elevated_subways: Blog

"The Soul of an Immoral Woman." Actually, he's continually led stray by his young, skeptical (of Catholicism among other things) parishioner Ellen. However, he admits that he has given into her charms since the very beginning. Here, she plays the role of a difficult but kinky middle-aged woman and they both enjoy it. She sticks to authenticity and abruptly leaves when they are done, leaving him to wonder what her eventually intentions about him will be.

There was an inconsistency in the story, so I replaced two chapters. As of August and September, 1969, Hank hasn’t yet moved out of his old neighborhood in the West Bronx although his family will be doing that in the fall. Thus I had to make some changes in Chapters 6 and 9 to account for that. The revisions in chapter 6 (“Excursions with Molly”) are fairly extensive, as they give more detail about their time together when she drives him home from a state park in Westchester County. I also changed the wording of a few sentences elsewhere in the story.

Even though I've written about her a number of of times, I've never explained the exact motivations for much of what she does. Here, she indulges in a ritualistic purging of her emotions from the previous year, and she gets her boyfriend to join in. Larger questions - like what happened to her parents and why she came to live with her uncle just before entering college - have been left unanswered. Maybe it's best to follow Oscar Wilde's advice here, “Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril.”

A reader found an error in it, and I found more when I reread the text. Also, it had been created as a stand-alone story, but I needed to make further changes to make it fit with the later "sequel" serial, "Katherine, Renée, and Paul." I think that serial is coming close to a conclusion, although I have to determine exactly what that will be.

This is in an indeterminate place in the timeline of 1995. It takes place mostly in Katherine's mind, and it is a fantasy she has about her real-life co-worker and lover Renée. It struck me that Katherine may have seen "Meet Me in St. Louis," which inspired the turn-of-the-century setting she uses. She especially likes the clothes and the presumed innocence of young girls which she suspects was an illusion even then. Thus it must have been intriguing for her to add a lesbian/bi-sexual angle to the "good girl" world of Esther Smith. She is also aroused by the corporal punishment of young people which was likely more common in those days and is described in more detail in Chapter 10.