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THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 7 page

A full three and a half months had passed since that awful day. Therese was gone. His friends were gone. And now he was a prisoner of the house on Liberty Street.

He had changed the number on the phone. He was not answering the mountains of mail he received. Aunt Viv went out by the back door to obtain those few supplies for the house which could not be delivered.

In a sweet, polite voice she fielded the few calls. “No, Michael isn’t here anymore.”

He laughed every time he heard it. Because it was true. The papers said he had “disappeared.” That made him laugh too. About every ten days or so, he called Stacy and Jim, just to say he was alive, then hung up. He couldn’t blame them if they didn’t care.

Now in the dark, he lay on his bed, watching again on the mute television screen the familiar old images of Great Expectations. A ghostly Miss Havisham in her tattered wedding garb talked to the young Pip, played by John Mills, who was just setting off for London.

Why was Michael wasting time? He ought to be setting off for New Orleans. But he was too drunk just now for that. Too drunk even to call for an airline schedule. Besides, there was the hope that Dr. Morris would call him, Dr. Morris, who knew this secret number, Dr. Morris to whom Michael had confided his one and only plan.

“If I could get in touch with that woman,” he had told Dr. Morris, “you know, the skipper who rescued me. If I could just take off my gloves and hold her hands when I talk to her, well, maybe I could remember something through her. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“You’re drunk, Michael. I can hear it.”

“Never mind that just now. That’s a given. I’m drunk and I’m going to stay drunk, but listen to what I’m saying. If I could get on that boat again … ”

“Yes?”

“Well, if I could get down on the deck of the boat, and touch the boards with my bare hands … you know, the boards I was lying on … ”

“Michael, that’s insane.”

“Dr. Morris, call her. You can get in touch with her. If you won’t call her, give me her name.”

“What do you mean, call her and tell her you want to crawl around on the deck of her boat, feeling for mental vibrations? Michael, she has a right to be protected from something like that; she may not believe in this psychic power thing.”

“But you believe in it! You know it works!”

“I want you to come back to the hospital.”

Michael had hung up in a rage. No more needles, no more tests, thank you. Over and over again Dr. Morris had called back, but the telephone messages were all the same: “Michael, come in. We’re worried about you. We want to see you.”

Then finally, the promise: “Michael, if you sober up, I’ll give it a try. I know where the lady can be found.”

Sober up; he thought about it now as he lay in the dark. He groped for the nearby cold can of beer, then cracked it open. A beer drunk was the best kind of drunk. And in a way it was being sober because he hadn’t poured a slug of vodka or Scotch in the can, had he? Now that was really drinking, that main-line poison, and he ought to know.



Call Dr. Morris. Tell him you’re sober, sober as you ever intend to get.

Seems like he’d done that. But maybe he’d dreamed it, maybe he was just drifting off again. Sweet to lie here, sweet to be so drunk you couldn’t feel the agitation, the urgency, the pain of not remembering …

Aunt Viv said, “Eat some supper.”

But he was in New Orleans, walking through those Garden District streets, and it was warm, and oh, the fragrance of the night jasmine. To think that all these years he had not smelled that sweet, heavy scent, and had not seen the sky behind the oaks catch fire, so each tiny leaf was suddenly distinct. The flagstones buckled over the roots of the oaks. The cold wind bit at his naked fingers.

Cold wind. Yes. It was not summer after all, but winter, the sharp, freezing New Orleans winter, and they were rushing through the dark to see the last parade of Mardi Gras night, the Mystic Krewe of Comus.

Such a lovely name, he thought as he dreamed, but way back then he had also thought it wondrous. And far ahead, on St. Charles Avenue, he saw the torches of the parade and heard the drums which always scared him.

“Hurry, Michael,” his mother said. She almost pulled him off his feet. How dark the street was, how terrible this cold like the cold of the ocean.

“But look, Mom.” He pointed through the iron fence. He tugged on her hand. “There’s the man in the garden.”

The old game. She would say there was no man there, and they would laugh about it together. But the man was there, all right, just as he’d always been—way back at the edge of the great lawn, standing beneath the bare white limbs of the crepe myrtles. Did he see Michael on that night? Yes, it seemed he did. Surely they had looked at each other.

