several of the cousins, older men, standing in the very rear of the room during Pierce’s “little speech” had joked bitterly and sarcastically amongst themselves. “Sure, there’s no man in that house,” one of them said. “Nooooo, no man at all. Just those nice ladies.”
“I’ve never seen a man there, have you?” And so on it went.
“Nope, no man at First Street. No sir!”
When cousins came to call on Deirdre, they were told pretty much the same story that Pierce had told at the funeral. Deirdre was too sick to see them. She hadn’t even wanted to see Cortland, she was so sick. And she didn’t know and mustn’t know that Cortland was dead.
“And look at that dark stairs,” said Millie Dear to Beatrice. “Cortland should have used the elevator. But he never would use the elevator. If he had just used the elevator, he would never have taken such a fall.”
Family legend today indicates that everyone agreed the adoption was for the best. Cortland should have stayed out of it. As Ryan Mayfair, Cortland’s grandson, said, “Poor Deirdre was no more fit to be a mother than the Madwoman of Chaillot. But I think my grandfather felt responsible. He had taken Deirdre to Texas. I think he blamed himself. He wanted to be sure she wanted to give up the baby. But maybe what Deirdre wanted wasn’t the important thing.”
At the time, I dreaded each new piece of news from Louisiana. I lay in bed at night in the Motherhouse thinking ceaselessly of Deirdre, wondering if there were not some way that we could discover what she truly wanted or felt. Scott Reynolds was more adamant than ever that we could not intervene further. Deirdre knew how to reach us. So did Cortland. So did Carlotta Mayfair, for what that was worth. There was nothing further that we could do.
Only in January of 1988, nearly thirty years later, did I learn in an interview with Deirdre’s old school friend Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan that Deirdre had tried desperately to reach me, and failed.
In 1959, Rita Mae had only just married Jerry Lonigan of Lonigan and Sons funeral home, and when she heard that Deirdre was at home, pregnant, and had already lost the father of her baby, Rita Mae screwed up her courage and went to call. As so many others have been, she was turned away at the door, but not before she saw Deirdre at the top of the stairs. Deirdre called out to Rita Mae desperately:
“Rita Mae, they’re going to take my baby! Rita Mae, help me.” As Miss Nancy sought to force Deirdre back up to the second floor, Deirdre threw a small white card down to Rita Mae. “Contact this man. Get him to help me. Tell him they’re going to take my baby away.”
Carlotta Mayfair physically attacked Rita Mae and tried to get the card away from her, but Rita, even though her hair was being pulled and her face scratched, held it tight as she ran through a hail of leaves out the gate.
When she got home she discovered the card was almost unreadable. Carlotta had torn part of it; and Rita had inadvertently clenched the little card in the moist palm of her hand. Only the word Talamasca, and my name, handwritten on the back, could be made out.
Only in 1988, when I encountered Rita Mae at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair-and gave her a card identical to the one destroyed in 1959-did she recognize the names and call me at my hotel to report what she remembered from that long ago day.
It was heartbreaking to this investigator to learn of Deirdre’s vain plea for help. It was heartbreaking to remember those nights thirty years before when I lay in bed in London thinking, “I cannot help her, but I have to try to help her. But how do I dare to do it? And how could I possibly succeed?”
The fact is I probably could not have done anything to help Deirdre, no matter how hard I might have tried. If Cortland couldn’t stop the adoption, it is sensible to assume that I couldn’t have stopped it either. Yet in my dreams I see myself taking Deirdre out of the First Street house to London. I see her a healthy normal woman today.
The reality is utterly different.
On November 7, 1959, Deirdre gave birth at five o’clock in the morning to Rowan Mayfair, nine pounds, eight ounces, a healthy, fair-haired baby girl. Hours afterwards, emerging from the general anesthesia, Deirdre found her bed surrounded by Ellie Mayfair, Father Lafferty, and Carlotta Mayfair, and two of the Sisters of Mercy who later described the scene in detail to Sister Bridget Marie.
