The Witching Hour (15 page)

Wedgwood china trimmed in gold. And cloth napkins with the letter M embroidered on them. And what a quick-witted woman, this Carl. She had looked prim in her tailored silk suit and ruffled white blouse, her salt and pepper gray hair in a neat
twist on the back of her head, her mouth neatly colored with pale pink lipstick. She put him at ease at once with her knowing smile.

“You might say it’s the curse of our family, Father, this excess of imagination.” She poured the hot milk and the hot coffee from two small silver pitchers. “We dream dreams; we see visions; we should have been poets or painters it seems. Not lawyers, such as I am.” She had laughed softly, easily. “Deirdre will be just fine, when she learns to tell fantasy from reality.”

Afterwards, she had shown him through the lower rooms. And Miss Millie had joined them. She was such a feminine thing, Miss Millie, her red hair in old-fashioned finger curls around her face, and jeweled rings on her fingers. She’d taken him to the window to wave to old Miss Belle, who had been cutting back the roses with large wooden-handled shears.

Carl explained that Deirdre would be going to the Sacred Heart sisters just as soon as there was a place. She was so sorry for this silly disturbance at St. Alphonsus and of course they’d keep Deirdre home if that was what Sister Bridget Marie wanted.

Father had started to object, but it was all decided. Simple matter to get Deirdre a governess, someone who knew children, why not?

They walked along the deep shaded porches.

“We are an old family, Father,” Carl said, as they went back into the double parlor. “We don’t even know how old. There is no one now who can identify some of the portraits you see around you.” Her voice was half amused, half weary. “We came from the islands, that’s what we know for certain—a plantation on Saint-Domingue—and before that from some dim European past that is now completely lost. The house is full of unexplained relics. Sometimes I see it as a great hard snail shell that I must carry on my back.”

Her hands passed lightly over the grand piano, over the gilded harp. She had little taste for such things, she said. What an irony that she had become the custodian. Miss Millie had only smiled, nodded.

And now if Father would excuse them, Miss Carl did have to go back downtown. Clients waiting. They walked out to the gate together.

“Thank you so much, Father!”

And so it had all been waved away, and the little white-faced girl with the black curls had left St. Alphonsus.

But in the days that followed it had bothered Father Mattingly, the question of those flowers.

Impossible to imagine a gang of little girls climbing over the
communion rail and robbing the altars of an enormous and impressive church like St. Alphonsus. Even the guttersnipes Father Mattingly had known as a boy would not have dared such a thing.

What did Sister Bridget Marie really think had happened? Had the children really stolen the flowers? The small, heavyset round-faced nun studied him a moment before she answered. Then she said no.

“Father, as God is my witness, they’re a cursed family, the Mayfairs are. And the grandmother of that very child, Stella she was called, told the very same tales in this very same school yard many a year ago. It was a frightening power Stella Mayfair had over those around her. There were nuns under this very roof who were scared to death to cross her, a witch is what they called her then and now.”

“Oh, come now, Sister,” he had objected immediately. “We’re not on the foggy roads of Tipperary, looking out for the ghost of Petticoat Loose.”

“Ah, so you’ve heard that one, Father.” She had laughed.

“From my own Irish mother on the Lower East Side, Sister, a dozen times.”

“Well, then, Father, let me tell you this much, that Stella Mayfair once took my hand, and held it like this, she did, and told me secrets of my own that I had never told a living soul this side of the Atlantic. I swear it, Father. It happened to me. There was a keepsake I’d lost at home, a chain with a crucifix on it, and I’d cried and cried as a girl when I’d lost it, and that very same little keepsake Stella Mayfair described to me. ‘You want it back, Sister?’ she said. And all the time smiling in her sweet way, just like her granddaughter Deirdre can smile at you now, more innocent than cunning. ‘I’ll get it for you, Sister,’ she said. ‘Through the power of the devil, you mean, Stella Mayfair,’ I answered her. ‘I’ll have none of it.’ But there was many another teaching sister at St. Alphonsus school that took another tack, and that’s how she kept her power over those around her, getting her way in one thing and another right up to the day she died.”

“Superstition, Sister!” he’d said with great authority. “What about little Deirdre’s mother? You’re going to tell me she was a witch, too?”