“Michael, we don’t have time for that man.”

“But Mom, he’s there, he really is … ”

The Mystic Krewe of Comus. The brass bands played their dark savage music as they marched by, the torches blazing. The crowds surged into the street. From atop the quivering papier-mâché floats, men in glittering satin costumes and masks threw glass necklaces, wooden beads. People fought to catch them. Michael clung to his mother’s skirt, hating the sound of the drums. Trinkets landed in the gutter at his feet.

On the long way home, with Mardi Gras dead and done, and the streets littered with trash, and the air so cold that their breath made steam, he had seen the man again, standing as he was before, but this time he had not bothered to say so.

“Got to go home,” he whispered now in his sleep. “Got to go back there.”

He saw the long iron lace railings of that First Street house, the side porch with its sagging screens. And the man in the garden. So strange that the man never changed. And that last May, on the very last walk that Michael had ever taken through those streets, he had nodded to the man, and the man had lifted his hand and waved.

“Yes, go,” he whispered. But wouldn’t they give him a sign, the others who had come to him when he was dead? Surely they understood that he couldn’t remember now. They’d help him. The barrier is falling away between the living and dead. Come through. But the woman with the black hair said, “Remember, you have a choice.”

“But no, I didn’t change my mind. I just can’t remember.”

He sat up. The room was dark. Woman with the black hair. What was that around her neck? He had to pack now. Go to the airport. The doorway. The thirteenth one. I understand.

Aunt Viv sat beyond the living room door, in the glow of a single lamp, sewing.

He drank another swallow of the beer. Then he emptied the can slowly.

“Please help me,” he whispered to no one at all. “Please help me.”

He was sleeping again. The wind was blowing. The drums of the Mystic Krewe of Comus filled him with fear. Was it a warning? Why don’t you jump, said the mean housekeeper to the poor frightened woman at the window in the movie Rebecca. Had he changed the tape? He could not remember that. But we are at Manderley now, aren’t we? He could have sworn it was Miss Havisham. And then he heard her whisper in Estella’s ear, “You can break his heart.” Pip heard it too, but still he fell in love with her.

I’ll fix up the house, he whispered. Let in the light. Estella, we shall be happy forever. This is not the school yard, not that long hollow hallway that leads to the cafeteria, with Sister Clement coming towards him. “You get back in that line, boy!” If she slaps me the way she slapped Tony Vedros, I’ll kill her.

Aunt Viv stood beside him in the dark.

“I’m drunk,” he said.

She put the cold beer in his hand, what a darling.

“God, that tastes so good.”

“There’s someone here to see you.”

“Who? Is it a woman?”

“A nice gentleman from England … ”

“No, Aunt Viv—”

“But he’s not a reporter. At least he says he’s not. He’s a nice gentleman. Mr. Lightner is his name. He says he’s come all the way from London. His plane from New York just landed and he came right to the front door.”

“Not now. You have to tell him to go away. Aunt Viv, I have to go back. I have to go to New Orleans. I have to call Dr. Morris. Where is the phone?”

He climbed out of the bed, his head spinning, and stood still for a moment until the dizziness passed. But it was no good. His limbs were leaden. He sank back into the bed, back into the dreams. Walking through Miss Havisham’s house. The man in the garden nodded again.

Someone had switched off the television. “Sleep now,” Aunt Viv said.

He heard her steps moving away. Was the phone ringing?

“Someone help me,” he whispered.

Three

 

JUST GO BY. Take a little walk across Magazine Street and down First and pass by that grand and dilapidated old house. See for yourself if the glass is broken out of the front windows. See for yourself if Deirdre Mayfair is still sitting on that side porch. You don’t have to go up and ask to see Deirdre.

What the hell do you think is going to happen?

Father Mattingly was angry with himself. It was a duty, really, to call on that family before he went back up north. He had been their parish priest once. He had known them all. And it had been well over a year since he’d been south, since he’d seen Miss Carl, since the funeral of Miss Nancy.

A few months ago, one of the young priests had written to say that Deirdre Mayfair had been failing badly. Her arms were drawn up now, close to the chest, with the atrophy that always sets in, in such cases.

