The Witching Hour (18 page)

Expressionless she was, behind the screen, which sagged on its light wooden framing. No answer when he whispered: “Deirdre.”

Around her neck on a chain was an emerald—a beautiful stone, and on her finger a ruby ring. Were these the jewels he’d heard tell of? How incongruous they looked on this silent woman in her limp white nightgown. She gave no sign that she either heard or saw him.

His visit with Miss Millie and Miss Nancy had been brief, uncomfortable. Carl was downtown at work, of course. And yes, that was Deirdre on the side porch and she was home to stay, but there was no need to whisper.

“The mind’s gone,” Nancy said with a bitter smile. “The electric shock wiped out her memory first. Then everything. She couldn’t get up to save herself if the place was burning down. Every now and then she wrings her hands, tries to speak, but she can’t—”

“Don’t!” Millie had whispered, with a little shake of the head and twist of her mouth as though it wasn’t in good taste to discuss this. She was old now, Miss Millie, old and beautifully gray, dainty as Miss Belle had been, Miss Belle who was now long gone. “Have some more coffee, Father?”

But it was a pretty woman sitting in the chair on the porch.
The shock treatments had not grayed her hair. And her eyes were still a deep blue, though they were utterly empty. Like a statue in church she was.
Father, help me.
The emerald caught the light, exploded like a tiny star.

Father Mattingly did not come south very often after that, and in the following years when he rang the bell, he was not welcome. Miss Nancy’s excuses became more abrupt. Sometimes nobody even answered. If Carl was there, the visit was rushed, artificial. No more coffee in the garden room, just a few quick words in that vast dusty parlor. Didn’t they ever turn on the lights anymore? The chandeliers were filthy.

Of course the women were getting quite old. Millie died in 1979. The funeral had been enormous, with cousins coming from all over the country.

Then last year Nancy had gone. Father Mattingly had gotten a letter from Red Lonigan. The priest had been in Baton Rouge at the time and he had driven down just for the funeral.

Miss Carl, in her late eighties, was bone thin, hawk-nosed, with white hair and thick glasses that magnified her eyes unpleasantly. Her ankles were swollen over the tops of her black string shoes. She had to sit down on a gravestone during the final words at the cemetery.

The house itself was going down pitifully. Father Mattingly had seen that for himself when he drove past.

Deirdre too had changed, inevitably. He could see that her fragile hothouse beauty had at last been lost. And in spite of the nurses who walked her back and forth, she had grown stooped, and her hands bent down and out at the wrists, like those of an arthritic patient. They said that her head had now fallen permanently to one side, and her mouth was always open.

It was a sad sight to behold even from a distance. And the jewels only made it more sinister. Diamond earrings on a senseless invalid. An emerald big as a thumbnail! And Father Mattingly, who believed above all in the sanctity of human life, thought Deirdre’s death would have been a blessing.

The afternoon following Nancy’s funeral, as he had paid a silent visit to the old place, he had met an Englishman stopped at the far end of the fence—a very personable man, who introduced himself to the priest as Aaron Lightner.

“Do you know anything about that poor woman?” Lightner had asked quite frankly. “For over ten years I’ve seen her on that porch. You know, I worry about her.”

“I worry myself,” Father Mattingly had confessed. “But they say there’s nothing anyone can do for her.”

“Such a strange family,” said the Englishman sympathetically.
“It’s so very hot. I wonder does she feel the heat? You’d think they’d fix the overhead fan. Do you see? It seems to be broken.”

Father Mattingly had taken an immediate liking to the Englishman. Such a forceful, yet polite man. And he was dressed so well in a fine three-piece linen suit. Even carried a walking stick. Made Father Mattingly think of the gentlemen who used to stroll in the evening on St. Charles Avenue. You used to see them on the front porches, wearing their straw hats, watching the traffic pass. Ah, another era.

Father Mattingly found himself chatting easily with the Englishman in a hushed voice under the low-hanging oaks, about all the “known” things with which the man seemed quite familiar—the shock treatments, the sanitariums, the baby daughter long ago adopted out in California. But Father Mattingly would not have dreamed of mentioning old Dave Collins’s gossip of Stella or “the man.” To repeat such nonsense would be flat-out wrong. And besides, it came too near to those painful secrets Deirdre had confided in him.

