Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  I did not argue. I could not drink a glass of milk at the time without wondering if I was going to die from it. And I could not get the memory of Cortland’s artificial smile out of my mind.

  I doubled the number of investigators in New Orleans and in Texas. But I also warned these people, personally by phone, that the objects of their surveillance were hostile and potentially very dangerous. I gave each and every one of our investigators full opportunity to refuse the job.

  As it turned out, I lost no investigators whatsoever. But several raised their price.

  As for Juliette Milton, our socialite undercover gossip, we retired her with an unofficial pension, over her protests. We did everything we could to make her sensible that certain members of this family were capable of violence. Reluctantly, she stopped writing to us, pleading in her letter of December 10, 1958 to understand what she had done wrong. We were to hear from her again several times over the years, however. She is still living as of 1989, in an expensive boarding house for elderly people in Mobile, Alabama.

  DEIRDRE‘S STORY CONTINUES

  My investigators in Texas were three highly professional detectives, two of whom had once worked for the United States government; and all three were cautioned that Deirdre was never to be disturbed or frightened by what we were doing in any way.

  ‘I am very concerned for this girl’s happiness, and for her peace of mind. But understand, she is telepathic. If you come within fifty feet of her, she is likely to know you are watching her. Please take care.’

  Whether they believed me or not, they followed my instructions. They kept a safe distance, gathering information about her through the school offices and from gossiping students, from old women who worked the desk in her dormitory, and from teachers who talked freely about her over coffee. If Deirdre ever knew she was being watched, we never found out.

  Deirdre did well in the fall semester at Texas Woman’s University. She made excellent grades. The girls liked her. Her teachers liked her.

  About every six weeks or so she signed out of the dormitory for dinner with her cousin Rhonda Mayfair and Rhonda’s husband, Professor Ellis Clement, who was Deirdre’s English teacher at this time. There is also a record of one date on December 10 with a boy named Joey Dawson, but it lasted one hour if the register is to be believed.

  The same register indicates that Cortland visited Deirdre often, frequently signing her out for a Friday or Saturday night in Dallas from which she returned before the ‘Late Check In’ time of one a.m.

  We know that Deirdre went home to Metairie to Cortland’s house for Christmas, and family gossip declared that she would not even see Carlotta when Carlotta came to call.

  Legal gossip supports the idea that Carlotta and Cortland were still not speaking. Carlotta would not return Cortland’s routine business calls. Acrimonious letters went back and forth between the two over the smallest financial matters concerning Deirdre.

  ‘He’s trying to get complete control of her for her own sake,’ said one secretary to a friend, ’but that old woman won’t have it. She’s threatening to take him to court.’

  Whatever the particulars of that struggle, we know that Deirdre began to deteriorate during the spring term. She began to miss classes. Dorm mates said she cried all night sometimes, but would not answer their knocks on her door. One evening she was picked up by the campus police in a small downtown park, apparently confused as to where she was.

  Finally she was called to the dean’s office for disciplinary action. She had missed too many classes. She was put on Compulsory Attendance, and though she did manage to appear in the classroom, teachers reported her as inattentive, and possibly ill.

  Finally in April, Deirdre began to suffer nausea every morning. Girls up and down the hallway could hear her struggling with her sickness in the communal washroom. The girls went to the dorm mother.

  ‘Nobody wanted to squeal on her. We were afraid. What if she tried to hurt herself?’

  When the dorm mother finally suggested she might be pregnant, Deirdre broke down sobbing, and had to be hospitalized until Cortland could come and get her, which he did on May I.

  What happened afterwards has remained a mystery to this day. The records at the New Mercy Hospital in New Orleans indicate that Deirdre was probably taken there directly upon arrival from Texas, and that she was given a private room. Gossip among the old nuns, many of whom were retired teachers from St Alphonsus School who remembered Deirdre, quickly verified that it was Carlotta’s attending physician, Dr Gallagher, who visited Deirdre and ascertained that yes, she was going to have a child.

  ‘Now, this girl is going to be married,’ he told the sisters. ‘And I don’t want anything mean being said. The father is a college professor from Denton, Texas, and he is on his way to New Orleans now.’

  By the time Deirdre was taken by ambulance to First Street three weeks later, heavily sedated and with a registered nurse in attendance, the gossip was all over the Redemptorist Parish that she was pregnant and soon to be married, and that her husband, the college professor, was ’a married man.’

  Quite the scandal it was to those who had watched the family for generations. Old ladies whispered about it on the church steps. Deirdre Mayfair and a married man! People glanced furtively at Miss Millie and Miss Belle as they passed. Some said that Carlotta would have no part of it. But then Miss Belle and Miss Millie took Deirdre with them to Gus Mayer and there they bought her a lovely blue dress and blue satin shoes for the wedding, and a new white purse and hat.

  ‘She was so drugged, I don’t think she knew where she was,’ said one of the salesgirls. ‘Miss Millie made all the choices for her. She just sat there, white as a sheet, and saying "Yes, Aunt Millie," in a slurred voice.’

