The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,285

school when she was very young.

Meantime, Lionel began attending day school when he was eight years old. He seems to have been a quiet, well-behaved boy who never gave anyone very much trouble, and to have been liked. He had a full-time tutor to assist him with his homework, and as time passed, he became something of an exceptional student. But he never made friends outside the family. His cousins were his only companions when he wasn’t at school.

The history of Stella was markedly different from the start. By all accounts Stella was a particularly beguiling and seductive child. She had soft black rippling hair and enormous black eyes. When one considers the numerous photographs of her from 1901 to her death in 1929, it seems impossible to imagine her living in any other era, so suited to the times was she with her slender boyish hips, pouty little red mouth, and bobbed hair.

In her earliest pictures she is the image of the luscious child in the Pears Soap advertisements, a white-skinned little temptress, gazing soulfully yet playfully at the spectator. By the time she was eighteen, she was Clara Bow.

On the night of her death, she was, according to numerous eyewitnesses, a femme fatale of unforgettable power, dancing the Charleston wildly in her short fringed skirt and glittering stockings, flashing her enormous jewellike eyes on everyone and no one as she commanded the attention of every man in the room.

When Lionel was sent off to school, Stella begged to be allowed to go to school also, or so she told the nuns at Sacred Heart herself. But within three months of her admission as a day student she was privately and unofficially expelled. The talk was that she frightened the other students. She could read their minds, and she enjoyed demonstrating the power, and also she could fling people about without touching them, and she had an unpredictable sense of humor and would laugh at things the nuns said which she considered to be blatant lies. Her conduct was mortifying to Carlotta, who was powerless to control her, though by all accounts Carlotta also loved Stella, and did make every effort to persuade Stella to fit the mold.

It may be surprising to learn in light of all this that the nuns and the children at Sacred Heart actually liked Stella. Numerous classmates remember her fondly, and even with delight.

When she wasn’t up to her tricks she was “charming,” “sweet,” absolutely “lovable,” “a darling little girl.” But nobody could stand being around her very long.

Stella next attended the Ursuline Academy long enough to make her First Communion with the class, but was expelled immediately after in the same private and unofficial manner and more or less for the same complaints. This time, apparently, she was crushed at being sent home, because she regarded school as great fun, and she did not like to be about the house all day with her mother and Uncle Julien telling her they were busy. She wanted to play with other children. Her governesses annoyed her. She wanted to go out.

Stella then attended four different private schools, spending no more than three or four months in each before ending up at the St. Alphonsus parochial school, where she was the only one, among an Irish-American proletarian student body, to be driven to school each day in a chauffeured Packard limousine.

Sister Bridget Marie—an Irish-born nun who lived at Mercy Hospital in New Orleans until she was ninety—remembered Stella vividly, even fifty years afterwards, and told this investigator in 1969 that Stella Mayfair was undoubtedly some sort of witch.

Once again, Stella was accused of reading minds, of laughing when people lied to her, of flinging things about by the power of the mind, and talking to an invisible friend, “a familiar” according to Sister Bridget Marie, who did Stella’s bidding, which included finding lost objects and making things fly through the air.

But Stella’s manifestation of these powers was by no means continuous. She often tried to behave herself for long periods; she enjoyed reading and history and English; she liked to play with the other girls in the school yard on St. Andrew Street, and she liked the nuns very much.

The nuns found themselves seduced by Stella. They let her into the convent garden to cut flowers with them; or took her into the parlor after school to teach her embroidery, for which she had a knack.

“You know what she was up to? I’ll tell you. Every