THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 2 page

Again and again, I was reminded that whatever my aspirations I would only be allowed to proceed with caution. Antha Mayfair had died violently. So had the father of her daughter, Deirdre. So had a Mayfair cousin from New York—Dr. Cornell Mayfair—who had come to New Orleans in 1945 expressly to see little eight-year-old Deirdre and investigate Carlotta’s claim that Antha had been congenitally insane.

I accepted the terms of the assignment. I set to work translating the diary of Petyr van Abel. In the meantime, I was given an unlimited budget to amplify the research in any and all directions. So I also commenced a “long distance” investigation into the present state of things with twelve-year-old Deirdre Mayfair, Antha’s only child.

I should like to add in conclusion that two factors apparently play a large role in any investigation which I undertake. The first of these seems to be that my personal manner and appearance put people at ease, almost unaccountably. They talk to me more freely perhaps than they might talk to someone else. How much I control this by any sort of “telepathic persuasion” is quite difficult or impossible to determine. In retrospect, I would say it has more to do with the fact that I appear to be “an Old World gentleman,” and that people assume that I am basically good. I also empathize strongly with those I interview. I am in no way an antagonistic listener.

I hope and pray that in spite of the deceptions I have maintained in connection with my work that I have never really betrayed anyone’s trust. To do good with what I know is my life’s imperative.

The second factor which influences my interviews and fieldwork is my mild mind-reading ability. I frequently pick up names and details from people’s thoughts. In general I do not include this information in my reports. It’s too unreliable. But my telepathic discoveries have certainly provided me with significant “leads” over the years. And this trait is definitely connected with my keen ability to sense danger, as the following narrative will eventually reveal …

It is time now to return to the narrative, and to reconstruct the tragic tale of Antha’s life and Deirdre’s birth.

THE MAYFAIR WITCHES FROM 1929
TO THE PRESENT TIMEAntha Mayfair With the death of Stella, an era ended for the Mayfairs. And the tragic history of Stella’s daughter Antha, and her only child, Deirdre, remains shrouded in mystery to this day.

As the years passed, the household staff at First Street dwindled to a couple of silent, unreachable, and completely loyal servants; the outbuildings, no longer needed for housemaids and coachmen and stable boys, fell slowly into disrepair.

The women of First Street maintained a reclusive existence, Belle and Millie Dear becoming “sweet old ladies” of the Garden District as they walked to daily Mass at the Prytania Street chapel, or stopped in their ceaseless and ineffectual gardening to chat with neighbors passing the iron fence.

Only six months after her mother’s death, Antha was expelled from a Canadian boarding school, which was the last public institution she was ever to attend. It was a surprisingly simple matter for a private investigator to learn from teacher gossip that Antha had frightened people with her mind reading, her talking to an invisible friend, and threats against those who ridiculed her or talked behind her back. She was described as a nervous girl, always crying, complaining of the cold in all kinds of weather, and subject to long unexplained fevers and chills.

Carlotta Mayfair took Antha home by train from Canada, and to the best of our knowledge, Antha never spent another night out of the First Street house until she was seventeen.

Nancy, a sullen, dumpy young woman, only two years older than Antha, continued to go to school every day until she was eighteen. At that point she went to work as a file clerk in Carlotta’s law offices, where she worked for four years. Every morning, without fail, she and Carlotta walked from First and Chestnut to St. Charles Avenue, where they caught the St. Charles car for downtown.

By this time the First Street house had taken on an air of perpetual gloom. Its shutters were never opened. Its violet-gray paint began to peel, and its garden grew wild along the iron fences, with cherry laurels and rain trees sprouting among the old camellias and gardenias, which had been so carefully tended years before. When the old unoccupied stable burned to the ground in 1938, weeds soon filled up the open space at the back of the property. Another dilapidated building was razed shortly after, and nothing remained but the old garçonnières, and one great and beautiful oak, its branches poignantly outstretched above the wild grass towards the distant main house.

