The witching hour lotmw-1

by Anne Rice

  In 1959, Rita Mae had only just married Jerry Lonigan of Lonigan and Sons funeral home, and when she heard that Deirdre was at home, pregnant, and had already lost the father of her baby, Rita Mae screwed up her courage and went to call. As so many others have been, she was turned away at the door, but not before she saw Deirdre at the top of the stairs. Deirdre called out to Rita Mae desperately:

  “Rita Mae, they’re going to take my baby! Rita Mae, help me.” As Miss Nancy sought to force Deirdre back up to the second floor, Deirdre threw a small white card down to Rita Mae. “Contact this man. Get him to help me. Tell him they’re going to take my baby away.”

  Carlotta Mayfair physically attacked Rita Mae and tried to get the card away from her, but Rita, even though her hair was being pulled and her face scratched, held it tight as she ran through a hail of leaves out the gate.

  When she got home she discovered the card was almost unreadable. Carlotta had torn part of it; and Rita had inadvertently clenched the little card in the moist palm of her hand. Only the word Talamasca, and my name, handwritten on the back, could be made out.

  Only in 1988, when I encountered Rita Mae at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair-and gave her a card identical to the one destroyed in 1959-did she recognize the names and call me at my hotel to report what she remembered from that long ago day.

  It was heartbreaking to this investigator to learn of Deirdre’s vain plea for help. It was heartbreaking to remember those nights thirty years before when I lay in bed in London thinking, “I cannot help her, but I have to try to help her. But how do I dare to do it? And how could I possibly succeed?”

  The fact is I probably could not have done anything to help Deirdre, no matter how hard I might have tried. If Cortland couldn’t stop the adoption, it is sensible to assume that I couldn’t have stopped it either. Yet in my dreams I see myself taking Deirdre out of the First Street house to London. I see her a healthy normal woman today.

  The reality is utterly different.

  On November 7, 1959, Deirdre gave birth at five o’clock in the morning to Rowan Mayfair, nine pounds, eight ounces, a healthy, fair-haired baby girl. Hours afterwards, emerging from the general anesthesia, Deirdre found her bed surrounded by Ellie Mayfair, Father Lafferty, and Carlotta Mayfair, and two of the Sisters of Mercy who later described the scene in detail to Sister Bridget Marie.

  Father Lafferty held the baby in his arms. He explained that he had just baptized it in the Mercy Hospital chapel, naming it Rowan Mayfair. He showed her the signed baptismal certificate.

  “Now kiss your baby, Deirdre,” said Father Lafferty, “and give her to Ellie. Ellie is ready to go.”

  Parish gossip says that Deirdre did as she was told. She had insisted that the child have the name Mayfair and once that condition was met, she let her baby go. Crying so as she could scarce see, she kissed the baby and let Ellie Mayfair take it from her arms. Then she turned her head, sobbing, into the pillow. Father Lafferty said, “Best leave her alone.”

  Over a decade later, Sister Bridget Marie explained the meaning of Rowan’s name.

  “Carlotta stood godmother to the child. I believe they got some doctor off the ward to be its godfather, so determined were they to have the baptism done. And Carlotta said to Father Lafferty, the child’s to be named Rowan, and he said to her, ‘Now, you know, Carlotta Mayfair, that that is not a saint’s name. It sounds like a pagan name to me.’

  “And she to him in her manner, you know the way she was, she says, ‘Father, don’t you know what the rowan tree was and that it was used to ward off witches and all manner of evil? There’s not a hut in Ireland where the woman of the house did not put up the rowan branch over the door to protect her family from witches and witchcraft, and that has been true throughout Christian times. Rowan is to be the name of this child!’ And Ellie Mayfair, the little mealymouth that she always was, just nodded her head.”

  “Was it true?” I asked. “Did they put the rowan over the door in Ireland?”

  Gravely Sister Bridget Marie nodded. “Lot of good that it did!”

  Who is the father of Rowan Mayfair?

  Routine blood typing done at the hospital indicates that the baby’s blood type matched that of Cortland Mayfair, who had died less than a month before. Allow us to repeat here that Cortland may also have been the father of Stella Mayfair, and that recent information obtained from Bellevue Hospital has at last confirmed that Antha Mayfair may have been his daughter as well.

