The witching hour

Twenty-two

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Antha 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.’ ”

Antha traveled back to Louisiana by train with her uncle and her aunt, and was immediately committed to St. Ann’s Asylum, where she remained for six weeks. Numerous Mayfair cousins came to see her. Family gossip indicated she was pale and at times incoherent but that she was coming along just fine.

In New York, our investigator Allan Carver arranged another chance meeting with Amanda Grady Mayfair. “How is the little niece coming along?”

“Oh, I could tell you the worst story!” said Amanda Grady Mayfair. “You cannot imagine. Do you know that girl’s aunt told the doctors in the asylum she wanted them to abort the girl’s baby? That she was congenitally insane and must never be allowed to have a child? Have you ever heard anything worse? When my husband told me that I told him if you don’t do something now, I’ll never forgive you. Of course he said no one was going to hurt that baby. The doctors weren’t going to do such a thing, not for Carlotta, not for anyone. Then when I called Beatrice Mayfair on Esplanade Avenue and told her all about it, Cortland was furious. ‘Don’t get everybody up in arms,’ he said. But that is exactly what I meant to do. I told Bea, ‘Go see her. Don’t let anyone keep you out.’ ”

The Talamasca has never been able to corroborate the story about the proposed abortion. But nurses at St. Ann’s later told our investigators that scores of Mayfair cousins came to see Antha at the asylum.

“They are not taking no for an answer,” Irwin Dandrich wrote. “They insist upon seeing her, and by all reports she is doing well. She is excited about her baby, and of course they have deluged her with presents. Her young cousin, Beatrice, brought her some antique lace baby clothes that had once belonged to somebody’s Great-aunt Suzette. Of course, it is common knowledge here that Antha never married the New York artist; but then what does it matter when your name is Mayfair, and Mayfair it will always be.”

The cousins proved just as aggressive after Antha was released from St. Ann’s and came home to First Street to convalesce in Stella’s old bedroom on the north side of the house. She had nurses with her round the clock, and obtaining information from them proved very simple for our investigators.

The place was described as “insufferably dreary.” But Millie Dear and Belle took excellent care of Antha. In fact, they didn’t leave the nurses much to do at all. Millie Dear sat with Antha all the time on the little upstairs porch outside her bedroom. And Belle knitted beautiful clothes for the baby.

Cortland stopped by every evening after work. “The lady of the house didn’t want him there, I don’t believe,” said one of the nurses. “But he came. Without fail he came. He and another young gentleman, I believe his name was Sheffield. They sat with the patient every night for a little while and talked.”

Family gossip said that Sheffield had read some of Antha’s writings from the New York days, and that Antha was “very good.” The nurses talked about the boxes from New York-crates of books and papers, which Antha examined but was too weak in general to truly unpack.

“I don’t really see anything mentally wrong with her,” said one of the nurses. “The aunt takes us out in the hallway and asks us the strangest questions. She implies the girl is congenitally insane, and may harm someone. But the doctors didn’t say anything to us about it. She’s a quiet, melancholy girl. She looks and sounds much younger than she is. But she’s not what I would call insane.”

Deirdre Mayfair was born on October 4, 1941, at the old Mercy Hospital on the river, which was later torn down. Apparently the birth presented no particular difficulty, and Antha was heavily anesthetized as was the custom in those days. Mayfairs packed the corridors of the hospital during visiting hours for the entire five days that Antha was there. Her room was full of flowers. The baby was a beautiful healthy little girl.

But the flow of information, so dramatically increased with the involvement of Amanda Grady Mayfair, came to an abrupt halt two weeks after Antha returned home. The cousins found themselves turned away by the black maid, Aunt Easter, or by Nancy when they came for their second and third visits. Indeed, Nancy had quit her job as a file clerk to take care of the baby (“Or to lock us out!” said Beatrice to Amanda long distance) and she was adamant that the mother and the baby not be disturbed.

When Beatrice called to inquire about the christening, she was told the baby had already been baptized at St. Alphonsus. Outraged, she called Amanda in New York. Some twenty of the cousins “crashed” the house on a Sunday afternoon.

“Antha was overjoyed to see them!” said Amanda to Allan Carver. “She was simply thrilled. She had no idea they’d been calling and dropping by. No one had even told her. She didn’t know people gave parties for a christening. Carlotta had arranged everything. She was hurt when she realized what had happened, and everyone changed the subject at once. But Beatrice was furious with Nancy. But Nancy is just doing what Carlotta told her to do.”

