it? Danny had discovered that the devastation of losing a child stayed very much the same; it mattered little that the details were different.

  BABY IN THE ROAD was first published in 1995, eleven years after the publication of East of Bangor and eight years after Joe had died. In the revised version, the former two-year-old grows up to be a risk-taking young man; he dies at Joe's age, twenty-two, when he's still a college student. The death is ruled an accident, thoug
h it might have been a suicide. Unlike Joe, the character in Danny's seventh novel is drunk at the time of his death; he has also swallowed a shitload of barbiturates. He inhales a ham sandwich and chokes to death on his own vomit.

  In truth, by the time he was a senior in college, Joe seemed to have outgrown his recklessness. His drinking--what little he did of it--was in control. He skied fast, but he'd had no injuries. He appeared to be a good driver; for four years, he drove a car in Colorado and didn't get a single speeding ticket. He'd even slowed down with the girls a little--or so it had seemed to his grandfather and his dad. Of course the cook and his son had never stopped worrying about the boy; throughout his college years, however, Joe had honestly given them little cause to be concerned. Even his grades had been good--better than they'd been at Northfield Mount Hermon. (Like many kids who'd gone away from home to an independent boarding school, Joe always claimed that college was easier.)

  As a novelist, Danny Angel had taken pains to make the arguably suicidal character in Baby in the Road as unlike Joe as possible. The young man in the book is a sensitive, artistic type. He's in delicate health--from the beginning, he seems fated to die--and he's no athlete. The novel is set in Vermont, not in Colorado. Revised, the boy's wayward mother isn't wayward enough to be a Katie character, although, like her doomed son, she has a drinking problem. In the rewrite, the Danny character, the boy's grieving father, doesn't give up drinking, but he's not an alcoholic. (He is never compromised or incapacitated by what he drinks; he's just depressed.)

  In the first few years after Joe died, the cook would occasionally try to talk his son out of drinking again. "You'll feel better if you don't, Daniel. In the long run, you'll wish you hadn't gone back to it."

  "It's for research, Pop," Danny would tell his dad, but that answer no longer applied--not after he'd rewritten Baby in the Road, and the book had been finished for more than five years. In the new novel that Danny was writing, the main characters weren't drinkers; Danny's drinking wasn't for "research"--not that it ever was.

  But the cook could see that Danny didn't drink to excess. He had a couple of beers before dinner--he'd always liked the taste of beer--and not more than a glass or two of red wine with his meal. (Without the wine, he didn't sleep.) It was clear that Dominic's beloved Daniel hadn't gone back to being the kind of drinker he used to be.

  Dominic could also see for himself that his son's sadness had endured. After Joe's death, Ketchum observed that Danny's sadness had a look of permanence about it. Even interviewers, or anyone meeting the author for the first time, noticed it. Not surprisingly, in many of the interviews Danny had done for various publications of Baby in the Road, the questions about the novel's main subject--the death of a child--had been personal. In every novel, there are parts that hit uncomfortably close to home for the novelist; obviously, these are areas of emotional history that the writer would prefer not to talk about.

  Wasn't it enough that Danny had made every effort to detach himself from the personal? He'd enhanced, he'd exaggerated, he'd stretched the story to the limits of believability--he'd made the most awful things happen to characters he had imagined as completely as possible. ("So-called real people are never as complete as wholly imagined characters," the novelist had repeatedly said.) Yet Danny Angel's interviewers had asked him almost nothing about the story and the characters in Baby in the Road; instead they'd asked Danny how he was "dealing with" the death of his son. Had the writer's "real-life tragedy" made him reconsider the importance of fiction--meaning the weight, the gravity, the relative value of the "merely" make-believe?

  That kind of question drove Danny Angel crazy, but he expected too much from journalists; most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been "wholly imagined." And those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice?

  But couldn't it be argued that Danny should have anticipated the personal nature of his interviewers' questions concerning Baby in the Road? Even nonreaders had heard about the accident that killed the famous writer's son. (To Ketchum's relief, the cowboy seemed to have missed it.) There'd also been the predictable pieces about the calamitous lives of celebrities' children--unfair in Joe's case, because the accident didn't appear to have been Joe's fault, and he hadn't been drinking. Yet Danny should have anticipated this, too: Before there was verification that alcohol wasn't a factor, there would be those in the media who too quickly assumed it had been.

  At first, after the accident--and again, when Baby in the Road was published--Dominic had done his best to shield his son from his fan mail. Danny had let his dad be a first reader, understanding that the cook would decide which letters he should or shouldn't see. That was how the letter from Lady Sky was lost.

