The Witching Hour

  What was this, more of Sister Bridget Marie's influence? But before he could speak, the child went on and he knew that it was Deirdre.

  "I didn't tell the devil to go away, when he brought the flowers. I wanted to and I know that I should have done it, and Aunt Carl is really, really angry with me. But Father, he only wanted to make us happy. I swear to you, Father, he's never mean to me. And he cries if I don't look at him or listen to him. I didn't know he'd bring the flowers from the altar! Sometimes he does very foolish things like that, Father, things like a little child would do, with even less sense than that. But he doesn't mean to hurt anyone."

  "Now, wait a minute, darling, what makes you think the devil himself would trouble a little girl? Don't you want to tell me what really happened?"

  "Father, he's not like the Bible says. I swear it. He's not ugly. He's tall and beautiful. Just like a real man. And he doesn't tell lies. He does nice things, always. When I'm afraid he comes and sits by me on the bed and kisses me. He really does. And he frightens away people who try to hurt me!"

  "Then why do you say he's the devil, child? Wouldn't it be better to say he's a made-up friend, someone to be with so you'll never be lonely?"

  "No, Father, he's the devil." So definite she sounded. "He's not real, and he's not made up either." The little voice had become sad, tired. A little woman in a child's guise struggling with an immense burden, almost in despair. "I know he's there when no one else does, and then I look and look and then everyone can see him!" The voice broke. "Father, I try not to look. I say Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and I try not to look. I know it's a mortal sin. But he's so sad and he cries without making a sound and I can hear him."

  "Now, child, have you talked to your Aunt Carl about this?" His voice was calm, but in fact the child's detailed account had begun to alarm him. This was beyond "excess of imagination" or any such excess he'd ever known.

  "Father, she knows all about him. All my aunts do. They call him the man, but Aunt Carl says he's really the devil. She's the one who says it's a sin, like touching yourself between the legs, like having dirty thoughts. Like when he kisses me and makes me feel chills and things. She's says it's filth to look at the man and let him come under the covers. She says he can kill me. My mother saw him too all her life and that's why she died and went to heaven to get away from him."

  Father Mattingly was aghast. So you can never shock a priest in the confessional, was that the old saying?

  "And my mother's mother saw him too," the child went on, the voice rushing, straining. "And she was really, really bad, he made her bad, and she died on account of him. But she went to hell probably, instead of heaven, and I might too."

  "Now, wait a minute, child. Who told you this!"

  "My Aunt Carl, Father," the child insisted. "She doesn't want me to go to hell like Stella. She told me to pray and drive him away, that I could do it if I only tried, if I said the rosary and didn't look at him. But Father, she gets so angry with me for letting him come--" The child stopped. She was crying, though obviously trying to muffle her cries. "And Aunt Millie is so afraid. And Aunt Nancy won't look at me. Aunt Nancy says that in our family, once you've seen the man, you're as good as done for."

  Father Mattingly was too shocked to speak. Quickly he cleared his throat. "You mean your aunts say this thing is real--"

  "They've always known about him, Father. And anyone can see him when I let him get strong enough. It's true, Father. Anyone. But you see, I have to make him come. It's not a mortal sin for other people to see him because it's my fault. My fault. He couldn't be seen if I didn't let it happen. And Father, I just, I just don't understand how the devil could be so kind to me, and could cry so hard when he's sad and want so badly just to be near me--" The voice broke off into low sobs.

  "Don't cry, Deirdre!" he'd said, firmly. But this was inconceivable! That sensible, "modern" woman in her tailored suit telling a child this superstition? And what about the others, for the love of God? Why, they made the likes of Sister Bridget Marie look like Sigmund Freud himself. He tried to see Deirdre through the dim grille. Was she wiping her eyes with her hands?

  The crisp little voice went on suddenly in an anguished rush.

