"I can help you with Ketchum," Injun Jane told Pam. "I suppose he's passed out somewhere--if so, I can carry him easier than Cookie can."
"He's passed out naked on the toilet, and I ain't got but one toilet," Pam said to Dominic, not looking at Jane.
"I hope he was just reading," the cook replied.
Ketchum appeared to be making his dogged way through Dominic Baciagalupo's books, which were really Dominic's mother's books and Rosie's beloved novels. For someone who'd left school when he was younger than Danny, Ketchum read the books he borrowed with a determination bordering on lunacy. He returned the books to the cook with words circled on almost every page--not underlined passages, or even complete sentences, but just isolated words. (Danny wondered if his mom had taught Ketchum to read that way.)
Once young Dan had made a list of the words Ketchum had circled in his mother's copy of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Collectively, the words made no sense at all.
symbolize
whippingpost
sex
malefactresses
pang
bosom
embroidered
writhing
ignominious
matronly
tremulous
punishment
salvation
plaintive
wailings
possessed
misbegotten
sinless
innermost
retribution
paramour
besmirches
hideous
And these were only the words Ketchum had circled in the first four chapters!
"What do you suppose he's thinking?" Danny had asked his dad. The cook had held his tongue, though it was hard to resist the temptation to reply. Surely "sex" and "bosom" were much on Ketchum's mind; as for "malefactresses," Ketchum had known some. (Six-Pack Pam among them!) Regarding the "paramour," Dominic Baciagalupo was more of an authority than he wanted to be--the hell with what Ketchum made of the word! And considering "whippingpost" and "writhing"--not to mention "wailings," "misbegotten," "besmirches," and "hideous"--the cook had no desire to investigate Ketchum's prurient interest in those words.