I suppose that’s what you think about me wanting to marry Peggy. I’m sure it’s what your mother thinks. Perhaps even Peggy thinks this, too. But my case is a little different. I wasn’t born in Boston. I was born in Hancock, Massachusetts, which is a good distance away. If you don’t know where Hancock is, it doesn’t make any difference; it’s a very small town and I hardly remember it. We moved from Hancock to Boston in 1936, when I was seven years old. I don’t remember anything about the trip except that the car was a DeSoto and I got carsick about every twenty miles. There were five of us then, including my mother and father. Later on, there were six. I have one brother and two sisters. I am the oldest. Not quite enough children, I suppose, to qualify us as a good Catholic family. But it was a good-sized family just the same. My father owns a drugstore which he inherited from an uncle—this was why we left Hancock, dreaming of an inheritance and a life of ease! But my father is not a pharmacist, which is probably why the drugstore has never made as much money for him as it made for his uncle.