  "Aunt Carl says it's a mortal sin even to think of him or think of his name. It makes him come immediately, if you say his name! But Father, he stands right beside me when she's talking and he says she's lying, and Father, I know it's terrible to say it, but she is lying sometimes, I know it, even when he's being quiet. But the worst part is when he comes through and scares her. And she threatens him! She says if he doesn't leave me alone she'll hurt me!" Her voice broke again, the cries barely audible. So small she seemed, so helpless! "But all the time, Father, even when I'm all alone, or even at Mass with everybody there, I know he's right beside me. I can feel him. I can hear him crying and it makes me cry, too."

  "Child, now think carefully before you answer. Did your Aunt Carl actually say she saw this thing?"

  "Oh, yes, Father." So weary! Didn't he believe her? That's what she was begging him to do.

  "I'm trying to understand, darling. I want so to understand, but you must help me. Are you certain that your Aunt Carl said she saw him with her own eyes?"

  "Father, she saw him when I was a baby and didn't even know I could make him come. She saw him the day my mother died. He was rocking my cradle. And when my grandmother Stella was a little girl, he'd come behind her to the supper table. Father, I'll tell you a terrible secret thing. There's a picture in our house of my mother, and he's in the picture, standing beside her. I know about the picture because he got it and gave it to me, though they had it hidden away. He opened the dresser drawer without even touching it, and then he put the picture in my hand. He does things like that when he's really strong, when I've been with him a long time and been thinking about him all day. That's when everybody knows he's in the house, and Aunt Nancy meets Aunt Carl at the door and whispers, 'The man is here. I just saw him.' And then Aunt Carl gets so mad. It's all my fault, Father! And I'm scared I can't stop him. And they're all so upset!"

  Her sobs had gotten louder, echoing against the wooden walls of the little cell. Surely they could hear her outside in the church itself.

  And what was he to say to her? His temper was boiling. What craziness went on with these women? Was there no one with a particle of sense in the whole family who could get a psychiatrist to help this girl?

  "Darling, listen to me. I want your permission to speak of these things outside the confessional to your Aunt Carl. Will you give me that permission?"

  "Oh, no Father, please, you mustn't!"

  "Child, I won't, not without your permission. But I tell you, I need to speak to your Aunt Carl about these things. Deirdre, she and I can drive away this thing together."

  "Father, she'll never forgive me for telling. Never. It's a mortal sin to ever tell. Aunt Nancy would never forgive me. Even Aunt Millie would be angry. Father, you can't tell her I told you about him!" She was becoming hysterical.

  "I can wipe that mortal sin away, child," he'd explained, "I can give you absolution. From that moment on, your soul is as white as snow, Deirdre. Trust in me, Deirdre. Give me permission to talk to her."

  For a tense moment the crying was his only answer. Then, even before he heard her turn the knob of the little wooden door, he knew he'd lost her. Within seconds, he heard her steps running fast down the aisle away from him.

  He had said the wrong thing, made the wrong judgment! And now there was nothing he could do, bound as he was by the seal of the confessional. And this secret had come to him from a troubled child who was not even old enough to commit a mortal sin, or benefit from the sacrament she'd been seeking.

  He never forgot that moment, sitting helpless, hearing those steps echoing in the vestibule of the church, the closeness and the heat of the confessional suffocating him. Dear God, what was he going to do?

  But the torture had only begun for Father Mattingly.

  For wee
ks after, he'd been truly obsessed--those women, that house ...

  But he could not act upon what he had heard any more than he could repeat it. The confessional bound him to secrecy in deed and word.

  He did not dare even question Sister Bridget Marie, though she volunteered enough information when he happened to see her on the playground. He felt guilty for listening, but he could not bring himself to move away.

  "Sure, they've put Deirdre in the Sacred Heart, they have. But do you think she'll stay there? They expelled her mother, Antha, when she was but eight years old. And from the Ursulines too she was expelled. They found a private school for her finally, one of those crazy places where they let the children stand on their heads. And what an unhappy thing she was as a young girl, always writing poetry and stories and talking to herself and asking questions about how her mother had died. And you know it was murder, don't you, Father, that Stella Mayfair was shot dead by her brother Lionel? And at a fancy dress ball in that house, he did it. Caused a regular stampede. Mirrors, clocks, windows, everything broken by the time the panic was over, and Stella lying dead on the floor."