In 1934, we started to receive the first reports from workmen who found it impossible to complete repairs or other jobs on the house. The Molloy brothers told everyone in Corona’s Bar on Magazine Street that they couldn’t paint that place because every time they turned around their ladders were on the ground, or their paint was spilled, or their brushes somehow got knocked in the dirt. “It must have happened six times,” said Davey Molloy, “that my paint just went right over, off the ladder, and poured out on the ground. Now, I know I never knocked over a full paint can! And that’s what she said to me, Miss Carlotta, she said, ‘You knocked it over yourself.’ Well, when that ladder went over with me on it, I tell you, that was it. I quit.”

Davey’s brother, Thompson Molloy, had a theory as to who was responsible. “It’s that brown-haired fella, the one who was always watching us. I told Miss Carlotta, ‘Don’t you think he could be doing it? That fella that’s always over there under the tree?’ She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about. But he was always watching us. We were trying to patch the wall on Chestnut Street and I seen him looking at us through the library shutters. Gave me the creeps, it did. Who is he? Is he one of them cousins? I’m not working there. I don’t care how bad times are. I’m not working on that house again.”

Another workman, hired only to paint the black cast-iron railings, reported the same “goings-on.” He gave up after half a day during which time debris fell on him from the roof and leaves constantly fell into his paint.

By 1935, it was common knowledge in the Irish Channel that nothing could be done “on that old house.” When a couple of young men were hired to clean out the pool that same year, one of them was knocked into the stagnant water and almost drowned. The other had a hell of a time getting him out. “It was like I couldn’t see anything. I had a hold of him, and I was hollering for somebody to help me, and we were going down in all that muck, and then thank God he had a hold of the side and he was saving me. That old colored woman, Aunt Easter, come out there with a towel for us and she hollered, ‘Just get away from that swimming pool. Never mind cleaning it. Just get away.’ ”

Even Irwin Dandrich heard the gossip. “They’re saying it’s haunted, that Stella’s spirit won’t let anyone touch anything. It’s as if the whole place is in mourning for Stella.” Had Dandrich heard of a mysterious brown-haired man? “I hear all kinds of things. Some say it’s Julien’s ghost. That he’s keeping an eye on Antha. Well, if he is, he isn’t doing a very good job.”

Shortly thereafter a vague story appeared in the Times-Picayune describing a “mysterious uptown mansion” where no work could be done. Dandrich clipped it and sent it to London with the note “My Big Mouth” in the margin.

One of our investigators took the reporter to lunch. She was happy to talk about it, and yes indeed it was the Mayfair house. Everyone knew it. A plumber said he was trapped under that house for hours when he tried to fix a pipe. He actually lost consciousness. When he finally came to himself and got out of there, he had to be taken to the hospital. Then there was the telephone man who was called to fix a phone in the library. He said he would never set foot in that house again. One of the portraits on the wall had actually looked at him. And he thought sure he saw a ghost in that very room.

“I could have written a great deal more,” said the young woman, “but the people at the paper don’t want any trouble with Carlotta Mayfair. Did I tell you about the gardener? He goes in there regularly to cut the grass, you know, and he said the weirdest thing when I called him. He said, ‘Oh, he never bothers me. He and I get along just fine. He and I are just real regular friends.’ Now, who do you suppose this man was referring to? When I asked him he said, ‘You just go up there. You’ll see him. He’s been there forever. My grandfather used to see him. He’s all right. He can’t move or talk to you. He just stands there looking at you from the shadows. One minute you see him. Then he’s gone. He don’t bother me. He’s all right by me. I get paid plenty to work there. I’ve always worked there. He don’t frighten me.”

Family gossip of the period dismissed the “ghost stories.” So did uptown society, according to Dandrich, though he implied he thought that people were naive.

“I think Carlotta herself started all those silly ghost stories,” said one of the cousins years after. “She wanted to keep people away. We just laughed when we heard it.”

“Ghosts at First Street? Carlotta was responsible for that house becoming a ruin. She always was penny-wise and pound-foolish. That’s the difference between her and her mother.”

But whatever the attitudes of the cousins and the local society, the priests at the Redemptorist rectory heard countless stories of ghosts and mysterious mischief at First Street. Father Lafferty called regularly at First Street, and rumor had it that he would not allow himself to be turned away.

