We have some two dozen stories similar to this one, and what characterizes almost all of them is that they involve not only telepathy, but empathy and sympathy on the part of Rowan-a clear desire to comfort or minister to a suffering or confused person. That person was invariably an adult. The telepathic power is never connected with tricks, frightening people, or quarrels of any kind.
In 1966, when Rowan was eight, she used this telepathic ability of hers for the last time as far as we know. During her fourth-grade term at a private school in Pacific Heights, she told the principal that another little girl was very sick and ought to see a doctor, but Rowan didn’t know how to tell anyone. The little girl was going to die.
The principal was horrified. She called Rowan’s mother and insisted that Rowan be taken to a psychiatrist. Only a deeply disturbed little girl would say “something like that.” Ellie promised to talk with Rowan. Rowan said nothing further.
However, the little girl in question was diagnosed within a week as having a rare form of bone cancer. She died before the end of the term.
The principal has told the story over dinner countless times. She deeply regretted her censure of Rowan. She wished in particular that she had not called Mrs. Mayfair, because Mrs. Mayfair became so terribly upset.
It may have been concern on Ellie’s part which put an end to this sort of incident in Rowan’s life. Ellie’s friends all knew about it. “Ellie was damned near hysterical. She wanted Rowan to be normal. She said she didn’t want a daughter with strange gifts.”
Graham thought the whole thing was a coincidence, according to the principal. He bawled out the woman for calling and telling Ellie when the poor little girl died.
Coincidence or not, this entire affair seems to have put an end to Rowan’s demonstrations of her power. It is safe to assume that she shrewdly decided to “go underground” as a mind reader. Or even that she deliberately suppressed her power to the point where it became nonexistent or extremely weak. Try as we might, we find nothing about her telepathic abilities from then on. People’s memories of her all have to do with her quiet brilliance, her indefatigable energy, and her love of science and medicine.
“She was that girl in high school who collected the bugs and the rocks, calling everything by a long Latin name.”
“Frightening, absolutely frightening,” said her high school chemistry teacher. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had reinvented the hydrogen bomb one weekend in her spare time.”
It has been speculated within the Talamasca that Rowan’s suppression of her telepathic power may have something to do with the growth of her telekinetic power, that she rechanneled her energy, so to speak, and that the two powers represent both sides of the same coin. To put it differently, Rowan turned away from mind and toward matter. Science and medicine became her obsessions from her junior high school years on.
Rowan’s only real boyfriend during her teenage years was also brilliant and reclusive. He seems to have been unable to take the competition. When Rowan was admitted to U.C. Berkeley and he was not, they broke up bitterly. Friends blamed the boyfriend. He later went east and became a research scientist in New York.
One of our investigators “bumped into him” at a museum opening, and brought the conversation around to psychics and mind readers. The man opened up about his old high school sweetheart who had been psychic. He was still bitter about it. “I loved that girl. Really loved her. Her name was Rowan Mayfair and she was very unusual-looking. Not pretty in an ordinary way. But she was impossible. She knew what I was thinking even before I knew it. She knew when I’d been out with someone else. She was so damned quiet about it, it was eerie. I heard she became a neurosurgeon. That’s scary. What will happen if the patient thinks something negative about her before he goes under the anesthesia? Will she slice the thought right out of his head?”
The fact is, no one reporting on Rowan mentions pettiness in connection with her. She is described as “formidable,” just as Mary Beth Mayfair was once described, but never small-minded or vindictive, or unduly aggressive in any personal way.
By the time Rowan entered U.C. Berkeley in 1976, she knew that she wanted to be a doctor. She was a straight A student in the premedicine program, took courses every summer (though she still went on vacation often with Graham and Ellie), skipped an entire year, and graduated at the top of her class in 1979. She entered medical school when she was twenty, apparently believing that neurological research would be her life’s work.
Her academic progress during this period was thought to be phenomenal. Numerous teachers speak of her as “the most brilliant student I have ever had.”
“She isn’t just smart. She’s intuitive! She makes astonishing connections. She doesn’t just read a book. She swallows it, and comes up with six different implications of the author’s basic theory of which the author never dreamed.”
“The students have nicknamed her Dr. Frankenstein because of her talk about brain transplants and creating whole new brains out of parts. But the thing about Rowan is, she’s a real human being. No need to worry about brilliance without a heart.”
“Oh, Rowan. Do I remember Rowan? You have to be kidding! Rowan could have been teaching the class instead of me. You want to know something funny-and don’t you ever tell anyone this! I had to go out of town at the end of the term, and I gave Rowan all the class papers to grade. She graded her own class! Now if that ever gets out I’m ruined, but we struck a bargain, you see. She wanted a key to the laboratory over the Christmas break, and I said, ‘Well, how about grading these papers?’ And the worst part of it was it was the first time I didn’t get a single student complaint about a grade. Rowan, I wish I could forget her. People like Rowan make the rest of us feel like jerks.”
“She isn’t brilliant. That’s what people think, but there’s more to it. She’s some sort of mutant. No, seriously. She can study the research animals and tell you what’s going to happen. She would lay her hands on them and say, ‘This drug isn’t going to do it.’ I’ll tell you something else she did too. She could cure those little creatures. She could. One of the older doctors told me once that if she didn’t watch it, she could upset the experiments by using her powers to cure. I believe it. I went out with her one time, and she didn’t cure me of anything, but boy, was she ever hot. I mean literally hot. It was like making love to somebody with a fever. And that’s what they say about faith healers, you know, the ones who’ve been studied. You can feel a heat coming from their hands. I believe it. I don’t think she should have gone into surgery. She should have gone into oncology. She could have really cured people. Surgery? Anybody can cut them up.”
(Let us add that this doctor himself is an oncologist, and non-surgeons frequently make extremely pejorative statements about surgeons, calling them plumbers and the like; and surgeons make similar pejorative remarks about non-surgeons, saying things such as “All they do is get the patients ready for us.”)
As soon as Rowan entered the hospital as an intern (her third year of medical school), stories of her healing powers and diagnostic powers became so common that our investigators could pick and choose what they wanted to write down.
In sum, Rowan is the first Mayfair witch to be described as a healer since Marguerite Mayfair at Riverbend before 1835.
Just about every nurse ever questioned about Rowan has some “fantastic” story to tell. Rowan could diagnose anything; Rowan knew just what to do. Rowan patched up people who looked like they were ready for the morgue.