At the ten o’clock Mass, I didn’t notice Ellen and her mom until I stepped into the pulpit to deliver my sermon. They were a few rows back to my right side.

Her mother appeared to be in her mid-forties. Nowadays, women that age strive to appear ten or even fifteen years younger. In 1957, they had fewer qualms about looking matronly, and that was how her mom was.

Ellen was mildly looking up at me. I could see that she had dressed up for church and that she was wearing a black hat. Beyond that, I tried to look at her as little as possible.

Later, at the top of the steps, I had some time because I wasn’t doing the eleven o’clock mass. Ellen and her mom came out, and Ellen introduced me.

Mrs. Morrisett said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Father. Ellen has been telling me what a wonderful priest you have been, how you’ve been helping her.”

“Oh, she has been saying that?” I probably should have used different content and a different tone with that question. I glanced sharply at Ellen but she was good at faking a deadpan look.

After a moment, Ellen said, “I’m going to step aside and let you two talk for a bit.”

Her mom then went into a confidential mode. “I’m so glad that someone is finally helping that girl. This is hard to talk about, but you are a priest and thus you should be understanding of these matters.”

“Of course, I will be.”

What was so hard to talk about? Well, I was going to find out. Mrs. Morrisett lowered her voice even more and said, “It’s disgraceful, but one day I came home and found Ellen sitting right there on the living room sofa. Her skirt was up and her hands were inside her panties. You know what that was about, right Father?”

“Yes, I believe I do.” I wasn’t surprised even considering the short time that I had known Ellen. She had told me about that very activity the previous day in Confession.

She shook her head and said, “Ellen is completely shameless, I’d say. She really needs a good spanking, but she is too old for that now.”

“That’s obviously true, I mean about her being too old.” If she only knew...

We chatted for about another minute. I thought she’d bring up Ellen’s female lover but apparently, she didn’t know anything about that. I glanced over, and Ellen was standing to the side, looking at us.

“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Morrisett, I need to talk to Ellen about something.”

“Of course, as I said, I’m so glad you’re doing this.”

I walked over there and said, “Let’s go down to the bottom of the steps, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure, whatever you want.”

We actually went to the side of the steps, and Ellen leaned on the supporting wall. I stood facing her, with my hands folded in front of myself. As on the day before, she gave me time to look her over. And she looked quite good indeed.

She had a light gray spring coat that was open at that moment. Under that, she was wearing a blue dress that was a bit shorter than the skirt she had on Saturday, and of course nylon stockings and black shoes. The heels on the latter were of moderate height.

I looked back up to examine that hat. It was a black pillbox, I’d call it, and it had a black bow of sorts to one side and also a black veil that seemed too small to ever cover her face.

Finally, I went back to her face. She had her glasses on but I could still read her expression quite well. It was that same mixture of confidence and defiance I had seen before. This lady is more than a touch arrogant, isn’t she?

She pointed to her head and said, “So, Father Chris, what do you think of my church lady hat?”

“It certainly is different.”

“Just different? Anyway, as you know, I told Mom about you last night, I mean that you were counseling me.”

“Yes, and as you predicted, she seemed quite pleased about it.”

“Did she tell you how she caught me masturbating?”

Wow, she got right into it. “How did you know that?” I could feel myself blushing.

“Because of how well I know her.” Ellen was smiling, and I guessed that she was going to tell me more about it. “I was there on the couch and she came home earlier than I had expected. The thing was, I was getting so close to succeeding at it, I was right on the edge.”

“So what did she do about it?”

“Not much, actually. Well, she did yell at me a lot, but I tried to ignore her as best I could.”

I decided to reveal one of my own confidences. “She said that you needed a good spanking, but that you were too old for it.”

Ellen found that amusing. “Really? She was obviously quite wrong about that!”

“Is that where you get the idea from; did she ever spank you?”

“No, never. She never even threatened it. That was all my own idea.”

She must have heard about it somewhere, but I wasn’t going to press her on that. Instead, decided to talk about myself a bit. “Ellen, it took me a long time to become a priest.”

