Little Casino

The libertine’s hell

SHORTS AND DRESSES. AND SKIRTS AND blouses.

And shirts and slips and half-slips and camisoles.

And brassieres and panties and corsets and girdles and teddies.

And garter belts, sheer stockings, high heels.

Suits, evening gowns, slacks, jeans. Christ knows what else, or what they’re called. Dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands of each article of clothing, lacy and silky and soft and smooth and shining, mountains of the stuff, miles of it. Hats.

But not a single woman to be discovered in any one of these things, not one, anywhere. This, says Father Graham to himself, is the libertine’s hell, or should be, at least it’s mine. His eyes are looking at something that is not in the rectory, his eyes are glassy, yet frightened. The liquefaction of her clothes, he says, and moans. Help me, God, help me.

“O how that glittering taketh me!” O! O! O!

This “Father Graham,” surely the figment, the crude figment of a particularly diseased imagination, does not in any way represent the loving, serene, chaste, and paternal shepherd whom millions of the faithful have honored and will continue to honor as the true bulwark of Holy Mother Church: Joseph Cardinal Cullinane.

“O my God! I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”

It is, perhaps, just as well that Father Graham has sublimated his tormenting desires into simple fetishes, since the parish is filled with women in their actual flesh.

Their flesh, he whispers, in the dark. Their sinful flesh!