Boston functions in the novel chiefly as a destination rather than as a sustained setting: Boston College gives Dessa a life beyond her family’s business, while the distance to her makes travel a practical and emotional problem for Dominick Birdsey. Later, Boston reappears in a proposed rail link to the expanding Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, placing the city within a changing regional economy.

Boston College and Dessa’s Independence

Dessa is a twenty-one-year-old senior at Boston College, where she studies early childhood education. Alongside her studies, she waits tables and works mornings at a Head Start program. Those jobs and her education mark a measure of independence from her family’s car dealership: her father had wanted her to return to work in its bookkeeping department, but she chose a change and the chance to find out whether employers outside her family would hire her. The novel does not dwell on Boston’s streets or campus life. Instead, Boston College identifies the city through Dessa’s choices: education, paid work, and a growing ability to shape her own path. Boston matters as the place her studies take her, and as the distance between that independent life and the people who want to remain close to her.

Distance, Courtship, and the Need for a Car

During the summer, Dominick and Dessa’s work schedules leave them Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights together. Their meetings are local: afterward, Dominick rides his bicycle along Lakeside, across Woodlawn, and onto Route 165. When the academic year approaches, however, he plans to travel to Boston every weekend to see her. The change from a summer routine of nearby meetings to a long-distance trip makes transport part of their courtship. Hitchhiking is cheap, but Dominick has already encountered alarming rides, including a driver who claimed to have explosives in the trunk and another whose wife, apparently high on acid, thought his head was on fire. He has saved almost eleven hundred dollars over the summer. After setting aside five hundred dollars to add to Ray’s college loan, he considers using what remains for a used car, insurance, and living costs. He also imagines saving for a diamond ring. At nineteen, with his twentieth birthday approaching over the holidays, he is already thinking of Boston not simply as somewhere to visit, but as a journey he wants to make reliably in order to preserve his relationship with Dessa.

College and the Regional Economy

The surrounding family economy gives college an additional weight. Ray resists paying tuition for the twins and proposes work instead, including apprenticeships at Electric Boat, where submarine construction supports the regional defense industry. His alternatives make clear that higher education competes with immediate, local routes into paid work; they also establish how strongly family decisions are shaped by what work is available and what it can provide. The later account of eastern Connecticut’s economic transformation enlarges Boston’s place in that geography. After the Cold War, Electric Boat’s payroll contracts sharply, while the Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, opened in 1992, becomes a major source of employment and expansion. Planners consider bringing gamblers from Boston by a proposed high-speed private railroad, alongside a possible river route from New York City. Boston thus appears again as a distant population center connected to the region by projected transportation, not as the site of the industrial change itself.

Narrative Significance

Across these appearances, Boston links personal mobility to economic change. For Dessa, Boston College is part of a life she is trying to make on her own terms; for Dominick, reaching her depends on money, a car, and repeated travel. In the later regional picture, the same city becomes a potential source of visitors for a casino economy rising as shipyard employment declines. Boston remains mostly offstage, but its changing functions—as educational destination, romantic distance, and proposed transport connection—help show how individual choices and the region’s prospects extend beyond Three Rivers.