“So, be a priest. No one is stopping you.”

“But I, you know...” I tried to explain it, “I broke my vow of chastity.”

“Is it chastity or celibacy? I’ve heard it both ways.”

“One and the same, I guess.”

“So what is it all about again?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain. It’s like one is not supposed to be distracted from one’s service to God. One way I’ve heard it described is that you are espoused to God in the same way one would be espoused to a wife.”

“So, do you think that God gives good blowjobs?”

I must have been glaring at her, because she put her hands to her lips and said, “Oops, I went too far again.” Yet she continued with the same theme, “So when do you think you broke your own vow? It couldn’t have been when you spanked me, because it’s appropriate to do that to naughty girls.”

“Ellen, that is enough.”

She didn’t stop, but she continued at some length. “Or maybe we should have toned it down a bit. Like I should have gotten it on the seat of my panties, or even the seat of my skirt. Over the skirt, I don’t think your hand would have been enough; you would have needed a wooden hairbrush at least. Anyway, then I used frottage; I rubbed myself on your lap. Is that technically breaking the vow?”

I couldn’t help myself, I found her weirdly funny. I must have cracked a smile because she shook a finger at me. “You see, you’re pretty naughty yourself, as I said.”

For some reason, I told her, “I don’t think there is human marriage in Heaven, from what I’ve been told.”

“Sounds like a pretty dull place. I bet they’re banging away like bunnies down in Hell.”

Then she pushed herself away from the wall and took a step towards me. “I’ll give you two options, Father Chris. The first is that I go home with Mom right now, maybe forever. If that is the case, you would only see me when she makes me go to Mass and probably to Confession.”

“You are going back to Confession?”

“If I do, I will certainly seek you out. You can unburden yourself and confess to me.”

That was so outrageous that I couldn’t respond directly. “So what is the second option?”

“Ah, I see you are interested, you bad boy. The second option is that we go over to the diner again. It’s getting to be lunchtime, and I’m feeling hungry. How about you?”

“But your mother will see us.”

She may a scoffing motion and said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell her right now and she can go home by herself. Believe me, she’ll be doubly pleased that you are spending some extra time with me.

Her brazenness was amazing, as was the meticulous way she planned these things. Like any good salesperson, she stopped talking and let the mark – me – make the next move.

Yet I could tell from her expression that she knew she already had me. In her clutches, I should say.

I was trying to cope with being in her presence. You could make a clean start right now, just send her off and make believe it all never happened. Even confess my sins the next time I went. No, I knew I was never going to do that last one.

In the end, it was her voice that got to me. It was a well-modulated voice. One could tell that she was a New Yorker, but she didn’t have that braying accent that some city girls had. I liked hearing her talk.

I said, “Okay, we’ll go over there and discuss some things.”

She rolled her eyes in a way that let me know that I was fooling myself again, but she didn’t call me out on it. “So then, I’ll go over and tell Mom right now.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

She made that scoffing motion again. “Don’t bother, I can deal with her.”

A few minutes later, we were in the diner.

That time, we couldn’t get a booth, so we made do with a table out in the open. I felt exposed sitting there, but if Ellen was bothered by it, she didn’t mention it. I was definitely feeling fidgety. Ellen scrunched around in her padded chair. “I’m still a bit achy back there. It was that belt of yours.”

“You asked for that too.”

“Hey, I’m not denying it.”

I ordered some kind of cottage cheese and Jell-O combination so that I could talk without having to chew too much, and I think Ellen did the same thing by getting egg salad.

After we gave our menus back we sat there looking at each other for a few moments. The thought I had was, who is this person, really? We’ve only really known each other for less than twenty-four hours.

The next thing she said caught me a bit off-guard. “I know you think I’m somewhat eccentric.”

“I never said that word.”

“But you believe it anyway.” Actually, she was correct about that. Women are so good at figuring these things out. “Probably I am eccentric, at least a bit. You’re also probably wondering why I don’t go out with guys my own age.”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“Ah, but you’re still thinking it anyway.” Very good Ellen, that’s two out of two so far.

