The Witching Hour (100 page)

Beatrice went up to First Street to see Deirdre and take her some presents. Nancy wouldn’t let her in.

The same mysterious male companion was responsible for Deirdre’s most traumatic expulsion from St. Rose de Lima boarding school when she was sixteen. Deirdre had attended the school for a full semester without mishap, and was in the middle of the spring term when the incident occurred. Family gossip said Deirdre had been blissfully happy at St. Ro’s, that she had told Cortland she never wanted to go home. Even over Christmas, Deirdre had remained at the boarding school, only going out with Cortland for an early supper on Christmas Eve.

Yet she loved the swings in the back play yard, which were big enough for the older children, and at twilight she would sing songs there with another girl, Rita Mae Dwyer (later Lonigan), who remembered Deirdre as a rare and special person, elegant and innocent; romantic and sweet.

As recently as 1988, more data was obtained about this expulsion directly from Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan in a conversation with this investigator.

Deirdre’s “mysterious friend” met her in the nuns’ garden in the moonlight, and spoke softly but audibly enough for Rita Mae to hear. “He called her ‘my beloved,’ ” Rita Mae told me. She had never heard such romantic words spoken except in a movie.

Defenseless and sobbing bitterly, Deirdre did not utter a word when the nuns accused her of “bringing a man onto the school grounds.” They had spied upon Deirdre and her male companion, peering through the slats of the convent kitchen into the garden where the two met in the dark. “This was no boy,” said one of the nuns in a rage afterwards to the assembled boarders. “This was a man! A grown man!”

The record from the period is almost vicious in its condemnations. “The girl is deceitful. She allowed the man to touch her indecently. Her innocence is a complete facade.”

There can be no doubt that this mysterious companion was Lasher. He is described by the nuns, and later by Mrs. Lonigan, as having brown hair and brown eyes, and beautiful old-fashioned clothes.

But the remarkable point is that Rita Mae Lonigan, unless she is exaggerating, actually heard Lasher speak.

Other startling information given us by Mrs. Lonigan is that Deirdre had the Mayfair emerald in her possession at the boarding school, that she showed it to Rita Mae, and showed her a
word engraved on the back of it: “Lasher.” If Rita Mae’s story is true, Deirdre knew little about her mother or her grandmother. She understood that the emerald had come to her from these women, but she did not even know how Stella or Antha had died.

It was common knowledge in the family in 1956 that Deirdre was crushed by her expulsion from St. Rose de Lima’s. She was admitted to St. Ann’s Asylum for six weeks. Though the records have proved unobtainable, nurses gossiped that Deirdre begged for shock treatment, and was given it twice. She was at this point almost seventeen.

From what we know of medical practice at this period, we can safely conclude that these treatments involved a higher voltage than is common now; they were probably very dangerous, resulting in a loss of memory for hours if not days.

Why a whole course was not pursued as was the custom we do not know. Cortland was dead set against the shock treatment, or so he told Beatrice Mayfair. He couldn’t believe in something so drastic for one so young.

“What is wrong with that girl?” Juliette asked Beatrice finally, to which Beatrice answered, “Nobody knows, darling. Nobody knows.”

Carlotta brought Deirdre home from the asylum, and there she languished for another month.

Relentless canvassing by our investigators indicated that a dark shadowy figure was often seen with Deirdre in the garden. A deliveryman from Solari’s grocery was “scared out of his wits” as he was leaving the property when he saw “that wild-eyed girl and that man” in the tall bamboo thicket by the old pool.

A spinster who lived on Prytania Street saw the pair in the chapel after dark. “I told Miss Belle. I stopped by the gate the following morning. I didn’t think it was quite proper. It had happened in the evening, just after dark. I went into the chapel to light a candle and say my rosary as I always do, and there she was in a back pew with this man. I could scarcely see them at first. I was a little frightened. Then when she got up and hurried out I saw her clearly under the street lamp. It was Deirdre Mayfair. I don’t know what happened to the young man.”

Several other persons reported similar sightings. The images were always the same—Deirdre and the mysterious young man in the shadows. Deirdre and the mysterious young man flushed from their place, or peering out at the stranger in an unsettling manner. We have fifteen different variations on these two themes.

