But it is now time to turn to Deirdre Mayfair, the present heiress of the Mayfair legacy, orphaned at the age of two months and left in the hands of her aging aunts.
Deirdre Mayfair
The First Street house continued to deteriorate after Antha’s death. The swimming pool had by this time become a rank swamp pond of duckweed and wild irises, its rusted fountain jets spewing green water into the muck. Shutters were once again bolted on the windows of the northside master bedroom. The paint continued to peel from the violet-gray masonry walls.
Elderly Miss Flanagan, almost completely blind in her last year, cared for little Deirdre until just before the child’s fifth birthday. Now and then she took the baby walking around the block in a wicker buggy, but she never crossed the street.
Cortland came on Christmas. He drank sherry in the long front parlor with Millie Dear and Belle and Nancy.
“I told them I wasn’t going to be turned away this time,” he explained to his son Pierce, who later told his mother. “No, sir. I was going to see that child with my own eyes on her birthday and on Christmas. I was going to hold her in my arms.” He made similar statements to his secretaries at Mayfair and Mayfair, who often bought the presents which Cortland took uptown.
Years later, Cortland’s grandson Ryan Mayfair talked about it to a sympathetic “acquaintance” at a wedding reception:
“My grandfather hated to go up there. Our place in Metairie was always so cheerful. My father said that Grandfather would come home crying. When Deirdre was three years old, Grandfather made them get their first Christmas tree in all those years. He took a package of ornaments up there for it. He bought the lights at Katz and Bestoff and put them on himself. It’s so hard to imagine people living in that sort of gloom. I wish I had really known my grandfather. He was born in that house. Think of it. And his father, Julien, had been born before the Civil War.”
Cortland, by this point in time, had become the image of his father, Julien. Pictures of him even as late as the mid-1950s show him as a tall, slender man with black hair, and gray only at the temples. His heavily lined face was remarkably like that of his father, except for the fact that his eyes were much larger, reminiscent of Stella’s eyes, though he had Julien’s agreeable expression, and frequently Julien’s cheerful smile.
By all accounts Cortland’s family loved him; his employees veritably worshiped him; and though Amanda Grady Mayfair had left him years before, even she seems to have always loved him, or so she told Allan Carver in New York the year she died. Amanda cried on Allan’s shoulder about the fact that her sons never understood why she had left their father, and she had no intention of telling them, either.
Ryan Mayfair, who knew his grandfather Cortland only briefly, was absolutely devoted to him. To him and his father, Cortland was a hero. He could never understand how his grandmother could “defect” to New York.
What was Deirdre like during this early period? We are unable to discover a single account of her in the first five years, except the legend in Cortland’s family that she was a very pretty little girl.
Her black hair was fine and wavy, like that of Stella. Her blue eyes were large and dark.
But the First Street house was once more closed to the outside world. A generation of passersby had become accustomed to its hopelessly forbidding and neglected facade. Once again, workmen couldn’t complete repairs on the premises. A roofer fell off his ladder twice and then refused to come back. Only the old gardener and his son came willingly to now and then cut the weed-infested grass.
As people in the parish died, certain legends concerning the Mayfairs died with them. Other stories became so miserably transformed by time as to be unrecognizable. New investigators replaced old investigators. Soon no one questioned about the Mayfairs mentioned the names of Julien or Katherine or Rémy or Suzette.
Julien’s son Barclay died in 1949, his brother Garland in 1951. Cortland’s son Grady died the same year as Garland, after a fall from a horse in Audubon Park. His mother, Amanda Grady Mayfair, died only shortly after, as if the death of her beloved Grady was more than she could take. Of Pierce’s two sons, only Ryan Mayfair “knows the family history” and regales the younger cousins-many of whom know nothing-with strange tales.
Irwin Dandrich died in 1952. However, his role had been already filled by another “society investigator,” a woman named Juliette Milton, who collected numerous stories over the years from Beatrice Mayfair and the other downtown cousins, many of whom lunched with Juliette regularly and did not seem to mind that she was a gossip who told them everything about everybody and told everybody everything about them. Like Dandrich, Juliette was not a particularly vicious person. Indeed, she doesn’t even seem to have been unkind. She loved melodrama, however, and wrote incredibly long letters to our lawyers in London, who paid her an annual amount equal to the annuity which had once been her sole support.
As was the case with Dandrich, Juliette never knew to whom she was supplying all this information about the Mayfairs. And though she broached the subject at least once a year, she never pressed.
In 1953, as I began my full-time translation of Petyr van Abel’s letters, I read the contemporary reports regarding twelve-year-old Deirdre as they poured in. I sent the investigators after every scrap of information. “Dig,” I said. “Tell me all about her from the very beginning. There is nothing I do not want to know.” I called Juliette Milton personally. I told her I would pay well for anything extra she could turn up.
During the early years at least Deirdre had followed in the footsteps of her mother, being expelled from one school after another for her “antics” and “strange behavior,” her disruption of the classes, and strange crying fits for which nothing could be done.
Once more Sister Bridget Marie, then in her sixties, saw the “invisible friend” in action in the St. Alphonsus school yard, finding things for little Deirdre and making flowers fly through the air. Sacred Heart, Ursulines, St. Joseph’s, Our Lady of the Angels-they all expelled little Deirdre within a couple of weeks. For months at a time, the child stayed home. Neighbors saw her “running wild” in the garden, or climbing the big oak tree on the back of the lot.
There was no real staff anymore at First Street. Aunt Easter’s daughter Irene did all the cooking and the cleaning thoroughly but steadily. Every morning she swept the pavements or the banquettes as they were called. Three o’clock saw her ringing out her mop at the tap by the rear garden gate.
Nancy Mayfair was the actual housekeeper, managing things in a brusque and offensive manner, or so said deliverymen and priests who now and then came to call.
Millie Dear and Belle, both picturesque if not beautiful old women, tended the few roses growing by the side porch which had been saved from the wilderness that now covered the property from the front fence to the back wall.
All the family appeared for nine o’clock Mass on Sundays at the chapel, little Deirdre a picture in her navy blue sailor dress and straw hat with its ribbons, Carlotta in her dark business suit and high-necked blouse, and the old ladies, Millie Dear and Belle, exquisitely attired in their black high string shoes, gabardine dresses with lace, and dark gloves.
Miss Millie and Miss Belle often went shopping together on Mondays, taking a taxi from First Street to Gus Mayer or Godchaux’s, the finest stores in New Orleans, where they bought their pearl gray dresses and flowered hats with veils, and other genteel accoutrements. The ladies at the cosmetic counters knew them by name. They sold them face powder and cream rouge and Christmas Night perfume. The two old women had lunch at the D.H. Holmes lunch counter before taking the taxi home. And they, and they alone, represented the First Street family at funerals, and even now and then at christenings, and even once in a while at a wedding, though they seldom went to the reception after the Nuptial Mass.