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.
“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.
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
