Two Spinsters

THE SISTERS MATERASSI (316 pp.)--Aldo Palazzeschl--Doubleday ($3.50).

For the better part of half a century, the Materassi sisters had dedicated their lives to the proposition that a pair of ladies' drawers, properly stitched, can be a thing of beauty. Teresa Materassi, in whom femininity had been buried like "a luxury she could not afford," did the stitching.

Sister Carolina, in whom femininity had been attenuated to a harmless affectation, did the embroidery. In the entire region of Florence, no pair was so successful.

The sisters were no homelier than many women who had sewed up husbands, but their thoughts were wound around their work like thread around a spool. Spinsters at 50, they had never even been kissed.

Then Remo, their 14-year-old orphan nephew, came to live with them. Remo had beautiful eyes "framed in long and vigorous lashes." He would bend over them while they were working, and when they felt "his fresh, youthful, fruit-scented breath on their necks and faces, a novel, unexpected feeling of well-being would run through them, bringing with it a swift intoxication, a slight giddiness." Neither of the old maids had the least idea what was creating such havoc in their dried-up bosoms.

But Italian Novelist Aldo Palazzeschi knew, and in The Sisters Materassi, first published in Italy 19 years ago, he handles the bewildered spinsters with a blend of irony and humor that is calculated to keep his readers smiling. It is a welcome summer change from the recent crop of grim, postwar Italian novels.

Abandoning themselves to the joy of raising Remo. the maiden aunts plan to make him an engineer, a millionaire, a deputy, a minister, and dream that he will rise "like a lighthouse ... to illumine the world." But Remo has no head for study and no heart for work. What he doesn't know about women, however, can be written on the head of one of his aunts' pins. After stripping the sisters of their savings, land and farm, Remo marries a beautiful American pressure-cooker heiress and goes to live with her. in New York. The blow is broken for the loving aunts when Remo tells them that he is not in love but has married for money.

Moreover, Remo has given them ten years of happiness, and, as they regain part of the fortune he squandered, they live in memories of the delightful past. In this they are greatly aided by a photograph of Remo in bathing trunks, blown up to two-thirds life size.

The Sisters' Materassi was hailed on its publication in Italy as a "great novel by a great writer." It is scarcely that, but Novelist Palazzeschi knows how to turn a funny phrase, create an engaging character, and tell a charming story.

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