On October 30 of that year, Antha was officially declared the recipient and full manager of the Mayfair legacy. She signed a power of attorney naming Cortland and Sheffield Mayfair as her legal representatives in all matters concerning the money; and she requested that they immediately establish a large trust for the management of the “restoration” of the First Street house. She expressed concern about the condition of the entire property.

Legal gossip says that Antha was stunned to discover that she owned the place. She had never had the slightest idea. She wanted to redecorate, paint, restore everything.

Carlotta was not at Antha’s meeting with her uncles. Carlotta had demanded of the law firm of Mayfair and Mayfair that they provide her with a complete audit on behalf of Antha of everything that had been done since Stella’s death, saying that the present records were inadequate, and she refused to participate in any sort of legal discussion until she received this audit “for review.”

Sheffield told his mother, Amanda, later, that Antha had been deliberately misled with regard to the legacy. She seemed hurt and even a little shocked as things were explained to her. And it was Carlotta who had hurt her. But all she would say was that Carlotta had probably had her good in mind all along.

The party went for a late lunch at Galatoire’s to celebrate. Antha was nervous about leaving the baby, but she seemed to have a good time. As they were leaving, Sheffield heard her ask his father the following question: “Then you mean she couldn’t have thrown me out of the house if she had wanted to? She couldn’t have put me on the street?”

“It’s your house, ma chérie,” Cortland told her. “She has permission to live there, but that is subject entirely to your approval.”

Antha looked so sad. “She used to threaten me,” she said under her breath. “She used to say she’d put me in the street if I didn’t do what she said.”

Cortland then took Antha away from the party and drove her home alone.

Antha and the baby went to lunch a few days later with Beatrice Mayfair at another fashionable French Quarter restaurant. A nurse was on hand to take the baby walking in its beautiful white wicker buggy while the two women enjoyed their wine and fish. When Beatrice described it all to Amanda later she told her Antha had really become a young woman. Antha was writing again. She was working on a novel, and she was going to have the First Street house completely fixed up.

She wanted to repair the swimming pool. She talked about her mother a little, how her mother had loved to give big parties. She seemed full of life.

Indeed, several contractors were approached to give estimates for “a complete restoration, including painting, carpentry repairs and some masonry work.” Neighbors were delighted to hear this from the servants. Dandrich wrote that a distinguished architectural firm had been consulted about rebuilding the carriage house.

Antha wrote a brief letter to Amanda Grady Mayfair in mid-November, thanking her for her help in New York. She thanked her for forwarding the mail from Greenwich Village. She said that she was writing short stories, and working on her novel again.

When Mr. Bordreaux, the mailman, passed on his regular rounds at nine A.M. on December 10, Antha was waiting for him at the gate. She had several large manila envelopes ready to go to New York. Could she buy the postage from him? They made a guess at the weight-she said she couldn’t leave the baby to go to the post office-and he took the packages with him. Antha also gave him a bundle of regular mail for various New York addresses.

“She was all excited,” he said. “She was going to be a writer. Such a sweet girl. And I’ll never forget. I made some remark about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that my son had enlisted the day before, and now we were in the war at last. And do you know? She’d never heard a thing about it. She didn’t even know about the bombing, or the war. Just like she was living in a dream.”

The “sweet girl” died that very afternoon. When the same postman came around with the afternoon mail at three-thirty, there was a cloudburst over that area of the Garden District. It was raining “cats and dogs.” Yet a crowd was assembled in the Mayfair garden, and the undertaker’s wagon was in the middle of the street. The wind was blowing “something fierce.” Mr. Bordreaux hung around in spite of the weather.

“Miss Belle was on the porch sobbing. And Miss Millie tried to tell me what was happening but she couldn’t say a word. Then Miss Nancy came to the edge of the porch and shouted at me. ‘You go on, Mr. Bordreaux. We’ve had a death here. You go on and get out of the rain.’ ”

Mr. Bordreaux crossed the street and sought shelter on the porch of a neighboring house. The housekeeper told him through the screen door that it was Antha Mayfair who was dead. She’d apparently fallen from the third-floor porch roof.

The storm was terrible, said the mailman, a regular hurricane. Yet he remained to watch as a body was put into the undertaker’s wagon. Red Lonigan was there, with his cousin Leroy Lonigan. Then the wagon drove away. Finally Mr. Bordreaux went back to delivering the mail, and very soon, about the time he reached Prytania Street, the weather had cleared up. When he passed the next day the sidewalk was littered with leaves.

