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 cafe 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!
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
