THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 9 page

“In a pig’s eye,” said Red.

“There was coins from all over the world in that purse—Italian coins and French coins and Spanish coins.”

“And how would you know?” Red asked.

“Father Lafferty’s seen it, ain’t you, Father? You’ve seen them coins. Miss Mary Beth used to throw them in the collection basket every Sunday, you know she done it. And you knew what she always said. ‘Spend them fast, Father, get them out of your hands before sundown, because they always come back.’ ”

“What are you talking about!” Red scoffed.

Father Lafferty said nothing. His small black eyes moved from Dave to Red. Then he glanced at Father Mattingly, who sat opposite him.

“What do you mean, they came back?” Father Mattingly asked.

“Back to her purse is what she meant!” Dave said arching his eyebrows. He took a long pull off his bottle. Nothing but foam left. “She could give them away forever, and they always came back.” He laughed hoarsely. There was the sound of phlegm in his voice. “She said the same thing to my mother fifty years ago when she paid her for doing the washing, that’s right, the washing—my mother did the washing in a lot of them big houses, and she was never ashamed of it neither, and Miss Mary Beth always paid her in them coins.”

“In a pig’s eye,” Red said.

“And I’ll tell you something else too,” Dave said, leaning forward on his elbow, his eyes narrow as he peered at Red Lonigan. “The house, the jewels, the purse, it’s all connected. Same with the name Mayfair and the way they always keep it, no matter who they marry. Always Mayfair in the end. And you want to know the reason? They’re witches, those women! Every one.”

Red shook his head. He pushed his full beer bottle towards Dave and watched as Dave wrapped his fingers around it.

“It’s the God’s truth, I’m telling you. It come down to them through the generations, the power of witchcraft, and back in them days there was plenty talk of it. Miss Mary Beth, she was more powerful than Stella.” He took a big swallow of Red’s beer. “And smart enough to keep her mouth shut which Stella was not.”

“Then how did you hear about it?” Red asked.

Dave took out his little white sack of Bull Durham tobacco and pressed it flat between fingers and thumb.

“You wouldn’t have a ready-made, would you, Father?” he asked Father Mattingly.

Red sneered. Father Mattingly gave Dave his pack of Pall Malls.

“Thank you, Father. And now to your question, Red, which I wasn’t avoiding. I know because my mother told me the things that Miss Mary Beth told her, back in 1921 when Miss Carlotta had graduated from Loyola and everybody was singing her praises, such a smart woman, being a lawyer and all that. ‘She’s not the chosen one,’ Miss Mary Beth said to my mother, ‘It’s Stella. Stella’s got the gift and she’ll get everything when I die.’ ‘And what’s the gift, Miss Mary Beth?’ my mother asked her. ‘Why, Stella’s seen the man,’ Miss Mary Beth said to my mother. ‘And the one who can see the man when she’s all alone inherits all.’ ”

Father Mattingly felt a chill run down his back. It had now been eleven years since he had heard that child’s unfinished confession, but he had never forgotten a word of it. They call him the man …

But Father Lafferty was glowering at Dave.

“Seen the man?” Father Lafferty asked coldly. “Now what in heaven’s name could such gibberish mean?”

“Well now, Father I should think a good Irishman like yourself would know the answer to that one. Ain’t it a fact that witches call the devil the man? Ain’t it fact they call him that when he comes in the middle of the night to tempt them to unspeakable evil!” He gave another of his deep cracking unhealthy laughs, and pulled a filthy snotrag from his pocket to wipe his nose. “Witches, and you know it, Father. That’s what they were and that’s what they are. It’s a legacy of witchcraft. And old Mr. Julien Mayfair, you remember him? I remember him. He knew all about it, that’s what my mother told me. You know it’s the truth, Father.”

“It’s a legacy all right,” Father Lafferty said angrily. He rose to his feet. “It’s a legacy of ignorance and jealousy and mental sickness! Ever hear of those things, Dave Collins? Ever heard of hatred between sisters, and envy, and ruthless ambition!” He turned and walked off through the milling crowd without waiting for the answer.

Father Mattingly felt stunned by Father Lafferty’s anger. He wished that Father Lafferty had merely laughed, as Dave Collins was doing.

