Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  ‘She had a remote look to her,’ said a woman who used to see her at the chapel. ‘She wasn’t vibrant like Stella; she always seemed wrapped in her dreams, and to tell you the truth, I felt sorry for her all alone in that house with those women. Don’t quote me on this but that Carlotta is a mean person. She really is My maid and my cook knew all about her. They said she would grab that girl by the wrist and dig her nails into her flesh.’

  Irwin Dandrich reported that old friends of Stella’s tried to call on the girl from time to time, only to be turned away ‘No one gets past Nancy or the colored maid, Aunt Easter,’ Dandrich wrote to the London investigators. ‘And the talk is that Antha is a veritable prisoner in that house.’

  Other than these few glimpses, we know virtually nothing of Antha during the years 1930 to 1938, and it seems nobody in the family knew much of her either. But we can safely conclude that all the references to the ’brown-haired man’ apply to Lasher; and if this is the case, we have more sightings of Lasher during this period than for all the decades before.

  Indeed, the sightings of Lasher are so numerous that our investigators got in the habit of merely jotting down notes such as ‘Maid working on Third Street says she saw Antha and the man walking together ’ Or ‘Woman on First and Prytama saw Antha standing under the oak tree talking to the man.’

  The First Street house had now taken on an air of sinister mystery even for the descendants of Remy Mayfair and of Suzette’s brothers and sisters, who had once been quite close

  Then, in April of 1938, neighbors witnessed a violent family quarrel at First Street. Windows were broken, people heard screaming, and finally a distraught young woman, clutching only a shoulder bag or a purse, was seen running out the front gate and towards St Charles Avenue. Without question it was Antha. Even the neighbors knew that much, and they watched from behind lace curtains as a police car pulled up only moments after and Carlotta went to the curb to confer with the two officers who drove off at once, siren screaming, apparently to catch the errant girl.

  That night Mayfairs in New York received telephone calls from Carlotta, informing them that Antha had run away from home and was headed for Manhattan Would they help with the search? It was these New York cousins who told the family in New Orleans Cousins called cousins. Within days Irwin Dandrich wrote to London that ’poor little Antha’ had made her bid for freedom She had run off to New York City. But how far would she ever get?

  As it turned out, Antha got quite far.

  For months no one knew the whereabouts of Antha Mayfair. Police, private investigators, and family members failed to find a clue to Antha’s whereabouts Carlotta made three separate tram trips to New York during this period, and offered substantial rewards to anyone in the New York police department who could offer help in the search. She called on Amanda Grady Mayfair, who had only recently left her husband, Cortland, and actually threatened Amanda.

  As Amanda told our ’undercover’ society investigator later, ‘It was simply dreadful. She asked me to meet her for lunch at the Waldorf. Well, of course I didn’t want to do it. Rather like going into a cage at the zoo to have lunch with a lion. But I knew she was all upset about Antha, and I suppose I wanted to give her a piece of my mind. I wanted to tell her that she had driven Antha away, that she never should have isolated that poor little girl from her uncles and cousins who loved her.

  ‘But, as soon as I sat down at the table, she started to threaten me. "Let me tell you, Amanda, if you are harboring Antha I can make trouble for you that you won’t believe." I wanted to throw my drink in her face. I was furious. I said, "Carlotta Mayfair, don’t you ever talk to me again, don’t you ever call me, or write to me, or come to my home. I had enough of you in New Orleans. I had enough of what your family did to Pierce and to Cortland. Don’t you ever ever come near me again." I tell you the smoke was coming out of my ears when I left the Waldorf. But you know, it is a regular technique with Carlotta. She makes an accusation as soon as she sees you. She’s been doing it for years, really. That way, you don’t have a chance to make an accusation against her.’

  In the winter of 1939, our investigators located Antha in a very simple way. Elaine Barrett, our witchcraft scholar, in a routine meeting with Evan Neville suggested that Antha must have financed her escape with the famous Mayfair jewels and gold coins. Why not try the shops in New York where such items could be sold for quick money? Antha was located within the month.

