care of Mary Beth’s horses and, unlike other boys whom Mary Beth kept, did know what he was doing in that capacity. The case for his having been Mary Beth’s lover rests entirely on the fact that they did dance together at many family gatherings, and later had many noisy quarrels which were overheard by maids, laundresses, and even chimney sweeps.
Also Mary Beth settled an immense sum of money on Kelly so that he could try his luck as a writer. He went to Greenwich Village in New York with this money, worked for a while as a reporter for the New York Times, and froze to death in a cold-water flat there, while drunk, apparently quite by accident. It was his first winter in New York and he may not have understood the dangers. Whatever the case, Mary Beth was distraught over his death, and had the body brought home and buried properly, though Kelly’s parents were so disgusted with what had happened that they would not attend the funeral. She had three words inscribed on his tombstone: “Fear no more.” And this may be a reference to the famous lines of Shakespeare in Cymbeline, “Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages.” But we do not know. She refused to explain it even to the undertaker or the tombstone workers.
The other “good-looking boys” who caused so much talk are unknown to us. We have only gossip descriptions which indicate they were all very handsome and what one might call “rough trade.” Full-time maids and cooks were highly suspicious of them and resentful towards them. And most accounts of these young men say nothing per se about their being Mary Beth’s lovers. They run something like this, “And then there was one of those boys of hers about, you know, one of those good-looking ones she always had around, and don’t ask me for what, and he was sitting on the kitchen steps doing nothing but whittling you know and I asked him to carry the laundry basket down but he was too good for that, you can well imagine, but of course he did it, because she came into the kitchen then, and he wouldn’t dare do nothing to run against her, you can be sure, and she give him one of her smiles, you know and said, ‘Hello there, Benjy.’ ”
Who knows? Maybe Mary Beth only liked to look at them.
What we do know for certain is that from the day she met him she loved and cared for Daniel McIntyre, though he certainly began his role in the Mayfair history as Julien’s lover.
Richard Llewellyn’s story notwithstanding, we know that Julien met Daniel McIntyre sometime around 1896, and that he began to place a great deal of important business with Daniel McIntyre, who was an up-and-coming attorney in a Camp Street firm founded by Daniel’s uncle some ten years before.
When Garland Mayfair finished law school at Harvard he went to work in this same firm, and later Cortland joined him, and both worked with Daniel McIntyre until the latter was appointed a judge in 1905.
Daniel’s photographs of the period show him to be pale, slender, with reddish-blond hair. He was almost pretty—not unlike Julien’s later lover, Richard Llewellyn, and not unlike the darker Victor who died from the fall beneath the carriage wheels. The facial bone structure of all three men was exceptionally beautiful and dramatic, and Daniel had the added advantage of remarkably brilliant green eyes.
Even in the last years of his life, when he was quite heavy and continually red-faced from drink, Daniel McIntyre elicited compliments on his green eyes.
What we know of Daniel McIntyre’s early life is fairly cut and dry. He was descended from “old Irish,” that is, the immigrants who came to America long before the great potato famines of the 1840s, and it is doubtful that any of his ancestors were ever poor.
His grandfather, a self-made millionaire commission agent, built a magnificent house on Julia Street in the 1830s, where Daniel’s father, Sean McIntyre, the youngest of four sons, grew up. Sean McIntyre was a distinguished medical doctor until he died abruptly of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight.
By then Daniel was already a practicing lawyer, and had moved with his mother and unmarried sister to an uptown St. Charles Avenue mansion where Daniel lived until his mother died. Neither McIntyre home is still standing.
Daniel was by all accounts a brilliant business lawyer, and