The Witching Hour (99 page)

Years later, Cortland’s grandson Ryan Mayfair talked about it to a sympathetic “acquaintance” at a wedding reception:

“My grandfather hated to go up there. Our place in Metairie was always so cheerful. My father said that Grandfather would come home crying. When Deirdre was three years old, Grandfather made them get their first Christmas tree in all those years. He took a package of ornaments up there for it. He bought the lights at Katz and Bestoff and put them on himself. It’s so hard to imagine people living in that sort of gloom. I wish I had really known my grandfather. He was born in that house. Think of it. And his father, Julien, had been born before the Civil War.”

Cortland, by this point in time, had become the image of his father, Julien. Pictures of him even as late as the mid-1950s show him as a tall, slender man with black hair, and gray only at the temples. His heavily lined face was remarkably like that of his father, except for the fact that his eyes were much larger, reminiscent of Stella’s eyes, though he had Julien’s agreeable expression, and frequently Julien’s cheerful smile.

By all accounts Cortland’s family loved him; his employees veritably worshiped him; and though Amanda Grady Mayfair had left him years before, even she seems to have always loved him, or so she told Allan Carver in New York the year she died. Amanda cried on Allan’s shoulder about the fact that her sons never understood why she had left their father, and she had no intention of telling them, either.

Ryan Mayfair, who knew his grandfather Cortland only briefly, was absolutely devoted to him. To him and his father, Cortland was a hero. He could never understand how his grandmother could “defect” to New York.

What was Deirdre like during this early period? We are unable to discover a single account of her in the first five years, except the legend in Cortland’s family that she was a very pretty little girl.

Her black hair was fine and wavy, like that of Stella. Her blue eyes were large and dark.

But the First Street house was once more closed to the outside world. A generation of passersby had become accustomed to its hopelessly forbidding and neglected facade. Once again, workmen couldn’t complete repairs on the premises. A roofer fell off his ladder twice and then refused to come back. Only the old gardener and his son came willingly to now and then cut the weed-infested grass.

As people in the parish died, certain legends concerning the Mayfairs died with them. Other stories became so miserably transformed by time as to be unrecognizable. New investigators replaced old investigators. Soon no one questioned about the Mayfairs mentioned the names of Julien or Katherine or Rémy or Suzette.

Julien’s son Barclay died in 1949, his brother Garland in 1951. Cortland’s son Grady died the same year as Garland, after a fall from a horse in Audubon Park. His mother, Amanda Grady Mayfair, died only shortly after, as if the death of her beloved Grady was more than she could take. Of Pierce’s two sons, only Ryan Mayfair “knows the family history” and regales the younger cousins—many of whom know nothing—with strange tales.

Irwin Dandrich died in 1952. However, his role had been already filled by another “society investigator,” a woman named Juliette Milton, who collected numerous stories over the years from Beatrice Mayfair and the other downtown cousins, many of whom lunched with Juliette regularly and did not seem to mind that she was a gossip who told them everything about everybody and told everybody everything about them. Like Dandrich, Juliette was not a particularly vicious person. Indeed, she doesn’t even seem to have been unkind. She loved melodrama, however, and wrote incredibly long letters to our lawyers in London, who paid her an annual amount equal to the annuity which had once been her sole support.

As was the case with Dandrich, Juliette never knew to whom she was supplying all this information about the Mayfairs. And though she broached the subject at least once a year, she never pressed.

In 1953, as I began my full-time translation of Petyr van Abel’s letters, I read the contemporary reports regarding twelve-year-old Deirdre as they poured in. I sent the investigators after every scrap of information. “Dig,” I said. “Tell me all about her from the very beginning. There is nothing I do not want to know.” I called Juliette Milton personally. I told her I would pay well for anything extra she could turn up.

* * *

During the early years at least Deirdre had followed in the footsteps of her mother, being expelled from one school after another for her “antics” and “strange behavior,” her disruption of the classes, and strange crying fits for which nothing could be done.