Over the years, the Talamasca has collected numerous stories connected with Antha’s death, but what actually happened on the afternoon of December 10, 1941, may never be known. Mr. Bordreaux was the last “outsider” ever to see or speak with Antha. The baby’s nurse, an elderly woman named Alice Flanagan, had called in sick that day.

What is known from the police records and from guarded talk emanating from the Lonigan family and the priests of the parish is that Antha jumped or fell from the porch roof outside the attic window of Julien’s old room some time before three P.M.

Carlotta’s story, gleaned from these same sources, was as follows:

She had been arguing with the girl about the baby, because Antha had deteriorated to such a point that she was not even feeding the child.

“She was in no way prepared to be a mother,” said Miss Carlotta to the police officer. Antha spent hours typing letters and stories and poetry, and Nancy and the others had to beat on the door of the room to make her realize that Deirdre was crying in the cradle and needed to be given a bottle or nursed.

Antha became “hysterical” during this last argument. She ran up the two flights of steps to the attic, screaming to be left alone. Carlotta, fearing that Antha would hurt herself-which she often did, according to Carlotta-pursued her into Julien’s old room. There Carlotta discovered that Antha had tried to scratch her own eyes out, and indeed had succeeded in drawing considerable blood.

When Carlotta tried to control her, Antha broke away, falling backwards through the window, and onto the roof of the cast-iron porch. She apparently crawled to the edge of it, and then lost her balance or deliberately jumped. She died instantly when her head struck the flagstones three stories below.

Cortland was beside himself when he learned of his niece’s death. He went immediately to First Street. What he told his wife in New York later was that Carlotta was absolutely distraught. The priest was with her, a Father Kevin, from the Redemptorist Parish. Carlotta said over and over that nobody understood how fragile Antha had been. “I tried to stop her!” Carlotta said. “What in the name of God was I expected to do!” Millie Dear and Belle were too upset to talk about it. Belle seemed to be confusing it all with the death of Stella. Only Nancy had frankly disagreeable things to say, complaining that Antha had been spoiled and sheltered all her life, that her head was full of silly dreams.

When Alice Flanagan, the nurse, was contacted by Cortland, she seemed afraid. She was elderly, and partially blind. She said she didn’t know anything about Antha’s ever hurting herself or becoming hysterical or anything like that. She took her orders from Miss Carlotta. Miss Carlotta had been good to her family. Miss Flanagan didn’t want to lose her job. “I just want to take care of that darling baby,” she told the police. “That darling baby needs me now.”

Indeed she took care of Deirdre Mayfair until the girl was five years old.

Finally, Cortland told Beatrice and Amanda to leave Carlotta in peace. Carlotta was the only witness to what had happened. And whatever had gone on that afternoon, surely Antha’s death had been a terrible accident. What could anyone do?

No true investigation followed the death of Antha. There had been no autopsy. When the undertaker became suspicious after examining the corpse and concluding that Antha’s facial scratches were not self-inflicted, he contacted the family doctor and was advised or told to let the matter drop. Antha was insane, that was the unofficial verdict. All her life she had been unstable. She had been committed to Bellevue and St. Ann’s Asylum. She had depended upon others to care for her and her child.

After Stella’s death, the Mayfair emerald was never mentioned in connection with Antha. No relative or friend ever reported seeing it. Sean Lacy never painted Antha with it. No one in New York had ever heard of it.

But when Antha died she had the emerald around her neck.

The question is obvious. Why was Antha wearing the emerald on that day of all days? Was it the wearing of the emerald that precipitated the fatal argument? And if the scratch marks on Antha’s face were not self-inflicted, did Carlotta try to scratch out Antha’s eyes, and if so why?

Whatever the case, the house on First Street was once again shrouded in secrecy. Antha’s plans for a restoration were never carried out. After furious arguments in the offices of Mayfair and Mayfair-Carlotta stormed out once, actually breaking the glass on the door-Cortland went so far as to petition the court for custody of baby Deirdre. Clay Mayfair’s grandson Alexander also came forward. He and his wife, Eileen, had a lovely mansion in Metairie. They could officially adopt the child or just take her informally, whatever Carlotta would allow.

Amanda Grady Mayfair told our undercover society man, Allan Carver, “Cortland wants me to go home to take care of the baby. I tell you I feel so sorry for that baby. But I can’t go back to New Orleans after all these years.”

