Blessed Art Thou Among Women – A Nun’s Tale From Priory to Cat House

Delia Masterson had been a delightful, obedient, dutiful child – a sweetheart, a natural charmer, and her parents’ pride and joy.  She curtsied when meeting adults, said yes Ma’am and no Ma’am, did the dishes without complaint, went to bed without a fuss, and came down to breakfast all bright and cheery every morning.

The Mastersons were good Catholics and went to church regularly, but little Delia found something more than ritual and obligation in the Mass. From First Communion onwards, she became a prayerful, inspired girl.  Religion was not something to be acquired like a handbag or a pair of shoes, but something glorious and intimate.  From the first chords of the organ to the final processional, Delia was in another world where Jesus was her brother and God her father.  As she walked out of St. Maurice with her mother and father, she was always in tears, tears of joy for having been in the presence of the Lord.

 

While Mr. and Mrs. Masterson were outwardly pleased at the piety and devotion of their daughter, they were inwardly a bit concerned.  Religion was all well and good up to a point – a social center, a moral meeting place, but little more -and here was young Delia taking it seriously, and they feared the worst, a religious vocation, a nunnery, cloisters, and a dead end for a bright, talented girl.

The nuns of St. Maurice, trained to spot new talent, saw Delia’s potential immediately, and they did everything to encourage it. They were especially kind to her – most children remember nuns more as prison guards than kindly women – invited her to tea, and talked of the Holy Family and how she was one of Jesus’ little children.

 

Puberty would do it, the nuns knew.  If Delia stayed the course and maintained her spiritual fidelity and piety as she matured as a young woman, she might well have a vocation.  If she turned tarty and boy crazy, and love of God went down the drain, they could discontinue their outreach and fish in other ponds.

To their surprise and absolute delight, the girl became only more prayerful as she grew older. A stunningly beautiful girl whose sexual maturity had turned her into a National Velvet Elizabeth Taylor, she could have made her way with ease in secular society; but she eschewed male attention, made the stations of the cross, received holy communion each and every Sunday and asked to see the convent where the nuns lived.

 

To make a long story short, Delia Masterson opted for the religious life and at eighteen was taken in as a novice to the Rosicrucian Order Of The Virgin Mary. It was there, ironically, that the banked fires of an ardent sexuality burned hot, and the heady mix of love for Jesus and Mary Sue Bartlett, sweet cornflower from Chillicothe was overwhelmingly beautiful. She never had a scintilla of doubt that this double life was what Jesus meant when he talked of love for all mankind; and since her passion for Mary Sue only doubled as they knelt next to each other at the communion rail, she knew that the priory was for her.

Yet only God knows for sure what he created, and Delia was indeed a complex confection, so when she found herself in the arms of Devon Price, technician, sometimes sculptor, deliciously male attendant upon her beauty, she was at first surprised, then delighted.  She knew that in traditional, canonical terms, she had overstepped her bounds, but she had this firm belief in the wholesomeness and universality of Jesus’ love and felt she had done no wrong. 

Her passion burned at both ends, and slowly but surely her vocation became an afterthought.  The priory was little more than a hothouse for sexual passion and desire.  As she walked out the door, asked to leave by Mother Superior, but still in love with Jesus, she faced the world with some misgivings.  What now?

 

She had been trained only for the religious life and had no practical skills, no credentials, and no job future and if she was honest with herself, was good at only only one thing – sex.  She knew that both men and women found her irresistibly desirable, and she was able to rouse the most hidden and repressed sexual desires in both.  Did this not suggest a career?

Once again she turned to Jesus for advice and counsel.  She knew what the Church would say, but Jesus the all-loving, the compassionate; the infinitely understanding would not turn away.

Mrs. Lambert Rivers was a patrician lady from Beacon Hill who understood the sexual preferences of the well-to-do, and had had many affairs with them.  She knew that there were just as many elegant hostesses of Boston who wanted a discreet but passionate affair with younger women as there were those who preferred young men; and so Mrs. Rivers facilitated introductions, and over tea and biscuits arranged many informal affairs.

 

It was particularly satisfying to meet the needs of her people, the well-born, the sophisticated, and wealthy women of Boston; and to do it with women.  Men had always been assumed to be the natural clients for such services; but Mrs. Rivers knew otherwise, and her ‘social club’ was the sought after place on the Charles.  She was discreet, charming, and welcoming to the women who came to her, and outside of her clients, few knew of the real inner workings of her establishment.

Delia met Mrs. Rivers at a Catholic convocation in Framingham.  Despite the quite unusual paths they had trod, both women had remained devout Catholics, although their reasons were quite different. While Jesus was Delia’s companion, her soul mate, her loving partner, he was a principal in Mrs. Rivers’ spiritual firm – the CEO of her secular enterprise which gave her context and a certain security.  Dealing with such intimacy and personal uniqueness was a responsibility.

And so it was that the two women came to a felicitous agreement.  Delia would work for Mrs. Rivers, be paid well, be invited to the Islands by the most congenial of clients, and have her pick of any of the young men who satisfied these women’s ‘other’ demands.

Sex is a marvelous, multi-layered, multi-faceted, unexplainable phenomenon; and in any city one can find entrepreneurs who satisfy the demand.  From ghetto pimps and ho’s to the tony, exclusive, bi-sexual arrangements of Mrs. Rivers Social Club, there are hundreds if not thousands of way stations for the sexually ambitious.

For some reason many of the matrons of Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, and Georgetown who came to the Club were as devoutly Catholic as Mrs. Rivers and Delia Masterson and in the same uniquely passionate way.  Jesus actually meant something to them, and without him life would have a distinctly missing piece.  He was as much a part of their sexual enterprise as anyone.