Once more Sister Bridget Marie, then in her sixties, saw the “invisible friend” in action in the St. Alphonsus school yard, finding things for little Deirdre and making flowers fly through the air. Sacred Heart, Ursulines, St. Joseph’s, Our Lady of the Angels—they all expelled little Deirdre within a couple of weeks. For months at a time, the child stayed home. Neighbors saw her “running wild” in the garden, or climbing the big oak tree on the back of the lot.

There was no real staff anymore at First Street. Aunt Easter’s daughter Irene did all the cooking and the cleaning thoroughly but steadily. Every morning she swept the pavements or the banquettes as they were called. Three o’clock saw her ringing out her mop at the tap by the rear garden gate.

Nancy Mayfair was the actual housekeeper, managing things in a brusque and offensive manner, or so said deliverymen and priests who now and then came to call.

Millie Dear and Belle, both picturesque if not beautiful old women, tended the few roses growing by the side porch which had been saved from the wilderness that now covered the property from the front fence to the back wall.

All the family appeared for nine o’clock Mass on Sundays at the chapel, little Deirdre a picture in her navy blue sailor dress and straw hat with its ribbons, Carlotta in her dark business suit and high-necked blouse, and the old ladies, Millie Dear and Belle, exquisitely attired in their black high string shoes, gabardine dresses with lace, and dark gloves.

Miss Millie and Miss Belle often went shopping together on Mondays, taking a taxi from First Street to Gus Mayer or Godchaux’s, the finest stores in New Orleans, where they bought their pearl gray dresses and flowered hats with veils, and other genteel accoutrements. The ladies at the cosmetic counters knew them by name. They sold them face powder and cream rouge and Christmas Night perfume. The two old women had lunch at the D.H. Holmes lunch counter before taking the taxi home. And they, and they alone, represented the First Street family at funerals, and even now and then at christenings, and even once in a while at a wedding, though they seldom went to the reception after the Nuptial Mass.

Millie and Belle even attended funerals of other persons in the parish, and would go to the wake if it was held at Lonigan
and Sons, nearby. They went to the Tuesday night Novena service at the chapel, and sometimes on summer nights they brought little Deirdre with them, clucking over her proudly and feeding her little bits of chocolate during the service so that she would be quiet.

No one remembered anymore that anything had ever been “wrong” with sweet Miss Belle.

Indeed, the two old ladies easily won the goodwill and respect of the Garden District, especially among families who knew nothing of the Mayfair tragedies or secrets. The First Street house was not the only moldering mansion behind a rusted fence.

Nancy Mayfair, on the other hand, seemed to have been born and reared in an entirely different class. Her clothes were always dowdy, her brown hair unwashed and only superficially combed. It would have been easy to mistake her for a hired servant. But nobody ever questioned the story that she was Stella’s sister, which of course she was not. She began to wear black string shoes when she was only thirty. Grumpily she paid the delivery boys from a worn pocketbook, or called down from the upstairs gallery to tell the peddler at the gate to go away.

It was with these women that little Deirdre spent her days when she was not struggling to pay attention in a crowded classroom, which always ended in failure and disgrace.

Over and over the parish gossips compared her to her mother. The cousins said maybe it was “congenital insanity,” though honestly no one knew. But to those who observed the family more closely—even from a distance of many miles—certain differences between mother and daughter were apparent very early on.

Whereas Antha was always slender and shrinking by nature, there was something rebellious and unmistakably sensuous in Deirdre from the start. Neighbors frequently saw her running “like a tomboy” through the garden. At the age of five she could climb the great oak tree to the top. Sometimes she concealed herself in the shrubbery along the fence so that she could deliberately startle those who passed by.

At nine years old she ran away for the first time. Carlotta rang Cortland in panic; then the police were called in. Finally a cold and shivering Deirdre showed up on the front porch of St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage on Napoleon Avenue, telling the sisters that she was “cursed” and “possessed of the devil.” They had to call a priest for her. Cortland came with Carlotta to take her home.

“Overactive imagination,” said Carlotta. It was to become a stock phrase.

A year later, police found Deirdre wandering in a rainstorm along the Bayou St. John, shivering and crying, and saying she was afraid to go home. For two hours she told the police lies about her name and background. She was a gypsy who had come to town with a circus. Her mother had been murdered by the animal trainer. She had tried to “commit suicide with rare poison” but had been taken to a hospital in Europe where they drew all the blood out of her veins.

