It was neither nature nor nurture that produced the likes of Angela Murphy, concluded her parents, good Catholics from South Philadelphia, church-goers, and respected members of the Irish-American community.
'Never touched drop, he didn't, God bless him, Michael Murphy, nor his good wife Margaret who worked her fingers to the bone, taking in washing and ironing to help feed her five little ones with one more on the way'.
The Michael Murphys, Angela's grandparents had come over from Ireland after the potato famine, they were sure after to tell everyone, not the bog Irish, the shanty Irish, the lace curtain Irish Americans were quick to say, not knowing how tough a life it was just to keep bread on the table, sure it was better than Mayo and the rain and fog chilling body and soul and the bloody bleating of sheep and goats day and night, but still by the love of God it was hard to see No Irish Need Apply signs everywhere.
They did what they could, stayed put in their neighborhood, stayed away from the pub, prayed to Jesus every morning and every night, and made their way in their new country.
Angela's father, Fearghal, was the oldest of the Murphy boys and the most responsible, for taking care of his four brothers and sisters it was that made a man of him said Father O'Reilly presiding over his marriage to Maureen O'Connell, as lovely a lass as you could find anywhere up and down the Main Line, and when they had a child, Angela, she was baptized in the same baptismal fount as her parents, her aunts, and uncles.
'May God bless little Angela', the priest said kindly, 'God's own little angel and may He watch over her as she becomes a woman', and with that, loved and blessed, Angela entered the world.
Yet something had gone wrong in God's plan for the little girl, for despite her chubby, rosy little cheeks, hers soft, flaxen hair, and bright blue eyes, Angela was not the angel everyone had expected. She was a stubborn, ornery, nasty child, possessed by Devil, her mother said in moments of despair, not one of us said her father pointing to great Uncle Sean who had been the shame of the family.
Sean had been a drunken lout, a blasphemer, a wife-beater, and child abuser. Jailed a hundred times by the peelers for drunk and disorderly, imprisoned twice for more serious crimes, Sean Murphy was a bad apple, it was as simple as that, and Fearghal, Angela's father assumed the same about his daughter.
'Don't give up on her, Fearghal Murphy', his wife said to him after he locked the little girl in her room after one of her volcanic fits, ripping pages out of picture books, standing there like a defiant queen urinating on the floor, splashing in it like a rain puddle and running away from her red-faced father as fast as she could.
The nuns wanted nothing to do with her and insisted to Father O'Reilly that they would not have her in their catechism classes. 'No amount of penance, Father, can redeem that little devil', they said; but the priest felt it was his ordained duty to keep the girl within the Church and the Redeemer's blessed arms.
Yet even he blanched when one day in the rectory where he had invited the now maturing young girl, she smiled at the priest, adjusted the folds and creases of his chasuble, and took his hand.
'Stop it, you little devil', the priest shouted and shoved her rudely out the rectory door. 'God help us all'; but the good father was immediately shameful and contrite. How could he have treated such a young, innocent soul in such a manner? Where was his divine calling when it was needed?
In fact this was the first time that the priest had been treated like a man, not a clerical cipher, and he worried more about his soul than that of Angela Murphy. Vile thoughts ran through his head just as troubling but intensely pleasurable feelings ran through him as the girl touched him ever so lightly but ever so meaningfully.
'I will set her straight', the priest said to himself, and invited the girl back to the rectory where he sat her down and began to lecture her on sexual propriety, the sanctity of marriage, and the promise of heaven to those who waited; but his heart was not in it, and he couldn't help looking at the young girl's legs, daintily but provocatively crossed, bare beneath her short, plaid school skirt. She moved them ever so slightly, but enough to turn the priest entirely from thoughts of Jesus Christ to unholy congress with the sweet young thing sitting opposite.