His sister told one of our investigators, “My brother knew plenty about what was going on, but he never gossiped about it. I asked him how Antha was doing, and he wouldn’t answer me. But I know he saw Antha. He got into that house. After Antha died, he came over here one Sunday and he just put his head on his arms on the dining table and he cried. That’s the only time I ever saw my brother, Father Thomas Lafferty, break down and cry.”

The family remained concerned about Antha throughout this period. The official story was that Antha was “insane,” and that Carlotta was always taking her to psychiatrists, but that “it didn’t do any good.” The child had been irreparably shocked by the shooting of her mother. She lived in a fantasy world of ghosts and invisible companions. She could not be left unattended; she could not visit outside the house.

Legal gossip indicates that the cousins frequently called Cortland Mayfair to beg him to look in on Antha, but that Cortland was no longer welcome at First Street. Neighbors report seeing him turned away several times.

“He used to go up there every Christmas Eve,” said one of the neighbors much later. “His car would pull up at the front gate, and his driver would hop out and open the door, and then take all the presents out of the trunk. Lots and lots of presents. Then Carlotta would come out and shake hands with him on the steps. He never got inside that house.”

The Talamasca has never found any record of doctors who saw Antha. It is doubtful Antha was ever taken outside the house except to go to Sunday Mass. Neighbors reported seeing her frequently in the garden at First Street.

She read her books under the big oak at the rear of the property; she sat for hours on the side gallery, her elbows on her knees.

A maid who worked across the street reported seeing her talking to “that man all the time, you know that browned-haired man, he is always up there to see her, must be one of the cousins, and he sure do dress nice.”

By the time Antha reached the age of fifteen, she sometimes went out the gate by herself. A mail carrier mentioned seeing her often, a thin girl with a dreamy expression walking alone and sometimes with a “good-looking young fella” through the streets. “The good-looking fella” had brown hair and brown eyes, and was always, dressed in a suitcoat and tie.

“They liked to scare the hell out of me,” said a local milkman. “One time I was just whistling to myself, coming out of the gate of Dr. Milton’s house on Second Street, and there they were just right in front of me, under the magnolia tree, in the shadows, and she was real still, and he was standing beside her. I nearly ran into them. I think they were just sort of whispering together, and maybe I scared her as bad as she scared me.”

There are no photographs in our files from this period. But all these witnesses and others describe Antha as pretty.

“She had a remote look to her,” said a woman who used to see her at the chapel. “She wasn’t vibrant like Stella; she always seemed wrapped in her dreams, and to tell you the truth, I felt sorry for her all alone in that house with those women. Don’t quote me on this but that Carlotta is a mean person. She really is. My maid and my cook knew all about her. They said she would grab that girl by the wrist and dig her nails into her flesh.”

Irwin Dandrich reported that old friends of Stella’s tried to call on the girl from time to time, only to be turned away. “No one gets past Nancy or the colored maid, Aunt Easter,” Dandrich wrote to the London investigators. “And the talk is that Antha is a veritable prisoner in that house.”

Other than these few glimpses, we know virtually nothing of Antha during the years 1930 to 1938, and it seems nobody in the family knew much of her either. But we can safely conclude that all the references to the “brown-haired man” apply to Lasher; and if this is the case, we have more sightings of Lasher during this period than for all the decades before.

Indeed, the sightings of Lasher are so numerous that our investigators got in the habit of merely jotting down notes such as “Maid working on Third Street says she saw Antha and the man walking together.” Or “Woman on First and Prytania saw Antha standing under the oak tree talking to the man.”

The First Street house had now taken on an air of sinister mystery even for the descendants of Rémy Mayfair and of Suzette’s brothers and sisters, who had once been quite close.

Then, in April of 1938, neighbors witnessed a violent family quarrel at First Street. Windows were broken, people heard screaming, and finally a distraught young woman, clutching only a shoulder bag of a purse, was seen running out the front gate and towards St. Charles Avenue. Without question it was Antha. Even the neighbors knew that much, and they watched from behind lace curtains as a police car pulled up only moments after and Carlotta went to the curb to confer with the two officers who drove off at once, siren screaming, apparently to catch the errant girl.