“There was something so sad about that child and so crazy,” said the officer afterwards to our investigator. “She was absolutely in earnest and the wildest look would come into her blue eyes. She didn’t even look up when her uncle and her aunt came to get her. She pretended she didn’t know them. Then she said they kept her chained in an upstairs room.”

At ten years of age, Deirdre was packed off to Ireland, to a boarding school recommended by an Irish-born priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Father Jason Power. Family gossip said it was Cortland’s idea.

“Grandfather wanted to get her away from there,” Ryan Mayfair gossiped later.

But the sisters in County Cork sent Deirdre home within the month.

For two years Deirdre studied with a governess named Miss Lampton, an old friend of Carlotta’s from the Sacred Heart. Miss Lampton told Beatrice Mayfair (on Esplanade Avenue downtown) that Deirdre was a charming girl, and very bright indeed. “She has too much imagination, that is all that’s wrong with her, and she spends much too much time alone.” When Miss Lampton moved north to marry a widower she’d met during his summer vacation, Deirdre cried for days.

Even during these years there were quarrels at First Street, however. People heard shouting. Deirdre frequently ran out of the house crying. She would climb the oak tree until she was well out of the reach of Irene or Miss Lampton. Sometimes she stayed up there until after dark.

But with adolescence a change came over Deirdre. She became withdrawn, secretive, no longer the tomboy. At thirteen she was far more voluptuous than Antha had been as a grown woman. She wore her black wavy hair long and parted in the middle, and held back by a bit of lavender ribbon. Her large blue eyes looked perpetually distrustful and faintly bitter. Indeed, the child had a bruised look to her, said the parish gossips who saw her at Sunday Mass.

“She was already a beautiful woman,” said one of the matrons
who went to the chapel regularly. “And those old ladies didn’t know it. They dressed her as if she were still a child.”

Legal gossip revealed other problems. One afternoon Deirdre rushed into the waiting room outside Cortland’s office.

“She was hysterical,” said the secretary later. “For an hour she screamed and cried in there with her uncle. And I’ll tell you something else, something I didn’t even notice till she was leaving. She wasn’t wearing matching shoes! She had on one brown loafer and one black flat shoe. I don’t think she ever realized it. Cortland took her home. I don’t know that he noticed it either. I never saw her after that.”

In the summer before Deirdre’s fourteenth birthday, she was rushed to the new Mercy Hospital. She had tried to slash her wrists. Beatrice went to see her.

“That girl has a spirit that Antha simply didn’t have,” she told Juliette Milton. “But she needs womanly advice on things. She wanted me to buy her cosmetics. She said she’s only been in a drugstore once in her entire life.”

Beatrice brought the cosmetics to the hospital, only to be told that Carlotta had put a stop to all visits. When Beatrice called Cortland, he confessed he didn’t know why Deirdre had slit her wrists. “Maybe she just wanted to get out of that house.”

That very week, Cortland arranged for Deirdre to go to California. She flew to Los Angeles to stay with Garland’s daughter, Andrea Mayfair, who had married a doctor on the staff of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. But Deirdre was home again at the end of two weeks.

The Los Angeles Mayfairs said nothing to anyone about what happened, but years afterwards their only son, Elton, told investigators that his poor cousin from New Orleans was crazy. That she had believed herself to be cursed by some sort of legacy, that she had talked of suicide to him, horrifying his parents. That they had taken her to see doctors who said she would never be normal.

“My parents wanted to help her, especially my mother. But the entire family was disrupted. I think what really finished it however was that they saw her out in the backyard one night with a man, and she wouldn’t admit to it. She kept denying it. And they were afraid something would happen. She was thirteen, I believe, and very pretty. They sent her home.”

Beatrice recounted pretty much the same story to Juliette Milton. “I think Deirdre looks too mature,” she said. But she wouldn’t believe Deirdre had lied about male companions. “She’s confused.” And Beatrice was adamant that there was no
congenital insanity. That was just a family legend that Carlotta had started, and one which really ought to be stopped.