Dave Collins swallowed the last of Red’s beer. “Couldn’t spare two bits, now, could you, Red?” he asked, his eyes darting from him to Father Mattingly.

Red sat listless staring at the empty beer bottle. Like a man in a dream he fished a crumpled dollar out of his pants pocket.

On the edge of sleep that night Father Mattingly remembered the books he’d read in the seminary. The tall man, the dark man, the comely man, the incubus who comes by night … the giant man who leads the Sabbat! He remembered dim pictures in a book, finely drawn, gruesome. Witches, he said the word as he passed into sleep. She says he’s the devil, Father. That it’s a sin even to look at him.

He awoke some time before dawn, hearing Father Lafferty’s angry voice. Envy, mental sickness. Was that the truth to read between the lines? It seemed a crucial piece had been fitted into the puzzle. He could almost see the full picture. A house ruled by an iron hand, a house in which beautiful and high-spirited women had met tragedy. And yet something bothered him still … They all see him, Father. Flowers scattered under foot, big long white gladiolus and delicate fronds of fern. He saw his shoe crushing them.

Deirdre Mayfair gave up her child. It was born at the new Mercy Hospital on the seventh of November, and that very same day, she kissed it and placed it in Father Lafferty’s hands and it was he who baptized it and placed it in the care of the cousins from California who were to adopt it.

But it was Deirdre who laid down the law that the child was to have the name Mayfair. Her daughter was never to be given any other last name, or Deirdre wouldn’t sign the papers. Her old uncle Cortland Mayfair had stood behind her on that one, and not even Father Lafferty could make her change her mind. She demanded to see it in ink on the baptismal certificate. And poor old Cortland Mayfair—a fine gentleman—was dead by that time, having taken that awful fall down the stairs.

Father Mattingly didn’t remember when he’d first heard the word “incurable.” She’d gone mad even before she left the hospital. They said she kept talking out loud to nobody at all, saying, “You did it, you killed him.” The nurses were afraid to go into her room. She wandered into the chapel in her hospital gown, laughing and talking out loud in the middle of Mass, accusing the empty air of killing her lover, separating her from her child, leaving her alone among “enemies.” When the nuns tried to restrain her, she’d gone wild. The orderlies had come and taken her away as she kicked and screamed.

By the time Father Lafferty died in the spring, they had locked her up far away. Nobody even knew where. Rita Lonigan asked her father-in-law, Red, because she wanted so badly to write. But Miss Carl said it would not be good. No letters for Deirdre.

Only prayers for Deirdre. And the years slipped by.

Father Mattingly left the parish. He worked in the foreign missions. He worked in New York. He went so far away that New Orleans was no longer in his thought, except now and then the sudden remembrance and shame: Deirdre Mayfair—the one he had not helped, his lost Deirdre.

Then one afternoon in 1976, when Father Mattingly had come down for a brief stay at the old rectory, he had passed the house and seen a thin, pale young woman sitting in a rocker on the side porch, behind a veil of rusted screen. She seemed no more than a wraith in a white nightgown, but he’d known at once it was Deirdre. He’d recognized those black curls hanging around her shoulders. And as he opened the rusted gate and came up the flagstone walk, he saw that even the expression on the face was the same—yes, it was Deirdre whom he’d brought home to this house almost thirty years ago.

Expressionless she was, behind the screen, which sagged on its light wooden framing. No answer when he whispered: “Deirdre.”

Around her neck on a chain was an emerald—a beautiful stone, and on her finger a ruby ring. Were these the jewels he’d heard tell of? How incongruous they looked on this silent woman in her limp white nightgown. She gave no sign that she either heard or saw him.

His visit with Miss Millie and Miss Nancy had been brief, uncomfortable. Carl was downtown at work, of course. And yes, that was Deirdre on the side porch and she was home to stay, but there was no need to whisper.

“The mind’s gone,” Nancy said with a bitter smile. “The electric shock wiped out her memory first. Then everything. She couldn’t get up to save herself if the place was burning down. Every now and then she wrings her hands, tries to speak, but she can’t—”

“Don’t!” Millie had whispered, with a little shake of the head and twist of her mouth as though it wasn’t in good taste to discuss this. She was old now, Miss Millie, old and beautifully gray, dainty as Miss Belle had been, Miss Belle who was now long gone. “Have some more coffee, Father?”