  Indeed, she had been selling rare and exquisite gold coins steadily to support herself since her arrival in 1938 Every coin dealer in New York knew her — the beautiful young woman with the fine manners and the cheerful smile who always brought in the rarest of merchandise, taken from a family collection in Virginia, she said.

  ‘At first I thought her stuff was stolen,’ said one com dealer. ‘I mean these were three of the finest French coins I’ve ever seen. I gave her a fraction of what they were worth and just waited. But absolutely nothing happened When I made the sale, I saved her a percentage. And when she brought me some marvelous Roman coins, I paid her what they were worth. Now she’s a regular. I’d rather deal with her than some of the other people who come in here, I’ll tell you that much.’

  It was a simple thing to follow Antha from one of these shops to a large apartment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village where she had been living with Sean Lacy, a handsome young Irish-American painter who showed considerable promise and had already exhibited with some critical approval several pieces of his work. Antha herself had become a writer Everyone in the building and on the block knew the young couple. Our investigators collected reams of information almost overnight.

  Antha was the sole support of Sean Lacy, friends said openly. She bought him anything he wanted, and he treated her like a queen. ‘He calls her his Southern Belle, actually, does everything for her. But then why shouldn’t he?’ The apartment was ’a wonderful place,’ full of bookshelves to the ceiling, and big old comfortable overstuffed chairs

  ‘Sean has never painted so well. He’s done three portraits of her, all of them very interesting. And you can hear Antha’s typewriter going constantly. She sold one story, I heard, to some little literary magazine in Ohio. They threw a party over that one. She was so happy She really is a little on the naive side But she’s a swell kid.’

  ‘She’d be a good writer if she’d write about what she knows,’ said one young woman in a bar who claimed to have once been Sean’s lover. ‘But she writes these morbid fantasies about an old violet-colored house in New Orleans and a ghost who lives there - all very high-pitched, and hardly what will sell. She really ought to get away from all that rot and write about her experiences here in New York.’

  Neighbors were fond of the young couple. ‘She can’t cook or do anything practical,’ reported a female painter who lived above them, ’but then why should she? She pays all the bills as it is. I asked Sean one time wherever does she get her money? He said she had a bottomless purse. All she ever had to do was reach in it Then he laughed.’

  Finally in the winter of 1940, Elaine Barrett, writing from London, urged our most responsible private investigator in New York to attempt to interview Antha. Elaine wanted desperately to go to New York herself, but it was out of the question. So she talked directly by phone to Allan Carver, a suave and sophisticated man who had worked for us for many years. Carver was a well-dressed and well-mannered gentleman of fifty. He found it a simple matter to make contact A pleasure, in fact.

  ‘I followed her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then happened upon her as she was sitting in front of one of the Rembrandts, just staring at it, rather lost in her thoughts. She is pretty, quite pretty, but very Bohemian. She was all wrapped up in wool that day, with her hair loose. I sat down beside her, flashed a copy of Hemingway’s short stories, and engaged her in conversation about him. Yes, she’d read Hemingway and she loved him. Did she love Rembrandt? Yes, she did. How about New York in general? Oh, she loved living here She never wa
nted to be anyplace else. The city of New York was a person to her She had never been so happy as she was now.

  ‘There wasn’t a chance of getting her out of there with me. She was too guarded, too proper. So I made the most of it as quickly as I could.

  ‘I got her talking about herself, her Me, her husband, and her writing. Yes, she wanted to be a writer. And Sean wanted her to be Sean wouldn’t be happy unless she was successful too. "You know, the only thing I can be is a writer," she said. "I’m absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you’ve lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you." It was all very touching actually, the way she spoke about it. She seemed altogether defenseless and absolutely genuine. I think, had I been thirty years younger, I would have fallen in love with her.

  ‘"But what kind of life did you have?" I pressed her "I can’t place your accent But I know you’re not from New York."

  ‘"Down south," she said "It’s another world." She grew sad instantly, even agitated "I want to forget all that," she said, "I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve made this rule for myself. I’ll write about my past but I won’t talk about it. I’ll turn it into art if I can, but I won’t talk about it I won’t give it life here, outside of art, if you follow what I mean."

