Constantine Dodge & Chrysler Motors

Constantine Dodge & Chrysler Motors is the automobile dealership associated with Diogenes Constantine and his family. The business enters the narrative first as a familiar local name, then as the setting for Dominick Birdsey’s attempt to find an affordable car. That visit turns a seemingly practical purchase into an encounter with the wealth and family influence surrounding Dessa Constantine.

Identity and Local Presence

The dealership is also referred to as Constantine Motors. Its name is recognizable through a radio jingle advertising the Dodge business, which Dominick recalls hearing repeatedly on Ralph Drinkwater’s radio. When Dessa gives her surname, Dominick connects it immediately to the advertisement—“Come see the Dodge boys at Constantine Motors”—and sings the jingle. Dessa laughs and says she will tell her father that the ads are beginning to pay off. The exchange establishes the business as part of the town’s everyday soundscape and makes the Constantine name publicly familiar before Dominick visits the dealership himself.

The Dealership and the Constantines

Diogenes Constantine is present at the dealership in his office when Dessa brings Dominick there to look for a car. Although she expects her father to help, Diogenes greets them coolly and hands the task over to his nephew, who had previously worked in the business. The scene connects the dealership’s commercial setting to the family’s private relationships: Dominick is not only a prospective customer but also the young man dating Diogenes’s daughter, a relationship that has already become a source of disagreement between father and daughter.

Dominick’s Search for an Affordable Car

Dominick needs a cheap used car. He has saved nearly eleven hundred dollars over the summer, plans to contribute five hundred dollars toward the loan Ray is giving him for college, and hopes to reserve most of what remains for a car and insurance. At the dealership, however, the nephew repeatedly directs him toward vehicles costing more than a thousand dollars and dismisses the cars Dominick asks about. A battered Fairlane is only one hundred and fifty dollars above Dominick’s stated limit, but the nephew refuses to sell it, saying he would not want his cousin riding in it. Dominick and Dessa leave without making a purchase.

The visit sharpens a practical divide already present in the relationship. Dessa believes her father can help, while Dominick has to reckon with a budget of about two hundred dollars and the limited choices available to him. His search continues elsewhere: he posts a notice at work asking for a car in that price range after checking local lots, junkyards, and classified advertisements without success.

Work, Wealth, and Regional Change

The dealership’s place in the story contrasts with the employment options available to Dominick and Thomas Birdsey. When Ray argues against paying for college, he proposes work at Electric Boat, where the twins might become apprentice pipe fitters, electricians, or welders; some positions, he says, would carry military deferments. The argument frames work in the region through shipbuilding, defense contracts, and immediate household finances, while college represents a contested route toward a different future.

Later, amid concern that the Navy might cancel Seawolf submarine contracts and Electric Boat might lay off workers, Leo Blood predicts that the casino will employ thousands. The narrative’s retrospective account describes Electric Boat, once the region’s economic backbone, as having shrunk to a fraction of its former payroll, while the Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort becomes a major employer and engine of local revival. The dealership is not presented as causing this economic transformation; rather, its familiar name and Dominick’s unsuccessful car search belong to an earlier local landscape in which family businesses, industrial work, and personal means shape what opportunities seem attainable.