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Why was Gamba so worried about that? Carmella wondered. If the boy had had more sex-she meant in those years when he was a student at Exeter -maybe he wouldn’t have become so infatuated with that Callahan girl when he went to college! And if he’d fucked a few more of his kissing cousins-Calogeros and Saettas, or for that matter every female in the DiMattia family-possibly he would have knocked up someone a whole lot nicer than Katie!
But because Dominic had obsessed about Elena Calogero and Teresa DiMattia, when Carmella came into the apartment and saw Da
“Teresa, you whore!” Carmella cried. (She actually called the girl a troia-from that notorious Trojan woman-but the word meant “whore,” of course.)
“I’m Josie, Teresa’s sister,” the girl said indignantly. She must have been miffed that her aunt didn’t recognize her.
“Well, yes, you are,” Carmella replied. “And what are you doing using our bed, Da
“Jeez, yours is bigger,” Josie told her aunt.
“And I hope you’re using a condom!” Carmella cried.
Dominic used condoms; he didn’t mind, and Carmella preferred it. Maybe the boy had found his father’s condoms. When it came to condoms, it was a dumb world, Carmella knew. At Barone’s Pharmacy, they kept the condoms hidden, completely out of sight. If kids asked for them, the pharmacist would give them shit about it. Yet any responsible parent who had a kid that age would tell the kid to use a condom. Where exactly were the kids supposed to get them?
“Was it one of your dad’s condoms?” Carmella asked Da
“I brought the condoms-Teresa gave them to me,” Josie said, ignoring the larger question of confession.
Now Carmella was really angry. Just what did that troia Teresa think she was doing, giving her kid sister condoms! “How many did she give you?” Carmella asked. But before the girl could answer, Carmella asked Da
“Jeez, do you want me to count them or something?” Josie asked her aunt, about the condoms. Poor Da
“Well, you kids be careful-I have to go to work,” Carmella told them. “Josie!” Carmella had cried, as she walked out of the apartment, just before she’d slammed the door. “You wash my sheets, you make my bed-or I’ll tell your mother!”
Carmella wondered if they had fucked all afternoon and evening, and if they’d had enough condoms. (She was so upset about it, she forgot that she’d gone back to the apartment because she’d forgotten something.)
Her dear Gamba had wanted his son to be safe from girls-and how the cook had cried when Da
Mainly, the boy’s grades weren’t great because he wrote all the time. Mr. Leary had been right: So-called creative writing wasn’t valued at Exeter, but the mechanics of good writing was. And there were individual English teachers there who’d played the Mr. Leary role for Da
The other thing Da
There’d been nowhere to run in the North End-not if you liked ru
When Da
Da
When he left Exeter with B grades in English and history, and C grades in just about everything else, Mr. Carlisle told Dominic and Carmella that perhaps the boy would be a “late bloomer.” But, as a writer, to publish a first novel less than a year after he left the Iowa Workshop was a fairly early-bloomer thing to do; of course Mr. Carlisle had been speaking strictly academically. And Da
“And here you were, Gamba, worried about a few hot Italian girls in the North End!” Carmella had once exploded at him. “What you should have seen coming was that University of New Hampshire iceberg!”
“A cold cunt,” Ketchum had called Katie.
“It was all the writing, too,” Dominic had replied to Carmella. “All that damn imagining all the time-it couldn’t have been good for Daniel.”
“You’re crazy, Gamba,” Carmella told him. “Da
“Ketchum wouldn’t have let that happen,” Dominic told her. “Ketchum wasn’t kidding, Carmella. Daniel would have become a writer with some missing fingers on his writing hand.”
Maybe she didn’t want to meet Mr. Ketchum after all, Carmella found herself thinking.