The Witching Hour (78 page)

And much as Rowan disliked turning it all over to him, she was glad he was there. The feeling was growing ever stronger in her that she wasn’t coming back here. She tried to remind herself that there was no reason for such a feeling. Yet she couldn’t shake it. The special sense told her to prepare Slattery to take over for her indefinitely, and that was what she had done.

Then at eleven
P.M.
, when she was scheduled to leave for the airport, one of her patients—an aneurysm case—began to complain of violent headaches and sudden blindness. This could only mean the man was hemorrhaging again. The operation which had been scheduled for the following Tuesday—to be performed by Lark—had to be performed by Rowan and Slattery right then.

Rowan had never gone into surgery more distracted; even as they were tying on her sterile gown, she had been worried about her delayed flight to New Orleans, worried about the funeral, worried that somehow she’d be trapped for hours during the layover in Dallas, until after her mother had been lowered into the ground.

Then looking around the OR, she had thought, This is the last time. I’m not going to be in this room again, though why I don’t know.

At last the usual curtain had fallen, cutting her off from past and future. For five hours, she operated with Slattery beside her, refusing to allow him to take over though she knew he wanted to do it.

She stayed in recovery with her patient for an additional forty-five minutes. She didn’t like leaving this one. Several times she placed her hands on his shoulders and did her little mental trick of envisioning what was going on inside the brain. Was she helping him or merely calming herself? She had no idea. Yet she worked on him mentally, as hard as she had ever worked on
anyone, even whispering aloud to him that he must heal now, that the weakness in the wall of the artery was repaired.

“Long life to you, Mr. Benjamin,” she whispered under her breath. Against her closed eyes, she saw the brain circuitry. A vague tremor passed through her. Then, slipping her hand over his, she knew he would be all right.

Slattery was in the doorway, showered and shaved, and ready to take her to the airport.

“Come on, Rowan, get out of here, before anything else happens!”

She went to her office, showered in the small private bathroom, put on her fresh linen suit, decided it was much too early to call Lonigan and Sons in New Orleans, even with the time difference, and then walked out of University Hospital, with a lump in her throat. So many years of her life, she thought, and the tears hovered. But she didn’t let them come.

“You all right?” Slattery had asked as he pulled out of the parking lot.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Just tired.” She was damned sick of crying. She’d done more of it in the last few days than in all her life.

Now, as he made the left turn off the highway at the airport, she found herself thinking that Slattery was about as ambitious as any doctor she’d ever met. She knew quite emphatically that he despised her, and that it was for all the simple, boring reasons—that she was an extraordinary surgeon, that she had the job he coveted, that she might soon be back.

A debilitating chill passed over her. She knew she was picking up his thoughts. If her plane crashed, he could take her place forever. She glanced at him, and their eyes met for a second, and she saw the flush of embarrassment pass over him. Yes, his thoughts.

How many times in the past had it happened that way, and so frequently when she was tired? Maybe her guard was down when she was sleepy, and this evil little telepathic power could assert itself wantonly, and serve up to her this bitter knowledge whether she wanted it or not. It hurt her. She didn’t want to be near him.

But it was a good thing that he wanted her job, a good thing that he was there to take it so that she could go.

It struck her very clearly now that, much as she had loved University, it wasn’t important where she practiced medicine. It could be any well-equipped medical center in which the nurses and technicians could give her the backup she required.

So why not tell Slattery she wasn’t coming back? Why not end the conflict inside him for his sake? The reason was simple.
She didn’t know why she felt so strongly that this was a final farewell. It had to do with Michael; it had to do with her mother; but it was as purely irrational as anything she’d ever felt.

Before Slattery even stopped at the curb, she had the door open. She climbed out of the car and gathered up her shoulder bag.

