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.
