The Witching Hour

  When Miss Nancy died last year, Rita said she was going to the funeral. "It's for Deirdre's sake."

  "But, honey," Jerry had said, "Deirdre won't know you're doing this." Deirdre hadn't spoken a single syllable in all these years.

  But Rita didn't care. Rita was going.

  As for Jerry, he didn't want to have anything to do with the Mayfairs. He missed his daddy more than ever.

  "Why the hell can't they call some other funeral home?" he had said under his breath. Other people did it now that his daddy was dead and gone. Why didn't the Mayfairs follow suit? He hated the old families.

  "Least this is a natural death, or so they tell me," he said.

  Now that really startled Rita. "Well, weren't Miss Belle and Miss Millie 'natural deaths'?" she asked.

  After he'd finished work that afternoon on Miss Nancy, he told Rita it had been terrible going into that house to get her.

  Right out of the old days, the upstairs bedroom with the draperies drawn and two blessed candles burning before a picture of the Mother of Sorrows. The room stank of piss. And Miss Nancy dead for hours in that heat before he got there.

  And poor Deirdre on the screen porch like a human pretzel, and the colored nurse holding Deirdre's hand and saying the rosary out loud, as if Deirdre even knew she was there, let alone heard the Hail Marys.

  Miss Carlotta didn't want to go into Nancy's room. She stood in the hallway with her arms folded.

  "Bruises on her, Miss Carl. On her arms and legs. Did she have a bad tumble?"

  "She had the first attack on the stairs, Mr. Lonigan."

  But boy, had he wished his dad was still around. His dad had known how to handle the old families.

  "Now, you tell me, Rita Mae. Why the hell wasn't she in a hospital? This isn't 1842! This is now. Now I'm asking you."

  "Some people want to be at home, Jerry," Rita said. Didn't he have a signed death certificate?

  Yes, he did. Of course he did. But he hated these old families.

  "You never know what they're going to do," he swore. "Not just the Mayfairs, I mean any of the old ones."

  Sometimes the relatives trooped into the viewing room and started right in working on the corpse with their own powder and lipstick. Now, nobody with any sense did that kind of thing anymore.

  And what about those old Irish guys who'd laugh and joke while they were acting as pallbearers. One would let his end of the coffin go just so his brother would get the full weight of it--prancing around on the graveyard path like it was Mardi Gras.

  And the stories the old ones told at the wake could make you sick. Old Sister Bridget Marie the other night downstairs telling about coming over on the boat from Ireland: The mama said to the baby in the bassinet, "If you don't stop crying, I'll throw you overboard." Then she tells her little boy to watch the baby. Little while she comes back. The baby's gone out of the bassinet. The little boy says, "He started crying again. So I threw him overboard."

  Now, what kind of a story is that to tell when you're sitting right beside the coffin?

  Rita smiled in spite of herself. She had always liked old Sister Bridget Marie.

  "The Mayfairs aren't Irish," she said. "They're rich and rich people don't carry on like that."

  "Oh, yes they are Irish, Rita Mae. Or Irish enough anyway to be crazy. It was the famous Irish architect Darcy Monahan who built that house, and he was the father of Miss Mary Beth. And Miss Carl is the daughter of Judge McIntyre and he was Irish as they come. Just a real old-timer. Sure they're Irish. As Irish as anybody else around here in this day and age."

  She was amazed that her husband was talking this much. The Mayfairs bothered him, that was clear enough, just as they had bothered his daddy, and nobody had ever told Rita the whole story.

  Rita went to the Requiem Mass at the chapel for Miss Nancy. She followed the procession in her own car. It went down First Street to pass the old house, out of respect for Deirdre. But there was no sign Deirdre even saw all those black limousines gliding by.

  There were so many Mayfairs. Why, where in the world did they come from? Rita recognized New York voices and California voices and even southern voices from Atlanta and Alabama. And then all the ones from New Orleans! She couldn't believe it when she went over the register. Why, there were Mayfairs from uptown and downtown, and Metairie, and across the river.

  There was even an Englishman there, a white-haired gentleman in a linen suit who actually carried a walking stick. He hung back with Rita. "My, what a dreadfully warm day this is," he said in his elegant English voice. When Rita had tripped on the path, he'd steadied her arm. Very nice of him.

