stenchy

After losing their violently unhappy parents to a car wreck as teenagers, the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, inherited a crumbling Victorian house as well as their mother’s ballet school, the center of their universe, a “cramped, sweaty, stenchy place, ripe as the hollow of a dancer’s pointed foot.”

But he does use the word “stenchy” to describe them: “You tend to get used to your own scent, but then if someone else happens to be in your suit, it takes a while to get your own scent back.”

I stayed there three hours; and I suppose if it hadn’t been for the horrid stenchy smell I’d be there yet.”

Despite the sordid tenements, putrid poolrooms, stenchy saloons, dirty streets and flying garbage, they provided their children with emotional security and imbued them with dignity.

Those two cases of fever in that old frame tenement up a narrow, stenchy alley were the quiet opening of a new act in the drama that was played that year in Westville.