The Tart, The Archbishop, And The General - The Taste Of Power Is Very Sweet Indeed

Lucinda Flanders grew up in a small town in Ohio in a classic rural district with more cows than people. The family farm raised pigs, had two milking cows, and small fields of corn and wheat. They lived modestly but well, were churchgoers, Republicans, and charitable neighbors. 

As such, her parents were unsure what to do with their daughter who had none of their rectitude and social probity, and at a very young age was spending more time with boys than on her duties at home.  There was something devilish in her, something unexpectedly different, desires and ambitions which did not match those of her parents or the community.  

She was seen in the back seat of cars, in the Toller's barn, in the cornfields, and in the gymnasium in spectacular contortions that reminded Mr. Adams, the history teacher, of Japanese Edo pornographic woodcuts where the subjects, like Lucinda were straddled, arranged in athletic positions, and performing calisthenic sex.

 

Talk of expulsion ran through the school administration; but because Lucinda was an honor student, a basketball star, and budding mathematician, the authorities could do nothing.  She was indeed a blot on the spotless reputation of the school, but given her talents and reputation - Billings Senior High was put on the map thanks to her athleticism and championship at the statewide math competition - they decided to look the other way. 

It wasn't until Mr. Cartwright, the French teacher decided to try his luck with Lucinda, was immediately successful, but was unfortunately caught in flagrante delicto with the delicious young girl and summarily fired. 

'The Billings Brothel' shouted the Chillicothe Times Herald, and soon after the first edition hit the newsstands, both Mr. Cartwright and Lucinda Flanders were told never to return. 

At his point Lucinda could have gone in any one of three ways - to Ohio State on a basketball scholarship, to Los Alamos Center for Advanced Mathematics, or the street and a life of languorous, sybaritic sexual pleasure. 

She didn't have a choice really, for those girls who are born with such sexual precocity cannot possibly deny it. In Lucinda's case, with her combination of intelligence and sexual ambition, she soon realized that she could capitalize on both.  Men were easy marks, and why not use her canniness and sexual appeal for profit?

It was at this point that she had the good fortune to meet the Very Reverend James J. O'Connor, Archbishop of Bolivar County, a man of ambition and rising prospects.  The Vatican had taken notice; but O'Connor, one of the few remaining straight prelates in the archdiocese, had a particularly strong attraction for young women.  Perhaps it was being surrounded by gay priests in the rectory, on the altar, in the sacristy and in the church refectory that the ordinarily careful and abstemious priest stepped over the line as soon as he saw Lucinda Flanders. 

Even if her reputation had not preceded her, he would have been drawn to this succulently delicious morsel. Sex shouted from every pore, from every strand of her carelessly tossed hair, her perfume, and her undulating, seductive walk.  It was a done deal from the moment she walked into the nave, knelt in a pew, and started saying the rosary. 

 

This piety was nothing of the kind - she had her eye on trouble, and her mind had set its sights on the archbishop, a man of God but known as a gentleman, a courtier, a man whose admiration of women was no secret. What a star to be hitched to! What a conquest! Washington, Rome, the Vatican itself. 

If it hadn't been for the buggery in every nook and cranny of the Church, Archbishop O'Connor might never have taken the step, the one that led to a Garden of Eden sexual paradise; but fed up, angered, and frustrated at the diddling and twiddling of priests, acolytes, and altar boys, he decided to express a manhood which had long been repressed. 

God would understand, for His church had become such a den of iniquity that a return of good Biblical (Joshua begat Esther, etc.) values would be condoned if not championed.  And so it was that the affair began and continued through the Archbishop's rather unusual recognition and invitation by the Cardinal of Washington, DC to take over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a local branch of the same Vatican office formerly run by then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. 

 

'Come with me', the Archbishop said to Lucinda, and so the couple moved across the country - he to the archbishop's elegant residence on the campus of Catholic University and she in a Dupont Circle townhouse, paid of course by the Archbishop from his inheritance.

It was to their credit that the illicit affair was kept secret for so long.  Washington is a porous, information-hungry, seditiously catty society and such a dalliance would have been front page news; but the assignations between the two lovers was always done far from the spotlight, often in uncomfortable quarters, but just as often as trysts in the Shenandoah as Mr. and Mrs. Jones. 

The affair remained secret and the Archbishop was being talked of as the replacement to the Cardinal who, now in his late 80s was said to be considering retirement to a villa in Tuscany.  O'Connor was doing quite well for himself, and saw himself as a Renaissance man, a Roman priest with a mistress and a fortune. 

At about this time General Abraham Lockhart Pender came into his life. Pender, a three-star general who served his country with distinction in both Afghanistan and Iraq, had been troubled with existential doubts.  He felt he was losing his faith. 

Brought up Catholic, educated at Georgetown, the country's premier Jesuit university, and a faithful congregant at the mystery of the Mass, he was at spiritual sixes and sevens.  No amount of prayer, introspection, or reflection could shake free the increasingly mordant questions of faith that kept him up at night. 

 

And so it was that the General sought and was granted an audience with the Archbishop, a man of suitable and comparable rank; and in a series of private meetings, his spiritual uncertainties began to fade. 

It was at one of these meetings that the General met Lucinda Flanders, hired by the Archbishop as his aide-de-camp, accounting advisor, and ecclesiastical factotum.  He needed nothing of Lucinda's services, but wanted his lover close by for comfort, pleasure, and companionship. 

Now, the General, long restricted by the Army's strict code of moral behavior, had grown sexually restive and, just like every man who had preceded him, was immediately attracted to the young and still nubile Lucinda Flanders. His overtures were obvious, and she took notice.  The archbishop's promised transfer to the Vatican was still far away, Rome was now just a fanciful dream, so the fortunes of a man of political power and influence looked very attractive. 

When the archbishop found the note on his pillow informing him of Lucinda's departure, he was at first disconsolate - at his age he would never again have such a young woman in his bed and would have to return to the celibate life of cold, hard emotional penury; but God provided.  He accepted his fate, upped his devotion, and led life as it should be led, a bit cold and stony, but rewarding nevertheless.  

As luck would have it, the General was transferred from Commandant of Fort Mead to the Pentagon, and his political future was bright.  He, still a youngish man of strategic battlefield brilliance and military intelligence, would make an ideal candidate for high office, and so he became a Republican Party celebrity, showered with attention, favors, and promises. 

Now, America is not France where the President can install his lover in the Elysees Palace without raising eyebrows, and before Sarkozy, Francois Mitterrand had longstanding affair with his mistress with whom he had a daughter, again to no particular public criticism. 

No, America is still a Puritanical, censorious, prurient society, and so the affair between the General and Lucinda had to be kept particularly quiet.  If and when his political future materialized then and then only would he jettison his wife and consider marriage with Lucinda. 

By this time, Lucinda's interest in men, Washington, and power had faded.  Her coffers were full, her offshore bank accounts rich with unaccountable equities, and her privacy still intact. Even as profligate, libertine, and sexually excessive as she was, she could return to Ohio without having left a trace on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Her parents were delighted to have her back among the cows and chickens.  That fol-de-rol when she was a youngster was long forgotten, and she was just plain Lucy again.  The old song verse, 'You can't keep 'em down at the farm once they've seen Paree' didn't apply.  She was happy to be back.