The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

Miss Millie and Miss Belle often went shopping together on Mondays, taking a taxi from First Street to Gus Mayer or Godchaux's, the finest stores in New Orleans, where they bought their pearl gray dresses and flowered hats with veils, and other genteel accoutrements. The ladies at the cosmetic counters knew them by name. They sold them face powder and cream rouge and Christmas Night perfume. The two old women had lunch at the D.H. Holmes lunch counter before taking the taxi home. And they, and they alone, represented the First Street family at funerals, and even now and then at christenings, and even once in a while at a wedding, though they seldom went to the reception after the Nuptial Mass.

Millie and Belle even attended funerals of other persons in the parish, and would go to the wake if it was held at Lonigan and Sons, nearby. They went to the Tuesday night Novena service at the chapel, and sometimes on summer nights they brought little Deirdre with them, clucking over her proudly and feeding her little bits of chocolate during the service so that she would be quiet.

No one remembered anymore that anything had ever been "wrong" with sweet Miss Belle.

Indeed, the two old ladies easily won the goodwill and respect of the Garden District, especially among families who knew nothing of the Mayfair tragedies or secrets. The First Street house was not the only moldering mansion behind a rusted fence.

Nancy Mayfair, on the other hand, seemed to have been born and reared in an entirely different class. Her clothes were always dowdy, her brown hair unwashed and only superficially combed. It would have been easy to mistake her for a hired servant. But nobody ever questioned the story that she was Stella's sister, which of course she was not. She began to wear black string shoes when she was only thirty. Grumpily she paid the delivery boys from a worn pocketbook, or called down from the upstairs gallery to tell the peddler at the gate to go away.

It was with these women that little Deirdre spent her days when she was not struggling to pay attention in a crowded classroom, which always ended in failure and disgrace.

Over and over the parish gossips compared her to her mother. The cousins said maybe it was "congenital insanity," though honestly no one knew. But to those who observed the family more closely--even from a distance of many miles--certain differences between mother and daughter were apparent very early on.

Whereas Antha was always slender and shrinking by nature, there was something rebellious and unmistakably sensuous in Deirdre from the start. Neighbors frequently saw her running "like a tomboy" through the garden. At the age of five she could climb the great oak tree to the top. Sometimes she concealed herself in the shrubbery along the fence so that she could deliberately startle those who passed by.

At nine years old she ran away for the first time. Carlotta rang Cortland in panic; then the police were called in. Finally a cold and shivering Deirdre showed up on the front porch of St. Elizabeth's Orphanage on Napoleon Avenue, telling the sisters that she was "cursed" and "possessed of the devil." They had to call a priest for her. Cortland came with Carlotta to take her home.

"Overactive imagination," said Carlotta. It was to become a stock phrase.

A year later, police found Deirdre wandering in a rainstorm along the Bayou St. John, shivering and crying, and saying she was afraid to go home. For two hours she told the police lies about her name and background. She was a gypsy who had come to town with a circus. Her mother had been murdered by the animal trainer. She had tried to "commit suicide with rare poison" but had been taken to a hospital in Europe where they drew all the blood out of her veins.

"There was something so sad about that child and so crazy," said the officer afterwards to our investigator. "She was absolutely in earnest and the wildest look would come into her blue eyes. She didn't even look up when her uncle and her aunt came to get her. She pretended she didn't know them. Then she said they kept her chained in an upstairs room."

At ten years of age, Deirdre was packed off to Ireland, to a boarding school recommended by an Irish-born priest at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Father Jason Power. Family gossip said it was Cortland's idea.

"Grandfather wanted to get her away from there," Ryan Mayfair gossiped later.

But the sisters in County Cork sent Deirdre home within the month.

For two years Deirdre studied with a governess named Miss Lampton, an old friend of Carlotta's from the Sacred Heart. Miss Lampton told Beatrice Mayfair (on Esplanade Avenue downtown) that Deirdre was a charming girl, and very bright indeed. "She has too much imagination, that is all that's wrong with her, and she spends much too much time alone." When Miss Lampton moved north to marry a widower she'd met during his summer vacation, Deirdre cried for days.

Even during these years there were quarrels at First Street, however. People heard shouting. Deirdre frequently ran out of the house crying. She would climb the oak tree until she was well out of the reach of Irene or Miss Lampton. Sometimes she stayed up there until after dark.

