The witching hour

Three

JUST GO BY. Take a little walk across Magazine Street and down First and pass by that grand and dilapidated old house. See for yourself if the glass is broken out of the front windows. See for yourself if Deirdre Mayfair is still sitting on that side porch. You don’t have to go up and ask to see Deirdre.

What the hell do you think is going to happen?

Father Mattingly was angry with himself. It was a duty, really, to call on that family before he went back up north. He had been their parish priest once. He had known them all. And it had been well over a year since he’d been south, since he’d seen Miss Carl, since the funeral of Miss Nancy.

A few months ago, one of the young priests had written to say that Deirdre Mayfair had been failing badly. Her arms were drawn up now, close to the chest, with the atrophy that always sets in, in such cases.

And Miss Carl’s checks to the parish were coming in as regular as always-one every month now, it seemed-made out for a thousand dollars to the Redemptorist Parish, with no strings attached. Over the years, she had donated a fortune.

Father Mattingly ought to go, really, just to pay his respects and say a personal thank you the way he used to do years ago.

The priests in the rectory these days didn’t know the Mayfairs. They didn’t know the old stories. They’d never been invited to that house. They had come only in recent years to this sad old parish, with its dwindling congregation, its beautiful churches locked now on account of vandals, the older buildings in ruins.

Father Mattingly could remember when the earliest Masses each day were crowded, when there were weddings and funerals all week long in both St. Mary’s and St. Alphonsus. He remembered the May processions and the crowded novenas, Midnight Mass with the church jammed. But the old Irish and German families were gone now. The high school had been closed years ago. The glass was falling right out of the windows.

He was glad that his was only a brief visit, for each return was sadder than the one before it. Like a missionary outpost this was, when you thought about it. He hoped in fact that he would not be coming south again.

But he could not leave without seeing that family.

Yes, go there. You ought to. You ought to look in on Deirdre Mayfair. Was she not a parishioner after all?

And there was nothing wrong with wanting to find out if the gossip was true-that they’d tried to put Deirdre in the sanitarium, and she had gone wild, smashing the glass out of the windows before lapsing back into her catatonia. On August 13 it was supposed to have happened, only two days ago.

Who knows, maybe Miss Carl would welcome a call.

But these were games Father Mattingly played with his mind. Miss Carl didn’t want him around any more now than she ever had. It had been years since he was invited in. And Deirdre Mayfair was now and forever “a nice bunch of carrots,” as her nurse once put it.

No, he’d be going out of curiosity.

But then how the hell could “a nice bunch of carrots” rise up and break out all the glass in two twelve-foot-high windows? The story didn’t make much sense when you thought about it. And why hadn’t the men from the sanitarium taken her anyway? Surely they could have put her in a straitjacket. Isn’t that what happened at times like that?

Yet Deirdre’s nurse had stopped them at the door, screaming for them to get back, saying that Deirdre was staying home and she and Miss Carl would take care of it.

Jerry Lonigan, the undertaker, had told Father the whole story. The ambulance driver for the sanitarium often drove limousines for Lonigan and Sons. Saw it all. Glass crashing out onto the front porch. Sounded like everything in that big front room was being broken. And Deirdre making a terrible noise, a howling. Horrible thing to imagine-like seeing someone rise from the dead.

Well, it wasn’t Father Mattingly’s business. Or was it?

Dear God, Miss Carl was in her eighties, never mind that she still went to work every day. And she was all alone in that house now with Deirdre and the paid help.

The more he thought about it, Father Mattingly knew he should go, even if he did loathe that house, and loathe Carl and loathe everything he’d ever known of those people. Yes, he should go.

Of course he hadn’t always felt that way. Forty-two years ago, when he’d first come from St. Louis to this riverfront parish, he had thought the Mayfair women genteel, even the buxom and grumbling Nancy, and surely sweet Miss Belle and pretty Miss Millie. The house had enchanted him with its bronze clocks and velvet portieres. He had loved the great cloudy mirrors, even, and the portraits of Caribbean ancestors under dimming glass.

He had loved also the obvious intelligence and purpose of Carlotta Mayfair, who served him café au lait in a garden room where they sat in white wicker chairs at a white wicker table, among potted orchids and ferns. They had spent more than one pleasant afternoon talking politics, the weather, and the history of the parish Father Mattingly was trying so hard to understand. Yes, he had liked them.

And he had liked little Deirdre, too, that pretty-faced six-year-old child he had known for so brief a time, who had come to such a tragic pass only twelve years later. Was it in the textbooks now that electric shock could wipe clean the entire memory of a grown woman so that she became the silent shell of herself, staring at the falling rain while a nurse fed her with a silver spoon?

Why had they done it? He had not dared to ask. But he had been told over and over. To cure her of her “delusions,” of screaming in an empty room “You did it” to someone who wasn’t there, someone she cursed endlessly for the death of the man who had fathered her illegitimate child.

Deirdre. Cry for Deirdre. That Father Mattingly had done, and no one but God would ever know how much or why, though Father Mattingly himself would never forget it. All his days, he’d remember the story that a little child had poured out to him in the hot wooden cell of the confessional, a little girl who was to spend her life rotting away in that vine-shrouded house while the world outside galloped on to its own damnation.

Just go over there. Make the call. Maybe it is some silent memorial to that little girl. Don’t try to put it all together. Talk of devils from a small child still echoing in your ears after all this time! Once you’ve seen the man, you’re done for.

Father Mattingly made up his mind. He put on his black coat, adjusted his Roman collar and black shirt front, and went out of the air-conditioned rectory onto the hot narrow pavement of Constance Street. He did not look at the weeds eating at the steps of St. Alphonsus. He did not look at the graffiti on the old school walls.

He saw the past if he saw anything as he made his way fast down Josephine Street, and around the corner. And then within two short blocks he’d entered another world. The glaring sun was gone, and with it the dust and the din of the traffic.

Shuttered windows, shady porches. The soft hissing sound of lawn sprinklers beyond ornamental fences. Deep smell of the loam heaped on the roots of carefully tended rose trees.

All right, and what will you say when you get there?

The heat wasn’t really so bad today, given that it was August, yet it was just like the young priest from Chicago said: “You start out fine, and then your clothes just get heavier and heavier.” He had had to laugh at that.

What did they think of all that ruin, the young ones? No use telling them how it had once been. Ah, but the city itself, and this old neighborhood-they were as beautiful as ever.

He walked on until he saw the stained and peeling side of the Mayfair house looming over the treetops, the high twin chimneys floating against the moving clouds. It seemed the vines were dragging the old structure right into the ground. Were the iron railings rusted more than when he last saw them? Like a jungle, the garden.

He slowed his pace. He slowed because he really didn’t want to get there. He didn’t want to see up close the garden gone to seed, chinaberry and oleander struggling with grass as high as wheat, and the porches stripped of paint, turning that dull gray that old untended wood turns in the damp climate of Louisiana.

He didn’t even want to be in this still, deserted neighborhood. Nothing stirred here but the insects, the birds, the plants themselves slowly swallowing up the light and the blue of the sky. Swamp this must have been once. A breeding place of evil.

But he was out of hand with these thoughts. What had evil to do with God’s earth, and the things that grew in it-even the jungle of the Mayfairs’ neglected garden.

Yet he could not help but think of all the stories he had ever heard of the Mayfair women. What was voodoo if it wasn’t devil worship? And what was the worse sin, murder or suicide? Yes, evil had thrived here. He heard the child Deirdre whispering in his ear. And he could feel evil as he rested his weight against the iron fence, as he looked up into the hard crusty black oak branches, fanning out above him.

He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. Little Deirdre had told him that she saw the devil! He heard her voice just as clearly now as he had heard it in the confessional decades ago. And he heard her footsteps, too, as she ran from the church, ran from him, ran from his failure to help her.

But it had started before that. It had started on a dreary slow Friday afternoon when a call came from Sister Bridget Marie for a priest to please come quick to the school yard. It was Deirdre Mayfair again.