Carlotta all but laughed in the face of these “do-gooders,” as she called them. She told the judge and indeed anyone in the family who asked her that Antha had been gravely ill. It was a congenital insanity, without question, and might well surface in Antha’s little girl. She had no intention of allowing anyone to take Deirdre out of her mother’s house, or away from darling Miss Flanagan, or from dear sweet Belle, or darling Millie, all of whom adored the child, and had time on their hands to care for her day in and day out as no one else could.

When Cortland refused to back down, Carlotta threatened him directly. His wife had left him, hadn’t she? Wouldn’t the family like to know after all these years just what sort of a man Cortland was? Cousins pondered her slurs and innuendoes. The judge in the case became “impatient.” To his mind, Carlotta Mayfair was a woman of impeccable virtue and excellent judgment. Why couldn’t this family accept the situation? Good Lord, if every orphan baby had aunts as sweet as Millie and Belle and Carlotta, this would be a better world.

The legacy was left in the hands of Mayfair and Mayfair, and the child was left in the hands of Carlotta. And the matter was abruptly closed.

Only one other assault on Carlotta’s authority was ever attempted. It was in 1945.

Cornell Mayfair, one of the New York cousins and a descendant of Lestan, had just finished his residency at Massachusetts General. He was training to be a psychiatrist. He had heard “incredible stories” about the First Street house from his cousin (by marriage) Amanda Grady Mayfair. And also from Louisa Ann Mayfair, Garland’s eldest granddaughter who went to Radcliffe and had an affair with Cornell while she was there. What was all this talk of congenital insanity? Cornell was fascinated. Also he was still in love with Louisa Ann, who had gone back to New Orleans rather than marry him and live in Massachusetts, and he could not understand the girl’s devotion to her home. He wanted to visit New Orleans and the family at First Street, and the New York cousins thought it was a good idea.

“Who knows?” he told Amanda over lunch at the Waldorf. “Maybe I’ll like the city, and maybe Louisa Ann and I can somehow work things out.”

On February 11, Cornell came to New Orleans, checking into a downtown hotel. He begged Carlotta to talk to him and she agreed to let him come uptown.

As he later told Amanda by long distance, he remained at the house for perhaps two hours, visiting with little four-year-old Deirdre alone for some of that time. “I can’t tell you what I’ve found out,” he said. “But that child has to be removed from this environment. And frankly I don’t want Louisa Ann involved. I’ll tell you the whole thing when I get back to New York.”

Amanda insisted that he call Cortland, that he tell Cortland all about his concerns. Cornell confessed that Louisa Ann had suggested the same thing.

“I don’t want to do that just now,” said Cornell. “I’ve just had a bellyful of Carlotta. I don’t want to meet any more of these people this afternoon.”

Trusting that Cortland could be of help, Amanda called him and told him what was going on. Cortland appreciated Dr. Mayfair’s interest. He called Amanda later that afternoon to tell her he had made an appointment with Cornell for dinner at Kolb’s downtown. He’d call her after they had talked together, but as things stood now, he liked the young doctor. He was eager to hear what he had to say.

Cornell never kept the appointment for dinner. Cortland waited for an hour at Kolb’s Restaurant and then rang Cornell’s room. No answer. The following morning, the hotel maid found Cornell’s dead body. He lay fully dressed on a rumpled bed, eyes half open, a half full glass of bourbon on the table at his side. No immediate cause of death could be found.

When an autopsy was performed, at the behest of Cornell’s mother as well as the New Orleans coroner, Cornell was found to have a small amount of a strong narcotic, mixed with alcohol, in his veins. It was ruled an accidental overdose and never investigated further. Amanda Grady Mayfair never forgave herself for sending young Dr. Cornell Mayfair to New Orleans. Louisa Ann “never recovered” and is to this day unmarried. A distraught Cortland accompanied the coffin back to New York.

Was Cornell a casualty of the Mayfair Witches? Once more we are forced to say that we do not know. One detail, however, gives us some indication that Cornell did not die from the small amount of narcotic and alcohol in his blood. The coroner who examined Cornell’s body before it was removed from the hotel room noted that Cornell’s eyes were full of hemorrhaged blood vessels. We now know that this is a symptom of asphyxiation. It is possible that someone severely disabled Cornell by slipping a drug into his drink (bourbon was found in the glass on the table), and then smothered him with a pillow when he could not defend himself.