Then she found herself staring at Slattery as he handed her the suitcase from the trunk. The chill passed over her again, slowly, uncomfortably. She saw malice in his eyes. What an ordeal the night had been for him. He was so eager. And he disliked her so much. Nothing in her manner, either personally or professionally, evoked a finer response in him. He simply disliked her. She could taste it as she took the suitcase from his hand.

“Good luck, Rowan,” he said, with a metallic cheerfulness.
I hope you don’t come back.

“Slat,” she said, “thank you for everything. And there’s something else I should tell you. I don’t think … Well, there’s a good possibility I may not come back.”

He could scarcely conceal his delight. She felt almost sorry for him, watching the tense movement of his lips as he tried to keep his expression neutral. But then she felt a great warm, wondrous delight herself.

“It’s just a feeling,” she said. (And it’s great!) “Of course I’ll have to tell Lark in my own time, and officially—”

“—Of course.”

“But go ahead and hang your pictures on the office walls,” she continued. “And enjoy the car. I guess I’ll send for it sooner or later, but probably later. If you want to buy it, I’ll give you the bargain of your life.”

“What would you say to ten grand for it, cash, I know it’s—”

“That will do it. Write me a check when I send you my new address.” With an indifferent wave, she walked off towards the glass doors.

The sweet excitement washed over her like sunlight. Even sore-eyed and sluggishly weary, she felt a great sense of momentum. At the ticket desk, she specified first class, one way.

She drifted into the gift shop long enough to buy a pair of big dark glasses, which struck her as very glamorous, and a book to read—an absurd male fantasy of impossible espionage and relentless jeopardy, which seemed slightly glamorous too.

The
New York Times
said it was hot in New Orleans. Good that she had worn the white linen, and she felt pretty in it. For a few moments, she lingered in the lounge, brushing her hair,
and taking care with the pale lipstick and cream rouge she hadn’t touched in years. Then she slipped on the dark glasses.

Sitting in the plastic chair at the gate, she felt absolutely anchorless. No job, no one in the house in Tiburon. And Slat double-clutching Graham’s car all the way back to San Francisco. You can have it, Doctor. No regret, no worry. Free.

Then she thought of her mother, dead and cold on a table at Lonigan and Sons, beyond the intervention of scalpels, and the old darkness crept over her, right amid the eerie monotonous fluorescent lights and the shining early morning air commuters with their briefcases and their blue all-weather suits. She thought of what Michael had said about death. That it was the only supernatural event most of us ever experience. And she thought that was true.

The tears came again, silently. She was glad she had the dark glasses. Mayfairs at the funeral, lots and lots of Mayfairs … 

She fell asleep as soon as she was settled on the plane.

THE PILE Of THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

PART VI

The Mayfair Family from 1900 through 1929

RESEARCH METHODS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As mentioned earlier, in our introduction to the family in the nineteenth century, our sources of information about the Mayfair family became ever more numerous and illuminating with each passing decade.

As the family moved towards the twentieth century, the Talamasca maintained all of its traditional kinds of investigators. But it also acquired professional detectives for the first time. A number of such men worked for us in New Orleans and still do. They have proved excellent not only at gathering gossip of all sorts but at investigating specific questions through reams of
records, and at interviewing scores of persons about the Mayfair family, much as an investigative “true crime” writer might do today.

These men seldom if ever know who we are. They report to an agency in London. And though we still send our own specially trained investigators to New Orleans on virtual “gossip-gathering sprees” and carry on correspondence with numerous other watchers, as we have all through the nineteenth century, these private detectives have greatly improved the quality of our information.

Yet another source of information became available to us in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, which we—for want of a better phrase—will call family legend. To wit, though Mayfairs are often absolutely secretive about their contemporaries’, and very leery of saying anything whatsoever about the family legacy to outsiders, they had begun by the 1890s to repeat little stories and anecdotes and fanciful tales about figures in the dim past.

Specifically, a descendant of Lestan who would say absolutely nothing about his dear cousin Mary Beth when invited by a stranger at a party to gossip about her, nevertheless repeated several quaint stories about Great-aunt Marguerite, who used to dance with her slaves. And later the grandson of that very cousin repeated quaint stories about old Miss Mary Beth, whom he never knew.

