The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,245

at Riverbend, he also went into merchandising with two New York affiliates and made a considerable fortune in that endeavor. He bought up property all over New Orleans, which he left to his niece Mary Beth, even though she was the designee of the Mayfair legacy and thereby stood to inherit a fortune larger than Julien’s.

There seems little doubt that Julien’s wife, Suzette, was a disappointment to him. Servants and friends spoke of many unfortunate arguments. It was said that Suzette for all her beauty was deeply religious and Julien’s high-spirited nature disturbed her. She eschewed the jewels and fine clothes which he wanted her to wear. She did not like to go out at night. She disliked loud music. A lovely creature, with pale skin and shining eyes, Suzette was always sickly and died young after the birth in rapid succession of her four children, and there is no doubt that the one girl, Jeannette, had some sort of “second sight” or psychic power.

More than once Jeannette was heard by the servants to scream in uncontrollable panic at the sight of some ghost or apparition. Her sudden frights and mad dashes from the house into the street became well-known in the Garden District, and were even written up in the papers. In fact, it was Jeannette who gave rise to the first “ghost stories” surrounding First Street.

There are several stories of Julien’s being extremely impatient with Jeannette and locking her up. But by all accounts he loved his children. All three of his sons went to Harvard, returning to New Orleans to practice civil law, and to amass great fortunes of their own. Their descendants are Mayfairs to this day, regardless of sex or marital connection. And it is the law firm founded by Julien’s sons which has, for decades, administered the Mayfair legacy.

We have at least seven different photographs of Julien with his children, including some with Jeannette (who died young). In every one, the family seems extremely cheerful, and Barclay and Cortland strongly resemble their father. Though Barclay and Garland both died in their late sixties, Cortland lived to be eighty years old, dying in late October of 1959. This member of the Talamasca made direct contact with Cortland the preceding year, but we shall come to that at the proper time.

(Ellie Mayfair, adoptive mother of Rowan Mayfair, the present designee of the legacy, is a descendant of Julien Mayfair, being a granddaughter of Julien’s son Cortland, the only child of Cortland’s son Sheffield Mayfair and his wife, a French-speaking cousin named Eugenie Mayfair, who died when Ellie was seven years old. Sheffield died before Cortland, of a severe heart attack in the family law offices on Camp Street in 1952, at which time he was forty-five. His daughter Ellie was a student at Stanford in Palo Alto, California, at the time, where she was already engaged to Graham Franklin, whom she later married. She never lived in New Orleans after that, though she returned for frequent visits and came back to adopt Rowan Mayfair in 1959.)

Some of our most interesting evidence regarding Julien himself has to do with Mary Beth, and with the birth of Belle, her first daughter. Upon Mary Beth Julien bestowed everything she could possibly desire, holding balls for her at First Street that rivaled any private entertainment in New Orleans. The garden walks, balustrades, and fountains at First Street were all designed and laid out for Mary Beth’s fifteenth birthday party.

Mary Beth was already tall by the age of fifteen, and in her photographs from this period she appears stately, serious, and darkly beautiful, with large black eyes and very clearly defined and beautifully shaped eyebrows. Her air is decidedly indifferent however. And this apparent absence of narcissism or vanity was to characterize her photographs all her life. Sometimes her mannish posture is almost defiantly casual in these pictures; but it highly doubtful that she was ever defiant so much as simply distracted. It was frequently said that she looked like her grandmother Marguerite and not like her mother, Katherine.

In 1887, Julien took his fifteen-year-old niece to New York with him. There Julien and Mary Beth visited one of Lestan’s grandsons, Corrington Mayfair, who was an attorney and in the merchandising business with Julien. Julien and Mary Beth went on to Europe in 1888, remaining an entire year and a half, during which time New Orleans was informed by numerous letters to friends and relatives that sixteen-year-old Mary Beth had “married” a