All the recent Catholic Discourse makes me a little sad that my short story didn’t win the Hugo at Dublin Worldcon, because that was the only time I was ever gonna have the chance to give the speech about my grandmother’s Catholic polyamory to a primarily Catholic audience.

For those who have not heard the tale, Grandma was a woman of strong appetites and equally strong folk Catholicism, which meant that she strongly objected to sex outside of marriage. Her solution was just to marry each of them and then, when they tapped out, get divorced.

But this was long ago—Grandma was a Rosie the Riveter in WW2—and divorces were tricky and annulments, which of course she also had to get, required the Church’s approval.

So Grandma had a system.

First of all, you must understand that Grandma was one of those rare intensely charismatic individuals that not-infrequently wind up starting cults or revolutions, and it is probably lucky that she did neither. Men fell at her feet. She married some of them two or three times.

She was neither beautiful nor terribly intelligent, but she was FUN. Being with her was being on a grand adventure. That, as it turns out, is more attractive than beauty to a lot of people. But I digress.

Her annulment system was simple. She would divorce and then marry the next guy. Then she would find a priest—preferably young and not terribly jaded—and fall on his neck, sobbing that she thought the annulment had gone through but apparently it hadn’t!

She was now a bigamist in the eyes of the Lord! She was going to hell because the paperwork had been misfiled! OH FATHER PLEASE CAN YOU SAVE ME!?

Priests were no more immune to Grandma’s charisma than anyone else. How could they let this nice woman go to hell over paperwork?!

Bear in mind, there were no computer records to check this against and learn that Grandma was on marriage #7 and husband #5, and though it only worked once per priest, Grandma moved a lot.

We never did learn how many husbands she had, or how many times she married any given one. She’d occasionally mention new ones in passing. My grandfather was on the way to the altar for the third time when he had the heart attack.

She called my step-grandfather up afterwards and told him she needed help. He said he’d been waiting for her call for a decade, leaped in the car and drove fourteen hours to get her. She had married him at least twice already, but declined to do so again.

(This put them in a weird place legally, but Grandma strongly denied they were living in sin. He was a man who could have lived platonically with her for twenty years, so she may well have been telling the truth. He just wanted to be where she was and worship her, so who knows?)

Even in her later years, she still had the charisma. There were dudes showing up offering her rides in their convertibles, long after she’d had cancer, the bad old chemo, had no hair, a mastectomy, and massive weight gain from a cooked thyroid. She had a power.

The moral of which is that looks not only aren’t everything, they’re hardly anything. But a young priest who will help you get an annulment—now that’s worth something!

ETA: Oh, and also at one point, a couple husbands went in together to buy her a house. Like I said, she mostly had worshippers.