THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 1 page

PART VIII

The Family from 1929 to 1956

THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF STELLA’S DEATH

In October and November of 1929, the stock market crashed and the world entered the Great Depression. The Roaring Twenties came to an end. Wealthy people everywhere lost their fortunes. Multimillionaires jumped out of windows. And in a time of new and unwelcome austerity, there came an inevitable cultural reaction to the excesses of the twenties. Short skirts, booze-swilling socialites, and sexually sophisticated motion pictures and books went out of style.

At the Mayfair house on First and Chestnut Streets in New Orleans, the lights went dim with Stella’s death and were never turned up again. Candles lighted Stella’s open-casket funeral in the double parlor. And when Lionel, her brother, who had shot her dead with two bullets in front of scores of witnesses, was buried a short time after, it was not from the house but from a sterile funeral parlor on Magazine Street blocks away.

Within six months of Lionel’s death, Stella’s art deco furniture, her numerous contemporary paintings, her countless records of jazz and ragtime and blues singers, all disappeared from the rooms of First Street. What did not go into the immense attics of the house went out on the street.

Countless staid Victorian pieces, stored since the loss of Riverbend, came out of storage to fill the rooms. Shutters were bolted on the Chestnut Street windows never to be opened again.

But these changes had little to do with the death of the Roaring Twenties, or the crash of the stock market, or the Great Depression.

The family firm of Mayfair and Mayfair had long ago shifted its enormous resources out of the railroads, and out of the dangerously inflated stock market. As early as 1924, it had liquidated its immense land holdings in Florida for boom profits. It continued to hold its California property for the western land boom yet to come. With millions invested in gold, Swiss francs, South African diamond mines, and countless other profitable ventures, the family was once again in a position to lend money to friends and distant cousins who had lost all they had.

And lend money right and left the family did, pumping new blood into its incalculably large body of political and social contacts, and further protecting itself from interference of any sort as it had always done.

Lionel Mayfair was never questioned by a single police officer as to why he shot Stella. Two hours after her death, he was a patient in a private sanitarium, where in the days that followed weary doctors nodded off listening to Lionel rave about the devil walking the hallways of the house at First Street, about little Antha taking the devil into her bed.

“And there he was with Antha and I knew it. It was happening all over again. And Mother wasn’t there, you see, no one was there. Just Carlotta fighting endlessly with Stella. Oh, you can’t imagine the door slamming and the screaming. We were a household of children without Mother. There was my big sister Belle clinging to her doll, and crying. And Millie Dear, poor Millie Dear, saying her rosary on the side porch in the dark, shaking her head. And Carlotta struggling to take Mother’s place, and unable to do it. She’s a tin soldier compared to Mother! Stella threw things at her. ‘You think you’re going to lock me up!’ Stella was hysterical.

“Children, I tell you, that’s what we were. I’d knock on her door and Pierce was in there with her! I knew it and all this in broad daylight. She was lying to me, and him with Antha, I saw him. All the time I saw him! I saw him! I saw them together in the garden. But she knew, she knew all along that he was with Antha. She let it happen.

“ ‘Are you going to let him have her?’ That’s what Carlotta said. How the hell was I supposed to stop it? She couldn’t stop it. Antha was under the trees out there singing with him, tossing the flowers in the air, and he was making them float there. I saw that! I saw that so many times! I could hear her laughing. That’s how Stella used to laugh! And what did Mother ever do, for Christ’s sake! Oh, God, you don’t understand. A household of children. And why were we children? Because we didn’t know how to be evil. Did Mother know how? Did Julien know how?

“Do you know why Belle’s an idiot? It was inbreeding! And Millie Dear’s no better! Good God, do you know that Millie Dear is Julien’s daughter! Oh, yes, she is! As God is my witness, yes, she is. And she sees him and she lies about it! I know she sees him.