Some of these stories reached Beatrice on Esplanade Avenue. “I don’t know if anyone is watching out for her. And she is so
 … so well developed physically,” she told Juliette. Juliette went with Beatrice to First Street.

“The girl was wandering in the garden. Beatrice went up to the fence and called to her. For a few minutes she didn’t seem to know who Bea was. Then she went to get the key to the gate. Of course Bea did all the talking after that. But the girl is shockingly beautiful. It has to do with the strangeness of her personality as much as anything else. She seems wild and deeply suspicious of people, and at the same time keenly interested in things about her. She fell in love with a cameo I was wearing. I gave it to her, and she was absolutely childlike in her delight. I hesitate to add that she was barefoot and wearing a filthy cotton dress.”

As fell came on, there were more reports of fights and screaming. Neighbors went so far as to call the police on two different occasions. Of the first occasion in September I was personally able, two years later, to obtain a full account.

“I didn’t like going there,” the officer told me. “You know, bothering these Garden District families just isn’t my line. And that lady really put us through it at the front door. It was Carlotta Mayfair, the one they call Miss Carl; the one who works for the judge.

“ ‘Who called you here? What do you want? Who are you? Let me see your identification. I’ll have to talk to Judge Byrnes about this if you come here again.’ Finally my partner said that people had heard the young lady in the house screaming, and we would like to talk to her and make certain for ourselves she was all right. I thought Miss Carl was going to kill him on the spot. But she went and got the young girl, Deirdre Mayfair, the one they talk about. She was crying and shaking all over. She said to my partner, C. J., ‘You make her give me my mother’s things. She took my mother’s things.’

“Miss Carl said she had had enough of this ‘intrusion,’ that this was a family argument and the police weren’t needed here. If we didn’t leave, she’d call Judge Byrnes. Then this girl, Deirdre, ran out of the house and towards the squad car. ‘Take me away!’ she screamed.

“Then something happened to Miss Carl. She was looking at the girl standing at the curb by our squad car, and she started prying. She tried to hide it. She took out her handkerchief and covered her face. But we could see, the lady was crying. The girl really had the lady at her wit’s ends.

“C. J. said, ‘Miss Carl, what do you want us to do?’ She went past him down to the sidewalk, and she laid her hand on the girl and she said, ‘Deirdre, do you want to go back to the
asylum? Please, Deirdre. Please.’ And then she just broke down. She couldn’t talk. The girl stared at her, all wild-eyed and crazy, and then she broke into sobs. And Miss Carl put her arm around the girl and took her back up the steps and inside.”

“Are you sure it was Carl?” I asked the officer.

“Oh, yeah, everybody knows her. Boy, I’ll never forget her. She called the captain the next day and tried to have C. J. and me fired.”

A different squad car answered the neighbor’s call a week later. All we know of this occasion is that Deirdre was trying to leave the house when the police arrived; they persuaded her to sit down on the porch steps and wait until her Uncle Cortland arrived.

Deirdre ran away the following day. Legal gossip reports of numerous phone calls back and forth, of Cortland rushing up to First Street, and Mayfair and Mayfair calling the New York cousins in search for Deirdre as they had when Antha disappeared years before.

Amanda Grady Mayfair was dead. Dr. Cornell Mayfair’s mother, Rosalind Mayfair, wanted nothing to do with “the First Street crowd” as she called them. Nevertheless she called the other New York cousins. Then the police contacted Cortland in New Orleans. Deirdre had been found wandering around barefoot and incoherent in Greenwich Village. There was some evidence that she had been raped. Cortland flew to New York that night. The following morning he brought Deirdre back with him.

The repeat of history came full circle with Deirdre’s second commitment to St. Ann’s Asylum. A week later she was released, and went to live with Cortland in his old family home in Metairie.

Family gossip described Carlotta as beaten down and discouraged. She told Judge Byrnes and his wife that she had failed with her niece. She feared the girl would “never be normal.”

When Beatrice Mayfair went to call on Carlotta one Saturday, she found her sitting alone in the parlor at First Street with all the curtains drawn. Carlotta wouldn’t talk.