  Deirdre “went mad” before she ever left Mercy Hospital after Rowan’s birth. The nuns said she cried by the hour, men screamed in an empty room, “You killed him!” Then wandering into the hospital chapel during Mass, she shouted once more, “You killed him. You left me alone among my enemies. You betrayed me!” She had to be taken out by force, and was quickly committed to St. Ann’s Asylum, where she became catatonic by the end of the month.

  “It was the invisible lover,” Sister Bridget Mane believes to this day. “She was shouting and cursing at him, don’t you know it, for he’d killed her college professor. He’d done it, because the devil wanted her for himself. The demon lover, that’s what he was, right here in the city of New Orleans. Walking the streets of the Garden District by night.”

  That is a very lovely and eloquent statement, but since it is more than highly likely that the college professor never existed, what other meaning can we attach to Deirdre’s words? Was it Lasher who pushed Cortland down the staircase, or startled him so badly that he fell? And if so, why?

  This is the end of the life of Deirdre Mayfair really. For seventeen years she was incarcerated in various mental institutions, given massive doses of drugs and ruthless courses of electric shock treatment, with only brief respites when she returned home, a ghost of the girl she had once been.

  At last in 1976, she was brought back to First Street forever, a wide-eyed and mute invalid, in a perpetual state of alertness, yet with no connective memory at ail.

  The side porch downstairs was screened in for her. For years she has been led out every day, rain or shine, to sit motionless in a rocking chair, her face turned ever so slightly towards the distant street.

  “She cannot even remember from moment to moment,” said one physician. “She lives entirely in the present, in a way we simply cannot imagine. You might say there is no mind there at all.” It is a condition described in some very old people who reach the same state in advanced senility, and sit staring in geriatric hospitals throughout the world. Regardless, she is drugged heavily, to prevent bouts of “agitation,” or so her various doctors and nurses have been told.

  How did Deirdre Mayfair become this “mindless idiot,” as the Irish Channel gossips call her, “this nice bunch of carrots” sitting in her chair? Shock treatments certainly contributed to it, course after course of them, given by every hospital in which she had ever stayed since 1959. Then there were the drugs-massive doses of near paralytic tranquilizers-given to her in astonishing combinations, or so the records, as we continue to gain access to them, reveal.

  How does one justify such treatment? Deirdre Mayfair ceased to speak coherently as early as 1962. When not tranquilized, she screamed or cried incessantly. Now and then she broke things. Sometimes she simply lay back, with her eyes rolling up in her head, and howled.

  As the years have passed, we have continued to collect information about Deirdre Mayfair. Every month or so we manage to “interview” some doctor or nurse, or other person who has been in the First Street house. But our record of what really happened remains fragmentary. Hospital files are, naturally, confidential and extremely difficult to obtain. But in at least two of the sanitariums where Deirdre was treated, we now know that no record of her treatment exists.

  One of her doctors has clearly and by his own admission to an inquiring stranger destroyed his records of Deirdre’s case. Another physician retired shortly after he had treated Deirdre, leaving only a few cryptic notes in his brief file. “Incurable. Tragic. Aunt demands contin
ued medication yet Aunt’s descriptions of behavior not credible.”

  We continue, for obvious reasons, to rely upon anecdotal evidence, for our assessment of Deirdre’s history.

  Though Deirdre has slumbered in a twilight induced by drugs all of her adult life, there have been countless sightings by those around her of “a mysterious brown-haired man.” Nurses in St. Ann’s Asylum claimed to have seen him-“some man going into her room! Now I know I saw that.” At a Texas hospital where she was incarcerated briefly, a doctor claimed to have seen “a mysterious visitor” who always “seemed somehow to just disappear when I wanted to question him or ask him who he was.”

  At least one nurse in a northern Louisiana sanitarium insisted to her superiors that she had seen a ghost. Black orderlies in the various hospitals saw “that man all the time.” One woman told us, “He not human. I know him when I see him. I see spirits. I call them up. I know him and he know me and he don’t come near me at all.”