  ‘I found this rather clever and interesting. I liked her I cannot tell you how much I liked her And you know, in my line of work, one gets so accustomed to just using people!

  ‘"Well, then tell me about what you write," I begged "Just tell me about one of your stories for instance, assuming you write stories, or tell me about your poems."

  ‘"If they’re any good, you’ll read them some day," she said, and then she gave me a parting smile and left I think she’d become suspicious. I don’t know really She was glancing around in a rather defensive way the whole time we talked. I even asked her at one point is she was expecting someone. She said not really, but "You never know " She acted as if she thought someone was watching her. And of course my people were watching her all the time I felt pretty uncomfortable about it at that moment, I can tell you’

  Reports continued to pour in for months that Antha and Sean were happy. Sean, a big burly individual with an endearing sense of humor, had a one-man show in the Village which was quite a success. Antha had a short poem (seven lines) in The New Yorker. The couple were ecstatic. Only in April of 1941 did the gossip change.

  ‘Well, she’s pregnant,’ said the upstairs painter, ’and he doesn’t want the baby, you know, and of course she wants it and God knows what’s going to happen. He knows a doctor who can take care of it, you see, but she won’t hear of it. I hate to see her going through this, really. She’s much too fragile. I hear her crying down there in the night.’

  On July i, Sean Lacy died in a single car accident (mechanical failure) coming back from a visit to his ailing mother in upstate New York A hysterical Antha had to be hospitalized at Bellevue ‘We just didn’t know what to do with her,’ said the upstairs painter ‘For eight hours straight she screamed. Finally we called Bellevue. I’ll never know if we did the right thing.’

  Records at Bellevue indicate Antha stopped screaming or indeed making any sound or movement as soon as she was admitted. She remained catatonic for over a week Then she wrote the name ‘Cort-land Mayfair’ on a slip of paper, along with the words ‘Attorney, New Orleans ’ Cortland’s firm was contacted at ten thirty the following morning. At once Cortland called his estranged wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, in New York and begged her to go to Bellevue and see to Antha until he could get there himself.

  A horrid battle then began between Cortland and Carlotta, Cortland insisting that he should take care of Antha because Antha had sent for him. Contemporary gossip tells us Carlotta and Cortland took the train together to New York to get Antha and bring her home

  At an emotional drunken lunch, Amanda Grady Mayfair poured out the whole story to her friend (and our informant) Allan Carver, who made it a point to inquire about her old southern family and its gothic goings-on. Amanda told him all about the poor little niece in Bellevue:

  ‘… It was simply awful Antha couldn’t talk She couldn’t. She’d tried to say something and she’d simply stammer. She was so fragile. The death of Sean had destroyed her utterly. It was twenty-four hours before she wrote down the address of the apartment in Greenwich Village. I went there immediately with Ollie Mayfair, you know, one of Remy’s grandchildren, and we got Antha’s things. Oh, it was so sad. Of course all Sean’s paintings belonged to Antha, as she was his wife, I supposed; but then the neighbors came in and they told us Antha had never married Sean. Sean’s mother and brother had already been there. They were coming back with a truck to take everything away. Seems that Sean’s mother despised Antha because she believed Antha had led her son into this Greenwich Village artist life.

  ‘I told Ollie, well, they can have everything else but they aren’t taking the portraits of Antha. I took those and all her clothes and things, and this old velvet purse filled with gold coins. Now, I’d heard of that purse, and don’t tell me you haven’t if you know the Mayfairs. And her writings, oh, yes, her writings. I packed up all of that - her stories, and chapters of a novel, and some poems she’d written. And do you know later on I found out she’d published a poem in The Neif Yorker. The New Yorker. But I didn’t find out about that until my son, Pierce, told me. And he went to the library and looked it up. It was very brief, something about snow falling and the museum in the park. Not what I would call a poem, actually. Rather a little bit of life, so to speak. But she was published in The New Yorker. That is the point. It was so sad taking everything out of that apartment. You know, dismantling a life.