And Miss Carl’s checks to the parish were coming in as regular as always—one every month now, it seemed—made out for a thousand dollars to the Redemptorist Parish, with no strings attached. Over the years, she had donated a fortune.

Father Mattingly ought to go, really, just to pay his respects and say a personal thank you the way he used to do years ago.

The priests in the rectory these days didn’t know the Mayfairs. They didn’t know the old stories. They’d never been invited to that house. They had come only in recent years to this sad old parish, with its dwindling congregation, its beautiful churches locked now on account of vandals, the older buildings in ruins.

Father Mattingly could remember when the earliest Masses each day were crowded, when there were weddings and funerals all week long in both St. Mary’s and St. Alphonsus. He remembered the May processions and the crowded novenas, Midnight Mass with the church jammed. But the old Irish and German families were gone now. The high school had been closed years ago. The glass was falling right out of the windows.

He was glad that his was only a brief visit, for each return was sadder than the one before it. Like a missionary outpost this was, when you thought about it. He hoped in fact that he would not be coming south again.

But he could not leave without seeing that family.

Yes, go there. You ought to. You ought to look in on Deirdre Mayfair. Was she not a parishioner after all?

And there was nothing wrong with wanting to find out if the gossip was true—that they’d tried to put Deirdre in the sanitarium, and she had gone wild, smashing the glass out of the windows before lapsing back into her catatonia. On August 13 it was supposed to have happened, only two days ago.

Who knows, maybe Miss Carl would welcome a call.

But these were games Father Mattingly played with his mind. Miss Carl didn’t want him around any more now than she ever had. It had been years since he was invited in. And Deirdre Mayfair was now and forever “a nice bunch of carrots,” as her nurse once put it.

No, he’d be going out of curiosity.

But then how the hell could “a nice bunch of carrots” rise up and break out all the glass in two twelve-foot-high windows? The story didn’t make much sense when you thought about it. And why hadn’t the men from the sanitarium taken her anyway? Surely they could have put her in a straitjacket. Isn’t that what happened at times like that?

Yet Deirdre’s nurse had stopped them at the door, screaming for them to get back, saying that Deirdre was staying home and she and Miss Carl would take care of it.

Jerry Lonigan, the undertaker, had told Father the whole story. The ambulance driver for the sanitarium often drove limousines for Lonigan and Sons. Saw it all. Glass crashing out onto the front porch. Sounded like everything in that big front room was being broken. And Deirdre making a terrible noise, a howling. Horrible thing to imagine—like seeing someone rise from the dead.

Well, it wasn’t Father Mattingly’s business. Or was it?

Dear God, Miss Carl was in her eighties, never mind that she still went to work every day. And she was all alone in that house now with Deirdre and the paid help.

The more he thought about it, Father Mattingly knew he should go, even if he did loathe that house, and loathe Carl and loathe everything he’d ever known of those people. Yes, he should go.

Of course he hadn’t always felt that way. Forty-two years ago, when he’d first come from St. Louis to this riverfront parish, he had thought the Mayfair women genteel, even the buxom and grumbling Nancy, and surely sweet Miss Belle and pretty Miss Millie. The house had enchanted him with its bronze clocks and velvet portieres. He had loved the great cloudy mirrors, even, and the portraits of Caribbean ancestors under dimming glass.

He had loved also the obvious intelligence and purpose of Carlotta Mayfair, who served him café au lait in a garden room where they sat in white wicker chairs at a white wicker table, among potted orchids and ferns. They had spent more than one pleasant afternoon talking politics, the weather, and the history of the parish Father Mattingly was trying so hard to understand. Yes, he had liked them.

And he had liked little Deirdre, too, that pretty-faced six-year-old child he had known for so brief a time, who had come to such a tragic pass only twelve years later. Was it in the textbooks now that electric shock could wipe clean the entire memory of a grown woman so that she became the silent shell of herself, staring at the falling rain while a nurse fed her with a silver spoon?

Why had they done it? He had not dared to ask. But he had been told over and over. To cure her of her “delusions,” of screaming in an empty room “You did it” to someone who wasn’t there, someone she cursed endlessly for the death of the man who had fathered her illegitimate child.