“ ‘Leave her alone,’ Stella says to me, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I know Millie can see him. I know she can. They were carrying cases of champagne for the party. Cases and cases, and there was Stella up there dancing to her phonograph records. ‘Just try to be decent for the party, will you, Lionel?’ For the love of heaven. Didn’t anybody know what was going on?

“And Carl talking about sending Stella to Europe! How could anyone get Stella to do anything! And what did it matter if Stella was in Europe? I tried to tell Pierce. I grabbed that young man by the throat and I said, ‘I’m going to make you listen.’ I would have shot him too if I could have done it. I would have, oh God, in heaven, why did they stop me! ‘Don’t you see, it’s Antha he’s got now! Are you blind?’ That’s what I said. You tell me! Are they all blind!”

On and on it went, we are told, for days on end. Yet the above is the only fragment noted verbatim in the doctor’s file, after which we are informed that “the patient continues on about she and her and him and he, and one of these persons is supposed to be the devil.” Or, “Raving again, incoherent, implying someone put him up to it, but it is not clear who this person is.”

On the eve of Stella’s funeral, three days after the murder, Lionel tried to escape. Thereafter he was kept permanently in restraints.

“How they managed to patch up Stella, I’ll never know,” one of the cousins said long after. “But she looked lovely.

“That was Stella’s last party, really. She’d left detailed instructions as to how it was to be handled, and do you know what I heard later? That she’d written all that out when she was thirteen! Imagine, the romantic notions of a girl of thirteen!”

Legal gossip indicated otherwise. Stella’s funeral instructions (which were in no way legally binding) had been included with the will she made in 1925 after Mary Beth’s death. And for all their romantic effect they were extremely simple. Stella was to be buried from home. Florists were to be informed that the “preferred flower” was the calla or some other white lily, and only candles would, be used to light the main floor. Wine should be served. The wake should continue from the time of laying out until the body was removed to the church for the Requiem Mass.

But romantic it was, by anyone’s standards, with Stella dressed in white in an open coffin at the front end of the long parlor, and dozens of wax candles giving off a rather spectacular light.

“I’ll tell you what it was like,” said one of the cousins long after. “The May processions! Exactly, with all those lilies, all that fragrance, and Stella like the May Queen in white.”

Cortland, Barclay, and Garland greeted the cousins who came by the hundreds. Pierce was allowed to pay his respects, though he was immediately thereafter packed off to his mother’s family in New York. Mirrors were draped in the old Irish fashion, though by whose order no one seemed to know.

The Requiem Mass was even more crowded, for cousins whom Stella had not invited to First Street while she was alive went directly to the church. The crowd in the cemetery was as big as it had been for Miss Mary Beth.

“Oh, but you must realize that it was a scandal!” said Irwin Dandrich. “It was the murder of 1929! And Stella was Stella, you see. It couldn’t have been more interesting to certain types of people. Did you know that the very night of her murder, two different young men of my acquaintance fell in love with her! Can you imagine? Neither of them had ever met her before and there they were quarreling over her, one demanding that the other let him have his chance with her, and the other saying that he had spoken to her first. My dear man, the party only started at seven. And by eight-thirty, she was dead!”

The night after Stella’s funeral, Lionel woke up screaming in the asylum, “He’s there, he won’t leave me alone.”

He was in a straitjacket by the end of the week, and finally on the fourth of November, he was placed in a padded cell. As the doctors debated whether to try electric shock, or merely to keep him sedated, Lionel sat crouched in the corner, unable to free his arms from the straitjacket, whimpering and trying to turn his head away from his invisible tormentor.

The nurses told Irwin Dandrich that he screamed for Stella to help him. “He’s driving me mad. Oh, why in the name of God doesn’t he kill me? Stella, help me. Stella, tell him to kill me.”

The corridors rang with his screams. “I didn’t want to give him any more injections,” one of the nurses told Dandrich. “He never really went to sleep. He’d wrestle with his demons, mumbling and cursing. It was worse for him that way, I think.”

“He is judged to be completely and incurably insane,” wrote one of our private detectives. “Of course, if he were cured he might have to stand trial for the murder. God knows what Carlotta has told the authorities. Possibly she hasn’t told them anything. Possibly no one has asked.”