By the time the Talamasca attempted to investigate this case (through a reputable private detective), the trail was cold. No one at the hotel could remember if Cornell Mayfair had had any callers that afternoon. Had he ordered his bourbon from room service? No one had ever asked these questions before. Fingerprints? None had been taken. After all, this wasn’t a murder …

But it is now time to turn to Deirdre Mayfair, the present heiress of the Mayfair legacy, orphaned at the age of two months and left in the hands of her aging aunts.

Deirdre Mayfair

The First Street house continued to deteriorate after Antha’s death. The swimming pool had by this time become a rank swamp pond of duckweed and wild irises, its rusted fountain jets spewing green water into the muck. Shutters were once again bolted on the windows of the northside master bedroom. The paint continued to peel from the violet-gray masonry walls.

Elderly Miss Flanagan, almost completely blind in her last year, cared for little Deirdre until just before the child’s fifth birthday. Now and then she took the baby walking around the block in a wicker buggy, but she never crossed the street.

Cortland came on Christmas. He drank sherry in the long front parlor with Millie Dear and Belle and Nancy.

“I told them I wasn’t going to be turned away this time,” he explained to his son Pierce, who later told his mother. “No, sir. I was going to see that child with my own eyes on her birthday and on Christmas. I was going to hold her in my arms.” He made similar statements to his secretaries at Mayfair and Mayfair, who often bought the presents which Cortland took uptown.

Years later, Cortland’s grandson Ryan Mayfair talked about it to a sympathetic “acquaintance” at a wedding reception:

“My grandfather hated to go up there. Our place in Metairie was always so cheerful. My father said that Grandfather would come home crying. When Deirdre was three years old, Grandfather made them get their first Christmas tree in all those years. He took a package of ornaments up there for it. He bought the lights at Katz and Bestoff and put them on himself. It’s so hard to imagine people living in that sort of gloom. I wish I had really known my grandfather. He was born in that house. Think of it. And his father, Julien, had been born before the Civil War.”

Cortland, by this point in time, had become the image of his father, Julien. Pictures of him even as late as the mid-1950s show him as a tall, slender man with black hair, and gray only at the temples. His heavily lined face was remarkably like that of his father, except for the fact that his eyes were much larger, reminiscent of Stella’s eyes, though he had Julien’s agreeable expression, and frequently Julien’s cheerful smile.

By all accounts Cortland’s family loved him; his employees veritably worshiped him; and though Amanda Grady Mayfair had left him years before, even she seems to have always loved him, or so she told Allan Carver in New York the year she died. Amanda cried on Allan’s shoulder about the fact that her sons never understood why she had left their father, and she had no intention of telling them, either.

Ryan Mayfair, who knew his grandfather Cortland only briefly, was absolutely devoted to him. To him and his father, Cortland was a hero. He could never understand how his grandmother could “defect” to New York.

What was Deirdre like during this early period? We are unable to discover a single account of her in the first five years, except the legend in Cortland’s family that she was a very pretty little girl.

Her black hair was fine and wavy, like that of Stella. Her blue eyes were large and dark.

But the First Street house was once more closed to the outside world. A generation of passersby had become accustomed to its hopelessly forbidding and neglected facade. Once again, workmen couldn’t complete repairs on the premises. A roofer fell off his ladder twice and then refused to come back. Only the old gardener and his son came willingly to now and then cut the weed-infested grass.

As people in the parish died, certain legends concerning the Mayfairs died with them. Other stories became so miserably transformed by time as to be unrecognizable. New investigators replaced old investigators. Soon no one questioned about the Mayfairs mentioned the names of Julien or Katherine or Rémy or Suzette.

Julien’s son Barclay died in 1949, his brother Garland in 1951. Cortland’s son Grady died the same year as Garland, after a fall from a horse in Audubon Park. His mother, Amanda Grady Mayfair, died only shortly after, as if the death of her beloved Grady was more than she could take. Of Pierce’s two sons, only Ryan Mayfair “knows the family history” and regales the younger cousins-many of whom know nothing-with strange tales.

Irwin Dandrich died in 1952. However, his role had been already filled by another “society investigator,” a woman named Juliette Milton, who collected numerous stories over the years from Beatrice Mayfair and the other downtown cousins, many of whom lunched with Juliette regularly and did not seem to mind that she was a gossip who told them everything about everybody and told everybody everything about them. Like Dandrich, Juliette was not a particularly vicious person. Indeed, she doesn’t even seem to have been unkind. She loved melodrama, however, and wrote incredibly long letters to our lawyers in London, who paid her an annual amount equal to the annuity which had once been her sole support.

