Beatrice went up to First Street to see Deirdre and take her some presents. Nancy wouldn’t let her in.
The same mysterious male companion was responsible for Deirdre’s most traumatic expulsion from St. Rose de Lima boarding school when she was sixteen. Deirdre had attended the school for a full semester without mishap, and was in the middle of the spring term when the incident occurred. Family gossip said Deirdre had been blissfully happy at St. Ro’s, that she had told Cortland she never wanted to go home. Even over Christmas, Deirdre had remained at the boarding school, only going out with Cortland for an early supper on Christmas Eve.
Yet she loved the swings in the back play yard, which were big enough for the older children, and at twilight she would sing songs there with another girl, Rita Mae Dwyer (later Lonigan), who remembered Deirdre as a rare and special person, elegant and innocent; romantic and sweet.
As recently as 1988, more data was obtained about this expulsion directly from Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan in a conversation with this investigator.
Deirdre’s “mysterious friend” met her in the nuns’ garden in the moonlight, and spoke softly but audibly enough for Rita Mae to hear. “He called her ‘my beloved,’ ” Rita Mae told me. She had never heard such romantic words spoken except in a movie.
Defenseless and sobbing bitterly, Deirdre did not utter a word when the nuns accused her of “bringing a man onto the school grounds.” They had spied upon Deirdre and her male companion, peering through the slats of the convent kitchen into the garden where the two met in the dark. “This was no boy,” said one of the nuns in a rage afterwards to the assembled boarders. “This was a man! A grown man!”
The record from the period is almost vicious in its condemnations. “The girl is deceitful. She allowed the man to touch her indecently. Her innocence is a complete facade.”
There can be no doubt that this mysterious companion was Lasher. He is described by the nuns, and later by Mrs. Lonigan, as having brown hair and brown eyes, and beautiful old-fashioned clothes.
But the remarkable point is that Rita Mae Lonigan, unless she is exaggerating, actually heard Lasher speak.
Other startling information given us by Mrs. Lonigan is that Deirdre had the Mayfair emerald in her possession at the boarding school, that she showed it to Rita Mae, and showed her a word engraved on the back of it: “Lasher.” If Rita Mae’s story is true, Deirdre knew little about her mother or her grandmother. She understood that the emerald had come to her from these women, but she did not even know how Stella or Antha had died.
It was common knowledge in the family in 1956 that Deirdre was crushed by her expulsion from St. Rose de Lima’s. She was admitted to St. Ann’s Asylum for six weeks. Though the records have proved unobtainable, nurses gossiped that Deirdre begged for shock treatment, and was given it twice. She was at this point almost seventeen.
From what we know of medical practice at this period, we can safely conclude that these treatments involved a higher voltage than is common now; they were probably very dangerous, resulting in a loss of memory for hours if not days.
Why a whole course was not pursued as was the custom we do not know. Cortland was dead set against the shock treatment, or so he told Beatrice Mayfair. He couldn’t believe in something so drastic for one so young.
“What is wrong with that girl?” Juliette asked Beatrice finally, to which Beatrice answered, “Nobody knows, darling. Nobody knows.”
Carlotta brought Deirdre home from the asylum, and there she languished for another month.
Relentless canvassing by our investigators indicated that a dark shadowy figure was often seen with Deirdre in the garden. A deliveryman from Solari’s grocery was “scared out of his wits” as he was leaving the property when he saw “that wild-eyed girl and that man” in the tall bamboo thicket by the old pool.
A spinster who lived on Prytania Street saw the pair in the chapel after dark. “I told Miss Belle. I stopped by the gate the following morning. I didn’t think it was quite proper. It had happened in the evening, just after dark. I went into the chapel to light a candle and say my rosary as I always do, and there she was in a back pew with this man. I could scarcely see them at first. I was a little frightened. Then when she got up and hurried out I saw her clearly under the street lamp. It was Deirdre Mayfair. I don’t know what happened to the young man.”
Several other persons reported similar sightings. The images were always the same-Deirdre and the mysterious young man in the shadows. Deirdre and the mysterious young man flushed from their place, or peering out at the stranger in an unsettling manner. We have fifteen different variations on these two themes.
Some of these stories reached Beatrice on Esplanade Avenue. “I don’t know if anyone is watching out for her. And she is so … so well developed physically,” she told Juliette. Juliette went with Beatrice to First Street.
“The girl was wandering in the garden. Beatrice went up to the fence and called to her. For a few minutes she didn’t seem to know who Bea was. Then she went to get the key to the gate. Of course Bea did all the talking after that. But the girl is shockingly beautiful. It has to do with the strangeness of her personality as much as anything else. She seems wild and deeply suspicious of people, and at the same time keenly interested in things about her. She fell in love with a cameo I was wearing. I gave it to her, and she was absolutely childlike in her delight. I hesitate to add that she was barefoot and wearing a filthy cotton dress.”
As fell came on, there were more reports of fights and screaming. Neighbors went so far as to call the police on two different occasions. Of the first occasion in September I was personally able, two years later, to obtain a full account.
“I didn’t like going there,” the officer told me. “You know, bothering these Garden District families just isn’t my line. And that lady really put us through it at the front door. It was Carlotta Mayfair, the one they call Miss Carl; the one who works for the judge.
“ ‘Who called you here? What do you want? Who are you? Let me see your identification. I’ll have to talk to Judge Byrnes about this if you come here again.’ Finally my partner said that people had heard the young lady in the house screaming, and we would like to talk to her and make certain for ourselves she was all right. I thought Miss Carl was going to kill him on the spot. But she went and got the young girl, Deirdre Mayfair, the one they talk about. She was crying and shaking all over. She said to my partner, C. J., ‘You make her give me my mother’s things. She took my mother’s things.’
“Miss Carl said she had had enough of this ‘intrusion,’ that this was a family argument and the police weren’t needed here. If we didn’t leave, she’d call Judge Byrnes. Then this girl, Deirdre, ran out of the house and towards the squad car. ‘Take me away!’ she screamed.
“Then something happened to Miss Carl. She was looking at the girl standing at the curb by our squad car, and she started prying. She tried to hide it. She took out her handkerchief and covered her face. But we could see, the lady was crying. The girl really had the lady at her wit’s ends.
“C. J. said, ‘Miss Carl, what do you want us to do?’ She went past him down to the sidewalk, and she laid her hand on the girl and she said, ‘Deirdre, do you want to go back to the asylum? Please, Deirdre. Please.’ And then she just broke down. She couldn’t talk. The girl stared at her, all wild-eyed and crazy, and then she broke into sobs. And Miss Carl put her arm around the girl and took her back up the steps and inside.”