  Juliette Milton could not resist writing to us. We received a long letter from her detailing how Beatrice Mayfair had been to First Street to see Deirdre and brought her a whole shopping bag of gifts. ‘Why ever did she go home to that house, instead of Cortland’s!’ wrote Juliette.

  There is some indication that Deirdre had little choice in the matter. Medical science in those days believed the placenta of the baby protected it from drugs injected into the mother. And nurses said that Deirdre was so heavily drugged when she left the hospital that she did not even know what was happening to her. Carlotta had come in the early afternoon on a weekday and obtained her release.

  ‘Now, Cortland Mayfair came looking for her that very evening,’ Sister Bridget Marie told me later in strictest confidence. ‘And was he ever fit to be tied when he discovered that child was gone!’

  Legal gossip deepened the mystery. Cortland and Carlotta were screaming at each other over the phone behind the office doors. Cortland told his secretary in a rage that Carlotta thought she could keep him out of the house where he was born. Well, she was out of her mind, if she thought so!

  Years later, Ryan Mayfair talked about it. ‘They said my grandfather was simply locked out. He went up to First Street and Carlotta met him at the gate and threatened him. She said, "You come in here and I’ll call the police."’

  On the first of July, another volley of information rocked the parish gossips. Deirdre’s future husband, the ’college professor’ who was leaving his wife to marry her, had been killed driving to New Orleans on the river road. His car had suffered a broken tie rod and veered to the right at great speed, striking an oak tree, whereupon it exploded into flames. Deirdre Mayfair, unmarried and not yet eighteen, was going to be giving up her baby. It was to be a family adoption, and Miss Carlotta was arranging the whole thing.

  ‘My grandfather was outraged when he heard about the adoption,’ said Ryan Mayfair many years later. ‘He wanted to talk to Deirdre, hear it from her own lips that she wanted to give up this child. But he still couldn’t get in the house on First Street. Finally he went to Father Lafferty, the parish priest, but Carlotta had him in her pocket. The priest was squarely on Carlotta’s side.’

  All this sounds extremel
y tragic. It sounds as if Deirdre almost escaped the curse of First Street, if only the father of her baby, driving from Texas to marry her, had not died. For years this sad scandalous story has been repeated throughout the Redemptorist Parish. It was repeated to me as late as 1988 by Rita Mae Lonigan. There is every indication that Father Lafferty believed the story of the Texas father of the baby. And countless reports indicate that the Mayfair cousins believed it. Beatrice Mayfair believed it. Pierce May-fair believed it. Even Rhonda Mayfair and her husband, Ellis Clement, in Denton, Texas seemed to have believed it, or at least the vague version which they were eventually told.

  But the story wasn’t true.

  Almost from the beginning, our investigators shook their heads in puzzlement. College professor with Deirdre Mayfair? Who? Constant surveillance ruled out completely the possibility of Rhonda Mayfair’s husband, Ellis Clement. He scarcely knew Deirdre.

  Indeed, there never was any such man in Denton, Texas, who dated Deirdre Mayfair, or was ever observed by anyone in her company. And there was no college professor employed at that university or any other school in the vicinity who died in a car crash on the Louisiana river road. Indeed, no one died in such a crash on the river road in 1959, as far as we know.

  Did an even more scandalous and tragic story lie behind this fabrication? We were slow in putting the pieces together. Indeed, by the time we learned of the river road car accident, the adoption of Deirdre’s baby was already being legally arranged. By the time we learned that there had been no river road accident, the adoption was a fait accompli.

  Later court records indicate that some time during August, Ellie Mayfair flew to New Orleans to sign adoption papers in the office of Carlotta Mayfair, though no one in the family seems to have known at the time that Ellie was there.

  Graham Franklin, Ellie’s husband, told one of his business associates years later that the adoption had been a real kettle of fish. ‘My wife stopped speaking to her grandfather altogether. He didn’t want us to adopt Rowan. Fortunately the old bastard died before the baby was even born.’

  Father Lafferty told his aging sister in the Irish Channel that the whole thing was a nightmare, but that Ellie Mayfair was a good woman and she would take the child to California where it would have a chance at a new life. All of Cortland’s grandchildren approved of the decision. It was only Cortland who was carrying on. ‘That girl can’t keep that baby. She’s crazy,’ said the old priest. He sat at his sister’s kitchen table, eating his red beans and rice and drinking his small glass of beer. ‘I mean it, she’s crazy. It’s just got to be done.’

  ‘It won’t work,’ the old woman later told our representative. ‘You can’t escape a family curse by moving away.’

  Miss Millie and Miss Belle bought beautiful bed jackets and nightgowns for Deirdre at Gus Mayer. The salesgirls asked about ’poor Deirdre.’