He and Lightner had somehow ended up at Commander’s Palace for a late lunch at the Englishman’s invitation. What a treat for the priest. How long had it been since he dined in a fine New Orleans restaurant like that with tablecloths and linen napkins. And the Englishman had ordered an excellent wine.

The man admitted candidly that he was interested in the history of families like the Mayfairs.

“You know they had a plantation in Haiti when it was still called Saint-Domingue. Maye Faire was the name of the place, I believe. They made a fortune in coffee and sugar in the days before the slave uprising.”

“So you know of them that far back,” said the priest, amazed.

“Oh, indeed, I do,” said Lightner. “It’s in the history books, you see. Powerful woman ran that place, Marie Claudette Mayfair Landry, following in the footsteps of her mother, Angélique Mayfair. But they had been there for four generations. It was Charlotte who had come from France in, what was it, the year 1689. Yes, Charlotte. And she gave birth to twins—Peter and Jeanne Louise, and they both lived to be eighty-one.”

“You don’t say. I’ve never heard tell of them that far back.”

“I believe it’s a simple matter of record.” The Englishman gave a little shrug. “Even the black rebels didn’t dare torch the plantation. Marie Claudette managed to emigrate with a king’s ransom in possessions as well as her entire family. Then it was La Victoire at Riverbend below New Orleans. I think they called it simply Riverbend.”

“Miss Mary Beth was born there.”

“Yes! That’s correct. In, let me see, I think it was 1871. It took the river to finally swallow that old house. Such a beauty it was, with columns all around. There were photographs of it in the very old guidebooks to Louisiana.”

“I’d like to see those,” the priest said.

“They’d built the house on First Street before the Civil War, you know,” Lightner went on. “It was actually Katherine Mayfair who built it and later her brothers Julien and Remy Mayfair lived there. And then Mary Beth made it her home. She didn’t like the country, Mary Beth. I believe it was Katherine who married the Irish architect, the one who died so young of yellow fever. You know, he built the banks downtown. Yes, the name was Monahan. And after he died, Katherine didn’t want to stay at First Street anymore because he had built it and she was so sick at heart.”

“Seems I heard a long time ago that Monahan designed that house,” said the priest. But he really didn’t want to interrupt. “I used to hear about Miss Mary Beth … ”

“Yes, it was Mary Beth Mayfair who married Judge McIntyre, though he was only a young lawyer then of course, and their daughter Carlotta Mayfair is the head of the house now, it seems … ”

Father Mattingly was enthralled. It wasn’t merely his old and painful curiosity about the Mayfairs, it was the engaging manner of Lightner himself, and the pleasing sound of his British accent. Just history, all this, not gossip, quite innocent. It had been a long time since Father Mattingly had spoken to such a cultivated man. No, this was not gossip when the Englishman told it.

And against his better judgment, the priest found himself telling in a tentative voice the story of the little girl in the school yard and the mysterious flowers. Now, that was not what he’d heard in the confessional, he reminded himself. Yet it was frightening that it should spill out this way, after a half-dozen sips of wine. Father Mattingly was ashamed of himself. Suddenly he couldn’t get the confession out of his mind. He lost the thread. He was thinking of Dave Collins and all those strange things he’d said and the way Father Lafferty had gotten so angry that July night at the bazaar, Father Lafferty who’d presided over the adoption of Deirdre’s baby.

Had Father Lafferty taken action on account of all Dave Collins’s crazy talk? He himself had never been able to do anything.

The Englishman was quite patient with the priest’s silent reverie. In fact, the strangest thing had happened. It seemed to Father Mattingly that the man was listening to his thoughts! But
that was quite impossible, and if a man could overhear the memory of a confession in that way, just what was a priest supposed to do about it?

How long that afternoon seemed. How pleasant, easeful. Father Mattingly had finally repeated Dave Collins’s old tales, and he had even talked of the pictures in the books of “the dark man” and of witches dancing.

And the Englishman had seemed so interested, only moving now and then to pour the wine, or to offer the priest a cigarette, never interrupting.

