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 1.
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 extremely 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 Mayfair 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.