  Most workmen cannot work on the First Street house any more today than they could in the days when Deirdre was a girl. There are the same old stories. There is even some talk of “a man around there” who doesn’t want things done.

  Nevertheless some repairs are completed; air-conditioning units have been installed in some rooms, and some upgrading of the electricity has been carried out-these tasks almost invariably being done under Carlotta Mayfair’s on-site supervision.

  The old gardener still comes, and he occasionally paints the rusted fence.

  Otherwise First Street slumbers beneath the oak branches. The frogs sing in the night around Stella’s pool with its lily pads and wild irises. Deirdre’s wooden swing has long ago fallen from the oak at the far end of the property. The wooden seat-a mere slat of wood-lies bleached and warping in the high grass.

  Many a person stopping to look at Deirdre in her rocking chair on the side porch has glimpsed “a handsome cousin” visiting her. Nurses have sometimes quit because of “that man who comes and goes like some kinda spook,” or because they kept seeing things out of the corner of their eye, or thought they were being watched.

  “There’s some kind of ghost hovering near her,” said one young practical nurse who told the agency she would never, never go back to that house. “I saw him once, in the bright sunlight. Scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  When I asked this nurse about it over lunch, she had few details to add to the story. “Just a man. A man with brown hair and brown eyes in a nice-looking coat and white shirt. But dear God, if I have ever seen anything more terrifying than that! He was just standing there in the sunlight beside her looking at me. I dropped the tray and just screamed and screamed.”

  Numerous other medical persons left the service of the family abruptly. One doctor was fired off the case in 1976. We continue to track down these people, to take their testimony and record it. We try to tell them as little as we can of why we want to know what they saw and when.

  What emerges from this data is a frightening possibility-that Deirdre’s mind has been destroyed to the point where she cannot control her evocation of Lasher. That is, she subconsciously gives him the power to appear near her in very convincing form. Yet she is not conscious enough to control him further, or indeed to drive him away, if on some level she does not want him there.

  In sum, she is a mindless medium; a witch rendered inoperative, and at the mercy perhaps of her familiar, who is ever at hand.

  There is another very distinct possibility. That Lasher is there to comfort her, to look out for her, and to keep her happy in ways perhaps that we do not understand.

  In 1980, over eight years ago, I managed to obtain an article of Deirdre’s clothing, a cotton duster, or loose-fitting garment, which had been put in the dustbin in back of the house. I took this garment back with me to England, and placed it in the hands of Lauren Grant, the most powerful psychometric in the order today.

  Lauren knew nothing per se about the Mayfair Witches, but one cannot rule out telepathy in such situations. I tried to keep out of it with my own thoughts as much as I could.

  “I see happiness,” she said. “This is the garment of someone who is blissfully happy. She lives in dreams. Dreams of green gardens and twilight skies, and exquisite sunsets. There are low-hanging branches there. There is a swing hanging from a beautiful tree. Is this a child? No, this is a woman. There is a warm breeze.” Lauren massaged the garment ever more tightly, pressing its fabric to her cheek. “Oh, and she has the most beautiful lover. Oh, such a lover. He looks like a picture. Steerforth out of David Copperfield, that sort of man. He’s so gentle, and when he touches her, she yields to him utterly. Who is this woman? All the world would like to be this woman. At least for a little while.”

  Is that the subconscious life of Deirdre Mayfair? Deirdre herself will never tell.

  In closing allow me to add a few details. Since 1976, Deirdre Mayfair, whether clothed in a white flannel nightgown or a cotton duster, has always worn the Mayfair emerald around her neck.

  I have seen Deirdre myself several times from a distance since 1976. By that time, I had made three visits to New Orleans to gather information. I have returned numerous times since.

  I invariably spend some time walking in the Garden District on these return visits; I have attended the funerals over the years of Miss Belle, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy, as well as Pierce, the last of Cortland’s sons, who died of a heart attack in 1984.

  At each funeral, I have seen Carlotta Mayfair. Our eyes have met. I have three times during this decade placed my card in her hand as I passed her. She has never contacted me. She has never made any more legal threats.

