Afterwards, I didn't talk to my mother about it all. But the one time I remember her touching me much beyond the age of six that didn't involve, say, a slap across the face happened about a month after he dumped me. She came up to me in the necrous hallway of our horrible house right after I had just seen the movie The Heart is Lonely Hunter. In it there's a sort of introverted young woman who gets involved with a boy only slightly older than her and it ends badly and the young man as cast in the movie looked a lot like the young man I am talking about here. She said "oh you poor thing", and she hugged me. One, I was horrified that she had such intimate knowledge of me and two, I didn't want sympathy from her.

This was an overshadowing relationship.

but not one of the major names you would recognize. And, he was from the cadet branch, and so didn't have as much money as other descendants did, but they still had enough to send him to Thacher.