Chapter Seven
And then we come to Nurse Jenna. She had grown up in a large, warm, tempestuous Italian-American family that was both loving and deeply conservative. Their devout Catholicism left no room for unpunished bad behavior, an opinion shared by the nuns at the parochial schools the large brood of children of course attended. Her father was a police lieutenant, but he never raised a hand to his youngsters. Their mother was quite the opposite, and misbehaving children would know her wrath physically, both in random swats to the head for minor sins like woolgathering, and in more formal corporal discipline. She had spent several years in a convent in the hard times after World War II, and that was where she had learned the ropes of chastising the squirming buttocks of childish miscrea
