The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,277

these affairs were managed by her daughter Stella, and her son, Lionel, and they were as spirited as ever.

Mayfairs were not only invited to these get-togethers, they were expected to attend, and Mary Beth was sometimes unpleasant to those who refused to accept her invitations. And there are two stories of her becoming extremely angry with members of the family who discarded the name Mayfair in favor of the name of their father.

Several stories we have gathered from friends of the family indicate that Mary Beth was both loved and feared by the cousins; whereas Julien, especially in his old age, was considered sweet and charming, Mary Beth was considered slightly formidable.

There are several stories which indicate that Mary Beth could see the future but disliked using the power. When asked to predict or to help make a decision, she frequently warned the family members involved that “second sight” wasn’t a simple thing. And that predicting the future could be “tricky.” However, she did now and then make outright predictions. For example, she told Maitland Mayfair—Clay’s son—that he would the if he took up airplane flying, and he did. Maitland’s wife, Therese, blamed Mary Beth for his death. Mary Beth shrugged it off with the simple words, “I warned him, didn’t I? If he hadn’t gone up in the damned plane, he couldn’t have crashed in it.”

Maitland’s brothers were distraught over Maitland’s death, and begged Mary Beth to try to stop such events if she could, to which she replied that she could give it a try, and would the next time something of that kind came to her attention. Again, she warned them that such things were tricky. In 1921, Maitland’s son, Maitland Junior, wanted to go on an expedition in the African jungles, of which his mother Therese strongly disapproved, and she appealed to Mary Beth either to stop the boy or to make some sort of prediction.

Mary Beth considered the matter for a long time, and then explained in her simple straightforward manner that the future wasn’t predetermined, it was merely predictable. And her prediction was that this boy would die if he went to Africa. But if he stayed here worse things might happen. Maitland Junior changed his own mind about the expedition, stayed home, and was killed in a fire six months later. (The young man was drunk and was smoking in bed.) At the funeral Therese accosted Mary Beth and demanded to know why she didn’t prevent such horrors. Mary Beth said almost casually that she foresaw the whole thing, yes, but there wasn’t much she could do to change it. To change it, she would have had to change Maitland Junior and that was not her job in life, and besides, she’d tried, to no avail, to talk to Maitland countless times; but she certainly felt dreadful about it, and she wished the cousins would stop asking her to look into the future.

“When I look into the future,” she reportedly said, “all I see is how weak most people are, and how little they do to fight fate or fortune. You can fight, you know. You really can. But Maitland wasn’t going to change anything.” Then she shrugged, or so the story goes, and walked with her characteristic big steps out of the Lafayette Cemetery.

Therese was horrified by these statements. She never forgave Mary Beth for her “involvement” (?) in the death of her husband or her son. And to her dying day, she maintained that an aura of evil surrounded the First Street house, and that whatever power the Mayfairs possessed worked only for the chosen ones.

(This story was told to us by a friend of Therese’s sister, Emilie Blanchard, who died in 1935. An abbreviated version was passed on to us by a nonrelative who overheard the conversation at the cemetery and made inquiries about it. Yet a third version was repeated to us by a nun who was present at the cemetery. And the agreement among the three as to Mary Beth’s statements makes this one of our most powerful pictures of her, albeit small. The two deaths involved were reported in the papers.)

There are countless other stories about Mary Beth’s predictions, advice, and the like. They are all very similar. Mary Beth advised against certain marriages, and her advice always turned out to be correct. Or Mary Beth advised people to enter into certain ventures and it worked out wonderfully. But everything points to the fact that Mary Beth