That night Mayfairs in New York received phone calls from Carlotta, informing them that Antha had run away from home and was headed for Manhattan. Would they help with the search? It was these New York cousins who told the family in New Orleans. Cousins called cousins. Within days Irwin Dandrich wrote to London that “poor little Antha” had made her bid for freedom. She had run off to New York City. But how far would she ever get?

As it turned out, Antha got quite far.

For months no one knew the whereabouts of Antha Mayfair. Police, private investigators, and family members failed to find a clue to Antha’s whereabouts. Carlotta made three separate train trips to New York during this period, and offered substantial rewards to anyone in the New York police department who could offer help in the search. She called on Amanda Grady Mayfair, who had only recently left her husband, Cortland, and actually threatened Amanda.

As Amanda told our “undercover” society investigator later, “It was simply dreadful. She asked me to meet her for lunch at the Waldorf. Well, of course I didn’t want to do it. Rather like going into a cage at the zoo to have lunch with a lion. But I knew she was all upset about Antha, and I suppose I wanted to give her a piece of my mind. I wanted to tell her that she had driven Antha away, that she never should have isolated that poor little girl from her uncles and aunts and cousins who loved her.

“But, as soon as I sat down at the table, she started to threaten me. ‘Let me tell you, Amanda, if you are harboring Antha I can make trouble for you that you won’t believe.’ I wanted to throw my drink in her face. I was furious. I said, ‘Carlotta Mayfair, don’t you ever talk to me again, don’t you ever call me, or write to me, or come to my home. I had enough of you in New Orleans. I had enough of what your family did to Pierce and to Cortland. Don’t you ever ever come near me again.’ I tell you the smoke was coming out of my ears when I left the Waldorf. But you know, it is a regular technique with Carlotta. She makes an accusation as soon as she sees you. She’s been doing it for years, really. That way, you don’t have a chance to make an accusation against her.”

In the winter of 1939, our investigators located Antha in a very simple way. Elaine Barrett, our witchcraft scholar, in a routine meeting with Evan Neville suggested that Antha must have financed her escape with the famous Mayfair jewels and gold coins. Why not try the shops in New York where such items could be sold for quick money? Antha was located within the month.

Indeed, she had been selling rare and exquisite gold coins steadily to support herself since her arrival in 1939. Every coin dealer in New York knew her—the beautiful young woman with the fine manners and the cheerful smile who always brought in the rarest of merchandise, taken from a family collection in Virginia, she said.

“At first I thought her stuff was stolen,” said one coin dealer. “I mean these were three of the finest French coins I’d ever seen. I gave her a fraction of what they were worth and just waited. But absolutely nothing happened. When I made the sale, I saved her a percentage. And when she brought me some marvelous Roman coins, I paid her what they were worth. Now she’s a regular. I’d rather deal with her than some of the other people who come in here. I’ll tell you that much.”

It was a simple thing to follow Antha from one of these shops to a large apartment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village where she had been living with Sean Lacy, a handsome young Irish-American painter who showed considerable promise and had already exhibited with some critical approval several pieces of his work. Antha herself had become a writer. Everyone in the building and on the block knew the young couple. Our investigators collected reams of information almost overnight.

Antha was the sole support of Sean Lacy, friends said openly. She bought him anything he wanted, and he treated her like a queen. “He calls her his Southern Belle, actually, does everything for her. But then why shouldn’t he?” The apartment was “a wonderful place,” full of bookshelves to the ceiling, and big old comfortable overstuffed chairs.

“Sean has never painted so well. He’s done three portraits of her, all of them very interesting. And you can hear Antha’s typewriter going constantly. She sold one story, I heard, to some little literary magazine in Ohio. They threw a party over that one. She was so happy. She really is a little on the naive side. But she’s a swell kid.”

“She’d be a good writer if she’d write about what she knows,” said one young woman in a bar who claimed to have once been Sean’s lover. “But she writes these morbid fantasies about an old violet-colored house in New Orleans and a ghost who lives there—all very high-pitched, and hardly what will sell. She really ought to get away from all that rot and write about her experiences here in New York.”