Sister Bridget Marie shook her head. “That was Antha, a lost one, shy, sweet, afraid of her own shadow—not at all like her mother, Stella, until Stella was killed, that is. You should have seen Miss Carlotta’s face when they buried Stella. And the same expression on her face twelve years after when they buried Antha. Now, Carl, she was as smart a girl as ever went to Sacred
Heart. The backbone of the family she is. But her mother never cared a fig for her. All Mary Beth Mayfair ever cared about was Stella. And old Mr. Julien, that was Mary Beth’s uncle, he was the same. Stella, Stella, Stella. But Antha, stark raving mad at the end, they said, and nothing but a girl of twenty when she run up the stairs in the old house and jumped from the attic window and dashed her head on the stones below.”

“So young,” he’d whispered. He remembered the pale, frightened face of Deirdre Mayfair. How old had she been when the young mother did such a thing?

“They buried Antha in consecrated ground, God have mercy on her soul. For who’s to judge the state of mind of such a person? Head split open like a watermelon when she hit the terrace. And baby Deirdre screaming out her lungs in the cradle. But then even Antha was something to fear.”

Father Mattingly was quietly reeling. It was the kind of talk he’d heard all his life at home, however, the endless Irish dramatizing of the morbid, the lusty tribute to the tragic. Truth was it wore him out. He wanted to ask—

But the bell had rung. Children were lining up in proper ranks for the march inside. Sister had to go. Yet suddenly, she turned back.

“Let me tell one story about Antha,” she said, her voice low on account of the hush in the school yard, “which is the best one that I know. In those days when the sisters sat down to supper at twelve noon, the children were silent in this yard until the Angelus was said and after that the Grace Before Meals. Nobody has such respect for anything in this day and age, but that was the custom then. And on one spring day, during that quiet time, a mean wicked girl name of Jenny Simpson comes up to frighten the poor, shy little Antha with the body of a dead rat she’d found under the hedge. Antha takes one look at the dead rat and lets out a chilling scream, Father, such as you never heard! And we come running from the supper table, as you can imagine, and what do you think we see? That mean wicked Jenny Simpson thrown over on her back, Father, her face bloody and the rat flying out of her hand over that very fence! And do you think it was little Antha did such a thing, Father? A mite of a child, as delicate as her daughter Deirdre is today? Oh, no! ’Twas the selfsame invisible fiend did it, Father, the devil himself, as brought those flowers flying through the air to Deirdre in this yard a week ago.”

“Sister, you think I’m the new boy on the block”—Father Mattingly had laughed—“to believe something like that.”

And she had smiled, it was true, but he knew from past experience
that an Irishwoman like that could smile at what she was saying and believe every word of it at the same time.

The Mayfairs fascinated him, as something complex and elegant can fascinate. The tales of Stella and Antha were remote enough to be romantic and nothing more.

The following Sunday he called again on the Mayfairs. He was offered coffee once more and pleasant conversation—it was all so removed from Sister Bridget Marie’s tales. The radio played Rudy Vallee in the background. Old Miss Belle watered the drowsing potted orchids. The smell of roast chicken came from the kitchen. An altogether pleasant house.

They even asked him to stay to Sunday dinner—the table was beautifully set with thick linen napkins in silver rings—but he politely declined. Miss Carl wrote out a check for the parish and put it in his hand.

As he was leaving he had glimpsed Deirdre in the garden, a white face peering at him from behind a gnarled old tree. He had waved to her without breaking his stride, yet something bothered him later about the image of her. Was it her curls all tangled? Or the distracted look in her eyes?

Madness, that’s what Sister Bridget had described to him, and it disturbed him to think it threatened that wan little girl. There was nothing romantic to Father Mattingly about actual madness. He had long held the belief that the mad lived in a hell of irrelevance. They missed the point of life around them.

But Miss Carlotta was a sensible, modern woman. The child wasn’t doomed to follow in the footsteps of a dead mother. She would, on the contrary, have every chance.

A month passed before his view of the Mayfairs changed forever, on the unforgettable Saturday afternoon that Deirdre Mayfair came to confession in St. Alphonsus Church.

It was during the regular hours when all the good Irish and German Catholics could be counted upon to clear their consciences before Mass and Communion on Sunday.