But with adolescence a change came over Deirdre. She became withdrawn, secretive, no longer the tomboy. At thirteen she was far more voluptuous than Antha had been as a grown woman. She wore her black wavy hair long and parted in the middle, and held back by a bit of lavender ribbon. Her large blue eyes looked perpetually distrustful and faintly bitter. Indeed, the child had a bruised look to her, said the parish gossips who saw her at Sunday Mass.

"She was already a beautiful woman," said one of the matrons who went to the chapel regularly. "And those old ladies didn't know it. They dressed her as if she were still a child."

Legal gossip revealed other problems. One afternoon Deirdre rushed into the waiting room outside Cortland's office.

"She was hysterical," said the secretary later. "For an hour she screamed and cried in there with her uncle. And I'll tell you something else, something I didn't even notice till she was leaving. She wasn't wearing matching shoes! She had on one brown loafer and one black flat shoe. I don't think she ever realized it. Cortland took her home. I don't know that he noticed it either. I never saw her after that."

In the summer before Deirdre's fourteenth birthday, she was rushed to the new Mercy Hospital. She had tried to slash her wrists. Beatrice went to see her.

"That girl has a spirit that Antha simply didn't have," she told Juliette Milton. "But she needs womanly advice on things. She wanted me to buy her cosmetics. She said she's only been in a drugstore once in her entire life."

Beatrice brought the cosmetics to the hospital, only to be told that Carlotta had put a stop to all visits. When Beatrice called Cortland, he confessed he didn't know why Deirdre had slit her wrists. "Maybe she just wanted to get out of that house."

That very week, Cortland arranged for Deirdre to go to California. She flew to Los Angeles to stay with Garland's daughter, Andrea Mayfair, who had married a doctor on the staff of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. But Deirdre was home again at the end of two weeks.

The Los Angeles Mayfairs said nothing to anyone about what happened, but years afterwards their only son, Elton, told investigators that his poor cousin from New Orleans was crazy. That she had believed herself to be cursed by some sort of legacy, that she had talked of suicide to him, horrifying his parents. That they had taken her to see doctors who said she would never be normal.

"My parents wanted to help her, especially my mother. But the entire family was disrupted. I think what really finished it however was that they saw her out in the backyard one night with a man, and she wouldn't admit to it. She kept denying it. And they were afraid something would happen. She was thirteen, I believe, and very pretty. They sent her home."

Beatrice recounted pretty much the same story to Juliette Milton. "I think Deirdre looks too mature," she said. But she wouldn't believe Deirdre had lied about male companions. "She's confused." And Beatrice was adamant that there was no congenital insanity. That was just a family legend that Carlotta had started, and one which really ought to be stopped.

Beatrice went up to First Street to see Deirdre and take her some pr

esents. Nancy wouldn't let her in.

The same mysterious male companion was responsible for Deirdre's most traumatic expulsion from St. Rose de Lima boarding school when she was sixteen. Deirdre had attended the school for a full semester without mishap, and was in the middle of the spring term when the incident occurred. Family gossip said Deirdre had been blissfully happy at St. Ro's, that she had told Cortland she never wanted to go home. Even over Christmas, Deirdre had remained at the boarding school, only going out with Cortland for an early supper on Christmas Eve.

Yet she loved the swings in the back play yard, which were big enough for the older children, and at twilight she would sing songs there with another girl, Rita Mae Dwyer (later Lonigan), who remembered Deirdre as a rare and special person, elegant and innocent; romantic and sweet.

As recently as 1988, more data was obtained about this expulsion directly from Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan in a conversation with this investigator.

Deirdre's "mysterious friend" met her in the nuns' garden in the moonlight, and spoke softly but audibly enough for Rita Mae to hear. "He called her 'my beloved,' " Rita Mae told me. She had never heard such romantic words spoken except in a movie.

Defenseless and sobbing bitterly, Deirdre did not utter a word when the nuns accused her of "bringing a man onto the school grounds." They had spied upon Deirdre and her male companion, peering through the slats of the convent kitchen into the garden where the two met in the dark. "This was no boy," said one of the nuns in a rage afterwards to the assembled boarders. "This was a man! A grown man!"