Father Mattingly had never heard of Deirdre Mayfair. Father Mattingly had only just come south from the seminary in Kirkwood, Missouri.

He found Sister Bridget Marie quickly enough, in an asphalt yard behind the old convent building. How European it had seemed to him then, quaint and sad with its broken walls, and the gnarled tree with the wooden benches built in a square around it.

The shade had felt good to him as he approached. Then he saw that the little girls seated along the bench were crying. Sister Bridget Marie held one pale shivering child by the thin part of her upper arm. The child was white with fear. Yet very pretty she was, her blue eyes too big for her thin face, her black hair in long careful corkscrew curls that shivered against her cheeks, her limbs well proportioned yet delicate.

There were flowers strewn all over the ground-big gladiolus and white lilies and long fronds of green fern and even big beautifully formed red roses. Florist flowers, surely, yet there were so many …

“Do you see that, Father?” Sister Bridget Marie exclaimed. “And they have the nerve to tell me it was her invisible friend, the devil himself, that put those flowers here, brought them right into her arms while they watched, the little thieves! They stole those flowers from the very altar of St. Alphonsus-!”

The little girls began to scream. One of them stamped her feet. A chorus of “We did see, we did see!” broke out with alarming fury. They egged each other on with their choking sobs into a regular chorus.

Sister Bridget Marie shouted for silence. She shook the little girl she had been holding by the arm, though the child had said nothing. The child’s mouth dropped open in shock, her eyes rolling to Father Mattingly in a silent entreaty.

“Now, Sister, please,” Father Mattingly said. He had gently freed the child. She was dazed, utterly pliant. He wanted to pick her up, wipe her face where the tears had smudged it with dirt. But he didn’t.

“Her invisible friend,” the sister said, “the one that finds everything that’s lost, Father. The one that puts the pennies for candy into her pockets! And they all eat it, too, stuffing their mouths with it, stolen pennies, you can be sure of it.”

The little girls were wailing even louder. And Father Mattingly realized he was stepping all over the flowers and the silent white-faced child was staring at his shoes, at the white petals crushed beneath them.

“Let the children go in,” Father Mattingly had said. It was essential to take command. Only then could he make sense of what Sister Bridget Marie was telling him.

But the story was no less fantastic when he and the sister were alone. The children claimed they saw the flowers flying through the air. They claimed they saw the flowers land in Deirdre’s arms. They had been laughing and laughing. Deirdre’s magic friend always made them laugh, they said. Deirdre’s friend could find your notebook or your pencil if you lost it. You asked Deirdre and he brought it to her. And there it was. And they even claimed to have seen him themselves-a nice man, a man with dark brown hair and eyes, and he would stand for one second right next to Deirdre.

“She’s got to be sent home, Father,” Sister Bridget Marie had said. “It happens all the time. I call her Great-aunt Carl or her Aunt Nancy, and then it stops for a while. Then it starts up again.”

“But you don’t believe-”

“Father, I tell you it’s six of one, half a dozen of another. Either the devil’s in that child, or she’s a devil of a liar, and makes them believe her wild tales as if she’s got them bewitched. She cannot stay at St. Alphonsus.”

Father Mattingly had taken Deirdre home himself, walking slowly, steadily with her through these same streets. Not a word was spoken. Miss Carl had been phoned at her downtown office. She and Miss Millie were waiting on the front steps of the grand house to meet them.

And how lovely it was then, painted a deep violet color with green shutters and the trim all in white and the porch railings painted a shiny black so you could see the cast-iron roses so clearly. The vines had been a graceful etching of leaf and color, not the menacing tangle they had since become.

“Overactive imagination, Father,” Miss Carl said without a trace of concern. “Millie what Deirdre needs is a warm bath.” And off the child had gone without a word spoken, and Miss Carl had taken Father Mattingly out for the first time into the glass garden room for café au lait at the wicker table. Miss Nancy, sullen and plain, had set out the cups and silver.

Wedgwood china trimmed in gold. And cloth napkins with the letter M embroidered on them. And what a quick-witted woman, this Carl. She had looked prim in her tailored silk suit and ruffled white blouse, her salt and pepper gray hair in a neat twist on the back of her head, her mouth neatly colored with pale pink lipstick. She put him at ease at once with her knowing smile.

“You might say it’s the curse of our family, Father, this excess of imagination.” She poured the hot milk and the hot coffee from two small silver pitchers. “We dream dreams; we see visions; we should have been poets or painters it seems. Not lawyers, such as I am.” She had laughed softly, easily. “Deirdre will be just fine, when she learns to tell fantasy from reality.”

Afterwards, she had shown him through the lower rooms. And Miss Millie had joined them. She was such a feminine thing, Miss Millie, her red hair in old-fashioned finger curls around her face, and jeweled rings on her fingers. She’d taken him to the window to wave to old Miss Belle, who had been cutting back the roses with large wooden-handled shears.

Carl explained that Deirdre would be going to the Sacred Heart sisters just as soon as there was a place. She was so sorry for this silly disturbance at St. Alphonsus and of course they’d keep Deirdre home if that was what Sister Bridget Marie wanted.

Father had started to object, but it was all decided. Simple matter to get Deirdre a governess, someone who knew children, why not?

They walked along the deep shaded porches.

“We are an old family, Father,” Carl said, as they went back into the double parlor. “We don’t even know how old. There is no one now who can identify some of the portraits you see around you.” Her voice was half amused, half weary. “We came from the islands, that’s what we know for certain-a plantation on Saint-Domingue-and before that from some dim European past that is now completely lost. The house is full of unexplained relics. Sometimes I see it as a great hard snail shell that I must carry on my back.”

Her hands passed lightly over the grand piano, over the gilded harp. She had little taste for such things, she said. What an irony that she had become the custodian. Miss Millie had only smiled, nodded.

And now if Father would excuse them, Miss Carl did have to go back downtown. Clients waiting. They walked out to the gate together.

“Thank you so much, Father!”

And so it had all been waved away, and the little white-faced girl with the black curls had left St. Alphonsus.

But in the days that followed it had bothered Father Mattingly, the question of those flowers.

Impossible to imagine a gang of little girls climbing over the communion rail and robbing the altars of an enormous and impressive church like St. Alphonsus. Even the guttersnipes Father Mattingly had known as a boy would not have dared such a thing.

What did Sister Bridget Marie really think had happened? Had the children really stolen the flowers? The small, heavyset round-faced nun studied him a moment before she answered. Then she said no.

“Father, as God is my witness, they’re a cursed family, the Mayfairs are. And the grandmother of that very child, Stella she was called, told the very same tales in this very same school yard many a year ago. It was a frightening power Stella Mayfair had over those around her. There were nuns under this very roof who were scared to death to cross her, a witch is what they called her then and now.”

“Oh, come now, Sister,” he had objected immediately. “We’re not on the foggy roads of Tipperary, looking out for the ghost of Petticoat Loose.”

“Ah, so you’ve heard that one, Father.” She had laughed.

“From my own Irish mother on the Lower East Side, Sister, a dozen times.”

“Well, then, Father, let me tell you this much, that Stella Mayfair once took my hand, and held it like this, she did, and told me secrets of my own that I had never told a living soul this side of the Atlantic. I swear it, Father. It happened to me. There was a keepsake I’d lost at home, a chain with a crucifix on it, and I’d cried and cried as a girl when I’d lost it, and that very same little keepsake Stella Mayfair described to me. ‘You want it back, Sister?’ she said. And all the time smiling in her sweet way, just like her granddaughter Deirdre can smile at you now, more innocent than cunning. ‘I’ll get it for you, Sister,’ she said. ‘Through the power of the devil, you mean, Stella Mayfair,’ I answered her. ‘I’ll have none of it.’ But there was many another teaching sister at St. Alphonsus school that took another tack, and that’s how she kept her power over those around her, getting her way in one thing and another right up to the day she died.”

