"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 m
ore 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."
"I'm very attached to it," young Dan said.
"Yes, I can see that--then by all means you must hang on to that name!" Mr. Leary said with genuine enthusiasm. (He felt awful; he'd not meant to insult the boy.)
"I think Daniel Baciagalupo is a good name for a writer," the determined fifteen-year-old told his teacher. "If I write good books, won't readers go to the trouble of remembering my name?"
"Of course they will, Danny!" Mr. Leary cried. "I'm sorry about the nom-de-plume business--it was truly insensitive of me."
"That's okay--I know you're just trying to help me," the boy told him.
"We should be hearing some word from Exeter any day now," Mr. Leary said anxiously; he was desperate to change the subject from the pen-name faux pas.
"I hope so," Danny Baciagalupo said seriously. A more thoughtful expression had returned to young Dan's face; he'd stopped scowling.
Mr. Leary, who was agitated that he'd overstepped his bounds, knew that the boy went to work at Vicino di Napoli almost every afternoon after school; the well-meaning English teacher let Danny go on his way.
As he often did after school, Mr. Leary did some errands in the neighborhood. He still lived in the area of Northeastern University, where he'd gone to graduate school and met his wife; he took the subway to the Haymarket station every morning, and he took it home again, but he did his shopping (what little there was of it) in the North End. He'd taught at the Michelangelo for so long, virtually everyone in the neighborhood knew him; he'd taught either them or their children. Simply because they teased him--after all, he was Irish--didn't mean that they didn't like Mr. Leary, whose eccentricities amused them.
The afternoon of his ill-conceived "bold suggestion," Mr. Leary paused in the garden at St. Leonard Church, once again fretting at the absence of an 's--obviously, to the old English teacher, the church should have been named St. Leonard's. Mr. Leary did his confessing at St. Stephen's, which had a proper's. He simply liked St. Stephen's better; it was more like a Catholic church anywhere. St. Leonard was somehow more Italian--even that familiar prayer in the garden of the church was translated into Italian. "Ora sono qui. Preghiamo insieme. Dio ti aiuta." ("Now I'm here. Let's pray together. God will help you.")
Mr. Leary prayed that God would help Daniel Baciagalupo get a full scholarship to Exeter. And there was another thing he'd never liked about St. Leonard, Mr. Leary thought, as he was leaving the garden. He hadn't gone inside the church; there was a plaster saint inside, San Peregrine, with his right leg bandaged. Mr. Leary found the statue vulgar.
And there was something else he preferred about St. Stephen's, the old Irishman was musing--how the church was across from the Prado, where the old men gathered to play checkers in the good weather. Mr. Leary occasionally stopped to play checkers with them. A few of those old guys were really good, but the ones who hadn't learned English irritated Mr. Leary; not learning English was either not American enough or too Italian to suit him.
A former pupil (a fireman now) called to the old teacher outside the fire station on the corner of Hanover and Charter streets, and Mr. Leary stopped to chat with the robust fellow. In no particular order, Mr. Leary then refilled a prescription at Barone's Pharmacy; in the same location, he paused at Tosti's, the record store, where he occasionally bought a new album. The one Italian "indulgence" that Mr. Leary loved was opera--well, to be fair, he also loved the way they served the espresso at the Caffe Vittoria, and the Sicilian meat loaf Danny Baciagalupo's dad made at Vicino di Napoli.
Mr. Leary made a small purchase at the Modern, a pastry shop on Hanover. He bought some cannoli to take home for his breakfast--the pastry cylinders were filled with sweetened ricotta cheese, nuts, and candied fruits. Mr. Leary had to confess to loving those Italian indulgences, too.
He didn't like to look up Hanover Street in the direction of Scollay Square, though he walked in that direction to take the subway home from the Haymarket station every school day. South of the Haymarket was the Casino Theatre, and in the near vicinity of the Scollay Square subway station was the Old Howard. At both establishments, Mr. Leary tried to see the new striptease shows on the nights they opened--before the censors saw the shows and inevitably "trimmed" them. His regular attendance at these striptease joints made Mr. Leary feel ashamed, although his wife had died long ago. His wife probably wouldn't have cared that he went to see the strippers--or she would have minded this indulgence less than if he'd remarried, which he hadn't. Yet Mr. Leary had seen a few of these strippers perform so many times, in a way he occasionally felt that he was married to them. He had memorized the mole (if it was a mole) on Peaches, the so-called Queen of Shake. Lois Dufee--whose name, Mr. Leary believed, was incorrectly spelled--was six feet four and had peroxide-blond hair. Sally Rand danced with balloons, and there was another dancer who used feathers. Precisely what he saw these and other strippers do was the usual subject of what he confessed at St. Stephen's--that and the repeated acknowledgment that he didn't miss his wife, not anymore. He'd once missed her, but--like his wife herself--the missing-her part had left him.