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"What did you say?" he asked her.
"Rilke said that, fuckhead. If you want to be a fucking writer, you ought to read him," she said.
Now she was leaving him because she'd met (in her words) "another stupid boy who thinks he should go to Vietnam--just to fucking see it!" Katie was going to get this other boy to knock her up. Then, one day, she would move on again--"until this fucking war is over."
She would eventually run out of time; mathematically speaking, there were a limited number of would-be soldiers she could save from the war in this fashion. They called young dads like Danny Baciagalupo "Kennedy fathers;" in March 1963, President Kennedy had issued an executive order expanding paternity deferment. It would exist only for a little while--that having a child was a workable deferment from the draft--but it had served for Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer. He'd gone from 2-S (the student deferment) to 3-A--fathers maintaining a bona fide relationship with a child were deferred. Having a kid could get you out of the war; eventually, the fuckers would close that door, too, but Danny had walked right through it. Whether it would work or not for this other "stupid boy" she had
met--well, at the time, not even Katie could say. She was leaving, anyway, whether or not she made a baby for the new would-be soldier, and regardless of how many more babies she would or wouldn't get to make for such a noble cause.
"Let me see if I have this right," were among Danny's last words to his departing wife, who'd never really been a wife, and who had no further interest in being a mother.
"If I stay any longer, fuckhead, the two-year-old is going to remember me," Katie had said. (She'd actually called her own child "the two-year-old.")
"His name's Joe," Danny had reminded her. That was when he'd said: "Let me see if I have this right. You're not just an anti-war activist and a sexual anarchist, you're also this radical chick who specializes in serial baby making for draft dodgers--have I got that right?"
"Put it in writing, fuckhead," Katie had suggested; and these were her last words to her husband: "Maybe it'll sound better in writing."
Both Ketchum and his dad had warned him. "I think letting me cut a few fingers off your right hand would be easier, and less painful in the long run," Ketchum had said. "How about just your fucking trigger finger? They won't draft you, I'll bet, if you can't squeeze a trigger."
Dominic had taken a dislike to Katie Callahan on the mere evidence of the first photograph Daniel showed him.
"She looks way too thin," the cook commented, scowling at the photo. "Does she ever eat anything?" (He should talk! Danny had thought; both Danny and his dad were thin, and they ate a lot.) "Are her eyes really that blue?" his father asked.
"Actually, her eyes are even bluer," Danny told his dad.
What is it about these preternaturally small women? Dominic found himself thinking, remembering his not-really-a-cousin Rosie. Had his beloved Daniel succumbed to one of those little-girl women whose petite appearance was deceiving? Even that first photograph of Katie conveyed to the cook the kind of childlike woman some men feel compelled to protect. But Katie didn't need protection; she didn't want it, either.
The first time they met, the cook couldn't look at her--it was the same way he had treated (still treated) Danny's aunt Filomena. "I should never have shown you your mother's photographs," Dominic said, when Danny told him he was marrying Katie.
I suppose I should have married some nice fat person! Daniel Baciagalupo found himself thinking, instead of working ahead on the chapter he was writing.
But the war in Vietnam would drag on, and on; Nixon would win the '68 election by promising voters an end to the war, but the war would continue until 1975. On April 23, 1970, issuing his own executive order, President Nixon put an end to the 3-A paternity deferment for new fathers--if the child was conceived on or after that date. In the last five years of the war, another 23,763 U.S. soldiers would be killed, and Daniel Baciagalupo would finally come to realize that he should have thanked Katie Callahan for saving his life.
"So what if she was a serial baby maker for draft dodgers," Ketchum would write to Danny. "She saved your ass, sure as shit. And I wasn't kidding--I would have chopped off your right hand to spare you getting your balls blown off, if she hadn't saved you. A finger or two, anyway."
But that April night in '67, when he kept trying to write in the rain in Iowa City, Daniel Baciagalupo preferred to think that it was his two-year-old, little Joe, who'd saved him.
Probably no one could have saved Katie. Many years later, Daniel Baciagalupo would read Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, a memoir by the fiction writer Robert Stone. "Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility," Stone would write. "Things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of us who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived."
Well, that certainly rang true for Katie Callahan, Danny would think, when he read that passage. But that book by Robert Stone wouldn't be written in time to save Katie. So she wasn't looking for protection, and she couldn't be saved, but--in addition to her looks, which were both wanton and seemingly underage--no small part of her appeal, and what made her most desirable to Danny, was that Katie was a renegade. (She also had the edginess of a sexual deserter; you never knew what she would do next, because Katie didn't know, either.)
"SIT DOWN, MICHAEL, SIT DOWN--eat something!" old Polcari had kept urging Mr. Leary, but the agitated Irishman was too worked up to eat. He had a beer, and then a glass or two of red wine. Poor Mr. Leary couldn't look at Carmella Del Popolo, Danny knew, without imagining that spade-shaped elf's goatee she'd possibly left unshaven in her left armpit. And when Dominic limped off to the kitchen to bring Mr. Leary a slice of the English teacher's favorite Sicilian meat loaf, Danny Baciagalupo, the writer-in-progress, saw the old owl looking at his dad's limp with new and startled eyes. Maybe a bear did that to the cook's foot! Mr. Leary might have been thinking; maybe there really had been a three-or four-hundred-pound Indian woman whose hair had hung below her waist!
There was one other thing Mr. Leary had lied about to Exeter--the part about these immigrants being prone to exaggeration. Hadn't Mr. Leary said that the Baciagalupo boy was "unlike the rest"? In the area of writerly exaggeration, Daniel Baciagalupo was a born exaggerator! And Danny was still at it on that rainy night in Iowa City, though he was sorely distracted; he was still a little bit in love with Katie Callahan, too. (Danny was only beginning to understand what his father had meant by the color he'd called lethal blue.)
How did that Johnny Cash song go? He'd first heard it six or seven years ago, Danny was guessing.
Oh, I never got over those blue eyes,
I see them everywhere.
More distractions, the writer thought; it was as if he were determined to physically remove himself (to detach himself) from that night in Vicino di Napoli with dear Mr. Leary.
It had taken Mr. Leary a third or fourth glass of red wine, and most of the meat loaf, before he was brave enough to take the pearl-gray envelope out of his inside jacket pocket. From across the table, Danny spotted the crimson lettering; the fifteen-year-old knew what Exeter's school colors were.
"And it's all boys, Dominic," the writer could still hear Mr. Leary saying. The old English teacher had indicated, with a nod of his head, the attractive Calogero girl (Danny's older cousin Elena) and her overripe friend Teresa DiMattia. Those girls were all over Danny whenever the after-school busboy was trying to change into his black busboy pants back in the kitchen.
"Give Danny some privacy, girls," Tony Molinari would tell them, but they wouldn't let up with their ceaseless vamping. In addition to dear Mr. Leary, maybe Danny had those girls to thank for his dad's decision to let him go to Exeter.