“Superstition, Sister!” he’d said with great authority. “What about little Deirdre’s mother? You’re going to tell me she was a witch, too?”

Sister Bridget Marie shook her head. “That was Antha, a lost one, shy, sweet, afraid of her own shadow-not at all like her mother, Stella, until Stella was killed, that is. You should have seen Miss Carlotta’s face when they buried Stella. And the same expression on her face twelve years after when they buried Antha. Now, Carl, she was as smart a girl as ever went to Sacred Heart. The backbone of the family she is. But her mother never cared a fig for her. All Mary Beth Mayfair ever cared about was Stella. And old Mr. Julien, that was Mary Beth’s uncle, he was the same. Stella, Stella, Stella. But Antha, stark raving mad at the end, they said, and nothing but a girl of twenty when she run up the stairs in the old house and jumped from the attic window and dashed her head on the stones below.”

“So young,” he’d whispered. He remembered the pale, frightened face of Deirdre Mayfair. How old had she been when the young mother did such a thing?

“They buried Antha in consecrated ground, God have mercy on her soul. For who’s to judge the state of mind of such a person? Head split open like a watermelon when she hit the terrace. And baby Deirdre screaming out her lungs in the cradle. But then even Antha was something to fear.”

Father Mattingly was quietly reeling. It was the kind of talk he’d heard all his life at home, however, the endless Irish dramatizing of the morbid, the lusty tribute to the tragic. Truth was it wore him out. He wanted to ask-

But the bell had rung. Children were lining up in proper ranks for the march inside. Sister had to go. Yet suddenly, she turned back.

“Let me tell one story about Antha,” she said, her voice low on account of the hush in the school yard, “which is the best one that I know. In those days when the sisters sat down to supper at twelve noon, the children were silent in this yard until the Angelus was said and after that the Grace Before Meals. Nobody has such respect for anything in this day and age, but that was the custom then. And on one spring day, during that quiet time, a mean wicked girl name of Jenny Simpson comes up to frighten the poor, shy little Antha with the body of a dead rat she’d found under the hedge. Antha takes one look at the dead rat and lets out a chilling scream, Father, such as you never heard! And we come running from the supper table, as you can imagine, and what do you think we see? That mean wicked Jenny Simpson thrown over on her back, Father, her face bloody and the rat flying out of her hand over that very fence! And do you think it was little Antha did such a thing, Father? A mite of a child, as delicate as her daughter Deirdre is today? Oh, no! ’Twas the selfsame invisible fiend did it, Father, the devil himself, as brought those flowers flying through the air to Deirdre in this yard a week ago.”

“Sister, you think I’m the new boy on the block”-Father Mattingly had laughed-“to believe something like that.”

And she had smiled, it was true, but he knew from past experience that an Irishwoman like that could smile at what she was saying and believe every word of it at the same time.

The Mayfairs fascinated him, as something complex and elegant can fascinate. The tales of Stella and Antha were remote enough to be romantic and nothing more.

The following Sunday he called again on the Mayfairs. He was offered coffee once more and pleasant conversation-it was all so removed from Sister Bridget Marie’s tales. The radio played Rudy Vallee in the background. Old Miss Belle watered the drowsing potted orchids. The smell of roast chicken came from the kitchen. An altogether pleasant house.

They even asked him to stay to Sunday dinner-the table was beautifully set with thick linen napkins in silver rings-but he politely declined. Miss Carl wrote out a check for the parish and put it in his hand.

As he was leaving he had glimpsed Deirdre in the garden, a white face peering at him from behind a gnarled old tree. He had waved to her without breaking his stride, yet something bothered him later about the image of her. Was it her curls all tangled? Or the distracted look in her eyes?

Madness, that’s what Sister Bridget had described to him, and it disturbed him to think it threatened that wan little girl. There was nothing romantic to Father Mattingly about actual madness. He had long held the belief that the mad lived in a hell of irrelevance. They missed the point of life around them.

But Miss Carlotta was a sensible, modern woman. The child wasn’t doomed to follow in the footsteps of a dead mother. She would, on the contrary, have every chance.

A month passed before his view of the Mayfairs changed forever, on the unforgettable Saturday afternoon that Deirdre Mayfair came to confession in St. Alphonsus Church.

It was during the regular hours when all the good Irish and German Catholics could be counted upon to clear their consciences before Mass and Communion on Sunday.

And so he was seated in the ornate wooden house of the confessional in his narrow chair behind a green serge curtain, listening in alternation to the penitents who came to kneel in the small cells to the left and the right of him. These voices and sins he could have heard in Boston or New York City, so similar the accents, the worries, the ideas.

“Three Hail Marys,” he would prescribe, or “Three Our Fathers” but seldom more than that to these laboring men and good housewives who came to confess routine peccadillos.

Then a child’s voice had caught him off guard, coming rapid and crisp through the dark dusty grille-eloquent of intelligence and precocity. He had not recognized it. After all, Deirdre Mayfair had not spoken one word before in his presence.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was weeks and weeks ago. Father, help me please. I cannot fight the devil. I try and I always fail. And I’m going to go to hell for it.”

What was this, more of Sister Bridget Marie’s influence? But before he could speak, the child went on and he knew that it was Deirdre.

“I didn’t tell the devil to go away, when he brought the flowers. I wanted to and I know that I should have done it, and Aunt Carl is really, really angry with me. But Father, he only wanted to make us happy. I swear to you, Father, he’s never mean to me. And he cries if I don’t look at him or listen to him. I didn’t know he’d bring the flowers from the altar! Sometimes he does very foolish things like that, Father, things like a little child would do, with even less sense than that. But he doesn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“Now, wait a minute, darling, what makes you think the devil himself would trouble a little girl? Don’t you want to tell me what really happened?”

“Father, he’s not like the Bible says. I swear it. He’s not ugly. He’s tall and beautiful. Just like a real man. And he doesn’t tell lies. He does nice things, always. When I’m afraid he comes and sits by me on the bed and kisses me. He really does. And he frightens away people who try to hurt me!”

“Then why do you say he’s the devil, child? Wouldn’t it be better to say he’s a made-up friend, someone to be with so you’ll never be lonely?”

“No, Father, he’s the devil.” So definite she sounded. “He’s not real, and he’s not made up either.” The little voice had become sad, tired. A little woman in a child’s guise struggling with an immense burden, almost in despair. “I know he’s there when no one else does, and then I look and look and then everyone can see him!” The voice broke. “Father, I try not to look. I say Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and I try not to look. I know it’s a mortal sin. But he’s so sad and he cries without making a sound and I can hear him.”

“Now, child, have you talked to your Aunt Carl about this?” His voice was calm, but in fact the child’s detailed account had begun to alarm him. This was beyond “excess of imagination” or any such excess he’d ever known.

“Father, she knows all about him. All my aunts do. They call him the man, but Aunt Carl says he’s really the devil. She’s the one who says it’s a sin, like touching yourself between the legs, like having dirty thoughts. Like when he kisses me and makes me feel chills and things. She’s says it’s filth to look at the man and let him come under the covers. She says he can kill me. My mother saw him too all her life and that’s why she died and went to heaven to get away from him.”

Father Mattingly was aghast. So you can never shock a priest in the confessional, was that the old saying?

“And my mother’s mother saw him too,” the child went on, the voice rushing, straining. “And she was really, really bad, he made her bad, and she died on account of him. But she went to hell probably, instead of heaven, and I might too.”

“Now, wait a minute, child. Who told you this!”

“My Aunt Carl, Father,” the child insisted. “She doesn’t want me to go to hell like Stella. She told me to pray and drive him away, that I could do it if I only tried, if I said the rosary and didn’t look at him. But Father, she gets so angry with me for letting him come-” The child stopped. She was crying, though obviously trying to muffle her cries. “And Aunt Millie is so afraid. And Aunt Nancy won’t look at me. Aunt Nancy says that in our family, once you’ve seen the man, you’re as good as done for.”