“I realized later she had been staring at the very spot where they put the coffin in the old days when the funerals were still at home. All she said to me was yes or no, or hmmmm when I asked her questions. Finally that horrible Nancy came in and offered me some iced tea. She acted put upon when I accepted. I told her I would get it myself and she said, oh, no Aunt Carl wouldn’t have that.”

When Beatrice had had her fill of sadness and rudeness she
left. She went out to Metairie to visit Deirdre at Cortland’s house on Country Club Lane.

This house had been in the Mayfair family since Cortland built it when he was a young man. A brick mansion with white columns and French windows and every “modern convenience,” it later passed to Ryan Mayfair, Pierce’s son, who lives there now. For years Sheffield and Eugenie Mayfair shared it with Cortland. Their only child, Ellie Mayfair, the woman who later adopted Deirdre’s daughter, Rowan, was born in this house.

At this period, Sheffield Mayfair had already died of a heart attack; Eugenie had been gone for years. Ellie lived in California, where she had just gotten married to a lawyer named Graham Franklin. And Cortland lived in the Metairie mansion on his own.

By all reports, the house was extremely cheerful, filled with bright colors, gay wallpaper, traditional furnishings, and books. Numerous French doors opened to the garden, the pool, and the front lawn.

The entire family seems to have thought it was the best place for Deirdre. Metairie had none of the gloom of the Garden District. Cortland assured Beatrice that Deirdre was resting, that the girl’s problems had been compounded by a lot of secrecy and bad judgment on the part of Carlotta.

“But he won’t really tell me what’s happening,” Beatrice complained to Juliette. “He never does. What does he mean, secrecy?”

Beatrice queried the maid by phone whenever she could. Deirdre was just fine, said the maid. The girl’s color was excellent. She had even had a guest, a very nice-looking young man. The maid had only seen him for a second or two—he and Deirdre had been out in the garden—but he was a handsome, gentlemanly sort of young man.

“Now, who could that be?” Beatrice wondered over lunch with Juliette Milton. “Not that same scoundrel who sneaked into the nuns’ garden to bother her at St. Ro’s!”

“Seems to me,” wrote Juliette to her London contact, “that this family does not realize this girl has a lover. I mean one lover—one very distinguished and easily recognized lover, who is seen in her company over and over. All the descriptions of this young man are the same!”

The significant, thing about this story is that Juliette Milton had never heard any rumors about ghosts, witches, curses, or the like associated with the Mayfair family. She and Beatrice truly believed this mysterious person was a human being.

Yet at the very same time, in the Irish Channel old people
gossiped over kitchen tables about “Deirdre and the man.” And by “the man,” they did not mean a human being. The elderly sister of Father Lafferty knew about “the man.” She tried to talk to her brother about it; but he would not confide in her. She gossiped with an elderly friend named Dave Collins about it; she gossiped with our investigator, who walked along with her on Constance Street as she made her way home from Sunday Mass.

Miss Rosie, who worked in the sacristy, changing the altar cloths and seeing to the sacramental wine, also knew the shocking facts about those Mayfairs and “the man.” “First it was Stella, then Antha, now Deirdre,” she told her nephew, a college boy at Loyola who thought she was a superstitious fool.

An old black maid who lived in the same block knew all about “that man.” He was the family ghost, that’s who he was, and the only ghost she ever saw in broad daylight, sitting with that girl in the back garden. That girl was going to hell when she died.

It was at this point, in the summer of 1958, that I prepared to go to New Orleans.

I had finished putting the entire Mayfair history into an early version of the foregoing narrative, which was substantially the same as what the reader has only just read. And I was deeply and passionately concerned about Deirdre Mayfair.

I felt that her psychic powers, and especially her ability to see and communicate with spirits, were driving her out of her mind.

After numerous discussions with Scott Reynolds, our new director, and several meetings with the entire council, it was decided that I should make the trip, and that I should use my own judgment as to whether Deirdre Mayfair was old enough or stable enough to be approached.

Elaine Barrett, one of the oldest and most experienced members of the Talamasca, had died the preceding year, and I was now considered (undeservedly) the leading expert in the Talamasca on witch families. My credentials were never questioned. And indeed, those who had been most frightened by the deaths of Stuart Townsend and Arthur Langtry—and most likely to forbid my going to New Orleans—were no longer alive.