And so he was seated in the ornate wooden house of the confessional in his narrow chair behind a green serge curtain, listening in alternation to the penitents who came to kneel in the small cells to the left and the right of him. These voices and sins he could have heard in Boston or New York City, so similar the accents, the worries, the ideas.

“Three Hail Marys,” he would prescribe, or “Three Our Fathers” but seldom more than that to these laboring men and good housewives who came to confess routine peccadillos.

Then a child’s voice had caught him off guard, coming rapid and crisp through the dark dusty grille—eloquent of intelligence
and precocity. He had not recognized it. After all, Deirdre Mayfair had not spoken one word before in his presence.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was weeks and weeks ago. Father, help me please. I cannot fight the devil. I try and I always fail. And I’m going to go to hell for it.”

What was this, more of Sister Bridget Marie’s influence? But before he could speak, the child went on and he knew that it was Deirdre.

“I didn’t tell the devil to go away, when he brought the flowers. I wanted to and I know that I should have done it, and Aunt Carl is really, really angry with me. But Father, he only wanted to make us happy. I swear to you, Father, he’s never mean to me. And he cries if I don’t look at him or listen to him. I didn’t know he’d bring the flowers from the altar! Sometimes he does very foolish things like that, Father, things like a little child would do, with even less sense than that. But he doesn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“Now, wait a minute, darling, what makes you think the devil himself would trouble a little girl? Don’t you want to tell me what really happened?”

“Father, he’s not like the Bible says. I swear it. He’s not ugly. He’s tall and beautiful. Just like a real man. And he doesn’t tell lies. He does nice things, always. When I’m afraid he comes and sits by me on the bed and kisses me. He really does. And he frightens away people who try to hurt me!”

“Then why do you say he’s the devil, child? Wouldn’t it be better to say he’s a made-up friend, someone to be with so you’ll never be lonely?”

“No, Father, he’s the devil.” So definite she sounded. “He’s not real, and he’s not made up either.” The little voice had become sad, tired. A little woman in a child’s guise struggling with an immense burden, almost in despair. “I know he’s there when no one else does, and then I look and look and then everyone can see him!” The voice broke. “Father, I try not to look. I say Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and I try not to look. I know it’s a mortal sin. But he’s so sad and he cries without making a sound and I can hear him.”

“Now, child, have you talked to your Aunt Carl about this?” His voice was calm, but in fact the child’s detailed account had begun to alarm him. This was beyond “excess of imagination” or any such excess he’d ever known.

“Father, she knows all about him. All my aunts do. They call him
the man
, but Aunt Carl says he’s really the devil. She’s the one who says it’s a sin, like touching yourself between the legs,
like having dirty thoughts. Like when he kisses me and makes me feel chills and things. She’s says it’s filth to look at the man and let him come under the covers. She says he can kill me. My mother saw him too all her life and that’s why she died and went to heaven to get away from him.”

Father Mattingly was aghast. So you can never shock a priest in the confessional, was that the old saying?

“And my mother’s mother saw him too,” the child went on, the voice rushing, straining. “And
she
was really, really bad, he made her bad, and she died on account of him. But she went to hell probably, instead of heaven, and I might too.”

“Now, wait a minute, child. Who told you this!”

“My Aunt Carl, Father,” the child insisted. “She doesn’t want me to go to hell like Stella. She told me to pray and drive him away, that I could do it if I only tried, if I said the rosary and didn’t look at him. But Father, she gets so angry with me for letting him come—” The child stopped. She was crying, though obviously trying to muffle her cries. “And Aunt Millie is so afraid. And Aunt Nancy won’t look at me. Aunt Nancy says that in our family, once you’ve seen
the man
, you’re as good as done for.”

Father Mattingly was too shocked to speak. Quickly he cleared his throat. “You mean your aunts say this thing is real—”

“They’ve always known about him, Father. And anyone can see him when I let him get strong enough. It’s true, Father. Anyone. But you see, I have to make him come. It’s not a mortal sin for other people to see him because it’s my fault.
My fault.
He couldn’t be seen if I didn’t let it happen. And Father, I just, I just don’t understand how the devil could be so kind to me, and could cry so hard when he’s sad and want so badly just to be near me—” The voice broke off into low sobs.