But it was a pretty woman sitting in the chair on the porch. The shock treatments had not grayed her hair. And her eyes were still a deep blue, though they were utterly empty. Like a statue in church she was. Father, help me. The emerald caught the light, exploded like a tiny star.

Father Mattingly did not come south very often after that, and in the following years when he rang the bell, he was not welcome. Miss Nancy’s excuses became more abrupt. Sometimes nobody even answered. If Carl was there, the visit was rushed, artificial. No more coffee in the garden room, just a few quick words in that vast dusty parlor. Didn’t they ever turn on the lights anymore? The chandeliers were filthy.

Of course the women were getting quite old. Millie died in 1979. The funeral had been enormous, with cousins coming from all over the country.

Then last year Nancy had gone. Father Mattingly had gotten a letter from Red Lonigan. The priest had been in Baton Rouge at the time and he had driven down just for the funeral.

Miss Carl, in her late eighties, was bone thin, hawk-nosed, with white hair and thick glasses that magnified her eyes unpleasantly. Her ankles were swollen over the tops of her black string shoes. She had to sit down on a gravestone during the final words at the cemetery.

The house itself was going down pitifully. Father Mattingly had seen that for himself when he drove past.

Deirdre too had changed, inevitably. He could see that her fragile hothouse beauty had at last been lost. And in spite of the nurses who walked her back and forth, she had grown stooped, and her hands bent down and out at the wrists, like those of an arthritic patient. They said that her head had now fallen permanently to one side, and her mouth was always open.

It was a sad sight to behold even from a distance. And the jewels only made it more sinister. Diamond earrings on a senseless invalid. An emerald big as a thumbnail! And Father Mattingly, who believed above all in the sanctity of human life, thought Deirdre’s death would have been a blessing.

The afternoon following Nancy’s funeral, as he had paid a silent visit to the old place, he had met an Englishman stopped at the far end of the fence—a very personable man, who introduced himself to the priest as Aaron Lightner.

“Do you know anything about that poor woman?” Lightner had asked quite frankly. “For over ten years I’ve seen her on that porch. You know, I worry about her.”

“I worry myself,” Father Mattingly had confessed. “But they say there’s nothing anyone can do for her.”

“Such a strange family,” said the Englishman sympathetically. “It’s so very hot. I wonder does she feel the heat? You’d think they’d fix the overhead fan. Do you see? It seems to be broken.”

Father Mattingly had taken an immediate liking to the Englishman. Such a forceful, yet polite man. And he was dressed so well in a fine three-piece linen suit. Even carried a walking stick. Made Father Mattingly think of the gentlemen who used to stroll in the evening on St. Charles Avenue. You used to see them on the front porches, wearing their straw hats, watching the traffic pass. Ah, another era.

Father Mattingly found himself chatting easily with the Englishman in a hushed voice under the low-hanging oaks, about all the “known” things with which the man seemed quite familiar—the shock treatments, the sanitariums, the baby daughter long ago adopted out in California. But Father Mattingly would not have dreamed of mentioning old Dave Collins’s gossip of Stella or “the man.” To repeat such nonsense would be flat-out wrong. And besides, it came too near to those painful secrets Deirdre had confided in him.

He and Lightner had somehow ended up at Commander’s Palace for a late lunch at the Englishman’s invitation. What a treat for the priest. How long had it been since he dined in a fine New Orleans restaurant like that with tablecloths and linen napkins. And the Englishman had ordered an excellent wine.

The man admitted candidly that he was interested in the history of families like the Mayfairs.

“You know they had a plantation in Haiti when it was still called Saint-Domingue. Maye Faire was the name of the place, I believe. They made a fortune in coffee and sugar in the days before the slave uprising.”

“So you know of them that far back,” said the priest, amazed.

“Oh, indeed, I do,” said Lightner. “It’s in the history books, you see. Powerful woman ran that place, Marie Claudette Mayfair Landry, following in the footsteps of her mother, Angélique Mayfair. But they had been there for four generations. It was Charlotte who had come from France in, what was it, the year 1689. Yes, Charlotte. And she gave birth to twins—Peter and Jeanne Louise, and they both lived to be eighty-one.”

