Word: mistressful
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...life in the rackets. At home, a Mafioso cultivates the image of a solid, churchgoing, charity-supporting citizen (see box). On the job, he keeps up a flashy front by wining and dining associates at expensive restaurants and resorts. Nearly every important Mob figure sports a well-kept mistress at gangster affairs. The dichotomy of Mafia life was nowhere seen better than at a flashy Manhattan restaurant where mobsters used to entertain their wives and children on Sunday afternoons and return in the evening with their girl friends...
...Georgina's four-tiered wedding cake calls for 16 pounds of currants. There was the history bulletin: Hudson snaps shut his newspaper (the time is 1930) and announces that two million Englishmen are unemployed. There was the subtle reminder that no servant is a heroine to her mistress: in an unusual fit of garrulity, Personal Maid Rose blurts out a childhood memory to Virginia Bellamy. Ever so slightly, the good lady's eyes begin to glaze over...
...little conception of how to use it. His singing, while pleasant, is much too weak for the role, and his characterization of Egerman, a stuffy middle-aged lawyer, is too low-keyed. Since in any production Egerman is likely to be overshadowed by the glamorous figure of his mistress Desiree, underplaying the role invites disaster. Knickerbocker walks through his part a virtual blank, good-looking, nice-sounding and totally vacuous...
...when the author lessens the depth of his stories, as he does in "The Instruction of a Mistress," and "The Hand of Emmagene," his tales lose much of their appeal. As cruel revelations of the obsessions with which Taylor's characters "feed" their minds, all these stories lack the moderating presence of an adolescent observer. The reader can't sympathize with the presumptuous homosexual poet who keeps his mind busy with the loveless education of mistresses. Then there is the niece who chops off her hand, because she can't transcend her low upbringing, the couple who finds its marriage...
Warren's depictions of major characters are less exact, particularly in the case of Jed's mistress, Rose (nee Rozelle) Carrington. Rose exists only as Jed imagines her-a compound of firelight and sweating sexuality. She is a medley of images, of bare feet and huddled fur and surrender. But, like Jed, for whom she ironically represents a form of ultimate reality, she is less a character than a poetic creation--evoked, but in the end, not completely present...