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No, indeed-that instructive and most formative experience had been with the boy’s aunt Filomena, his mother’s youngest sister, when Da
It was still May; the blackflies were bad, but not at the pace he was ru
She’d been only the second woman in the Saetta and Calogero clans to attend college, but Filomena had shared another distinction with her older sister Rosie-namely, a certain lawlessness with men. Filomena might have been only a preteen-at most, thirteen or fourteen-when Rosie had been sent away to the north country. She’d loved Rosie, and had looked up to her-only to see her disgraced, and displayed as a bad example to the younger girls in the family. Filomena had been sent to Sacred Heart, an all-girls’ Catholic school near the Paul Revere House on North Square. She’d been kept as safe from boys as was humanly and spiritually possible.
As Da
The cook and Ketchum had jumped to the conclusion that young Daniel had seen something of his mother in Katie. What the boy had seen, perhaps, was that combination of a repressed girlhood in an angry young woman of wanton self-destructiveness; Katie had been a younger, more political version of his aunt Filomena. The difference between them was that Filomena had been devoted to the boy, and her sexual efforts to outdo the mere girls in Da
In Da
How could the boy possibly have had any interest in Exeter ’s dances with various girls’ schools? How could a closely chaperoned and chaste hug on the dance floor ever compete with the ardent, sweat-slicked contact he’d maintained with Filomena on an almost weekly basis-not only throughout his Exeter years but including Da
And all the while, those Calogeros and Saettas took pity on “poor” Filomena; pretty as she was, she struck them as an eternal wallflower, both a maiden aunt and a spinster-in-the-making. Little did they know that, for seven hungry years, the woman was indulging the ceaseless sexual appetites of a teenage boy on his way to becoming a young man. In those seven years that his aunt Filomena dominated Da
All those other Calogeros, and the Saettas, thought of Filomena as “pathetic”-those were his father’s very words for her, Da
“Let’s just say I keep them busy at confession,” she told her spellbound nephew, for whom Filomena had set a standard; the young women who followed Filomena in Da
Filomena was in her mid-to late thirties-too old to have a baby, in her estimation-when the issue of Da
Had Filomena met that most vulgar young woman, she might have opted for Ketchum’s Browning knife instead, but ultimately that decision wasn’t hers. Filomena felt fortunate to have captured such a vital young man’s almost complete attention for the seven years she’d held him in her thrall. Da
Filomena would be in her mid-to late fifties now, the writer knew-ru
In her letter, Filomena wrote: “I warmly enjoyed your novel, as you no doubt intended-a generous amount of homage with a justifiable measure of condemnation. Yes, I took advantage of you-if only in the begi
She’d written that letter two years ago-The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt had been published in ’81. He’d often thought of seeing her again, but how could Da