Deirdre. Cry for Deirdre. That Father Mattingly had done, and no one but God would ever know how much or why, though Father Mattingly himself would never forget it. All his days, he’d remember the story that a little child had poured out to him in the hot wooden cell of the confessional, a little girl who was to spend her life rotting away in that vine-shrouded house while the world outside galloped on to its own damnation.

Just go over there. Make the call. Maybe it is some silent memorial to that little girl. Don’t try to put it all together. Talk of devils from a small child still echoing in your ears after all this time! Once you’ve seen the man, you’re done for.

Father Mattingly made up his mind. He put on his black coat, adjusted his Roman collar and black shirt front, and went out of the air-conditioned rectory onto the hot narrow pavement of Constance Street. He did not look at the weeds eating at the steps of St. Alphonsus. He did not look at the graffiti on the old school walls.

He saw the past if he saw anything as he made his way fast down Josephine Street, and around the corner. And then within two short blocks he’d entered another world. The glaring sun was gone, and with it the dust and the din of the traffic.

Shuttered windows, shady porches. The soft hissing sound of lawn sprinklers beyond ornamental fences. Deep smell of the loam heaped on the roots of carefully tended rose trees.

All right, and what will you say when you get there?

The heat wasn’t really so bad today, given that it was August, yet it was just like the young priest from Chicago said: “You start out fine, and then your clothes just get heavier and heavier.” He had had to laugh at that.

What did they think of all that ruin, the young ones? No use telling them how it had once been. Ah, but the city itself, and this old neighborhood—they were as beautiful as ever.

He walked on until he saw the stained and peeling side of the Mayfair house looming over the treetops, the high twin chimneys floating against the moving clouds. It seemed the vines were dragging the old structure right into the ground. Were the iron railings rusted more than when he last saw them? Like a jungle, the garden.

He slowed his pace. He slowed because he really didn’t want to get there. He didn’t want to see up close the garden gone to seed, chinaberry and oleander struggling with grass as high as wheat, and the porches stripped of paint, turning that dull gray that old untended wood turns in the damp climate of Louisiana.

He didn’t even want to be in this still, deserted neighborhood. Nothing stirred here but the insects, the birds, the plants themselves slowly swallowing up the light and the blue of the sky. Swamp this must have been once. A breeding place of evil.

But he was out of hand with these thoughts. What had evil to do with God’s earth, and the things that grew in it—even the jungle of the Mayfairs’ neglected garden.

Yet he could not help but think of all the stories he had ever heard of the Mayfair women. What was voodoo if it wasn’t devil worship? And what was the worse sin, murder or suicide? Yes, evil had thrived here. He heard the child Deirdre whispering in his ear. And he could feel evil as he rested his weight against the iron fence, as he looked up into the hard crusty black oak branches, fanning out above him.

He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. Little Deirdre had told him that she saw the devil! He heard her voice just as clearly now as he had heard it in the confessional decades ago. And he heard her footsteps, too, as she ran from the church, ran from him, ran from his failure to help her.

But it had started before that. It had started on a dreary slow Friday afternoon when a call came from Sister Bridget Marie for a priest to please come quick to the school yard. It was Deirdre Mayfair again.

Father Mattingly had never heard of Deirdre Mayfair. Father Mattingly had only just come south from the seminary in Kirkwood, Missouri.

He found Sister Bridget Marie quickly enough, in an asphalt yard behind the old convent building. How European it had seemed to him then, quaint and sad with its broken walls, and the gnarled tree with the wooden benches built in a square around it.

The shade had felt good to him as he approached. Then he saw that the little girls seated along the bench were crying. Sister Bridget Marie held one pale shivering child by the thin part of her upper arm. The child was white with fear. Yet very pretty she was, her blue eyes too big for her thin face, her black hair in long careful corkscrew curls that shivered against her cheeks, her limbs well proportioned yet delicate.

There were flowers strewn all over the ground—big gladiolus and white lilies and long fronds of green fern and even big beautifully formed red roses. Florist flowers, surely, yet there were so many …

“Do you see that, Father?” Sister Bridget Marie exclaimed. “And they have the nerve to tell me it was her invisible friend, the devil himself, that put those flowers here, brought them right into her arms while they watched, the little thieves! They stole those flowers from the very altar of St. Alphonsus—!”