As was the case with Dandrich, Juliette never knew to whom she was supplying all this information about the Mayfairs. And though she broached the subject at least once a year, she never pressed.

In 1953, as I began my full-time translation of Petyr van Abel’s letters, I read the contemporary reports regarding twelve-year-old Deirdre as they poured in. I sent the investigators after every scrap of information. “Dig,” I said. “Tell me all about her from the very beginning. There is nothing I do not want to know.” I called Juliette Milton personally. I told her I would pay well for anything extra she could turn up.

During the early years at least Deirdre had followed in the footsteps of her mother, being expelled from one school after another for her “antics” and “strange behavior,” her disruption of the classes, and strange crying fits for which nothing could be done.

Once more Sister Bridget Marie, then in her sixties, saw the “invisible friend” in action in the St. Alphonsus school yard, finding things for little Deirdre and making flowers fly through the air. Sacred Heart, Ursulines, St. Joseph’s, Our Lady of the Angels-they all expelled little Deirdre within a couple of weeks. For months at a time, the child stayed home. Neighbors saw her “running wild” in the garden, or climbing the big oak tree on the back of the lot.

There was no real staff anymore at First Street. Aunt Easter’s daughter Irene did all the cooking and the cleaning thoroughly but steadily. Every morning she swept the pavements or the banquettes as they were called. Three o’clock saw her ringing out her mop at the tap by the rear garden gate.

Nancy Mayfair was the actual housekeeper, managing things in a brusque and offensive manner, or so said deliverymen and priests who now and then came to call.

Millie Dear and Belle, both picturesque if not beautiful old women, tended the few roses growing by the side porch which had been saved from the wilderness that now covered the property from the front fence to the back wall.

All the family appeared for nine o’clock Mass on Sundays at the chapel, little Deirdre a picture in her navy blue sailor dress and straw hat with its ribbons, Carlotta in her dark business suit and high-necked blouse, and the old ladies, Millie Dear and Belle, exquisitely attired in their black high string shoes, gabardine dresses with lace, and dark gloves.

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 presents. 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!”

The record from the period is almost vicious in its condemnations. “The girl is deceitful. She allowed the man to touch her indecently. Her innocence is a complete facade.”

There can be no doubt that this mysterious companion was Lasher. He is described by the nuns, and later by Mrs. Lonigan, as having brown hair and brown eyes, and beautiful old-fashioned clothes.

But the remarkable point is that Rita Mae Lonigan, unless she is exaggerating, actually heard Lasher speak.

Other startling information given us by Mrs. Lonigan is that Deirdre had the Mayfair emerald in her possession at the boarding school, that she showed it to Rita Mae, and showed her a word engraved on the back of it: “Lasher.” If Rita Mae’s story is true, Deirdre knew little about her mother or her grandmother. She understood that the emerald had come to her from these women, but she did not even know how Stella or Antha had died.

It was common knowledge in the family in 1956 that Deirdre was crushed by her expulsion from St. Rose de Lima’s. She was admitted to St. Ann’s Asylum for six weeks. Though the records have proved unobtainable, nurses gossiped that Deirdre begged for shock treatment, and was given it twice. She was at this point almost seventeen.

From what we know of medical practice at this period, we can safely conclude that these treatments involved a higher voltage than is common now; they were probably very dangerous, resulting in a loss of memory for hours if not days.

Why a whole course was not pursued as was the custom we do not know. Cortland was dead set against the shock treatment, or so he told Beatrice Mayfair. He couldn’t believe in something so drastic for one so young.

“What is wrong with that girl?” Juliette asked Beatrice finally, to which Beatrice answered, “Nobody knows, darling. Nobody knows.”

Carlotta brought Deirdre home from the asylum, and there she languished for another month.

Relentless canvassing by our investigators indicated that a dark shadowy figure was often seen with Deirdre in the garden. A deliveryman from Solari’s grocery was “scared out of his wits” as he was leaving the property when he saw “that wild-eyed girl and that man” in the tall bamboo thicket by the old pool.

A spinster who lived on Prytania Street saw the pair in the chapel after dark. “I told Miss Belle. I stopped by the gate the following morning. I didn’t think it was quite proper. It had happened in the evening, just after dark. I went into the chapel to light a candle and say my rosary as I always do, and there she was in a back pew with this man. I could scarcely see them at first. I was a little frightened. Then when she got up and hurried out I saw her clearly under the street lamp. It was Deirdre Mayfair. I don’t know what happened to the young man.”