  Father Mattingly only shook his head at the pity of it.

  "No wonder Antha went wild after, and not ten years later took up with a painter, no less, who never bothered to marry her, leaving her in a four-story walk-up in Greenwich Village in the middle of winter with no money and little Deirdre to take care of, so that she had to come home in shame. And then to jump from that attic window, poor thing, but what a hellish life it was with her aunts picking on her and watching her every move and locking her up at night, and her running down to the French Quarter and drinking, mind you, at her age, with the poets and the writers and trying to get them to pay attention to her work. I'll tell you a strange secret, Father. For months after she died, letters came for her, and manuscripts of hers came back from the New York people to whom she'd sent them. And what an agony for Miss Carlotta, the postman bringing her a reminder of such pain and suffering when he rang the bell at the gate."

  Father Mattingly said his silent prayer for Deirdre. Let the shadow of evil not touch her.

  "There was one of Antha's stories in a magazine, they told me, published in Paris, they said, but it was all in English, and that come too to Miss Carlotta and she took one look at it and locked it away. 'Twas one of the Mayfair cousins told me that part of it, and how they offered to take the baby off her hands--little Deirdre--but she said no, she'd keep it, she owed that to Stella, and to Antha, and to her mother, and to the child itself."

  Father Mattingly stopped in the church on his way back to the rectory. He stood for a long time in the silent chamber of the sacristy looking through the door at the main altar.

  For a sordid history he could forgive the Mayfairs easily enough. They were born ignorant into this world like the rest of us. But for warping a little girl with lies of the devil who drove a mother to suicide? But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, Father Mattingly could do but pray for Deirdre as he was praying now.

  Deirdre was expelled from St. Margaret's Private Academy near Christmastime and her aunts packed her off to a private school up north.

  Some time after that he'd heard she was home again, sickly, studying with a governess, and once after that he did glimpse her at a crowded ten o'clock Mass. She had not come to Communion. But he had seen her seated in the pew with her aunts.

  More and more of the Mayfair story came to him in bits and pieces. Seems everybody in the parish knew he'd been to that house. Over a kitchen table, Grandma Lucy O'Hara took his hand. "So I hear Deirdre Mayfair's been sent away, and you've been to that house on her account, is that not so, Father?" What on earth could he say? And so he listened.

  "Now I know that family. Mary Beth, she was the grande dame, she could tell you all about how it had been on the old plantation, born there right after the Civil War, didn't come to New Orleans until the 1880s, though, when her uncle Julien brought her. And such an old southern gentleman he was. I can still remember Mr. Julien riding his horse up St. Charles Avenue; he was the handsomest old man I ever saw. And that was a real grand plantation house at Riverbend, they said, used to be pictures of it in the books even when it was all falling down. Mr. Julien and Miss Mary Beth did everything they could to save it. But you can't stop the river when the river has a mind to take a house.

  "Now, she was a real beauty, Mary Beth, dark and wild-looking, not delicate like Stella--or plain like Miss Carlotta--and they said Antha was a beauty though I never did get to see her, or that poor baby Deirdre. But Stella was a real true voodoo queen. Yes, I mean Stella, Father. Stella knew the powders, the potions, the ceremonies. She could read your fortune in the cards. She did it to my grandson, Sean, frightened him half out of his wits with the things she told him. That was at one of those wild parties up there on First Street when they were swilling the bootleg liquor and had a dance band right there in the parlor. That was Stella.

  "She liked my Billy, she did." Sudden gesture to the faded photograph on the bureau top. "The one who died in the War. I told him, 'Billy, you listen to me. Don't you go near the Mayfair women.' She liked all the handsome young men. That's how come her brother killed her. On a clear day she could make the sky above you cloud over. 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 the
n 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. No questions asked by me either.

  "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.