“You don’t say. I’ve never heard tell of them that far back.”

“I believe it’s a simple matter of record.” The Englishman gave a little shrug. “Even the black rebels didn’t dare torch the plantation. Marie Claudette managed to emigrate with a king’s ransom in possessions as well as her entire family. Then it was La Victoire at Riverbend below New Orleans. I think they called it simply Riverbend.”

“Miss Mary Beth was born there.”

“Yes! That’s correct. In, let me see, I think it was 1871. It took the river to finally swallow that old house. Such a beauty it was, with columns all around. There were photographs of it in the very old guidebooks to Louisiana.”

“I’d like to see those,” the priest said.

“They’d built the house on First Street before the Civil War, you know,” Lightner went on. “It was actually Katherine Mayfair who built it and later her brothers Julien and Remy Mayfair lived there. And then Mary Beth made it her home. She didn’t like the country, Mary Beth. I believe it was Katherine who married the Irish architect, the one who died so young of yellow fever. You know, he built the banks downtown. Yes, the name was Monahan. And after he died, Katherine didn’t want to stay at First Street anymore because he had built it and she was so sick at heart.”

“Seems I heard a long time ago that Monahan designed that house,” said the priest. But he really didn’t want to interrupt. “I used to hear about Miss Mary Beth … ”

“Yes, it was Mary Beth Mayfair who married Judge McIntyre, though he was only a young lawyer then of course, and their daughter Carlotta Mayfair is the head of the house now, it seems … ”

Father Mattingly was enthralled. It wasn’t merely his old and painful curiosity about the Mayfairs, it was the engaging manner of Lightner himself, and the pleasing sound of his British accent. Just history, all this, not gossip, quite innocent. It had been a long time since Father Mattingly had spoken to such a cultivated man. No, this was not gossip when the Englishman told it.

And against his better judgment, the priest found himself telling in a tentative voice the story of the little girl in the school yard and the mysterious flowers. Now, that was not what he’d heard in the confessional, he reminded himself. Yet it was frightening that it should spill out this way, after a half-dozen sips of wine. Father Mattingly was ashamed of himself. Suddenly he couldn’t get the confession out of his mind. He lost the thread. He was thinking of Dave Collins and all those strange things he’d said and the way Father Lafferty had gotten so angry that July night at the bazaar, Father Lafferty who’d presided over the adoption of Deirdre’s baby.

Had Father Lafferty taken action on account of all Dave Collins’s crazy talk? He himself had never been able to do anything.

The Englishman was quite patient with the priest’s silent reverie. In fact, the strangest thing had happened. It seemed to Father Mattingly that the man was listening to his thoughts! But that was quite impossible, and if a man could overhear the memory of a confession in that way, just what was a priest supposed to do about it?

How long that afternoon seemed. How pleasant, easeful. Father Mattingly had finally repeated Dave Collins’s old tales, and he had even talked of the pictures in the books of “the dark man” and of witches dancing.

And the Englishman had seemed so interested, only moving now and then to pour the wine, or to offer the priest a cigarette, never interrupting.

“Now, what do you make of all that,” the priest whispered at last. Had the man said anything back? “You know, old Dave Collins is dead, but Sister Bridget Marie is going to live forever. She’s nearing a hundred.”

The Englishman smiled. “You mean the sister in the school yard that long-ago day.”

Father Mattingly was now drunk on the wine he’d had, that was the plain truth of it. And he kept seeing the yard and the children and the flowers strewn all over the pavement.

“She’s out at Mercy Hospital now,” the priest said. “I saw her last time I was down. I suppose I’ll see her this time. And what nonsense she talks now that she doesn’t know who she’s talking to. Old Dave Collins died in a bar on Magazine Street. Fitting place. All his friends chipped in for the biggest funeral.”

The priest had drifted off again, thinking of Deirdre and the confessional. And the Englishman had touched the back of his hand and whispered: “You mustn’t worry about it.”

The priest had been startled. Then he’d almost laughed at the idea that someone could read his mind. And that’s what Sister Bridget Marie had said about Antha, wasn’t it? That she could hear people talking through the walls and read their minds? Had he told the Englishman that part?