Several other persons reported similar sightings. The images were always the same-Deirdre and the mysterious young man in the shadows. Deirdre and the mysterious young man flushed from their place, or peering out at the stranger in an unsettling manner. We have fifteen different variations on these two themes.

Some of these stories reached Beatrice on Esplanade Avenue. “I don’t know if anyone is watching out for her. And she is so … so well developed physically,” she told Juliette. Juliette went with Beatrice to First Street.

“The girl was wandering in the garden. Beatrice went up to the fence and called to her. For a few minutes she didn’t seem to know who Bea was. Then she went to get the key to the gate. Of course Bea did all the talking after that. But the girl is shockingly beautiful. It has to do with the strangeness of her personality as much as anything else. She seems wild and deeply suspicious of people, and at the same time keenly interested in things about her. She fell in love with a cameo I was wearing. I gave it to her, and she was absolutely childlike in her delight. I hesitate to add that she was barefoot and wearing a filthy cotton dress.”

As fell came on, there were more reports of fights and screaming. Neighbors went so far as to call the police on two different occasions. Of the first occasion in September I was personally able, two years later, to obtain a full account.

“I didn’t like going there,” the officer told me. “You know, bothering these Garden District families just isn’t my line. And that lady really put us through it at the front door. It was Carlotta Mayfair, the one they call Miss Carl; the one who works for the judge.

“ ‘Who called you here? What do you want? Who are you? Let me see your identification. I’ll have to talk to Judge Byrnes about this if you come here again.’ Finally my partner said that people had heard the young lady in the house screaming, and we would like to talk to her and make certain for ourselves she was all right. I thought Miss Carl was going to kill him on the spot. But she went and got the young girl, Deirdre Mayfair, the one they talk about. She was crying and shaking all over. She said to my partner, C. J., ‘You make her give me my mother’s things. She took my mother’s things.’

“Miss Carl said she had had enough of this ‘intrusion,’ that this was a family argument and the police weren’t needed here. If we didn’t leave, she’d call Judge Byrnes. Then this girl, Deirdre, ran out of the house and towards the squad car. ‘Take me away!’ she screamed.

“Then something happened to Miss Carl. She was looking at the girl standing at the curb by our squad car, and she started prying. She tried to hide it. She took out her handkerchief and covered her face. But we could see, the lady was crying. The girl really had the lady at her wit’s ends.

“C. J. said, ‘Miss Carl, what do you want us to do?’ She went past him down to the sidewalk, and she laid her hand on the girl and she said, ‘Deirdre, do you want to go back to the asylum? Please, Deirdre. Please.’ And then she just broke down. She couldn’t talk. The girl stared at her, all wild-eyed and crazy, and then she broke into sobs. And Miss Carl put her arm around the girl and took her back up the steps and inside.”

“Are you sure it was Carl?” I asked the officer.

“Oh, yeah, everybody knows her. Boy, I’ll never forget her. She called the captain the next day and tried to have C. J. and me fired.”

A different squad car answered the neighbor’s call a week later. All we know of this occasion is that Deirdre was trying to leave the house when the police arrived; they persuaded her to sit down on the porch steps and wait until her Uncle Cortland arrived.

Deirdre ran away the following day. Legal gossip reports of numerous phone calls back and forth, of Cortland rushing up to First Street, and Mayfair and Mayfair calling the New York cousins in search for Deirdre as they had when Antha disappeared years before.

Amanda Grady Mayfair was dead. Dr. Cornell Mayfair’s mother, Rosalind Mayfair, wanted nothing to do with “the First Street crowd” as she called them. Nevertheless she called the other New York cousins. Then the police contacted Cortland in New Orleans. Deirdre had been found wandering around barefoot and incoherent in Greenwich Village. There was some evidence that she had been raped. Cortland flew to New York that night. The following morning he brought Deirdre back with him.

The repeat of history came full circle with Deirdre’s second commitment to St. Ann’s Asylum. A week later she was released, and went to live with Cortland in his old family home in Metairie.

Family gossip described Carlotta as beaten down and discouraged. She told Judge Byrnes and his wife that she had failed with her niece. She feared the girl would “never be normal.”