  ‘When I got back to the hospital, Carlotta and Cortland were already there. They were fighting with each other in the hallway. But you had to see and hear a fight between Carl and Cort to believe it, it was all whispers, and little gestures, and tight lips. It was really something. But there they stood, talking to each other like that and I knew they were ready to kill each other.

  ‘"That girl’s pregnant you know," I said. "Did the doctors tell you?"’

  ‘"She ought to get rid of it," Carl said. I thought Cortland was going to die. I was so shocked myself I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I absolutely hate Carlotta. I don’t care who knows it. I hate her. I have hated her all my life. It gives me nightmares to think of her being alone with Antha. I told Cortland right there in front of her. "That girl needs care."

  ‘But Cortland had tried to get custody of Antha, he had tried it in the very beginning, and Carlotta had threatened to fight him, to expose all kinds of things about us, she said. Oh, she is dreadful. And Cortland had given up. And I think he knew he wasn’t going to get control of Antha now. "Look, Antha’s a woman now," I said. "Ask her where she wants to go. If she wants to stay in New York she can stay with me. She can stay with Ollie." Not a chance!

  ‘Carlotta went in to talk to those doctors. She did her routine. She managed some sort of official transfer of Antha to a mental hospital in New Orleans. She ignored Cortland as if he wasn’t even there. I got on the phone to all the cousins in New Orleans. I called everyone. I even called young Beatrice Mayfair on Esplanade Avenue — Remy’s granddaughter. I told them that child was sick, and she was pregnant and she needed loving care.

  ‘Then the most sad thing happened. They were taking Antha to the train station, and she gestured for me to come over to her, and she whispered in my ear. "Save my things for me, please, Aunt Mandy. She’ll throw them all away if you don’t," and to think I had already shipped all her things back home. I called my son Sheffield and told him about it. I said, "Sheff, do what you can for her when she gets back.‘"

  Antha traveled back to Louisiana by train with her uncle and her aunt, and was immediately committed to St Ann’s Asylum, where she remained for six weeks. Numerous Mayfair cousins came to see her. Family gossip indicated she was pale and at times incoherent but that she was coming along
just fine.

  In New York, our investigator Allan Carver arranged another chance meeting with Amanda Grady Mayfair. ‘How is the little niece coming along?’

  ‘Oh, I could tell you the worst story!’ said Amanda Grady Mayfair. ‘You cannot imagine. Do you know that girl’s aunt told the doctors in the asylum she wanted them to abort the girl’s baby? That she was congenitally insane and must never be allowed to have a child? Have you ever heard anything worse? When my husband told me that I told him if you don’t do something now, I’ll never forgive you. Of course he said no one was going to hurt that baby. The doctors weren’t going to do such a thing, not for Carlotta, not for anyone. Then when I called Beatrice Mayfair on Esplanade Avenue and told her all about it, Cortland was furious. "Don’t get everybody up in arms," he said. But that is exactly what I meant to do. I told Bea, "Go see her. Don’t let anyone keep you out."’

  The Talamasca has never been able to corroborate the story about the proposed abortion. But nurses at St Ann’s later told our investigators that scores of Mayfair cousins came to see Antha at the asylum.

  ‘They are not taking no for an answer,’ Irwin Dandrich wrote. ‘They insist upon seeing her, and by all reports she is doing well. She is excited about her baby, and of course they have deluged her with presents. Her young cousin, Beatrice, brought her some antique lace baby clothes that had once belonged to somebody’s Great-aunt Suzette. Of course, it is common knowledge here that Antha never married the New York artist; but then what does it matter when your name is Mayfair, and Mayfair it will always be.’

  The cousins proved just as aggressive after Antha was released from St Ann’s and came home to First Street to convalesce in Stella’s old bedroom on the north side of the house. She had nurses with her round the clock, and obtaining information from them proved very simple for our investigators.

  The place was described as ’insufferably dreary.’ But Millie Dear and Belle took excellent care of Antha. In fact, they didn’t leave the nurses much to do at all. Millie Dear sat with Antha all the time on the little upstairs porch outside her bedroom. And Belle knitted beautiful clothes for the baby.