But why say anything to Exeter about those questionable elements of the boy’s imagination, which had even upset Mr. Leary? Those extreme details were mere indulgences the more mature writer would one day outgrow. For example, the woman who wore a man’s wool-flannel shirt, without a bra; she had raped the retarded boy, after she’d consumed an entire six-pack of beer! Why did Exeter need to know about her? (Mr. Leary wished he could forget her.) Or the woman in one of the cold-water tenement buildings on Charter Street, near the bathhouse and the Copps Hill Burying Ground-as Mr. Leary remembered her, she had pretty big breasts, too. This was another Baciagalupo story, and the woman on Charter Street was referred to as the stepmother of the retarded boy-the same boy from that earlier story, but he was no longer called retarded. (In the new story, the boy was described as “just plain damaged.”)
The father with the eaten foot had confusing dreams-both of the bear and of the slain Indian woman. Given the voluptuousness of the damaged boy’s stepmother, Mr. Leary suspected the father of having a preternatural attraction to overweight women; naturally, it was entirely possible that the young writer found big women alluring. (Mr. Leary was beginning to feel the unwelcome allure of such women himself.)
And the stepmother was Italian, thus inviting Mr. Leary’s prejudices to come into play; he looked for signs of laziness and exaggeration in the woman, finding (to his enormous satisfaction) a perfect example of the aforementioned “unrestrained appetites” Mr. Leary had long held Italian women accountable for. The woman overbathed herself.
She was so eccentrically devoted to her baths that an oversize bathtub was the centerpiece of the cold-water flat’s undersize kitchen, where four pasta pots were constantly simmering-her bathwater was heated on the gas stove. The placement of the bathtub created quite a privacy problem for the indulgent woman’s damaged stepson, who had bored a hole in his bedroom door, which opened into the kitchen.
What further damage was done to the boy by spying on his naked stepmother-well, Mr. Leary could only imagine! And, to talk about young Baciagalupo’s inventiveness with details, when the voluptuary shaved her armpits, she left a small, spade-shaped patch of hair (in one armpit) purposely unshaven, “like an elf’s meticulously trimmed goatee,” young Dan had written.
“In which armpit?” Mr. Leary had asked the beginning writer.
“The left one,” Danny answered, without a moment’s hesitation.
“Why the left one, and not the right?” the English teacher asked.
The Baciagalupo boy looked thoughtful, as if he were trying to remember a rather complicated sequence of events. “She’s right-handed,” Danny answered. “She’s not as skillful with the razor when she’s shaving with her left hand. She shaves her right armpit with her left hand,” he explained to his teacher.
“Those are good details, too,” Mr. Leary told him. “I think you should put those details in the story.”
“Okay, I will,” young Dan said; he liked Mr. Leary, and did his best to protect his English teacher from the torments of the other boys.
The other boys didn’t bother Danny. Sure, there were bullies at the Mickey, but they weren’t as tough as those Paris Manufacturing Company thugs. If some bully in the North End gave Danny Baciagalupo any trouble, young Dan just told his older cousins. The bully would get the shit kicked out of him by a Calogero or a Saetta; the older cousins could have kicked the shit out of those West Dummer dolts, too.
Danny didn’t show his writing to anyone but Mr. Leary. Of course the boy wrote rather long letters to Ketchum, but those letters weren’t fiction; no one in his right mind would make up a story and try to pass it off on Ketchum. Besides, it was for pouring out his heart that young Dan needed Ketchum. Many of the letters to Ketchum began, “You know how much I love my dad, I really do, but…” and so on.
Like father, like son: The cook had kept things from his son, and Danny (in grades seven and eight, especially) was of an age to keep things back. He would be thirteen when he began grade seven and first met Mr. Leary; the Baciagalupo boy would be fifteen when he graduated from eighth grade. He was both fourteen and fifteen when he showed his English teacher the stories he made up with ever-increasing compulsion.
Despite Mr. Leary’s misgivings about the subject matter-meaning the sexual content, chiefly-the wise old owl of an Irishman never said an unpraiseworthy word to his favorite pupil. The Baciagalupo boy was going to be a writer; in Mr. Leary’s mind, there was no doubt about it.
The English teacher kept his fingers crossed about Exeter; if the boy was accepted, Mr. Leary hoped the school would be so rigorous that it might save young Baciagalupo from the more unsavory aspects of his imagination. At Exeter, maybe the mechanics of writing would be so thoroughly demanding and time-consuming that Danny would become a more intellectual writer. (Meaning what, exactly? Not quite such a creative one?)
Mr. Leary himself was not entirely sure what he meant by the mystifying thought that becoming a more intellectual writer might make Danny a less creative one-if that was what Mr. Leary thought-but the teacher’s intentions were good. Mr. Leary wanted all the best for the Baciagalupo boy, and while he would never criticize a word young Dan had written, the old English teacher ventured out on a limb in making a bold suggestion. (Well, it wasn’t that bold a suggestion; it merely seemed bold to Mr. Leary.) This happened to be in that almost-mud-season time of Danny’s eighth-grade year-in March 1957, when Danny had just turned fifteen, and the boy and his teacher were waiting to hear from Exeter. That Mr. Leary made the aforementioned “bold suggestion” would (years later) prompt Daniel Baciagalupo to write his own version of Ketchum’s periodic claim.
“All the shit seems to happen in mud season!” Ketchum regularly complained, in seeming refutation of the fact that the cook and his beloved cousin Rosie were married in mud season, and young Dan had been born just before it. (Of course, there was no actual mud season in Boston.)
“Danny?” Mr. Leary asked tentatively-almost as if he weren’t sure of the boy’s name. “Down the road, as a writer, you might want to consider a nom de plume.”
“A what?” the fifteen-year-old asked.
“A pen name. Some writers choose their own names, instead of publishing under their given names. It’s called a nom de plume in French,” the boy’s teacher explained. Mr. Leary felt his heart rise to his throat, because young Baciagalupo suddenly looked as if he’d been slapped.
“You mean lose the Baciagalupo,” Danny said.
“It’s just that there are easier names to say, and remember,” Mr. Leary told his favorite pupil. “I thought that, since your father changed his name-and the widow Del Popolo hasn’t become a Baciagalupo, has she?-well, I merely imagined that you might not be so terribly attached to the Baciagalupo name yourself.”