“Yes, you did. I want to thank you … ”

He and the Englishman had said good-bye at six o’clock outside the gates of the Lafayette Cemetery. It had been the golden time of evening when the sun is gone and everything gives back the light it has absorbed all day long. But how forlorn it all was, the old whitewashed walls, and the giant magnolia trees ripping at the pavement.

“You know, they’re all buried in there, the Mayfairs,” Father Mattingly had said, glancing at the iron gates. “Big above-ground tomb down the center walk to the right, has a little wrought-iron fence around it. Miss Carl keeps it in good repair. You can read all those names you just told me.”

The priest would have shown the Englishman himself but it was time to get back to the rectory, time to go back to Baton Rouge and then up to St. Louis.

Lightner gave him an address in London.

“If you ever hear anything more about that family—anything you feel comfortable passing on—well, would you contact me?”

Of course Father Mattingly had never done that. He’d misplaced the name and address months ago. But he remembered that Englishman kindly, though sometimes he wondered who the man really was, and what he had actually wanted. If all the priests of the world had such a soothing manner as that, what a splendid thing it would be. It was as if that man understood everything.

As he drew nearer the old corner now, Father Mattingly thought again of what the young priest had written: that Deirdre Mayfair was shriveling up, that she could hardly walk anymore.

Then how could she have gone wild on August 13th, he’d like to know, for the love of heaven? How could she have broken the windows out and scared off men from an asylum?

And Jerry Lonigan said his driver saw things thrown out—books, a clock, all manner of things, just hurling through the air. And the noise she’d made, like an animal howling.

The priest found it hard to believe.

But there it was, the evidence.

As he slowly approached the gate on this warm August afternoon, he saw the white-uniformed window man on the front porch, atop his wooden ladder. Knife in hand, he applied the putty along the new panes. And each one of those tall windows had shining new glass, complete with the tiny brand-name stickers.

Yards away, on the south side of the house, behind her veil of rusted copper screen sat Deirdre, hands twisted out at the wrists, head bent and to the side against the back of the rocker. The emerald pendant on its chain was a tiny spark of green light for an instant.

Ah, what had it been like for her to break those windows? To feel the strength coursing through her limbs, to feel herself in possession of such uncommon power? Even to make a sound, why, it must have been magnificent.

But that was a strange thought for him, wasn’t it? Yet he felt himself swept up in some vague sadness, some grand melancholy. Ah, Deirdre, poor little Deirdre.

The truth was, he felt sad and bitter as he always did when he saw her. And he knew he would not go up the flagstone path to the front steps. He would not ring the bell only to be told again that Miss Carl wasn’t home, or that she could not receive him just now.

This trip had only been Father Mattingly’s personal penance. Over forty years ago, he had done the wrong thing on a fateful Saturday afternoon, and a girl’s sanity had hung in the balance. And no visit now would ever make the slightest difference.

He stood at the fence for a long moment, listening to the scrape of the window man’s knife, curiously clear in the soft tropical quiet around him. He felt the heat penetrate his shoes, his clothes. He let the soft mellow colors of this moist and shady world work on him.

It was a rare place, this. Better for her surely than some sterile hospital room, or vista of close-cropped lawn with no more variation than a synthetic carpet. And what made him think that he could have ever done for her what so many doctors had failed to do? Maybe she had never had a chance. Only God knows.

Suddenly he glimpsed a visitor behind the rusted screens, sitting beside the poor mad woman. Nice young man it seemed—tall, dark-haired, well dressed in spite of the wilting temperature. Maybe one of those cousins from away, from New York City or California.

The young fella must have just come out on the porch from the parlor, because a moment ago he had not been there.

So solicitous, he seemed. It was positively loving the way he inclined towards Deirdre. Just as if he was kissing her cheek. Yes, that was what he was doing. Even in the dense shade, the priest could see it, and it touched him deeply. It made the sadness well in him painfully.

But the window man was finishing now. He was gathering up his ladder. He came down the front steps and went around the flagstone walk and past the screen porch, using his ladder as he went, to drive back the banana trees and the swollen oleander.

The priest was finished too. He had done his penance. He could go home now, back to the hot barren pavements of Constance Street, and the cool confines of the rectory. Slowly he turned and moved towards the corner.