On the morning of the sixth of November, alone and unattended, Lionel apparently went into a convulsion and died of suffocation, having swallowed his tongue. No wake was held in the funeral parlor on Magazine Street. Cousins were turned away the morning of the funeral, and told to go directly to the Mass at St. Alphonsus Church. There they were told by hired funeral directors not to continue on to the cemetery, that Miss Carlotta wanted things quiet.

Nevertheless they gathered at the Prytania Street gates of Lafayette No. 1, watching from a distance as Lionel’s coffin was placed beside Stella’s.

Family legend:

“It was all over, everyone knew it. Poor Pierce eventually managed to get over it. He studied at Columbia for a while, then entered Harvard the following year. But to the day he died no one ever mentioned Stella in his presence. And how he hated Carlotta. The only time I ever heard him speak of it, he said she was responsible. She ought to have pulled the trigger herself.”

Not only did Pierce recover, he became a highly capable lawyer, and played a major role in guiding and expanding the Mayfair fortune over the decades. He died in 1986. His son, Ryan Mayfair, born in 1936, is the backbone of Mayfair and Mayfair today. Young Pierce, Ryan’s son, is at present the most promising young man in the firm.

But those cousins who said “It was all over” were right.

With the death of Stella, the power of the Mayfair Witches was effectively broken. Stella was the first of Deborah’s gifted descendants to die young. She was the first one to die by violence. And never after would a Mayfair Witch “rule” at First Street, or assume direct management of the legacy. Indeed, the present designee is a mute catatonic and her daughter—Rowan Mayfair—is a young neurosurgeon living over two thousand miles from First Street who knows nothing of her mother, her heritage, her inheritance, or her home.

How did it all come to this? And can any one person be blamed? These are questions over which one could agonize eternally. But before we consider them in greater detail, let us draw back and consider the position of the Talamasca after Arthur Langtry’s death.

THE STATUS OF THE INVESTIGATION IN 1929 No autopsy was ever performed on Arthur Langtry. His remains were buried in England in the Talamasca cemetery, as he had long ago arranged for them to be. There is no evidence that he died by violence; indeed, his last letter, describing Stella’s murder, indicates that he was already suffering from heart trouble. But one can say with some justification that the stress of what he saw in New Orleans took its toll. Arthur might have lived longer had he never gone there. On the other hand, he was not retired, and he might have met his death in the field on some other case.

To the ruling council of the Talamasca, however, Arthur Langtry was another casualty of the Mayfair Witches. And Arthur’s glimpse of Stuart’s spirit was fully accepted by these experienced investigators as proof that Stuart had died within the Mayfair house.

But how exactly did Stuart die, the Talamasca wanted to know. Had Carlotta done it? And if so, why?

The outstanding argument against Carlotta as the murderer is perhaps obvious already and will become even more obvious as this narrative continues. Carlotta has been throughout her life a practicing Catholic, a scrupulously honest lawyer, and a law-abiding citizen. Her strenuous criticisms of Stella were apparently founded upon her own moral convictions, or so family, friends, and even casual observers have assumed.

On the other hand, Carlotta is credited by scores of persons with driving Lionel to shoot Stella, for doing everything but putting the gun in his hand.

Even if Carlotta did put the gun in Lionel’s hands, such an emotional and public act as Stella’s murder is a very different thing from the secret and cold-blooded killing of a stranger one hardly knows.

Was Lionel perhaps the murderer of Stuart Townsend? What about Stella herself? And how can we rule out Lasher? If one considers this being to have a personality, a history, indeed a profile as we say in the modern world, does not the killing of Townsend more logically fit the modus operandi of the spirit than anyone else in the house?

Unfortunately none of these theories can provide for the cover-up, and certainly there was a cover-up with employees of the St. Charles Hotel being paid to say that Stuart Townsend was never there.