  "You have some weird readers," the cook had complained one day. "And so many of your fans address you by your first name, as if they were your friends! It would unnerve me--how you have all these people you don't know presuming that they know you."

  "Give me an example, Pop," Danny said.

  "Well, I don't know," Dominic said. "I throw out more mail than I show you, you know. There was one letter last week--she might have been a stripper, for all I know. She had a stripper's name."

  "Like what?" Danny had asked his dad.

  "'Lady Sky,'" the cook had said. "Sounds like a stripper to me."

  "I think her real name is Amy," Danny said; he tried to remain calm.

  "You know her?"

  "I know only one Lady Sky."

  "I'm sorry, Daniel--I just assumed she was a wacko."

  "What did she say, Pop--do you remember?"

  Naturally, the cook couldn't remember all the details--just that the woman seemed presumptuous and deranged. She'd written some gibberish about protecting Joe from pigs; she'd said she was no longer flying, as if she'd once been able to fly.

  "Did she want me to write her back?" Danny asked his dad. "Do you remember where her letter was from?"

  "Well, I'm sure there was a return address--they all want you to write them back!" the cook cried.

  "It's okay, Pop--I'm not blaming you," Danny said. "Maybe she'll write again." (He didn't really think so, and his heart was aching.)

  "I had no idea you wanted to hear from someone named Lady Sky, Daniel," the cook said.

  Something must have happened to Amy; Danny wondered what it could have been. You don't jump naked out of airplanes for no reason, the writer thought.

  "I was sure she was a crazy person, Daniel." With that, the cook paused. "She said she had lost a child, too," Dominic told his son. "I thought I would spare you those letters. There were quite a lot of them."

  "Maybe you should show me those letters, Dad," Danny said.

  After the discovery that Lady Sky had written to him, Danny received a few more letters from his fans who'd lost children, but he'd been unable to answer a single one of those letters. There were no words to say to those people. Danny knew, since he was one of them. He would wonder how Amy had managed it; in his new life, without Joe, Danny didn't think it would be all that hard to jump naked out of an airplane.

  IN DANNY ANGEL'S WRITING ROOM, on the third floor of the house on Cluny Drive, there was a skylight in addition to the window with the view of the clock tower on the Summerhill liquor store. This had once been Joe's bedroom, and it occupied the entire third floor and had its own bathroom, with a shower but not a tub. The shower was adequate for a college kid like Joe, but the cook had questioned the extravagant size of the bedroom--not to mention the premier view. Wasn't this wasted on a young man attending school in the States? (Joe would never get to spend much time in Toronto.)

  But Danny had argued that he wanted Joe to have the best bedroom, because maybe then his son would be more inclined to c
ome to Canada. The room's isolation on the third floor also made it the most private bedroom in the house, and--for safety's sake--no third-floor bedroom should be without a fire escape, so Danny had built one. The room, therefore, had a private entrance. When Joe died, and Danny converted the boy's bedroom into a writing room, the novelist left his son's things as they were; only the bed had been removed.

  Joe's clothes stayed in the closet and in the chest of drawers--even his shoes remained. All the laces were untied, too. Joe had not once taken off a pair of shoes by untying the laces first. He'd kicked off his shoes with the laces tied, and they were always tightly tied, with a double knot, as if Joe were still a little boy whose shoes often came untied. Danny had long been in the habit of finding his son's double-knotted shoes and untying the laces for him. It was a few months, or more, after Joe died before Danny had untied the last of Joe's shoelaces.

  What with Joe's wrestling and skiing photographs on the walls, the so-called writing room was a virtual shrine to the dead boy. In the cook's mind, it was masochistic of his son to choose to write there, but a limp like Dominic's would keep him from investigating that third-floor writing room with any regularity; Dominic rarely ventured there, even when Daniel was away. With the bed gone, no one else would sleep there--apparently, that was what Danny wanted.

  When Joe had been with them in Toronto, both the cook and his son could hear the boy's kicked-off shoes drop (like two rocks) above them--or the more subtle creaking of the floorboards whenever Joe was walking around (even barefoot, or in his socks). You could also hear that third-floor shower from the three bedrooms on the second floor. Each of the second-floor bedrooms had its own bath, with the cook's bedroom being at the opposite end of the long hall from his beloved Daniel's bedroom--hence father and son had some measure of privacy, because the guest room was between them.