Father Mattingly was too shocked to speak. Quickly he cleared his throat. “You mean your aunts say this thing is real-”

“They’ve always known about him, Father. And anyone can see him when I let him get strong enough. It’s true, Father. Anyone. But you see, I have to make him come. It’s not a mortal sin for other people to see him because it’s my fault. My fault. He couldn’t be seen if I didn’t let it happen. And Father, I just, I just don’t understand how the devil could be so kind to me, and could cry so hard when he’s sad and want so badly just to be near me-” The voice broke off into low sobs.

“Don’t cry, Deirdre!” he’d said, firmly. But this was inconceivable! That sensible, “modern” woman in her tailored suit telling a child this superstition? And what about the others, for the love of God? Why, they made the likes of Sister Bridget Marie look like Sigmund Freud himself. He tried to see Deirdre through the dim grille. Was she wiping her eyes with her hands?

The crisp little voice went on suddenly in an anguished rush.

“Aunt Carl says it’s a mortal sin even to think of him or think of his name. It makes him come immediately, if you say his name! But Father, he stands right beside me when she’s talking and he says she’s lying, and Father, I know it’s terrible to say it, but she is lying sometimes, I know it, even when he’s being quiet. But the worst part is when he comes through and scares her. And she threatens him! She says if he doesn’t leave me alone she’ll hurt me!” Her voice broke again, the cries barely audible. So small she seemed, so helpless! “But all the time, Father, even when I’m all alone, or even at Mass with everybody there, I know he’s right beside me. I can feel him. I can hear him crying and it makes me cry, too.”

“Child, now think carefully before you answer. Did your Aunt Carl actually say she saw this thing?”

“Oh, yes, Father.” So weary! Didn’t he believe her? That’s what she was begging him to do.

“I’m trying to understand, darling. I want so to understand, but you must help me. Are you certain that your Aunt Carl said she saw him with her own eyes?”

“Father, she saw him when I was a baby and didn’t even know I could make him come. She saw him the day my mother died. He was rocking my cradle. And when my grandmother Stella was a little girl, he’d come behind her to the supper table. Father, I’ll tell you a terrible secret thing. There’s a picture in our house of my mother, and he’s in the picture, standing beside her. I know about the picture because he got it and gave it to me, though they had it hidden away. He opened the dresser drawer without even touching it, and then he put the picture in my hand. He does things like that when he’s really strong, when I’ve been with him a long time and been thinking about him all day. That’s when everybody knows he’s in the house, and Aunt Nancy meets Aunt Carl at the door and whispers, ‘The man is here. I just saw him.’ And then Aunt Carl gets so mad. It’s all my fault, Father! And I’m scared I can’t stop him. And they’re all so upset!”

Her sobs had gotten louder, echoing against the wooden walls of the little cell. Surely they could hear her outside in the church itself.

And what was he to say to her? His temper was boiling. What craziness went on with these women? Was there no one with a particle of sense in the whole family who could get a psychiatrist to help this girl?

“Darling, listen to me. I want your permission to speak of these things outside the confessional to your Aunt Carl. Will you give me that permission?”

“Oh, no Father, please, you mustn’t!”

“Child, I won’t, not without your permission. But I tell you, I need to speak to your Aunt Carl about these things. Deirdre, she and I can drive away this thing together.”

“Father, she’ll never forgive me for telling. Never. It’s a mortal sin to ever tell. Aunt Nancy would never forgive me. Even Aunt Millie would be angry. Father, you can’t tell her I told you about him!” She was becoming hysterical.

“I can wipe that mortal sin away, child,” he’d explained, “I can give you absolution. From that moment on, your soul is as white as snow, Deirdre. Trust in me, Deirdre. Give me permission to talk to her.”

For a tense moment the crying was his only answer. Then, even before he heard her turn the knob of the little wooden door, he knew he’d lost her. Within seconds, he heard her steps running fast down the aisle away from him.

He had said the wrong thing, made the wrong judgment! And now there was nothing he could do, bound as he was by the seal of the confessional. And this secret had come to him from a troubled child who was not even old enough to commit a mortal sin, or benefit from the sacrament she’d been seeking.

He never forgot that moment, sitting helpless, hearing those steps echoing in the vestibule of the church, the closeness and the heat of the confessional suffocating him. Dear God, what was he going to do?

But the torture had only begun for Father Mattingly.

For weeks after, he’d been truly obsessed-those women, that house …

But he could not act upon what he had heard any more than he could repeat it. The confessional bound him to secrecy in deed and word.

He did not dare even question Sister Bridget Marie, though she volunteered enough information when he happened to see her on the playground. He felt guilty for listening, but he could not bring himself to move away.

“Sure, they’ve put Deirdre in the Sacred Heart, they have. But do you think she’ll stay there? They expelled her mother, Antha, when she was but eight years old. And from the Ursulines too she was expelled. They found a private school for her finally, one of those crazy places where they let the children stand on their heads. And what an unhappy thing she was as a young girl, always writing poetry and stories and talking to herself and asking questions about how her mother had died. And you know it was murder, don’t you, Father, that Stella Mayfair was shot dead by her brother Lionel? And at a fancy dress ball in that house, he did it. Caused a regular stampede. Mirrors, clocks, windows, everything broken by the time the panic was over, and Stella lying dead on the floor.”

Father Mattingly only shook his head at the pity of it.

“No wonder Antha went wild after, and not ten years later took up with a painter, no less, who never bothered to marry her, leaving her in a four-story walk-up in Greenwich Village in the middle of winter with no money and little Deirdre to take care of, so that she had to come home in shame. And then to jump from that attic window, poor thing, but what a hellish life it was with her aunts picking on her and watching her every move and locking her up at night, and her running down to the French Quarter and drinking, mind you, at her age, with the poets and the writers and trying to get them to pay attention to her work. I’ll tell you a strange secret, Father. For months after she died, letters came for her, and manuscripts of hers came back from the New York people to whom she’d sent them. And what an agony for Miss Carlotta, the postman bringing her a reminder of such pain and suffering when he rang the bell at the gate.”

Father Mattingly said his silent prayer for Deirdre. Let the shadow of evil not touch her.

“There was one of Antha’s stories in a magazine, they told me, published in Paris, they said, but it was all in English, and that come too to Miss Carlotta and she took one look at it and locked it away. ’Twas one of the Mayfair cousins told me that part of it, and how they offered to take the baby off her hands-little Deirdre-but she said no, she’d keep it, she owed that to Stella, and to Antha, and to her mother, and to the child itself.”

Father Mattingly stopped in the church on his way back to the rectory. He stood for a long time in the silent chamber of the sacristy looking through the door at the main altar.

For a sordid history he could forgive the Mayfairs easily enough. They were born ignorant into this world like the rest of us. But for warping a little girl with lies of the devil who drove a mother to suicide? But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, Father Mattingly could do but pray for Deirdre as he was praying now.

Deirdre was expelled from St. Margaret’s Private Academy near Christmastime and her aunts packed her off to a private school up north.

Some time after that he’d heard she was home again, sickly, studying with a governess, and once after that he did glimpse her at a crowded ten o’clock Mass. She had not come to Communion. But he had seen her seated in the pew with her aunts.

More and more of the Mayfair story came to him in bits and pieces. Seems everybody in the parish knew he’d been to that house. Over a kitchen table, Grandma Lucy O’Hara took his hand. “So I hear Deirdre Mayfair’s been sent away, and you’ve been to that house on her account, is that not so, Father?” What on earth could he say? And so he listened.

“Now I know that family. Mary Beth, she was the grande dame, she could tell you all about how it had been on the old plantation, born there right after the Civil War, didn’t come to New Orleans until the 1880s, though, when her uncle Julien brought her. And such an old southern gentleman he was. I can still remember Mr. Julien riding his horse up St. Charles Avenue; he was the handsomest old man I ever saw. And that was a real grand plantation house at Riverbend, they said, used to be pictures of it in the books even when it was all falling down. Mr. Julien and Miss Mary Beth did everything they could to save it. But you can’t stop the river when the river has a mind to take a house.