The little girls began to scream. One of them stamped her feet. A chorus of “We did see, we did see!” broke out with alarming fury. They egged each other on with their choking sobs into a regular chorus.

Sister Bridget Marie shouted for silence. She shook the little girl she had been holding by the arm, though the child had said nothing. The child’s mouth dropped open in shock, her eyes rolling to Father Mattingly in a silent entreaty.

“Now, Sister, please,” Father Mattingly said. He had gently freed the child. She was dazed, utterly pliant. He wanted to pick her up, wipe her face where the tears had smudged it with dirt. But he didn’t.

“Her invisible friend,” the sister said, “the one that finds everything that’s lost, Father. The one that puts the pennies for candy into her pockets! And they all eat it, too, stuffing their mouths with it, stolen pennies, you can be sure of it.”

The little girls were wailing even louder. And Father Mattingly realized he was stepping all over the flowers and the silent white-faced child was staring at his shoes, at the white petals crushed beneath them.

“Let the children go in,” Father Mattingly had said. It was essential to take command. Only then could he make sense of what Sister Bridget Marie was telling him.

But the story was no less fantastic when he and the sister were alone. The children claimed they saw the flowers flying through the air. They claimed they saw the flowers land in Deirdre’s arms. They had been laughing and laughing. Deirdre’s magic friend always made them laugh, they said. Deirdre’s friend could find your notebook or your pencil if you lost it. You asked Deirdre and he brought it to her. And there it was. And they even claimed to have seen him themselves—a nice man, a man with dark brown hair and eyes, and he would stand for one second right next to Deirdre.

“She’s got to be sent home, Father,” Sister Bridget Marie had said. “It happens all the time. I call her Great-aunt Carl or her Aunt Nancy, and then it stops for a while. Then it starts up again.”

“But you don’t believe—”

“Father, I tell you it’s six of one, half a dozen of another. Either the devil’s in that child, or she’s a devil of a liar, and makes them believe her wild tales as if she’s got them bewitched. She cannot stay at St. Alphonsus.”

Father Mattingly had taken Deirdre home himself, walking slowly, steadily with her through these same streets. Not a word was spoken. Miss Carl had been phoned at her downtown office. She and Miss Millie were waiting on the front steps of the grand house to meet them.

And how lovely it was then, painted a deep violet color with green shutters and the trim all in white and the porch railings painted a shiny black so you could see the cast-iron roses so clearly. The vines had been a graceful etching of leaf and color, not the menacing tangle they had since become.

“Overactive imagination, Father,” Miss Carl said without a trace of concern. “Millie what Deirdre needs is a warm bath.” And off the child had gone without a word spoken, and Miss Carl had taken Father Mattingly out for the first time into the glass garden room for café au lait at the wicker table. Miss Nancy, sullen and plain, had set out the cups and silver.

Wedgwood china trimmed in gold. And cloth napkins with the letter M embroidered on them. And what a quick-witted woman, this Carl. She had looked prim in her tailored silk suit and ruffled white blouse, her salt and pepper gray hair in a neat twist on the back of her head, her mouth neatly colored with pale pink lipstick. She put him at ease at once with her knowing smile.

“You might say it’s the curse of our family, Father, this excess of imagination.” She poured the hot milk and the hot coffee from two small silver pitchers. “We dream dreams; we see visions; we should have been poets or painters it seems. Not lawyers, such as I am.” She had laughed softly, easily. “Deirdre will be just fine, when she learns to tell fantasy from reality.”

Afterwards, she had shown him through the lower rooms. And Miss Millie had joined them. She was such a feminine thing, Miss Millie, her red hair in old-fashioned finger curls around her face, and jeweled rings on her fingers. She’d taken him to the window to wave to old Miss Belle, who had been cutting back the roses with large wooden-handled shears.

Carl explained that Deirdre would be going to the Sacred Heart sisters just as soon as there was a place. She was so sorry for this silly disturbance at St. Alphonsus and of course they’d keep Deirdre home if that was what Sister Bridget Marie wanted.

Father had started to object, but it was all decided. Simple matter to get Deirdre a governess, someone who knew children, why not?

They walked along the deep shaded porches.