  What did all these people think of that awful old house, she wondered, and of the Lafayette Cemetery with all the moldering vaults. They were crowded all through the narrow aisles, standing on tiptoe trying to see over the high tombs. Mosquitoes in the high grass. And there was one of the tour buses stopped at the gates right now. Those tourists sure loved it, all right. Well, get an eyeful!

  But the big shock was the cousin who'd taken Deirdre's baby. For there she was, Ellie Mayfair from California. Jerry pointed her out while the priest was saying the final words. She had signed the register at every funeral for the last thirty years. Tall, dark-haired woman in a sleeveless blue linen dress, with beautiful suntanned skin. She wore a big white hat. like a sunbonnet, and a pair of dark glasses. Looked like a movie star. How they gathered around her. People clasping her hand. Kissing her on her powdered cheek. When they bent real close, were they asking her about Deirdre's daughter?

  Rita wiped her eyes. Rita Mae, they're going to take my baby. Whatever had she done with that little fragment of white card with the word Talamasca on it? Was probably right here in her prayer book somewhere. She never threw anything away. Maybe she should speak to that woman, just ask her how to get in touch with Deirdre's daughter. Maybe some day that girl ought to know what Rita had to tell. But then what right had she to meddle like that? Yet if Deirdre died before Rita did, and Rita saw that woman again, well, then she'd go and ask. Nothing would stop her.

  She had almost broken down right then and there, and imagine, people would have thought she was crying for old Miss Nancy. That was a laugh. She had turned around, trying to hide her face and then she'd seen that Englishman, that gentleman, staring at her. He had a real strange expression on his face, like he was worried about her crying, and then she did cry and she made a little wave to him to say, It's all right. But he came over to her anyway.

  He gave her his arm, the way he had before, and helped her to walk just a little ways away and there was one of those benches so she sat down on it. When she looked up, she could have sworn Miss Carl was staring at her and at the Englishman, but Miss Carl was real far away, and the sun was shining on her glasses. Probably couldn't see them at all.

  Then the Englishman had given her a little white card and said he would like to talk to her. Whatever about, she had thought, but she took the card and put it in her pocket.

  It was late that night when she found it again. She had been looking for the prayer card from the funeral. And there it was, that little card from the man and there were the same names after all these years--Talamasca and Aaron Lightner.

  For a minute Rita Mae thought she was going to faint dead away. Maybe she'd made a big mistake. She hunted through her prayer book for the old card or what was left of it. Sure enough, they were the same, and on this new one, the Englishman had written in ink the name of the Monteleone Hotel downtown and his room number.

  Rita found Jerry sitting up late, drinking, at the kitchen table.

  "Rita Mae, you can't go talking to that man. You can't tell him anything about that family."

  "But Jerry, I have to tell him what happened before, I have to tell him that Deirdre tried to get in touch with him."

  "That was years and years ago, Rita Mae. That baby is grown up. She's a doctor, did you know that? She's going to be a surgeon, that's what I heard."

  "I don't care,
Jerry." Then Rita Mae had broken down, but even through her tears, she was doing a strange thing. She was staring at that card and memorizing everything on it. She memorized the room number of the hotel. She memorized the phone number in London.

  And just as she figured, Jerry suddenly took the card and slipped it in his shirt pocket. She didn't say a word. She just kept crying. Jerry was the sweetest man in the world, but he never would understand.

  He said, "You did a nice thing, going to the funeral, honey."

  Rita said no more about the man. She wasn't going to go against Jerry. Well, at least at this moment her mind was not made up yet.

  "But what does that girl out there in California know about her mother?" Rita said. "I mean, does she know Deirdre never wanted to give her up?"

  "You have to leave it alone, honey."

  There had never been a moment in Rita's life quite like that one years ago in the nuns' garden--hearing Deirdre with that man, hearing two people talk of love like that. Twilight. Rita had told Jerry about it all right, but nobody understood. You had to be there, smelling the lilies and seeing the sky like blue stained glass through the tree branches.

  And to think of that girl out there, maybe never knowing what her real mother was like ...

  Jerry shook his head. He filled his glass with bourbon and drank about half of it.