“Now, she was a real beauty, Mary Beth, dark and wild-looking, not delicate like Stella-or plain like Miss Carlotta-and they said Antha was a beauty though I never did get to see her, or that poor baby Deirdre. But Stella was a real true voodoo queen. Yes, I mean Stella, Father. Stella knew the powders, the potions, the ceremonies. She could read your fortune in the cards. She did it to my grandson, Sean, frightened him half out of his wits with the things she told him. That was at one of those wild parties up there on First Street when they were swilling the bootleg liquor and had a dance band right there in the parlor. That was Stella.

“She liked my Billy, she did.” Sudden gesture to the faded photograph on the bureau top. “The one who died in the War. I told him, ‘Billy, you listen to me. Don’t you go near the Mayfair women.’ She liked all the handsome young men. That’s how come her brother killed her. On a clear day she could make the sky above you cloud over. That’s the God’s truth, Father. She used to scare the sisters at St. Alphonsus making storms like that right over the garden. And when she died that night, you should have seen the storm over that house. Why, they said, every window in the place was broken. Rain and wind like a hurricane around that place. Stella made the heavens weep for her.”

Speechless, Father Mattingly sat, trying to like the tepid tea full of milk and sugar, but he was remembering every word.

He didn’t call on the Mayfairs anymore. He didn’t dare. He could not have that child think-if she was there at all-that he meant to tell what he was bound forever to keep secret. He watched for the women at Mass. He seldom saw them. But this was a big parish of course. They could have gone to either church, or to the little chapel for the rich over there in the Garden District.

Miss Carlotta’s checks were coming in, however. That he knew. Father Lafferty, who did the accounts for the parish, showed him the check near Christmastime-it was for two thousand dollars-quietly remarking on how Carlotta Mayfair used her money to keep the world around her nice and quiet.

“They’ve sent the little niece home from the school in Boston, I suppose you heard that.”

Father Mattingly said that he hadn’t. He stood in the door of Father Lafferty’s office, waiting …

“Well, I thought you got on famous with those ladies,” Father Lafferty said. Father Lafferty was a plainspoken man, older than his sixty years, not a gossip.

“Only visited once or twice,” said Father Mattingly.

“Now they’re saying little Deirdre’s sickly,” Father Lafferty said. He laid the check down on the green blotter of his desk, looked at it. “Can’t go to regular school, has to stay home with a private tutor.”

“Sad thing.”

“So it seems. But nobody’s going to question it. Nobody’s going to go over and see if that child’s really getting a decent education.”

“They have money enough … ”

“Indeed, enough to keep everything quiet, and they always have. They could get away with murder.”

“You think so?”

Father Lafferty seemed to be having a little debate with himself. He kept looking at Carlotta Mayfair’s check.

“You heard about the shooting, I suppose,” he said, “when Lionel Mayfair shot his sister Stella? Never spent a day in prison for it. Miss Carlotta fixed all that. So did Mr. Cortland, Julien’s son. Between them those two could have fixed anything. No questions asked here by anyone.”

“But how on earth did they … ”

“The insane asylum of course, and there Lionel took his own life, though how no one knows since he was in a straitjacket.”

“You don’t mean it.”

Father Lafferty nodded. “Of course I do. And again no questions asked. Requiem Mass same as always. And then little Antha, she came here, Stella’s daughter, you know-crying, screaming, saying it was Miss Carlotta who made Lionel murder her mother. Told the pastor downstairs in the left parlor. I was there, Father Morgan was there, so was Father Graham, too. We all heard her.”

Father Mattingly listened in silence.

“Little Antha said she was afraid to go home. Afraid of Miss Carlotta. She said Miss Carlotta said to Lionel, ‘You’re no man if you don’t put a stop to what’s going on,’ even gave him the thirty-eight-caliber pistol to shoot Stella. You’d think somebody would have asked a few questions about that, but the pastor didn’t. Just picked up the phone and called Miss Carlotta. Few minutes later a big black limousine comes and gets little Antha.”

Father Mattingly stared at the small thin man at the desk. No questions asked by me either.

“The pastor said later the child was insane, she’d told the children she could hear people talking through the walls, and she could read their minds. He said she’d calm down, she was just wild over the death of Stella.”

“But she got worse after that?”

“Jumped out of the attic window when she was twenty, that’s what she did. No questions asked. She wasn’t in her right mind, and besides, she was just a child. Requiem Mass as usual.”

Father Lafferty turned the check over, hit the back of it with the rubber stamp that carried the parish endorsement.

“Are you saying, Father, that I should call on the Mayfairs?”

“No, Father, I’m not. I don’t know what I’m saying if you want the truth. But I wish now Miss Carlotta had given that child up, gotten her out of that house. There are too many bad memories under that roof. It’s no place for a child now.”

When Father Mattingly heard that Deirdre Mayfair had been sent off to school again-this time in Europe-he decided he had to call. It was spring, well over three years since the haunting confession. He had to make himself go up to that gate, if for no other reason than because he could think of nothing else.

It came as no surprise that Carlotta invited him into the long double parlor and the coffee things were brought in on the silver tray, all quite cordial. He loved that big room. He loved its mirrors facing each other. Miss Millie joined them, then Miss Nancy, though she apologized for her dirty apron, and even old Miss Belle came down by means of an elevator he had not even known was there, hidden as it was behind a great twelve-foot-high door that looked like all the others. Old Miss Belle was deaf, he caught on to that immediately.

Through the veil of small talk, he studied these women, trying to fathom what lay behind their restrained smiles. Nancy was the drudge, Millie the scatterbrain, old Miss Belle almost senile. And Carl? Carl was everything they said she was-the clever one, the business lady, the lawyer. They talked of politics, corruption in the city, of rising prices and changing times. But not on that visit or any other did she speak the names Antha, Stella, Mary Beth, Lionel. In fact there was no talk anymore of history, and he could not bring himself to broach the subject, not even to ask a simple question about a single object in the room.

Leaving the house, he glanced at the flagstone patio overgrown with weeds. Head split open like a watermelon. Going down the street he looked back at the attic windows. All covered with the vines, they were now, shutters askew.

That was his last visit, he told himself. Let Father Lafferty take care of it. Let no one take care of it.

But his sense of failure deepened as the years passed.

When she was ten years old Deirdre Mayfair ran away from home and was found two days later walking along the Bayou St. John in the rain, her clothes soaking wet. Then it was another boarding school somewhere-County Cork, Ireland, and then she was home again. The sisters said she’d had nightmares, walked in her sleep, said strange things.

Then came word that Deirdre was in California. The Mayfairs had cousins out there to look after her. Maybe the change of climate would do some good.

Father Mattingly knew now that he would never get the sound of that child’s crying out of his head. Why in God’s name had he not tried another tack with her? He prayed she told some wise teacher or doctor the things she’d told him, that somebody somewhere would help her as Father Mattingly had failed to do.

He could never recall hearing when Deirdre came back from California. Only some time in ’56, he knew she was in boarding school downtown at St. Rose de Lima’s. Then came the gossip she’d been expelled and run away to New York.

Miss Kellerman told Father Lafferty everything on the church steps one afternoon. She’d heard it from her maid who knew the “colored girl” that sometimes helped in that house. Deirdre had found her mother’s short stories in a trunk in the attic, “all that nonsense about Greenwich Village.” Deirdre had run off to find her father, though nobody knew if the man was alive or dead.

It had ended with her commitment to Bellevue, and Miss Carlotta had flown to New York to bring Deirdre back.