Perhaps an acceptable scenario is one which accommodates all of the suspects involved. For instance, what if Stella did invite Townsend to First Street, where he met his death through some violent intervention of Lasher. And what if a panic-stricken Stella then turned to Carlotta or Lionel or even Pierce to help her conceal the body and make sure no one at the hotel said a word?

Unfortunately this scenario, and others like it, leaves too many unanswered questions. Why, for instance, would Carlotta have participated in such treachery? Mightn’t she have used the death of Townsend to get rid of her baby sister once and for all? As for Pierce, it is highly unlikely that such an innocent young man could have become involved in such a thing. (Pierce went on to live a very respectable life.) And when we consider Lionel we must ask: if he did have knowledge of Stuart’s death or disappearance, what prevented him from saying something about it when he went “stark raving mad”? He certainly said enough about everything else that happened at First Street, or so the records show.

And lastly, we should ask—if one of these unlikely people did help Stella bury the body in the backyard, why bother to remove Townsend’s belongings from the hotel and bribe the employees to say he was never there?

Perhaps the Talamasca was wrong, in retrospect, for not pursuing the matter of Stuart further, for not demanding a full-scale investigation, for not badgering the police into doing something more. The fact is, we did push. And so did Stuart’s family when they were informed of his disappearance. But as one distinguished law firm in New Orleans informed Dr. Townsend: “We have absolutely nothing to go on. You cannot prove the young man was ever here!”

In the days that followed Stella’s murder, no one was willing to “disturb” the Mayfairs with further questions about a mysterious Texan from England. And our investigators, including some of the best in the business, could never crack the silence of the hotel employees, nor get so much as a clue as to who might have paid them off. It is foolish to think the police could have done any better.

But there is one very interesting bit of contemporary “opinion” to consider before we leave this crime unsolved; and that is the final word on the subject by Irwin Dandrich, gossiping with one of our private detectives in a French Quarter bar during the Christmas season of 1929.

“I’ll tell you the secret to understanding that family,” said Dandrich, “and I’ve watched them for years. Not just for your queer birds in London, mind you. I’ve watched them the way everybody watches them—forever wondering what goes on behind those drawn blinds. The secret is realizing that Carlotta Mayfair isn’t the clean-living, righteous Catholic woman she has always pretended to be. There’s something mysterious and evil about that woman. She’s destructive, and vengeful too. She’d rather see little Antha go mad than grow up to be like Stella. She’d rather see the place dark and deserted than see other people having fun.”

On the surface, these remarks seem simplistic, but there may be more truth to them than anyone realized at the time. To the world Carlotta Mayfair certainly did represent clean living, sanity, righteousness, and the like. From 1929, she attended Mass daily at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel on Prytania, gave generously to the church and all its organizations, and though she carried on a private war with Mayfair and Mayfair over the administration of Antha’s money, she was always extremely generous with her own. She lent money freely to any and all Mayfairs who had need of it, sent modest gifts for birthdays, weddings, christenings, and graduations, attended funerals, and now and then met with cousins outside the house for lunch or tea.

To those who had been so grievously offended by Stella, Carlotta was a good woman, the backbone of the house on First Street, the able and endlessly self-sacrificing caretaker of Stella’s insane daughter, Antha, and the other dependents, Millie Dear, Nancy, and Belle.

She was never criticized for her failure to open the house to the family, or her refusal to reinstate reunions and get-togethers of any kind. On the contrary, it was understood that “she had her hands full.” No one wanted to make any demands on her. Indeed, she became a sort of sour saint to the family as the years passed.

My opinion—for what it’s worth—after forty years of studying the family, is that there is a great deal of truth to Irwin Dandrich’s estimation of her. It is my personal conviction that she presents a mystery as great as that of Mary Beth or Julian. And we have only scratched the surface of what goes on in that house.

THE POSITION OF THE ORDER FURTHER CLARIFIED With regard to the future, it was decided by the Talamasca in 1929 that no further attempt at personal contact would be made.