Neighbors were fond of the young couple. “She can’t cook or do anything practical,” reported a female painter who lived above them, “but then why should she? She pays all the bills as it is. I asked Sean one time wherever does she get her money? He said she had a bottomless purse. All she ever had to do was reach in it. Then he laughed.”

Finally in the winter of 1940, Elaine Barrett, writing from London, urged our most responsible private investigator in New York to attempt to interview Antha. Elaine wanted desperately to go to New York herself, but it was out of the question. So she talked directly by phone to Allan Carver, a suave and sophisticated man who had worked for us for many years. Carver was a well-dressed and well-mannered gentleman of fifty. He found it a simple matter to make contact. A pleasure, in fact.

“I followed her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then happened upon her as she was sitting in front of one of the Rembrandts, just staring at it, rather lost in her thoughts. She is pretty, quite pretty, but very Bohemian. She was all wrapped up in wool that day, with her hair loose. I sat down beside her, flashed a copy of Hemingway’s short stories, and engaged her in conversation about him. Yes, she’d read Hemingway and she loved him. Did she love Rembrandt? Yes, she did. How about New York in general? Oh, she loved living here. She never wanted to be anyplace else. The city of New York was a person to her. She had never been so happy as she was now.

“There wasn’t a chance of getting her out of there with me. She was too guarded, too proper. So I made the most of it as quickly as I could.

“I got her talking about herself, her life, her husband, and her writing. Yes, she wanted to be a writer. And Sean wanted her to be. Sean wouldn’t be happy unless she was successful too. ‘You know, the only thing I can be is a writer,’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you’ve lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.’ It was all very touching actually, the way she spoke about it. She seemed altogether defenseless and absolutely genuine. I think, had I been thirty years younger, I would have fallen in love with her.

“ ‘But what kind of life did you have?’ I pressed her. ‘I can’t place your accent. But I know you’re not from New York.’

“ ‘Down south,’ she said. ‘It’s another world.’ She grew sad instantly, even agitated. ‘I want to forget all that,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve made this rule for myself. I’ll write about my past but I won’t talk about it. I’ll turn it into art if I can, but I won’t talk about it. I won’t give it life here, outside of art, if you follow what I mean.’

“I found this rather clever and interesting. I liked her. I cannot tell you how much I liked her. And you know, in my line of work, one gets so accustomed to just using people!

“ ‘Well, then tell me about what you write,’ I begged. ‘Just tell me about one of your stories for instance, assuming you write stories, or tell me about your poems.’

“ ‘If they’re any good, you’ll read them some day,’ she said, and then she gave me a parting smite and left. I think she’d become suspicious. I don’t know really. She was glancing around in a rather defensive way the whole time we talked. I even asked her at one point if she was expecting someone. She said not really, but ‘You never know.’ She acted as if she thought someone was watching her. And of course my people were watching her all the time. I felt pretty uncomfortable about it at that moment, I can tell you.”

Reports continued to pour in for months that Antha and Sean were happy. Sean, a big burly individual with an endearing sense of humor, had a one-man show in the Village which was quite a success. Antha had a short poem (seven lines) in The New Yorker. The couple were ecstatic. Only in April of 1941 did the gossip change.

“Well, she’s pregnant,” said the upstairs painter, “and he doesn’t want the baby, you know, and of course she wants it and God knows what’s going to happen. He knows a doctor who can take care of it, you see, but she won’t hear of it. I hate to see her going through this, really. She’s much too fragile. I hear her crying down there in the night.”

On July 1, Sean Lacy died in a single car accident (mechanical failure) coming back from a visit to his ailing mother in upstate New York. A hysterical Antha had to be hospitalized at Bellevue. “We just didn’t know what to do with her,” said the upstairs painter. “For eight hours straight she screamed. Finally we called Bellevue. I’ll never know if we did the right thing.”