“Now, what do you make of all that,” the priest whispered at last. Had the man said anything back? “You know, old Dave Collins is dead, but Sister Bridget Marie is going to live forever. She’s nearing a hundred.”

The Englishman smiled. “You mean the sister in the school yard that long-ago day.”

Father Mattingly was now drunk on the wine he’d had, that was the plain truth of it. And he kept seeing the yard and the children and the flowers strewn all over the pavement.

“She’s out at Mercy Hospital now,” the priest said. “I saw her last time I was down. I suppose I’ll see her this time. And what nonsense she talks now that she doesn’t know who she’s talking to. Old Dave Collins died in a bar on Magazine Street. Fitting place. All his friends chipped in for the biggest funeral.”

The priest had drifted off again, thinking of Deirdre and the confessional. And the Englishman had touched the back of his hand and whispered: “You mustn’t worry about it.”

The priest had been startled. Then he’d almost laughed at the idea that someone could read his mind. And that’s what Sister Bridget Marie had said about Antha, wasn’t it? That she could hear people talking through the walls and read their minds? Had he told the Englishman that part?

“Yes, you did. I want to thank you … ”

He and the Englishman had said good-bye at six o’clock outside the gates of the Lafayette Cemetery. It had been the golden time of evening when the sun is gone and everything gives back the light it has absorbed all day long. But how forlorn it all was, the old whitewashed walls, and the giant magnolia trees ripping at the pavement.

“You know, they’re all buried in there, the Mayfairs,” Father Mattingly had said, glancing at the iron gates. “Big above-ground tomb down the center walk to the right, has a little wrought-iron fence around it. Miss Carl keeps it in good repair. You can read all those names you just told me.”

The priest would have shown the Englishman himself but it
was time to get back to the rectory, time to go back to Baton Rouge and then up to St. Louis.

Lightner gave him an address in London.

“If you ever hear anything more about that family—anything you feel comfortable passing on—well, would you contact me?”

Of course Father Mattingly had never done that. He’d misplaced the name and address months ago. But he remembered that Englishman kindly, though sometimes he wondered who the man really was, and what he had actually wanted. If all the priests of the world had such a soothing manner as that, what a splendid thing it would be. It was as if that man understood everything.

As he drew nearer the old corner now, Father Mattingly thought again of what the young priest had written: that Deirdre Mayfair was shriveling up, that she could hardly walk anymore.

Then how could she have gone wild on August 13th, he’d like to know, for the love of heaven? How could she have broken the windows out and scared off men from an asylum?

And Jerry Lonigan said his driver saw things thrown out—books, a clock, all manner of things, just hurling through the air. And the noise she’d made, like an animal howling.

The priest found it hard to believe.

But there it was, the evidence.

As he slowly approached the gate on this warm August afternoon, he saw the white-uniformed window man on the front porch, atop his wooden ladder. Knife in hand, he applied the putty along the new panes. And each one of those tall windows had shining new glass, complete with the tiny brand-name stickers.

Yards away, on the south side of the house, behind her veil of rusted copper screen sat Deirdre, hands twisted out at the wrists, head bent and to the side against the back of the rocker. The emerald pendant on its chain was a tiny spark of green light for an instant.

Ah, what had it been like
for her
to break those windows? To feel the strength coursing through her limbs, to feel herself in possession of such uncommon power? Even to make a sound, why, it must have been magnificent.

But that was a strange thought for him, wasn’t it? Yet he felt himself swept up in some vague sadness, some grand melancholy. Ah, Deirdre, poor little Deirdre.

The truth was, he felt sad and bitter as he always did when he saw her. And he knew he would not go up the flagstone path to the front steps. He would not ring the bell only to be told again
that Miss Carl wasn’t home, or that she could not receive him just now.

This trip had only been Father Mattingly’s personal penance. Over forty years ago, he had done the wrong thing on a fateful Saturday afternoon, and a girl’s sanity had hung in the balance. And no visit now would ever make the slightest difference.

He stood at the fence for a long moment, listening to the scrape of the window man’s knife, curiously clear in the soft tropical quiet around him. He felt the heat penetrate his shoes, his clothes. He let the soft mellow colors of this moist and shady world work on him.