The Saga Of Blythe Harper–A Happy Hooker In A Censorious Age

Blythe Harper wanted to make her First Communion when she was seven years old, a full year before the Church-sanctioned age of eight.  Despite the encouragement of her mother and the support of her local parish priest, the archdiocese refused.  Rules are rules, they said.

Blythe was disappointed and wore her First Communion outfit – white crinoline skirt, pumps, and gloves, and floral tiara woven from flowers grown in her garden – every Sunday before being told to change into her ordinary Sunday best.  Every morning she knelt before the shrine she had constructed in her bedroom – a crucifix, statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a picture of Jesus among the poor – said a prayer in remembrance of her dead grandmother, and asked Jesus not to forget her when it came time for Resurrection. 

She made her First Communion the following year, but her mother had to buy her another dress, so wrinkled and worn was the old one from so many Sundays of wear, and new soft, white kid gloves to replace those which had gotten stained and creased. The old pumps were still shiny and white, and the garden just as full of verbena, lilies, foxglove, and baby’s breath as in previous years. 

As she walked up the aisle to the altar, she tried to keep her head down, and feel humble and unworthy so that the moment of first receiving the body and blood of Jesus would feel all that more miraculous.  She couldn’t resist looking at the rows of parishioners and saw her parents who gave her a discreet wave and each other a hug, basking in the glorious, transforming moment of the Sacrament.

The nuns and priests of St. Anthony’s were sure that little Blythe had a gift and that she would certainly join the Oblates of The Little Flower.  Never in the life of the church had  the seen such a pious, devoted, lovingly spiritual girl.  They told her parents as much, and no word of praise could have been more welcome. 

The Harpers were a modest couple, he a pharmacist, she a nurses aide, both with modest schooling and from modest social backgrounds.  They never expected their daughter to be a bright light on Wall Street, academia, or medicine and had no intention of encouraging her.  On the contrary, both Harpers could only imagine their only daughter, married to Christ and living with him in the holy matrimony of the spirit.

When she was only ten, she felt the rush of hormones which in most girls came a year or two later.  One morning she woke up to find herself living in someone else’s body , one that felt good and eager for something unexplored and unexplained.  Nothing seemed the same to her – not the hot porridge her mother served every morning, not the dog barking next door, the squirrels scrambling up the birdfeeder, the wind in the oak trees, or the patches of snow still on the ground.

She went to school as before, but for the first time noticed people – not the silly boys in the back of her class or the silliest girls giggling up and down the staircase, or the headmaster, but Mr. Henry the science teacher and football coach and Mr. Lang, the Latin teacher.  

Before her ‘morning’ she had paid no attention to them, and listened to their explanations of air pressure and declensions with indifference and boredom; but after her epiphany she looked at them.  How they stood, how they smiled, how they gestured when they talked; and when they looked at her she smiled and waited for a smile back.

She felt increasingly funny in her clothes – schoolgirl clothes she thought – and told her mother she wanted a change, something more ‘fitting’, something “older”.  Alarm bells rang, for Mrs. Harper had gone through a difficult adolescence that she never talked about – a time of sexual exploration and adventure only contained by the discipline of her father and the hellfire admonishments of Father Brophy, a fire-and-brimstone gunslinger whose obsession with sexual waywardness was well known.

The survivors of Noah’s ark went on to populate the world with heathen fornicators, blasphemers, and the morally corrupt, Father Brophy warned, and God should never should have let them off.  Extermination of a foul, disobedient, insolent race should have been the penalty for such denial.

Here Father Brophy paused, looked over the congregation, past the flowered women, the shaved and collared men, and the restless children, and fixed his eyes on a man standing in the vestry.

The vile putrefaction of sin, disobedience, and abandonment of Jesus Christ is alive and well in our own parish.  There are some who fornicate at will – adulterers, masturbators, alley cats whose carnal appetites have no  bounds, no barriers, no Do Not Enter signs.  These are the men and women who will be condemned to a roasting, everlasting hellfire.

The man in the vestry squirmed, and edged his way towards the door of the church, but he was called back.  “You, sinner, cannot escape God’s wrath, his eternal punishment, and your consignment to a burning, merciless punishment ever after.”