Our director, Evan Neville, believed that first and foremost we should abide by Arthur Langtry’s advice, and that second, the warning from the specter of Stuart Townsend should be taken seriously. We should stay away from the Mayfairs for the time being.

Several younger members of the council believed, however, that we must attempt to make contact with Carlotta Mayfair by mail. What harm could result from doing this, they argued, and what right had we to withhold our information from her? To what purpose had we acquired this information? We must prepare some sort of discreet digest for her of the information we had acquired. Certainly our very earliest records—Petyr van Abel’s letters—should be made available to her, along with the genealogical tables we had made.

This precipitated a furious and acrimonious debate. Older members of the order reminded the younger ones that Carlotta Mayfair was in all probability responsible for the death of Stuart Townsend, and more than likely responsible for the death of her sister, Stella. What obligation could we possibly have to such a person? Antha was the person to whom we should make our disclosure, and such a thing could not even be considered until Antha reached the age of twenty-one.

Besides, in the absence of any guiding personal contact, how was information to be given to Carlotta Mayfair and what information could we possibly give?

The history of the Mayfair family as it existed in 1929 was in no way ready for “outside eyes.” A discreet digest would have to be prepared, with the names of witnesses and investigators thoroughly expunged from the record, and once again, what would be the purpose of giving this to Carlotta? What would she do with it? How might she use it in regard to Antha? What would be her overall reaction? And if we were going to give this history to Carlotta, why not give it also to Cortland and his brothers? Indeed, why not give it to every member of the Mayfair family? And if we did do such a thing, what would be the effects of such information upon these people? What right had we to contemplate such a spectacular intervention in their lives?

Indeed, the nature of our history was so special, it included such bizarre and seemingly mysterious material, that no disclosure of it could be arbitrarily contemplated.

… And so on and on the debate raged.

As always at such times, the rules, the goals, and the ethics of the Talamasca were completely reevaluated. We were forced to reaffirm for ourselves that the history of the Mayfair family—due to its length and its detail—was invaluable to us as scholars of the occult, and that we were going to continue to gather information on the Mayfairs, no matter what the younger members of the council said about ethics and the like. But our attempt at “contact” had been an abysmal failure. We would wait until Antha Mayfair was twenty-one, and then a careful approach would be considered, depending upon who was available within the order for such an assignment at that time.

It also became clear as the council continued its wrangling that almost no one there—Evan Neville included—really knew the full story of the Mayfair Witches. In fact there was considerable arguing not only about what to do and how it should be done, but about what had happened and when in the Mayfair family. For the file had simply become too big and too complicated for anyone to examine effectively within a reasonable period of time.

Obviously the Talamasca must find a member willing to take on the Mayfair Witches as a full-time assignment—someone able to study the file in detail and then make intelligent and responsible decisions about what to do in the field. And considering the tragic death of Stuart Townsend, it was determined that such a person must have first-rate scholarly credentials, as well as great field experience; indeed, he must prove his knowledge of the file by putting all of its materials into one long coherent and readable narrative. Then, and only then, would such a person be allowed to broaden his study of the Mayfair Witches by more direct investigation with a view to a contact eventually being made.

In sum, the enormous task of translating the file into a narrative was seen as a necessary preparation for field involvement. And there was great wisdom to this approach.

The one sad flaw in the whole plan was that such a person was not found by the order until 1953. And by that time Antha Mayfair’s tragic life had come to a close. The designee of the legacy was a wan-faced twelve-year-old girl who had already been expelled from school for “talking with her invisible friend,” and making flowers fly through the air, or finding lost objects, and reading minds.

“Her name is Deirdre,” said Evan Neville, his face creased with worry and sadness, “and she is growing up in that gloomy old house just the way her mother did, alone with those old women, and God only knows what they know or believe about their history, and about her powers, and about this spirit who has already been seen at the child’s side.”

The young member, greatly inflamed by this and by earlier conversations, and much random reading of the Mayfair papers, decided he had better act fast.

As I myself, obviously, am that member, I shall now pause before relating the brief and sad story of Antha Mayfair, to introduce myself.

