The witching hour lotmw-1

by Anne Rice

  As for her cross-dressing, she did it so long and so well that just about everyone became accustomed to it. In the last years of her life she would often go out in her tweed suit, and with her walking stick, and stroll around the Garden District for hours. She did not bother to pin up her hair any more or hide it beneath a hat. She wore it in a simple twist or bun; and people took her appearance entirely for granted. She was Miss Mary Beth to servants and neighbors for blocks around, walking with her head slightly bowed, and with very big steps, and waving in a lackadaisical fashion to those who greeted her.

  As for her lovers, the Talamasca has been able to find out almost nothing about them. Of a young cousin, Alain Mayfair, we know the most, and it is not even certain that he was Mary Beth’s lover. He worked for Mary Beth as a secretary or chauffeur or both from 1911 until 1913, but was frequently in Europe for long periods. He was in his twenties at the time, and very handsome and spoke French very well, but not to Mary Beth, who preferred English. There was some disagreement between him and Mary Beth in 1914, but no one seems to know what it was. He then went to England, joined the forces fighting in World War I, and was killed in combat. His body was never recovered. Mary Beth held an immense memorial service for him at First Street.

  Kelly Mayfair, another cousin, also worked for Mary Beth in 1912 and 1913, and continued in her employ until 1918. He was a strikingly handsome red-haired, green-eyed young man (his mother was Irish-born); he took care of Mary Beth’s horses and, unlike other boys whom Mary Beth kept, did know what he was doing in that capacity. The case for his having been Mary Beth’s lover rests entirely on the fact that they did dance together at many family gatherings, and later had many noisy quarrels which were overheard by maids, laundresses, and even chimney sweeps.

  Also Mary Beth settled an immense sum of money on Kelly so that he could try his luck as a writer. He went to Greenwich Village in New York with this money, worked for a while as a reporter for the New York Times, and froze to death in a cold-water flat there, while drunk, apparently quite by accident. It was his first winter in New York and he may not have understood the dangers. Whatever the case, Mary Beth was distraught over his death, and had the body brought home and buried properly, though Kelly’s parents were so disgusted with what had happened that they would not attend the funeral. She had three words inscribed on his tombstone: “Fear no more.” And this may be a reference to the famous lines of Shakespeare in Cymbeline, “Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages.” But we do not know. She refused to explain it even to the undertaker or the tombstone workers.

  The other “good-looking boys” who caused so much talk are unknown to us. We have only gossip descriptions which indicate they were all very handsome and what one might call “rough trade.” Full-time maids and cooks were highly suspicious of them and resentful towards them. And most accounts of these young men say nothing per se about their being Mary Beth’s lovers. They run something like this, “And then there was one of those boys of hers about, you know, one of those good-looking ones she always had around, and don’t ask me for what, and he was sitting on the kitchen steps doing nothing but whittling you know and I asked him to carry the laundry basket down but he was too good for that, you can well imagine, but of course he did it, because she came into the kitchen then, and he wouldn’t dare do nothing to run against her, you can be sure, and she give him one of her smiles, you know and said, ‘Hello there, Benjy.’ ”

  Who knows? Maybe Mary Beth only liked to look at them.

  What we do know for certain is that from the day she met him she loved and cared for Daniel McIntyre, though he certainly began his role in the Mayfair history as Julien’s lover.

  Richard Llewellyn’s story notwithstanding, we know that Julien met Daniel McIntyre sometime around 1896, and that he began to place a great deal of important business with Daniel McIntyre, who was an up-and-coming attorney in a Camp Street firm founded by Daniel’s uncle some ten years before.

  When Garland Mayfair finished law school at Harvard he went to work in this same firm, and later Cortland joined him, and both worked with Daniel McIntyre until the latter was appointed a judge in 1905.

  Daniel’s photographs of the period show him to be pale, slender, with reddish-blond hair. He was almost pretty-not unlike Julien’s later lover, Richard Llewellyn, and not unlike the darker Victor who died from the fall beneath the carriage wheels. The facial bone structure of all three men was exceptionally beautiful and dramatic, and Daniel had the added advantage of remarkably brilliant green eyes.

  Even in the last years of his life, when he was quite heavy and continually red-faced from drink, Daniel McIntyre elicited compliments on his green eyes.

  What we know of Daniel McIntyre’s early life is fairly cut and dry. He was descended from “old Irish,” that is, the immigrants who came to America long before the great potato famines of the 1840s, and it is doubtful that any of his ancestors were ever poor.

  His grandfather, a self-made millionaire commission agent, built a magnificent house on Julia Street in the 1830s, where Daniel’s father, Sean McIntyre, the youngest of four sons, grew up. Sean McIntyre was a distinguished medical doctor until he died abruptly of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight.

  By then Daniel was already a practicing lawyer, and had moved with his mother and unmarried sister to an uptown St. Charles Avenue mansion where Daniel lived until his mother died. Neither McIntyre home is still standing.