He glanced back only once. The screen porch was empty now save for Deirdre. But surely that nice young man would come back out soon. It had gone right to the priest’s heart to see that tender kiss, to know that someone even now still loved that lost soul that he himself had failed to save so long ago.

Four

THERE WAS SOMETHING she had to do tonight. Someone she was supposed to call. And it was important, too. But after fifteen hours on duty—and twelve of them spent in the Operating Room—she could not now remember.

She wasn’t Rowan Mayfair yet, with all Rowan’s personal griefs and concerns. She was just Dr. Mayfair, empty as a clear pane of glass, sitting here silent in the doctors’ coffee room, hands shoved in the pockets of her dirty white coat, her feet on the chair opposite, a Parliament cigarette on her lip, listening to them talk as neurosurgeons always talk, regurgitating in language every exciting moment of the day.

Soft bursts of laughter, voices overlapping on voices, smell of alcohol, rustle of starched clothes, sweet aroma of the cigarettes. Never mind the personal disgrace that almost all of them smoked. It was nice to remain here, comfortable in the glare of the lights on the dirty Formica table, and the dirty linoleum tile, and the dirty beige walls. Nice to be putting off the thinking time, the time when memory would come back to fill her up again and render her heavy and opaque.

In truth, it had been a damn near perfect day, which was why her feet hurt so much. She had been through three emergency surgeries, one following another, from the gunshot wound at six A.M. to the car crash victim brought in four hours ago. And if every day was like this day, her life was going to be just fine. It was going to be perfectly wonderful, actually.

She was aware of that just now, in a relaxed sort of way. After ten years of medical school and internship and residency she was what she had always wanted to be—a doctor, a neurosurgeon, and most specifically the new board-certified Staff Attending in Neurosurgery in a giant university hospital where the Neurological Trauma Center could keep her operating on accident victims almost full-time.

She had to admit she was glorying in it, glorying in her first week as something other than an overworked and critically exhausted chief resident who still had to operate fifty percent of the time under someone else’s eye.

Even the inevitable talk today had not been so terrible—the endless running diatribe in the Operating Room, the dictating of the notes after, and finally the lengthy informal coffee room review. She liked these doctors around her, the shiny-faced interns opposite, Dr. Peters and Dr. Blake, who had just begun their rotation and were looking at her as if she were a witch instead of a doctor. And Dr. Simmons, the chief resident, who told her now and then in a heated whisper that she was the finest doctor he’d ever seen in surgery and that the nurses said the same thing, and Dr. Larkin, the beloved chief of neurosurgery, known to his protégées as Lark, who had forced her over and over again today to elaborate—“Explain, Rowan, explain in detail. You have to tell these boys what you’re doing. Gentlemen, behold, this is the only neurosurgeon in western civilization who does not like to talk about her work.”

Understatement. She hated talking. She was innately suspicious of language because she could “hear” with remarkable accuracy what lay behind it, and also she just didn’t know how to talk very well.

Now they were talking about Dr. Larkin’s virtuoso performance this afternoon with the meningioma, thank heaven, and she could drift in this delicious exhaustion, savoring the taste of the cigarette, and the awful coffee, and the lovely glare of the light on the beautifully blank walls.

Trouble was, she’d told herself this morning to remember about this personal thing, this call that had to be made, this something that really mattered to her. So what did that mean? It would come back as soon as she stepped out of the building.

And she could do that any time she liked. After all, she was the Attending, and she didn’t have to be here longer than fifteen hours, and she never had to sleep in the on-call room again, and nobody expected her to go down to Emergency just to see what was going on, though left to her own devices, perhaps, that is what she would have liked to do.

Two years ago, less than that perhaps, she would have been long gone by this time, headed over the Golden Gate at the speed limit, eager to be Rowan Mayfair again, in the wheelhouse of the Sweet Christine, singlehanding her out of Richardson Bay and into the open sea. Only when she had set the autopilot for a great circular course, well out of the way of the channels, would the exhaustion have conquered her. She would have gone down below deck into the cabin where the wood shone as brilliantly as the polished brass, and falling into the double bunk, she would have lost herself in a thin sleep through which all the little sounds of the boat penetrated sweetly.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 609