into the, marsh, and within a week it was gone altogether, as if it had never been there.
That Mary Beth and Julien regarded this as a tragedy was obvious. There was much talk in New Orleans of the engineers they consulted, in attempting to avert the tragedy. And no small part of it was Katherine, Mary Beth’s aging mother, who did not want to move to New Orleans to the house Darcy Monahan had built for her decades ago.
At last, Katherine had to be sedated for the move to the city, and as stated earlier, she never recovered from the shock, and soon went insane, wandering around the First Street gardens, talking all the time to Darcy, and searching also for her mother, Marguerite, and endlessly turning out the contents of drawers to find things which she claimed to have lost.
Mary Beth tolerated her, and was heard to say once, much to the shock of the doctor in attendance, that she was happy to do what she could for her mother, but she did not find the woman or her plight “particularly interesting,” and she wished there was some drug they could give the woman to quiet her down.
Julien was present at the time, and naturally found this very funny and went into one of his disconcerting riffs of laughter. He was understanding of the doctor’s shock, however, and explained to him that the great virtue of Mary Beth was that she always told the truth, no matter what the consequences.
If they did give Katherine “some drug,” we know nothing of it. She began to wander the streets around 1898, and a young mulatto servant was hired simply to follow her around. She died in bed at First Street, in a rear bedroom, in 1905, on the night of January 2, to be exact, and to the best of our knowledge there was no storm to mark her death, and no unusual event of any kind. She had been in a coma for days, according to the servants, and Mary Beth and Julien were at her side when she died.
On January 15, 1899, in an enormous wedding held at St. Alphonsus Church, Mary Beth married Daniel McIntyre. It is interesting to note that up until this time the family had worshiped at the Notre Dame church (the French church of the tri-church parish), but for the wedding it chose the Irish church, and thereafter went to all services at St. Alphonsus.
Daniel seems to have been on very friendly terms with the Irish-American priests of the parish, and to have been lavish in his support of the parish. He also had a cousin in the Irish-American Sisters of Mercy who taught at the local school.
It seems safe therefore to assume that the change to the Irish church was Daniel’s idea. And it is also safe to assume that Mary Beth was almost indifferent to the matter, though she did go to church often with her children and great-nieces and nephews, though what she believed about it one cannot say. Julien never went to church, except for the customary weddings, funerals, and christenings. He also seems to have preferred St. Alphonsus to the humbler French church of Notre Dame.
The wedding of Daniel and Mary Beth was, as already mentioned, an enormous affair. A reception of dazzling proportions was held at the First Street house, with cousins coming from as far away as New York. Daniel’s family, though much much smaller than the Mayfair family, was also in attendance, and by all reports the couple were deeply in love and deeply happy, and the dancing and singing went on late into the night.
The couple went to New York for a honeymoon trip, and from there to Europe, where they remained for four months, cutting short their journey in May because Mary Beth was already expecting a child.
Indeed, Carlotta Mayfair was born seven and one-half months after her parents’ marriage, on September 1, 1899.
On November 2 of the following year, 1900, Mary Beth gave birth to Lionel, her only son. And finally, on October 10 of the year 1901, she gave birth to her last child, Stella.
These children were of course all the legal offspring of Daniel McIntyre, but one can legitimately ask for the purposes of this history, who was their real father?
There is overwhelming evidence, both from medical records and from pictures, to indicate that Daniel McIntyre was Carlotta Mayfair’s father. Not only did Carlotta inherit Daniel’s green eyes, she also inherited his beautiful reddish-blond curly hair.
As for Lionel, he was also of the same blood type as Daniel McIntyre, and also tended to resemble him though he bore a strong resemblance to his mother as well, having her dark eyes and her “expression,” especially as he grew older.
As for Stella, her blood type, as recorded in her superficial postmortem examination in 1929, indicates that she could not have been Daniel McIntyre’s daughter. We know that this information came to the notice of her sister Carlotta at the time. In fact, talk about Carlotta’s request for blood typing is what brought it to the attention of the Talamasca.
It is perhaps superfluous to add that Stella bore no resemblance to Daniel. On the contrary, she resembled Julien with her delicate bones, black curling hair, and very brilliant, if not twinkling dark eyes.
As we have no blood type for Julien, and do not know that any was ever recorded, we cannot add that scrap of evidence to the case.
Stella might have been fathered by any of Mary Beth’s lovers, though we do not know that she had a lover in the year before Stella was born. Indeed, the gossip concerning Mary Beth’s lovers came after, but that may only mean that she grew careless about her lovers as the years passed.
One other definite possibility is Cortland Mayfair, Julien’s second son, who was, at the time of Stella’s birth, twenty-two years old and an extremely appealing young man. (His blood type was finally obtained in 1959 and is compatible.) He was in residence off and on at First Street, as he was studying law at Harvard and did not finish until 1903. That he was very fond of Mary Beth was well-known to everyone, and that he took an interest all his life in the family legacy is also well-known.
Unfortunately for the Talamasca, Cortland was throughout most of his life a very secretive and guarded man. He was known even to his brothers and his children as a reclusive individual who disliked any sort of gossip outside the family. He loved reading, and was something of a genius at investment. To our knowledge, he confided in no one. Even those closest to him give contradictory versions of what Cortland did, and when, and why.
The one aspect of the man of which everyone is certain is that he was devoted to the management of the legacy and to making money for himself, his brothers and their children, and Mary Beth. His descendants are among the richest of the Mayfair clan to this day.
When Mary Beth died, it was Cortland who prevented Carlotta Mayfair from virtually dismantling her mother’s financial empire by taking over its complete management on behalf of Stella, who was in fact the designee, and did not care what happened to it as long as she could do as she pleased.
Stella never “cared a thing about money” by her own admission. And over Carlotta’s wishes, she placed her interests entirely in Cortland’s hands. Cortland and his son Sheffield continued to manage the bulk of the fortune on behalf of Antha after Stella’s death.
We should stress here, however, that after Mary Beth died her empire began to fall apart. No one individual could take her place. And though Cortland did a marvelous job of consolidating and investing and preserving, the dizzying expansion which had gone on under Mary Beth essentially came to an end.
But to return to our principal concern here, there are other indications that Cortland was Stella’s father. Cortland’s wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, had a deep aversion to Mary Beth and to the entire Mayfair family, and she would never accompany Cortland to the First Street house. This did not stop Cortland from visiting there all the time, and he took all of his five children there, so that they grew up knowing his family quite well.
Amanda eventually left Cortland when their youngest son, Pierce Mayfair, finished Harvard in 1935, leaving New Orleans forever and going to live with her younger sister, Mary Margaret Grady Harris, in New York.
In 1936 Amanda told one of our investigators at a cocktail party (a casual chance meeting had been arranged) that her husband’s family was evil, that if she were to tell the truth about it people would think she was crazy, and that she would never go south again to be among those people, no matter how much her sons begged her to do so. A little later during the evening, when she was quite intoxicated, she asked our investigator, whose name she did not know, whether or not he believed people could sell their souls to the devil. She said that her husband had done it, and he was “richer than Rockefeller” and so was she and so were her sons. “They will all burn in hell some day,” she told him. “Of that you can be sure.”
When our investigator asked if the lady really believed this sort of thing, she replied that there were witches alive in the modern world who could throw spells.
“They can make you believe you are some place you aren’t, that you’re seeing things when there’s nothing there. They did that to my husband. And you know why? Because my husband is a witch, a powerful witch. Don’t