THE AUTHOR OF THIS NARRATIVE, AARON LIGHTNER,
ENTERS THE PICTURE A complete biography of me is available under the heading Aaron Lightner. For the purposes of this narrative the following is more than sufficient.

I was born in London in 1921. I became a full member of the order in 1943, after I had finished my studies at Oxford. But I had been working with the Talamasca since the age of seven, and living in the Motherhouse since the age of fifteen.

Indeed, I had been brought to the attention of the order in 1928 by my English father (a Latin scholar and translator) and my American mother (a piano teacher) when I was six years old. It was a frightening telekinetic ability that precipitated their search for outside help. I could move objects just by concentrating upon them or telling them to move. And though this power was never very, strong, it proved very disturbing to those who saw examples of it.

My concerned parents suspected that this power went along with other psychic traits, of which they had indeed seen an occasional glimpse. I was taken to several psychiatrists, on account of my strange abilities, and finally one of these said, “Take him to the Talamasca. His powers are genuine, and they are the only ones who can work with someone like this.”

The Talamasca was more than willing to discuss the question with my parents, who were greatly relieved. “If you try to crush this power in your son,” Evan Neville said, “you will get nowhere with him. Indeed you place his well-being at risk. Let us work with him. Let us teach him how to control and use his psychic abilities.” Reluctantly my parents agreed.

I began to spend every Saturday at the Motherhouse outside of London, and by the age of ten I was spending weekends and summers there as well. My father and mother were frequent visitors. Indeed my father began doing translations for the Talamasca from its old crumbling Latin records in 1935, and worked with the order until his death in 1972, at which time he was a widower living in the Motherhouse. Both my parents loved the General Reference Library at the Motherhouse, and though they never sought official membership in the order, they were in a very real sense a part of it all their lives. They did not object when they saw me drawn into it, only insisting that I complete my education, and not allow my “special powers” to draw me prematurely away from “the normal world.”

My telekinetic power never became very strong, but with the aid of my friends in the order, I became keenly aware that—under certain circumstances—I could read people’s thoughts. I also learned to veil my thoughts and feelings from others. I learned also how to introduce my powers to people when and where it was appropriate, and how to reserve them primarily for constructive use.

I have never been what anyone would call a powerful psychic. Indeed my limited mind-reading ability serves me best in my capacity as a field investigator for the Talamasca, particularly in situations which involve jeopardy. And my telekinetic ability is seldom called upon for anything of a practical nature.

By the time I was eighteen, I was devoted to the order’s way of life and its goals. I could not easily conceive of a world without the Talamasca. My interests were the interests of the order, and I was completely compatible with its spirit. No matter where I went to school, no matter how much I traveled with my parents or with school friends, the order had become my true home.

When I completed my studies at Oxford, I was received into full membership, but I was really a member long before then. The great witch families had always been my chosen field. I had read extensively in the history of the witchcraft persecutions. And those persons fitting our particular definition of witch were of great fascination to me.

My first fieldwork was done in connection with a witch family in Italy, under the guidance of Elaine Barrett, who was at that time, and for many years later, the most able witch investigator in the order.

It was she who first introduced me to the Mayfair Witches, in a casual conversation over dinner, telling me firsthand of what had happened to Petyr van Abel, Stuart Townsend, and Arthur Langtry, and inviting me to begin my reading of the Mayfair materials in my spare time. Many a night during the summer and winter of 1945 I fell asleep with the Mayfair papers all over the floor of my bedroom. I was already jotting down notes for a narrative in 1946.

The year 1947, however, took me completely away from the Motherhouse and the File on the Mayfair Witches for work in the field with Elaine. I did not realize until later that these years provided me with precisely the field record I would need for the romance with the Mayfair Witches which would become my life’s work.

I was given the assignment formally in 1953: begin the narrative; and when it is complete in acceptable form, we will discuss sending you to New Orleans to see the inhabitants of the First Street house for yourself.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 674