Then one afternoon in the summer of 1959, over a kitchen table, Father Mattingly heard of the “scandal.” Deirdre Mayfair was pregnant at eighteen. She had dropped out of classes at a college in Texas. And the father? One of her own professors, would you believe, and a married man and a Protestant too. And he was getting a divorce from his wife of ten years to marry Deirdre!

It seemed the whole parish was talking about it. Miss Carlotta had washed her hands of the whole thing, they said, but Miss Nancy had taken Deirdre to Gus Mayer to buy her a nice pretty dress for the city hall wedding. Deirdre was a beautiful girl now, beautiful as Antha and Stella had been. Beautiful they said as Miss Mary Beth.

Father Mattingly remembered only that frightened, white-faced child. Flowers crushed under foot.

The marriage was never to take place.

When Deirdre was in her fifth month, the father was killed on his way to New Orleans. Car crash on the river road. The tie rod had broken on his old ’52 Ford, the car had gone out of control and hit an oak, exploding instantly.

Then wandering through the crowds of the church bazaar on a hot July evening, Father Mattingly was to hear the strangest story of the Mayfairs yet, one that would haunt him in years to come as did the confession.

Lights were strung across the asphalt yard. Parishioners in shirtsleeves and cotton dresses strolled from one wooden booth to another, playing the games of chance. Win a chocolate cake on a nickel bet when the wheel spins. Win a teddy bear. The asphalt was soft in the heat. The beer flowed at the makeshift bar of boards set upon barrels. And it seemed that everywhere Father Mattingly turned he caught some whisper of the goings-on at the Mayfair house.

Gray-headed Red Lonigan, the senior member of the undertaker family, was listening to Dave Collins tell him that they had Deirdre locked up in her room. Father Lafferty sat there staring sullenly over his beer at Dave. Dave said he’d known the Mayfairs longer than anybody, even longer than Red.

Father Mattingly got a cold bottle of Jax from the bar and took his place on the bench at the end.

Dave Collins was now in his glory with two priests in the audience.

“I was born in 1901, Father!” he declared, though Father Mattingly did not even look up. “Same year as Stella Mayfair, and I remember when they kicked Stella out of the Ursuline Academy uptown and Miss Mary Beth sent her to school down here.”

“Too much gossip about that family,” Red said gloomily.

“Stella was a voodoo queen, all right,” Dave said. “Everybody knew it. But you can forget about the penny-ante charms and spells. They wasn’t for Stella. Stella had a purse of gold coins that was never empty.”

Red laughed sadly under his breath. “All she ever had in the end was bad luck.”

“Well, she crammed in a lot of living before Lionel shot her,” Dave said, narrowing his eyes and leaning forward on his right arm, his left hand locked to the beer bottle. “And no sooner was she dead and gone than that purse turned up right beside Antha’s bed and no matter where they hid it, it always came back again.”

“In a pig’s eye,” said Red.

“There was coins from all over the world in that purse-Italian coins and French coins and Spanish coins.”

“And how would you know?” Red asked.

“Father Lafferty’s seen it, ain’t you, Father? You’ve seen them coins. Miss Mary Beth used to throw them in the collection basket every Sunday, you know she done it. And you knew what she always said. ‘Spend them fast, Father, get them out of your hands before sundown, because they always come back.’ ”

“What are you talking about!” Red scoffed.

Father Lafferty said nothing. His small black eyes moved from Dave to Red. Then he glanced at Father Mattingly, who sat opposite him.

“What do you mean, they came back?” Father Mattingly asked.

“Back to her purse is what she meant!” Dave said arching his eyebrows. He took a long pull off his bottle. Nothing but foam left. “She could give them away forever, and they always came back.” He laughed hoarsely. There was the sound of phlegm in his voice. “She said the same thing to my mother fifty years ago when she paid her for doing the washing, that’s right, the washing-my mother did the washing in a lot of them big houses, and she was never ashamed of it neither, and Miss Mary Beth always paid her in them coins.”

“In a pig’s eye,” Red said.

“And I’ll tell you something else too,” Dave said, leaning forward on his elbow, his eyes narrow as he peered at Red Lonigan. “The house, the jewels, the purse, it’s all connected. Same with the name Mayfair and the way they always keep it, no matter who they marry. Always Mayfair in the end. And you want to know the reason? They’re witches, those women! Every one.”

Red shook his head. He pushed his full beer bottle towards Dave and watched as Dave wrapped his fingers around it.

“It’s the God’s truth, I’m telling you. It come down to them through the generations, the power of witchcraft, and back in them days there was plenty talk of it. Miss Mary Beth, she was more powerful than Stella.” He took a big swallow of Red’s beer. “And smart enough to keep her mouth shut which Stella was not.”

“Then how did you hear about it?” Red asked.

Dave took out his little white sack of Bull Durham tobacco and pressed it flat between fingers and thumb.

“You wouldn’t have a ready-made, would you, Father?” he asked Father Mattingly.

Red sneered. Father Mattingly gave Dave his pack of Pall Malls.

“Thank you, Father. And now to your question, Red, which I wasn’t avoiding. I know because my mother told me the things that Miss Mary Beth told her, back in 1921 when Miss Carlotta had graduated from Loyola and everybody was singing her praises, such a smart woman, being a lawyer and all that. ‘She’s not the chosen one,’ Miss Mary Beth said to my mother, ‘It’s Stella. Stella’s got the gift and she’ll get everything when I die.’ ‘And what’s the gift, Miss Mary Beth?’ my mother asked her. ‘Why, Stella’s seen the man,’ Miss Mary Beth said to my mother. ‘And the one who can see the man when she’s all alone inherits all.’ ”

Father Mattingly felt a chill run down his back. It had now been eleven years since he had heard that child’s unfinished confession, but he had never forgotten a word of it. They call him the man …

But Father Lafferty was glowering at Dave.

“Seen the man?” Father Lafferty asked coldly. “Now what in heaven’s name could such gibberish mean?”

“Well now, Father I should think a good Irishman like yourself would know the answer to that one. Ain’t it a fact that witches call the devil the man? Ain’t it fact they call him that when he comes in the middle of the night to tempt them to unspeakable evil!” He gave another of his deep cracking unhealthy laughs, and pulled a filthy snotrag from his pocket to wipe his nose. “Witches, and you know it, Father. That’s what they were and that’s what they are. It’s a legacy of witchcraft. And old Mr. Julien Mayfair, you remember him? I remember him. He knew all about it, that’s what my mother told me. You know it’s the truth, Father.”

“It’s a legacy all right,” Father Lafferty said angrily. He rose to his feet. “It’s a legacy of ignorance and jealousy and mental sickness! Ever hear of those things, Dave Collins? Ever heard of hatred between sisters, and envy, and ruthless ambition!” He turned and walked off through the milling crowd without waiting for the answer.

Father Mattingly felt stunned by Father Lafferty’s anger. He wished that Father Lafferty had merely laughed, as Dave Collins was doing.

Dave Collins swallowed the last of Red’s beer. “Couldn’t spare two bits, now, could you, Red?” he asked, his eyes darting from him to Father Mattingly.

Red sat listless staring at the empty beer bottle. Like a man in a dream he fished a crumpled dollar out of his pants pocket.

On the edge of sleep that night Father Mattingly remembered the books he’d read in the seminary. The tall man, the dark man, the comely man, the incubus who comes by night … the giant man who leads the Sabbat! He remembered dim pictures in a book, finely drawn, gruesome. Witches, he said the word as he passed into sleep. She says he’s the devil, Father. That it’s a sin even to look at him.

He awoke some time before dawn, hearing Father Lafferty’s angry voice. Envy, mental sickness. Was that the truth to read between the lines? It seemed a crucial piece had been fitted into the puzzle. He could almost see the full picture. A house ruled by an iron hand, a house in which beautiful and high-spirited women had met tragedy. And yet something bothered him still … They all see him, Father. Flowers scattered under foot, big long white gladiolus and delicate fronds of fern. He saw his shoe crushing them.