Mrs. Harper was always glad to hear Father Brophy go on like this, calling out the fallen, the disreputable, and the godless.  She was happy that she had received God’s grace and only prayed that her daughter would remain on her holy path to prayer and salvation at the Oblates.

It wasn’t to be.  Whether it was the influence of her Aunt Milly, a showgirl, a ‘dancer’ and featured Las Vegas runway star; or her second cousin Blanche who had married and divorced twice, each time to a man with money who set her up in a life of ease which she took to like a duck to water and became famous for her sexual soirees in New York; or perhaps some genetic inheritance from a distant Victorian burlesque queen who made headlines for her ‘degeneracy and sexual profligacy’ (She was called a vixen, a succubus, an unwanted harridan on both stage and streets by the New York Herald), she, in one fell swoop gave up thoughts of the oblates, the Catholic Church, propriety, and motherhood.

“You slattern!”, shouted her mother when Blythe came in, barely 15, dressed like a streetwalker, the spitting image of Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, hooking on Times Square.  “Get out of this house!”, she yelled, blessing herself, reaching for her rosary beads. “What have you done to me?”, she asked the Lord Jesus, unware of her blasphemy and her own malediction so mad with rage was she. 

No amount of second hand psychoanalysis; no parsing of his extensive memoirs; no exegesis of his plays, poetry, and short fiction could explain Tennessee Williams’ promiscuity, his fascination with the trash of the gay world, with violent sex and humiliation, abuse, and abandonment; and no gentle look into the psyche, family, or random influences of Blythe Harper’s life could have predicted her slide from grace.

None of this mattered to her, however, and she took up sexual deviance with a vengeance.  Far from the self-destructive, painfully dependent Williams, she was a happy hooker, a woman in full form and full sexual promise; and if the shared one thing with the playwright, it was her sense of futility with the prescribed order of things, received wisdom, and righteousness.  Human nature, wrote Williams, has nothing to do with such propriety, such denial of sexual expression, such patriarchal hammering shut of the female soul.

Yet she was no Belle du Jour, the intriguing Catherine Deneuve character of the Luis Bunuel film – a high class sophisticate of the best Parisian society by day and a high class prostitute by night.  Blythe had none of the Deneuve character’s reticence and initial timidity, vestiges of her own Catholic upbringing.  Blythe embraced the lifestyle, loved the lobbies of the Mayflower, the Ritz Carlton, and the Plaza.  She was like the Bree Daniels character in the Alan Pakula film, Klute, a strong, confident woman who confides to her therapist that she is proud of her profession and her talent of making men happy. 

Blythe had bits of Belle, Bree, and Williams – a sense of independence, individuality, and philosophical conviction that all is possible in a neurally-determined world of infinite, random choice.  She was happy as a woman, as a prostitute, and as a defiantly independent woman.

Of course women like her were censored by the progressive Left.  Prostitution was an abasement of the female spirit, an abject submission to the hormone-ridden, ignorant male predators of the world.  Pornography was anathema – a putrid, disgraceful pandering to male bestiality and testosterone-sodden impulse, only permitted in the direst of economic circumstances, an occasion not of sin or subjection but of profitable commercial activity.

Blythe paid them no mind.  They, like many of Tennessee Williams’ theatregoers, misunderstood female sexuality in all its expressiveness. If a woman’s body was indeed her own, and all reproductive choices her own, then so were her sexual choices. One should neither condemn nor praise Blanche Dubois for her prostitution, her duplicity, her theatricality, and her animal sexual desires. 

Blythe and her mother were long estranged – not because of Blythe by any means, as comfortable as she was in her own skin, but because of her mother, a sorely disappointed woman, angry and feeling discarded.  Not only did her precious, holy daughter give up the Oblates and the Church, but roamed the deepest of immoral depths.

Life and age have ways of sorting things out.  Blythe had a pull-by date and never regretted the day when she closed her little black book, retired to Florida, and bought a small book shop in the Keys.  No one knew her there, and if they did, she would be lionized.  There, where beats the heart of sexual freedom, she would have been a goddess.