  "Honey, if you knew what I knew about those people."

  Jerry was drinking too much bourbon all right. Rita saw that. Jerry was no gossip. A good mortician couldn't be a gossip. But he started to talk now and Rita let him.

  "Honey," he said, "Deirdre never had a chance in that family. You might say she was cursed when she was born. That's what Daddy said."

  Jerry had been just a grade-school kid when Deirdre's mother, Antha, died, in a fall from the porch roof outside the attic window of that house. Her skull had broken open on the patio. Deirdre was a baby then and so was Rita Mae, of course. But Jerry was already working with his daddy.

  "I tell you we scraped her brains up off the flagstones. It was terrible. She was only twenty years old, and pretty! She was prettier even than Deirdre got to be. And you should have seen the trees in that yard. Honey, it was like a hurricane was happening just over that house, the way those trees were blowing. Even those stiff magnolia trees were bending and twisting."

  "Yeah, I've seen them like that," Rita said, but she was quiet so he would go on talking.

  "The worst part was when we got back here and Daddy had a good look at Antha. He said right away, 'See these scratches around her eyes. Now that never happened in the fall. There were no trees under that window.' And then Daddy found out one of the eyes was torn right out of the socket. Now Daddy knew what to do in those situations.

  "He got right on the phone to Dr. Fitzroy. He said he thought there ought to be an autopsy. And he stood his ground when Dr. Fitzroy argued with him. Finally Dr. Fitzroy came clean that Antha Mayfair had gone out of her mind and tried to scratch her own eyes out. Miss Carl tried to stop her and that's when Antha had run up to the attic. She fell, all right, but she was clean out of her head when it happened. And Miss Carl had seen the whole thing. And there was no reason in the world for people to be talking about it, for it to get into the newspapers. Hadn't that family had enough pain, what with Stella? Dr. Fitzroy said for Daddy to call over to the priest house at St. Alphonsus and talk to the pastor if he still wasn't sure about it.

  " 'Sure doesn't look self-inflicted to me,' Daddy said, 'but if you're willing to sign the death certificate on this one, well, I guess I've done what I can.' And there never was any autopsy. But Daddy knew what he was talking about.

  " 'Course he made me swear I'd never tell a living soul about it. I was real close to Daddy then, already a big help to him. He knew he could trust me. And I'm trusting you now, Rita Mae."

  "Oh, what an awful thing," Rita whispered, "to scratch her own eyes out." She prayed Deirdre had never known.

  "Well, you haven't heard all of it," Jerry said, taking another drink of his bourbon. "When we went to cleaning her up, we found the emerald necklace on her--the same one Deirdre wears now--the famous Mayfair emerald. The chain was twisted around her neck, and the thing was caught in her hair in back. It was covered with blood and God knows what else was on it. Well, even Daddy was shocked, with all he'd seen in this world, picking the hair and the splinters of bone out of that thing. He said, 'And this is not the first time I've had to clean the blood off this necklace.' The time before that, he'd found it around the neck of Stella Mayfair, Antha's mother."

  Rita remembered the long-ago day at St. Ro's, the necklace in Deirdre's hand. And many years later, Mr. Lonigan showing her Stella's name on the gravestone.

  "And Stella was the one shot by her own brother."

  "Yes, and that was a terrible thing, to hear Daddy tell it. Stella was the wild one of that generation. Even before her mother died, she filled that old house with lights, with parties going on night after night, with the bootleg booze flowing and the musicians playing. Lord only knows what Miss Carl and Miss Millie and Miss Belle thought of all that. But when she started bringing her men home, that's when Lionel took matters into his own hands and shot her. Jealous of her is what he was. Right in front of everybody in the parlor, he said, 'I'll kill you before I let him have you.' "

  "Now what are you telling me," Rita said. "It was brother and sister going to bed together?"

  "Could have been, honey," Jerry said. "Could have been. Nobody ever knew the name of Antha's father. Could have been Lionel for all anybody knew. They even said ... But Stella didn't care what anybody thought. They said when she was carrying Antha, she invited all her lady friends to come up there for a big party. Never bothered Stella that she had that baby out of wedlock."

  "Well, that's the damnedest thing I ever heard," Rita Mae whispered. "Especially in those days, Jerry."