  ‘Oh, she is doing the best she can,’ said Miss Millie. ‘It was a terrible, terrible thing.’ Miss Belle told a woman at the chapel that Deirdre was having those ’bad spells again.’

  ‘She doesn’t even know where she is half the time!’ said a grumpy Nancy, who was sweeping the walk when one of the Garden District matrons passed the gate.

  What did happen behind the scenes all those months at First Street? We pressed our investigators to find out everything that they could. Only one person of whom we know saw Deirdre during the last months of her ’confinement’ - to use the old-fashioned term for it, which in this instance may be the correct one - but we did not interview that person until 1988.

  At the time, the attending physician came and went in silence. So did the nurse who assisted Deirdre for eight hours each day.

  Father Lafferty said the girl was resigned to the adoption. Beatrice Mayfair was told she couldn’t see Deirdre when she came to call, but she had a glass of wine with Millie Dear, who said the whole thing was heartbreaking indeed.

  But by October i, Cortland was desperate with worry over the situation. His secretaries report that he made continuous calls to Carlotta, that he took a taxi to First Street and was turned away over and over again. Finally on the afternoon of October 20, he told his secretary he would get into that house and see his niece even if he had to break down the door.

  At five o’clock that afternoon a neighbor spotted Cortland sitting on the curbstone at First and Chestnut Streets, his clothes disheveled and blood flowing from a cut on his head.

  ‘Get me an ambulance,’ he said. ‘He pushed me down the stairs!’

  Though the neighbor woman sat with him until the ambulance arrived, he would say nothing more. He was rushed from First Street to nearby Touro Infirmary. The intern on duty quickly ascertained that Cortland was covered with severe bruises, that his wrist was broken, and that he was bleeding from the mouth. ‘This man has internal injuries,’ he said. He called for immediate assistance.

  Cortland then grabbed the intern’s hand and told him to listen, that it was very important that he help Deirdre Mayfair, who was being held prisoner in her own home. ‘They’re taking her baby away from her against her will. Help her!’ Then Cortland died.

  A superficial postmortem indicated massive internal bleeding and severe blows to the head. When the young intern pressed for some sort of police investigation, Cortland’s sons immediately quieted him. They had talked to their cousin Carlotta Mayfair. Their father fell down the steps and then refused medical assistance, leaving the house on his own. Carlotta had never dreamed he was so badly hurt. She had not known he was sitting on the curb. She was beside herself with grief. The neighbor should have rung the bell.

  At Cortland’s funeral - a huge affair out in Metairie - the family was told the same story. While Miss Belle and Miss Millie sat quietly in the background, Cortland’s son, Pierce, told everyone that Cortland had been confused when he made some vague statement to the neighbor about a man pushing him down the steps. In fact there had been no man in the First Street house who could have done such a thing. Carlotta herself saw him fall. So did Nancy, who rushed to try to catch him, but failed.

  As for the adoption, Pierce was firmly behind it. His niece Ellie would give the baby exactly the environment it needed to have every chance. It was tragic that Cortland had been against the adoption, but Cortland had been eighty years old. His judgment had been impaired for some time.

  The funeral proceeded, grandly and without incident, though the undertaker remembered years later that several of the cousins, older men, standing in the very rear of the room during Pierce’s ’little speech’ had joked bitterly and sarcastically amongst themselves. ‘Sure, there’s no man in that house,’ one of them said. ‘Nooooo, no man at all. Just those nice ladies.’ ‘I’ve never seen a man there, have you?’ And so on it went. ‘Nope, no man at First Street. No sir!’

  When cousins came to call on Deirdre, they were told pretty much the same story that Pierce had told at the funeral. Deirdre was too sick to see them. She hadn’t even wanted to see Cortland, she was so sick. And she didn’t know and mustn’t know that Cortland was dead.

  ‘And look at that dark stairs,’ said Millie Dear to Beatrice. ‘Cortland should have used the elevator. But he never would use the elevator. If he had just used the elevator, he would never have taken such a fall.’

  Family legend today indicates that everyone agreed the adoption was for the best. Cortland should have stayed out of it. As Ryan Mayfair, Cortland’s grandson, said, ‘Poor Deirdre was no more fit to be a mother than the Madwoman of Chaillot. But I think my grand’ father felt responsible. He had taken Deirdre to Texas. I think he blamed himself. He wanted to be sure she wanted to give up the baby. But maybe what Deirdre wanted wasn’t the important thing.’

  At the time, I dreaded each new piece of news from Louisiana. I lay in bed at night in the Motherhouse thinking ceaselessly of Deirdre, wondering if there were not some way that we could discover what she truly wanted or felt. Scott Reynolds was more adamant than ever that we could not intervene further. Deir
dre knew how to reach us. So did Cortland. So did Carlotta Mayfair, for what that was worth. There was nothing further that we could do.

  Only in January of 1988, nearly thirty years later, did I learn in an interview with Deirdre’s old school friend Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan that Deirdre had tried desperately to reach me, and failed.

  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 the 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?’