Father Lafferty held the baby in his arms. He explained that he had just baptized it in the Mercy Hospital chapel, naming it Rowan Mayfair. He showed her the signed baptismal certificate.
“Now kiss your baby, Deirdre,” said Father Lafferty, “and give her to Ellie. Ellie is ready to go.”
Parish gossip says that Deirdre did as she was told. She had insisted that the child have the name Mayfair and once that condition was met, she let her baby go. Crying so as she could scarce see, she kissed the baby and let Ellie Mayfair take it from her arms. Then she turned her head, sobbing, into the pillow. Father Lafferty said, “Best leave her alone.”
Over a decade later, Sister Bridget Marie explained the meaning of Rowan’s name.
“Carlotta stood godmother to the child. I believe they got some doctor off the ward to be its godfather, so determined were they to have the baptism done. And Carlotta said to Father Lafferty, the child’s to be named Rowan, and he said to her, ‘Now, you know, Carlotta Mayfair, that that is not a saint’s name. It sounds like a pagan name to me.’
“And she to him in her manner, you know the way she was, she says, ‘Father, don’t you know what the rowan tree was and that it was used to ward off witches and all manner of evil? There’s not a hut in Ireland where the woman of the house did not put up the rowan branch over the door to protect her family from witches and witchcraft, and that has been true throughout Christian times. Rowan is to be the name of this child!’ And Ellie Mayfair, the little mealymouth that she always was, just nodded her head.”
“Was it true?” I asked. “Did they put the rowan over the door in Ireland?”
Gravely Sister Bridget Marie nodded. “Lot of good that it did!”
Who is the father of Rowan Mayfair?
Routine blood typing done at the hospital indicates that the baby’s blood type matched that of Cortland Mayfair, who had died less than a month before. Allow us to repeat here that Cortland may also have been the father of Stella Mayfair, and that recent information obtained from Bellevue Hospital has at last confirmed that Antha Mayfair may have been his daughter as well.
Deirdre “went mad” before she ever left Mercy Hospital after Rowan’s birth. The nuns said she cried by the hour, men screamed in an empty room, “You killed him!” Then wandering into the hospital chapel during Mass, she shouted once more, “You killed him. You left me alone among my enemies. You betrayed me!” She had to be taken out by force, and was quickly committed to St. Ann’s Asylum, where she became catatonic by the end of the month.
“It was the invisible lover,” Sister Bridget Mane believes to this day. “She was shouting and cursing at him, don’t you know it, for he’d killed her college professor. He’d done it, because the devil wanted her for himself. The demon lover, that’s what he was, right here in the city of New Orleans. Walking the streets of the Garden District by night.”
That is a very lovely and eloquent statement, but since it is more than highly likely that the college professor never existed, what other meaning can we attach to Deirdre’s words? Was it Lasher who pushed Cortland down the staircase, or startled him so badly that he fell? And if so, why?
This is the end of the life of Deirdre Mayfair really. For seventeen years she was incarcerated in various mental institutions, given massive doses of drugs and ruthless courses of electric shock treatment, with only brief respites when she returned home, a ghost of the girl she had once been.
At last in 1976, she was brought back to First Street forever, a wide-eyed and mute invalid, in a perpetual state of alertness, yet with no connective memory at ail.
The side porch downstairs was screened in for her. For years she has been led out every day, rain or shine, to sit motionless in a rocking chair, her face turned ever so slightly towards the distant street.
“She cannot even remember from moment to moment,” said one physician. “She lives entirely in the present, in a way we simply cannot imagine. You might say there is no mind there at all.” It is a condition described in some very old people who reach the same state in advanced senility, and sit staring in geriatric hospitals throughout the world. Regardless, she is drugged heavily, to prevent bouts of “agitation,” or so her various doctors and nurses have been told.
How did Deirdre Mayfair become this “mindless idiot,” as the Irish Channel gossips call her, “this nice bunch of carrots” sitting in her chair? Shock treatments certainly contributed to it, course after course of them, given by every hospital in which she had ever stayed since 1959. Then there were the drugs-massive doses of near paralytic