She said, “Let me tell you a little story about myself. I did go out with two guys from City College last semester. They were both very nice to me, very respectful.” She leaned forward. “Maybe a little too nice. I wish they had gotten a bit fresh with me.”

There was that word I had thought about yesterday. I shouldn’t have said this, but I did anyway. “So how far would you have gone with them?”

She wasn’t a bit fazed by that, although I guessed that some women might slap my face. “I don’t know, how far did I go with you?” She laughed a bit. “Pretty far, I’d say. And it was only the first time.”

The first time? I deflected the topic a bit. “So who is this girlfriend of yours?”

“Oh, that’s my dear Clara.”

“Is she a lesbian?” I was getting rather brazen myself.

“No, I’d say she’s bisexual.” She pointed to herself. “Just like I seem to be.” Then she had a story about Clara. “We had lived near each other for a couple of years; just down the block. And we went to the same high school. Now she’s at Hunter.” That was Hunter College, another branch of the city university system.

“And one day last summer, just before our first semesters started, her parents were out and we were sitting there in her living room. And you know that feeling when two people are looking at each other and they both know that they want each other?”

“I admit, Ellen, that I wouldn’t know what that is like.”

She seemed pensive for a moment. “I think you do know more than a little, from yesterday.” Perhaps she wanted to avoid embarrassing me, but she did it anyway when she changed the subject. “So anyway – well, I told you about Clara and me in Confession yesterday, I mean what we do together.”

I tried to imagine that, and I could almost do it. Yesterday morning, that would have been impossible.

After our food arrived, I knew what I wanted to talk to her about, “So what are you studying at City?”

“I thought you’d never ask. I’m an English major.”

“That’s funny, so was I, I mean at Fordham.”

“I knew priests had to go to a university first, but I never thought about what they did there.”

We got to talking about T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

I asked her, “So do you think the narrator really drowns at the end?”

“Yeah, the sea girls, the mermaids. No, I don’t think he literally drowns. He’s sort of drowning in his own life.”

“What is bothering that guy, do you think?”

“My interpretation is that he’s got some kind of romantic or sexual issue, some problem with dealing with women.”

“The ones who talk about Michelangelo?”

“Yes, there are a lot of clues in there. He talks about the women he has known, like the way their arms look, for example. ‘Is it perfume from a dress, that makes me so digress?’ Also, he’s so damn self-conscious about himself, especially his own appearance.”

For the first time, I felt some understanding, some kinship perhaps, about what he was going through.

At one point, Ellen took off her glasses and put them on the table. “I know I’m being self-conscious. And, I know it’s a stereotype, but they make me look bookish, I think.”

“I’m sure plenty of dumb people wear glasses.

“Well, I am pretty bookish. Isn’t vanity one of the seven deadly sins?”

“It’s pride, actually.”

She leaned forward again and said, quietly, “So how old were you when you committed, I mean personally, to being a priest?”

So now it was about me again, but I answered truthfully. “I had thought about it earlier, but I was fourteen when I finally decided on it.”

“Did you go to a Catholic high school?”

“Yes, it was all-boys.”

“But Fordham is coed. It must have been difficult for you with all of those girls around.” When I refused to answer, she went on anyway, which didn’t surprise me. “So when you masturbated back then, those must have been the ones you were thinking of.”

“Ellen, I don’t really feel comfortable talking about this.”

“You should unburden yourself, as I said; confession is good for the soul.”

“I’m not confessing anything to you.”

She shrugged, “But you already have started it, I suppose.”

For the first time, I felt real anger at her. You hussy, you do have a lot of nerve. She wasn’t done with me. “So during the later wet dream period, why did you go over only to pictures? Because there were no women at the seminary?”

I shouldn’t have answered that either, but I did. “I guess I was unconsciously feeling guilty, and I felt better with drawings rather than real people. I was asleep, anyway.”

“I get it. What did you dream of doing with them?”

“I don’t know, they were just lying in a bed I suppose.”

“But you didn’t even know what they looked like between their legs.” She smiled, “You’re learning now, however.”