  Daniel was by all accounts a brilliant business lawyer, and numerous records attest to his having advised Julien well in a variety of business ventures. He also represented Julien successfully in several crucial civil suits. And we have one very interesting little anecdote told to us years later by a clerk in the firm to the effect that, about one of these civil suits, Julien and Daniel had a terrible argument in which Daniel repeatedly said, “Now Julien, let me handle this legally!” to which Julien repeatedly replied, “All right, if you are so damned set on doing it, then do it. But I tell you I could very easily make this man wish he had never been born.”

  Public records also indicate that Daniel was highly imaginative in finding ways for Julien to do things he wanted to do, and for helping him discover information about people who opposed him in business.

  On February 11, 1897, when Daniel’s mother died, he moved out of their uptown St. Charles Avenue home, leaving his sister in the care of nurses and maids, and took up residence in an ostentatious and lavish four-room suite at the old St. Louis Hotel. There he began to live “like a king,” according to bellhops and waiters and taxi drivers who received enormous tips from Daniel and served him expensive meals in his parlor which fronted on the street.

  Julien Mayfair was Daniel’s most frequent visitor, and he often stayed the night in Daniel’s suite.

  If this arrangement aroused any enmity or disapproval in Garland or Cortland, we know nothing of it. They became partners in the firm of McIntyre, Murphy, Murphy, and Mayfair, and after the retirement of the two Murphy brothers, and the appointment of Daniel to the bench, Garland and Cortland became the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair. In later decades, they devoted their entire energies to the management of Mayfair money, and they were almost partners with Mary Beth in numerous ventures; though there were other ventures in which Mary Beth was involved of which Garland and Cortland apparently knew nothing.

  Daniel was already by this time a heavy drinker, and there are numerous accounts of hotel staff members having to help him to his suite. Cortland also kept an eye on him continuously, and in later years when Daniel bought a motor car, it was Cortland who was always offering to drive Daniel home so that he wouldn’t kill himself or someone else. Cortland seems to have liked Daniel very much. He was the defender of Daniel to the rest of the family, which became-over the years-an ever more demanding role.

  We have no evidence that Mary Beth ever met Daniel during this early period. She had already become very active in business, but the family had num
erous lawyers and connections, and we have no testimony to indicate that Daniel ever came to the First Street house. It may have been that he was embarrassed by his relationship with Julien, and a bit more puritanical about such things in general than Julien’s other lovers had been.

  He was certainly the only one of Julien’s lovers of whom we know who had a professional career of his own.

  Whatever the explanation, he met Mary Beth Mayfair in late 1897, and Richard Llewellyn’s version of the meeting-in Storyville-is the only one we have. We do not know whether or not they fell in love as Llewellyn insisted, but we do know that Mary Beth and Daniel began to appear together at numerous social affairs.

  Mary Beth was by that time about twenty-five years old and extremely independent. And it was no secret that little Belle-the child of the mysterious Scottish Lord Mayfair-was not right in the head. Though very sweet and amiable, Belle was obviously unable to learn even simple things, and reacted emotionally to life forever as though she were about four years old, or so the cousins later described it. People hesitated to use the word feebleminded.

  Everyone knew of course that Belle was not an appropriate designee for the legacy as she might never marry. And the cousins discussed this fairly openly at the time.

  Another Mayfair tragedy was also a topic of conversation and that was the destruction, by the river, of the plantation of Riverbend.

  The house, built by Marie Claudette before the beginning of the century, was built on a thumb of land jutting into the river, and sometime around 1896 it became clear that the river was determined to take this thumb of land. Everything was tried, but nothing could be done. The levee had to be built behind the house and finally the house had to be abandoned; the ground around the house was slowly flooded; then one night the house itself collapsed into the, marsh, and within a week it was gone altogether, as if it had never been there.

  That Mary Beth and Julien regarded this as a tragedy was obvious. There was much talk in New Orleans of the engineers they consulted, in attempting to avert the tragedy. And no small part of it was Katherine, Mary Beth’s aging mother, who did not want to move to New Orleans to the house Darcy Monahan had built for her decades ago.

  At last, Katherine had to be sedated for the move to the city, and as stated earlier, she never recovered from the shock, and soon went insane, wandering around the First Street gardens, talking all the time to Darcy, and searching also for her mother, Marguerite, and endlessly turning out the contents of drawers to find things which she claimed to have lost.

  Mary Beth tolerated her, and was heard to say once, much to the shock of the doctor in attendance, that she was happy to do what she could for her mother, but she did not find the woman or her plight “particularly interesting,” and she wished there was some drug they could give the woman to quiet her down.

  Julien was present at the time, and naturally found this very funny and went into one of his disconcerting riffs of laughter. He was understanding of the doctor’s shock, however, and explained to him that the great virtue of Mary Beth was that she always told the truth, no matter what the consequences.

  If they did give Katherine “some drug,” we know nothing of it. She began to wander the streets around 1898, and a young mulatto servant was hired simply to follow her around. She died in bed at First Street, in a rear bedroom, in 1905, on the night of January 2, to be exact, and to the best of our knowledge there was no storm to mark her death, and no unusual event of any kind. She had been in a coma for days, according to the servants, and Mary Beth and Julien were at her side when she died.