Deirdre Mayfair gave up her child. It was born at the new Mercy Hospital on the seventh of November, and that very same day, she kissed it and placed it in Father Lafferty’s hands and it was he who baptized it and placed it in the care of the cousins from California who were to adopt it.

But it was Deirdre who laid down the law that the child was to have the name Mayfair. Her daughter was never to be given any other last name, or Deirdre wouldn’t sign the papers. Her old uncle Cortland Mayfair had stood behind her on that one, and not even Father Lafferty could make her change her mind. She demanded to see it in ink on the baptismal certificate. And poor old Cortland Mayfair-a fine gentleman-was dead by that time, having taken that awful fall down the stairs.

Father Mattingly didn’t remember when he’d first heard the word “incurable.” She’d gone mad even before she left the hospital. They said she kept talking out loud to nobody at all, saying, “You did it, you killed him.” The nurses were afraid to go into her room. She wandered into the chapel in her hospital gown, laughing and talking out loud in the middle of Mass, accusing the empty air of killing her lover, separating her from her child, leaving her alone among “enemies.” When the nuns tried to restrain her, she’d gone wild. The orderlies had come and taken her away as she kicked and screamed.

By the time Father Lafferty died in the spring, they had locked her up far away. Nobody even knew where. Rita Lonigan asked her father-in-law, Red, because she wanted so badly to write. But Miss Carl said it would not be good. No letters for Deirdre.

Only prayers for Deirdre. And the years slipped by.

Father Mattingly left the parish. He worked in the foreign missions. He worked in New York. He went so far away that New Orleans was no longer in his thought, except now and then the sudden remembrance and shame: Deirdre Mayfair-the one he had not helped, his lost Deirdre.

Then one afternoon in 1976, when Father Mattingly had come down for a brief stay at the old rectory, he had passed the house and seen a thin, pale young woman sitting in a rocker on the side porch, behind a veil of rusted screen. She seemed no more than a wraith in a white nightgown, but he’d known at once it was Deirdre. He’d recognized those black curls hanging around her shoulders. And as he opened the rusted gate and came up the flagstone walk, he saw that even the expression on the face was the same-yes, it was Deirdre whom he’d brought home to this house almost thirty years ago.

Expressionless she was, behind the screen, which sagged on its light wooden framing. No answer when he whispered: “Deirdre.”

Around her neck on a chain was an emerald-a beautiful stone, and on her finger a ruby ring. Were these the jewels he’d heard tell of? How incongruous they looked on this silent woman in her limp white nightgown. She gave no sign that she either heard or saw him.

His visit with Miss Millie and Miss Nancy had been brief, uncomfortable. Carl was downtown at work, of course. And yes, that was Deirdre on the side porch and she was home to stay, but there was no need to whisper.

“The mind’s gone,” Nancy said with a bitter smile. “The electric shock wiped out her memory first. Then everything. She couldn’t get up to save herself if the place was burning down. Every now and then she wrings her hands, tries to speak, but she can’t-”

“Don’t!” Millie had whispered, with a little shake of the head and twist of her mouth as though it wasn’t in good taste to discuss this. She was old now, Miss Millie, old and beautifully gray, dainty as Miss Belle had been, Miss Belle who was now long gone. “Have some more coffee, Father?”

But it was a pretty woman sitting in the chair on the porch. The shock treatments had not grayed her hair. And her eyes were still a deep blue, though they were utterly empty. Like a statue in church she was. Father, help me. The emerald caught the light, exploded like a tiny star.

Father Mattingly did not come south very often after that, and in the following years when he rang the bell, he was not welcome. Miss Nancy’s excuses became more abrupt. Sometimes nobody even answered. If Carl was there, the visit was rushed, artificial. No more coffee in the garden room, just a few quick words in that vast dusty parlor. Didn’t they ever turn on the lights anymore? The chandeliers were filthy.

Of course the women were getting quite old. Millie died in 1979. The funeral had been enormous, with cousins coming from all over the country.

Then last year Nancy had gone. Father Mattingly had gotten a letter from Red Lonigan. The priest had been in Baton Rouge at the time and he had driven down just for the funeral.

Miss Carl, in her late eighties, was bone thin, hawk-nosed, with white hair and thick glasses that magnified her eyes unpleasantly. Her ankles were swollen over the tops of her black string shoes. She had to sit down on a gravestone during the final words at the cemetery.

The house itself was going down pitifully. Father Mattingly had seen that for himself when he drove past.

Deirdre too had changed, inevitably. He could see that her fragile hothouse beauty had at last been lost. And in spite of the nurses who walked her back and forth, she had grown stooped, and her hands bent down and out at the wrists, like those of an arthritic patient. They said that her head had now fallen permanently to one side, and her mouth was always open.

It was a sad sight to behold even from a distance. And the jewels only made it more sinister. Diamond earrings on a senseless invalid. An emerald big as a thumbnail! And Father Mattingly, who believed above all in the sanctity of human life, thought Deirdre’s death would have been a blessing.

The afternoon following Nancy’s funeral, as he had paid a silent visit to the old place, he had met an Englishman stopped at the far end of the fence-a very personable man, who introduced himself to the priest as Aaron Lightner.

“Do you know anything about that poor woman?” Lightner had asked quite frankly. “For over ten years I’ve seen her on that porch. You know, I worry about her.”

“I worry myself,” Father Mattingly had confessed. “But they say there’s nothing anyone can do for her.”

“Such a strange family,” said the Englishman sympathetically. “It’s so very hot. I wonder does she feel the heat? You’d think they’d fix the overhead fan. Do you see? It seems to be broken.”

Father Mattingly had taken an immediate liking to the Englishman. Such a forceful, yet polite man. And he was dressed so well in a fine three-piece linen suit. Even carried a walking stick. Made Father Mattingly think of the gentlemen who used to stroll in the evening on St. Charles Avenue. You used to see them on the front porches, wearing their straw hats, watching the traffic pass. Ah, another era.

Father Mattingly found himself chatting easily with the Englishman in a hushed voice under the low-hanging oaks, about all the “known” things with which the man seemed quite familiar-the shock treatments, the sanitariums, the baby daughter long ago adopted out in California. But Father Mattingly would not have dreamed of mentioning old Dave Collins’s gossip of Stella or “the man.” To repeat such nonsense would be flat-out wrong. And besides, it came too near to those painful secrets Deirdre had confided in him.

He and Lightner had somehow ended up at Commander’s Palace for a late lunch at the Englishman’s invitation. What a treat for the priest. How long had it been since he dined in a fine New Orleans restaurant like that with tablecloths and linen napkins. And the Englishman had ordered an excellent wine.

The man admitted candidly that he was interested in the history of families like the Mayfairs.

“You know they had a plantation in Haiti when it was still called Saint-Domingue. Maye Faire was the name of the place, I believe. They made a fortune in coffee and sugar in the days before the slave uprising.”

“So you know of them that far back,” said the priest, amazed.

“Oh, indeed, I do,” said Lightner. “It’s in the history books, you see. Powerful woman ran that place, Marie Claudette Mayfair Landry, following in the footsteps of her mother, Angélique Mayfair. But they had been there for four generations. It was Charlotte who had come from France in, what was it, the year 1689. Yes, Charlotte. And she gave birth to twins-Peter and Jeanne Louise, and they both lived to be eighty-one.”

“You don’t say. I’ve never heard tell of them that far back.”

“I believe it’s a simple matter of record.” The Englishman gave a little shrug. “Even the black rebels didn’t dare torch the plantation. Marie Claudette managed to emigrate with a king’s ransom in possessions as well as her entire family. Then it was La Victoire at Riverbend below New Orleans. I think they called it simply Riverbend.”

“Miss Mary Beth was born there.”

“Yes! That’s correct. In, let me see, I think it was 1871. It took the river to finally swallow that old house. Such a beauty it was, with columns all around. There were photographs of it in the very old guidebooks to Louisiana.”

