The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"Where are you, Michael?" she whispered, as she sat back again, and closed her eyes.

Twenty-two

THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

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 Ste

lla, 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.