  On January 15, 1899, in an enormous wedding held at St. Alphonsus Church, Mary Beth married Daniel McIntyre. It is interesting to note that up until this time the family had worshiped at the Notre Dame church (the French church of the tri-church parish), but for the wedding it chose the Irish church, and thereafter went to all services at St. Alphonsus.

  Daniel seems to have been on very friendly terms with the Irish-American priests of the parish, and to have been lavish in his support of the parish. He also had a cousin in the Irish-American Sisters of Mercy who taught at the local school.

  It seems safe therefore to assume that the change to the Irish church was Daniel’s idea. And it is also safe to assume that Mary Beth was almost indifferent to the matter, though she did go to church often with her children and great-nieces and nephews, though what she believed about it one cannot say. Julien never went to church, except for the customary weddings, funerals, and christenings. He also seems to have preferred St. Alphonsus to the humbler French church of Notre Dame.

  The wedding of Daniel and Mary Beth was, as already mentioned, an enormous affair. A reception of dazzling proportions was held at the First Street house, with cousins coming from as far away as New York. Daniel’s family, though much much smaller than the Mayfair family, was also in attendance, and by all reports the couple were deeply in love and deeply happy, and the dancing and singing went on late into the night.

  The couple went to New York for a honeymoon trip, and from there to Europe, where they remained for four months, cutting short their journey in May because Mary Beth was already expecting a child.

  Indeed, Carlotta Mayfair was born seven and one-half months after her parents’ marriage, on September 1, 1899.

  On November 2 of the following year, 1900, Mary Beth gave birth to Lionel, her only son. And finally, on October 10 of the year 1901, she gave birth to her last child, Stella.

  These children were of course all the legal offspring of Daniel McIntyre, but one can legitimately ask for the purposes of this history, who was their real father?

  There is overwhelming evidence, both from medical records and from pictures, to indicate that Daniel McIntyre was Carlotta Mayfair’s father. Not only did Carlotta inherit Daniel’s green eyes, she also inherited his beautiful reddish-blond curly hair.

  As for Lionel, he was also of the same blood type as Daniel McIntyre, and also tended to resemble him though he bore a strong resemblance to his mother as well, having her dark eyes and her “expression,” especially as he grew older.

  As for Stella, her blood type, as recorded in her superficial postmortem examination in 1929, indicates that she could not have been Daniel McIntyre’s daughter. We know that this information came to the notice of her sister Carlotta at the time. In fact, talk about Carlotta’s request for blood typing is what brought it to the attention of the Talamasca.

  It is perhaps superfluous to add that Stella bore no resemblance to Daniel. On the contrary, she resembled Julien with her delicate bones, black curling hair, and very brilliant, if not twinkling dark eyes.

  As we have no blood type for Julien, and do not know that any was ever recorded, we cannot add that scrap of evidence to the case.

  Stella might have been fathered by any of Mary Beth’s lovers, though we do not know that she had a lover in the year before Stella was born. Indeed, the gossip concerning Mary Beth’s lovers came after, but that may only mean that she grew careless about her lovers as the years passed.

  One other definite possibility is Cortland Mayfair, Julien’s second son, who was, at the time of Stella’s birth, twenty-two years old and an extremely appealing young man. (His blood type was finally obtained in 1959 and is compatible.) He was in residence off and on at First Street, as he was studying law at Harvard and did not finish until 1903. That he was very fond of Mary Beth was well-known to everyone, and that he took an interest all his life in the family legacy is also well-known.

  Unfortunately for the Talamasca, Cortland was throughout most of his life a very secretive and guarded man. He was known even to his brothers and his children as a reclusive individual who disliked any sort of gossip outside the family. He loved reading, and was something of a genius at investment. To our knowledge, he confided in no one. Even those closest to him give contradictory versions of what Cortland did, and when, and why.

  The one aspect of the man of which everyone is certain is that he was dev
oted to the management of the legacy and to making money for himself, his brothers and their children, and Mary Beth. His descendants are among the richest of the Mayfair clan to this day.

  When Mary Beth died, it was Cortland who prevented Carlotta Mayfair from virtually dismantling her mother’s financial empire by taking over its complete management on behalf of Stella, who was in fact the designee, and did not care what happened to it as long as she could do as she pleased.

  Stella never “cared a thing about money” by her own admission. And over Carlotta’s wishes, she placed her interests entirely in Cortland’s hands. Cortland and his son Sheffield continued to manage the bulk of the fortune on behalf of Antha after Stella’s death.

  We should stress here, however, that after Mary Beth died her empire began to fall apart. No one individual could take her place. And though Cortland did a marvelous job of consolidating and investing and preserving, the dizzying expansion which had gone on under Mary Beth essentially came to an end.

  But to return to our principal concern here, there are other indications that Cortland was Stella’s father. Cortland’s wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, had a deep aversion to Mary Beth and to the entire Mayfair family, and she would never accompany Cortland to the First Street house. This did not stop Cortland from visiting there all the time, and he took all of his five children there, so that they grew up knowing his family quite well.