“Are you sure it was Carl?” I asked the officer.
“Oh, yeah, everybody knows her. Boy, I’ll never forget her. She called the captain the next day and tried to have C. J. and me fired.”
A different squad car answered the neighbor’s call a week later. All we know of this occasion is that Deirdre was trying to leave the house when the police arrived; they persuaded her to sit down on the porch steps and wait until her Uncle Cortland arrived.
Deirdre ran away the following day. Legal gossip reports of numerous phone calls back and forth, of Cortland rushing up to First Street, and Mayfair and Mayfair calling the New York cousins in search for Deirdre as they had when Antha disappeared years before.
Amanda Grady Mayfair was dead. Dr. Cornell Mayfair’s mother, Rosalind Mayfair, wanted nothing to do with “the First Street crowd” as she called them. Nevertheless she called the other New York cousins. Then the police contacted Cortland in New Orleans. Deirdre had been found wandering around barefoot and incoherent in Greenwich Village. There was some evidence that she had been raped. Cortland flew to New York that night. The following morning he brought Deirdre back with him.
The repeat of history came full circle with Deirdre’s second commitment to St. Ann’s Asylum. A week later she was released, and went to live with Cortland in his old family home in Metairie.
Family gossip described Carlotta as beaten down and discouraged. She told Judge Byrnes and his wife that she had failed with her niece. She feared the girl would “never be normal.”
When Beatrice Mayfair went to call on Carlotta one Saturday, she found her sitting alone in the parlor at First Street with all the curtains drawn. Carlotta wouldn’t talk.
“I realized later she had been staring at the very spot where they put the coffin in the old days when the funerals were still at home. All she said to me was yes or no, or hmmmm when I asked her questions. Finally that horrible Nancy came in and offered me some iced tea. She acted put upon when I accepted. I told her I would get it myself and she said, oh, no Aunt Carl wouldn’t have that.”
When Beatrice had had her fill of sadness and rudeness she left. She went out to Metairie to visit Deirdre at Cortland’s house on Country Club Lane.
This house had been in the Mayfair family since Cortland built it when he was a young man. A brick mansion with white columns and French windows and every “modern convenience,” it later passed to Ryan Mayfair, Pierce’s son, who lives there now. For years Sheffield and Eugenie Mayfair shared it with Cortland. Their only child, Ellie Mayfair, the woman who later adopted Deirdre’s daughter, Rowan, was born in this house.
At this period, Sheffield Mayfair had already died of a heart attack; Eugenie had been gone for years. Ellie lived in California, where she had just gotten married to a lawyer named Graham Franklin. And Cortland lived in the Metairie mansion on his own.
By all reports, the house was extremely cheerful, filled with bright colors, gay wallpaper, traditional furnishings, and books. Numerous French doors opened to the garden, the pool, and the front lawn.
The entire family seems to have thought it was the best place for Deirdre. Metairie had none of the gloom of the Garden District. Cortland assured Beatrice that Deirdre was resting, that the girl’s problems had been compounded by a lot of secrecy and bad judgment on the part of Carlotta.
“But he won’t really tell me what’s happening,” Beatrice complained to Juliette. “He never does. What does he mean, secrecy?”
Beatrice queried the maid by phone whenever she could. Deirdre was just fine, said the maid. The girl’s color was excellent. She had even had a guest, a very nice-looking young man. The maid had only seen him for a second or two-he and Deirdre had been out in the garden-but he was a handsome, gentlemanly sort of young man.
“Now, who could that be?” Beatrice wondered over lunch with Juliette Milton. “Not that same scoundrel who sneaked into the nuns’ garden to bother her at St. Ro’s!”
“Seems to me,” wrote Juliette to her London contact, “that this family does not realize this girl has a lover. I mean one lover-one very distinguished and easily recognized lover, who is seen in her company over and over. All the descriptions of this young man are the same!”
The significant, thing about this story is that Juliette Milton had never heard any rumors about ghosts, witches, curses, or the like associated with the Mayfair family. She and Beatrice truly believed this mysterious person was a human being.
Yet at the very same time, in the Irish Channel old people gossiped over kitchen tables about “Deirdre and the man.” And by “the man,” they did not mean a human being. The elderly sister of Father Lafferty knew about “the man.” She tried to talk to her brother about it; but he would not confide in her. She gossiped with an elderly friend named Dave Collins about it; she gossiped with our investigator, who walked along with her on Constance Street as she made her way home from Sunday Mass.
Miss Rosie, who worked in the sacristy, changing the altar cloths and seeing to the sacramental wine, also knew the shocking facts about those Mayfairs and “the man.” “First it was Stella, then Antha, now Deirdre,” she told her nephew, a college boy at Loyola who thought she was a superstitious fool.
An old black maid who lived in the same block knew all about “that man.” He was the family ghost, that’s who he was, and the only ghost she ever saw in broad daylight, sitting with that girl in the back garden. That girl was going to hell when she died.
It was at this point, in the summer of 1958, that I prepared to go to New Orleans.
I had finished putting the entire Mayfair history into an early version of the foregoing narrative, which was substantially the same as what the reader has only just read. And I was deeply and passionately concerned about Deirdre Mayfair.
I felt that her psychic powers, and especially her ability to see and communicate with spirits, were driving her out of her mind.
After numerous discussions with Scott Reynolds, our new director, and several meetings with the entire council, it was decided that I should make the trip, and that I should use my own judgment as to whether Deirdre Mayfair was old enough or stable enough to be approached.
Elaine Barrett, one of the oldest and most experienced members of the Talamasca, had died the preceding year, and I was now considered (undeservedly) the leading expert in the Talamasca on witch families. My credentials were never questioned. And indeed, those who had been most frightened by the deaths of Stuart Townsend and Arthur Langtry-and most likely to forbid my going to New Orleans-were no longer alive.
Twenty-three
The Story of Deirdre Mayfair
Revised Completely 1989
I arrived in New Orleans in July of 1958, and immediately checked into a small, informal French Quarter hotel. I then proceeded to meet with our ablest professional investigators, and to consult some public records, and to satisfy myself upon other points.
Over the years we had acquired the names of several people close to the Mayfair family. I attempted contact. With Richard Llewellyn I was quite successful, as has already been described, and this report alone occupied me for days.
I also managed “to run into” a young lay teacher from St. Rose de Lima’s who had known Deirdre during her months there, and more or less clarified the reasons for the expulsion. Tragically this young woman believed Deirdre to have had an affair with “an older man” and to have been a vile and deceitful girl. Other girls had known of the Mayfair emerald. It was concluded that Deirdre had stolen it from her aunt. For why else would the child have had such a valuable jewel at school?