When Beatrice Mayfair went to call on Carlotta one Saturday, she found her sitting alone in the parlor at First Street with all the curtains drawn. Carlotta wouldn’t talk.

“I realized later she had been staring at the very spot where they put the coffin in the old days when the funerals were still at home. All she said to me was yes or no, or hmmmm when I asked her questions. Finally that horrible Nancy came in and offered me some iced tea. She acted put upon when I accepted. I told her I would get it myself and she said, oh, no Aunt Carl wouldn’t have that.”

When Beatrice had had her fill of sadness and rudeness she left. She went out to Metairie to visit Deirdre at Cortland’s house on Country Club Lane.

This house had been in the Mayfair family since Cortland built it when he was a young man. A brick mansion with white columns and French windows and every “modern convenience,” it later passed to Ryan Mayfair, Pierce’s son, who lives there now. For years Sheffield and Eugenie Mayfair shared it with Cortland. Their only child, Ellie Mayfair, the woman who later adopted Deirdre’s daughter, Rowan, was born in this house.

At this period, Sheffield Mayfair had already died of a heart attack; Eugenie had been gone for years. Ellie lived in California, where she had just gotten married to a lawyer named Graham Franklin. And Cortland lived in the Metairie mansion on his own.

By all reports, the house was extremely cheerful, filled with bright colors, gay wallpaper, traditional furnishings, and books. Numerous French doors opened to the garden, the pool, and the front lawn.

The entire family seems to have thought it was the best place for Deirdre. Metairie had none of the gloom of the Garden District. Cortland assured Beatrice that Deirdre was resting, that the girl’s problems had been compounded by a lot of secrecy and bad judgment on the part of Carlotta.

“But he won’t really tell me what’s happening,” Beatrice complained to Juliette. “He never does. What does he mean, secrecy?”

Beatrice queried the maid by phone whenever she could. Deirdre was just fine, said the maid. The girl’s color was excellent. She had even had a guest, a very nice-looking young man. The maid had only seen him for a second or two-he and Deirdre had been out in the garden-but he was a handsome, gentlemanly sort of young man.

“Now, who could that be?” Beatrice wondered over lunch with Juliette Milton. “Not that same scoundrel who sneaked into the nuns’ garden to bother her at St. Ro’s!”

“Seems to me,” wrote Juliette to her London contact, “that this family does not realize this girl has a lover. I mean one lover-one very distinguished and easily recognized lover, who is seen in her company over and over. All the descriptions of this young man are the same!”

The significant, thing about this story is that Juliette Milton had never heard any rumors about ghosts, witches, curses, or the like associated with the Mayfair family. She and Beatrice truly believed this mysterious person was a human being.

Yet at the very same time, in the Irish Channel old people gossiped over kitchen tables about “Deirdre and the man.” And by “the man,” they did not mean a human being. The elderly sister of Father Lafferty knew about “the man.” She tried to talk to her brother about it; but he would not confide in her. She gossiped with an elderly friend named Dave Collins about it; she gossiped with our investigator, who walked along with her on Constance Street as she made her way home from Sunday Mass.

Miss Rosie, who worked in the sacristy, changing the altar cloths and seeing to the sacramental wine, also knew the shocking facts about those Mayfairs and “the man.” “First it was Stella, then Antha, now Deirdre,” she told her nephew, a college boy at Loyola who thought she was a superstitious fool.

An old black maid who lived in the same block knew all about “that man.” He was the family ghost, that’s who he was, and the only ghost she ever saw in broad daylight, sitting with that girl in the back garden. That girl was going to hell when she died.

It was at this point, in the summer of 1958, that I prepared to go to New Orleans.

I had finished putting the entire Mayfair history into an early version of the foregoing narrative, which was substantially the same as what the reader has only just read. And I was deeply and passionately concerned about Deirdre Mayfair.

I felt that her psychic powers, and especially her ability to see and communicate with spirits, were driving her out of her mind.

After numerous discussions with Scott Reynolds, our new director, and several meetings with the entire council, it was decided that I should make the trip, and that I should use my own judgment as to whether Deirdre Mayfair was old enough or stable enough to be approached.

Elaine Barrett, one of the oldest and most experienced members of the Talamasca, had died the preceding year, and I was now considered (undeservedly) the leading expert in the Talamasca on witch families. My credentials were never questioned. And indeed, those who had been most frightened by the deaths of Stuart Townsend and Arthur Langtry-and most likely to forbid my going to New Orleans-were no longer alive.