“We are an old family, Father,” Carl said, as they went back into the double parlor. “We don’t even know how old. There is no one now who can identify some of the portraits you see around you.” Her voice was half amused, half weary. “We came from the islands, that’s what we know for certain—a plantation on Saint-Domingue—and before that from some dim European past that is now completely lost. The house is full of unexplained relics. Sometimes I see it as a great hard snail shell that I must carry on my back.”

Her hands passed lightly over the grand piano, over the gilded harp. She had little taste for such things, she said. What an irony that she had become the custodian. Miss Millie had only smiled, nodded.

And now if Father would excuse them, Miss Carl did have to go back downtown. Clients waiting. They walked out to the gate together.

“Thank you so much, Father!”

And so it had all been waved away, and the little white-faced girl with the black curls had left St. Alphonsus.

But in the days that followed it had bothered Father Mattingly, the question of those flowers.

Impossible to imagine a gang of little girls climbing over the communion rail and robbing the altars of an enormous and impressive church like St. Alphonsus. Even the guttersnipes Father Mattingly had known as a boy would not have dared such a thing.

What did Sister Bridget Marie really think had happened? Had the children really stolen the flowers? The small, heavyset round-faced nun studied him a moment before she answered. Then she said no.

“Father, as God is my witness, they’re a cursed family, the Mayfairs are. And the grandmother of that very child, Stella she was called, told the very same tales in this very same school yard many a year ago. It was a frightening power Stella Mayfair had over those around her. There were nuns under this very roof who were scared to death to cross her, a witch is what they called her then and now.”

“Oh, come now, Sister,” he had objected immediately. “We’re not on the foggy roads of Tipperary, looking out for the ghost of Petticoat Loose.”

“Ah, so you’ve heard that one, Father.” She had laughed.

“From my own Irish mother on the Lower East Side, Sister, a dozen times.”

“Well, then, Father, let me tell you this much, that Stella Mayfair once took my hand, and held it like this, she did, and told me secrets of my own that I had never told a living soul this side of the Atlantic. I swear it, Father. It happened to me. There was a keepsake I’d lost at home, a chain with a crucifix on it, and I’d cried and cried as a girl when I’d lost it, and that very same little keepsake Stella Mayfair described to me. ‘You want it back, Sister?’ she said. And all the time smiling in her sweet way, just like her granddaughter Deirdre can smile at you now, more innocent than cunning. ‘I’ll get it for you, Sister,’ she said. ‘Through the power of the devil, you mean, Stella Mayfair,’ I answered her. ‘I’ll have none of it.’ But there was many another teaching sister at St. Alphonsus school that took another tack, and that’s how she kept her power over those around her, getting her way in one thing and another right up to the day she died.”

“Superstition, Sister!” he’d said with great authority. “What about little Deirdre’s mother? You’re going to tell me she was a witch, too?”

Sister Bridget Marie shook her head. “That was Antha, a lost one, shy, sweet, afraid of her own shadow—not at all like her mother, Stella, until Stella was killed, that is. You should have seen Miss Carlotta’s face when they buried Stella. And the same expression on her face twelve years after when they buried Antha. Now, Carl, she was as smart a girl as ever went to Sacred Heart. The backbone of the family she is. But her mother never cared a fig for her. All Mary Beth Mayfair ever cared about was Stella. And old Mr. Julien, that was Mary Beth’s uncle, he was the same. Stella, Stella, Stella. But Antha, stark raving mad at the end, they said, and nothing but a girl of twenty when she run up the stairs in the old house and jumped from the attic window and dashed her head on the stones below.”

“So young,” he’d whispered. He remembered the pale, frightened face of Deirdre Mayfair. How old had she been when the young mother did such a thing?

“They buried Antha in consecrated ground, God have mercy on her soul. For who’s to judge the state of mind of such a person? Head split open like a watermelon when she hit the terrace. And baby Deirdre screaming out her lungs in the cradle. But then even Antha was something to fear.”

Father Mattingly was quietly reeling. It was the kind of talk he’d heard all his life at home, however, the endless Irish dramatizing of the morbid, the lusty tribute to the tragic. Truth was it wore him out. He wanted to ask—


Date: 2015-12-18; view: 555


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