The Unhappy Prostitute
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
She arrived at a wall of ancient crypts, stacked four high, like adjacent rows of file cabinets. Weather and age had obliterated many of the inscriptions. On one stack of crypts, vandals had pulled away the rotting red brick and marble headstone. The open grave was dated in 1882. She stood on her tiptoes and looked inside. An iron coffin occupied most of the crypt. At one time, an oval, glass window had covered the top of the coffin. Shattered glass sprinkled over the remains of a skeleton. Curious, Audra stood on the fallen brick to see better and leaned her head inside the dusty tomb. As her eyes adjusted to the limited light, she saw two tiny, iron coffins, pushed against the back wall of the crypt. The sight of the three coffins prompted a question: What would it be like to be a mother with babies, buried inside a grave such as this? The depressed mood returned instantly. Memories raced: of Uncle Cal and her abortion and of her dead mother and father. She stepped away from the grave and sat on a cold, marble bench. From a reservoir of repressed feelings, tears cascaded down her cheeks. Without cloth or tissue, she lifted her skirt and buried her face. Sobs shook her shoulders. Ten strides from Audra, Joseph M. Hardister dug his jogging shoes into the crushed seashells covering the cemetery drive and stopped in his tracks. He expected the weeping woman to hear the noise and to look up and to put down her skirt. Apparently she was too upset to hear him. With his right hand, he brushed his sweat-wet, blond hair away from his eyes.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Audra Lawson Eaglefeather is no novice, free-lance prostitute. She has been a working girl in New Orleans for two years, and during that time, she has learned to do anything to make a customer feel good. PART I begins the unhappy prostitute’s story in the present, with the full-blood Sioux Indian in her second year as a New Orleans call girl. Before leaving the Crescent City for a weekend tryst with her friend, Sally, Audra walks to a neighborhood cemetery and experiences the full impact of her unhappiness, as she sits alone and weeps. The crying woman does not hear the jogger, Father Joseph Hardister, a promiscuous priest who introduces himself to the disturbed girl, but hides his real identity from her. The brief encounter in the cemetery leads to an intense relationship between Hardister and Audra and creates an emotional preoccupation for the lonely Indian woman. PART II tells how Audra became a prostitute. She recalls events from her childhood, especially the sexual molestation by her uncle and her subsequent developmental years. The daughter of Sioux Indians, Audra is nearing twenty when her mother dies from cancer and her drunken father falls from a second floor staircase and dies. Audra vows to move from Iowa’s freezing winters and makes plans to move to Florida. PART III of the book returns Audra’s story to the present, as her relationship to Joseph suffers because of their lies to each other. Joseph tries to deal with his guilt about being a priest. Audra cannot continue her relationship to Joseph and work as a prostitute. Before they can declare themselves in honesty to each other, circumstances over which they have no control thrust them into individual crises, which threaten to destroy their growing love for each other.
About the Author
Reverend Donald Corley completed fifty years in the Christian ministry in 1991 and moved to Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where he writes fiction and teaches philosophy at Henderson State University, as a member of the adjunct faculty. Since his retirement as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Gonzales, Texas, in addition to THE UNHAPPY PROSTITUTE, Dr. Corley has published four novels: THE SHERIFF, THE PEDOPHILE MURDERS, DOUBLE MURDER IN NEW ORLEANS, AND TYCHICUS: THE ROMAN COURIER. Dr. Corley also served as the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Arkadelphia and the First Presbyterian Church in Bastrop, Louisiana. From 1957 and lasting twenty years, Dr. Corley directed the hospital chaplains at the Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, and organized and supervised the hospital’s first clinical pastoral education program. During those years, the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education certified Corley as a clinical pastoral educator. He was also a Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors and an Accredited Chaplain in the American Protestant Hospital Chaplain’s Association. Corley graduated from Ouachita Baptist University and earned the Doctor of Theology Degree from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He and Lynell married in 1945. They are the parents of three daughters, Donna (deceased), Betty, and Cindy. Now seventy-six, Corley stated, "I intend to write and teach so long as physical reality permits." His sixth novel will be published in 2003. Two other novels are under development.