  She is very old now, white-haired, painfully thin. Yet she still goes to work every day. She can no longer climb up on the step of the St. Charles car, so she is taken by a regular taxi. Only one black servant works in the house regularly, with the exception of Deirdre’s devoted nurse.

  With each visit, I encounter some new “witness” who can tell me more about “the brown-haired man” and the mysteries surrounding First Street. The stories are all much the same. But we have indeed come to the end of Deirdre’s history, though she herself is not yet dead.

  It is time to examine in detail her only child and heir, Rowan Mayfair, who has never set foot in her native city since the day she was taken away from it, six hours after her birth, on a cross-continental jet flight.

  And though it is much too soon to attempt to put the information on Rowan into a coherent narrative, we have made some critically important notes from our random material, and there is considerable indication that Rowan Mayfair-who knows nothing of her family, her history, or her inheritance-may be the strongest witch the Mayfair family has ever produced.

  Twenty-four

  THE AIR-CONDITIONING FELT good after the hot streets. But as she stood quietly for a moment in the foyer of Lonigan and Sons, unobserved and therefore anonymous, she realized the heat had already made her faintly sick. The icy stream of air was now shocking her. She felt the kind of chill you have when you have fever. The enormous crowd milling only a few feet away took on a curious dreamlike quality.

  When she’d first left the hotel, the humid summer afternoon had seemed manageable. But by the time she’d reached the dark house on Chestnut and First, she was feeling weak and already feeling the chill, though the air itself had been moist and warm and close, full of the raw smell of earth and green things.

  Yes, dreamlike all of this-this room now with its white damask walls and small new crystal chandeliers, and the noisy well-dressed people in ever shifting clusters. Dreamlike as the shaded world of old houses and iron fences through which she had just walked.

  From where she stood, she could not see into the coffin. It was mounted against the far wall of the second room. As the noisy gathering shifted here and there, she caught glimpses of the deeply polished wood and the silver handles, and of the tufted satin inside the open lid.

  She felt an involuntary tightening of
her facial muscles. In that coffin, she thought. You have to go through this room, and through the next room, and look. Her face felt so curiously rigid. Her body felt rigid too. Just go up to the coffin. Isn’t that what people do?

  She could see them doing it. She could see one person after another stepping up close to the coffin, and looking down at the woman inside.

  And sooner or later someone would notice her anyway. Someone would ask, perhaps, who she was. “You tell me. Who are all these people? Do they know? Who is Rowan Mayfair?”

  But for this moment, she was invisible, watching the rest of them, the men in their pale suits, the women in pretty dresses, and so many of the women wearing hats, and even gloves. It had been years since she had seen women in gaily colored dresses with belted waists and soft full skirts. There must have been two hundred people roaming about, and they were people of all ages.

  She saw bald, pink-scalped old men in white linen with canes, and young boys slightly uncomfortable in their tight collars and ties. The backs of the necks of old men and young boys looked equally naked and vulnerable. There were even little children playing around the adults, babies in white lace being bounced on laps, toddlers crawling on the dark red carpet.

  And there a girl, perhaps twelve years old, staring at her, with a ribbon in her red hair. Never in all her years in California had she seen a girl of that age-or any child, for that matter-with a real ribbon in her hair, and this was a big bow of peach-colored satin.

  Everyone in their Sunday best, she thought. Was that the expression? And the conversation was almost festive. Like a wedding, it seemed suddenly, though she had never been to such a wedding, she had to admit. Windowless this room, though there were white damask draperies hung here and there utterly concealing what might have been windows.

  The crowd shifted, broke again, so that she could see the coffin almost completely. A fragile little old man in a gray seersucker suit was standing alone looking down at the dead woman. With great effort, he lowered himself onto the velvet kneeler. What had Ellie called such things? I want there to be a prie-dieu by my coffin. Rowan had never seen a seersucker suit before in her life. But she knew that’s what it was, because she’d seen it in the movies-in the old black-and-white films in which the fans churned and the parrot clucked on its perch and Sidney Greenstreet said something sinister to Humphrey Bogart.