“I’d like to see those,” the priest said.

“They’d built the house on First Street before the Civil War, you know,” Lightner went on. “It was actually Katherine Mayfair who built it and later her brothers Julien and Remy Mayfair lived there. And then Mary Beth made it her home. She didn’t like the country, Mary Beth. I believe it was Katherine who married the Irish architect, the one who died so young of yellow fever. You know, he built the banks downtown. Yes, the name was Monahan. And after he died, Katherine didn’t want to stay at First Street anymore because he had built it and she was so sick at heart.”

“Seems I heard a long time ago that Monahan designed that house,” said the priest. But he really didn’t want to interrupt. “I used to hear about Miss Mary Beth … ”

“Yes, it was Mary Beth Mayfair who married Judge McIntyre, though he was only a young lawyer then of course, and their daughter Carlotta Mayfair is the head of the house now, it seems … ”

Father Mattingly was enthralled. It wasn’t merely his old and painful curiosity about the Mayfairs, it was the engaging manner of Lightner himself, and the pleasing sound of his British accent. Just history, all this, not gossip, quite innocent. It had been a long time since Father Mattingly had spoken to such a cultivated man. No, this was not gossip when the Englishman told it.

And against his better judgment, the priest found himself telling in a tentative voice the story of the little girl in the school yard and the mysterious flowers. Now, that was not what he’d heard in the confessional, he reminded himself. Yet it was frightening that it should spill out this way, after a half-dozen sips of wine. Father Mattingly was ashamed of himself. Suddenly he couldn’t get the confession out of his mind. He lost the thread. He was thinking of Dave Collins and all those strange things he’d said and the way Father Lafferty had gotten so angry that July night at the bazaar, Father Lafferty who’d presided over the adoption of Deirdre’s baby.

Had Father Lafferty taken action on account of all Dave Collins’s crazy talk? He himself had never been able to do anything.

The Englishman was quite patient with the priest’s silent reverie. In fact, the strangest thing had happened. It seemed to Father Mattingly that the man was listening to his thoughts! But that was quite impossible, and if a man could overhear the memory of a confession in that way, just what was a priest supposed to do about it?

How long that afternoon seemed. How pleasant, easeful. Father Mattingly had finally repeated Dave Collins’s old tales, and he had even talked of the pictures in the books of “the dark man” and of witches dancing.

And the Englishman had seemed so interested, only moving now and then to pour the wine, or to offer the priest a cigarette, never interrupting.

“Now, what do you make of all that,” the priest whispered at last. Had the man said anything back? “You know, old Dave Collins is dead, but Sister Bridget Marie is going to live forever. She’s nearing a hundred.”

The Englishman smiled. “You mean the sister in the school yard that long-ago day.”

Father Mattingly was now drunk on the wine he’d had, that was the plain truth of it. And he kept seeing the yard and the children and the flowers strewn all over the pavement.

“She’s out at Mercy Hospital now,” the priest said. “I saw her last time I was down. I suppose I’ll see her this time. And what nonsense she talks now that she doesn’t know who she’s talking to. Old Dave Collins died in a bar on Magazine Street. Fitting place. All his friends chipped in for the biggest funeral.”

The priest had drifted off again, thinking of Deirdre and the confessional. And the Englishman had touched the back of his hand and whispered: “You mustn’t worry about it.”

The priest had been startled. Then he’d almost laughed at the idea that someone could read his mind. And that’s what Sister Bridget Marie had said about Antha, wasn’t it? That she could hear people talking through the walls and read their minds? Had he told the Englishman that part?

“Yes, you did. I want to thank you … ”

He and the Englishman had said good-bye at six o’clock outside the gates of the Lafayette Cemetery. It had been the golden time of evening when the sun is gone and everything gives back the light it has absorbed all day long. But how forlorn it all was, the old whitewashed walls, and the giant magnolia trees ripping at the pavement.

“You know, they’re all buried in there, the Mayfairs,” Father Mattingly had said, glancing at the iron gates. “Big above-ground tomb down the center walk to the right, has a little wrought-iron fence around it. Miss Carl keeps it in good repair. You can read all those names you just told me.”

The priest would have shown the Englishman himself but it was time to get back to the rectory, time to go back to Baton Rouge and then up to St. Louis.

Lightner gave him an address in London.

“If you ever hear anything more about that family-anything you feel comfortable passing on-well, would you contact me?”

Of course Father Mattingly had never done that. He’d misplaced the name and address months ago. But he remembered that Englishman kindly, though sometimes he wondered who the man really was, and what he had actually wanted. If all the priests of the world had such a soothing manner as that, what a splendid thing it would be. It was as if that man understood everything.

As he drew nearer the old corner now, Father Mattingly thought again of what the young priest had written: that Deirdre Mayfair was shriveling up, that she could hardly walk anymore.

Then how could she have gone wild on August 13th, he’d like to know, for the love of heaven? How could she have broken the windows out and scared off men from an asylum?

And Jerry Lonigan said his driver saw things thrown out-books, a clock, all manner of things, just hurling through the air. And the noise she’d made, like an animal howling.

The priest found it hard to believe.

But there it was, the evidence.

As he slowly approached the gate on this warm August afternoon, he saw the white-uniformed window man on the front porch, atop his wooden ladder. Knife in hand, he applied the putty along the new panes. And each one of those tall windows had shining new glass, complete with the tiny brand-name stickers.

Yards away, on the south side of the house, behind her veil of rusted copper screen sat Deirdre, hands twisted out at the wrists, head bent and to the side against the back of the rocker. The emerald pendant on its chain was a tiny spark of green light for an instant.

Ah, what had it been like for her to break those windows? To feel the strength coursing through her limbs, to feel herself in possession of such uncommon power? Even to make a sound, why, it must have been magnificent.

But that was a strange thought for him, wasn’t it? Yet he felt himself swept up in some vague sadness, some grand melancholy. Ah, Deirdre, poor little Deirdre.

The truth was, he felt sad and bitter as he always did when he saw her. And he knew he would not go up the flagstone path to the front steps. He would not ring the bell only to be told again that Miss Carl wasn’t home, or that she could not receive him just now.

This trip had only been Father Mattingly’s personal penance. Over forty years ago, he had done the wrong thing on a fateful Saturday afternoon, and a girl’s sanity had hung in the balance. And no visit now would ever make the slightest difference.

He stood at the fence for a long moment, listening to the scrape of the window man’s knife, curiously clear in the soft tropical quiet around him. He felt the heat penetrate his shoes, his clothes. He let the soft mellow colors of this moist and shady world work on him.

It was a rare place, this. Better for her surely than some sterile hospital room, or vista of close-cropped lawn with no more variation than a synthetic carpet. And what made him think that he could have ever done for her what so many doctors had failed to do? Maybe she had never had a chance. Only God knows.

Suddenly he glimpsed a visitor behind the rusted screens, sitting beside the poor mad woman. Nice young man it seemed-tall, dark-haired, well dressed in spite of the wilting temperature. Maybe one of those cousins from away, from New York City or California.

The young fella must have just come out on the porch from the parlor, because a moment ago he had not been there.

So solicitous, he seemed. It was positively loving the way he inclined towards Deirdre. Just as if he was kissing her cheek. Yes, that was what he was doing. Even in the dense shade, the priest could see it, and it touched him deeply. It made the sadness well in him painfully.

But the window man was finishing now. He was gathering up his ladder. He came down the front steps and went around the flagstone walk and past the screen porch, using his ladder as he went, to drive back the banana trees and the swollen oleander.

The priest was finished too. He had done his penance. He could go home now, back to the hot barren pavements of Constance Street, and the cool confines of the rectory. Slowly he turned and moved towards the corner.

He glanced back only once. The screen porch was empty now save for Deirdre. But surely that nice young man would come back out soon. It had gone right to the priest’s heart to see that tender kiss, to know that someone even now still loved that lost soul that he himself had failed to save so long ago.