Of course much of this family legend is too vague to be of interest to us, and much concerns “the grand plantation life” which has become mythic in many Louisiana families and does not shed light upon our obsessions. However, sometimes these family legends tie in quite shockingly with bits of information we have been able to gather from other sources.

And when and where they have seemed especially illuminating, I have included them. But the reader must understand “family legend” always refers to something being told to us recently about someone or something in the “dim past.”

Yet another form of gossip which came to the fore in the twentieth century is what we call legal gossip—and that is, the gossip of legal secretaries, legal clerks, lawyers, and judges who knew the Mayfairs or worked with them, and the friends and families of all these various non-Mayfair persons.

Because Julien’s sons, Barclay, Garland, and Cortland, all became distinguished lawyers, and because Carlotta Mayfair was a lawyer, and because numerous grandchildren of Julien also went into law, this network of legal contacts has tended to grow larger than one might suppose. But even if this had not been the
case, the financial dealings of the Mayfairs have been so extensive that many, many lawyers have been involved.

When the family began to squabble in the twentieth century, when Carlotta began to fight over the custody of Stella’s daughter; when there were arguments about the disposition of the legacy, this legal gossip became a rich source of interesting details.

Let me add in closing that the twentieth century saw even greater and more detailed record keeping in general than the nineteenth. And our paid investigators of the twentieth century availed themselves of these numerous public records concerning the family. Also as time went on, the family was mentioned more and more in the press.

As we carry this narrative towards the year 1900, we should note that the ethnic character of the Mayfair family was changing.

Though the family had begun as a Scottish-French mix, incorporating in the next generation the blood of the Dutchman Petyr van Abel, it had become after that almost exclusively French.

In 1826, however, with the marriage of Marguerite Mayfair to the opera singer Tyrone Clifford McNamara, the legacy family began to intermarry fairly regularly with Anglo-Saxons.

Other branches—notably the descendants of Lestan and Maurice—remained staunchly French, and if and when they moved to New Orleans they preferred to live “downtown” with other French-speaking Creoles, in or around the French Quarter or on Esplanade Avenue.

The legacy family, with Katherine’s marriage to Darcy Monahan, became firmly ensconced in the uptown “American” Garden District. And though Julien Mayfair (half Irish himself) spoke French all his life, and married a French-speaking cousin, Suzette, he gave his three boys distinctly American or Anglo names, and saw to it that they received American educations. His son Garland married a girl of German-Irish descent with Julien’s blessing. Cortland also married an Anglo-Saxon girl, and eventually Barclay did also.

As we have already noted Mary Beth was to marry an Irishman, Daniel McIntyre, in 1899.

Though Katherine’s sons Clay and Vincent spoke French all their lives, both married Irish-American girls—Clay the daughter of a well-to-do hotel owner, and Vincent the daughter of an Irish-German brewer. One of Clay’s daughters became a member
of the Irish Catholic Order of the Sisters of Mercy (following in the footsteps of her father’s sister), to which the family contributes to this day. And a great-granddaughter of Vincent entered the same order.

Though the French Mayfairs worshiped at the St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, the legacy family began to attend services at their parish church, Notre Dame, on Jackson Avenue, one of a three-church complex maintained by the Redemptorist Fathers which sought to meet the needs of the waterfront Irish and German immigrants as well as the old French families. When this church was closed in the 1920s a parish chapel was established on Prytania Street in the Garden District, quite obviously for the rich who did not want to attend either the Irish church of St. Alphonsus or the German church of St. Mary’s.

The Mayfairs attended Mass at this chapel, and indeed residents of First Street attend Mass there to this day. But as far back as 1899, the Mayfairs began to use the Irish church of St. Alphonsus—a very large, beautiful, and impressive structure—for important occasions.