  "That's the way it was, honey. And it wasn't just from Daddy I heard about some of those things either. Lionel shot Stella in the head, and everybody in the house went just plain wild, breaking out the windows to the porches to get out of there. Regular panic. And don't you know that little Antha was upstairs, and she came down during all that commotion, and seen her mother lying there dead on the living room floor."

  Rita shook her head. What had Deirdre said on that long-ago afternoon? And they said her mother died when she was young, too, but they never talk about her.

  "Lionel ended up in a straitjacket after he shot Stella. Daddy always said the guilt drove him out of his mind. He kept screaming the devil wouldn't leave him alone, that his sister had been a witch and she'd sent the devil after him. Finally died in a fit, swallowed his own tongue, and no one there to help him. They opened up the padded cell and there he was, dead, and turning black already. But at least that time the corpse came all neatly sewn up from the coroner. It was the scratches on Antha's face twelve years later that always haunted Daddy."

  "Poor Dee Dee. She must have known some of it."

  "Yeah," Jerry said, "even a little baby knows things. You know they do! And when Daddy and I went to get Antha's body out of that yard, we could hear little Deirdre just wailing away in there as if she could feel it that her mother was dead. And nobody picking up that child, nobody comforting her. I tell you, that little girl was born under a curse. Never had a chance with all the goings-on in that family. That's why they sent her baby daughter out west, to get her away from all that, and if I were you, honey, I wouldn't meddle in it."

  Rita thought of Ellie Mayfair, so pretty. Probably on a plane right this minute for San Francisco.

  "They say those California people are rich," Jerry said. "Deirdre's nurse told me that. That girl's got her own private yacht out there on San Francisco Bay, tied right up to the front porch of her house on the water. Father's a big lawyer out there, a real mean son-of-a-bitch, but he makes plenty. If there's a curse on the Mayfairs, that girl got away from it."

  "Jerry, you don't believe in curses," Rita said, "
and you know it."

  "Honey, think about the emerald necklace just for a minute. Two times Daddy cleaned the blood off it. And it always sounded to me like Miss Carlotta herself thought there was a curse on it. First time Daddy cleaned it up--when Stella got shot, you know what Miss Carlotta wanted Daddy to do? Put the necklace in the coffin with Stella. Daddy told me that. I know that for a fact. And Daddy refused to do it."

  "Well, maybe it's not real, Jerry."

  "Hell, Rita Mae, you could buy a block of downtown Canal Street with that emerald. Daddy had Hershman from Magazine Street appraise it. I mean here he was with Miss Carlotta telling him things like 'It is my express wish that you put it in the coffin with my sister.' So he calls Hershman, I mean he and Hershman were always good friends, and Hershman said it was real, all right, the finest emerald he'd ever laid eyes on. Wouldn't even know how to put a price on it. He'd have to take a jewel like that to New York for a real evaluation. He said it was the same with all the Mayfair jewels. He'd cleaned them once for Miss Mary Beth before she even passed them on to Stella. He said jewels like that ended up on display in a museum."

  "Well, what did Red say to Miss Carlotta?"

  "Told Miss Carlotta no, he wasn't putting any million-dollar emerald in a casket. He cleaned it all off with rubbing alcohol and got a velvet case for it from Hershman and then he took it over to her. Same as we did together years later when Antha fell from the window. Miss Carl didn't ask us to bury it that time. And she didn't demand to have the funeral in the parlor neither."

  "In the parlor!"

  "Well, that's where Stella was laid out, Rita Mae, right there in that house. They always did that in the old days. Old Julien Mayfair was buried from the parlor and so was Miss Mary Beth and that was 1925. And that's the way that Stella had said it was to be done. She'd left that word in her will, and so they did it. But with Antha nothing like that happened. We brought that necklace back, Daddy and me together. I came in with Daddy and there Miss Carl was in that double parlor with no lights on and it being so dark in there with the porches and the trees and all, and there she was just sitting there, rocking little Deirdre in the cradle beside her. I went in with Daddy and he put the necklace in her hand. And you know what she did? She said, 'Thank you, Red Lonigan.' And she turned and put that jewel case in the cradle with the baby."