It wasn't long before Father O'Reilly gave in to his desires, and crossing every moral, legal, and divine line there was, entered into a sexual affair with young Angela Murphy, a passionate, epiphanic one - one of God's mysteries. Was populating the earth such a spiritual affair that He created a desire, half of which would have done the trick? Was this part of his test of faith? A latter day test of Job? And why could he not free himself from what would inevitably and consequentially turn to disaster?
The desire of the priest was such that he took many risks, and of course one afternoon was caught in flagrante delicto by none other than Bridey O'Hara, old biddy, sour spinster praying the Stations of the Cross every Saturday before confession, a dry, uninteresting affair that took up a good fifteen minutes with nothing but veniality as the pews filled outside the confessional.
Needless to say, the priest was outed, chastised, defrocked, and sent packing. The Church of the Resurrection had to be once and for all cleansed of the evil that had grown within it.
Nothing was heard after Father O'Reilly's dismissal, and reports had him in the Idaho panhandle and Columbus, Mississippi, but there had been no sightings of him and it was doubtful there would be as he certainly folded himself into the fabric of America.
Now, the mores of the town and America in general being what they were, it was assumed that Angela Murphy had been sexually abused, and as such was granted victimhood. 'The poor girl...that sweet innocent thing...that prayerful angel...' repeated the townspeople of Mayberry Hill; but the men of the town knew differently. They knew a nymphet when they saw one, referring to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - preternaturally sexy, desirous, fully mature women at an early age; and Angela was one.
Most of them, wary of the opprobrium let alone the legal consequences of advances to this desirable, infinitely approachable girl, stayed away from her; but some, breathing in the same irresistible pheromones as the departed Father O'Reilly had, succumbed, gave in to temptation, were in seventh heaven for a month or two and then suffered the same fate as the priest.
While she was still in her adolescent years, she flew under the radar. She was always assumed to be the victim, not the temptress; but as she grew older, the calculus had changed, sex was a mutual affair, a quid pro quo arrangement at worst, and a delightful fugue at best.
Even in this modern day where feminism had finally gotten rid of the notion of a girl's reputation - that is serial sexuality was a matter of choice not opprobrium - there was still some residual suspicion about a woman free and easy with her sexual favors; but Angela by this time had learned how to negotiate psycho-social waters. Her desirability was in no way diminished by her libertine ways. In fact men were even more drawn to her to find out if the magic was real.
There was indeed magic in the air when Angela walked into a room. Heads turned, wives were ignored, and all sense of propriety was replaced by one of urgency.
Now, it should be explained that Mayberry Hill, a small town in rural New Hampshire where Angela now lived, was a very proper place, hewn from old New England stock, educated in Puritan ways, and heir more to Cotton Mather than to entrepreneurs. Not that they harbored any of the feelings of their Salem ancestors who burned witches at the stake in a fiery resentment of female sexuality. No, although the residents of the town might think suspiciously about female duplicity and sexual forwardness they were far from the misogyny of Salem.
Women were respected in Mayberry Hill, good wives and mothers, faithful to God and their husbands, never a cause of concern, in their place willingly and dutiful members of the community.
Angela changed all that. It was as though a sexual emissary had been sent by forces beyond the town's comprehension to reorder sexual priorities, to restore sexual congress as the inalienable, irrefutable be-all and end-all of Man's short life.
What Nabokov missed in his story was that some nymphets never lose their preternatural sexual allure. His Lolita in the final scenes of the book is a pregnant, barefoot housewife; but this Lolita, Angela Murphy, never lost that sexual divinity that defines very few. The years only added to her allure, her sexual savvy, her confidence, and her Nietzschean way of riding above the herd.
The small town was surprisingly but inevitably changed by Angela Murphy. The annals of history are filled with stories of individuals who made a difference, whose intelligence, insight, or creativity changed the way others thought about life or acted within it. Although Angela would never go down in history, she was nonetheless no less influential. In her own way she rid the town of the last vestiges of old-fashioned sexual propriety, Salem, the church, and Godfearing itself. She was the doyenne of a new republican era - nothing political but inestimably social. She was quite something.
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