Records at Bellevue indicate Antha stopped screaming or indeed making any sound or movement as soon as she was admitted. She remained catatonic for over a week. Then she wrote the name “Cortland Mayfair” on a slip of paper, along with the words “Attorney, New Orleans.” Cortland’s firm was contacted at ten-thirty the following morning. At once Cortland called his estranged wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, in New York and begged her to go to Bellevue and see to Antha until he could get there himself.

A horrid battle then began between Cortland and Carlotta, Cortland insisting that he should take care of Antha because Antha had sent for him. Contemporary gossip tells us Carlotta and Cortland took the train together to New York to get Antha and bring her home.

At an emotional drunken lunch, Amanda Grady Mayfair poured out the whole story to her friend (and our informant) Allan Carver, who made it a point to inquire about her old southern family and its gothic goings-on. Amanda told him all about the poor little niece in Bellevue:

“ … It was simply awful. Antha couldn’t talk. She couldn’t. She’d tried to say something and she’d simply stammer. She was so fragile. The death of Sean had destroyed her utterly. It was twenty-four hours before she wrote down the address of the apartment in Greenwich Village. I went there immediately with Ollie Mayfair, you know, one of Rémy’s grandchildren, and we got Antha’s things. Oh, it was so sad. Of course all Sean’s paintings belonged to Antha, as she was his wife, I supposed; but then the neighbors came in and they told us Antha had never married Sean. Sean’s mother and brother had already been there. They were coming back with a truck to take everything away. Seems that Sean’s mother despised Antha because she believed Antha had led her son into this Greenwich Village artist life.

“I told Ollie, well, they can have everything else but they aren’t taking the portraits of Antha. I took those and all her clothes and things, and this old velvet purse filled with gold coins. Now, I’d heard of that purse, and don’t tell me you haven’t if you know the Mayfairs. And her writings, oh, yes, her writings. I packed up all of that—her stories, and chapters of a novel, and some poems she’d written. And do you know later on I found out she’d published a poem in The New Yorker. The New Yorker. But I didn’t find out about that until my son, Pierce, told me. And he went to the library and looked it up. It was very brief, something about snow falling and the museum in the park. Not what I would call a poem, actually. Rather a little bit of life, so to speak. But she was published in The New Yorker. That is the point. It was so sad taking everything out of that apartment. You know, dismantling a life.

“When I got back to the hospital, Carlotta and Cortland were already there. They were fighting with each other in the hallway. But you had to see and hear a fight between Carl and Cort to believe it, it was all whispers, and little gestures, and tight lips. It was really something. But there they stood, talking to each other like that and I knew they were ready to kill each other.

“ ‘That girl’s pregnant you know,’ I said. ‘Did the doctors tell you?’

“ ‘She ought to get rid of it,’ Carl said. I thought Cortland was going to die. I was so shocked myself I didn’t know what to say.

“I absolutely hate Carlotta. I don’t care who knows it. I hate her. I have hated her all my life. It gives me nightmares to think of her being alone with Antha. I told Cortland right there in front of her, ‘That girl needs care.’

“But Cortland had tried to get custody of Antha, he had tried it in the very beginning, and Carlotta had threatened to fight him, to expose all kinds of things about us, she said. Oh, she is dreadful. And Cortland had given up. And I think he knew he wasn’t going to get control of Antha now. ‘Look, Antha’s a woman now,’ I said. ‘Ask her where she wants to go. If she wants to stay in New York she can stay with me. She can stay with Ollie.’ Not a chance!

“Carlotta went in to talk to those doctors. She did her routine. She managed some sort of official transfer of Antha to a mental hospital in New Orleans. She ignored Cortland as if he wasn’t even there. I got on the phone to all the cousins in New Orleans. I called everyone. I even called young Beatrice Mayfair on Esplanade Avenue—Rémy’s granddaughter. I told them that child was sick, and she was pregnant and she needed loving care.

“Then the most sad thing happened. They were taking Antha to the train station, and she gestured for me to come over to her, and she whispered in my ear. ‘Save my things for me, please, Aunt Mandy. She’ll throw them all away if you don’t,’ and to think I had already shipped all her things back home. I called my son Sheffield and told him about it. I said, ‘Sheff, do what you can for her when she gets back.’ ”

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 624