Read Online Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving - Free Book Online Page B

too full of mixed memories—for Dominic Baciagalupo. And Rosie’s prior experience in the North End had made her wary of moving back to Boston, although both the Saetta and Calogero families entreated the young cousins to come “home.”
    Children know when they are not loved unconditionally. Dominic was aware that his mother had felt she was spurned. And while Rosie never appeared to resent the circumstances that had compelled her to marry a mere boy , she truly resented how her family had banished her to Berlin in the first place.
    The entreaties by the Saetta and Calogero families fell on deaf ears. Who were they to say all was forgiven? Apparently, it was okay with them that the cousins were married, and that they had a child; but what Dominic and Rosie remembered was how it had not been okay for either a Saetta or a Calogero to be pregnant and un married.
    “Let them find someone else to forgive,” was how Rosie put it. Dominic, knowing how Nunzi had felt, agreed. Boston was a bridge that had been burned behind them; more to the point, the young couple felt confident that they hadn’t burned it.
    Surely moral condemnation wasn’t new to New England, not in 1942; and while most people might have chosen Boston over Twisted River, the decisions made by many young married couples are circumstantial. To the newly formed Baciagalupo family, Twisted River may have seemed remote and raw-looking, but there was no paper mill. The sawmill and logging-camp settlement had never kept a cook through a single mud season, and there was no school—not in a town largely inhabited by itinerants. There was, however, the potential for a school in the smaller but more permanent-seeming settlement on Phillips Brook—namely, Paris (formerly, West Dummer), which was only a few miles on the log-hauler road from the visibly scruffier settlement in Twisted River, where the logging company had heretofore refused to invest in a permanent cookhouse. According to the company, the portable, makeshift kitchen and the dining wanigans would have to do. That this made Twisted River look more like a logging camp than an actual town failed to discourage Dominic and Rosie Baciagalupo, to whom Twisted River beckoned as an opportunity—albeit a rough one.
    In the summer of ’42—leaving themselves enough time to order textbooks and other supplies, in preparation for the new Paris school—the cook and the schoolteacher, together with their infant son, followed the Androscoggin north to Milan, and then traveled north-northwest on the haul road from the Pontook Reservoir. Where Twisted River poured into the Pontook was simply called “the narrows;” there wasn’t even a sawmill, and the rudimentary Dead Woman Dam was as yet unnamed. (As Ketchum would say: “Things were a lot less fancy then.”)
    The couple with their child arrived at the basin below Twisted River before nightfall and the mosquitoes. To those few who remembered the young family’s arrival, the man with the limp and his pretty but older-looking wife with her new baby must have appeared hopeful—although they carried only a few clothes with them. Their books and the rest of their clothes, together with the cook’s kitchenware, had come ahead of them—all of it on an empty logging truck, covered with a tarp.
    The kitchen and dining wanigans needed more than a good cleaning: A full-scale restoration was what the wanigans wanted—and what the cook would insist on having, if he was going to stay. And if the logging company expected the cook to remain past the next mud season, they would have to build a permanent cookhouse—with bedrooms above the cookhouse, where the cook and his family intended to live.
    Rosie was more modest in her demands: A one-room school would be sufficient for Paris, née West Dummer, where there had never been a school before; there were only a few families with school-age children on Phillips Brook in 1942, and fewer still in Twisted River. There would soon